Dr Teo, who teaches Modern European History at Macquarie University and has written two successful novels herself, has identified a patch of territory that Edward Said neglected in his monumental work Orientalism (1978). Said and his successors concentrated on fine arts, music, literature, up-market travel writing, and, to some extent, film, but their research period began with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, mainly involved texts by men, and did not extend to popular culture or to today’s greatly changed world, let alone to the eternal question: What do women want? Sexual attraction and romantic love, and how Western women ‘understood and represented Oriental love affairs and interracial relationships’ is the patch that Teo has decisively made her own.

Desert Passions traces the origins of Western fascination with the Middle East back to the Middle Ages, when Crusader epics and male narratives of chivalric love made somewhat contradictory assumptions about women’s desires. In response to the expansion of Islamic Spain, imagined abductions of European women, and their enslavement and sequestration in a sheik’s harem, proliferated in literature. The French fictional heroine Roxane (or Roxelane), who supposedly married a sultan and bore his children but remained a champion of liberty, attracted several novelists and composers, including Mozart in The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782). Romantic poetry of outlaw, infidel heroes like Byron’s The Giaour (1813) and The Corsair (1814) attracted early nineteenth-century writers and readers to the Orient – if not in person, then in their imagination. Soon, British pornographic novels like The Lustful Turk (1823) began promoting the notion that, throughout the declining Ottoman empire, what virginal Englishwomen needed was a good rape, and in the declining Ottoman empire they would get it. As British and French imperialism spread in the Middle East, spirited European adventuresses joined the fray in fiction, and many novels told of their being overpowered by despotic Muslim men, with a lot of horse-riding across deserts and nights in tents. Frequently, they contrived in the end to take their reformed despoilers back home as monogamous, middle-class husbands.

The popularity of these novels, Teo shows, rose with successive wars, and with the dispiritedness of English men. Attention to the Middle East surged with the Six Day War in 1967 and the 1970s oil shocks, when sheik novels reappeared in Britain, followed by the United States (with films as well), and Australia. The two Gulf Wars kept the genre in business. What Teo calls ‘Disneyfication’ spread from the fiction to soft-core ‘Arabian Nights’ movies for children, that may leave another generation of Western readers as deluded about the Middle East as its predecessors. Indeed, she concludes from reading readers’ comments on various websites, many people don’t want facts about such disturbing events as 9/11 to dispel their romantic illusions about the Orient. It is, says one reader, all about love.

At the centre of Teo’s research patch is The Sheik (1921), a novel written by a woman, E.M. Hull, with a ‘new woman’ as its heroine, and which attracted a vast female readership. It was succeeded by Hull’s Sons of the Sheik (1925), two movies starring Rudolph Valentino, and dozens, hundreds even, of films and novels about sheiks and desert romances. As society changed in the course of the twentieth century, these narratives successively took up white-supremacist themes, then became more erotic, then second-wave feminist, and then anti-terrorist. Americans, Australians, and one Canadian woman joined the British authors. When Mills & Boon and similar publishers took over the genre, they gave authors their writing instructions, and rape was dropped. Abortion, Teo observes, was never to be mentioned: she does not comment on contraception. A degree of Middle Eastern ‘authenticity’ was encouraged by the publishers, but if one motivation consistently drove the novels and films, it was the Western heroine’s Occidental superiority, and her self-assigned role of reforming the sheik, even if she preferred her desert life to dreary England. To validate the love interest, sheiks were presented more positively than the stereotypical Arab men of most Western popular culture. (How many sheiks are there? asked one reader). But in The Sheik and its successor narratives, many of these men turned out to be British, or half-European: which was, it seems, intended to explain their fundamental nobility of character. It was also the authors’ way of getting around the antipathy to ‘coloured’ men seducing white women that, Teo shows, existed in all the Anglophone countries.

Teo is to be admired for her persistence in painstakingly researching so many lightweight writers and their online admirers. She admits that most of these novels erase or silence the women in Arab societies, and selectively stereotype the men. The few comments she finds online from Muslim women express distaste for the way sheik fiction represents Arab men. She cites one study of Middle Eastern men’s writings about European women (Derek Hopwood, 1999), but presumably for reasons of length, consigns it to an endnote and does not discuss what they say, though that would surely have been interesting. Teo also opts to ignore Barbara Cartland completely, even though Cartland was the queen of romance, and some of her novels included sheiks and deserts.

More importantly, perhaps, Teo omits such serious writers of the past as Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell, or those of the present like Geraldine Brooks and Sally Neighbour, whose presentations of fact would contrast with deficiencies in the fiction. Admittedly, Teo’s study may already be more serious than its subject warrants, given that much of this fiction is so trivial and ridiculous. But she gives credit where it is due, and understands the enduring power of memes: for example, the nineteenth-century image of the sheik as the ‘noble Bedouin’ (represented in the popular imagination by Peter O’Toole or Omar Sharif), which reappears influentially in contemporary liberal Western journalism on Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly that of Paul McGeough. Teo also recognises the contributions that negative images of Arabs in American popular culture make to the ‘cultural warehouse’ of impressions by which international events are explained (like invading Iraq) or policies justified (like liberating Muslim women). What she cannot argue from the mass of evidence she has collected, however, is that women’s images of Arabs in romance fiction are sufficiently different from those of men and carry enough weight to have any countervailing effect.