Autonomy and Symbolic Capital in an Academic Social Movement
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.
Sociology and the History of Islam
Here’s a video of a 40-minute introductory talk I gave on the Qur’an and the early history of Islam, on 30 January 2013 at the National University of Singapore. The talk was part of a lecture series called ‘Introduction to the Study of the Contemporary Middle East’, organised by the university’s Middle East Institute, where I was then a post-doc.
Nationalist Tastes and Intellectual Struggles in Egypt
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.