Dear Joseph Massad.

As a Westerner studying Arabic and researching about LGBTQ societies in the Middle East makes Joseph A Massad’s book ” Desiring Arabs” a very important tool.
”With this scholarly, intellectual history, Columbia professor Massad critiques how Arabs have narrated their sexual desires in scholarship and literature and attempts to explain recent changes in such narratives as a response to, and to some degree an internalization of, pervasive and pejorative Western views of Arab sexual desire.”

When you read, it absorbs you and every step that could be considered Western biased gives you a Massad slap, the Massad effect

After I read it, I came back with a lot of ideas. Thoughts where planted in my head that makes my work wider and richer. But the same criticism Edward Said’s book Orientalism got, is given to MR. Massad. In his attempts to point out the ”pure” Arab sexuality he create a state of Orientalism in Reverse.

I’m happy to have read it as a Westerner studying and researching in the Middle East. But there is a lot MR. Massad chooses not to take in to his story. And his critic for the Lebanese gay organization HELEM to minimize and makes them” agents” of the west is Orientalism in Reverse.

HELEM have replyed to Massads critic on Dialoges on Civilazation read it here


http://www.resetdoc.org/EN/Helem-replies-Massad.php


The quote is from a review on Amazon.com