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But even if the current law and policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell’’ is repealed, gay service members are unlikely to come out of the closet in large numbers, service members said.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

FRAMING GAY NEWS. Al Jazeera’s Arabic network “is not interested in covering gay rights issues the way Al Jazeera English does,” says Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
Al Jazeera English is ready for broadcast in Canada thanks to a CRTC decision last year, which heralded the network’s arrival as “increasing [the] diversity of editorial viewpoints in the Canadian broadcasting system.” While the English network garners lavish praise, gay activists say its Arabic sister network does a poor job of reporting on queer issues.

Al Jazeera is based in Doha, Qatar — making it the only global news service with headquarters in the Middle East. Al Jazeera Arabic was started in 1996, and in 2007, Al Jazeera added a sister channel, Al Jazeera English, to its network.

“I feel Al Jazeera English is a reliable source of information, and I think what they are offering is a perspective from the Middle East region, but the professionalism of the reports, including on [lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans] topics, has global standards,” says Hossein Alizadeh, Middle East and North Africa program coordinator at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC).

Gay activist El-Farouk Khaki says Al Jazeera English’s entry into Canada is good news for the representation of queers in media.

“What we suffer from is invisibility in Canada within the larger Muslim community,” says Khaki. “Some of the more traditional, conservative groups do not recognize our existence.”

Al Jazeera English regularly reports on gay issues. In recent months, its coverage included segments about the gruesome murders of close to 100 gay men by al Mahdi Shi’ite militias in Iraq in 2009, the killing of gay youths in a Tel Aviv club last summer, and India’s court decision to decriminalize gay sex.

But Al Jazeera’s Arabic network “is not interested in covering gay rights issues the way Al Jazeera English does,” says Alizadeh. Comparing Al Jazeera Arabic with Al Jazeera English “is like comparing apples and oranges.” Al Jazeera Arabic is geared towards a Middle Eastern audience and does not challenge cultural values or orthodox religion, he says.

Extremist religious viewpoints are expressed on Al Jazeera Arabic’s religious talk show Shariah and Life. A number of participants who regularly contribute to Al Jazeera Arabic make negative comments about homosexuality but appear on the channel again and again, he says. This includes Yousef al-Qaradawi, a prominent scholar who is on every other week. While Alizadeh says the cleric has offered some progressive views such as “discouraging government monitoring of citizen behaviour, the right of people to commit sin and the right to privacy,” he also promotes anti-gay views — in line with orthodox Islam.

“Al Jazeera and any other network operating in the region,” says filmmaker Parvez Sharma, “are very uncomfortable talking about homosexuality in any honest and open way.”

Alizadeh suggests that most Middle Eastern media use negative language in reports about homosexuality. For instance, media in the Middle East tend to frame it as a personal scandal if an actor is gay and claim that homosexuality is a Western conspiracy designed to undermine the social fabric of the Arab world.

Brian Whitaker, a Guardian reporter and the author of Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East, writes in the book: “While clerics denounce it as a heinous sin, newspapers, reluctant to address it directly, talk cryptically of ’shameful acts’ and ‘deviant behaviour.’”

Whitaker says that when gay issues are mentioned in Middle Eastern newspapers, the focus is typically on same-sex marriage in the West. Moreover, the falsely framed “Western otherness” of homosexuality “can be readily exploited to whip up popular sentiment.”

Yanar Mohammed, a Canadian-Iraqi feminist leader and co-founder of the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, is critical of the lack of coverage of feminist and queer issues on Al Jazeera Arabic. Last spring, she blew the whistle on the persecution of gay men in Iraq, a story that TV network Al Arabiya broke in April. While the story was reported on Al Jazeera English, Mohammed says she did not see any coverage on Al Jazeera Arabic. Mohammed says the Arabic network has kept a distance from her and her organization since 2004 when she expressed concern about the demise of Iraq’s secular state and the negative impacts of Islam on women’s rights.

“They do not like to acknowledge there is a gay and lesbian issue in the Arab world,” says Mohammed. The Al Jazeera Arabic channel is “based on Islamic ideology” and “reflects an Arab macho mentality,” she says.

“Al Jazeera English is different,” says Sharma. “Its mandate is to project a secular, modern image of the Arab world. In doing that, it has a completely different management.”

Al Jazeera English is, Alizadeh agrees, a different entity. “They have a different viewership and a different editorial team. The only thing in common is the name and the financial sponsor.”

But the Arabic and English channels share the Doha headquarters, and — when it comes down to it — that is where the shots are called on issues that are controversial in the Middle East. In 2008, when the US bureau of Al Jazeera English wanted to do a story about the coexistence of Islam and homosexuality, they tried to arrange an interview with Sharma on the popular Riz Khan show.

“A lot of communication went back and forth between the Washington bureau and Doha,” says Sharma. “The management in Doha killed the story. It turned out to be too controversial.”

Although Al Jazeera English is the world seen through secular Arab eyes, it nonetheless “draws lines,” says Sharma. “There are degrees of comfort. Talking to me is too controversial because a) I’m gay and b) I’m Muslim…. If I was a news story [or] if something happened to me, then they would cover it.”

Alizadeh is glad to hear that Al Jazeera English is coming to Canada. He emphasizes the essential role of a free press in effecting democracy. “There are elements of culture that can’t change overnight. With the free flow of information, eventually an environment is created where queer people will be able to talk about their issues.”

Xtra spoke to Al Jazeera Arabic’s Washington bureau chief for this story.

“We here in the US, we never had to cover homosexuality from any angle,” said Abdur-Rahim Fuqara. “I’m not sure what the station’s editorial line is…. What I can do is speak to the headquarters in Doha [to find out] and see how they have covered issues when they have covered it.”

Fuqara did not respond to Xtra’s request for another interview.

http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Al_Jazeera_Arabic_ignores_gay_news_activists-8202.aspx