Run-ins, altercations, tussles and skirmishes have regularly taken place between US based academics, mostly diasporic scholars, and activists based in the Arab world. Although these encounters pre-date the events of the 'Arab Spring' they have reached a new pitch after the uprisings of 2011. Online journals,Jadaliyya being the most prominent among them, have staged such confrontations in which the Arab activist suddenly finds himself or herself the object of a fierce attack. The attack, in its subdued mode, charges the activist of being the unwitting handmaiden of western imperialist projects- instrumentalised by transnational bodies such as the Gay International and the UN international agencies or as a naïve participant in western discourses which the anti-imperialists have coined as " homonationalism" and "femonationalism". These western discourses, according to them, not only use the plight of women and gays in the Arab World to assert the moral superiority of the "West", but, as is the case in some European countries, by making the cultural attitude towards homosexuality and women a bureaucratic question to Muslim immigrants seeking citizenship. The local activist becomes an unwitting participant in these debates by either making "gay rights" or “patriarchy” a social question in the first place, or by not paying sufficient attention to the way his or her activism can be appropriated by such discourses.
In its more vicious mode, the attack accuses the Arab activist of being illiterate, ignorant, mediocre and worst still, uninformed about the latest canons propagated seemingly exclusively within the hallways of US academia. Sometimes the activist is derogatorily called a native informant, a commoditised member of the compradors of the South, a poseur who in order to change the Arab world to appear modern and liberal in the eyes of the West through the medium of his or her activism, abandons the Arab, the Muslim and Islam to the salivating discursive dogs of the West.
Sometimes the critic adopts a maximalist position and denies any validity to the type of local gender activism in question. The activist is charged with introducing identities that are foreign into the Arab cultural scene ("gay"), inciting homophobic discourse through their own activism, (homophobia presumably being a phenomenon that postdates their activism and never predates it) and scaring certain sexual practices away (same sex practices that can only occur if "gay" identity is not attached to the participants). Sometimes the critic, the US academic that is, identifies a "local authentic" to give local weight to his/her critique – a Bedouin woman for instance – who upholds exactly the opposite of what the activist is asserting: "Honor IS good", rendering the activist recrimination of crimes committed in its name suspect. It is important of course that this "authentic" identity selectively chosen by the critic to enunciate the truth of the matter belongs to a marginal community - a Bedouin, a villager, always a woman - which is to be contrasted with the social class of the activist, who is typically urban, middle or upper-middle class and Westernised. The point is not to be missed. The local activist is an outsider thrice: by virtue of his or her class position, by virtue of the presumably “external” discourses of oppression and grievance that the activist peddles and by virtue of the international audience they seek to impress.
