A common phenomenon among Arab progressive writers, as they become older, is that many resort to very reactionary ideas. Whether that is because they become personally more religious, or are just catering to the masses of "Al Sahwa Al Islameya", loosely translated as the Islamic Reawakening, it is annoying, but sometimes useful.
Most of the young generation of Arab leftists grew up in a conservative society with a very short-temper when it comes to religious debate. As a consequence, leftists are more and more socially alienated, and sometimes reacted by resorting to an adolescent attitude towards anything religious. As a consequence, their political role is trivialized and limited to posting statements of any Islamic uproar on "controversial" books and "art", which is rather frequent.
In this book, Galal Amin starts off as an enlightened leftist intellectual who is fighting cultural colonialist thinking among leftists, suggesting that their attitude towards religion and enlightenment is dictated by the European progressives approach to religion.
Somewhere near the middle, however, Galal Amin treads that thin line and emerges as a reactionary who believes he has some anonymously-based religious authority to evaluate acceptable "art" and decide what is "good taste". If a movie is by some 60's hot actress that he thinks was a real "artist", then it is a "good" movie. If that movie is more contemporary, has "too much" sex and is -by his standards- "cheesy", it would be acceptable to censor its showing, in order to protect "good taste". Not only that, but those who argue for its showing are attention-seekers, bourgeois-wannabes or even worse, cultural colonialists.
Read in a certain way, this book can be seen as a whistle blow to Arab leftists warning them of their attitude towards religion, and about worrying about homosexual rights in a country where 50% are below the poverty line. For me, however, it just goes to prove how people can become very boring when they are older.