This article frames the history of anticolonialism in the Arab world as a history of gender, sex, and power. By thinking with early twentieth-century Arab intellectuals, it revises the assumption that the heterosexual body enters into politics primarily as a site of regulation and control. Europeans justified colonialism in the Arab East by arguing that Arabs were like children who needed tutelage before self-rule. Arab writers contested these temporal assumptions through their own theories of human development. Some figured childrearing as a form of temporal engineering through which Arab women would control human and civilizational growth. Others, like cosmopolitan Arab nationalist Fuʾad Sarruf, advocated an anticolonial nationalism that tied the temporality of rupture and event to the sexual development of the male body. These responses by Arab intellectuals to assumptions of colonial belatedness show how the biological body entered anticolonial politics as an active agent of political transformation.

本文将阿拉伯世界的反殖民主义历史描述为性别、性和权力的历史。通过与二十世纪早期的阿拉伯知识分子一起思考，它修正了异性恋身体主要作为监管和控制场所进入政治的假设。欧洲人为阿拉伯东部的殖民主义辩护，认为阿拉伯人就像孩子一样，在自治之前需要监护。阿拉伯作家通过他们自己的人类发展理论对这些时间假设提出质疑。一些人认为育儿是一种时间工程，阿拉伯妇女可以通过这种形式控制人类和文明的发展。其他人，如世界主义的阿拉伯民族主义者 Fuʾad Sarruf，提倡一种反殖民民族主义，将破裂和事件的时间性与男性身体的性发育联系起来。