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Knowledge and its production: Rania Khallaf traces an epistemological cartography

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Part of an English-language workshop organised by the UK Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW) -- in collaboration with the Supreme Council of Culture (SCC) -- this three-day workshop focused on the production of knowledge. In the opening session CASAW scholar and workshop coordinator Hoda El-Sadda stressed terrorism and its influence on the Western imaginary in perception of the Arab world: "There is a long story of knowledge biased against the Arab world, which has much to do with colonialism." The legacy found renewed expression in recent responses to Islamic terrorism, she explained, pointing out that CASAW was established in response to the failure of UK and US academic centres specialised in the Middle East to approach the region objectively. For his part Clive Halls traced a similar trajectory in the history of the translation of modern Arabic literature into English, starting with Taha Hussein's autobiography in 1932. In Naguib Mahfouz's Trilogy, for example, the double standards of male- female relations in the urban middle class have contributed to negative images of Arabs, while Aburahman Munif's Cities of Salt -- a project of comparable magnitude -- provided an enlightened and enlightening account of the conditions pertaining to Arab tribal life. He also mentioned Tayib Saleh's Season of Migration to the North as a rare example of a profound and helpful insight into East-West relations from an Arab standpoint, stressing that the absence of translations of vernacular writers like poet Ahmed Fouad Negm has resulted in an incomplete and largely misleading picture. This he blamed on the translators tendency to marginalise vernacular voices.

Cairo University linguistics professor Madiha Doss blamed it, rather on Arabs themselves, deploring the fact that Arabic dialects have never been studied in Arab universities, except occasionally in the context of folklore. "In addition," she elaborated, "there remains a severe lack in the field of interdisciplinary linguistics, with the relations of language to history and sociology largely ignored." Critic Gaber Asfour, former SCC chairman, focused rather on the obstacles in the way of the production of literary knowledge in Arab academia. Citing the 19th-century literary traveller Rifaa El-Tahtawi as an example -- El-Tahtawi's sojourn in Paris, while facilitating interchange, was limited by his own deeply rooted and hierarchical perspective: believing poetry to be "the craft of the Arabs", for example, El-Tahtawi could not recognise the French poetic genius -- Asfour referred to a "passive assimilation of ideas" as the main obstacle in the way of the production of Arab knowledge. In a thinly veiled reference to his once rival critic Abdel-Aziz Hammouda's championing of structuralism -- a phenomenon that, according to Asfour, had already died, giving way to deconstruction, by 1968 -- he also underlined the absence of scepticism in relation to the transmission of knowledge from the West. At the other end of the spectrum, Asfour took issue with the forced resignation of both Ahmed Mansour and Nasr Hamed Abou-Zeid, both of whom had been working on the Quran. "The political authorities have had much to do with reducing the margin of freedom in Egyptian universities," Asfour elaborated. "In 1954 some 50 scholars were dismissed; and Sadat's reign was even worse, with over 60 professors fired." Asfour expressed anger with what he called "Islamisation" -- an ad hoc mix of social and political as well as religious sentiments now spreading at the expense not only of plurality but of an epistemological tradition too.

Nahawand Eissa, a Lebanese scholar, said much "knowledge", particularly as transmitted through the media, is muddled and potentially destructive. She spoke of the need to rethink media studies and approach the media from a gender-specific perspective, with a view to facilitating movement from the private to the public realm and vice a versa. She focused on the need to contest gender stereotypes and transcend proscriptions of the female role. "I wonder," she concluded with emotion, "if it is possible to define the contemporary woman, or to cast her against a traditional, 'passive' counterpart." Manchester University scholar Katherine Prescott echoed the same concern with presentations of the Arab woman -- a problematic issue, she said, not only for Arabs but, even more so, for non-Arabs studying or writing about Arabs. But it was in the context of Islamic art and architecture that Robert Hillenbrand, another CASAW scholar, made the profoundly significant statement that, since that subject is only available to postgraduate students and only in a select few universities in Britain, it is unreasonable to expect people who have studied neither the history of Islam nor Islam as a religion "to be unbiased historians in the near future". Most Muslim scholars, what is more, "are imprisoned in the box of their own countries", with political or financial constraints preventing them from touring the Islamic world. "I hope I will live to see a book written by an Arab-Muslim scholar on the Taj Mahal, for example," he added with an ironic smile. Cairo University scholar Sahar Sobhi posed questions about Arabic travel writing since the 18th century, arguing that, while it is a particularly efficient instrument of epistemological exchange, it remains largely absent from the academic sphere whether in Egypt or in the UK. Hala Fouad, also from Cairo University, made a similar point about the Sufi canon, stressing the role of Orientalists in the study and interpretation of these texts and arguing that Arab-Muslim scholars have yet to transcend the Orientalist legacy in any but the most narrowly moralistic or else religious manner.