Among the many shocking violations of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the most notorious was sexual torture. Military personnel justified this abhorrent technique as an effective tool for interrogating Arabs, who are perceived as repressed and especially susceptible to sexual coercion. These abuses laid bare a racist and sexually charged power dynamic at the root of the U.S. conquest of Iraq—a dynamic that reflected centuries of Western assumptions about Arab sexuality. Desiring Arabs uncovers the roots of these attitudes and analyzes the impact of Western ideas—both about sexuality and about Arabs—on Arab intellectual production.

Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, the supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, Joseph A. Massad instead reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. To this aim, he assembles a massive and diverse compendium of Arabic writing from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. For instance, he demonstrates how, in the 1980s, the rise of sexual identity politics and human rights activism in the West came to define Arab nationalist, and especially Islamist, responses to sexual desires and practices, and he reveals the implications these reactions have had for contemporary Arabs.

A work of impressive scope and erudition, Joseph A. Massad’s chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture.