The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East

For scholars within Western academia who study contemporary Muslims and the Middle East—a group of which I am a member—a common dilemma arises as we consider our research and its audience. On the one hand, inaccurate stereotypes of Muslims and Arab people are so pervasive that it can seem that if our work does nothing more than reveal Muslims as complicated, self-reflexive, thinking, and feeling human beings then we have scored a major scholarly victory. At the same time, if our research focuses too much on this kind of social mission—compensating for negative stereotypes with more “positive” ones—the nuanced, complicating, and potentially deeply enlightening aspects of our objects of study can be glossed over. Stanford anthropologist Marcia Inhorn’s impeccably researched book The New Arab Man seems caught between these tendencies of honorable stereotype replacement and in-depth …