Among the many shocking violations of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the most notorious was sexual torture. Military personnel justified this abhorrent technique as an effective tool for interrogating Arabs, who are perceived as repressed and especially susceptible to sexual coercion. These abuses laid bare a racist and sexually charged power dynamic at the root of the U.S. conquest of Iraq - a dynamic that reflected centuries of Western assumptions about Arab sexuality. Desiring Arabs uncovers the roots of these attitudes and analyzes the impact of Western ideas - both about sexuality and about Arabs - on Arab intellectual production. Sexual desire has long played a key role in Western judgments about the value of Arab civilization. In the past, Westerners viewed the Arab world as licentious, and Western intolerance of sex led them to brand Arabs as decadent; but as Western society became more sexually open, supposedly prudish Arabs soon became viewed as backward. Rather than focusing exclusively on how these views developed in the West, Joseph A. Massad instead reveals the history of how Arabs represented their own sexual desires. from the nineteenth century to the present in order to chart the changes in Arab sexual attitudes and their links to Arab notions of cultural heritage and civilization. For instance, he demonstrates how, in the 1980s, the rise of sexual identity politics and human rights activism in the West came to define Arab nationalist, and especially Islamist, responses to sexual desires and practices, and he reveals the implications these reactions have had for contemporary Arabs. A work of impressive scope and erudition, Joseph A. Massad's chronicle of both the history and modern permutations of the debate over representations of sexual desires and practices in the Arab world is a crucial addition to our understanding of a frequently oversimplified and vilified culture.

This paperback edition of a classic not only tests a number of popular hypotheses about the Mughal Empire during the reign of Aurangzeb by examining the composition and the role of nobility under his rule, but also assesses afresh the material and questions that have been thrown up since 1966.

Constructs a history of a heretical untouchable community over the last 200 years, the Satnamis of Central India, who combine features of a caste and a sect to challenge the tenor of ritual power that defines Hinduism. Discusses issues of caste and untouchability, sect and kinship, and myths as part

The book provides an insight into the lives of Khusro Mirza Beg, a scion of a princely family of Georgia, who was adopted by Mir Karam Ali Khan Talpur, and Fareedun, also from Georgia, whose paths fatefully crossed thousands of miles away, in distant Sindh. The author traces the historical background that led to the author's ancestors migration from Georgia in the early 1800's to Sindh, and focuses on Khusro's life as a young man, and his relationship with the Mirs of Sindh, and continues with the family history until the twentieth century.

In 1638, the ruler of Japan ordered a crusade against his own subjects, a holocaust upon the men, women and children of a doomsday cult. The sect was said to harbour dark designs to overthrow the government. Its teachers used a dead language that was impenetrable to all but the innermost circle of believers. Its priests preached love and kindness, but helped local warlords acquire firearms. They encouraged believers to cast aside their earthly allegiances and swear loyalty to a foreign god-emperor, before seeking paradise in terrible martyrdoms. The cult was in open revolt, led, it was said, by a boy sorcerer. Farmers claiming to have the blessing of an alien god had bested trained samurai in combat and proclaimed that fires in the sky would soon bring about the end of the world. The Shogun called old soldiers out of retirement for one last battle before peace could be declared in Japan. For there to be an end to war, he said, the Christians would have to die. This is a true story.