So human a brain: knowledge and values in the neurosciences

While some of these formulations are not particularly original, the efforts by several contributors to orient them within a broader social context are sometimes illuminating. The book's many explicit personal accounts provide valuable vignettes on a little-known aspect of the social scene in Islamic countries, and often in ways that the authors themselves seem not to have noticed. A "drag" dress-up party in Damascus (pp. 52-3), for example, is unlikely to have anything to do with an indigenous Syrian tradition, and (assuming that it is not to be dismissed as fictional) rather reflects the impact of Western influence. If the perspective of the "insider", as it were, is in some ways a merit of the book, in others it is clearly problematic. The authors' often outspoken tenor, ubiquitous sexual slang, graphic exposition of sexual episodes, and stress upon exclusively male-male sexual behaviour all tend to mould their assessment of male-male sexuality in the Islamic world into patterns familiar in the West, despite repeated stress on the difference between the two cultures. More importantly, it may be asked whether those aspects of the Islamic male-male sexual world which are familiar and accessible to Western visitors are really representative of the whole. In important ways, one must suspect that they are not. The book stresses, for example, that men who have relations with other males routinely marry and enjoy fulfilling heterosexual relationships revolving around the creation and nurturing of their own nuclear families. But the important issues of socialization which thus arise are hardly adumbrated in the book. It is also curious that while ethnic stereotypes are repeatedly rejected in principle. they are often invoked in practice: "For North Africans and Southwest Asians it is self-evident that men like to penetrate all kinds of beings" (p. 5), "Since a Moroccan has a hard-on all the time ." (p. 29), thieving Iranians (p. 63), etc. Such deliverances convey the impression that the Muslim man, in so far as he is really the subject of this book, is here viewed as a mere object of sexual pursuit, and in only a secondary sense is regarded as an individual with personal sexual concerns and interests which need to be understood within the context of his own culture. Discussion of specifically medical material or issues is almost non-existent in the book, and even AIDS appears only rarely and in an entirely peripheral fashion. This is unfortunate, …