For Samir*, a 34-year-old gay man living in Saudi Arabia, each day is a denial. He lives in Mecca, the holiest city according to Islam, and is acutely aware of the stigma that surrounds his gay lifestyle.

“I’m a Muslim. I know it’s forbidden, but I can’t help it,” he tells ABC News, clearly conflicted.

“I pray to God to help me be straight, just to avoid hell. But I know that I’m gay and I’m living as one, so I can’t see a clear vision for the future.”

Samir, like many gay men in the Arab world, guards his sexual orientation with a paranoid secrecy. To feel free he takes long vacations to Thailand, where he has a boyfriend, and spends weekends in Lebanon, which he regards as having a more gay-tolerant society.

But at home in Saudi Arabia, he is vigilant. Samir’s parents don’t know of his lifestyle. He says his mom would kill herself if she found out. They constantly set him up with women they consider potential wives. At work, Samir watches his words, careful not to arouse the suspicion of colleagues.

“You can’t let a word slip that makes you seem gay-friendly or gay,” he says. “Before you make a move you have to think.”

Samir occasionally goes to Saudi cafes known to be popular gay hangouts, but his public engagements stop there. He and his friends are constantly wary of officers from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the kingdom’s religious police, who patrol for and punish men they suspect of being gay.

Homosexuality is illegal in Saudi Arabia, but the charge calls for four witnesses to make a case. Arrests by the religious police are far more arbitrary. In a recent case they apprehended one man at a Jeddah shopping mall, suspecting he was gay from his tight jeans and fitted shirt.

“I’ve been invited to private parties for gay men in Jeddah, but I never go because I know what would happen if we were caught,” Samir told ABC News.

“Unless it’s a VIP house — if the party is at the home of one of the princes or one of the sheiks then you’re protected.”

In Saudi Arabia, where men and women are strictly separated, there is some space for gay life. Gay men can go cruising — a term for picking up partners — and socialize in male-only sections of cafes and restaurants. In line with sex-segregated social norms, gay lovers can often spend intimate time together without arousing suspicion.

But gays and lesbians in Saudi Arabia still need to accommodate the pressures of public life, in some cases pairing off to accommodate a freer lifestyle.

“There is a gay group of girls in Saudi looking for gay men to marry. It’s the perfect solution,” says Samir, adding that he wouldn’t mind a lesbian wife of his own.

Online Freedom but With Entrapment Risks

For Samir, the dozens of emerging Web forums for gay Arab men are a freer alternative to the offline Saudi society. I met him in one such forum, called Arab Gay Love, e-cruising for new friends and partners. Some of the users there surf with screen names that specify their sexual role: “top” or “bottom.” Among Arabs, it seems, a mix of stigma and machismo steers gay men toward the former.

“The more masculine you are, the more likely you are to label yourself as a ‘top.’ It re-enforces this feeling that you’re not really gay,” said Ahmed*, a gay Palestinian born in Kuwait. “They’re more comfortable with being tops, because it’s easier to negate [the gay stigma].”

Gay Web Sites Blocked in Many Arab Countries

Web forums like arab-gay.com and manhunt.net are inaccessible in many Arab countries, blocked by state-run web filtering software. Using proxy servers men can get around the bans to the blocked sites, connecting with potential dates and building a knowledge base for gay life in the Arab world.

One blog from Syria, largely considered a repressed society, details a tourist’s guide to gay hangouts in Damascus and Aleppo.

“You could almost pick up guys everywhere, you just need to have a good gaydar. …There are four hammams in Damascus where you could play safely, but always be careful,” he writes, then listing the most popular “hammams,” or bath houses. He goes on to name the Safwan Hotel in

Lattakia as “the most famous gay-friendly hotel in the region.”

From his home in Mecca, Samir can surf the web forums and Facebook groups that connect him to the gay Arab world. But he does so with care, fearing that authorities will follow and flag gay activity online.

“You cannot be safe and intimate online. … he government can track everything. If they have their eye on you, they can follow your every move,” he says.

If Samir’s approach seems paranoid, it’s conditioned by horror stories of harsh crackdowns by Arab governments on gay life. In Egypt, where police have systematically arrested and tortured suspected homosexuals, vice squads have logged on to chat rooms posing as gay men. Forming friendships under a false identity, the police set up an expected first date, then meet their “suspects” with a brutal arrest.

“I was waiting for that guy I chatted with on the Internet a couple of days before that day, right in front of McDonald’s [in] Heliopolis. & It was almost 1 p.m., when I found four big guys surrounding me,” one victim of police brutality told Human Rights Watch after being set up on a false date.

“I was fighting and yelling in the street. I was dragged, almost carried to the police car … taken to [the station], the ‘Adab’ Section, which takes care of prostitution, raping and, recently, homosexuality.” Human Rights Watch documented dozens of Web-based entrapments — men arrested by Egyptian police then tormented with beatings, electrocution and anal examinations.

The vice squad’s practice of covertly hunting gay men in chat rooms cooled once the teeming gay Internet scene in Egypt slowed down. Fear and suspicion effectively shut down one of gay Egypt’s few free outlets. At one point online entrapment was yielding one arrest per week, according to Human Rights Watch.

The Web was part of a greater crackdown in Egypt, a country that was once a liberal environment for homosexuals. (One gay Palestinian who has studied Arab homophobia described 20th century Egypt as the “San Francisco of the Middle East.”) Social and authoritarian attitudes toward homosexuality began to change after the Egyptian Revolution in 1952, and grew steadily harsher through the 1990s as the secular state gave way to a growing Islamic puritanism.

Government-led assaults on homosexuals intensified in 2001. The pivot point was a mass arrest known as the “Queen Boat” incident. In the early morning hours of May 11, 2001, police raided a floating nightclub called the Queen Boat, a then-popular gay hangout moored on the Nile River. Suddenly surrounded by uniformed and undercover members of the Cairo Vice Squad, dozens of gay men were arrested, detained and tortured.

U.S. Government Has Been Quiet About Gay Crackdown in Iraq

What ensued from the Queen Boat arrests was a show trial — forced confessions, some extracted under torture and a media circus designed to amplify public fear and maximize the government’s political gain from the arrest. Though Egypt claims to have no law against homosexuality, it routinely criminalizes and prosecutes gay men under a law prohibiting “juhur,” or debauchery, a charge originally levied for prostitution.

In the heat of the case, one article in the state-owned Al-Gomhoureya newspaper gave full names and identifying details of the accused, depicting the arrested homosexuals as part of an underground religious cult. The paper ran one headline, “Satanist Pervert Surprises: They Called Themselves God’s Soldiers and Practice Group Sex in Private and Public & Meetings Every Thursday at Queen Boat,” cited in the Human Rights Watch report.

Analysts point out a number of ways the Egyptian government gains from crackdowns like the Queen Boat raid. News pages full of homophobic rants are a useful distraction from issues like a faltering economy and rampant corruption, which erode government support. In the same stroke, the state gains ground against its Islamist opponents by attacking homosexuals — trumped-up offenders against Muslim values. “They want to reassert their relevance and position themselves as defenders of morality is one way to do it,” said Scott Long, an expert who helped produce the Human Rights Watch report.

“One of the ways [Arab authorities] prove they’re bona fide is by cracking down on people that everyone hates. Hardly anyone is going to stand up and stick up for homosexuals,” he said.

Long applies his analysis to other governments in the region. In 2005, authorities in Abu Dhabi, part of the United Arab Emirates, arrested more than two dozen men in the desert town of Ghantout at an event state officials characterized as a mass gay wedding. The UAE announced the men would receive lashings, jail time and forced hormone and psychological treatment. The case was eventually overturned on appeal, after news of the trial drew criticism from human rights activists and the U.S. State Department.

The U.S. government has been comparatively quiet, though, through a more recent and more deadly crackdown in Iraq. In attacks that accelerated last February, Shiite militiamen have carried out a series of beatings and assassinations of gay men, occasionally with the help of the Interior Ministry, according to Scott Long of Human Rights Watch. Al Qaeda in Iraq, a rival Islamist group, has also reportedly attacked gay men in Iraq, in what human rights activists call a clear moral cleansing campaign.

“The easiest group to attack are gay people, both politically and in regards to the militias’ Islamist aims. & They can’t stop women from going to work, they can’t stop couples from being together in public, but they can attack gay men,” said Michael Luongo, a gay rights expert and author of the book “Gay Travels in the Muslim World.”

“If you want religious credibility you attack gay people,” he said of the Islamist brigades. The recent spate of attacks followed a succession of sermons in Iraqi mosques, attacking the scourge of homosexuality. As in the case of Egyptian arrests, suspected homosexuals were detained, tortured, and forced to give names of other gay men for authorities to pursue.

Small Space for Gay Pride

Long recently traveled to Iraq to document the attacks and advocate for gay Iraqis under attack.

“There’s a campaign to kill them,” he said, describing how homosexuals have learned to protect themselves by keeping a low profile. “They hide. People turn off their phones, change their e-mail addresses, and stay home.”

Outside the spaces of hostile discrimination, homosexuals in the Middle East do manage to form a community and enjoy a freer lifestyle.

Israel, perhaps the most tolerant state in the Middle East, has a thriving gay community. Last year thousands attended the annual gay pride parade in Tel Aviv, though the event has drawn right-wing protests and attacks. A similar parade in Jerusalem, a more socially conservative environment, took place with police protection along the parade route.

Up the coast in Lebanon, a relatively liberal Arab society plays host to the first gay rights group in the Arab world. Members of Helem, an acronym in Arabic for “Lebanese Protection for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgenders,” are activists at their own peril. In a country that moves back and forth between secularism and religious politics, the group and its gay community center are creating a space for their freedom.

In other parts of the Arab world gay life has to fit into whatever space is provided, and the borders are constantly moving. In Dubai, arguably the most modern city in Arabia, gay expats have little trouble living and loving freely. Rashid, a young Lebanese expat who lives with his partner in Dubai, knows he has it better than most. Unlike many gays in the Gulf, Rashid has come out to his parents, and felt comfortable meeting men and dating as he grew up in Abu Dhabi.

Locals, he says, have a harder time. “The Europeans and Westerners are more comfortable with their homosexuality. The locals, the Saudis and Bahrainis, are less open about it,” Rashid told ABC News.

“One friend, an Emirati, was discovered to be gay at 1999 and his family disowned him. Last we heard he was deported, he can no longer come back to the UAE, and lives in France.”

The mix of tolerance and discrimination across the Middle East creates little opportunity for a cohesive gay rights movement. Moreover, the local take on homosexuality is out of line with the Western norm, a notion of being gay as a recognized minority group.

“The phrase ‘to be is not to do’ is how I explain it,” said Luongo of homosexuality in the Arab world. In other words, being gay is an act, not an identity. When gay pride does emerge, it is associated with the West, and an invading cultural colonialism. The pushback on any budding gay rights movements will likely continue, part of ongoing discrimination against homosexuals in the Middle East. There, gays will continue their negotiated lifestyle, knowing that they live and love under scrutiny.

*Name changed to protect identity

The tens of millions of Arabic-speaking users of Microsoft’s popular Bing search engine have a problem. When it comes to searching for gay rights in Egypt, breast-feeding information in Algeria or sex advice in Jordan, they are out of luck. Bing is censoring search results in the Arab-speaking world, according to a prominent American research organization. The ban applies to search results in both Arabic and English found using Bing’s Arab portal.

A partial list of banned terms is shown above. But here’s the big problem… all the evidence points to Microsoft voluntarily censoring their search engine. No Arab countries asked them to censor search results. According to the Open Net Institute:

Microsoft’s explanation as to why some search keywords return few or no results is that “[s]ometimes websites are deliberately excluded from the results page to remove inappropriate content as determined by local practice, law, or regulation.” It is unclear, however, whether Bing’s keyword filtering in the Arab countries is an initiative from Microsoft, or whether any or all of the Arab states have asked Microsoft to comply with local censorship practices or laws.

It is interesting that Microsoft’s implementation of this type of wholesale social content censorship for the entire “Arabian countries” region is in fact not being practiced by many of the Arab government censors themselves. That is, although political filtering is widespread in the MENA region, social filtering, including keyword filtering, is not practiced by all countries in MENA. ONI 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 testing and research found no evidence of social content filtering (e.g., sex, nudity, and homosexuality) at the national level in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Libya.

Meanwhile, MIT’s Technology Review parsed the Open Net report and found something very interesting. It seems that Microsoft is obsessed with the gays:

ONI performed the study by testing the search terms inside the countries. Banned words include “sex,” ” “intercourse,” “breast,” “nude,” and many more in both the English and Arabic language. The investigators also made a curious discovery: Bing engineers remembered to bar ordinary Arabs from searching for the word “penis” but not for the word “vagina.” But they left no stone unturned when it came to blocking words that might lead to sites having to do with homosexuality.

Local portal of Bings in nearly all countries or languages allow users to choose whether to use “safe search” or not. Arabic has the dubious distinction of being the only language in which users are forced to use a “nanny filter.”

Among other Arabic-speaking countries, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon and Libya do not require search engine filtering at the national level. So, it seems, Microsoft threw internet users in those country under the bridge in order to please Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Andy Greenberg notes that Microsoft is hypocritically a member of the Global Network Initative, which fights against censorship around the world. So why the embrace of sweeping web search censorship? Unlike rivals Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is a prolific pay-software producer with extensive sales in hyperconservative Arab countries. Despite piracy being endemic in the greater Middle East, Microsoft still makes a pretty penny there.

So what is a Bing-loving Egyptian to do when he wants to search for porn? Well, Microsoft strangely decided to filter based on domain destination rather than IP address… the regular US-based Bing page still provides sexxay search results to anyone in the Arab-speaking world who opens it.

BAGHDAD – Days before a deployment to Iraq last year, the 26-year-old soldier’s sergeant told his troops that they would get to know one another pretty well over the next few months.

“I’m in trouble,’’ the specialist remembered thinking. He feared comrades would find out he is gay. Worse, he said, they could figure out that he has been dating another soldier in the combat arms battalion for more than five years. Their careers were on the line.

The reaction during the soldier’s yearlong deployment – nobody asked about it – offers new insight into how today’s military might adapt to a repeal of the ban on openly gay service members sought by President Obama and top Pentagon officials. The specialist didn’t exactly tell, but by the end of the tour, his sexual orientation had become a poorly kept secret – and his career was undamaged.

“I don’t know if I won any hearts and minds among the Iraqis,’’ said the specialist, who returned home from Iraq recently. “But I did among my brothers in arms because I did my job well and went above and beyond. I was respected.’’

A younger and more liberal corps of soldiers has given rise to a degree of tolerance in today’s military, an institution soldiers describe as still largely unwelcoming of gays, according to interviews with more than a dozen enlisted troops and officers, both gay and straight.

Underground gay communities have emerged at bases across the United States and even in war zones. In Iraq, one e-mail group maintained by gay troops includes a database where soldiers post their instant-messaging screen names and the base where they’re stationed. Dozens have profiles on gay dating sites, some posing in uniform.

In recent years, service members and researchers say, a growing number of gay troops have disclosed their sexual orientation to supervisors and comrades. They say they are buoyed by a sense that wartime commanders are increasingly reluctant to lose skilled troops to a ban many now view as archaic.

But even if the current law and policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell’’ is repealed, gay service members are unlikely to come out of the closet in large numbers, service members said.

“An openly gay soldier would have a lot to overcome,’’ said Matthew Gallagher, a former Army captain and popular blogger who left the Army last year. “It is a culture fueled entirely by machismo, and it definitely has a bit of locker-room homophobia.’’

Gallagher, 26, who is straight, said he nonetheless thinks openly gay service members should be allowed to serve. “At the end of the day, the military thrives off of pragmatism, and nothing matters more to soldiers.’’

Other officers disagree, arguing that lifting the ban could demoralize an institution strained by two ongoing wars and the toll of nearly a decade of combat.

“Due to the nature of what soldiers do, we discriminate against the too young, the too old, the infirm, the overweight, the physically unfit, and women,’’ said a senior commander who has served in Iraq, speaking on the condition of anonymity to argue against the administration’s position.

Officers often notice that their soldiers may be gay. There was something different about the 26-year-old specialist, his commander said in an interview. “He didn’t discuss his orientation with anyone, but after his peers got to know him it was apparent.’’

The specialist’s rudimentary command of Arabic and broad range of skills made him an asset. “I don’t think his orientation became an issue, because he maintained a professional appearance and performed like any other soldier,’’ said the captain.

Istanbul/Beirut – Homosexual men in the Arab world live in constant fear. Shiite militias in Iraq torture them to death, and in Saudi Arabia they risk a flogging.

Though there are prominent politicians, actors and artists in Arab countries whose homosexuality is an open secret, they, too, can expect harassment and criminal prosecution if they ‘out’ themselves.

Lesbianism remains such a taboo in the patriarchic societies of the Middle East that it is hardly discussed in public. Lebanon is so far the only Arab country where gays and lesbians are safe to avow their sexual orientation.

In Syria, where homosexuals face from six to 12 months in prison for ’shameless behaviour,’ there is now a Web site, at least, that deals with the concerns of gays and lesbians.

Whether they belong to the Muslim majority or Christian minority, most Arabs justify their rejection of homosexuality with religious arguments.

‘Since the invasion of the American occupiers, the phenomenon of homosexuality among young men has spread in all regions of our country, and to them we say, you bring shame on us with your behaviour,’ Iraqi Sheikh Hassan al-Asari called out to the congregation at the Kufa mosque in the holy Shiite city of Najaf on a recent Friday.

The mosque was full, and thousands of Shiite Muslims listened attentively to the words of al-Asari, regarded as a confidant of radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

In a report last August titled ‘They Want Us Exterminated,’ the advocacy group Human Rights Watch described how far this hate toward homosexuals, couched in religion, can go. Homosexual Iraqis told of death squads that torture, mutilate and murder gays.

A number of the masked men who attack gays also rape them. Though it may seem inconsistent, some men in Turkey and the Arab world consider only the ‘passive’ partner in a sexual act between two men to be homosexual and effeminate. The ‘active’ man, however, retains his masculinity.

Homosexual men are even banned from serving in Turkey’s armed forces, ‘homosexual’ being defined as a man who can be proven to have ‘assumed the passive role’ during sex with another man.

People in the Middle East also have difficulty with the nomenclature of homosexuality. Sexual acts between members of the same gender are such a taboo in Arab countries that most Arabs either use expletives when referring to gays and lesbians or speak of ‘abnormal behaviour.’

In the United Arab Emirates, where ‘abnormal sexual relations’ are punishable by up to three years in prison, police last year launched an anti-homosexuality campaign whose official title was ‘Let’s protect our society’s traditional values!’

And in Saudi Arabia, the most conservative Arab state, a man who wears makeup and women’s clothing is called a ‘daughter of the sheikhs.’

“Sadj” is the colloquial Arabic word for “gay” in most countries of the Middle East. While a more appropriate adjective “mithli” (“like me, similar, same-(sex)”) has found its way into the elite academic vernacular of contemporary Arab society, “sadj” is the term I heard most during my travels in the Middle East. Meaning, roughly, “peculiar” or “strange,” sadj is the easy way to classify a homosexual in the Arab world. The concept of homosexuality, of intimate and romantic same-sex relations, is still so taboo, that there is no need to delve farther than that one word. Forget butch or fem or any other adjectives you’ve come to appreciate as descriptive markers in Western gay society: sadj pretty much covers all the bases. More a result of culture than of religion (but now, unfortunately, reinforced by the three dominant monotheistic religions of the region), homosexuality in the Middle East nowadays is something people don’t particularly care to talk about. In some more progressive parts of the region, people understand and recognize that these “sadjeeyeen” exist, but there is no need to discuss them. Morocco is one of these places.

If you juxtapose Morocco (Maroc, in French) against many other countries in the Arab world, such as Sudan or Iraq, the sliver of North Africa looks likes a calm oasis for Middle Eastern gays and lesbians. While sporadic acts of violence against homosexuals is definitely a threat, they pale in comparison to the recent violence that has flared in post-invasion Iraq. And while many Moroccans are just as torn on the issue as most Arabs across the Middle East, Morocco tends to be a more lenient society overall than other North African countries. Morocco itself is a patchwork of cultures and languages, ranging from Berber to Spanish, Portuguese to Arab, and French to Senegalese and sub-saharan African. Most Moroccans are descendants of the Berbers, the original inhabitants of the the “maghreb” region of North Africa, including the current Moroccan ruler, King Mohammed VI. Throw in there a mix of all the ethnicities listed above and you have a country steeped in cultural diversity and plurality. In my opinion, this kind of melting pot of cultures, minorities, languages, and religions is the ideal environment for the acceptance of homosexuals. Look at the United States or Britain: two countries with relatively accepting social policies with historically large immigrant populations. Currently Morocco has the potential to reach the level of acceptance needed for an open society that embraces homosexuals, but with the rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism and extremism, as well as a cultural revival aiming to bring Morocco back to the seventh century and the time of the Prophet Muhammad, homosexuals (at least Moroccan homosexuals) continue to be looked at, thankfully in a mostly nonviolent manner, as taboo: as “sadj.”

This doesn’t mean that Morocco is anti-gay. On the contrary, the country has come a long way under the auspices of the current royal regime. In 2005, King Muhammad VI endorsed a grand, sweeping reform of the mudawana, or Moroccan family code, that extended much needed basic human rights to Morocco’s women and children, much to the chagrin of many fundamentalists. In addition to the family law reforms, King Muhammad VI has expanded (if only by a small measure) the power of Morocco’s parliament and has endorsed the idea of more powerful multiparty political system. While Morocco’s monarchy is not going anywhere anytime soon (the king is considered a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad), many in Morocco are becoming more and more impatient with the royal house. And while most homes and shops are equipped with portraits of their youthful king, it is common to find many Moroccans who would rather see the throne abolished, to be replaced by a more democratic system or an Islamist-led regime. New rumors about the king emerge everyday and can result in a strict response from the Moroccan government if leaked to the press or published online. The most entertaining, and personally interesting, rumor I stumbled across during my time in Morocco is that the king himself may be homosexual. Young, in his forties, and an avid water sportsman, many street vendors sell smiling photos of the king on vacation jet skiing in the south of France. Very rarely do you see pictures of the Moroccan ruler with his young wife or child. One of the juiciest rumors came this past summer, when it became known that the Moroccan king had decided to take a vacation to a private chateau outside of Paris, sans his wife or child, and, presumably, in the company of men. Could the Moroccan king be gay? For most traditional Moroccans, this would result in a blasphemy so intense it could threaten the throne itself. The idea of a gay member of the Prophet Mohammad’s lineage would be disastrous for the royal family and Morocco’s system of constitutional monarchy. Unfortunately, we may never know. Any questioning the king’s sexuality would almost certainly result in a swift backlash by the royal house and the Moroccan authorities. It is important to note that this type of response by the Moroccan government is not reserved for questioning their ruler’s personal life alone, almost any publicized opinion of the king can result in imprisonment or trial.

The king aside, Moroccan society, especially urban communities, are becoming slightly more open to homosexuals in their presence, if not the accepting of the actual concept itself. Marrakech, for example, is the largest city in southern Morocco and the tourist hub of the country. Known for its pink hued buildings, winding “souks” (markets) and djemma el-fnaa, or Square of the Dead, once used to display the executions of prisoners but now used for outdoor food stalls and entertainment, Marrakech is the Morocco many think of when considering the country for a vacation. With the desert to one side and the looming High Atlas mountains to the other, Marrakech is truly a magical city. This is made more so by its recent transition into a more decadent venue. Bars and clubs are springing up across the new city, inviting Moroccans to sit back, sip a beer (another taboo across much of the Middle East) and socialize with singles outside of the home and immediate community. Across town, in the old city, gay Europeans are coming in droves to buy up expensive real estate to renovate traditional Moroccan riads, or courtyard homes, into summer homes. Many rural Moroccan gays are leaving their villages and farms to settle into apartments and homes in Morocco’s new flashy vacation city. Walking through the djemma el-fnaa one evening, I met several gay Moroccan men, all out enjoying themselves and their new found urban freedom. This new liberalism has even resulted in the publication of a “Hedonists Guide to Marrakech”, part of a series of tour books usually reserved for larger, more European destinations. Agadir, Casablanca, and Fez, three other Moroccan cities, are also working to catch up with Marrakech’s success, expanding their new cities and allowing the construction of discotheques, bars, and other places that encourage mingling amongst the Moroccan youth.

In short, Morocco is no France or Spain. To be openly homosexual is still dangerous, if more to one’s reputation and family honor than to one’s physical safety as in other Middle Eastern countries. While the king still calls all the shots and the press is heavily censured, the diverse history of the Moroccan people is creating a moderate atmosphere in a conservative neighborhood of the world. More and more Moroccan gays are finding it easier to meet each other and live their lives, especially in cities such as Marrakech. Gay travelers are finding an option in the Middle East to experience Arab culture and not fear for their safety, although modesty is absolutely required when in public. And while the Moroccan dialect still uses words such as “sadj” to describe homosexuals, many are finding themselves apathetic and, in some rare cases, open to same-sex relations. After returning home from living in Morocco, I called my host brother to tell him that I am gay. I was almost more nervous than when I came out to my parents. I expected immediate rejection from my host family, a crumbling of cross cultural relations I had nurtured over the past year. To my surprise my host brother and other Moroccan friends completely embraced my sexuality. “Who cares?” my host brother exclaimed, “You are my brother, and I love you for who you are.”

I only hope that this feeling of acceptance and openness will become more and more widespread in Morocco in the years to come.

Might is right?

No! Might is not always right but it can impose its rights on you.It can bully,intimidate,coerce or bomb you into submission.

The West have perfected the art of ‘might is right’ into a new form of colonialism, deploy either by the might of the pen or the barrel of a gun.

In the case of Iraq, Afghanistan now Pakistan and soon Yemen and very soon Iran the gun speaks louder than the pen.Where literacy is low and the pen has no effect the gun would be the weapon of choice.

The Talibans respect only two things, Islam and Pastunwali, no guns and bombs are going to scare them off.The Brits have seen it,the Russians got their balls fried and the Amercian offering themselves a journey to hell.It’s going to be a long and senseless war.

In Afghanistan, keeping young boy as company is not uncommon.Sodomy not only exists in Genesis 19.24 and God’s retribution for impenitent sins.Today, divine retributions come still in its familiar forms, the acts of God.

In Malaysia, the axiomatic ” pen is mightier than the sword” has proven its might and stabbed Malaysians right in the hearts.

In the hearts and minds, Malaysians are bought.It’s no more the court of justice that be the judge of Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy case, it’s the court of public opinion that have decided his innocent.

Washington Post (in my previous post here.) in its hard hitting editorial warned Malaysia that the Obama administration and other Western governments interested in stability in Asia should make clear that the imprisonment of Mr. Anwar would be a blatant human rights violation — and not in Malaysia’s interest.

A kind of threat?

Isn’t Malaysia a sovereign nation and has its own rule of law?

The might of Western powers have made them into believing theirs are the only righteous path and the rest of the world is nescient and, therefore, must be taught a lesson, whatever it might be, from human rights to doesn’t matter how contorted morality is in the eyes of the Easterners, the way of the West is superciliously prettier.Submit or be damned.

Homosexuality, as we all know, exists all over the world and in every culture. Most religion, particularly the Abrahamic religions do not look kindly upon it.In the Bible, the story of Lot and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah was about divine anger against sodomy.

In some Middle Eastern countries you are dead meat if you are caught or known to be gay. It’s viewed as a sickness and sexual perversion.In Eastern Asia they are mostly tolerated but kept under the lid.In the West they have gained celebrity status, excepted and viewed as the right of an individual and where the burqas and minarets are seen as bigger evil than sodomy.

In most part of Asia including the very modern and squeaky clean Singapore sodomy with same sex partners is a crime.Old Mr Lee wanted the whole sodomy law to be repelled but, somehow, his government was not in favour of such drastic change.As in the words of his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong “it could send the wrong signal and encourage LGBT activists to ask for more concessions, such as same-sex marriage and parenting.”

In 2007, Singapore amended its Sodomy Law and decriminalised sodomy among heterosexual partners but still makes it an offence among same sex partners.Maximum imprisonment for sodomy in Singapore is 2 years.However, no one had been charged in recent times.

In Malaysia sodomy is much more serious offence,if convicted a maximum of 20 years is allowed under the law.

In some Middle Eastern countries you could get killed for being gay, not necessarily by the law but by maniacal homophobic.

With the exception of Anwar Ibrahim there have been no other sodomy case in Malaysia. As long as there was no police report against a person the government have no business charging him.In the case of Anwar, a police report was lodged by an aggrieved party.The right place to decide the case is the Malaysian court of justice,not the Western press,not the court of public opinion and not Anwar’s court of courtiers.

In many truly Asian countries, I don’t consider the Middle East as truly Asian, most people have no problem with gays, we, somehow tolerated them and ignored whatever their sexual orientation.Some are open about it, most are closet case.

The Assyrians have a long history dating back to biblical times. The rise of Assyria, a kingdom in northern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) began around 1350 BC. At its height (730-650 BC), the Assyrian empire controlled the Middle East from the Gulf to Egypt, but it collapsed in 612 BC.

Today, there are about two million Assyrians living in Iraq, 700,000 in Syria, 400,000 in the USA and about 500,000 in the rest of the world.

They have their own language and alphabet.

They are almost all Christians: Chaldean church 45%, Syriac Orthodox 26%, Church of the East 19%, Syrian Catholic 4%, others 6%. See list of Assyrian religious links.

THE ISSUE OF same-sex sexualities in the Arab world is a political and intellectual minefield, and more so since 9/11 than before. In a bizarre twist, neoconservatives and other rightists who were hostile for decades to the lesbian/gay movement(1) have repackaged themselves as defenders of oppressed Arab women and gays. Responses from the left have been divided.

When international human rights or LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) groups have issued alerts lately about persecution of Middle Eastern LGBT people (most often in Iran), some anti-imperialist gays have denounced the critics for contributing to the Republicans’ (and some prominent Democrats’) war drive. Others, closer to the politics of Against the Current, have insisted on the importance both of opposition to U.S. intervention and of solidarity with LGBTs.

The arguments have rarely shown much knowledge of the sexual cultures of the Arab world, however, or included much analysis of how imperialism and sexuality interact. Overcoming this lack of understanding is a crucial and urgent task.

The right’s reliance on arguments about women’s and sexual freedom makes it increasingly difficult to be an anti-imperialist or antiracist in the United States without integrating gender and sexual analysis. Similarly, international feminist and LGBT movements are hamstrung by their relative weakness in and ignorance of the Arab world. They badly need to take up the task of linking imperialism, gender and sexuality.

This task is not made any easier by the paucity of serious scholarship on sexualities in the Arab world. Lesbian/gay studies has focused mostly on modern Europe and North America. Fortunately more work has been done in recent years on dependent-world LGBTs. But Africa and the Middle East are the parts of the world where LGBT communities are least visible and LGBT movements most harshly repressed.

This helps explain why scholarship on Arab same-sex sexualities has been relatively thin on the ground. People outside the Arab world, who often don’t know it well or even speak Arabic, have published most of what exists in English. While academics in North America and Europe have many times more resources, the knowledge and experience of researchers in and from the Arab world are indispensable.

Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, has now walked out boldly into this minefield with his book Desiring Arabs. Massad is no stranger to controversy. His earlier work concentrated on Jordan and Palestine, not exactly fields where calm, collegial discussion is the rule in U.S. academe – least of all at Columbia, a hotbed of right-wing Zionist hate campaigns of which Massad has been a prime target. Naturally and rightly, the left and defenders of Palestinian rights have come to his defense.

Desiring Arabs has brought Massad a new crowd of detractors. His criticisms of North American and European efforts to identify, defend and free gay people in Arab countries(2) have been met with a wave of accusations. An online review of Desiring Arabs by a staff member of The New Republic, after describing police torture of a Palestinian gay man in graphic detail, charged Massad with an “insidious attempt to convince the world that men like [this one] are somehow figments of the Western world’s imagination.”(3)

Another review by Brian Whitaker, former Middle East editor of the London Guardian, accused Massad of reflecting “essentially the same ideas” as the Jordanian Islamic Action Front when it denounced women’s rights as an “American and Zionist” attack on the nation’s “identity and values.”(4) These are excerpts from the relatively nuanced attacks; other diatribes on the net have been more scurrilous.
No Homophobe

Massad is clearly no homophobe and has no sympathy with torturers or fundamentalists. On the contrary, Desiring Arabs is an important resource for serious students of sexualities in the Arab world. It confirms that same-sex sexual desire and behavior were widespread in Arabic literature during the centuries when Arab civilization was at its height.

Above all, the book does a service to scholarship comparable to what Kate Millett did in Sexual Politics or Dennis Altman in Homosexual Oppression and Liberation: it analyses the sexual ideologies of a wide range of 19th- and 20th-century literary works, many of them inaccessible to non-Arabic speakers. In the process Massad shows respect for and familiarity with queer theory, the dominant current today in LGBT studies.

For all its merits, however, Desiring Arabs has major flaws. Like many queer theorists, Massad seems more interested in literature than in reality. He leaves crucial questions about Arabs’ sexual behavior and identities not only unanswered – answers admittedly hard to come by in countries where mass surveys or in-depth interviews about sexuality are rarely feasible – but largely unaddressed.

While his criticisms of activists’ and academics’ Eurocentrism are often justified, he seems to suggest that the international lesbian/gay rights movement is largely to blame for the persecution of people engaged in same-sex sexualities in the Middle East today. Yet his own research shows that this persecution predated international LGBT activism by many decades.

Massad rightly rejects many lesbians and gays’ essentialism (”we were born this way” and “we are everywhere”). However, he does not engage seriously enough with the more substantial scholarly work that has been done on global same-sex sexualities. As a result, he doesn’t recognize that LGBT studies have not always shared the essentialist impulses of many ordinary LGBT people. On the contrary, many theorists have emphasized that same-sex sexualities have been socially constructed in the course of history, and that these sexualities were and are extraordinarily diverse in different parts of the world.

Edward Said warned in his classic book Orientalism against notions that “there is such a thing as a real or true Orient (Islam, Arab or whatever)” or “that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically ‘different’ inhabitants.”(5) Massad describes Said not only as “a mentor, a friend, and a colleague” but also as “a surrogate father” (xiii) and seems to heed Said’s warning when he writes, “My point here is not to argue in favor of non-Western nativism and of some blissful existence prior to the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the non-West.” (42)

Nonetheless, his book tends to idealize the indigenous sexual culture of the Arab world. He repeatedly dismisses signs of lesbian or gay life in the Arab world as outside impositions, fabrications or shameful attempts by Arabs to mimic Europeans or Americans. He fails to come to terms with the reality that the Arab world too is increasingly part of a global capitalist order and that its contemporary sexualities are likely to be hybrid and diverse.
Beyond Gay and Straight

On one central issue Massad is right: his insistence that traditional Arab sexualities were not based on a “hetero-homo binary.” (40) This will be a difficult point for many U.S. readers to grasp, given how deeply the division between “gay people” and “straight people” has shaped our common-sense understanding of sexuality. Most scholars agree, however, that this binary conception is a fairly recent development, and that there have been innumerable other ways of conceiving sexuality.

Massad’s reading of the Koran, later Islamic religious texts and medieval Arabic love poetry confirms what other historians have found: that Arabs in the first centuries of Islam simply did not classify human beings in this way. It is less clear how much continuity there is between this traditional Arab sexual culture and the sexual culture of the contemporary Arab world.

Despite Massad’s skepticism, there are self-identified lesbians and gay men in the Arab world today. But distinctive lesbian/gay identities as they exist in North America and Europe do seem less visible in Arab countries than in most other regions. Many Arab men who have sex with other men do not identify at all as gay, transgender or even bisexual. Some of them fuck transgender or other males, concealing this sex from public knowledge; others simply have discrete sex with one another.(6)

As Massad points out, this means that the tactics that LGBT movements have used elsewhere cannot simply be imported unchanged into the Arab world. For example, in a culture where people can engage in same-sex sexual behavior without necessarily identifying as gay, it is doubtful what it means to call on them to “come out.” People whose lives include both same-sex and different-sex relationships have to be free to decide when, where and how they speak up.

Massad has strong arguments for rejecting the insistence that desire is “embedded in the body [and] can only be freed in an individualist project of liberation through public confessionals” (365) – though even in the Arab world, transgender people and others do sometimes feel that their desire is embedded in their bodies.

The scholars in LGBT studies who laid the foundations for a social constructionist approach should be sensitive to the pitfalls of binary thinking. Yet as Massad shows, when it comes to the Arab world some of the most distinguished theorists can succumb to Eurocentrism. This Eurocentrism contradicts the main thrust of the history of sexuality since the 1970s. Even worse, it ignores the key lesson of 20th-century liberation struggles: that each oppressed people needs to find its own way to free itself through understanding and transforming its own unique social formation.

Massad is better at showing how Arab sexual cultures do not work and cannot be freed, however, than in analyzing how they do work and can be freed. There is still an enormous amount of work to be done before this question can be answered. Nonetheless, Massad could have benefited a bit more from analyses by other scholars.

Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe’s anthology Islamic Homosexualities, for example, contains more useful insights than Massad allows in his passing, cutting reference to it. (170-71) A reader who knew the book only from Massad’s comments would never guess that Roscoe and Murray denounce Eurocentrism and the tendency to tell the “history of homosexuality as a progressive, even teleological, evolution from pre-modern repression, silence, and invisibility to modern visibility and sexual freedom.” They even contrast the relative uniformity of modern “Western” homosexuality to the “variety, distribution, and longevity of same-sex patterns in Islamic societies.”(7)

Massad barely discusses the social relations that made up classical Arab sexual culture. For example, his account of classical Arabic poetry makes clear, as others have, that boy love was an important theme for a major Abbasid poet like Abu Nuwas. But he casts little light on the dynamics of what Murray and Roscoe call “age-differentiated homosexuality,” either in classical times or in the Arab world today.

He also devotes virtually no attention to another component of Arab sexual culture: transgender. Studies have shown transgender’s importance as a form of same-sex sexual expression in many parts of the underdeveloped world, including Muslim countries like Pakistan and Indonesia. There is evidence from several continents that working-class and poor people in particular are more likely than middle-class people to engage in transgender relationships as opposed to lesbian/gay relationships.(8)

Transgender people have shown an impressive capacity for radical organizing and action, to the point of virtually taking over the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004. Forms of transgender have been identified in at least some Arab countries, as among the hassas of Morocco and khanith of Oman.

Yet Massad passes over the subject in virtual silence. He denounces the International Lesbian and Gay Association for saying that transvestite dancers are popular in Egypt; he comments that this was “a nineteenth-century phenomenon” and complains that time “is never factored in when the topic is Arabs and Muslims.” (167) But elsewhere he mentions the popularity of female impersonators as singers in Cairo in the 1920s and ’30s, and of a female impersonator on Syrian TV as late as the 1980s. (364)

Massad’s snipe is one example of how he tends to substitute discussions of ideology (Is time a factor in discussing Arabs?) for discussions of reality (Is transgender still a significant phenomenon in the Arab world?).
Empire and Culture

Imperialist domination of the Arab world is increasingly politicizing sexuality. Is Massad open to sexual politics within Arab countries, or only to a defense of Arab sexual culture against imperialism? Can Arab anti-imperialists opt for solidarity with women, transgender people and youth in their own region, with all this implies for transforming the existing sexual culture? The Islamist political movements that currently have hegemony over the oppositions to U.S.-backed regimes clearly prefer the defense of tradition – as they selectively define it. But the choice remains open.

There is neither a historical nor a logical connection between anti-imperialism and cultural nativism. The British Empire was careful not to interfere with Islamic domination of civil society in countries it ruled like Egypt and Pakistan. By contrast, Muslim Turkey’s fierce resistance to colonization after the First World War and Muslim Indonesia’s struggle for independence after the Second World War involved far-reaching secularization. It is no accident that Turkey and Indonesia have stronger LGBT communities and movements today than almost any Arab country.(9)

Still today in the Arab world, repressive regimes linked to imperialism use sexual repression as a cover. Many of the Arab regimes whose repression of same-sex sexuality is most notorious, like the Saudi kingdom and Egypt, are among the closest U.S. allies in the region and among the Arab countries best integrated into the neoliberal world economic order. And U.S. right-wing lip service to lesbian/gay rights is worse than useless to LGBT Arab people.

The Shiite parties, militias and gangs that dominate Iraq today are guilty of vicious repression of people engaged in same-sex sexualities, which the U.S. occupiers have hardly lifted a finger to stop. In one incident in 2007, an Iraqi LGBT activist heard Americans talking in the next room while Iraqi police were torturing him.(10)

Massad consistently assumes that the presence of lesbian/gay identities in the Arab world is a result of European and North American cultural influence. His wide-ranging analysis of 19th- and 20th-century literature does show, as he says, that “cultural production as a whole has been marshaled, consciously and unconsciously, toward … shaming non-Europe into assimilation.” (416) But he hardly tries to make a case for cultural causes of gay identity as opposed to other factors; he only occasionally puts forward a class or economic analysis.(11)

In fact, the spread of lesbian/gay identities in the dependent world probably owes less to outside cultural influences than to social causes like mass migration to cities, more waged labor by women, higher wages, commodification of everyday life, assumption of some traditional family functions by the state, and the spread of modern medicine with its penchant for classification.(12) The relative scarcity of lesbian/gay identities in Arab countries would then be due less to weaker European and North American influence (which seems doubtful) than to factors like the region’s relatively low rate of female-paid employment.

Another factor is probably what Gilbert Achcar calls “the Arab despotic exception”: the fact that the United States has continued to back dictatorships in the Middle East, due to its vital economic and geopolitical interests there, rather than risk the kind of transitions to nominal democracy that it has allowed in much of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of Asia.(13) The result has been less freedom for political and social organizing, and specifically for LGBT organizing, in the Arab world.
Repression

Massad makes clear at many points in Desiring Arabs that he deplores the repression of same-sex sexuality by Arab governments. What has generated most of the controversy around the book is the chapter (by far the shortest one) where he blames this repression largely on the lesbian/gay groups, human rights organizations and “discourse” that he calls the “Gay International.”(14)

Speaking of the crackdown on same-sex sexual activity in Egypt following the 2001 Queen Boat raid, for example, Massad says, “The Gay International and its activities are largely responsible for the intensity of this repressive campaign.” (184)

“By inciting discourse about homosexuals where none existed before, the Gay International is in fact heterosexualizing a world that is being forced to be fixed by a Western binary,” he says. (188) The “sexual rights agenda … has led to much repression and oppression in the contemporary Arab world.” (375) He even says that Islamic fundamentalism has an “unwitting alliance” with the “crusading Gay International in identifying people who practice certain forms of sex.” (265)

The irony of this line of argument is that Massad provides so much evidence that hostility to same-sex sexualities in the Arab world long predated the arrival of LGBT movements. He describes a host of modern Arab attempts to deny, downplay or condemn traditional Arab openness to same-sex sexual desire.

He notes that erotic poetry focusing on youths or men “disappeared completely as a poetic genre” around the late 19th century. (35) He devotes almost 20 pages to 20th-century Arab critics’ denunciation of the poet Abu Nuwas’ praise of youthful male beauty. (76-94)

He describes a paradigm shift in the work of Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, from the 1947 novel Midaq Alley, which portrays same-sex sexuality as commonplace but public awareness of it as shameful, to the 1957 novel Sugar Street, which portrays male same-sex desire as an “illness.” (272-90) And he shows how Arab literature since the defeat in the 1967 war with Israel has been pervaded by images of humiliating, emasculating penetration of Arab men.

Taken as a whole, this suggests a drastic, century-long transformation of Arab sexual culture, in large measure completed before the modern lesbian/gay movement was born with the 1969 Stonewall rebellion.
European influence undoubtedly played some role in this transformation, as shown by colonial laws against “sodomy” still on the books in many former European colonies. Doubtless other factors, neglected by Massad, played a role as well, as in the case of modernizing, nationalist and Stalinist regimes elsewhere in the dependent world.(15) But protests by international LGBT and human rights groups have undoubtedly been more a reaction than a contributing factor.

The power of these organizations is derisible compared to that of the former colonial empires, the U.S. military, major multinationals or the international financial institutions. Imperialist governments have shown virtually no interest in supporting them with more than an occasional press release. Arab governments may vilify these organizations in their propaganda, but Massad provides little evidence that they have had any significant effect on law or policy, even negatively.

Furthermore, while international LGBT organizations are largely European-led and often Eurocentrist in their thinking, they are far from having a unified agenda for the Arab world, as the 2001 Egyptian Queen Boat raid showed.

For example, Act Up Paris responded to the raid with a protest at the Egyptian embassy, whose slogans included a demand to “free our lovers.” This slogan would hardly have been welcomed by the Egyptian defendants, who were not defending themselves as open gay men, let alone as men with European lovers.

If this were typical of the European movement, Massad’s charges would be vindicated. But in fact, at the next Euromediterranean Summer University on Homosexualities, an annual LGBT gathering in Marseille, a lone representative of Act Up Paris faced a barrage of criticism from virtually every other participant in the discussion for his group’s insensitivity and counterproductive tactics.

Massad’s argument becomes even less plausible when he asserts that the Egyptian police “do not seek to, and cannot if they were so inclined, arrest men practicing same-sex contact but rather are pursuing those among them who identify as ‘gay.’” (183) This is the opposite of the truth: the police rarely know whether the people they harass, arrest or torture identify as gay. There is hardly a law or policy on earth that uses this as a criterion for police repression.

The sequence of cause and effect is the reverse, as historians have shown: the common experience of repression can contribute to the development of transgender, gay and lesbian identities. In any case, the dominant sexual ideology that Arab states have developed over the past century has increasingly led to repressive practices against same-sex sexual behavior, and did so before lesbian or gay identities had begun to emerge. Clearly the identities are not the cause of the repression.
Love and Solidarity

In at least a few Arab countries, some people engaging in same-sex sexuality have begun responding to repression by assuming LGBT identities and even organizing LGBT groups. The Lebanese group Helem is one example. Interestingly, it suspended its LGBT advocacy in 2006 to turn its headquarters over to relief efforts for victims of the Israeli invasion, working with a range of other Lebanese organizations.(16)

Among Palestinians in the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel, the LGBTQ [the Q here stands for "Questioning" - ed.] group Al-Qaws has been working since 2001 “not simply to mimic an existing model of queer identity/community, but to provide a social space for LGBTQ Palestinians to independently engage in a dialogue about our own visions and ideals for a community.”(17)

As Arabs engaged in same-sex sexualities begin adopting LGBT identities, they may form more lasting relationships and speak more of their love for one another. This would cast doubt on Massad’s assertion that in the Arab world the goal of sexual desire is “consummation and not romantic love.” (363)(18)

Contrary to conservative ideologies now gaining ground, sexuality does not require any justification in romantic love or in stable partnerships sanctified by marriage. Pleasure is its own sufficient justification. But neither should same-sex desire necessarily be limited to episodic gratification “on the side.” Love too has its rights.

No one can know for sure if, when, how or in what forms Arab LGBT communities and movements will develop.(19) In particular, no one knows for sure what proportion of Arabs who have sex with people of the same sex identity as lesbian, gay, transgender or bisexual. But this is no argument against solidarity with them. Nor is it an argument for privileging those who have LGBT identities, as international movements tend to do – or those who have no such identities, as Massad does.

In the age of neoliberal globalization, power relations between colonizers – witting or unwitting – and colonized cut across LGBT movements, anti-imperialist movements and for that matter the Marxist left. The fact remains that all the victims of oppression today badly need allies in the imperialist countries, who have access to far greater resources.

Cultural sensitivity and respect for self-determination are essential. But neither should stand in the way of solidarity with the victims of repression by regimes whose vicious sexual puritanism often goes hand in hand with their subservience to an imperial agenda.
Notes

1. Older readers may remember Midge Decter’s notorious article “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary vol. 70 no. 3 (Sept. 1980).
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2. The chapter of Desiring Arabs that sets out Massad’s criticisms of international LGBT groups is based on his article “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture vol. 14 no. 2 (Spring 2002).
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3. James Kirchick, “Queer Theory: The Columbia Professor Who Also Doesn’t Think Gay People Exist in the Middle East,” The New Republic online (www.tnr.com), Oct. 15, 2007.
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4. Brian Whitaker, “Distorting Desire,” Gay City News, Sept. 13, 2007.
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5. Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979, 322.
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6. According to Iwan van Grinsven, Limits to Desire: Obstacles to Gay Male Identity and Subculture Formation in Cairo, Egypt, Nijmegen: n.p. 1997, 37, some Egyptian men speak of ‘face-to-face’ sex, meaning that anal intercourse is avoided so as to evade issues of masculine/feminine or active/passive roles.
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7. Will Roscoe and Stephen O. Murray, “Introduction,” in Murray and Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature, New York: New York University Press, 1997, 4-6. Roscoe also gives an interesting account of the sexual culture of pre-Islamic Arabia, and of the emergence of the sexual culture of classic Arab civilization from the interaction between this pre-Islamic culture and sexual cultures of the Persian, Byzantine and Western Roman empires that the Arabs conquered: Roscoe, “Precursors of Islamic Male Homosexualities,” in Islamic Homosexualities, 55-86. Given the influence of pre-rabbinical Judaism on Islam, the sexual culture of pre-Islamic Arabia might be illuminated by a comparison with the sexual culture of the ancient Hebrews: see Daniel Boyarin, “Are There Any Jews in ‘The History of Sexuality’?” Journal for the History of Sexuality vol. 5 no. 3 (1995), 333-55.
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8. I summarize the evidence in my “Introduction: Remapping Sexualities,” in Peter Drucker (ed.), Different Rainbows, London: GMP, 2000, 24-25.
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9. See my “Introduction” to Different Rainbows, 29.
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10. Doug Ireland, “Iraqi Gay Activist Arrested, Tortured,” Gay City News, May 3, 2007.
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11. In an otherwise vigorous defense of Desiring Arabs, Yoshie Furuhashi has commented that Massad has “relatively little to say about the role [of] the emergence and development of the capitalist mode of production, with its tendency to proletarianize, urbanize, atomize, and commodify people, in the emergence and development of [a] discourse of sexuality under capitalist modernity.” (http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/desiring-arabs.html)
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12. I make this argument at length in the “Introduction” to Different Rainbows, 14-25.
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13. Gilbert Achcar, “The Arab Despotic Exception,” in Eastern Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq in a Marxist Mirror, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004, 69-74.
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14. On its face, the term “Gay International” suggests an analogy with the Communist International. It seems like a curious choice of epithet for someone like Massad, who seems in some sense to identify with the left.
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15. See my “Introduction” to Different Rainbows, 31-32, 34.
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16. www.helem.net; “Lebanese gay group helping refugee relief,” Pink News, September 1, 2006.
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17. Haneen Maikey, “Rainbow over Palestine,” guardian.co.uk, March 10, 2008.
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18. Massad’s assertion may not do justice even to the classical Arab conception of sexual desire. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, 27, notes for example, “In Islamic Sufi literature homosexual eroticism was a major metaphorical expression of the spiritual relationship between God and man.”
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19. In my conclusion, “Reinventing Liberation,” to Different Rainbows, 217-20, I suggest that LGBT movements in the dependent world are likely to often be alliances of a range of groups with distinctive sexualities and identities.
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A Yemeni view

Calm analysis of Yemen’s problems, by Yemenis from inside the country, is rather scarce but Abdullah al-Faqih, Professor of Political Science at Sana’a University, provides exactly that in an article headed “The challenges of dealing with Yemen’s deep crises”.

It’s a clear and concise review of the main problems facing Yemen, and how they came about: the war in the north, the southern secessionist movement, al-Qaeda and the economy. It doesn’t say anything very new but for anyone wanting to catch up on the current situation this would be an excellent starting point.

Faqih’s views on what should be done are also interesting and I’ll quote his conclusion in full:

President Saleh’s foremost concern is to retain total economic and political power in his own hands as long as he lives, and to hand it down to his son afterwards. The US and the international community are concerned about the threat al-Qaeda poses to regional and international peace and many educated Yemenis are concerned about the potential for tension between Saleh’s goal and that of the international community.

Of all his enemies in the south and north, al-Qaeda appears to be the least dangerous and less of a threat to what he values most. In fact, he has had it on his side on at least few occasions. Saleh might not be using al-Qaeda or the Houthis to blackmail neighbouring and friendly countries, as some of his critics often suggest, but it is obvious that he lacks a strong incentive to be rid of al-Qaeda once and for all or to reach a settlement with the Houthis. With Saleh and his country’s future depending largely on what the outside world says and does, al-Qaeda is an insurance policy for dancer and stage, but can also become an accelerator for the collapse of both of them.

The international community’s options in Yemen are very limited. On the one hand, it cannot turn its back on Yemen without risking disastrous consequences; on the other, it cannot rally behind Saleh against his opponents either in the north or south or even against al-Qaeda alone while leaving the other two for Saleh to handle alone.

Any sound strategy to tackle Yemen’s complexities should meet several conditions: (1) it should be comprehensive in scope and inclusive of political, economic and security issues; (2) it should aim as its priority to dismantle the ongoing political conflicts in the north and south –the Saudis, in particular, should immediately stop paying the bills of the war in the north and direct the money instead towards development and reconstruction; and (3) the international community should fully engage Saleh using a combination of incentives and disincentives.

Containing the secessionist movement in the south and preventing Yemen from degenerating into a Somalia-like state will require restructuring and strengthening the Yemeni state and political system in ways that will allow meaningful power-sharing, accountability, the de-personalisation of power and the rule of law. Parliamentarianism, deep decentralisation, bicameralism, proportional representation and free media are all key components to any viable solution to Yemen’s current myriad problems.

The separation of south and north is almost impossible and if allowed could lead to the breakdown of the country as a whole into warring tribes, sects, regions and ideological orientations. As in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and elsewhere, only extremist groups focusing on passion and advocating terror can gain advantage in the event of a split.

BAGHDAD—In a private meeting with Mohammed Bahr al-Ulloum, President Bush urged the Iraqi Governing Council president to amend the recently ratified Iraqi constitution to protect the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. “The Iraqi constitution, signed just a few short weeks ago, will usher in a new era of democratic freedom in Iraq,” Bush said. “But there are some unlawful and unholy acts that the constitution’s original drafters could not have possibly intended to protect.” Bush then told al-Ulloum he must act quickly and decisively to preserve his country’s most sacred tradition.