Could Erich Auerbach have written Mimesis without Homer, Shakespeare, or Virginia Woolf? Could Roland Barthes have envisaged S/Z without Balzac's "Sarrassine"? To what extent,then,are these theories, informed by their own historical circumstances and literary traditions, applicable to the rich tradition of Arabic? More importantly, and especially so in the era of post-coloniality, where-in the vast sand of literary criticism- could a line be drawn between Eurocentrist and nativist theories? These two questions trigger a few others: what available mechanisms does Arabic literary theory have to contain chronic drifts of theory towards Europe? While Western theory on balance seeks to be universal and might even be compassionate towards the Other, how do we assess the concerns for immunizing Arabic Studies against surrendering once again to the good old gravitational pull of Eurocentrism? If the persistence of Eurocentrism in Arabic Studies is at all curable, what are the scientific or identitarian means needed to provide such remedy? How can the enormously varied cultures of the Arab world not only speak in, but provide organic critique for, their own distinctive voices? As its title indicates, Decolonizing Arabic Studies is a call for liberating the global community of Arabists from a fashionable yet potentially repressive servility to Eurocentrist theory. While many of the analyses of Arabic literary and cultural texts sound like they offer a revolutionary approach to Arab Studies, only a handful of these studies have solid educational value and contextual grounding that the field can benefit from or build upon. By considering the historical geneses of Western literary theories and their educational implications, the presenters in this panel will provide arguments, pose questions and interrogate answers about the increasingly abstract and historically irrelevant employment of Eurocentrist theories they encounter in their assessment and teaching of Arabic texts in today's universities. Yet, instead of dismissing the reliance on Western theory as ostentatious and nonrepresentational, the goal of this panel is to examine their main hypotheses in relationship to the empirical and historical specificities of Arabic literary and cultural productions. For this reason, the panel does not just present a critique of the employment of Western theory in approaching Arabic literary and cultural heritage in texts ranging from classical, medieval, nahda, to modern and contemporary eras,but it also provides illumination for an emancipatory path in order to enlarge and enrich our inquiry in this current situation of Arabic Studies.
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Dr. Mohammad Salama
The term “Late Antiquity” constitutes a relatively new European approach to the Qur’an. It situates the origins of Islam within a larger geog-historical context of the cultures of the Near East which preceded it, including Jewish, Christian, pagan, and syncretic traditions. This position challenges Muslim historical narratives of the genesis of Islam, which present it as a break with all existing traditions. Proponents of Late Antiquity contend that such periodization is informative and enlightening since it avoids the accusations of direct textual plagiarism from Jewish or Christian texts advanced by Orientalists and proposes instead a study of the Qur’an as an original text that draws on narratives and figures of the Biblical tradition in an intriguing and vigorous manner. Angelika Neuwirth’s foundational study, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang (The Qur’an as a Text of Late Antiquity: A European Approach” is the first of its kind to connect the Qur’an to this larger context. Praised by Deutschlandradio Kultur as a book that will “re-organize all the myths and misunderstandings that have crept into interpretations of the Koran over the course of the centuries on the part of Muslims,” and commended by Andrew Rippin as “unrivalled by any other work that has appeared for probably the past 100 years, in its overall scope, analytical depth, unified vision and intellectual rigor,” Neuwirth’s argument that the Qur’an is a product of the so-called Late Antiquity has gone incontestable since its initiation in Western scholarship in the last decade. But what exactly is “Late Antiquity”? And what does the Qur’an have to do with it? This paper takes this question as its central thesis. More specifically, the paper argues that if historical investigations of ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ in the genesis of Islam must submit to a Eurocentrist mapping of the contours of such history, how could one assess the validity of this mapping beyond the existing structures of Eurocentric historiographic boundaries? Is the historical past, especially that of a non-European text belonging to an alien culture, considered a progression toward an ostensible goal? Or is it, rather, a recounting of an intelligible totality? To ask the question more directly, if the history of Islam’s origin is a document that constitutes itself in relationship to other documents and historical contexts, what makes the judgement of such history veritable? What makes it relative or constructed? And for whom?
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Prof. Hanadi Al-Samman
Middle Eastern queers have often resisted Western hegemonic models that tie them down to forced binaries, detached modes of belonging, rigid definitions of the closet, and a coming out dialectic that privileges visibility, pride, and family desertion.
In this paper, I will examine the decolonizing queer project that a documentary “Oriented,” and a Palestinian activist organization (alQaws) offer in order to shift the conversation from the global to the local LGBTQ politics, and to shed light on the colonial violence equally enacted on the queer and national Palestinian body. AlQaws contends that transnational queer solidarity with Palestine should emanate from a place of decolonizing rather than reifying international homogenizing discourse and theorizing mechanisms of LGBTQ rights. Therefore, it complicates mainstream discourse and policies around coming out, homophobia, pride, and visibility (Maikey and Shamali 2011). By proposing to abandon a single-issue approach to sexuality, it urges activists to adopt an intersectional lens that pays attention to how diverse elements, including class, race, and gender, impact and contribute to the redefinition of LGBTQ identities in the region.
Adopting a pinkwatching approach that exposes how Israeli Pinkwashing reframes “the relationship between Israel and Palestine from ‘colonizer-colonized’ to one that distinguishes between those who are ‘modern and open,’ and those who are presented as ‘backward and homophobic’” is essential to debunking the myth that Israel is the only haven to LGBTQ individuals in the Middle East. In identifying the insidious correlation between the fragmented Palestinian land under Israeli occupation, and that of the injured LGBTQ body, decolonial queering transcends hegemonic binaries in order to regain sovereignty of one’s local culture, body experiences, and the specificity of queer Middle Eastern subjectivity.
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Dr. Peter Gran
"De-colonizing the Study of the Early Nahda in Egypt"
The term early Nahda arose as a way for Nahdawi scholars to explain the background of the long nineteenth century leading to the rise of the Egyptian novel, e.g., Zaynab among others. The term as a result is often associated with the 19th century translation movement yet somehow is never connected to the contemporaneous movement to revive the Arab-Islamic heritage by prominent figures such as Al-Zabidi, Al-`Attar among others. This one-dimensional approach to the cultural and historical dynamics of the early Nahda has however created more problems than it has solved, one such problem being that of how to reconcile the received Orientalist image of Egypt as a stagnant despotic society with the image of Egypt as a vibrant society capable of producing high culture including novels. In recent times, with the growth of knowledge about the revival of heritage, there continues to be no obvious solution. To make this point clear, the paper introduces a recent book on Ottoman Egyptian poetry and comments on some other work associating the Nahda with the 16th century. In such a situation, the paper argues there is an urgent need to reconsider the existing theories of the Early Nahda in a more reflexive way that could explain not only what has been dismissed but why it has been dismissed. In doing so, this paper interrogates the 19th century European colonial culture which gave rise to such theories concluding that what is called for at this point is a further de-centering and decolonizing of early Nahda literary and intellectual thought leaving open the possibility that the term “Early Nahda” might in fact be more applicable to some later and or earlier period and associated with some entirely different factors.
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Christian Junge
This paper approaches the language practices of Area Studies from a postcolonial perspective. Taking the example of Arabic Studies at German and European universities, it critically discusses structures, economies and practices marginalizing academic knowledge in Arabic and presents a theoretical framework and practical interventions in order to decolonize academic Arabic abroad in teaching and research.
More than forty years ago, Edward Said published his influential critique of Orientalism (1978) that fundamentally changed the field of Arabic Studies. One of his major concerns was the European Orient discourse that silenced the Arab ‘other’. This silencing has been – and still is – widely criticized as a Eurocentric way of provincializing ‘other’ traditions of knowledge production and marginalizing epistemic entanglements and thereby performing an act of academic imperialism. While many scholars of Arab Studies in German and European universities are in theory very aware of this set of problems, their academic practices often lack to incorporate such an awareness in regard to teaching and doing research. Likewise, students are learning to read and listen to Arabic, but only few efforts are made to foster speaking and writing Arabic for academic purposes. In addition, many academic studies show little interest to discuss Arabic studies seriously and at length. By marginalizing Arabic as modern academic language, European academia produces, as this paper argues, still its own ‘Orient’.
Against this background, the paper outlines academic structures, economies and practices that marginalize Arabic knowledge production. Based on critical reflections by Abdelfattah Kilito, Walter Mignolo, Ngugi wa’Thiongo, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Wolf Lepenies, the paper develops a postcolonial framework that takes into account the practices of regional epistemic languages in Area Studies abroad. In a second step, the paper presents some practical interventions from Arabic Studies in Germany and Europe to decolonize academic Arabic abroad and thereby invites also to reconsider the role of practices - and particular linguistic ‘practices’ - in postcolonial theory formation itself.
