Research on SocioResources

Training Scholars to Study Non-Scholarly Life

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

While I was reading Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations, it occurred to me that Islamic Studies is afflicted with what Bourdieu called the scholastic fallacy: the belief that you can explain the actions of people in non-scholarly situations by projecting scholarly thinking onto them. This isn’t a matter of distinguishing between ’elite’ and ‘popular’ practices. In everyday life, everyone, including off-duty scholars, relies on what Bourdieu called practical sense, which ‘makes it possible to appreciate the meaning of the situation instantly, at a glance, in the heat of the action, and to produce at once the opportune response.’

If you want to understand people’s practical sense, you really need to spend time with them, listen to them, and notice what they do. It would also help to get to know their cultural references, e.g. by watching the films they watch. Naturally, if you don’t speak their language, you have to learn it. In the 2000s, I was lucky enough to be able to do this in Egypt, which was then one of the best places to learn spoken Arabic. Since then, Egypt has become a more dangerous place for foreign students and researchers. Even getting access to archives can be difficult. What happens to research when students can’t learn the necessary languages, do fieldwork, or access archives? They might be tempted to use canonical texts as a substitute. But if you try to make those texts answer questions about everyday life, you fall into the scholastic fallacy.

I wrote about these problems, and about possible solutions, in ‘Training Scholars to Study Non-Scholarly Life’, a chapter in Teaching Islamic Studies in the Age of ISIS, Islamophobia, and the Internet, edited by Courtney M. Dorroll. The pre-print of the chapter is freely available here.

New Book: Ten Arab Filmmakers

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Arabic Translation of 'Autonomy and Symbolic Capital in an Academic Social Movement'

Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

This is the only one of my publications that has been through peer review twice: once for the original publication in European Journal of Turkish Studies, and a second time for Idafat. Mounir Saidani, professor of sociology at the University of Tunis El Manar, translated it well, and I revised the translation somewhat.

For a brief summary of the article and its context, see Autonomy and Symbolic Capital in an Academic Social Movement.

Autonomy and Symbolic Capital in an Academic Social Movement

Thu, 15 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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. The article suggests that the group’s survival for such a long time under Mubarak, and its limited successes, depended on the involvement of renowned academics, on participatory democracy, and on the avoidance of conflicts between professors. I suggest that all these assets became liabilities following the revolutionary uprising of January 2011, and that this is why the group has largely demobilized.

Why I Did It #

In August 2012, when I was a post-doc at the National University of Singapore, I started to plan a long-term research project on the autonomy of Arab academics and on their ability to reach non-specialist audiences as intellectuals or activists. I wanted this project to include something on the March 9 Group. Jordi Tejel, the editor of this issue of EJTS, then invited me to contribute an article to the issue. In order to meet the publication deadlines, I suggested a small-scale study focusing on March 9. This would allow me to start working on the issues I was interested in, while producing an article in the time available.

What I Like About It #

Social movement theory hasn’t paid much attention to activists’ prestige, but during my own experience as an activist (in London, long ago), it seemed to me that social movements were keen to involve prestigious activists. So I’m glad I finally had a chance to do a study that deals with this aspect of activists’ careers. I’m also glad to have written about events that I see as historically important and that might otherwise have been forgotten. And since my PhD was about intellectual projects that I see as basically misguided, it was a pleasant change to study a group whose work I respect.

What I Wish I Could Have Done #

Some of the activists I interviewed belong to families that have produced generations of well-known activists, and I wish I had had the time and space to explore that phenomenon further. I also would have liked to include the perspectives of Muslim Brotherhood members who were involved in these events, as well as the views of non-activist academics.

What Next? #

Since I had to do this study in a limited amount of time, I did it using methods I was very familiar with. I think the need to publish quickly tends to limit the autonomy of research, because it discourages the researcher from taking the time to learn new techniques, and favours the reproduction of well-known, low-risk methods. Next I’d like to a research project involving techniques, especially quantitative ones, that I’m less familiar with.

Nationalist Tastes and Intellectual Struggles in Egypt

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is a talk I gave at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in New Orleans on 12 October 2013, in the panel ‘The Politics of Taste in the Late Ottoman Empire and Egypt’. In under 15 minutes, it outlines the main argument of my PhD thesis and gives a few examples.

Here’s the abstract:

In the early 20th century, Egyptian effendi intellectuals used nationalism to introduce new tastes in literature, cinema, music, journalism, and other cultural practices into Egypt. To this end, they constructed a nationalism that portrayed them as ideally qualified to be the nation’s guides, in contrast to the clergy, whose qualifications they devalued. Thus the promotion of nationalist tastes not only advanced effendi intellectuals’ careers by creating demand for their products; it was also a strategy in a broader struggle among Egyptians over prestige, credibility, and economic interests. This struggle was carried out in the pages of novels and essays, in political conflicts over educational policy, in courtrooms, and in the streets. The nationalism that emerged from this struggle, and became part of respectable mainstream tastes, increasingly resembled religion, and helped legitimize military dictatorship in the 1950s.