Unspeakable Love*****
Brian Whitaker
Saqi Books LL27,000

What is it really like to live in a country that outlaws your sexual preferences? What are the punishments meted out if those preferences are discovered? How do families and friends react to the news that someone is gay or lesbian, and how do those individuals come to terms with their own feelings when their culture and religion may expressly forbid it?

When it was published in 2006, Brian Whitaker’s study of gay and lesbian lifestyles in the Middle East was a first, but it would stand out even in a crowded field. Clear-eyed and well researched, its commentary is full of vital first person accounts that help flesh out the complex picture of homosexuality in the region – in politics, law, religion, the media, literature, film and on the street.

Updated with new material and re-issued in 2011 against the background of widespread prodemocracy uprisings in the Arab world, this is a timely moment to take up the volume. Whitaker gives short shrift to any ideas of a correlation of regime change with the liberalisation of sexual lives; instead, we are reminded to place attitudes towards homosexuality within the wider context of ‘the nature of the Arab state, the role of government, and the function of the law’.

Beyond its essential original role of documenting the state of homosexual lives in the Middle East, ‘Unspeakable Love’ is also a learned treatise on how and why some cultures think about private lives in the ways that they do – and to what degrees Arab homosexuals can hope for the better.