This paper offers a novel reading of Arabic sexological publications from the 1920s. Existing studies on early Arabic sexology present a Foucauldian perspective on the subject, focusing on aspects of disciplining bodies and desires in colonial and quasi-colonial contexts of knowledge production and nation building in the MENA region. This paper looks at the emerging Arabic expert discourse on human sexuality from a new angle by focusing on its unique reception of evolutionary theory. Engaging with Bruno Latour’s concept of the modern Constitution, it analyzes the discussion of human sexuality in Arabic sexological texts, which is set between natural drive and self-refinement. The studied texts reveal an ambiguous portrayal of human sexuality as both grounded in animalistic instincts of procreation and as also transcending the bestial nature: a cultivated sexuality is presented as a fundamental part of the modern and civilized subject. While attempting to clearly distinguish the civilized from the barbarian, human from non-human and to draw a clear line between nature and culture, Arab sexologists at the same time kept blurring these supposedly clear lines. This double operation of separation and blurring, or, in Latour’s terms, of purification and translation, is particularly visible in their theorization of aesthetics. Reading Charles Darwin’s work as a theory of aesthetic feeling and judgement, Arab sexologists in the early 20th century engaged in a rich discussion on the natural predisposition to perceive beauty. Aesthetic taste, accordingly, is seen as a capacity which can be explained by natural laws. At the same time, the enjoyment of art, the refinement of taste and aesthetic judgement is discussed as a marker of culture and civilization, of transcending a purely natural state. Suggesting a post-anthropocentric reading of Arabic sexology, this paper aims at moving beyond describing the transformed sexual discourse of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as colonial adaptations of a European medicalizing sexual discourse. It presents an understanding of Arabic sexology as a discourse with a profoundly ambivalent understanding of nature that made it possible to conceive of certain bodies, practices or desires as natural and normal, and to label others as monstrosities.

Focusing on the prominent emphasis on gender and sexuality in contemporary Islamic discourse, the paper explores changing configurations of sexual difference as schemes for articulating modernist visions of Islamic normativity and related forms of subjecthood that accompany them. It asks how sexual difference emerged as an allegedly undisputed transcendental fact and thus a locus for the production of authoritative Islamic speech. The nature of women and men as well as relations between the sexes in the realms of marriage, family, society and polity at large have been major concerns of public debates in the MENA on religion, modernity and scientific progress since the colonial period. In these debates, Islam figured as a key reference beyond the circles of religious specialists. It developed into a core resource for projects of both, personhood as well as social and political order. At the same time, Islamic references themselves were continuously rearticulated and reorganized on the structural as well as the conceptual level cutting across the secular-religious divide. Against this background, notions of properly sexed and sexualized human “nature” became crucial apologetic devices in modern foundationalist conceptions of Islamic normativity as well as in arguments about specific forms of subjecthood. Based on critical textual analysis of selected writings by Islamic intellectuals from different countries of the Arab speaking region covering the period from the 1950s to the 2000s (such as ?Allal al-Fasi, ?A?isha ?Abd al-Rahman, Fatima Ahmad, Rashid al-Ghannushi and Hiba Raouf ?Izzat), the paper scrutinizes the shifting political grammar as well as the different epistemic grounds of Islamic definitions of sexual difference.

Modern constructs of gender have been embedded in political projects for decades to institute, mobilize and discipline populations across the globe. This is particularly true in societies and cultures of the Middle East where colonialist and nationalist forces have vied to produce competing but often paralleling discourses. Though feminist scholarship has contributed to clarifying the underlying patriarchal and oppressive agendas of civilizing and modernizing projects, much of this literature has concerned itself with unpacking patriarchal values, its systems, abuses and its changing discourses and economies. Few have investigated the epistemological tools employed to critique the foundational narratives of gender and gender oppression. Some studies questioned whether modernization is truly the answer to gender injustice with fewer studies interrogating the entanglements of gender and sexuality in legacies of modernity that offer secularism as the binary other of the religious in Middle Eastern societies (and also in EuroAmerican Muslim contexts). This proposed paper, therefore aims to trouble the uncritical deployment of binaristic categories of religion and secularism in normative epistemologies informing the study of gender and sexuality in Muslim cultures and societies. The paper argues that a gendered and posthumanist critical epistemology that not only historicizes normative categories of religion and secularism but that also decenters the primacy of western notions of the human, is central for a contextual understanding of gender and sexuality and the experiences of being a Muslim and/or Middle Eastern subject. This is because when we question the normative notions of, “the modern subject” or “the religious subject,” and interrogate the tools we take up to grapple with the social and economic processes that help shape personhood, it becomes clear that there is a disjuncture between normative epistemology and the complexity of lived experience. Moreover, debates about the secular/religious divide consistently surface as integral to the processes of “othering,” and marginalization in which the western “human” is defined by means of xenophobic but liberal civilizational and imperialist discourses as the epitome of technical sophistication and progressive gender politics. Deploying modern discourses of gender and secularism in these discourses is both a means of guaranteeing the rights of Euro American citizens as well as denying them to others. These strategies of social closure particularly deployed against “Islam,”—perceived as the quintessential “other” of the liberal civic order—are grounded in normative modern epistemologies that will be unpacked in this paper.

Orientalism divided the world along gendered terms into a masculine, active, rational, and progressive West and a feminine, passive, irrational, and backward Orient. Given this gendered understanding of modernity, how did the Orient as a "living tableau of queerness," in Said’s pointed expression, accommodate formations of the masculine heroic? This paper explores the location of the Arab Muslim hero within the asymmetric relationship between East and West through an examination of obituaries for Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri (1807-1883). It suggests that the assigning of masculine heroism to occasional “Orientals” should be conceived as an intrinsic part of European expansion into the Orient as it permitted imagining a commitment to submission and loyal acquiescence to colonial projects of modernity. Abd al-Qadir, who was at times explicitly compared to his contemporary Garibaldi, was doubtlessly one of the most illustrious figures of modern Middle Eastern history. Two moments of his life gained him global notoriety: first, his tenacious military resistance as leader of jihad against the French invasion of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, which was followed by imprisonment in France 1847-1852 and his widely popularized liberation by France’s president and later emperor Louis Napoléon; second, his protection of the Christian population in his Damascene exile during the riots of 1860, for which Abd al-Qadir was decorated and honored by various European governments. His lifetime coincided with a peak in hero worship in Western Europe, exemplified in the works of Thomas Carlyle, as well as a shift towards bourgeois versions of hegemonic masculinity. Against this background, many European intellectuals recognized in Abd al-Qadir a decidedly Arab form of masculine virtue and heroic character, took pride in being acquainted with him, and made sure to visit him on their journeys through the Levant. When he died in 1883 after a protracted illness, Abd al-Qadir had largely retreated from politics or anti-colonialist activity, lived a quietist life as a local notable and respected Islamic thinker, and benefited from French financial and diplomatic support. Abd al-Qadir’s death received substantial attention in the international media. In this paper, I present a critical analysis of obituaries that appeared in French, British, and Ottoman journals. In doing so, I discern and compare how journals in different imperial contexts emphasized the masculine heroic in Abd al-Qadir’s life to counter or validate Orientalist images of the Orient and projects of colonial expansion.