Arabian Rights

Three decades after it first appeared, Edward Said’s Orientalism continues to dominate discussion of the west’s historic response to the Middle East. In Desiring Arabs, Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad largely corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanising. Said came up short, argues Massad, only in not recognising how far that stereotype-laden discourse in the west also helped to shape Arab intellectual writing itself, especially on Arab sexual identities.

The work of the 8th-century Arab poet, Abu Nawas, lover of boys and wine, permeates Desiring Arabs as a marker of changing attitudes. Drawing on a vast array of Arabic sources from the 19th and early 20th centuries, Massad charts an increasingly shy and troubled discussion of Nawas’s licentiousness. This, he shows, was often in the context of the adoption by local writers of western conceptions of “civilisation” and “progress”.

“In the course of writing classical and medieval Arab history,” Massad writes, “these modern historians encountered an ancient Arab society with different sexual mores and practices that were difficult to assimilate into a modern Arab nationalist project informed by European notions of progress and modernisation and a Victorian sexual ethic.”

Imported western concepts such as “decadence” and “degeneration” further helped bury the reputation of Nawas – and, by extension, the relatively diverse, artistic and fun-loving period of Islamic history his poetry symbolised. By the early 20th century, his poetry had been censored from Arabic-language schoolbooks, and mentioned only to condemn him. As one Egyptian commentator put it, “boy love” was now considered a “disgrace” to Arab literature.

In an unlikely alliance, both Arab nationalists and increasingly bold Islamist thinkers and activists were eager to purge their history of boy-love sentiment. For the nationalists, the “dubious” ancestry of poets such as Nawas (of both Arab and Persian extraction) pointed to corrupting historical foreign influences. Islamists, meanwhile, presented the “decadent” Abbasid and Ummayad periods of Islamic history as a failure to emulate the life of the Prophet.

If Massad, a controversial professor at Columbia University, had stopped his intellectual inquiries at this point, this would still have been an extraordinary book. Massad brilliantly goes on to trace the legacy of this racist, internalised, orientalist discourse right up to the present.

For example, in 1973 Raphael Patai published his infamous book The Arab Mind, which taught that Arabs are repressed and especially susceptible to sexual torture. Massad presents this as a kind of “how-to” manual by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

It is fitting that the statue of Nawas, in the street named after him in Baghdad, should provide the book’s only illustration. Wine glass in hand, he towers over the chaos of occupation and the debates about the future of his monument – perhaps proving that great poetry stands the ravages of time.