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Ed Webb

On the Second Anniversary: Censorship Concerns | Arabic Literature (in English) - 0 views

arablit.wordpress.com/...nniversary-censorship-concerns

Egypt censorship politics #jan25 cartoons art

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • At a recent news conference, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights noted that, two years after January 25, many abuses of state power continue. Censorship is among these abuses
  • censorship, instability, and fear of censorship create a difficult environment for longer-form artistic developments
  • in a recent interview with Mai Elwakil and Andeel at the Egypt Independent, pioneering political cartoonist Amro Selim remained steadfast: We need to constantly push the boundaries whether they are set by society, the political regime or even a newspaper’s editors. If people equate your critique of a bearded political Islamist figure with atheism, then you must do it more, all the time, on purpose. This is ground that we are gaining. It is a battle with possible lawsuits and threats. But we must continue. We went through a lot to be able to draw the president every day. We won ground under Mubarak’s rule. At the beginning of Al-Dostour, I told them that we must shatter the god-like image of the ruler who we cannot draw. We started drawing him from the back, and bit-by-bit we turned him around, until making a cartoon of him became the norm. Then we drew his sons, Gamal and Alaa. We were very happy when these cartoons were published. Before that, if Mubarak were ever represented, it would be with Egypt holding him like her beloved son. We have come a long way in a society that asked us to “respect” the ruler. Now, they want us to go back.
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  • I believe there is a communication channel between cartoonists and readers that even editors might miss. It is amusing to experiment with overcoming censorship.
Ed Webb

The Arab and Muslim Evolution of 'Deviance' in Homosexuality - New Lines Magazine - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...n-of-deviance-in-homosexuality

MENA ArabWorld authoritarianism repression language Arabic discourse LGBT LGBTQ LGBTQIA

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jun 22 - Cached
  • before the 20th century, Arabs and Muslims never used shudhudh jinsi to describe homosexuality. For more than a millennium, many learned elites, including religious scholars, linguists and poets, discussed all kinds of sexual relations, including what they called “liwat” and “sihaq” (which refer to male and female sexual acts respectively), that were close to our modern understanding of homosexuality, without using terms like deviant, abnormal or unnatural
  • When it was first introduced in Arabic in the early 20th century, shudhudh did not exclusively mean homosexuality. Instead, it was more of a scientific and medical category and included a wide range of sexual activities deemed “deviant,” like masturbation, sadism, masochism, fetishism, etc. And contrary to what opponents of homosexuality often claim, mithlyah is not a recent translation of homosexuality that aimed to replace the term shudhudh and normalize homosexuality. Rather, it was the original term that earlier Arab translators chose for homosexuality, coined at the same time as the term shudhudh and within the same movement of translating modern European psychological and sexologist literature. It then took more than three decades for shudhudh to become a synonym of homosexuality and the favorite term in the anti-homosexuality Arab discourse.
  • (The Quran uses different words when referring to the condemned deeds of Lut’s people: “fahisha,” or obscenity, and “khaba’ith,” or lewdness. Both terms encompass acts beyond same-sex sexual relations, such as highway robbery and dealing in unspecified dishonorable or shameful acts in their assembly.)
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  • not only that pre-modern Arab-Islamic thought never used shudhudh in reference to homosexuality; it also had no term for the concept of homosexuality as understood today
  • In his book “Desiring Arabs,” Columbia University professor of modern Arab thought Joseph Massad shows how modern Arab Nahda intellectuals adopted a variety of strategies to explain away certain aspects of their culture that did not fit with Victorian notions of what is shameful and appropriate
  • Emerging 19th-century fields such as psychology, psychiatry and sexology focused on identifying sexual abnormality and its boundaries. In the process, however, these fields also played a role in reinforcing the familiar. Unlike pre-modern moralists and anatomists who thought that a weak moral will or a biological malfunction in the genitals caused sexual “perversions,” the main argument advanced by these specialists was that functional diseases of sexual instinct caused sexual deviance. At the core of this argument is the claim that there is something called sexual instinct, that it is naturally linked to its object — the opposite sex — and its purpose is reproduction. It also presumes that this instinct emerges in the human body during puberty and slowly decays thereafter.
  • Ten years after El Saadawi’s transformation of the shudhudh phenomenon from a psychological to a social one, Egyptian author and journalist Muhammed Jalal Kushk represented the second transformation, when he claimed that homosexuality is basically a civilizational issue
  • Kushk uses the premise of “sex as virtue” to declare that most sexual desires and activities are not abnormal or deviant. He rejects prohibition of masturbation, anal intercourse between males and females, oral sex and other behaviors.Yet the only activity that he insists on keeping as shudhudh is homosexuality. This is not because he thinks there is something inherent in the sexual activity itself that renders it to be shudhudh but because he considers homosexuality to be a moral indicator of civilizational decline
  • For him, homosexuality represents the extreme expression of individualism and thus the extreme form of rejection of what he considers an imperative moral responsibility to one’s civilization and future generations. In this way, Kushk explains the growing visibility and recognition of homosexuality in the West as a sign of the beginning of the West’s decline.
  • the narrow meaning of shudhudh to exclusively mean homosexuality occurred only in the last third of the 20th century. It was also during this time that the term started to be used in a derogatory manner. The exact moment of this change is unknown but happened amid a rise in Islamist movements in the region starting from the 1970s and the global anti-homosexuality discourse associated with the spread of the AIDS pandemic.
  • The final transformation of the term shudhudh occurred in the past decade and it involved the fact of its becoming the central notion in an anti-homosexuality discourse that has become dominant and officially supported
  • Among the ways that Arab states substitute their lack of democratic legitimacy is by assuming moral authority. In the past five decades, this moral authority was exercised through regulating religion and subjugating Arab women. This is why gender and religious issues were among the hottest controversial topics in this period. But recently, and in reaction to the Arab Spring, the new authoritarian Arab regimes have changed how they treat both religion and women. If you are an Arab dictator and want moral legitimacy, but you do not want to derive it from Islam or gender, what is the most convenient source that fits your new secular conservative agenda? Arguably, the answer is adopting anti-homosexuality and, to a lesser degree, anti-atheism discourse.
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