Joseph Massad

Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World

One of the more compelling issues to emerge out of the gay movement in the last two decades is the universalization of “gay rights.” This project has appropriated the prevailing U.S. discourse on human rights in order to launch itself on an international scale. Following in the footsteps of the white Western women’s movement, which had sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women’s movements in the non-Western world — a situation that led to major schisms from the outset — the gay movement has adopted a similar missionary role. Organizations dominated by white Western males (the International Lesbian and Gay Association [ILGA] and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission [IGLHRC]) sprang up to defend the rights of “gays and lesbians” all over the world and to advocate on their behalf. ILGA, which was founded in 1978 at the height of the Carter administration’s human rights campaign against the Soviet Union and Third World enemies, asserts that one of its aims is to “create a platform for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people internationally, in their quest for recognition, equality, and liberation, in particular through the world and regional confer

The Intransigence of Orientalist Desires: A Reply to Arno Schmitt

In defense of his magnum opus, Sexuality and Eroticism among Males in Moslem Societies (1992), Arno Schmitt, who coedited the book with Jehoeda Sofer and contributed three chapters ranging from twenty to four pages of text (the third chapter had a whopping eight pages), tells us in his unkind, albeit incoherent, response to my essay “Re-Orienting Desire” (2002) about the topics he covered in his twenty-page chapter. He proudly declares: “I studied the culture, mode of production, mode of reproduction, social stratification, law, ritual, medicine, and theologies of Eastern Mediterranean people over a 3,000-year period. I supplemented this with studies from other shores of the Mediterranean, from Latin America (a cultural extension of Iberia), to Iran, India (influenced by Iran), and the Malay archipelago (influenced in turn by India), as well as transmigrants.” The arrogance of this scope is staggering indeed. What justice can one hope to do to the specificities of these societies over such a geographically vast, linguistically diverse, and historically lengthy stretch in twenty or even twenty thousand pages? Only an orientalist épistémè/fantasy can hold these disparate places and times together as a coherent object of study. The kinds of literacy required to attempt this sweep are formidable and nowhere evinced by Schmitt—his poor Arabic, as demonstrated in my essay, let alone his evident lack of literacy in any of the other myriad languages spoken by Muslims (whom he studies), is the least of his limitations. Even Schmitt’s maligned Foucault limited himself to Europe

Liberalism from the Standpoint of its Victims

I welcome these lively engagements with my book Islam in Liberalism and thank the contributors for their valuable readings and the Journal of Politics Religion and Ideology for inviting us to this exchange and for providing the platform. As I mention at the outset of Islam in Liberalism, the book started out as an introduction to another book, which, however, expanded beyond its initial purpose and became a book all its own. The purpose of the work is to investigate the relationship of ‘liberalism’ to ‘Islam’ rather than provide an explication of either term. Indeed, it is an investigation of how ‘liberalism’ thinks itself through something it calls ‘Islam’ both at the level of ideology and political practice since the eighteenth century while at the same time presenting its version of Islam as Islam-in-itself and Islam-for-itself. Marc Michael’s incisive summation of the book’s argument, in relation to liberalism’s others as always being racialized as Muslims and Jews (as Orientals without and within), is a welcome insight. As I state in the book, it was hardly coincidental that the Eastern Question and the Jewish Question would emerge in the same period of the late eighteenth century to pose the question of Europe’s others and to pose these others as threats to the emergent liberalism and its geographic manifestation captured in the non-differentiating names ‘Europe’ and ‘the Occident’. Edward Said’s important reminder that the Arab is the ‘shadow that dogs the Jew’ for Europe and its liberal intelligentsia is also operative here (324). Michael’s important understanding of anti-communism as another name for anti-Semitism and Orientalism is crucial. After all, it was fear of Jews as communists which impelled the anti-Semitic British foreign minister Arthur Balfour to issue the ‘Balfour Declaration’ in support of the Zionist colonial-settler project on 2 November 1917, a mere five days before the final triumph of the Russian Revolution. The Protestant Balfour sought to give a national-colonial alternative to the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia in order to weaken the communist movement, which in his mind and the mind of many liberal and illiberal West European anti-Semites was the work of Jews. It was Lord Balfour who had also introduced the Aliens Act in 1905 when he served as Britain’s Prime Minister precisely to close down the gates of immigration to East European Jewry to Britain in order to save the country from the ‘undoubted evils that had fallen upon the country from an immigration which was largely Jewish’. Balfour’s later contempt for the Palestinians would hardly be an innovative or novel position. That Churchill was a co-architect of British support for Zionist settler-colonialism and was motivated by the very same anti-Semitic anti-communism is par for the course. This anti-Semitism as anti-communism as Zionism would motivate liberal and illiberal Europeans to support Jewish self-expulsion out of Europe and the ensuing Zionist colonization of Palestine, and those included not only the Nazi regime and the Polish anti-Semitic regime after 1935, but also the liberal British and American regimes during the same period. The inability of European and Euro-American liberals (as is the case with European fascists) not to racialize their detractors or their enemies is not a simple political choice but rather, and as Islam in Liberalism’s main thesis has it, an outcome of how liberalism constitutes itself in relation to its others and how ‘Islam’ (and Jews) come to be internalized as its constitutive others. One of things I wanted to track in the book was the all-encompassing reach of liberal ideology in its production of an Islam that not only European and Euro-American liberals would

The Cultural Work of Recovering Palestine

For the Palestinian people, the loss of the territory of Palestine has been the trauma that structured their post1948 identity. Whether banished from it or still living in it under Israeli settlercolonialism, the loss of Palestine has marked the lives of all Palestinians. For Sigmund Freud, identification results primarily from the trauma of loss, which impels Edward Said to assert that “identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed.”1 But how is a Palestinian to belong to

A REPLY TO ANDREW SHRYOCK'S REVIEW OF COLONIAL EFFECTS: THE MAKING OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN JORDAN ( IJMES 38 [2006]: 478–79)

In his review of my book, Andrew Shryock asserts, “The interpretive key to Colonial Effects is located in its first paragraph,” in the preface, where I state that I am a “Palestinian Jordanian.” Indeed, this discovery—namely, that my national identity is the determining factor of my scholarship—is the interpretive key to Shryocks own grossly misrepresentative review. All his subsequent observations follow neatly in its footsteps.

R ASHID K HALIDI , Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Pp. 325.

Rashid Khalidi sets out to study the emergence of Palestinian nationalism at the dawn of the 20th century. He explores the early cultural beginnings of Palestinian identity, which precede the encounter with Zionism, and studies the different developments of Palestinian identity in light of that encounter. Whereas a large number of accounts stress that Palestinian identity developed exclusively as a result of the encounter with colonial Zionism, Khalidi sets the record straight. In line with predominant theories of nationalism, Khalidi demonstrates that national identities are defined in relation to an other. Palestine identity, which as early as 1701 manifested itself against a hostile European Christianity, remained Jerusalem-centered until the beginning of the 20th century. That is when a modern Palestinian nationalism was emerging, before the encounter with British colonialism and Zionist settler colonialism changed the configuration of both the Palestinian self and its other. Khalidi charts the changes in the forms of knowledge that the Palestinian intelligentsia was acquiring in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, noting the shift from Islamic studies to modern social science and the humanities. Through an inventory of Palestinian libraries, Khalidi carefully chronicles these changes in forms of knowledge, correlating them with the new and emerging political ideas in the country.