Edward Said’s Orientalism pointed out the folly of assuming ’that the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books—texts—say,’ but the field of Islamic Studies doesn’t seem to have paid much attention. Job descriptions emphasise knowledge of canonical texts, and published work, such as Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? (2016), is often written as if you could understand, say, Sufism just by reading classical Sufi philosophy, without taking a close look at what Sufis actually do.
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Mona Abaza interviews me on openDemocracy:
There’s a school of thought that says it doesn’t matter whether nations are real, because people behave as if they are. But false beliefs can have very destructive effects: think of witch trials, or the denial of climate science. Belief in nations is dangerous because, since they’re imaginary, you can say whatever you want about them and no one can prove you wrong…
Strangely, although nationalism is a pervasive social phenomenon with immense effects everywhere in the world, it’s not a central preoccupation of sociology or any of the dominant social science disciplines.
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Ten Arab Filmmakers: Political Dissent and Social Critique is an edited volume about the films and careers of Arab directors whose films take a critical view of social realities. It includes a chapter by me (open access) on how the Egyptian filmmaker Yousry Nasrallah has succeeded in occupying a rather autonomous position in the cinematographic field.
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Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology has just published an Arabic translation (open access) of my article, ‘Autonomy and Symbolic Capital in an Academic Social Movement: The March 9 Group in Egypt’. I’m glad that I was able to make this research accessible to more readers, especially readers in Egypt who have been directly affected by the events discussed in the article. The effort that I put into getting it published in Arabic will be rewarded if it contributes something to discussions about social movements in Egypt before and since the revolutionary uprising of 2011.
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The European Journal of Turkish Studies (EJTS) has just published my article ‘Autonomy and Symbolic Capital in an Academic Social Movement: The March 9 Group in Egypt’ (open access), as part of a special issue on demobilization at universities in Turkey and in other countries.
What It’s About The March 9 Group for University Autonomy is a small group of Egyptian university professors who have campaigned, since 2003, against the regime’s interference in academic affairs and campus life.
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