Studies of cultural and literary production in the Middle East often focus on individual works and their canonical creators. This analysis rarely considers the institutions within which cultural actors are situated. With few exceptions (Jacquemond, Winegar, Kane), the history of state and private institutions with which Arab educators, writers, and journalists negotiate constantly has received little attention. Although it is challenging to locate and access research materials to reconstruct these institutional histories, they can enable scholars to understand their subjects and interlocutors not as great men and women whose ideas float above their political, economic, and personal circumstances, but as deeply embedded in human struggles and specific constraints.
This multidisciplinary panel has invited five scholars to rethink the ways in which cultural and educational institutions produce, and are underpinned by, thought embedded in practice. The panel asks what these institutions do and how institutional and bureaucratic conditions affect cultural production. The panelists reflect on their methodological approaches and respond to the challenges of writing institutions into the history of cultural production. We ask: How does writing such a history impact the type of sources scholars seek? Can institutions help us think through “genre” as a means of constructing and negotiating meaning? What categories and paradigms does this institutional focus force scholars to re-think and even re-configure?
To answer these questions, each paper explores cultural actors within particular cultural or educational institutions. Paper 1 shows how efforts to institutionalize education in late nineteenth-century Beirut and Mount Lebanon shaped educational thought and produced gendered visions for civilizational renewal across geography, nationality, and sect. Paper 2 traces the institutionalization of philosophy in interwar Egypt through the careers of philosophers employed at Cairo University and al-Azhar simultaneously, revealing the entangled histories of modern Arabic philosophy education and Islamic reformism. Paper 3 examines how the Information Administration, an organ within the Ministry of National Guidance, shaped official narratives about the 1952 revolution in Nasser’s Egypt. Turning the focus to the margins of formal institutions, paper 4 explores the contemporary world of literary informality in Cairo and the way it appropriates and subverts the institutional practice of honoring (al-takrim). Paper 5 shows how al-Ahram became a platform for public opinion making in the 1950s by promoting Hassanein Heikal’s “easy” journalistic accounts at the expense of “rigorous” academic research. Each paper demonstrates that the relationship between these cultural actors and their institutions was fluid, contested and co-constitutional.
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Dr. Hussam R. Ahmed
In 1954, Egyptian university professors deemed inimical to the new revolutionary regime led by Gamal Abdel Nasser were fired. Successive measures, including the creation of the Supreme Council of the Universities in 1954 and the Ministry of Higher Education in 1961 enforced Egyptian academics’ firm subservience to the directives of the ministry and the council. Citing lack of academic freedom, Egypt’s iconic intellectual-academic Taha Hussein lamented in the early 1970s that the university had been turned into a secondary school incapable of creating the nation’s thinking elite. Reflecting on the university purge decades later, Egypt’s prominent journalist and Nasser’s spokesperson Mohamed Hassanein Heikal claimed that it was the 1952 Revolution’s “first real mistake.”
Despite Heikal’s remorse, this paper explores his role in promoting journalistic accounts at the expense of rigorous academic research. Through his close ties with Nasser, immunity against state censorship and control of the daily al-Ahram (1957-1974), Heikal had unrivalled access to information and the institutional platform necessary to formulate the regime’s views and justify its policies. By analyzing Heikal’s editorial role in al-Ahram - through his weekly commentary “bi-Saraha,” his initiative to offer Egypt’s most renowned intellectuals such as Tawfiq al-Hakim positions in his newspaper, and turning it into a closely-monitored arena for publishing controversial works such as Naguib Mahfouz’s Awlad Haretna - this paper shows the ways in which Heikal skillfully used al-Ahram as a mouthpiece for the regime claiming it was a space for critical thinking while engendering a journalistic school drawing on undisclosed sources and privileged private connections with decision-makers in Egypt and around the world.
While this paper does not seek to oppose journalism to the university (after all, academics wrote for newspapers, and journalists taught at the university), it is informed by intellectual discussions probing into the consequences of “easy” journalism overshadowing more “serious” academic research (T. Hussein, M. Foucault, P. Bourdieu and R. Barthes). By exploring the institutional changes that contributed to transferring public opinion making from Taha Hussein (who refused to have an office in al-Ahram) to Hassanein Heikal in the 1950s, this paper brings more substance to understanding Egypt’s shift from a parliamentary system to an authoritarian one. It also explores the impact that shift has had over knowledge and cultural production in Egypt – traditionally seen as one of the prominent hubs of Arab culture.
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Dr. Susanna Ferguson
One of the most important features of the rise of modern schooling in the Arab East was the separation of girls from boys in the classroom, a feature that often goes unremarked as a vestige of “traditional” forms of gender segregation in the region even though there was nothing traditional about these nineteenth-century schools. While working women toiled alongside men in the fields and the silk factories of Mt. Lebanon, women who passed through modern schools were introduced to a new regime of gendered labor, in which their unique task was increasingly to undertake tarbiya, the moral cultivation and proper raising of children in the home. For reformers across sect, this idea—that women were uniquely suited for tarbiya, but needed formal, institutional education to perfect it—became central to dreams of civilizational renewal based on motherhood and gender difference.
This paper draws on the archives and pedagogical production of nineteenth century schools to investigate how efforts to institutionalize education in late nineteenth-century Beirut and Mount Lebanon shaped educational thought. Specifically, it shows how these efforts produced new ideals of masculinity and femininity, which served as the gendered grounds for visions for civilizational renewal taking shape in the Arab East. These ideals reflected the institutional priorities, pedagogical traditions, and multiple audiences brought together by new educational institutions. These institutions taught that educated women would raise sons and daughters to advance their communities towards a better future. Women, in turn, would be defined by their capacities to reproduce and nurture, and their sexuality would be firmly directed towards reproductive ends. This normative regime of gendered labor, however, did not simply travel through the ether. Rather, the new ideals of masculinity and femininity were forged in the classrooms of schools administered by missionaries and local reformers alike.
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Dr. Chihab El Khachab
In Nasser’s Blessed Movement, Joel Gordon has noted how narratives of the 1952 Egyptian revolution have constantly been subject to revision since the July 23rd coup itself. These revisions are not just a product of successive generations of historians or historically minded intellectuals trying to re-evaluate the revolution’s consequences, but also a product of the sources on which scholars have based their accounts. Writers who also witnessed the events have privileged personal conversations and documents (e.g. Qissat Thawrat 23 Yuliu, Ahmad Hamrush, 1977). Professional historians have relied on local and foreign archives (e.g. Nasser’s Blessed Movement, Joel Gordon, 1992), publications by intellectuals (e.g. Egypt’s Incomplete Revolution, Rami Ginat, 1997), accounts printed in the popular press (e.g. Revolutionary Womanhood, Laura Bier, 2011), and speeches by the revolutionary leadership (e.g. Nida’ al-Sha‘b, Sharif Younis, 2012). These sources emphasize the role of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, his ministers, and prominent intellectuals in narrating the revolution, but they miss the range of state institutions that have re-narrated the revolution in their own ways from 1952 onwards.
This paper examines one such institution: the Information Administration (maslahat al-isti‘lamat) at the Ministry of National Guidance, itself created in 1952 to consolidate old-regime cultural institutions under a single umbrella. Shortly after its inception in 1954, the Administration grew into a central node in the regime’s efforts to gather and publish information on the revolution’s achievements for a domestic and international audience. The Administration’s core mission was to disseminate propaganda (di‘aya), both in the sense of promoting a positive image of the regime domestically and countering negative press abroad. Despite its crucial role in producing Nasser-era propaganda, the Information Administration has remained virtually unexamined in existing scholarship. This paper offers a brief institutional history of the Administration between 1954 and 1967 (when it grew into the still-standing State Information Service). The paper further analyses some key publications produced by the Administration – in particular, a book series on the revolution’s achievements published almost yearly, in multiple languages, between 1955 and 1966. This series narrates the revolution’s success as a joint effort among state institutions, thereby creating an institution-centric narrative of the revolution to contrast with Nasser-centric ones. In sum, the analysis highlights the importance of marrying institutional and textual analysis to understand the intellectual production of state-cultural administrations in Egypt.
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Dr. Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė
In his memoir, an Egyptian critic ‘Abbas Khidr narrated how his friend and the future Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb staged a fake honoring ceremony (haflat al-takrim) in the mid-1930s Cairo. Assuming the role of a host and with all due solemnity, Qutb ceremonially accorded the title of adib to a turbaned sheikh present (Khidr, 1983). To declare a sheikh to be a literati is to invert social reality of the Interwar Egypt, in which literature was associated with the sheikh’s nemesis, efendis. By staging a fictitious honoring ceremony, Qutb and his friends aimed to mock the institutional practice by appropriating it and turning it into the means of social criticism and fun.
In contemporary Cairo, holding honoring ceremonies has become a common practice within the informal world of literature structured around numerous venues of literary socialization, such as literary clubs (andiya al-adab) and symposiums (nadawat). The distribution of certificates and trophies of honor acknowledging the literary merit of the receiver is a crucial part of closing ceremonies of literary sessions held in these places. Practiced profusely and with little selectivity, honoring ceremonies seek to create and maintain a belief that anyone can become writer. In so doing, the informal world of literature subverts the institutional practice to serve its own goal: the creation of a community of writers in the margins of formal institutions.
This presentation suggests to think about the institution from the vantage point of its defining practice: takrim, or the honoring. Traditionally associated with the established institutions, such as the Opera House, universities, ministries or syndicates, takrim is a ritual practice aimed to distribute institutional recognition to its distinguished members. What happens to this practice when it slips out from institutional control and is appropriated by the anti-institution? Based on the long-term ethnographic fieldwork in literary clubs in contemporary Cairo, this presentation suggests to view literary clubs as the liminal space in which the categories produced by formal institutions are suspended, reworked, and subverted. By exploring the way the practice of takrim is reconfigured to fit the goals of literary informality, it shows how it paradoxically expresses the desire to become an institution itself.
