While I was away on vacation, things have been happening in the blogging world. I have just accessed my blogroll for the first time in a week and discovered that everybody is writing about an American graduate student in Scotland who has been blogging under the guise of a gay woman in Damascus. Now that he has been revealed to be a straight man in Great Britain, numerous blogs are almost exploding in condemnation of his “dishonesty.”
If you care to visit the actual blog (one that attracted over 2,000 followers and had over 800,000 hits since it was started this February), you will discover that, from the very beginning, the texts that are posted on it are announced as a novel, a work of fiction. I wouldn’t say it is a particularly good novel, but the author tried to make clear from the start that this is what it was. Posts are referred to as ‘chapters’ and are structured as such. Can anybody really doubt that 4-page-long dialogues cannot possibly be faithfully memorized by their participants and transmitted word-for-word? Any such account will of necessity be either fictional or fictionalized. Many of the posts on the blog are poems, which makes it even clearer that we are dealing with a work of fiction.
The reason why people are so upset about the ‘discovery’ that Amina Arraf is not a real person but a product of somebody’s imagination is that MacMaster managed to tap into a number of obsessions that currently preoccupy many liberal bloggers. What can be sexier in the mind of a progressive blogger than a gay Muslim woman persecuted during her fight for freedom within the framework of the Arab Spring? This was an image that was begging to be invented and, of course, it was. The West loves rewriting events happening in foreign places in its own language and in accordance with its own set of concerns. MacMaster did exactly what the absolute majority of commentators on foreign affairs do on a regular basis.
Talking to Westerners about feminism, gay rights, democracy, left and right, freedom, etc. is difficult because they so often refuse to recognize that these concepts can carry an entirely different meaning for people from other cultures. I studiously avoid any articles on Russian-speaking countries that appear in Western media because they keep trying to massage a very different reality into a set of concepts that are alien to it.
Of course, when a person called Amina Arraf with a suitably Arab (but still one that can be attractive to the Western gaze) appearance starts writing exactly what Western progressives want to hear from an Arab fighter for freedom and gay rights, everybody is extremely happy. Finally, these strange, incomprehensible people are giving us what we want and are speaking the language we have been eager to have them speak. When it’s revealed that the dream of the ‘correct’ Muslim gayness is nothing but a fantasy of an American blogger, the hope of finally encountering an embodiment of our pseudo-liberal fantasies is dashed and a wave of outrage is unleashed.
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The reasons why this is irresponsible have nothing to do with Western liberals or anyone else in the “West” and everything to do with the fact that people who live in places where homesexuality is a crime outed themselves to the brutal regimes they live under out of concern for this fictional persona. Yes, perhaps they should have known she was fiction. But when one knows that people believe in a persona, they should not have it commit actions that endanger others. See this post for other examples of this: http://loveanddisdain.blogspot.com/2011/06/irresponsible-blogging-on-amina-arraf.html
There are also plenty of Arab bloggers who write in English and say things that would make say, secularists, happy, like this one: http://www.sandmonkey.org/. The Arab world, after all, despite what the English media says, has quite the variety of opinions on everything. There are also legitimate Arab gay rights groups whose work is undermined by this deception, like this one: http://www.helem.net/
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The post you quote was actually the first one I saw in my blogroll on this subject. If adults decided to out themselves for whatever reasons, a blogger whose blog they chose to do that can hardly be blamed for their decision. Let’s not infantilize those people, especially since we have no idea whether they exist. Who’s to say that any commenter on that blog is 100% who they claimed to be? Who’s to say some of the commenters weren’t also characters created by MacMaster?
You can’t expect an American blogger to bear a greater responsibility for the welfare of gay Syrians than they do for their own welfare. Wouldn’t that be extremely patronizing on his part?
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I’m referring to contacting the authorities out of fear for another person, not outing themselves on the blog itself. If any blogger, in any country, said they were kidnapped, I would consider them responsible for what ensues, real or not. I haven’t actually read the blog, just about it, so I’m not sure to what extent it’s obvious that this was fictional. I should have specified that I don’t agree with everything in the post I quoted which is quite long. I also don’t disagree with what you say about pseudo-liberals, but I think it’s missing the point. You don’t need fictional blogs to find things liberals like in the Arabic blogosphere.
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I definitely don’t need fictional blogs. But this blog had over 800,000 hits in several months which is a lot. Today, bloggers I consider to be pseudo-liberals are acting personally offended by the fact that it was all make-believe.
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I am not personally offended, particularly as I never even read the blog. However, I think it is irresponsible for two main reasons. One is causing people to out themselves to authorities out of fear for another person, as I mentioned above. The second is undermining the legitimate work of gay rights groups in the Arab World. They are usually dismissed as American/European/Western/Israeli propaganda, which is typically a bogus claim, but this particular case provides fodder for that claim.
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No, not you. i don’t consider you to be one of those pseudo-liberals. It’s the “let’s pity the poor Arabs / Slavs / Latins” crowd I dislike. You are obviously not one of them.
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I hadn’t seen the blog but there was the Facebook page which apparently really did deceive a lot of people worldwide, and I can see how/why.
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I am proud to say that I have never in my life seen a Facebook page, so this is not something I could comment on.
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