Comparative studies of Orientalism have generated debate about the role of imperial power relations in knowledge production regardless of their grouping under Oriental, Islamic, or Middle East Area Studies. Palestine/Israel as an object of study only magnifies this effect. This panel uses a comparative analysis of knowledge production on Palestine and Israel from multiple perspectives to explore new dimensions of scholarship and critique of Orientalism. The first dimension of comparison is geographic. Finnish Orientalism is not only understudied in English, but also represents a three-century-old European tradition in a country that itself experienced the imperialism of neighbors. Zionist Orientalism has navigated the dual self-image of European colonialism and anti-colonial activism. Palestinian Orientalism of the early 20th century balanced the competing influences of European, Zionist, and Islamic traditions. The panel’s second axis compares different disciplinary traditions that fall under the rubric of Orientalism. In this panel, this includes history, language and linguistics, and ethnography.
One paper raises the question of how linguistic descriptions seemingly focused on the abstract structure of language can ultimately be detached from the surrounding social dynamics and cultural hegemony. This is investigated through an exploration of the dialectology of Finnish scholar Heikki Palva. In a broader study of Orientalism in Finland, another paper explores the effects on contemporary research in a country where the critique of Orientalism largely bypassed scholarly and public discourses. A third paper explores the complex system of the British Mandate’s ministry of education, through the lens of a Palestinian administrator. A fourth paper looks into the archival correspondence between Zionist students of Arabic at the American University in Beirut, in the 1920s and their mentors at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem, all Ashkenazi. The last paper explores the recent history of the Arabic Department at the Hebrew University through an ethnography of the department. All the papers highlight the complexity of network between Orientalism, empire, natives and settlers.
This panel furthers our understanding and critique of Orientalism in three main ways. First, it highlights the intersectionality of dominant Orientalist discourses with local scholarly conditions. Second, it revisits the place of power relations in knowledge production in non-imperial contexts. Third, it interrogates the image and reality of the “holy land” in producing Orientalist, Oriental Islamic, or Area Studies scholarship. In sum, the panel attempts to avoid the reification of Orientalism and the critique of it through comparative analysis.
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Given its origins, how much is the Arabic studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem still influenced by its German origins? To what extent is it influenced today by the sociopolitical reality around it? Five generations after its founding, the department continues to navigate the tensions between these two intellectual realities. This is an ethnography of the Arabic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The research relies on fieldwork at the Hebrew University in fall 2019 and later interviews with faculty, students, and former students at the department. The research uses interdisciplinary methods such as discourse analysis of the performative aspect of identity and the role language plays in it. The study concludes with the following: while the first generation was German oriented, later generations developed a more nuanced understanding of the field. Part of this nuances stems from later generations including Arab Jews. After 1967, members of the department could interact with Arabic as a lived language in East Jerusalem. Yet, it took until 2019 for a Palestinian Arab to join the tenure system faculty. The paper concludes that while members of the department insist that they are not political, this position is becoming increasingly untenable in a context of the politics of knowledge production, university politics, and the politics of Jerusalem.
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During the 1930s, young students from the Hebrew University embarked on a 'year abroad' at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Among them were individuals who after 1948 would later play significant roles in the development of Israeli Oriental Studies (Mizrahanut). While AUB, with its Protestant heritage and American leadership, predominantly conducted classes in English, subjects pertaining to Islam were taught in Arabic. For Jewish-Zionist students whose native language was not Arabic, the opportunity to study at AUB was invaluable for enhancing their practical knowledge of modern Arabic. Concurrently, these students, representing the second generation of Zionist Orientalists in Jerusalem, had to reconcile the disparities between their education under their philologically-oriented, German-trained professors in Jerusalem and the local academic methodologies encountered in Beirut. Moreover, that year marked their first experience studying alongside Arab peers, an uncommon occurrence at the nascent Hebrew University.
In my paper, I will delve into the experiences of these students during their year at AUB, drawing insights from contemporaneous letters sent home and retrospective recollections. I contend that their time in Beirut significantly shaped their perceptions of Jewish-Arab relations, potentially influencing their views on the political significance of Arab-Jewish relations. However, their time at AUB was not primarily viewed as an opportunity for professional advancement but rather as a means to refine their language skills. Their academic mindset was deeply rooted in the German Orientalist tradition of their Jerusalem professors, leading them to perceive most of their Beirut professors more as language informants than as inspiring scholars.
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In Finland and in other Nordic countries, Oriental Studies have not been explicitly tied to colonial and imperial projects in the Middle East. However, any research in human and social sciences engages in acts of worldmaking and is unavoidably positioned ¬– even when it does not actively reproduce, for example, problematic power structures.
In this presentation, I focus on disciplinary language ideologies of late 20th century Arabic dialectology by examining Heikki Palva’s (1935¬–2022) contributions to and impact on Finnish and Nordic Oriental Studies. Palva was Professor of Arabic at the University of Göteborg, Sweden in 1970–82 and, subsequently, at the university of Helsinki in 1982–1998. His research focused on Arabic dialects in the Arab East, and as an Arabic dialectologist he was recognized as one of the leading researchers in the field. The early years of Palva's career were a time of disciplinary differentiation in Nordic Middle Eastern research, and Modern Arabic gained traction as a field on its own right. Later, more sociolinguistic perspectives started to become part of the research, while the overall outlook to language still remained structuralistically oriented. In Palva’s reseach, though, language users’ own perspectives to variation were also present from early on.
In my paper, I consider to what extent linguistic description seemingly focusing on the abstract structure of language can ultimately be detached from the surrounding social dynamics, and cultural hegemony. I examine the question from the point of view of Nordic research institutions and by considering the conceptual and methodological framework offered by Western linguistics. Throughout the late 20th century, the study of Arabic dialects was largely concentrated in Anglo-European academic spaces. Also concepts and methods had similar cultural, largely eurocentric bias. In this sense, Nordic Oriental Studies focusing on Modern Arabic did not differ that much from their other European counterparts. At the same time Palva's work, for example, already laid ground for changes towards more epistemically sustainable research in the field. This process is still ongoing.
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Hannu Juusola
In Finland, research on the Middle East goes back to the establishment of the chair of Linguarum orientalium at the Academia Aboensis (Turku) in 1640. In general, the Finnish research tradition has followed the German tradition in emphasizing philological research and focus on the study of ancient and classical periods. In line with Edward Said’s description of the German tradition (Said 1978: 19), Finnish Orient has also been very scholarly (see Juusola 2013). The transition from the Orientalist research tradition to the modern Middle East studies (area studies) has been slow by regional (i.e., Nordic) standards. Probably due to the conservatism of the Finnish research tradition, relative lack of historical colonial ambitions, and the late arrival of significant number of Arab or Muslim populations to Finland, the so-called Oritalism debate largely bypassed the Finnish academic community in the period when such debates were commonplace in many other countries.
As I and others have described elsewhere (Juusola 2013; Isotalo 2009), Finnish Orientalism, nevertheless, attests to common characteristics of the European Orientalist discourse, such as essentialism and romantism. The latest phase of Orientalism, since the beginning of the 21st Century, has so far attracted little academic interest. The aim of this article is to analyze the recent trends in the development of Orientalist tradition in Finland. In particular, the purpose is to describe and consider neo-Orientalist tendencies in the Finnish scholarly and public discourses. The paper demonstrates, how neo-Orientalist characteristics easily cross geographical and cultural borders and appear in the contexts, such as Finland, where Orientalist stereotypes only have had a limited relevance.
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The lecture will discuss a critique of texts written by European orientalists and their influence on the writing of Arab and Muslim history. This critique was written from 1958-1976 by Abdul Latif Tibawi (1910-1981), born in the village of Taybeh (Tulkarm district). It preceded by at least two decades the appearance of Edward Said’s well-known book Orientalism in the late 1970s, a book that placed the texts of the various orientalists and their groups at the center of a raging debate that has not ended to this day.
In his youth, Tibawi was a high-ranking official in the education administration of the British Mandate in Palestine. In the late 1940s he travelled to England for a seminar at Oxford University, but the 1948 Nakba events in his homeland prevented him from returning and he remained in Oxford, earned his PhD, received a permanent position, and subsequently engaged in research and teaching until retiring.
His thorough acquaintance with the Mandate government organs in Palestine, strongly influenced by the Oxford school of thought, and his many years of experience at Oxford University and its Department of Islamic Studies granted him a wealth of extensive knowledge on the thought patterns underlying orientalist writing, particularly that originating from British experts. This was manifested in two important books he published from 1965-1979. The first was called English-speaking orientalists: A critique of their approach to Islam and Arab nationalism (Pamphlets – al-Markaz al-Islāmī, Geneva), 1965, and the second Second critique of English-speaking orientalists and their approach to Islam and the Arabs, 1979.
Consulting these two books, in addition to in-depth analysis of other studies in this area, indicates an ordered and systematically constructed critical theory regarding the writings of European orientalists about the culture of Islamic and eastern nations, quite a few years before Edward Said’s book and name attained their high acclaim. From a methodical perspective Tibawi has a clear advantage over Said, because he carried out his analysis with the tools of a professional historian closely acquainted with historical methods. He was also intimately familiar with the intricacies of classical Muslim and Arab history. The main conclusion that will be presented in the lecture, illustrated by textual analysis, is that the first seeds of the critique of orientalism by Arab Muslim authors were already sown several years before Said introduced the study of orientalism, with all its complexities, to the global discourse
