Fantasies of perverse sexuality forged relations between the Anglo-European and Arab worlds, with both cultures projecting lurid aberrations (and abominations) on the Other in an ever-oscillating dance between desire and repulsion. With subtlety, keen insight, and close attention to Burton and Lawrence's highly partial ethnography and loaded translations, Feras Alkabani tracks the fluctuations of this unappeasable mutual curiosity. Reading the two famous Orientalists in the context of their Arabic contemporaries and later writers, he is able to explore the strong, historical shifts and exchanges in attitudes to same-sex relations. This is scholarship characterised throughout by an appealing empathy for the human subject, whatever their gender or orientation or ethnicity.

Marina Warner, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Birkbeck College, London, UK and Distinguished Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, UK

In this wonderfully erudite and profound work, Feras Alkabani explores the nuances and paradoxes of the maverick Orientalism of Sir Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence. Paying particular attention to the homoerotic motivations of the two scholar-adventurers, this book illuminates anachronistic tensions between fantasy and historical experience so as to add much intricacy to our understandings of Euro-Arab cultural encounters.

Caroline Rooney, Professor Emeritus of African and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Kent, UK

Illuminating. Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence and the Culture of Homoerotic Desire is an original, nuanced reading of cross-cultural encounters between the British and the Arabs in the long nineteenth century that shaped discourses on modernity in two entangled cultural spheres. Through the prism of the 'Orient' as theatre and 'Orientalism' as masquerade, Feras Alkabani stages the British and Arab cultural, historical and political entanglement in the conversations about homoerotic desire between British adventurers in the Orient, Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence, and Arab travellers to Europe, Rifa?a al-Tahtawi and Muhammad b. ?Abdallah al-Saffar, and unveils the ways in which the allure of and romance with cultural difference underpin liberatory discourses on self and other, imperialism and nationalism, and modernity and tradition, equally in Victorian Britain and Nahdawi Arab world. A must-read for anyone interested in Orientalism, European modernism, and Arab nationalism.

Wen-chin Ouyang, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK