February 10, 2013
Middle
East Studies is a curious field. Unlike more sharply defined traditional social
sciences, it may appear to be an arbitrary collection of disciplinary
approaches studying an arbitrary collection of countries. It often finds itself
in cross currents that mirror the politics—and passions—of the region it
examines. The Middle East Studies Center at the American University in Cairo
recently hosted a panel of specialists to engage in some self-reflection that
seemed particularly apt in the midst of the Arab Spring: “Why Middle East
Studies? A Discussion of the State of the Field.”
AUC
President Lisa Anderson, a political scientist and a past president of the
Middle East Studies Association, put the development of Middle East Studies in
the context of the evolution of the social sciences. “The social sciences were
born as the handmaidens of public policy from the very beginning,” she argued.
“The conceit that the social sciences were ever separate from political power is
one that we should discard. From the very beginning, questions that were posed
by the precursors of political scientists in the 1870s and 1880s in the United
States, people who thought of themselves at that time as political economists,
were questions of public moment. They were really about the progressive era in
the United States at that time, a period of considerable ferment and debate
about how the country ought to be run. And that was when the social sciences as
we know them were born.” Some have expressed dismay at the failure of social
scientists to foresee the Arab uprisings, but Anderson preferred to cast it as
a challenge: “Those of us who have been practicing political science,
particularly both of and in the region, have found enormous exhilaration in
hope—and hope in recognition of how wrongheaded and myopic our disciplines have
so often proved to be.”
Bassam
Haddad, director of the Middle East Studies Program at George Mason University,
put forth another challenge, declaring: “The mainstream discourse in the United
States on the Middle East can be more important than what is actually going on
in the Middle East itself.” By that he was referring to the simplistic and
biased narrative collectively written by American scholars and journalists that
influences or reinforces American policy for the Middle East and that in turn
has had profound consequences for the region. He pointed to cynical shifts in
U.S. media coverage of the Arab Spring. “Reports, analysis and writings on the
uprisings in the United States during the first few months spoke of masses that
defied authoritarian rule by going to streets and risking life and limb,” he
explained. “However, there was no pre-designated location or space in the
mainstream discourse to put these images, so they floated, un-theorized. No
sooner than the uprisings became messy, chaotic, and violent, we began to
detect a different trend. The media in the United States went full circle to
interpret the meaning of the uprisings through the good old perennial lens.”
Haddad told the gathering about an effort he is leading to address the problem
of the distorted narrative, the Knowledge Production Project, which aims to
accumulate and catalogue all material produced in the U.S. concerning the
Middle East. The project will include everything from think tank policy papers
and academic analyses to popular films and literature, collected in a database
that will permit, he said, new inquiries into the connections between these
plural centers of knowledge production and the development of U.S. foreign
policy.
Hoda
Elsadda, a professor of English and comparative literature at Cairo University, addressed the
underlying question in the discussion: Is scholarship isolated from the real
world? For Elsadda, it is essential that Middle East Studies scholars
consciously strive to make a positive contribution to the region they study.
Quoting South African cleric and Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu, she
concluded: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side
of the oppressor.”