In one of the graduate commencements at the American University in Cairo, the late scholar Edward Said signed off his opening speech on the academic space with a simulation between the academic and the traveler. “The image of traveler depends not on power, but on motion, on a willingness to go to different worlds, use different idioms, understand a variety of disguises, masks, rhetoric, and be free to do so, and to be critical…"
Those words and many others bring Said consistently back to life. Thursday marked the sixth memory of his death, which al-Masry al-Youm’s English Edition opted to commemorate through the voices of young Egyptian travelers delving into the different realms of academia. Said’s Orientalism, Covering Islam, Nationalism – Colonialism and Literature, Representations of the Intellectual and others share an overriding archetype of critical consciousness when producing knowledge about the Middle East.
Being bearers of the notion of the traveler as described by Said, those thriving academics recount their inspiration with Said’s literary and theoretical production, its position in their intellectual quests as well as questions and critiques they have for it. Being critical consumers of Said’s theoretical knowledge, they manifest Said’s very vision for a lucid and nuanced academic project.
Noha el-Hennawy is working towards acquiring her MS degree in journalism from Columbia University, after having practiced journalism in Egypt professionally for the past five years for a variety of media outlets. For her, flirting with Said’s ideas when journalism is practiced in American corporate media is only normal and recurrent. “It happened several times when I was working on stories for American media,” she says. “I felt Said’s words were very true. Western media has been highly orientalized and that’s why they focus on issues that fit their images about the orient, like human rights, women issues and other issues associated with backwardness. They stay away from other issues that are equally important like poverty, which does not entail a cultural element of backwardness.”
El-Hennawy keeps this in mind as she chooses her practical assignments as a Master of Science candidate in New York City. She is currently working on the issue of the Arab community in the city for it’s closer to her interests. She recognizes the fortes of certain Western media practices with regards to academic training, as well as reporting ethics and zeal, yet the approach and the pre-conceptions leave much to desire. “After I came here, I felt for sure I didn’t want to cover anything other than the Middle East. It might be the home sickness, but I think of journalists as organic intellectuals. You can’t practice journalism else than in your own country. Otherwise it becomes a breadwinning profession. But I see journalism as more than [that]. It [has the function] of fulfilling a civic obligation to your country, your society, your region…"
For Dina Bishara, who is in a PhD political science program at George Washington University in Washington DC, specializing in comparative politics, explicit references to Said’s work are somewhat rare in political science scholarship on the Middle East. But that doesn’t preclude the centrality of his arguments to the field. “Said’s scholarship has initiated a paradigm shift in the scholarly study of the Middle East. It has forced scholars to seriously question and refine their assumptions. In that sense, it has encouraged a healthy debate about previously accepted approaches,” she says. This is particularly relevant given the predominant analytical lens in studying Middle East politics and which focus on the factor of religion as opposed to the political economy for example. “Political scientists studying the Middle East are still grappling with the degree to which the region is “unique.” Debates about “Arab” or “Muslim” exceptionalism with regards to democratization, foreign policy decision-making, and nationalism, to name a few, continue to permeate the study of Middle East politics.”
Bishara is currently considering her dissertation topic which will focus on the region. While doing so, she is aware of certain shortcomings associated with Said’s Orientalism. “I think the fear of orientalist accusations is particularly salient for young scholars who study the Middle East while living abroad. There is always a fear that time spent outside of the Middle East has ‘tainted’ the scholar’s perspective in a way that renders his/her scholarship subject to insensitivity to context or other common misperceptions about the region.” This is reflected in Bishara’s process of identifying her dissertation topic. “I contemplated exploring issues related to the politics of sexuality in my dissertation. Even though I intended such a project to investigate the politics of authority and the degree to which the state regulated the private realm, I was faced with the internal and external struggle of presenting my ideas in a way that reflected sensitivity to a number of concerns. These included using Western-centric categories to analyze the politics of a particular Arab country, focusing on a topic that is deemed by some Arab scholars as marginal, and conducting yet another study focusing on the plight of women in the Arab world. Realizing that I might never adequately allay the fears of my critics, I decided for the time being to shift my research focus away from this issue.”
Zeinab Abul Magd also expounds on her critical use of Said’s scholarship. She has acquired a PhD degree in history from Georgetown University and is currently teaching Middle East history in the University of Oberlin, Ohio. Her courses include economic history, Islam and politics, colonial and post-colonial state in the Middle East and North Africa. “Said influences my work at different degrees. In teaching, I rely on his arguments a lot to bring young American students on board with us… Said’s arguments were raised 30 years ago in response to orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East and in my teaching, I work hard on correcting those stereotypes. So I use his narrative with young students in the simplest way and I put in my syllabi the sources that match with his argument the most,” she says. However, working on her own academic research, she tries to find new avenues. “With the advent of post-modern and post-colonial theory or the critique of western modernity and its impositions on the Middle East, which Said was a leading figure in, all what we are doing is criticizing modernity and the West one way or another. I believe young Arab scholars need to split away from this and try to create a new narrative about ourselves.”
That said, Abul Magd does not think that misrepresentation of the Middle East by the West has been eradicated yet. “The field of history still perpetuate stereotypes about Arabs especially those who are trained in old orientalist programs at universities such as Princeton or Chicago. For instance, there is always the emphasis on studying the divisions between shi’a and sunna in Middle-Eastern history because of the situation in Iraq and Lebanon. Some scholars only perceive the Middle East in terms of religious [and] political conflict and study the roots of this conflict in early Islamic history.” Accordingly, she remains fascinated with Said’s ideas about representation. "…That the West creates representative images about us and acts with us according to them. They are inventions of the West’s imagination but yet decide on how the West perceives us and what foreign policy it applies to us.”
Dina Ramadan also shares a nuanced relation with Said’s academia. A PhD candidate in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, her earlier research re-examines Said’s theories through an under-studied microcosm. She focused on ways in which Middle Eastern art was exhibited in western art capitals, different discourses that produced these exhibitions and the modes of consumption associated with them. “Of course Said’s paradigms, especially his thoughts on the production of knowledge and of places was very useful,” she says. While currently she works on the early 20th century Egyptian intellectuals’ discourse about their artistic production, she attempts to extend Said’s scholarship rather than reproduce its theories through different empirical evidence. “I think we are in a different moment now, and many fields, particularly in Middle East studies need to work out what happens post-orientalism,” she adds. “Much of art readings from the region, including a lot that is produced regionally, is framed through a narrative of tradition versus modernity. What I am more concerned about, certainly in my own work, and particularly when thinking about the art world, and the work that is produced on it, is where can we go from here. How do we move past thinking about artistic production, whether in writing or in exhibiting, through a particular lens?”
Ramdan particularly appreciates Said’s texts Reflections on Exile, for they give the idea of the intellectual being in a constant state of exile, a discomfort that eventually benefits production. “I think in many ways, and as much as academics try and deny it, our work has a deeply personal element to it. So I guess, in a way, my work on Egypt’s art scene in the first half of the 20th century was in many ways a way for me to try and figure out where the roots of these debates came from and to see if there were moments in which the concerns were different, and if so why. I don’t think I have answered the question at all. But I think the short answer is, as someone who works on the ‘region’ from abroad there is always a question of positionality that is at play. How to balance the questions you think are important in the library in New York with the questions that concern people in your sources, or in contemporary Cairo…"
