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Did homosexuality exist in the Arab World in the premodern period? Can we even speak about homosexuality as a category of human behavior before it was conceptualized by European positivists in the latter half of the 19th century? Do homosexual acts signify the existence of homosexuality? Is the very notion of premodern homosexuality in the Arab World an orientalist invention? These are just some of the questions raised by Khaled El-Rouayheb's insightful book in the University of Chicago Press series on gay and lesbian studies.
El-Rouayheb's book is part of a growing corpus of work on sexuality in the Middle East and homosexuality in particular. His discussion of the absence of a concept of sexual orientation in Arabic literary sources from 1500 to 1800 touches on some of the same themes of nuanced premodern elite sexual practices explored by Afsaneh Najmabadi in Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (2005). Edward Said's introduction of the work of Michel Foucault to Middle East studies is also in evidence here. Although Foucault's notions of hegemonic discourse and the relationship of textual authority to power have...