Desiring Arabs
By Joseph A. Massad
University of Chicago Press £22.50, 448 pages
FT bookshop price: £18

Three decades after it first appeared, Edward Said’s Orientalism continues to dominate discussion of the west’s historic response to the Middle East. In Desiring Arabs, Said’s disciple Joseph A. Massad largely corroborates his mentor’s thesis that orientalist writing was racist and dehumanising. Said came up short, argues Massad, only in not recognising how far that stereotype-laden discourse in the west also helped to shape Arab intellectual writing itself, especially on Arab sexual identities.