Knowledge production in higher education: Between Europe and the Middle East

By Manchester University Press

Mindful of divisive labels in constructions of the ‘Middle East and North Africa’ (MENA) and of ‘Europe’, the editors and contributors of Knowledge production in higher education reflexively immerse themselves in an investigation of how knowledge about these regions is produced at higher educational establishments. Zooming in on mutual scholarship about ‘Europe’ and/or ‘the MENA’ opens up a wide range of possibilities for supplanting visions of so-called traditional Orientalists, to abandon the sets of magnifying glasses through which the Other is studied. For those interested in the decolonisation of academia and issues of positionality this is a must read.

This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4, Quality education

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526160560

Book preview

Knowledge production in higher education: the Middle East and Europe – an introduction

Michelle Pace and Jan Claudius Völkel

Introduction

As a child, wrote Taha Hussein in his celebrated autobiography The Days (al-Ayyam), he ‘was convinced that the world ended to the right of him with the canal’, and he could not ‘imagine that there was human, animal and vegetable life on the other side of the canal just as much as there was on his side’ (Hussein, 2018 [1926]: 10). With this metaphorical description, the boy who would later become Egypt’s most celebrated intellectual of the twentieth century referred not only to the blindness that befell him during childhood but also about the poverty in his village, and its restrictive cultural and religious traditions, which limited his horizon even further. Yet, they also ‘gave rise to his yearning for the world beyond the canal. Knowledge and education were to be his route out into the wider world’ (Pflitsch, 2015: n.p.).

Taha Hussein saw education not only as the key to his own personal development, but also for the whole Egyptian nation in its striving for modernisation and liberation from European colonialism. Much of his inspiration for the intended renaissance (nahda) of education in Egypt and the Arab world resulted from his move from al-Azhar University (with its traditional base of religiously inspired teachings) to Cairo University (having emancipatory aspirations) for his PhD. His subsequent relocation to Montpellier and Paris (1914–19) enabled him to cross the canal even further. Here, he pursued a doctorate d’État with an analysis of the works of the renowned Arab historian Ibn Khaldun under Émile Durkheim and Paul Fauconnet (Roussillon, 1999: 1363), and met his wife, Suzanne Bresseau, a devoted French Catholic, thus bringing Europe and its southern neighbourhood into his private and professional life.

Many fellow ‘nahdawis’ (those who strove for an ‘Arab renaissance’) shared his observations, which originated in a deep desire for Arab national self-determination and liberation from European colonial domination. Education had an important place in their conceptualisation of a better future in a double sense: as emancipation from European domination (as external constraint), and in liberation from the centuries-old religious domination over higher education (as internal constraint). Initially, higher education materialised in the Arab world mainly at the religious study epicentres of Zitouna in Tunis (founded in 737), Qarawiyyin in Fez (859) and al-Azhar in Cairo (969). In the awakened nahda moment, new ‘flagship universities’ were founded across the Middle East¹ and North Africa (MENA): Cairo University in 1908,² Damascus University in 1923, the Lebanese University in Beirut in 1951 and Mohammed V University in Rabat in 1957. These universities were meant to trigger unprecedented, independent and decolonised knowledge production, yet in reflection of ‘European best practice and to some extent the strengths of their colonial masters’ (Waterbury, 2020: ch. 2).

With this expectation of ‘liberating’ the Arab peoples, the MENA’s modern universities were inherently political from their conception. Meanwhile, in Europe, educational establishments had also become deeply political (and politicised) institutions. This was evident when the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1916) reflected, ‘Education should not aim at a dead awareness of static facts, but at an activity directed toward the world that our efforts are to create.’ In Taha Hussein’s thinking, this translates into the role of higher education to widen our horizons across shores.

Both Europe and the MENA region went through immense political turmoil during the twentieth century and, in both, a virulent public and political discourse ensued that centred around the role and responsibilities of institutions of higher education in times of crisis. Between the two world wars, with the imminent onset of the Great Depression, the American educational philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins deemed it to be the task of the university to ‘procure a moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution throughout the world’ (Hutchins quoted in Mayer, 1993: 328). Higher education’s politicisation was further augmented during the decades after the Second World War, when thinking became dominated by the globe’s split into a ‘first’, a ‘second’ and a ‘third’ world (Coronil, 1996: 53–4), and the shock pertaining to academia’s multiple involvements in the horrors of the Second World War (Abbott and Schiermeier, 2000) became apparent. Instead of contributing to Hutchins’s ‘moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution’, scientists had assembled weapons of mass destruction, had planned the Holocaust and had vindicated the Nazis’ inhumane differentiation of humankind on the basis of their race, belief, health or sexual orientation. By observing the trial against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt (1963) not only coined her famous phrase ‘banality of evil’ but also developed her idea of ‘worldly education’: thinking, and eventually judging, can never happen alone. For Arendt, ‘thinking was of the world, worldly; and as such was nothing if not dialogical’ (see Nixon, 2020 for an analysis).

From Taha Hussein to Hannah Arendt, education has historically been seen as enriching one’s Self through the encounter with an Other – seeing and meeting the unknown world ‘beyond the canal’. Institutions of higher education provide the space for such encounters, which happen through in-classroom teachings, readings of assignments and writings of papers in libraries and at home, during conferences and research trips. As such, academic knowledge production is genuinely political and dialogical. Higher education under Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, the Baath Party in Syria, Muammar Qadhafi in Libya – as well as in communist Eastern Europe – was the space for politicised abuse for national mobilisation purposes (al-Maaloli, 2016; Aran Milton, 2013). As Alaoui and Springborg (2021: 3) put it:

Most postcolonial Arab educational systems were geared to the needs of expanding states seeking to inculcate nationalist orthodoxy among their diverse populations. Their primary vocational focus was thus the civil service, the tangible manifestation of social contracts that have underpinned these authoritarian orders and that shield graduates from international competition.

For MENA scholars, the predominance of authoritarian regimes has heavily impacted on their professional – sometimes even their personal – life. Being in exile or simply abroad, the long arm of the regime back home often put them under immense pressure, both in their teaching and in their research. In that understanding, the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ opened the way to another sort of ‘other side of the canal’: the hope for a new democratic framework for their genuine scholarly work. This gave them a feeling both of liberation and also of empowerment. Amal Grami (2018: 19) saw MENA scholars following the Arab Spring as ‘for the most part no longer represented as silent, passive and incapable of resolving conflicts regarding the relationship between power, knowledge, action and thought’. Sadly, the recent re-autocratisation trend across the MENA region has closed this democratic window of opportunity in most Arab countries (Völkel, 2022).

For the MENA and Europe as the selected foci regions of this edited volume, our contributors shed light on how academics have deliberated the immensely politicised nature of institutions of higher education and their practices – be these, in the context of colonialism, decolonialism, nation-building or political transformation (see Berube and Nelson, 1995; Dei and Kempf, 2006). The book therefore explores the politics of institutes of higher education in view of the scholarly practices that are characteristic of the ways in which the MENA is taught at European universities and how Europe – or increasingly, the European Union (EU) – is discussed at institutions of higher education in the MENA. A reflexive understanding of how we teach and study Europe/the EU at MENA universities and how we teach and study the MENA in Europe is needed to help overcome existing divisions between the Global North and the Global South in knowledge production, ‘which creates multiple and competing peripheries and signals the need for a reframing or retheorizing that is attentive to multiple and diverse ways of knowing and understanding the world’ (Naylor et al., 2018: 199).

This introduction is organised as follows: It will first reflect on the institutional and individual positionality of educators in higher educational establishments. Thereafter we introduce the core themes of our contributions and conclude with reflections on the role and responsibility of the academic community in the knowledge production process. By doing so this edited volume engages with the classic ‘Area Studies controversy’ on how to construct knowledge about other regions (Bank and Busse, 2021; Stevens, Miller-Idriss and Shami, 2018: 27–38; Szanton, 2004; Tessler, Nachtway and Banda, 1999; Waheed, 2020). This controversy has been traditionally reflected in a tension between disciplines, including International Relations (IR) and Area Studies along with calls for more dialogue between them. This is why the authors of this volume agree that it is important to bring IR into conversation with Area Studies. Moreover, much of this debate has traditionally been rather United States-centric. In fact, ‘the’ Area Studies controversy has often been the story of American academia; however, these dynamics have played out differently in a European setting as well, for example, in France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. The present edited volume thus constitutes an important contribution to this debate by providing insights into how the Area Studies controversy is played out in various parts of Europe and in the MENA, which has seldom been perceived as a place constructing knowledge about other regions, in the present case Europe.

Positionality and the academy

That positionality – institutional or individual – has an inalienable effect on the nature of scholarly output is widely recognised across the social sciences. Lila Abu-Lughod’s claim that ‘every view is a view from somewhere’ (Abu-Lughod, 1991: 141) is finding renewed relevance in discussions of foundational disciplinary biases. For instance, David Lake’s (2016) critique of IR as a ‘white man’s discipline’ builds on vibrant a priori attempts to reformulate the field of political science and IR in a way that exceeds the limits of the white, male academic’s intuitive imagination of the political world (Acharya, 2013; Akhtar et al., 2005; Ayoob, 2002; Griffin, 2007; Kovach, 2010; Le Melle, 2009; Smith, 2012; Wilson, 2009). Moreover, feminist IR scholars including Julie Mertus (2007) and Deborah Stienstra (2000) sought to reveal and challenge the gendered nature of IR. With reference to the MENA region, Morten Valbjørn and Waleed Hazbun (2017: 3) have been key in advancing the debate about non-Western concepts in IR by asking, ‘how can the non-West to a larger extent become a producer of knowledge rather than being an object of knowledge and how can insights from different places be connected in a genuinely international debate?’ (see also Burns, 2014; Darwich, Valbjørn and Salloukh, 2020; El Shakry, 2020; Hazbun and Valbjørn, 2018). Ahmed M. Abozaid (2021) responds by showing how a good cohort of scholars from the Global South have in fact been producers of knowledge, if only Western scholars in their ‘white self-absorbed societies’ had been actively listening. Samer Abboud (2015) earlier also reflected on the manner in which subjective experiences of faculty and students shape the classroom and the study of global politics. To this we add: what about the knowledge production of many educators from Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other MENA countries who, like Taha Hussein, left their home states and set up new homes in European (or other Western) countries? Are these academics representative of knowledge produced about the MENA in Europe? For instance, do (originally) Maghrebi researchers in French universities – in particular those who hold French citizenship – symbolise French knowledge production about the MENA (that would mean: as outsiders) or North African knowledge production of the MENA in France (which would mean: as insiders)? And, what about Europeans working at MENA universities: from which position(ality) do they look at things?

Among the various issues that arise regarding knowledge production by transnational scholars, the role of (originally) native intellectuals in this activity assumes a special significance for at least two reasons: first, it is important to understand what kind of ‘local’ knowledge and disciplinary protocols these intellectuals bring to the production of knowledge. Second, this, in turn, sheds light on the significant influence MENA intellectuals in diaspora wield in European knowledge production about the MENA and vice versa (or the sway that European intellectuals in diaspora carry in MENA knowledge production about Europe). Such liminal positionalities also carry responsibilities in the classroom and in public debates.

The overwhelming tendency to teach and discuss literature authored by white, male scholars and by those who tend to overlook the colonial foundations of intellectual deliberations within the social sciences and humanities has triggered efforts to ‘decolonise’ the university (Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu, 2018; Mbembe, 2016). Arguing that ‘Africa is not a country, but it is taught like one’, Breeanna Elliott (2017) stipulated that the curricular material provided to students would need ‘to humanize the diverse people of Africa and to normalize the various lives they lead’ (emphasis in original). Similar concerns regarding the teaching of the MENA have led to initiatives like Portland State University’s ‘Middle East Teaching Tools’, and events like ‘The Ethics of Political Science Research and Teaching in the MENA’, jointly held at Rabat’s Mohammed V University and the London School of Economics in 2015 (with funding from the APSA MENA Program and Carnegie Foundation), which address ethical issues in the study of violence, access and power in the field, the biases of research funding instruments and the challenges of drawing insights from Area Studies into mainstream disciplines (Balta, 2015; Burton, 2015; Darwich, 2015).

This edited volume is firmly rooted in this growing body of academic works that critically engage with politics in/of higher education and research. To this end, it is embedded within the history and development of relations between Europe and the MENA. It recognises that relations between these two regions have been marked by political, economic, social, cultural, academic, artistic and religious entanglements: in other words, relations have been and continue to be equally informed by a history of economic, intellectual, political, societal and cultural exchanges, as well as by wars, imperial conquests, crusades, resources exploitation, colonialism and postcolonial hierarchies of international politics. Seeing the still persistent dominance of the Global North in determining the nature and norms of international politics, it would be ‘easy’ to simply relay the often-stigmatised perception of the MENA in Europe. Nonetheless, as this edited volume involves perspectives from both the MENA and Europe, its contribution to the study of the politics of/in higher education is two-fold.

First, by exploring how the MENA is taught in Europe and how Europe is taught in the MENA, this edited volume treats both regions as having their own agency, as places that are critical to our understanding of the relevance and impact of learning in university environments. Accordingly, this volume brings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars to systematically challenge, differentiate and understand the dynamics and realities that go beyond dominant (Europe-/MENA-centric) accounts, while trying to avoid the pitfalls of simplification and knowledge fragmentation.

Second, this volume aims to contribute to thinking of ways in which higher education can be decolonised. In doing so it explores the impact of colonialism not just on teaching and research in Europe but also on the manner in which Europe is taught at MENA universities. Several academic works have shed light on how assumptions about racial and civilisational hierarchies remain firmly rooted in the foundations of various academic fields (for example Gerring and Yesnowitz, 2006; Grondin, 2012; Shapiro, 1999). Furthermore, these assumptions have served as intellectual justifications for colonial endeavours in the MENA (as well as Africa, Latin America and Asia). In the era of the postcolonial, efforts have been made to challenge many of these assumptions. Nonetheless, such assumptions persist in public discourses as well as in academic studies. In its core aims and promised contribution this volume fills the need for new ways of thinking about the history and context that educators are products of – and how in turn these experiences impact upon the knowledge that gets produced in higher educational establishments. The decentring and decolonisation of knowledge production on the MENA and Europe is not just necessary, it is long overdue.

Knowledge production in and on the MENA and Europe: An overview

The contributions to this volume explore different aspects of mutual (re)presentation(s) at institutions of higher learning in the MENA and Europe. To this end, the chapters provide a nuanced overview of the manner of knowledge production of these two regions in Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Palestine and Turkey.

Before we proceed with further elaboration on the raison d’être framing this volume, it is important to highlight our challenge as guest editors in the selection of case countries. Choices and exclusions were unavoidable as an inclusion of all relevant countries would have broken the mould. For example, the Nordic countries are only represented by Denmark. Arab monarchies are not included whatsoever. We recognise that some omissions may be more critical than others, not least chapters on Greece, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Spain, Tunisia, the UK, and Qatar or the United Arab Emirates (as well as, to a lesser extent, Kuwait) as hosts of new branches from internationally renowned universities in often remote ‘educational cities’.³ Similarly, it would have been interesting to offer a study on the work being carried out at the Oriental Studies Insitute of the University of Sarajevo since its foundation in 1950 or at the Department of Oriental Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Belgrade: Orientalism and Balkanism were ‘multilayered and polyphonic’ in former Yugoslavia (Hetemi, 2015: 312).

Unlike a comprehensive handbook on Euro-Mediterranean relations and mutual perceptions, the purpose of this edited volume is to elaborate on overarching issues that apply not necessarily to certain countries only, such as colonialism (France, but similarly Italy, Spain, the UK) or the influence of religion on early scholarship (the Catholic church in Europe as well as MENA universities as places of primarily theological studies in their early periods).

At times, non-ideational reasons worked against the inclusion of a case study. In the initial phase of this project we had gone to great lengths to secure a contribution on the United Kingdom, for instance, but for various reasons none of the colleagues we approached were available or able to commit, although they all deemed this to be a crucially important endeavour. The large number of Middle East scholars and academic institutions makes the UK an important site for the production of knowledge about the Middle East. In addition, the UK has been prominent in the Saidian debate on Orientalism and colonialism, partly due to Britain’s historical role in the region and its ongoing very close ties with a number of Middle East countries (Wearing, 2018). Therefore, an examination of how the Middle East is taught and studied in the UK would have provided relevant insights into the interplay between (post)colonialism and the way the MENA is studied. British (MENA) research institutes receive a high number of students and scholars from the region; but in the UK’s privatised higher education system, they also receive massive financial support from MENA sources, a point that raises questions about these research centres’ academic independence (Delmar-Morgan, 2016).

The contributors to this volume also recognise that ‘the Middle East and North Africa’ and ‘Europe’ are not just apolitical, spatial demarcations of particular regions. They are constructed categories that are imbued with particular discourses, histories as well as impressions of regional and global political realities that define not just perceptions of the ‘Other’, but also perceptions of the ‘Self’, in view of the ‘Other’. In the same way as the nahdawis around Taha Hussein had intended to combine their ‘revival of the Arab-Islamic tradition while engaging modern European concepts and methods’ (Ahmed, 2018: 15), the contributions in this edited volume provide for a reflexivity in our understanding of how reflecting on Europe and the MENA equally requires a reflection of the Self as well.

This edited volume sheds light on how important this double perception is. Probably any university seminars on Europe and/or the MENA start with the seemingly simple question: What is Europe? And what is the MENA? Irrespective the already disputed usage of both the terms ‘MENA’⁴ and Europe,⁵ a clear geographical definition for either region is non-existent. The concept of a cultural space around the Mediterranean that is confined by the Alps in the north and the Sahara in the south is certainly not false. In terms of food, culture, history and lifestyle, a Sicilian certainly shares less with a Finnish than with a Moroccan or a Tunisian – despite the former two sharing the privilege of an EU passport and other codified EU privileges.

Such similarities beyond the classical dichotomy between Europe and the MENA find their echo also in many of the contributions collected in this book, which we subdivide into four thematic sections. These must not be understood as sharp categories that mutually exclude each other, but rather as concentric circles that have an individual core but otherwise may overlap as well: history, liminality, Orientalism and hierarchies. Following this categorisation, the first three chapters show, in a comparable historical approach, the influence politics and the state have had on higher education. Timo Behr distinguishes the different strands of Middle East Studies in France and provides an overview of their historical roots. Subsequently, he analyses how these approaches have changed over time and the way in which these traditions have evolved with the changing landscape of French domestic politics as well as France’s growing interests overseas. Similarly, Sonja Hegasy, Stephan Stetter and René Wildangel explore intellectual entanglements in research and teaching traditions between Germany and the MENA regarding what is perceived as the ‘Orient’ over the longue durée of global modernity. They take as their point of departure the emergence of Oriental Studies in the Prussian Empire, the increasing embeddedness of German Orientalism in the imperial ambitions of the German Empire, as well as continuities and discontinuities in Oriental scholarship in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, followed by the division in East and West Germany and eventual reunification in 1990. For Italy, Giulia Cimini and Claudia De Martino explore the interest of Italian scholars in the histories, societies and politics of the ‘Near East’ which dates back to the nineteenth century. They argue that this pursuit was rooted in European Orientalism and that the development of Middle East Studies as an autonomous discipline has been intricately interlinked with Italian monarchical, colonial and republican history. Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly in the last two decades, these studies have significantly evolved in Italy, mirroring a mutated international context.

The second section deals with countries and societies in liminal situations, either geographically or in terms of their nation-building processes, and their imaginings of Europe and the MENA. They are united in a positionality that oscillates between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. James Sater’s chapter zooms in on how teaching the MENA in Malta relates to the history and geopolitical environment of this small island state. Unlike major Western countries, Malta has not had a colonial relationship with the MENA and was itself subject to occupation and British colonial rule from 1813 to 1964. Furthermore, due to the significant influence of Arab and Muslim rule over the Maltese islands (870–1091) and Sicily, and subsequent trade relations with North Africa, the country displays a deep Arab heritage, most notably in its language. This historical trajectory has impacted on MENA-related courses at the University of Malta – which, in turn, serve to tackle Malta’s own identification and embeddedness in the MENA region.

In Palestine, Europe is largely taught in the context of its colonial past and how this past has contributed to the creation of the Israel–Palestine question. Asem Khalil argues that a thorough understanding of Europe and its history is indispensable for a nuanced understanding of Palestine itself. This contribution represents some hard questions about addressing controversial issues in higher education. From the way in which Europe is taught at Palestinian universities one observes that educators need to be cautious and work on establishing guidelines dealing with potential biases, point(s) of view, and the need for reflexive and critical thinking. It is with such (teaching) awareness that educators can facilitate students’ deep learning on challenging topics in the classroom.

Aylin Güney, Emre İşeri and Gökay Özerim guide us through the manner in which universities in Turkey had to increase the diversification of courses on regional studies in IR departments, particularly following the end of the Cold War, which precipitated various chain reactions that affected the country. Although there are not many EU/Europe dimensions in the courses on the MENA, there is a comprehensive and wide selection of courses under the title of EU/European Studies. When the courses on the MENA are analysed, it is observed that the EU aspect is almost non-existent (although there are some courses within EU Studies that deal with the EU’s foreign policy towards the MENA countries). The authors argue that the reason for the lack of attention to the EU’s role in the MENA and its embodiment in MENA-related courses can, first, be related to the relative importance of the role played by the United States in the region. Second, the geographical location of Turkey and the lingering question about its ‘liminal’ characteristic in between the MENA and Europe can be another reason why there is not sufficient attention paid to the EU in those courses on the MENA region.

Three chapters further illustrate this contest between the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ in the third section of this edited volume with an explicit discussion of Edward W. Said (1978)’s concept of ‘Orientalism’. In his famous work Said revealed how knowledge about the ‘East’ is often produced through imagined constructions rather than through actual facts. In doing so the ‘East’ is set up as the antithesis of the ‘West’ – through literary texts and historical records. These ‘a priori’ formulations of the ‘East’ are therefore limited in terms of their understandings of the actual lived lives in the MENA (Pace, 2006). Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen explains how Danish scholarly engagement with the MENA began in earnest in the second half of the eighteenth century. This was due to a political engagement with the piracy states of the Maghreb. A series of military defeats in the nineteenth century put an end to this international engagement. Consecutive scholarship was concentrated on the classical MENA languages and literatures. Contemporary Middle East Studies with a socio-political focus were only introduced from 1981. In the twenty-first century, the Danish military engagement in the region, jihadi terrorism, the cartoon crisis and the thorny issue of immigration have had immense effects on Danish scholarship. The author argues that irrespective of this new engagement and interest, some of the old deficiencies have not been overcome. Scholars pay insufficient attention to local MENA debates, and they either ignore or exaggerate religion and culture as factors of influence in MENA society and politics. This reflection is echoed in the contribution by Bassant Hassib and Jan Claudius Völkel who explore the image of Europe at Egyptian universities through the particular lens of ‘transformative education’. As Diwan (2021: 15) shows, the ‘social and political returns to education, in the sense of its contribution to the formation of emancipative social and political values, are […] dismally lower in the [MENA] region than in the rest of the world’ (own omission). The politicisation of higher education has, however, impacted upon Egyptian knowledge production over the last decades, and Europe has been modelled as both ‘friend’ and ‘foe’. The authors argue that it was, in particular, Nasser’s conceptions of emancipation and decolonisation that informed the manner in which ‘Europe’ features at Egyptian universities. Given the EU’s economic importance, it has at times been described as a partner as well.

Moving to the Netherlands, Anne de Jong describes her experience with ‘enlightened students’ who are convinced that they have overcome Orientalism. In an autobiographical account, she explains how, by immersing herself within the gaze of her own students, she radically changed her BA course on the Anthropology of the MENA at the University of Amsterdam. She further narrates how students come to her seminars equipped with their own opinions as formulated through news sources, and how they are prepared to face their own prejudices and shortcomings. In a nutshell, students today expect to learn about the real MENA, which brings an entirely new set of teaching and knowledge production challenges.

The fourth set of chapters discusses aspects of hierarchy, whether between Europe and the MENA, between gender identities or between researchers and policy-makers. Juline Beaujouan discusses the existing imbalance between northern and southern academia using the example of collaborative research between UK and Syrian scholars, under the particular conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on her own extensive experiences in Syria, Iraqi Kurdistan and other places in the Mashreq, she engages with the public health crisis as an opportunity. So, while the limitation on travel options had put a halt to many transnational research projects, it also strengthened the agency of local scholars in MENA countries, who now can serve as accepted partners on an equal footing in joint research programmes with European counterparts. Without doubt, the pandemic has obliged donors and organisers to better value and accept the work of local academics such as in Syria.

Merve Özdemirkıran-Embel’s chapter on feminist approaches to the study of the MENA and Europe argues how it is crucial to analyse the manner in which the MENA is taught at universities in Europe. More specifically, she focuses on how researchers consider these knowledge production processes from the perspective of gender as a cross-cutting issue. She maintains that it is imperative to focus on ‘who teaches’ in order to bring out the position and role of female academics in their respective institutional structures and classrooms.

Along these critical lines, this volume also turns our attention towards the role of think tanks in knowledge production. Working within the confines of a prominent think tank in Rome, Daniela Huber reflects on the knowledge produced within think tanks as liminal spaces between academic and policy-making communitites. She highlights three constraining factors on this type of knowledge production: the context in which think tanks operate – whether autocratic or democratic; the funding structures – public or private, generating a tough, competitive environment; and larger structures of occlusion and exclusion/inclusion which shed light on the European gaze on the Arab world but not vice versa. She considers the impact that think tank environments have on their researchers as well as their emancipatory potential and need to work more closely with marginalised communities.

Concluding reflections

Cognisant of fragmenting labels in constructions of ‘the MENA’ and of ‘Europe’, our contributors supersede such logics by immersing themselves as subjects and objects of the study at hand, making themselves simultaneously ‘scholar’ and ‘subject’. Thus, the MENA and Europe cease to be somewhere ‘out there’ for observing the Other, and become spaces where researchers observe themselves, in the field, but also in classrooms and conference halls. Zooming in on mutual scholarship about ‘Europe’ and/or ‘the MENA’ opens up a wide range of possibilities for superseding visions of so-called traditional Orientalists, to abandon the sets of magnifying glasses through which the MENA and/or Europe are studied as fascinating objects of desire in their own right. In short, what we (as editors) and our contributors to this edited volume set out to do is to embark on a far more introspective study. Taha Hussein’s ‘other bank of the canal’ does not lose its fascination as unknown territory for ongoing research of (whatever) a disciplinary focus; but it loses its alienness, and it becomes part of the Self, through reflexive, ongoing knowledge production.

How do we negotiate this territory, that is, the opportunity and challenge of reflexivity in higher education’s knowledge production? When knowledge production about Europe and the MENA matters, in which politics, history, the economy, as well as social and cultural relations are closely bound up, we cannot be objective and nuanced in our research and teaching methods if we do not tackle these subjects from an open, interdisciplinary perspective. It should be expected that the centrality of the MENA in Europe and of Europe in the MENA would translate into a thorough understanding of each region on either side. There is, however, insufficient knowledge of each region’s languages together with often simplistic perceptions of their respective political, historical, economic, social and cultural processes. In light of these challenges, this volume explores the politics that underlie the pedagogical and curricular practices that determine knowledge production: that is, the way the MENA is presented in European universities and how Europe is featured in academic institutions in the MENA. It does so in order to systematically challenge, differentiate and understand the dynamics and realities that go beyond dominant (Euro-/MENA-centric) accounts, while trying to avoid the pitfalls of simplification and knowledge fragmentation.

Notes

1The term ‘Middle East’ became popularised in 1957 through the Eisenhower Doctrine in the discussion of the repercussions