In If This Is a Man, Primo Levi describes the "Muselmann", or Muslim, as the "true", the "complete" witness of the Nazi death camps. The "Muselmann" was the term for the inmate who, utterly depleted of the will to live, awaited his murder at the lowest level of racial degradation: a "staggering corpse", in Jean Améry's words, "a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions". Indeed, as Levi wrote, "if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen."

During the 19th century, the virile Arab and Turk who had once provoked paranoia in Christendom morphed into the sick man of Europe – the will-less Muselmann. However, anticolonial resistance after 1945 soon resurrected an older demonology. In The Question, Henri Alleg's memoir of torture in French-ruled Algeria, the Muslim is a proudly defiant insurrectionary with political will and zeal: a menacing spectre that the French seek to exorcise by sodomising their Algerian prisoners with bottles and delivering electric shocks to their genitals. The torture was an instance of what Levi had called "useless violence". But it had its own logic: it was essential to rebuilding a masculine identity profoundly damaged by France's abject capitulation to Nazi Germany and then to the Viet Cong at Dien Bien Phu.

Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi's extraordinary account of rendition, captivity and torture reveals, more vividly than any book in the previous decade of shock-and-awe ferocity, how he and countless other men became victims of a profound sense of individual and collective emasculation. His captors tried to re-establish their full-spectrum dominance in a variety of ways. There is among them the permissive libertarian who announces, "Today, we're gonna teach you about great American sex", as two topless women rub themselves against Slahi's shackled body, and play with his penis.