This presentation focuses on South Asian involvement in Arab affairs after 1947 by examining how Indian and Pakistani intellectuals approached their neighbors to the west in their travels, polemics, and scholarship. I narrate how an anti-colonial and Arabophile cadre of South Asian scholars was dispersed and conscripted into competing national projects after the subcontinent’s partition. Examining the intellectual activity and institutional itineraries of intellectuals working in government and universities, I determine the different political positions and points of emphasis, as well as the shared networks of prestige and patronage, between “West Asian Studies” and its American counterpart, “Middle Eastern Studies.” This scholarly arrangement, distinct from centuries of Arabo-Islamic learning on the subcontinent and part of the global invention of area studies, has received little critical attention. The formation of West Asian Studies, inextricable from the rise of non-alignment and competing visions of unity and liberation in South Asia, represents a valuable site from which to study the intellectual history of purportedly post-colonial politics. In addition to the memoirs of academics and scholar-diplomats, the archives of international institutions like UNESCO, the records of American foundations like those of Ford and Rockefeller, this presentation also draws on the papers and publications of South Asian institutions of political and academic power like the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Aligarh Muslim University’s Centre for West Asian Studies, and Delhi’s Institute for Afro-Asian and World Affairs.

The paper traces on the development of Arab Studies as the central axis for inter-disciplinary knowledge production about the Arab past, drawing on the intellectual lineage of the nineteenth-century Arab nahda (awakening) while being enabled by Cold War funding for area studies. Whereas the story of Area Studies and Middle Eastern Studies in the United States—and in Britain to a certain extent—has been told, the history of Middle East Studies in the Middle East is yet to be unpacked. The paper traces the developed of the Arab Studies Program (ASP) at the American University of Beirut (AUB) starting in1936 and up until 1956. In 1936, Constantine Zurayq took part in a delegation to Egypt that sought Taha Hussein’s council for establishing a scholarly program dedicated to the study of the Arab world. However, the Program only came to fruition in 1948, led by Zurayq and Nabih Amin Faris, enabled by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1956, Faris, as ASP director, submitted a proposal for the reformation of Program to Zurayq, then Acting President of AUB. Faris’s 1956 proposal contained a section on ‘Related Activities’, which included: a Summa Arabica, a Translation Bureau, a university journal (though reviving al-Muqtataf) and a University Press (through reviving the American Press). This proposal bears the distinct marks of a Nahdawi project, namely a community of scholars who are engaged in teaching, pedagogical reform and translation, and who disseminate their knowledge through the periodical press, all sustained through a political economy of print. This raises the question: is the program a product of the Cold-War politics of knowledge production and the growth of Area Studies programs, or is it enmeshed in the historiography of the nahda? Such a question collapses the historiographic distinction between late Nahda and the early years of the Cold War while complicating the notion that the Nahda ended at a particular historiographic juncture across various intellectual spaces. It indicates that the Nahdawi imagery lived on in the practice of certain institutional settings and liberal intellectual milieus. It also points to the conclusion that Area Studies took on different forms in varying contexts, and that the American model for Middle Eastern Studies in the Middle East did not go unchallenged.

After the defeat of 1967 as well as the perceived failures of nationalism and developmentalism, many Arab thinkers began to revisit Arab history in an attempt to assess the roots of these failures. Historians have shown how Marxist, feminist, and liberal intellectuals increasingly turned toward culturalism and engaged in 'self-criticism’ in the 1970s and '80s: thinkers such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Yassin al-Hafiz, and Hisham Sharabi offered a variety of sociocultural explanations in order to account for Arab stagnation and defeat. In this paper, I suggest that some Arab theorists and social scientists sought to account for these failures in another way: by revisiting Arab socioeconomic history of the Ottoman era. A flurry of publications appeared in the 1970s and '80s that debated whether a transition to capitalism took place in the Levant and Egypt in the nineteenth century. The debates turned on what mode of production preceded capitalism, and whether the orthodox Marxist conception of a linear transition from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production applied to the Arab world. It is in this context that many thinkers from the Levant and Egypt seized upon Marx’s concept of an 'Asiatic Mode of Production,' a concept that was not the subject of much discussion in Arabic developmentalist thought of the early to mid-twentieth century. Syrian thinkers such as Tawfiq Sallum and George Tarabishi translated some of the key Soviet texts on the Asiatic Mode of Production into Arabic. Others held conferences and published their own texts that discussed whether socioeconomic relations in the late Ottoman Arab world should be characterized as ‘feudal’ or ‘Asiatic.' At stake was a new way of accounting for the Arab world’s ‘incomplete’ transition to capitalism, which in turn explained the failures of mid-twentieth century developmentalism. On the one hand, this dovetailed with the revival of interest in the Asiatic Mode of Production in Soviet historical thought in the 1960s. On the other hand, it provided a means for Arab Marxists in particular to reject the culturalist emphases of the new 'self-criticisms,' opting instead for explanations that emphasized the Arab world’s particular socioeconomic formation in the Ottoman era.

In the mid-twentieth century, economists in countries like India, Iraq, and Lebanon that were poised to become or were newly independent were often coerced into adapting Anglo-American macroeconomic frameworks of calculating national income in order to form a structural picture of their “developing” economies. Implicit in this statistical method was the concept of a “production boundary” or an invisible border that discriminates between productive and non-productive economic activities. Only those activities that were considered “productive” in a capitalist sense, i.e. manufacturing, forestry, commercial agriculture were eligible to be measured. This instantiated a second wave of calculation debates among economists in non-aligned nations on how to measure predominantly agrarian economies. This was because the production boundary did not simply demarcate the realms of “capitalist” and “non-capitalist” economic activity, it also implied that activities that were not measured were developmentally inferior or “informal.” The production boundary also manifested spatially as the borders between the “formal” and the “informal” built environment. While in the household, it established a gendered boundary between “wage” labor and “reproductive” labor that socially and economically devalued “women’s work,” such as uncompensated childcare, cleaning, and farming for household consumption. Thus, while national income accounts were publicized as a doctrine of revelation after the Great Depression, they often functioned as a project of concealment. This paper, therefore, examines how the Iraqi economist-policymaker Khair el-Din Haseeb tried to seize the means of calculation in order to measure the Iraqi economy. One type of economic activity that was being concealed was the architectural production of rural migrants and cultivators in Iraq, specifically those who inhabited reed (sarifa) and mud (kukh) houses. This led him to conduct fieldwork in southern Iraq in 1957 and design a calculative framework that ascribed a “scarcity value” to rural architecture. Eventually appointed as the governor of the Central Bank of Iraq, Haseeb functioned as Iraq’s de facto economic czar in the 1960s as he directed the nationalization of large sectors of the economy. This continued until a coup in July 1968 resulted in his arrest and subsequent exile to Beirut. There, he founded and directed the Center for Arab Unity Studies that continued to advance a distinct pan-Arab economic and political project of integration that would not be subsumed by the developmental frameworks of neoliberal institutions founded in the early twentieth century that Haseeb’s initial research on national income in Iraq was trying to counter.