What Words Want

Over two sunny days in Paris, participants at the conference “Les mots du désir” (“Words of Desire”) shared thoughts, hypotheses, prejudices, assumptions, and conclusions about how premodern, modern, and contemporary Arab societies have discussed eroticism in literature, song, film, dance, quasi-scientific discourse, and everyday speech. European and North American academic interest in the sex lives of Arabs living and dead, as well as in the sexual identities, representations, mores, and behaviors prevalent in past and present Arab societies shows no sign of abating, but one way in which the organizers of this conference attempted to avoid the trap of the colonial gaze that continues to color most such analyses was to focus on the languages in which desire, behavior, repulsion, and other emotions are expressed. Not every paper was devoid of orientalist prurience, but most were serious attempts to scrutinize Arabic erotic discourse in a variety of contexts, genres, and settings. The conference was prompted by Claire Savina (Paris-Sorbonne/IFPO/CERMOM) and was organized by her and her doctoral supervisor, Frédéric Lagrange (Paris-Sorbonne). The conference was held at the Institut du Monde Arabe and Université Paris-Sorbonne, respectively, and was supported by those institutions as well as by INALCO-CERMOM, IISMM, and EHESS. Submissions were evaluated by a committee made up of Pascal Buresi (IISMM), Abdallah Cheikh-Moussa (Paris-Sorbonne, CERMOM), Luc-Willy Deheuvels (INALCO-CERMOM), Katia Zakharia (Lyon 2, CIHAM), and myself. The conference organizers plan to make a recording of the conference available online and also to publish a proceedings volume. The first day of the conference concluded with a roundtable discussion, “Writing, Conveying, and Translating Desire,” that featured Daniel Newman (University of Durham), who has translated at-Tīfāshī’s Nuzhat al-albābinto English as Sensual Delights of the Heart(2013); Salwa al-Neimi, author of La preuve par le miel; Marion Toubol, author of Amours: Voyage dans l’intimité des Egyptiens; and Habeeb Akande, author of A Taste of Honey: Sexuality and Erotology in Islam.

Twenty-one papers were presented during the two-day conference: fifteen by scholars working in the European Union, four by scholars working in the United States, and two by scholars working in North Africa. Thirteen papers concerned the premodern phases of Arabo-Islamic culture, while eight papers dealt with the modern Arab world and its diasporas. The largest number of papers presented at the conference dealt either with Arabic erotological texts or with explicitly erotic creative works. This cluster included papers on sex manuals, classical Arabic poetry, Egyptian pop music, and love treatises. The papers that fall outside this cluster can be divided into two equal groups: (1) papers—influenced undoubtedly by the conference title—that dealt with lexical issues in Arabic eroticism and (2) papers that limned the implicit erotic dimensions of creative works. Among the papers that traced implicit eroticism, Yasmina Brunet’s paper “La danse orientale comme traduction de l’érotisme arabe aujourd’hui, limites et enjeux” was notable for treating a performance art and for dealing with creative works largely produced in the Arab diaspora. Brunet provided a categorization of trends in contemporary belly dance based on performance analysis as well as interviews with choreographers and performers. Dwight Reynolds’s paper “Music as Desire: Erotic Dimensions of Musical Imagery in the Muwashshaḥ” also treated the figure of the performer, in this case the usually female singer of muwashshaḥātas presented in muwashshaḥātlyrics themselves. Reynolds turned his attention to the intimate space of muwashshaḥāttexts and their erotic imagery. He found that representations of musical scenes in the muwashshaḥātnot only are self-referential but “add to the sensuality of these imagined encounters.” Continuing with the theme of music, Frédéric Lagrange, the conference host, presented a very rich paper, “Chanter le désir, mimer l’obscenité: Fantasmes masculins et agaceries féminines dans la chanson égyptienne, de l’ère des almées aux...