Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Excerpts from The Islamic Enlightenment

A collection of articles

 Memorialising Complexities

Talking about sex and sexuality in Palestine  (in Arabic) Generally speaking, the 1950s nationalist revolutions were much more radical then the 2011 "revolutions".* Similarly, the current writings about religion and sexuality in the Middle East are much less radical than the 1960 and 1970s writings by the Syrians Abou Ali Yassin  and Sadiq Jala Al-Azm, for example.  Although different sexual practices, albeit discreet, are very common, Wilhelm Reich's Sexual Revolution is still relevant for the region. Contemporary writings do not step outside the dominant bourgeois discourse, and they tend to anchor their analyses in a Western-centric persepctive of sexuality, ignoring commodification and sexualisation of the body by capitalism.  Even from a bourgeois perspective, the tendency is to disassociate the dominance of capitalist relations, i.e. bourgoeis norms and morality, from changes in people's sexual practices and gender relations. After all, that was the co...

Gender and Empire Essential readings

Sexuality and Solitude Foucault and Sennet, 1981

What is required is a Foucaultian investigation into the conditions of possibility for truth statements about "Islam." Instead of assuming and seeking to uncover the machanisms by which something called sexuality operates inside the category Islam, scholars must begin with the "positive mechanisms" that generate this Western will to know. Folowing Foucault, "we must investigate the conditions of their emergence and operation ... we must define the strategies of power that are immanent in this will to knowledge." The outcome of this kind of approach will reveal much about how Western scholarship on sexuality not only constitutes something it calls "Islam" but also how it constitutes "Europe," the "West," as an always already racialized normativity." The question to ask then is not what is the nature of "sexuality," its operations, repressions, manifestations, and productions in Islam, but rather in a specific ...

What Ottoman erotica teaches us about sexual pluralism

Foucault's  History of Sexuality : A Marxist Engagement

Sexagon: Muslims, France and the Sexualization of the National Culture

Reassessing Foucault: Modern Sexuality and the Transition to Capitalism

The power thinker

" Ideas and words are often products of their time. That is certainly true of heterosexuality, which was borne out of a time when American life was becoming more regularised. As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class." (BBC online) The invention of 'heterosexuality'

I recommend

The Scientific Assassination of a Sexual Revolutionary: How America Interrupted Wilhelm Reich's Orgasmic Utopia

"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us."  — W. H. Auden   Some of the books I have read and I recommend: Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 by Khaled El-Rouayheb Brutal Friendship - The West and the Arab Elite by Saïd K. Aburish Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States by Adam Hanieh Islam in Liberalism by Joseph Massad Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong What is Islam? by Shahab Ahmed Desiring Arabs by Joseph Massad Egypt: Spies, Soldiers and Statesmen by Hazem Kandil Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher Inside the Brotherhood by Hazem Kandil, 2015 Debt, The IMF, and The world Bank, Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010 Man's Fate (or La Condition Humaine) by Andre Malraux 1984 by George Orwell Animal Farm by George Orwell Three Penny Opera by Bertolt Brecht The Autumn of the Patriarch by G. G. Marquez The Slave Trade by Hugh...