Georgetown’s Elliott Colla Misses Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood

Elliott Colla

While many applaud the Egyptian people’s speedy course correction in ousting the Muslim Brotherhood, the ranks of Middle East studies are filled with academics who remain nostalgic for the Islamist party and the “revolution” that ushered it in. In the latest Campus Watch research, Andrew Harrod reports on a lecture from Georgetown University Arabic literature professor Elliott Colla, in which he focused on esoteric literary documents and protest signage as part of his longing for the “good old days.” Harrod’s article appears today at Jihad Watch:

Egypt’s Arab Spring “revolutionary period is over,” lamented Georgetown University Arabic literature professor Elliott Colla on June 25 at the anti-Israel Washington, DC, Jerusalem Fund before about twenty listeners. With stereotypical academic bias, his presentation, “The Poetry of Dissent,” ignored political dangers from an “Egyptian revolution” celebrated, in his leftist view, for “many, many accomplishments” of popular culture.

Seemingly unconcerned by the possibility of Egypt becoming a sharia state after dictator Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow, Colla focused on literary “documents of a social movement that tried to change a regime but stumbled.” His slides were reminiscent of a college English seminar, examining genres such as “Literary Journalism,” “Literary Memoirs,” and “Graphic Novels” among the “expressive cultures of revolutionary Egypt.” He described the “speed of publication” as “remarkable” for the various forms of literature that appeared between Mubarak’s February 2011 fall and the July 2013 overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-dominated government. “Everything tends to become melodrama” in soap opera-like novels from this period, he observed, while the “Collective Memoirs” presented in a slide were “open-ended and polyphonic.” Such minor details somehow interested him more than, say, a MB revocation of Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

To read the entire article, please click here.
Cinnamon Stillwell analyzes Middle East studies academia in West Coast colleges and universities for Campus Watch. A San Francisco Bay Area native and graduate of San Francisco State University, she is a columnist, blogger, and social media analyst. Ms. Stillwell, a former contributing political columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has written on a wide variety of topics, including the political atmosphere in American higher education, and has appeared as a guest on television and talk radio.
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