Charles Saatchi clearly enjoys his role as the art world's grand provocateur. His Sensation! show at the Royal Academy was just one of many to have provoked outrage at what might constitute contemporary art. Now he has put together an exhibition of contemporary art from the Middle East which contains elements that could provoke dramatically hostile reactions from Muslim fundamentalist quarters. In our hypersensitive times, after the fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie and the violent reaction to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet, Saatchi might be testing his luck in celebrating homosexual images of cavorting naked Muslim men, and cartoonish sculptures of Tehran prostitutes and transsexuals.

Yet however combustible it may turn out to be, Saatchi has good reason to put on this top-notch survey of Middle Eastern contemporary art. News of the Middle East today is dominated by images and reports of death and destruction, of terrorists and refugees, and the human misery caused by long-held political and religious antagonism. This widespread conflict overshadowing the region has tended to obscure the remarkably vibrant contemporary art scene that is alive and well in the countries of the Middle East and its diaspora.

Young artists in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and many other nations of the region are graduating from art school, travelling abroad, building perspectives on their own experiences, and turning out art works that speak of what they have grown up with. Some treat their subject matter obliquely, others choose to meet the brutal suffering and the dispiriting politics head on, producing works that are as direct and brutal as the head of an axe.

In its second show since moving to the King's Road, the Saatchi Gallery offers us a major survey of recent Middle Eastern painting, sculpture and installation. Nineteen artists are represented, most of them in their twenties and thirties, from Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria and Algeria, and their works reveal something of the range of their experiences and of the cultural and historical traditions of their homelands.

These nations have had long and rich visual arts traditions going back several centuries, but in the last hundred years, governments and rulers have invested in building museums and filling them with national collections, establishing art schools and sending young art students to study in beaux arts institutions all over the world, to bring back Western and Far Eastern aesthetics. The legacies of these investments and of the independent art scenes they have spawned are to be seen in this rich and revealing exhibition, which thrums with the ideas and the energies of artists from whom we in the West seldom hear.

This is a large show of almost 90 works, mostly large-scale paintings, with a selection of sculptures and installations. It is noticeable that the installations avoid the tricks and high-tech gimmicks beloved of Western artists. Perhaps their message is too urgent for them to be messing around with strobe lights and computer-generated stuff. Perhaps they cannot get hold of these things, but the poverty of their materials contributes to the direct hit of their concepts.

One of the most arresting pieces is Ghost by Kader Attia, a French Algerian living in an immigrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris. Ghost is a room full of supplicant Muslim women wrapped in silver garments, row upon row of figures kneeling in devotion, 240 of them filling the room to the extent that there is only just space enough to pick your way along one side and get to the front. You expect to hear the murmur, the gentle susurration of prayer, but as you turn at the end of the room you see that these women are hollow figures, vacant shells of tin foil, each with a gaping black hole where the face should be swathed in the veil. Attia's image of emptiness is heavily political, the shrouded, veiled, yet empty, figure of Muslim women presented as the symbol of divergent struggles over decolonisation, nationalism, revolution, Westernisation and anti-Westernisation.

Rokni Haerizadeh, an Iranian from Tehran, paints epic tableaux so vibrant with colour, movement and energy that you expect them to give off their own high-intensity noise and heat. In Typical Iranian Funeral he depicts the scene of the burial with crowds of hired mourners wailing extravagantly and corpses on full display; this is contrasted with the funeral feast, shared between close family and friends, divisively seated at separate tables. In his Typical Iranian Wedding diptych, he describes the business of getting hitched, Iranian style: the men in one room eating, drinking and carousing with abandon, and the women on the other side of a curtain, dressed to the nines for each other but barely eating or drinking.

Haerizadeh's brush is brutal and his satire sharp, but his treatment of his flawed world is broadly sympathetic. Ahmed Alsoudani, on the other hand is more bitterly direct about his life's experience. An Iraqi from Baghdad, he fled to Syria before claiming asylum in America, and now lives in Berlin. His contemporary history paintings come directly from his experiences as a child, depicting the turbulence and the bitter confusion of the atrocities that have taken place in his country. Informed by the works of Goya and George Grosz, these large war canvases are raw and aggressive in their depiction of suicide bombers, of the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the carnage and destruction, as well as the fractured nature of daily life in Baghdad.

One of the most deliberately controversial bodies of work is that by Haerizadeh's brother, Ramin, who has also been embraced by Saatchi, and has produced a series of manipulated photographs of two semi-naked men entitled Men of Allah. Based on photographs of the artist, they show two bearded and heavily hirsute men cavorting in fleshy and highly sensuous poses. The images undoubtedly transgress religious, political and gender boundaries and one might fear for the reactions of fundamentalists to the pouting lips and ballooning buttocks of these overtly homosexual images.

Shirin Fakhim, an Iranian living and working in Tehran, is similarly provocative with her series of humorous makeshift sculptures of Tehran prostitutes fashioned from everyday objects and items of clothing. She makes her life-size figures from footballs, torn and patched stockings, exaggeratedly plumped brassieres and cheap market-stall items shoved down stockings, each one finished off with a wig on top and a pair of trademark stiletto boots down below. With their badly stitched-up crotches and wayward hanks of rope revealing pre-op transsexuals, these prostitute dolls become rude jokes, provoking thoughts of cross dressing and the sordid reality of poverty, domestic violence and human trafficking.

I would be prepared to bet that Hayv Kahraman, another Iraqi from Baghdad, has studied early Chinese art and the masterpieces of Renaissance Florence, as well as Islamic miniatures, because her depictions, particularly the diptych, Carrying on Shoulder 1 & Carrying on Shoulder 2 are influenced by the serenity, delicacy and angelic beauty of these periods of explosive artistic riches. All her paintings depict the fable of the sacrifice of the lamb, recorded both in the Koran and the Bible, but she recasts the legend with women taking the men's role. Her exquisite women are depicted two dimensionally on bare canvas, their elongated necks and delicate features cast like angels, and their swaying bodies clothed in loosely flowing fabric beautifully wrought with designs both traditional and contemporary.

There are so many powerful, authoritative and insightful works in this show that I cannot mention them all; but I have at least briefly to include Shadi Ghadirian, whose work has been seen in the UK as part of the Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art show that toured in 2003. Her humorous photographs take on the subject of women and the veil, her Like Everyday Series showing brightly coloured veils with kitchen utensils held in place of the face. A colander represents a woman who is all mouth, a broom huddles demurely beneath the veil, and a meat cleaver brings to mind the “hatchet face”.

This is a richly fascinating survey and anyone with an interest in the region, at any level, would do well to take a look at these revelatory views from the inside.

Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East is at the Saatchi Gallery (www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk), Duke of York's HQ, London SW3, from Friday to May 6

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010