You can download a .docx version of this transcript here.
Summary:
2:17: Ali and Nadeen’s conversation begins, discussing the terminology each use to describe the region they work on, and why it’s important.
10:46: The two discuss: What does it mean to be Arab? Has what it means to be Arab changed over time?
26:10: Ali and Nadeen discuss languages and coloniality, and the internalized inferiority it can produce. Why aren’t there more published works about the region in Arabic? Why is publishing research in Arabic difficult? And why is this important? They also touch on differences in the education systems of Lebanon and Kuwait.
40:12: Ali introduces the differences he’s noticed about decolonising in English vs decolonising in Arabic, and the two discuss. How do we actually decolonise? What role does language play? They also share frustrations they have in common.
Full Transcript:
Ben: Welcome to Decolonising Ideas, a podcast from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. From 2021 to 2024, we're hosting the Institute Project on Decoloniality, supporting over 100 researchers from around the world to come to Edinburgh to explore issues including decolonising gender and sexuality, decolonising the curriculum, anticolonial and decolonial theory, intersectionality and multiple inequalities, Scotland's role in the British Empire, the University of Edinburgh's own colonial legacy and alumni roles in the slave trade, and the histories of Edinburgh graduates and staff of colour.
Decoloniality is a complex area of study, covering many ways of thinking and processes of action. This is our working definition, which isn't intended to exclude any decolonial scholars or theoretical frameworks: Informed by the work of a variety of writers in both the Global South and Global North, and spanning Indigenous rights, Africana thought and movements for reparatory justice, decolonial inquiry contends that knowledge generated within what's termed a ‘colonial matrix of power’ has left us with a narrow, patriarchal and contested understanding of ourselves and the world. One means of addressing this is to challenge accepted theories of knowledge about the modern and the global understood as epistemic disobedience, with a view to reimagining and reconstructing our world, something in which university-based teaching and learning, research and wider community engagement is pivotal.
You can visit our website to find out more at www.iash.ed.ac.uk. Join us for a series of discussions about race, racialisation and decoloniality. Welcome to Decolonizing Ideas.
This episode features two Postdoctoral Fellows at IASH, Dr Nadeen Dakkak and Dr Ali Kassem. They're working with IASH and the Alwaleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh in 2021-2022.
Nadeen: Hi, everyone. I'm so happy to be here today with my colleague Ali. We are both IASH-Alwaleed Fellows at the University of Edinburgh, and we'd be happy to talk about our research at IASH but also in general about the region that we work on, what we understand decoloniality to be in the region, and why it's important for the region in general.
Ali: Hi, everyone. I'm Ali. So, as Nadeen mentioned, we're both doctors and Fellows here at the Institute for Advanced Studies, and we're also both affiliated to the Alwaleed Centre here as well. And hopefully throughout this conversation, we'll be talking a bit about what that means and our own research, but also more broadly about some of the questions related to the colonial and the region on which we both work in different ways from different positions. So, both of us work on and we're going to actually talk a bit about what we call this region. So, it's the whole question of whether we work on the ‘Middle East’ or the ‘Arab world’. Some people have been pushing for calling this part of the world SWANA, which is South West Asia and North Africa.
I work particularly on the Gulf. I work more on the Mediterranean, the Eastern Mediterranean specifically, although I've begun doing work in other parts, but not the Gulf - Tunisia and Egypt somewhat, but definitely not the Gulf. The question of naming is definitely a big one because obviously ‘Middle East’ only makes sense if you're in the US, because it's the east of the west and it's not in the middle of anything. So, a big question is: middle of where? East of what? And that's why I think naming that referred to it in terms of its position within Asia makes a lot of sense, and particularly a part of it being West Asia, a part of it being North Africa, make a lot more sense.
So, I would identify myself as someone who works on the Middle East, but probably that's how this knowledge gets constructed.
Nadeen: Can I ask what wording do you use in your own research and I'm curious about? So, do you actually use Southwest Asia or not the East?
Ali: Definitely. So, I managed to dodge this so far because working on Lebanon, I've been using Eastern Mediterranean, which mainly just kind of refers to that space, which includes Lebanon and surrounding spaces. But increasingly, when I had to refer to the broader region, I have been using West Asia, North Africa. But I would also say that, again, it's not just the name because it obviously designates a particular space and it's often used to homogenize the space. And I don't think, as hopefully will come out from this conversation, it's a very heterogeneous region and talking about it as one causes a lot of difficulties and erases a lot of its particularities. So, I think I'm probably in West Asia now a lot more.
Nadeen: Yeah, for me, because I work on the Gulf, most of the terms that I use throughout my work is the Gulf or the Gulf States, but I situate the Gulf within the Arab world. So again, it's the question of where does the Gulf fit? And I think once I talk a bit more about my research, I would say how there's this push as well for the Gulf to be understood not only part of the Arab world but also part of the Indian Ocean world. And historically, it was part of the Indian Ocean world. And so there's a lot of emphasis on trying to understand the Gulf not just in relation to Arab countries, but also in relation to South Asia, East Africa, and so on.
It's not easy. But again, like you said, it's not easy to shift the terminology because this is what we use a lot of the time. And obviously in Arabic it’s different. But I think also in Arabic, we use the same words to refer to the region on the news. And these words are just, I mean, the terminology is taken for granted, even though words like the Middle East or the Arab World, they do have colonial legacies. They're Eurocentric, like you said. And I think it's good that we began this conversation with terminology, because if we don't question the words, we don't question the borders of the region, how this region came to be, what it is. And borders are important because I think the region is still witnessing a lot of violence because of borders, contested borders, and accordingly, contested identities and contested citizenship and who belongs here and who belongs there. And also, what you said about how some groups don't feel that these terminologies represent the minorities in the region.
Ali: Absolutely. That was a lot. So definitely also keeping in mind the fact so even the term ‘Arab world’ is really, really problematic. So, what I've been using in my work is Arab majority, because in some way I think one can argue that it is a majority, but a lot of the people who live in the region and who have always lived in the region for throughout the past decades do not identify as Arab. In Lebanon, we have a very colonial conversation about not being Arab, whatever that means, which is very problematic. But I think a lot of other communities, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurdish communities and so on, I don't know. Some of them might identify as Arab, some of them might not, and they're a huge portion of the population in the region. But it's really interesting that you highlight that this is also in Arabic because those categories have been translated and they've become the categories we think of, even if we're thinking in Arabic, even if we're reading in Arabic, that really shows the hegemony of this. It has a very specific history because it's really interesting that in France, for example, up to today, they still don't use ‘Middle East’ a lot. They use Near East. So, for example, [the] French Institute is Institut français du Proche-Orient. It's not Middle East. It's ‘near’ because for France, the way it imagined that this was the closer part of the east to it, because the US comes out from the other way.
Nadeen: This is really interesting. I didn't know this thing.
Ali: Yeah. So there are all of these contested things with the movement of the Metropolitan, the center of Empire from Europe and Western Europe to the US. Increasingly over the past couple of decades, these terms have changed in the region as well. And Lebanon, it wasn't in Arabic, it wasn't called Middle East. It was called Near East. You get all of these words that are very loaded and as you say, that are super powerful in determining people's lives and migration movement moving across borders where you can and cannot belong. And in a world which is defined by its so-called refugee crises, these become really, really powerful, and borders and boundaries and nations and identities become the spaces in which different forms of racism and discrimination and influence and privileges and rights and all of it unfold. So they are very, very powerful.
And also, even if we think of the region. Right. Because, what does it mean to belong to the Arab region as such a heterogeneous place, but also as a place where…? One really ironic example of this is that when we had a research project of mostly German and Swiss academics and a couple of Lebanese academics on it as well, and we had a research seminar in Jordan, which is very close to Lebanon, and then another one in Tunisia. And these are both parts of supposedly the Middle East, North Africa region, the Arab world, and so on. People with Lebanese passports couldn't get into Tunisia without a priorly approved visa, but people with the German passport could. Right. So you get all of these forms of, what does it mean to be Arab if Europeans can move around the region in a way that people from other parts cannot, right?
Yeah. And I think in the Gulf really quite obvious and powerful in many ways.
Nadeen: Yeah, you're absolutely right. Because I work on Arab migration to the Gulf, and it's always the question of, how is an Arab migrant supposed to feel in the Gulf? I mean, supposedly they speak the same language and they have a lot of cultural commonalities, and sometimes they're also like religious commonalities as well. The assumption is that it shouldn't feel that they're moving or migrating to a different place, but it is very different. So it makes you question, what does it mean to the Arab?
And what you're saying is exactly, it's just the fact that these are not just questions that we reflect on in our own research or academically. These are questions that affect our everyday understanding of who we are. So I'm someone who identifies from the Arab world, and I do think that I am Arab, so I'm from the Arab world. Technically, I speak Arabic, but I don't know whether that would then affect how I perceive myself in relation to other Arabs from different countries and so on. And what you said about some Lebanese, some Lebanese people having this idea of: we're not Arab. It's also common in Egypt. Right. I mean, there's this idea of, Egyptians are not Arab and the Arabs came through Islam. Right. And it's very different in the Gulf because then you have notions of Arabness as having this pure origin, and it becomes the basis of exclusion as well. So people who do not have Arab origins, then are discriminated against, seen as not having the right to be naturalized or not being authentic citizens like other Arabs and so on. I think this is a conversation that could go on forever, right?
Ali: Yeah. But that's really interesting. So what would the difference in the Gulf be between the experiences of someone who is racialized as Arab versus the experience of someone who is racialized as white? And what kind of discrimination do you see there?
Nadeen: Yeah, it's the whole question of there being a social hierarchy. It's complex. But if you're Arab, it really differs because if you're an Arab from, I don't know, from Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, it's not the same as being Arab from Lebanon, North Syria. Right. It depends on origins. Families really matter, tribes matter. But there's also the question of in the labor hierarchy at a company, someone whose wife could get a higher salary or could be given a higher position than an Arab migrant from Lebanon, for example, just by virtue of them being white, not necessarily through qualification. So it's a very complex kind of dynamic.
And these hierarchies have existed because we go back to the question of colonization. It's because of the presence of colonialism in the region and how they were imposed and so on.
Ali: The dynamics are very similar in Lebanon, but they're applied in very, very different ways, I'm sure. You know, but obviously in Lebanon, if you're Arab, you're discriminated against. And the more Arab you are, the more inferior you are. And it really includes language, of course, because as you know, Lebanese Arabic is loaded with French and English words, and we have these powerful calls to Latinize how we write Lebanese Arabic and so on. Those forms of discrimination also exists there but it's just like a flipped coin of it. And I think also Lebanese people perceive themselves as trying to distinguish or distance themselves from being Arab, and that's really where it comes from. And absolutely, it goes back to the histories and the legacies of colonialism that are ongoing in many, many different ways and many different forms across the region, obviously.
Nadeen: And also because of what it means to be Arab has changed, I think, in response to colonialism. Maybe the way I understand is that originally being Arab means anyone who spoke Arabic. So if you speak Arabic, regardless of where you come from, then you're Arabic. But I think that towards the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, in responses and like mobilizations, political, but also intellectual against Ottoman, the Ottoman Empire, there was this emphasis on Arabness, and then Arabness took on a different meaning in response to British and French colonialism during the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser, right. In the 50s. So it is then that we started to see Arabness perhaps in a different way, and then the borders of what we now understand as the airbrush came into place.
So I genuinely think that being could be something more inclusive. It could be broadened or decolonized, since everything is about being decolonized now. So it could be thought of in different terms. But it might take a lot of work. And I'm sure there are many people who have been researching this and working on this and the development of Arab identity from, I don't know, a few centuries ago until today.
Ali: No, that's fascinating, because I would never think of what was defined an Arab as someone who speaks Arabic.
Nadeen: Oh, really?
Ali: Yeah, because I'm not sure why and I'm pretty much pretty sure it just has a lot to do with my own colonization. But I've always found these categories. So if you think of Africa, right. If you think of Tunisia and Morocco and so on, why is it not African countries? And what does it mean, the racialization of being African and the difference between being African and being Arab? Because obviously there's that: African Arab. What does that mean? Where are you from? Where are you from? It doesn't make a lot of sense. Or being Black Arabs and so on. And then you can have your own reflection, or being racialized as phenotypically white and being Arab. And what does that mean?
But I've always thought of Arabness, for me, and this is because I think this is where it gets interesting is, I've always thought of Arabness as the Gulf, right? There's Arabs, they're the real Arabs and everyone else isn't. They just got lumped into it because they speak the language, particularly because I think, so Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, that part of the Mediterranean, has a very, very different history and very, very different experiences. And also, if you think of so called, Northern Africa, Tunisia and Morocco and so on, they also have very different experiences. But if you ask me, how could you say, okay, what counts? What is an Arab identity? What kind of cultural habits does it contain, even if we think of things like art or music or cuisine and food and so on? In my imagination, which doesn't say much, but in my imagination, there's something about the Gulf that doesn't exist in other places. But it's really interesting that you said, well, yeah, but it's the Gulf. It's Indian Ocean. How does it relate to those other places? And then I'm like, oh, wait, that doesn't stand either. So what does it end up being?
Nadeen: Yeah, this is so interesting. Thank you for mentioning that, because I haven't thought how different our perspectives would be considering that we come from countries which are very close. Technically, I'm Syrian, but the fact that I was raised in Kuwait, I've never seen Arabness as something related to Kuwait or the Gulf at all. I always had this kind of idea of Arabness being people in the Arab world in the sense that they speak Arabic in these countries. I never associate it with the Gulf. But what you're saying is definitely right, because I've been reading about or I came across something written about how people in Egypt also use the word Arab to describe people from the Gulf. So even if they identify as Arab, because they're part of the Arab world and they speak Arabic, they also use Arab to refer to the people from the Gulf, which could be slightly similar to what you're saying.
But, yeah, if we move to talk about the Gulf in particular, what you're saying about the Gulf being part of the Indian Ocean, I've been reading quite a lot of interesting research written on that. And part of its importance comes from the fact that it highlights the Gulf’s cosmopolitanism. Right. It's not people from the Arab region per se. I mean, there are Persians, there are people from Africa, there are people from Asia who have lived in the region for a really long time. And it's just this idea that you need to be Arab in order to be recognized as an authentic citizen that puts a lot of exclusion on certain groups of people. And there has been a push to go against that, a push in that sense to decolonize the Gulf, because the idea of the Gulf as Arab has also come with the emergence of these states as nation states in the aftermath of independence from British colonialism, for the majority of them anyway.
Ali: Yeah, absolutely. And I also think one thing we can bring into this is religion. So in Lebanon, for example, Palestinian refugees who came to Lebanon, who are also supposedly a part of the Arab world, Christian Palestinians got naturalized and became Lebanese citizens. But non-Muslim Palestinians haven’t. And they cannot. So they can't even apply. They're not eligible. But even if they've been living… even if their grandparents came to Lebanon and their parents lived their whole lives in Lebanon and they were born and raised and themselves have lived their whole lives in Lebanon, they're not eligible to apply to any form of naturalization. They can't even own land. They can't do anything. Basically, they have to live in refugee camps and so on. But that wasn't the case for Christian Palestinians.
And I think that also has to do with forms of religion being understood as - I don't want to say this, and I don't want it to come off too strong - but in many different ways, Arabness is a stigma in Lebanon, in kind of middle class or upper class circles. And in that space, there are things that can make you less Arab, less different. Like religion. So by being Arab Christian, then, okay, you're okay. But if you're not, then and also it's really because you're from Syria and you can probably say more about this, but in kind of the Lebanese imaginary, Syria, there are different parts. So there are parts of Syria that are closer to us, and there are parts of Syria that are like a bit more racialized and more inferiorized. They're geographic. So you get these regions that are like, oh, they're cool and the other ones that are not. So it's really interesting how these things get mapped out. And these are really very powerful things that determine people's possibilities in life and what kind of things they can do and what kind of things they have.
Nadeen: What you're saying about the naturalization of Palestinian refugees, they're refugees. Right. Who are granted limited citizenship because of their religion. Isn't that like a reflection of the whole wider sectarianism in Lebanon? Isn't it? It's just a small part of how things are going in the country in terms of religious divisions and so on?
Ali: Well, yes, definitely. I think sectarianism is useful, but it's obviously a very problematic lens to study how things unfold in Lebanon. It's been extensively critiqued, as being this Eurocentric narrative of what's happening, and also something that exceptionalizes the state. This is other countries have politics. Lebanon has sectarianism. But there's definitely a lot in terms of the hierarchy of religious and sectarian belongings in Lebanon that is very, very directly, that comes very clearly from France, because Lebanon never existed before. It never existed. It wasn't a thing. It was made into a thing by the French to carve out. They understood it as carving out a space for specifically Maronite Christians to have a homeland in a way, to stay in the East and to have their own country.
And that was really based on many, many forms of exclusion and discrimination, including, against the Muslim population that lived in the surrounding region or within the space, but also even other Christian groups. So Eastern Christian groups were very much discriminated against because the Maronites, they have a very specific history. But one thing that is usually said is that they've always had very, very strong ties to France and to the Vatican and they’re a Catholic group as well. That always formed the basis of Lebanese identity. That was the invention of Lebanese identity, and that's where it started.
So it started off as a hierarchized space where there's a dominant grouping. But of course, that has changed a lot, particularly with World War Two and the weakening of France and the emergence of the US and the whole US / Soviet Union, whatever it was, a lot has changed since. But you get those legacies that continue to exist even within the legal systems and even within everyday practices.
Nadeen: Yeah. And I would say this is very similar as well to the case of the Gulf. So there is also this length of sectarianism being critiqued in the case. It's very different, but also very similar because it's a colonial legacy in the case of Bahrain and not just in the case of Bahrain, other countries in the region, the Sunni-Shia kind of sectarianism.
So what many researchers have been arguing, it's not like these divisions have not existed in the past, but they took on a different form because of colonialism. And certain divisions were entrenched because of colonialism and because of the borders, whether they are physical geographic borders or social borders that came into place in the early 20th century towards the mid-20th century. So it is very similar to what you're saying about Lebanon.
Ali: Absolutely. I think these things happen not just across the region, but across the Global South and across the world. And then the colonial question is all over them. Right. So obviously, I think we're both agreeing here that when we talk about the colonial, we're not talking about historically colonialism only, because we are talking about ongoing coloniality, which includes the legacies of Empire and the legacies of the colonial in terms of establishing these nation states and their political systems and so on. But also beyond that.
For me, the other day I was asked, what was my first encounter with the colonial? That's a very difficult question because it's always been there. I've never not had it there. At school, for example, we always had this hierarchy about speaking French and speaking English. And the more French and English you speak and the less Arabic you speak and the higher up you are on the hierarchy of who you are and how worthy you are and how civilized you are and how cultured you are and so on. So we get all of these things that are there even for kids and even when they're living within my own families.
I have a little brother and my mom had this really crazy decision that no one is allowed to speak to him in Arabic - we can only speak to him in French until he's six. And then after he's six years old, then he'll start learning Arabic.
Nadeen: So he can improve the language.
Ali: Yeah. So he can be really good in French. And now he's in high school, he's in grade 10. And now he decided that he wants to drop Arabic and he doesn't want to learn it anymore. And I'm going crazy. I'm like, you can't. This is your language. He's like, no, it's a stupid language. It's very difficult. But these things are there throughout. And the forms of inferiority that they produce and they produce and even forms of internalized Orientalism and internalized inferiority and internalized senses of self-hate in many different ways are very powerful. But it's so interesting to hear that. I think it's a similar scene and I don't know. So, with the Gulf Americanizing in many different ways?
Nadeen: Yeah. What you're saying is very different because Lebanon has the legacy of French colonialism, which is very different from British colonialism, and it's also very different in the case of the Gulf. So yes, there's like a push for, not a push, but like there are so many obviously bilingual schools, American schools, British schools, and also universities, because of also countries like Qatar and others wanting to have an education economy and having all these branches of US campuses and so on.
What you're saying, you talked about the level of how that feeling of inferiority translates at the level of everyday sorts of identification and how you understand yourself and how the kinds of school education in a sense. But it's also, I think, visible in our own research. Because when you come to read about the region, I don't know about you, but you don't read so much in Arabic, you find that most of the research being published on the region is in English. And so it translates to the level of knowledge production. And I think the origins of that are education. And it's very evident in the case of the Gulf and also in the case of other regions being researched. There are people producing knowledge in Arabic, but it's marginal because of the politics of translation, because of the politics of citation. And also knowledge production itself depends on a number of factors. So it's just amazing to see how it translates at different levels. Right? This whole language issue comes even to the point when you become a researcher and you choose which language do you want to work with? And these are very existential questions to me and you as well. Right. People working on the region in English.
Ali: Absolutely. And it's really great that you mentioned translation because obviously translation is not just translation. Right. So when we translate, we are translating across epistemologies, we are translating across… there's a lot of erasure that takes place. There's a lot that's untranslatable and so on. And also thinking of what are we doing in terms of research and in terms of being academics? And as you say, we don't really engage with the knowledge that is being produced in Arabic and that has long been produced in Arabic. But also we don't even, a lot of us don't disseminate our work in Arabic either. And personally, I can't write in Arabic. So it's very difficult for me to produce a text. I can write in English. I can write in French. I can probably write in German. I can't write in Arabic, which is pathetic, you know?
And what I've been doing. I've actually been getting friends trying to produce small pieces of text and translating them. So I have to write them in English and then we translate them so that we can publish them in Arabic. So that some of the things that I'm doing which are really relevant for the people living in that part of the world, so that access can exist and that kind of form of engagement with the social can exist. And it's really super, like you say, it's an existential crisis about, what's the point of doing this and only speaking to an English-speaking audience, only speaking to your American audience, and where will that get us and what kind of change will that do? I love you saying it's an existential crisis. It very, very much is on so many levels.
Nadeen: Yeah. It's just difficult. What you're saying about you having to actually put the effort in, for example, for us, who I don't know, got an English education or did a PhD in English and had to write our research in English. It actually takes a lot of effort to start writing in another language if you haven't been used to that. But I remember once meeting an academic who was based at an institution in Qatar, and he was saying, you know, “it was also the same for me, but I just trained myself. I was teaching myself to write in Arabic, not because I can't write in French” - he was educated in France and he wrote in French – “but because it's not something that comes easily”. You're going to actually have to invest in it. I think if we see that as part of decoloniality, it is definitely not an easy process. It's intentional. It needs to come with effort. Otherwise it won't happen. And it's at the level of the everyday, trying to read in a different language, trying to write in a different language and trying to think of the knowledge that we produce where it fits.
Ali: Yeah, absolutely. And this really shows, like the added labour that you need to do and that you get burdened with if you want to do this kind of work and how difficult it becomes and really shows how the question of decolonization is not just about… it goes back to schools, it goes back to basic socialization, families and so on. And now I don't know about you, but we never grew up reading Arabic or reading Arabic novels or reading Arabic. That wasn't a part of our social environment.
Nadeen: In my case it’s less than you [laughs].
Ali: Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting because in Lebanon we have this, how do I say, this idea that people in Syria are really good at Arabic.
Nadeen: Very stereotypical [laughs].
Ali: Yeah, of course. And there was this whole thing when the Syrian refugees came into Lebanon and they were supposed to enter the Lebanese education system, so in the Lebanese educational system, even in state schools and so on, even today, science subjects are taught in either French or English. They can't be taught in Arabic. No one does. But in Syria they are taught in Arabic. And I think you mentioned Abdel Nasser earlier, and I think that was a part of particular processes that happened in Syria and in Egypt and in other parts of the Arab world that didn't happen in Lebanon in the second part of the past century.
But they had this thing where they were saying Syrian children and young people who entered Lebanese schools couldn't work. They can't switch to learning biology and physics and chemistry and math in French or English, even if they had learned French and English. So they had a lot of difficulties, and they were asking that they be taught it in Arabic. And the Lebanese state, our teachers can't teach in Arabic. It doesn't work.
Nadeen: Even in government schools? You don't have an Arabic curriculum for sciences?
Ali: No. You have to pick either French or English. And also sectarianism also comes in because generally Christian majority regions do it in French and Muslim majority regions do it in English. And it's really because at one point I was like, okay, so you have the French on your side. Let's see if we can get the British on our side. Then there are all of these politics about, how do you appeal to different imperial powers and how do you draw those lines? But yeah, again, it had a huge impact on so many people and it harmed so many people's education, but it was, definitely the colonial history was ongoing.
Nadeen: Yeah, this is very interesting. In Kuwait, I think this is also the difference. Right? So Lebanon was one of the countries whose own education system was shaped by French colonialism in a way. So Kuwait, where I've lived, and I'm sure that's the case for the Gulf States as well, the education system was very influenced by the Egyptian education system. So I had an Arabic education. I never studied sciences in English. I studied everything in Arabic. And so the curriculum itself was shaped with the help of Egyptian teachers, Egyptian educators, and other Arab countries as well, at least in the case of Kuwait. So it makes it very different, right? It's a different conversation. It's something that also shaped the kinds of generations that are educated in these countries, what kinds of options they have when it comes to University education. And if they become researchers, then what kind of knowledge will be producing or what kind of change they will be doing in their own countries and in the future.
Ali: Absolutely. And I think the history of Arab nationalism and what happens in terms of Arab nationalism, I think Egypt was obviously really central in that and Syria as well, if I'm not mistaken. And I think that had a huge influence on particularly on education systems in a lot of places. But that never happened in Lebanon. What happened? So there were things like nationalizing the state university. There was a movement at one point to make it possible to learn things in Arabic there. But again, that maps also. And you might find some faculties that teach some things in terms of higher education in Arabic, but they're also, again, mostly in Muslim majority regions. And that also maps out in terms of how good the degree is considered to be, the quality of the education, the quality of the infrastructure and so on. But otherwise that is a different scene, which, as you say, then again, ends up producing what kind of scholars we get and what kind of researchers we get.
But in Lebanon, it's the other way around. So people who… it's not possible to be a well-regarded academic if you publish in Arabic. Increasingly, you have to publish in English; French become less and less powerful. But yeah, Arabic is not really a choice. You do that. So you have people now at the American University of Beirut, they’re superstar Ivy League graduates who spent half of their lives in Columbia and MIT. And now they're like, we want to focus on Arabic because we want to do this. And it's interesting. And they get to do it a bit, because they are who they are. Which is interesting how this politics of decolonization and who can decolonize. If someone who doesn't have that identity says, I want to publish in Arabic, they're like, of course you want to publish in Arabic, it's what you do. So it's really interesting how this decolonization is unfolding. But yeah, it's very nascent and not developed at all.
Nadeen: Yeah. I think it also reflects on the publishing industry, though, right? The publishing industry, and also what kind of funding do you have to do research in Arabic or to do research in English? Funding really matters. I always think of these things as structural. It's not just a question of you making the decision to be an Arabic researcher in the sense of researching in the Arabic language and writing in the Arabic language or making the decision to do it in French and English, because if you don't have institutional funding, you don't get to do research. And the reasons why some institutions that research and publish in Arabic don't have funding are also structural. Who gets funding and who gets to do research and who doesn't?
Very often academics are, at least in Kuwait, and I'm sure that's the case in many other countries in the region, are over-burdened with a lot of teaching. They don't get to do as much research as they'd like to do. And that really is a question of structural inequality in the world in general and academic inequality. So I'm thinking here that if we want to tackle this struggle in our own research, how would you then? And this is out of curiosity. So you mentioned about the difficulty of writing in Arabic or reading in Arabic. How do you tackle that? Are you exploring what is being written about your research in Arabic to see whether there are parallels, to see whether there are points of connections that can be made regardless of how difficult that could be because of where you are based and the kind of education that you've had in your past or in your future research?
Ali: You bring up something that's really interesting and really challenging because I think and this is I'm just going to say this. And again, I don't want it to come off as too strong, but I think in many ways, decolonization in English has made a lot more advances than it has in Arabic. One thing that I've done is I've tried engaging the Lebanese University at one point and the Lebanese universities to the State University where you'll find a lot more Arabic than you would in private institutions. And of course, it is marginalized in many different ways. It's very impoverished. It struggles and so on. But particularly over the past couple of decades, there has been an increasing presence of Arabic and Arabic scholarship within the Lebanese University.
And at one point I was like, this is excellent. I have to get out of the bubble of UB. I have to get out of the bubble of this Westernized education. And I'm going to go and engage with the Lebanese University. And I went there, and those people there who do teach in Arabic or write in Arabic, they translate from French and they translate from English, but more from French. They all use Arabic as a language, but epistemologically, it's all French and English. And what I found was that the conversations I was having in English at UB were much, much more critical and much more trying to counter Eurocentric categories and concepts and so on. And to think of the histories of the colonial and all of that than the ones they were having there in Arabic. They were talking about Durkheim. I was like, Durkheim? Seriously? That is so problematic on so many levels. Why are you using Durkheim to theorize something that's happening, that's like the worst person you can use?
But they were still stuck in that space. And for them, if they don't, they would be completely delegitimized as people who are doing social science. So specifically, I'm talking about people who do sociology and political science. So to get the legitimacy, if you're using Arabic, you have to use… all their references are either translations or works in English. All the concepts, the categories they use come from the canons of sociology, the European canons of sociology and political science. So it was very disappointing. And that was one of my experiences when I was like, okay, this is definitely not the place that's happening. It's ironic that I can really talk about decoloniality with people in the US in ways that I could never do with people who are in Lebanon, even the ones who are trying to write in Arabic, which really shows how challenging these questions get. And that a lot of times the knowledge that people have in the region is very much colonized and has already been colonized.
And it's been colonized. It's a process that's been happening over the past at least 300 years.
Nadeen: So you're saying that the kind of change you're seeing or whatever looked like changes, it was just at the surface. It wasn’t an actual reconsidering the terms that they're using and so on. They were just translating things. Sounds very familiar, actually [laughs].
Ali: [laughs]Yeah. But it was really dangerous because it was, one, reproducing those things and two, being done out of position. So a lot of them who wanted to write in Arabic didn't want to write in Arabic. Well, I don't want to count. I'm sure a lot of people did want to write in Arabic to reclaim that. But I know that a lot of people wanted to write in Arabic because they felt, well, we can't compete with knowledge being produced in English and French, and we can't establish ourselves, and we don't want to speak to that audience. There's too much, for whatever reasons. So we might kind of do our own niche, do this in Arabic, but technically, they're doing the same thing. It's the same language, the same conversation and the same discourse and categories that are structuring what they say and what they do not say.
This kind of really takes us to the question of, if we want to decolonize - if we keep in mind, of course, the fact that colonization has been happening since 1492, and it's a process that's been going on for the past 500 years and that has really shaped the planet and every single dimension - where do we find these alternative knowledges? Where do we find these spaces that would allow us to contest the knowledges, the dominant Eurocentric knowledges that we have that have become common sense and natural and so-called universal and so on. And it's really frustrating when you see a lot of othered communities reproducing that same knowledge, and you're like, oh, I thought I would find something here, but not yet. And again, another existential crisis.
Nadeen: What you're saying is exactly right, because it's not just a question of language. Right? I mean, you don't just shift languages, and suddenly you're thinking in a different way! I think there's a lot of people who put a lot of emphasis on language in the sense that, for example, you publish, like, a piece in English, a very critical piece you've just published in English, for whatever reason, in some English magazine or website. And then you have all these sort of people saying, well, you know, this should be translated. Why is this in English, not in Arabic?
There's a lot of anger, and I understand where that's coming from, because divisions and who speaks English and who doesn't are very often also class divisions. Right. So when you decide to publish a piece that is relevant to a certain segment of the population in some part of the region in English, you are excluding people who don't read that language, even though that piece is for them and they just don't read it because they didn't have the education to do so.
And I understand that. But also sometimes this emphasis on language is superficial because it homogenizes peoples as well. It assumes that all people from the region come from the same background, they have the same education, even though it's very hybrid, very mixed. I mean, people can, for all sorts of reasons, migrate and get another language and feel more comfortable speaking English or French, which doesn't mean that they are not very critical. I mean, you can speak English and French and you can publish in English and French, and be more critical than someone who's doing it in Arabic without much understanding of why it's happening.
It's a very frustrating thing, actually. I've had experiences feeling not very comfortable speaking academically in Arabic about my research and sort of feeling like an outsider because there's the assumption that it's not like you're showing off, but why don't you just speak Arabic, you're an Arab. And it comes with all sorts of essentialist assumptions about how an Arab should be, what they should speak. But I've taken this to a personal level. But it reflects the conversation.
Ali: It does in so many different ways, and I think it's really important. You're absolutely right. And when we think about why we're doing what we're doing again and when we think about what we want out of it and who we want to speak to, it's really frustrating to find that, why can I speak. So for example, in my teaching I've tried teaching in Lebanon. Teaching here in the UK, or teaching in - I've taught in other places for Finnish students and so on - here's a lot more space to talk about the decolonization and the decolonial than there is in a lot of spaces in Lebanon and the region more broadly. And sometimes I get the feeling that people who have tried out modernity and have found it to be… there's not so much to it, are much more open to critiques of it than people who feel that this is something they still haven't reached and that they still have to develop and become.
So in Lebanon, I've had conversations again with people at the Lebanese University, and I'm like, well, what you're doing with your education system is completely Westernizing it. They’re like, yes! That's the problem. And they're like, what do you mean that's a problem? That's what we've been working for! And when you come to those people and say your labor for the past ten years has been seeking to get you up in terms of rankings, and this is horrible because it's a messed-up system. It's a very Eurocentric epistemologically colonizing system. And they're like, we've been working towards this for the past ten years. You can't just come to us and say we shouldn't be doing it, and we should be kind of looking at Indigenous knowledge. What does that even mean? Indigenous knowledge would keep us backwards. We need to develop, we need to modernize.
So it's really ironic how these conversations unfold. Again, really frustrating to feel that who can you have the decolonial conversations with and who can you not, and what spaces can they be had in and what spaces can they be not? And what comes into that and how they're so powerful and, like you say, so structural and so institutional.
Nadeen: Yeah, for sure.
Ben: Thank you for listening to Decolonising Ideas, an occasional podcast series by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. We would like to thank Dr Ali Kassem and Dr Nadeen Dakkak for their incredible contributions to this episode, and offer a very special thank-you to Saber Bamatraf for composing and performing our fantastic intro music; you can find a link to his music in the episode description.
This series is produced by Dr Ben Fletcher-Watson.
Branding and production by Lucien Staddon Foster.
Recording and editing by Eric Berger.