Irony and Counter-Irony in Rashid al-Daif's How the German Came to His Senses

While numerous studies of homosexuality in the Arab world exist within the academic discipline of Gay studies, almost nothing has been done by way of opening an intercultural dialogue over the question. Attitudes toward homosexuality are apparently so widely divergent as to be almost paradigmatic of a more generalized Great Cultural Divide between the West and the Arab world. This essay argues that Lebanese novelist Rashid al-Daif's 'Awdat al-almani ila rushdih (How the German Came to His Senses) seeks to establish an intercultural dialogue among contesting viewpoints over the question of homosexuality. This essay seeks to show how al-Daif's novelized biography of the gay German writer Joachim Helfer employs a rhetoric of irony and counter-irony in order to overcome the obstacles to understanding that exist between Arab heterosexual males and gay Germans. The essay is limited to studying al-Daif's text and does not examine Helfer's response.