Sexual Encounters in the Middle East: The British, the French and the Arabs, by Derek Hopwood

Sexual Encounters in the Middle East: The British, the French and the Arabs.
By Derek Hopwood. Reading, UK: Ithaca, 1999; paperback ed., 2006.
Pp. 308. $34.50 (paper).

From: The Journal of the History of Sexuality, April 2011

Kenne th M. Cuno
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Reading this book, I was reminded of an “ethnographic moment” I experienced in Egypt in 1998. After the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released the transcript of President Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony regarding his affair with Monica Lewinsky, an Arabic translation of it appeared in Cairo. The cover featured an artist’s rendering of Ms. Lewinsky wearing her famous blue dress together with a leering President Clinton. But whereas the original dress had long sleeves, the Egyptian artist made the dress sleeveless, so that Ms. Lewinsky’s arms were exposed to the top of her shoulders. No respectable Egyptian woman bares her upper arms in public space. With this change the artist was sending an unmistakable signal that Ms. Lewinsky is a woman of loose morals—unmistakable, that is, to Egyptians but unnoticeable to most Westerners. This is but one small difference, among many, between Middle Eastern and European American sexual mores. When Derek Hopwood quotes an Egyptian complaining about “naked” European women going about in his country, I think I understand the context. Unfortunately, there is little such context in this book.
Hopwood’s book, despite its title, is really about the misunderstandings and fantasies that persist between northwestern Europeans (specifically, the British and French) and Arabs about the prevailing sexual mores and attitudes toward gender in each other’s societies. It is, moreover, lopsidedly devoted to the fantasies that Europeans (and one could say by extension Americans) have had about Muslims, in particular, Arabs, for the past several centuries. Only the closing chapter attempts to present Arab views of European sexuality. At the outset, Hopwood states as his aim “to describe and analyze an important—that is the sexual—aspect of the encounters which have taken place over the centuries between people from Britain, France and the Arab world.” He contends that “sexual attitudes have deeply influenced the Euro-Arab relationship,” that “sexual attitudes and proclivities” influenced “the way people reacted to each other” and thereby “influenced the course of history,” though in fact the book makes no effort to demonstrate exactly how the course of history was influenced (1–2). Rather, the author has collected a number of accessible sources through which he presents a narrative of British and French “sexual attitudes and proclivities” in and toward the Middle East and North Africa.
A study of the construction of modern Western notions of sexuality and sexual mores in the Arab world is certainly a worthwhile project, and the author was preceded in this field by and draws upon other authors such as Judy Mabro, Billie Melman, Malek Aloulla, Edward Said, Mohammed Sharafuddin, and Rana Kabbani.1 However, this book does not measure up to the analytical standard set by these authors. It lacks analysis and is merely a descriptive account that mainly presents a taxonomy of Anglo-French “attitudes and proclivities.”
The two more or less constant elements in the Western European view of Muslims and Arabs have been violence and lasciviousness. Hopwood
traces the development of these tropes from religious polemics against the Prophet Muhammad through increasingly secular writings from the
seventeenth century on—translations, including the Arabian Nights, travel writings, and writings such as Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois that used the Orient as a foil for contemporary Europe. The association of Islam with violence derives from the first encounters of Christians with the new faith in the form of conquest, followed by centuries of warfare between imperial states using Islam and Christianity as legitimating ideologies. The role of the Prophet Muhammad as a political and military leader was the opposite of the image of Jesus, whose kingdom was in the next world. The contrast was just as strong when it came to sexuality: as opposed to Jesus’s celibacy, Muhammad had several wives—more than are normally permitted Muslim men by Qur’anic dispensation—and he reportedly enjoyed these relationships sexually and emotionally. From this contrast arose the polemical construction of the Prophet as a sexual libertine, which Christians advanced
as proof of the falseness of the religion he proclaimed.
Although the Christian polemic of sexual licentiousness lives on,2 a transition began in the seventeenth century to secular, seemingly more descriptivewriting of the travel and ethnographic genres, including authors usually regarded as lacking an animus toward their subjects, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) and Edward Lane (1801–76). Here the sexual tropes shifted somewhat. Arab women (and, in some of the examples given, other Muslim women as well) began to be described as lascivious and Arab (and other Muslim) men as violent tyrants in their treatment of women. Here I think it is possible to detect a distorted version of a commonplace justification for veiling and sexual segregation, namely, that it contains and protects (male) society from the powerfully disruptive force of women’s sexuality. But in his single-minded focus on the “attitudes and proclivities” brought to the East by Europeans, Hopwood overlooks the possibility of a dialogic relationship between reporters and subjects. It is likely that writers such as Lane and James Augustus St. John (1801–75) were influenced by their (male) Ottoman and upper-class Arab interlocutors. He does note that straight-laced Victorians found the veiled and unapproachable women of the East alluring and that, ccording to a popular theory, a warm climate stimulated the libido. He also shows how these tropes of a sensual East were popularized by operatic works, romantic poetry, and Orientalist painting.
Poets such as Lord Byron (1788–1824) and writers such as Pierre Loti (1850–1923) moved beyond reinforcing these tropes, projecting onto the
East fantasies of personal freedom from the constraints of European culture. Though they wrote about their experiences, the Middle East and North Africa were but a backdrop for self-exploration. Many nineteenth-century travel writers focused on practices that both titillated and repelled bourgeois Europeans: prostitution, dancing girls (including transvestites), slave concubinage, polygyny, homosexuality, and public baths. The belief that prostitution was rampant in the Arab world—that is, more rampant than in Europe—owed much to writers like Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), a noted sexual tourist, and to armies of occupation. Europeans also believed that homosexuality and lesbianism were rampant as a result of the homosocial worlds created by sexual segregation, although it is perhaps doubtful that homosexuality and prostitution would be rampant at the same time. The escapades of some gay writers like André Gide (1869–1951) added to the
association of the East with homosexuality in European minds.
The two concluding chapters take up related topics. One offers a series of short biographical discussions of British officials, soldiers, and writers who lived in the Middle East and had some influence on policy, from Wilfrid Scawan Blunt (1840–1922) to Freya Stark (1893–1993) and beyond. The emphasis is on their sexuality, though Hopwood does not attempt to connect that with their policy making, as his introduction seems to promise.
The only official whose life was fairly mundane in that respect appears to have been Sir John Glubb (1897–1986), who built and led Jordan’s Arab Legion until 1956, though the author manages to intimate that Glubb’s fondness for his Bedouin soldiers was excessive. The final chapter looks at the way that Europeans, especially women, have been portrayed in Arabic literature. Here the tables are turned: the East is represented nearly always by a man and Europe by a seductive woman.
In sum, this is not a work of original scholarship nor of analytical depth. It may serve to introduce novice readers to some of the more common Western misapprehensions about sexuality in the Arab world and some of the travelers, writers, and artists who contributed to them, but it does little to explain these misapprehensions or to suggest whether they might be overcome.

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Notes:

1 Judy Mabro, Veiled Halftruths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of Middle Eastern Women (London: I. B. Tauris, 1991); Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994); and Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule (London: Macmillan, 1986).
2 In 2002 Pastor Jerry Vines of the First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, caused a stir by declaring the Prophet to have been a “demon-possessed pedophile.” That accusation may refer to his marriage to Aisha bint Abi Bakr, which was contracted at an early age but not consummated until after she reached puberty, following Arabian custom. Pastor Vines was a past president of the Southern Baptist  Convention.