Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reflections on a different worldview

Arlene Clemesha,Silvia Ferabolli

doi:10.5752/p.2317-773x.2020v8n4p97-109

Abstract

This paper describes and analyses the experiences of two Brazilian professors in teaching History and International Relations of the Middle East and the Arab World, both at undergraduate and graduate levels. Essentially, this paper is an exercise of comparison between the limits faced – but also the possibilities found – by the authors in the development of their activities as Latin American professors promoting the study of the Middle East and the Arab World in Brazil. Its main aim is to help scholars involved with these subject-matters to reflect on their pedagogical practices and on the knowledge they are promoting (or inhibiting) with their research proposals and teaching procedures. Anchored in the methodological techniques of participant observation and critical curriculum analysis, this paper reaches the conclusion that the socialisation of Brazilian scholars in the Anglo-Saxon literature on the Middle East when not mediated by a critical posture towards these parochial knowledges that pretend to be global, can make them more reproducers of the discourses produced in the North about the region than thinkers of the Global South capable of offering their educatees a space of knowledge production that is meaningful to them as Brazilian students.

Highlights

This paper describes and analyses the experiences of two Brazilian professors in teaching History and International Relations of the Middle East and the Arab World, both at undergraduate and graduate levels
This paper is an exercise of comparison between the limits faced – and the possibilities found – by the authors in the development of their activities as Latin American professors promoting the study of the Middle East and the Arab World in Brazil
This paper proposes an approach to Middle Eastern studies that focuses on less ethnocentric theoretical and analytical methods and perspectives and from a worldview that both avoids the essentialization of the peoples and societies of the region and recognizes the uniqueness of their historical, political, social, and cultural developments

Summary

Introduction

3. The Arabic term means “place of immigration”, and was used to name the literary movement created by Arab immigrants in the Americas during the first half of the 20th century. The teaching and scholarly research of themes related to the peoples that have been called “Turks” in Latin America in general, and in Brazil in particular, is a relatively recent albeit rapidly developing field in universities throughout the region. In the main Brazilian universities, Arabic language and literature were the first programs to be established. They benefited from the strong Arab immigration to the region and the important mahjar[3] literature developed in the first half of the twentieth century, following the arrival in Brazil of many Arab immigrants with Ottoman passports, who were therefore called “Turks”. Several decades later, the language and literature programs were followed by the implementation of undergraduate courses and graduate Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reflections on a different worldview research lines in History, Anthropology, Political Science and International Relations. They were dedicated to Arab, Muslim, Turkish/Ottoman and Persian/Iranian studies, usually – but not exclusively – grouped under the great “Middle East” umbrella. The development of these courses has encountered important limitations, but also marked advantages. Firstly, these disciplines and research programs can be implemented together with the critique of Orientalism itself. Secondly, there exists a large potential for the exchange of experiences and knowledge between regions – the Middle East and Latin America – that are in dialogue with each other on the bases of comparable historical and political conditions (CLEMESHA, 2016). This paper proposes an approach to Middle Eastern studies that focuses on less ethnocentric theoretical and analytical methods and perspectives and from a worldview that both avoids the essentialization of the peoples and societies of the region and recognizes the uniqueness of their historical, political, social, and cultural developments. To achieve this goal, the authors describe and analyze their experiences in undergraduate and graduate teaching of courses whose central theme is the Middle East and/or or the Arab World, two concepts that are often used as synonyms, but that have specifics that need to be discussed, if what is sought is a differentiated view of these regions. While the Middle East is an analytical category that describes a region that even today “no one knows” where it is, in the words of Roderic Davison in 1960 (DAVISON, 1960), the Arab World is the physical and ideational space constituted by the twenty-two members of the League of Arab States and its diasporas. While the Middle East is built by the external gaze of scholars who define its borders according to their teaching and research interests, the Arab World was – and has been – engendered by a historical process centred around the idea that those who speak Arabic and/or identify themselves as Arabs form a “diverse unit” and that the political, social, economic, and especially cultural dynamics that unite them – even in diversity – deserve a differentiated academic-intellectual engagement (FERABOLLI, 2015). In order to promote this necessary dialogue, this study employs participant observation and critical curriculum analysis as its main methodological techniques. The paper is divided as follows: the first section is dedicated to the analysis of teaching and learning Arab and Middle Eastern studies in the Graduate Program in International Strategic Studies (PPGEEI) of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and in the undergraduate course in International Relations of the same university. The second section follows the same undertaking, but focusing on the field of Arab History at the Arabic Language, Literature and Culture course of the Department of Oriental Letters of the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) of the University of São Paulo (USP). Essentially, this paper is an exercise of comparison between the limits faced – but also the possibilities found – by the authors in the development of their activities as Latin American professors promoting the study of the Middle East and the Arab World in Brazil. Its main aim is to offer productive insights in order to help scholars involved with these subject-matters to also reflect on their pedagogical practices and on the knowledge they are promoting (or inhibiting) with their research proposals and teaching techniques. A 2017 quantitative and qualitative research piece focusing on the Brazilian academic research on the Middle East, found that the University of São Paulo (USP) and the Federal University of Rio Grande do SUL (UFRGS) had produced the largest amount of theses and dissertations in the past decades on this study area. From 1996 to 2017, USP produced 100 thesis and dissertations related to Arabic or Middle Eastern topics, while UFRGS produced 18, followed closely by UNICAMP, with 17, UFSC with 13, PUCSP, with 13, UFPR with 12, UNB with 12, and so forth, totaling 266 works defended at Brazilian universities during that period. While the academic research produced at USP tended to concentrate on Arabic and culture related topics, with a lesser amount of research on International Relations, the contrary could be observed in regard to UFRGS, and other federal universities where the Middle Eastern studies were implemented more recently and typically in the International Relations courses. Therefore, the universities and programs chosen for this study hold very distinct realities in regard to when and how these programs were implemented. Notwithstanding, they currently face similar theoretical and methodological challenges, which allow them to be analysed in parallel and comparatively to a certain degree (CAMPONÊS DO BRASIL, 2016). The argument developed in this section is that destabilizing the Middle East discourse as a zone of perennial conflict in university classrooms requires direct and systematic interventions by academics entitled with the task of teaching Arab and Middle Eastern studies, both regarding the way the courses are constructed and the choice of the bibliography to be consulted. It is also argued that a specific focus on intra-Arab relations allows for more frequent use of concepts such as “cooperation”, “development”, “culture” and “Global South”, which contributes to a more positive and empathetic look by students towards that space of the world inhabited mainly by peoples who identify themselves as Arabs and Muslims. The Graduate Program in International Strategic Studies (PPGEEI) initiated its activities in 2011. During its first eight years of existence, eighty-five Master’s dissertations and fifty Doctoral theses were defended. Of this amount, only nine dissertations had the Middle East (ME) or the Arab World (AW) as their subject matters, including individualized country studies. This small number of dissertations included at least three on Brazilian foreign policy to the Middle East or Arab countries, one on Afghanistan (a country whose inclusion in this list is questionable), one on United States (US) foreign policy to the Middle East, two on Iraq and two on Syria. Except for the cases of Brazilian foreign policy studies for AW/ ME, almost all of these dissertations dealt with crises, conflicts and wars. No Doctoral thesis on the AW/ME has been defended since the foundation of the PPGEEI. It is difficult to understand how the Arab World, the third largest destination of Brazilian global exports, after only China and the United States, arouses so little interest in the PhD students of this program. When we make explicit the fact that the flow of Arab-Brazilian Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reflections on a different worldview trade exceeds US$ 19 billion per year (CÂMARA DE COMÉRCIO ÁRABE-BRASILEIRA, 2019) and that there are at least 11 million Brazilians of Arab descent living in the country (VIANA, 2020), this indifference seems even more troubling. This is not to suggest that trade flows or diaspora communities are the only elements to take into consideration when making up the choices of research topics in International Relations (IR), but they are not irrelevant data to be overlooked either. In the first semester of 2019, a course was taught at the PPGEEI with the specific title of “International Relations of the Arab World”. The objective of the professor responsible for the course was to build a differentiated perspective for the so-called Middle Eastern studies. She did so by first defining a new regional dimension to work with (the Arab World, instead of the Middle East), and then focusing on the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics that constitute the Arab region and its relations with the global North and South. Security issues were included in the syllabus, but they were taken out of the spotlight. In other words: crises, conflicts and wars involving Arab countries since the beginning of the 20th century have not been excluded from the program, but they were not the central focus of the course, as usually is the case in Middle Eastern studies. In addition, students were asked to write papers (in pairs) avoiding the reification of the Arab region as a zone of perennial conflict (although writing about conflicts was not forbidden). When writing their papers, they were also invited to avoid, wherever possible, themes revolving around regional conflicts or “proxy wars”, where Arab actors are presented as mere puppets in the hands of the so-called global powers. In the first round of presentations of the proposed articles, in the fifth week of class, the limits of the conception of a course centred on the International Relations of the Arab World with a less bellicose character were evident. Firstly, four classes of three hours each (therefore 12 hours) did not seem to be enough to make graduate students understand what constitutes an Arab political-cultural subject and what constitutes an Arab region, especially in its differentiation from the Middle East or the Mediterranean. At least half of the initial paper proposals submitted by students had Israel and Iran as objects of study. It is noteworthy that not once was Turkey mistaken for an Arab country (as Israel and Iran often are), and that Turkey’s location in the world is debatable only in terms of Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia and to a lesser extent the Middle East. Turkey’s participation in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is perhaps the most prominent feature in the eyes of International Relations/ International Strategic Studies students, resulting in the non-questioning of the non-Arabness of the Turks. In the tenth week of the course, a second round of discussions on the proposed papers was held. By that time, the conceptual boundaries – and the implications of building these identity boundaries for IR and area studies – between Arabs, Iranians, Persians, Muslims, Turks, Jews and Israelis were already clear. Nonetheless, the focus on regional power disputes, especially involving non-Arab actors, did not change. The hostile relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia seem to exert a special fascination on students, who understand these relations to be fundamentally mediated by the opposition between Sunnis and Shiites. At the end of the semester, in the fifteenth class (totaling 60 hours/class), the final versions of the proposed papers were delivered and the themes covered by them were exactly the ones that follow: the smuggling of migrants in Libya and the European geopolitical dispute; the military industrial defense complex in Egypt; the dispute of narratives between Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya; the Middle East visions of Al-Jazeera; oil as a link between South Sudan and China; the Chinese-Saudi strategic rapprochement mediated by the convergence of the Saudi Vision 2030 and the Belt and Road initiative; the “proxy war” in the context of Saudi intervention in Yemen; the Saudi quest for power in the Middle East; and Hezbollah as a foreign policy tool of Shiism/Iran. While the themes are pertinent and appropriate for a course on the Arab World taught in a graduate program in strategic studies, it is essential to note that the professor responsible for the course insisted that the topics covered by the papers avoided as much as possible security issues, and that students were invited to make a conscious effort to explore spaces for intra/inter-Arab cooperation, issues of Arab economic development, and the increasingly active participation of social movements in the Arab political scene. However, it seems that the place assigned to the Arab World by the world centers of knowledge production both in International Relations and Middle Eastern studies is accepted with little or no criticism by Brazilian students. And this is certainly constitutive (note that no causal relationship is being inferred here at all) of the difficulties Brazil faces in expanding bilateral trade and establishing more complex forms of strategic relations with its Arab partners, whether in the areas of social technology transfer, educational exchanges, and the development of joint research to solve or mitigate costly problems for both Brazilian and Arab peoples, such as desertification, food security, and water management, for example. At the undergraduate level, the opening to “other” (and not “new”) themes is facilitated by the way Middle Eastern studies are integrated into the IR curriculum. Firstly, International Relations of the Middle East is not exactly a course of the IR program at UFRGS, but an optional module that falls under the umbrella of Thematic Seminars and is only taught to the extent that a professor is willing to teach the course and the coordination agrees that the course needs to be taught. It is a delicate balance that has been maintained since 2018, the first year that the International Relations of the Middle East was taught as an undergraduate module at UFRGS. At the first class, it becomes clear that students enroll in the course because they want to “know more” about the Middle East and the expectation of the kind of “more knowledge” that can be built in the classroom is certainly different from that of the PPGEEI. The professor in charge of the course during the two semesters it was offered (2018/01 and 2019/01) began each semester by asking what the students already knew about the Middle East and what they would like to know more about it. The answers were those expected: they know that there is a problem between Israel and “the Arabs”; they know that the Gulf monarchies are rich in oil, but that most of the region is poor; they know that there is a desert that divides North Africa from sub-Saharan Africa; they know that Iran is developing an atomic weapon and that this can be a problem; they know that women are oppressed by Islam; and they know, of course, that there is a war against global terrorism, that its epicenter is the Middle East, and that the United States is leading that war. Unsurprisingly, these were exactly the topics that they wanted to know more about. The professor then suggests building a course that reverses the logic on which these naive knowledges are based, in the language of Paulo Freire (FREIRE, 1968, 1996). The proposed course therefore a) aims to overcome the criticism on the extravagant spending of the Gulf oil monarchies and to focus on the various development funds and banks they maintain that promote development in the Arab World, Africa and Asia; b) suggests discussing the causes of poverty in the region, investigating the colonial origins of this poverty, but also analyzing the efforts of post-colonial states to overcome underdevelopment; c) seeks an analysis of the Sahara not as a barrier between North and South Africa, but as a bridge linking the continent and, within this perspective, drawing attention to Arab-African cooperation via summits held between the Arab League and the African Union; d) proposes to work on the Iranian nuclear program within the terms of racism in global politics and how the terms defining which states are able or not to handle nuclear weapons are highly racialized; e) invites students to center the debate on gender issues in the Middle East on Islamic feminist movements, moving Muslim women from the position of victims in which they are usually placed by the media (a view that is internalized by students) and demonstrating how they stand up to, negotiate, and resist patriarchy; f) proposes the comprehension of the logic and rationality of terrorism of both non-state groups and established states; g) rejects the construction of the discipline in the form of an evolutionary historical trajectory that begins in the World War I and ends with the War on Terror and proposes instead the study of thematic units built around the themes of differentiated state formations, the construction of national and supra-national identities, the search for development, South-South cooperation, and also regional conflicts[4]. The students accept the terms of the new methodological proposal and engage in the development of works that concentrate on such themes as the construction of Palestinian resistance; the foundations, performance and meanings of the Arab League; the new international perspectives of Saudi Arabia under the reign of Mohammed Bin Salman; Shiite political Islam; the Armenian diaspora in the United States; comparative studies between Turkish and Iranian secularism; the Westernization of Muslim fashion; post-colonialism and identity formation in the Arab World; Kurdish women’s forms of resistance; the World Cup in Qatar; television media in the Arab World; Palestinian voices in Brazil; Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030; the perception of Porto Alegre’s Jewish community about Israel; contemporary Arab cinema; and Queer resistance to Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The greater openness of IR undergraduate students at UFRGS to other perspectives on the AW/ME and the relative reticence of the PPGEEI’s students to these alternative worldviews may be due to the fact that undergraduates feel less pressured than graduate students to produce “relevant”[5] knowledge. As dictated by the rules of Orientalism, this kind of knowledge seeks more to explain “what went wrong” in the Middle East[6] than to understand how the peoples of the region constitute themselves as subjects of their own history. 4. This suggested program was one way – among various possible ways – the professor (one of the authors of this paper) found to approach Middle Eastern/Arab World studies differently. However, this should not be seen as reminiscent of a political correctness agenda. Moreover, the author understands the pressing need for discussing the ethical aspect of criticizing agendas put forward by the so-called Western powers and at the same time using instruments promoted precisely by these very powers (governmental and non-governmental international organizations or financial bodies, for example) in order to set public and security agendas worldwide. 5. See Lewis (2002). 6. For a critique of who/what determines what is legitimate knowledge in the Social Sciences in general and IR in particular see Mignolo (2002); Alatas (2003); Connel (2012); Tickner (2003).

Arab history teaching and research at USP

Conclusion