Controversy continues to surround Joseph Massad of Columbia University and his book, Desiring Arabs. Earlier this month, the ResetDOC website published an interview with Massad where he renewed his attack on western gay rights activists who, he said, insist on inflicting "epistemic and physical violence" against "other peoples and societies in the name of liberation and in the name of reproducing a world in their own image".

Besides attacking the "Gay International" (as he calls it), Massad's book is also dismissive of local – Arab – gay activism, and in his recent interview he described Helem, the Lebanese LGBT organisation, as "founded by a tiny minority of individuals who want to assimilate into the western gay movement".

This has now provoked a lengthy reply from Ghassan Makarem, one of the founders of Helem, arguing that contrary to what Massad might think, they are not agents of the west.

Massad was a protégé of the late Edward Said, author of the influential book, Orientalism, and he claims that Desiring Arabs was written with Said's support. However, it is doubtful whether Said read a complete draft before he died. Massad later had a dispute about its content with Harvard University Press, the publisher that Said had lined up for him, and switched to the University of Chicago Press.

Part of Said's critique in Orientalism, as Dror Ze'evi notes, focused on the way western writers and artists represented oriental sexuality: "By falsely endowing the Orient with a different, corrupt sexual urge, Europe and America could rationalise their colonialist schemes."

A different kind of sexuality? The cover of Orientalism shows Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting, “The Snake Charmer” (1883)

   
Although Massad seems to regard Desiring Arabs as reinforcing Said's arguments, his book actually suggests the orientalists were right in that there really is such as thing as a specifically oriental sexuality. Ze'evi comments: 

Rather than create an imaginary and false construct of the Orient, as Said claimed, what “the west” effectively tries to do [according to Massad] is efface this difference and incorporate the Orient into the heteronormalised Occident, in total disregard of the damage done to its inhabitants.

These two conflicting views, from Said and Massad, are not easily reconciled – which prompts Ze'evi to describe Massad's book as "first and foremost a refutation" of Said's Orientalism thesis (though perhaps unintentionally so).

But I think that is going too far. Massad's book is basically a case of "reverse orientalism", an increasingly popular attitude in the Middle East which accepts the first part of the orientalists' view – that Arabs and the west are essentially different – but then turns it into an argument for cultural protectionism, resisting all kinds of "foreign" influence. 

The opposing argument is that different cultures can (and should) interact with each other for their mutual benefit – and this is what seems to have been happening with perceptions of homosexuality.

Ze'evi, the author of a book on sexual discourses during the Ottoman period in the Middle East, writes:

Massad clearly shows that from the beginning of the twentieth century, long before the wicked “Gay International” was hatched, Arab literature has been grappling with the notion of homosexuality. In fact ... Massad's evidence reveals that for more than a century the spectre of heteronormalcy (or the rigid division of people into heterosexuals and homosexuals) has engendered deep anxiety in Arab literary production.

It should be obvious that such a long-term entanglement with the notion of homosexuality could not but produce a sizable group of people who understand and define themselves or some of their peers as homosexuals, at least in literate circles. 

If Massad's evidence is to be trusted, then he is completely wrong in his conclusions. Arab homosexuality and the persecution of gays are not products of “The Gay International” but rather of a long and intense engagement between Arab East and European West. If ever there was a moment when East and West were two completely separate and uncontaminated spheres of sexuality, it disappeared the moment the first modern Arab author described Abu Nuwas as a corrupt homosexual.