How would you assess Middle East studies as it is
undertaken by scholars based in the region?
The most striking problem is the limited expertise that Arab
scholars have about countries in the Middle East other than their
own. Even in the most established intellectual institutions, for
example in Egypt, it is difficult to find real experts on Lebanon,
Jordan or Yemen. Very few could even be called real experts on
the Palestinian question. The problem is even greater in countries
with newer and smaller academic establishments. One factor is
the weakness of scholarly communities in general, and another
is that would-be researchers are spending most of their time teaching--or
perhaps "over-teaching" is more accurate--in colleges and universities
with poor working conditions. Then there is the problem of poorly-equipped
libraries, and very limited resources to support scholarly research.
There are political factors, too. After the Camp David agreement,
inter-Arab connections broke down, and this stifled research on
other countries. In the 1950s and '60s, there was an inspired
interest in comparative work on nationalism and social movements,
but this has receded and been replaced by more in-country work.
This inhibits the development of regional expertise.
How would you describe the circulation of locally-produced
scholarly research in the region?
The problem here is one of access to publications. There is
absolutely no institutional structure in the Middle East that
facilitates the circulation of academically-oriented research.
Except for those rare studies put out by commercial publishers,
studies by academic presses are like clandestine publications
as far as their marketability or accessibility to scholars outside
of that country. You can find them if you seek them out, which
enterprising individuals visiting other countries sometimes do.
But most scholarly works in Arabic get very limited exposure.
There are a couple of exceptions. One is the Center for Arab
Unity Studies in Beirut. Since the mid-1970s, this has been a
kind of advocacy and research center on Arab relations that has
published some good works, including theses. In the early years,
the Center was largely interested in Arab ideologies and nationalist
movements. There were very few single-country studies because
this would have been considered "infra-national." But this has
changed in the last few years. The Center has been publishing
on Palestine, on the Algeria crisis, on Lebanese reconstruction.
And contrary to most of the university publishers, the Center
has a good distribution network.
How would you describe the dominant paradigms informing or
influencing the work of Arab scholars' research agendas?
The work of scholars trained in local universities still tends
to be very traditional, due to the problems of limited exposure
to debates and discussions going on elsewhere. Although there
are some individuals who are engaged in theoretical and methodological
debates, trends emanating from the West have not had much of an
impact on research in general. The last major trend in Arab social
science, by now rather dated, is variations on Marxist approaches.
Topically, however, some of the same issues of interest in the
West are drawing the attention of Arab scholars, especially civil
society and citizenship issues, and women's studies. These topics
are generating some lively research, especially in North Africa,
Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. I am talking, of course, about research
in Arabic.
What kinds of critical reevaluations of modernization are
being elaborated by Middle East-based scholars?
While one no longer finds the kinds of naive advocacy of Western-style
modernization, one finds few constructive alternatives to deal
with problems related to development--urban sprawl, the welfare
state, militarization. These problems present a real dilemma for
people in the region, and not simply in an intellectual sense.
You have societies in real crisis, with difficult choices to make.
What is the first priority? Certainly scholars can play an important
role in promoting understandings about the issues at hand. For
this reason, I think it is a problem that so much intellectual
energy is being devoted to issues of "images" and "representations."
The priority should be the social conditions affecting people's
lives, yet in this area scholarship remains quite weak. The most
challenging ideas are coming from the constellation of Islamist
intellectuals, including former leftists turned anti-modernist
Islamists.
How do you envisage a more comprehensive approach to analyzing
social conditions?
The social map has changed considerably in the last 20 years.
Yet we know very little about these changes because so much intellectual
energy is being channeled into ideological debates, not into research
and the hard work of social analysis. From an academic perspective,
this is a problem.
Existing statistics are not usually very helpful, and survey
research is quite limited because the possibilities for doing
such work are often shaped by national interests and priorities
of the regimes. The main problem, as I see it, is the real gap
in solid sociological approaches to the study of social categories,
to which neither quantitative methods nor more narrowly focused
anthropological approaches are adequate.
What is really missing is a solid middle-level range of scholarship.
We have lots of work being done at the very local level, like
studies of neighborhoods or particular institutions. And we still
have a concern for global relations, particularly among those
remaining committed leftists as well as among Islamists. But there
is a real lack of critical work on what is happening at the national
level. In the 1960s and '70s, this was starting to develop, but
it was subverted by conditions in Palestine, the Lebanon civil
war, the fallout from Egypt's signing of a treaty with Israel.
The best middle-level work is going on in North Africa, because
of the influence of French intellectual traditions and the flow
of people and information between the Maghrib and France. The
French tradition is strong on sociology, with its emphasis on
the study of classes, social history, mobility, relations between
the state and society, and so on.
The US-influenced scholarly tradition, which tends to be more
prominent in Egypt and the Mashriq, has a very limited commitment
to sociology-there are hardly any American or American-trained
Arab sociologists working on the Middle East. Rather, the middle-level
analysis is dominated by political scientists for very specific
reasons related to US foreign policy, whether for or against it.
And the anthropologists have tended, at least until rather recently,
to look for the "exotic," the less overtly political issues. As
for this middle level analysis among scholars in the region, it
is lacking because this is the most sensitive area, the area where
relations of power are constructed and reconstructed. There is
a real need for-and a real lack of-research on the effects of
economic liberalization on societies, on the effects of the end
of the Cold War on national policies, and on the quite slow and
often reversible transition to democracy.
What can you say about the role that governments play in
facilitating or constraining researchers' abilities to conduct
their work?
Scholars have to present their research agendas in ways that
make them acceptable to the powers that be. What this means depends
on the country, of course. In many countries, you still need a
permit to do any kind of research, particularly field work and
survey research. In some places, permission is almost impossible
to get. This has been one factor pushing researchers into studies
of particular communities or to work on documents. The results
are an emphasis on textual representations and images, or on historical
studies. You can work on some neighborhood or tribe, or study
TV programs, or work on poetry or craft-making. I am not dismissing
that, don't get me wrong. But if it is the major trend, then it
is not enough to really understand the Arab world. It presents
a distorted view because there is no way to put these findings
into some larger perspective.
How would you characterize relations between scholars coming
from the US and Europe and their colleagues in the Arab world?
It depends largely on the scholars themselves, on the ethics
and motivations that they bring to their work. Certainly there
is strong resentment toward those who are perceived as acting
paternalistically or taking advantage of local scholars as "native
informants." But there is a basis for real cooperation and collaboration
when scholars find that they can share in each others' perspectives
and contribute to each others' work.
One issue that this question raises is the naive and romanticized
views of the region that some Western scholars bring, especially
when it is coupled by a lack of preexisting knowledge about the
societies in which they land. In the 1960s and '70s there was
a trend to go to "revolutionary places." Some of this produced
great collaborations, especially in Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon.
During the intifada, lots of people went to the West Bank, partly
motivated by solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. But when
a romanticized view is what motivates scholars to choose a research
site, this can generate frustrations on the part of local scholars
who have their own--unromanticized--agendas.
How would you describe cross-cultural influences on scholarship?
There is not nearly enough cross-fertilization. Only a handful
of Arab scholars are widely known by scholars in Europe and North
America; the same people are always being invited to conferences
and having their books translated. Promising younger scholars
from the region have few opportunities to travel to present their
work or attend academic conferences. As for the Arab world, the
biggest problem is the serious decline in foreign language mastery
and the declining number of works being translated into Arabic.
The younger generation of students, even graduate students, have
difficulty reading material in English or French, a noticeable
change from 20 or 30 years ago. One reason is the rapid popularization
of higher education which has the consequence of falling standards.
In a general sense, academic institutions are being exhausted
due to the overburdening of teachers and limited resources. The
language issue is compounded by problems getting works translated,
as fewer outlets have the capacity to fund such projects, and
governments are less interested in subsidizing translations. This
has hurt social science scholarship through the constricted circulation
of publications, which in turn inhibits cross-cultural dialogues.
Are there any significant region-wide research projects that
facilitate collaborative work among Arab scholars?
One important area is human rights. This is more advocacy-oriented
than academic, but some of the activists are scholars. There are
also some important developments in women's studies, building
regional networks, especially in the last two or three years.
Last summer, 50 researchers from all over the region gathered
in Beirut for the first meeting of an Arab women's research network,
organized by the Lebanese Association of Women Researchers. Their
journal, Bahithat, includes both female and male authors reflecting
on the state of research in the region. It is a women-led but
not women-limited initiative. The Birzeit Women's Studies Center
is also doing some interesting research and network-building.
One other emerging network worth mentioning is on women and
memory, based in Egypt. It is mostly historical and literary-focused,
but includes people in various disciplines. They are engaging
in critical readings of Arab traditions from a feminist perspective.
Now they have formed an association and are planning meetings
and conferences. These are a few examples of good and innovative
research, regional networking, critical analysis.
In the last two years, ten or so of the major social science
and policy research centers in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon
have decided to develop systematic means of information sharing,
exchanges, training workshops, collaborative research, and to
pool their intellectual resources. This very promising regional
initiative can now be visited on the web [Arab Social Science
Research: www.assr.org]. This initiative reflects a response to
the desire for more inter-Arab research enterprises. I hope that
such projects can get the necessary support because there is a
real need to develop critical masses of experts who can deal with
the problems facing the region today. So although there is a problem
doing research on other countries, there is a growing trend to
cultivate networks and structures to facilitate a greater exchange
of information. I see this as a revitalization of an "Arab sphere."
