Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reecons on a dierent worldview

Studying the Middle East from Brazil:

reﬂections on a different worldview

Estudiar el Medio Oriente desde Brasil: reﬂexiones sobre

una cosmovisión diferente

Estudando o Oriente Médio a partir do Brasil: reﬂexões

sobre uma visão de mundo diferente

Arlene Clemesha

Silvia Ferabolli

DOI: 10.5752/P.2317-773X.2020v8.n4.p97

Received in: August 10, 2020

Accepted in: December 07, 2020

A

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 Bra-

zil. Its main aim is to help scholars involved with these subject-matters to reect

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 curricu-

lum analysis, this paper reaches the conclusion that the socialisation of Brazilian

scholars in the Anglo-Saxon scholarship on the Middle East must be mediated

by a critical posture towards any parochial knowledge that pretends to be global.

When the critical approach to academic literature is not the case, scholars tend

to become more reproducers of the discourses produced in the North about the

region than thinkers of the Global South capable of oering their educatees a

space of knowledge production that is meaningful to them as Brazilian students.

Keywords: Middle East. Arab World. Pedagogy.

R

Este artículo describe y analiza las experiencias de dos docentes brasileños en

la enseñanza de Historia y Relaciones Internacionales en el Oriente Medio y el

Mundo Árabe, tanto en cursos de pre-grado como de pos-grado. Este artículo,

essencialmente, es un ejercicio para comparar los límites enfrentados, pero

también las posibilidades encontradas, por los autores en el desarrollo de sus

actividades como maestros latinoamericanos que promueven el estudio del

Medio Oriente y el mundo árabe en Brasil. Su objetivo principal es ayudar a los

1. Professora Dra. de História Árabe do

Curso de Árabe do Departamento de

Letras Orientais da Universidade de São

Paulo – USP. Contato: aeclem@usp.br

2. Professora Dra. de Relações Interna-

cionais do Mundo Árabe do Programa

de Pós-Graduação em Estudos Estra-

tégicos Internacionais da Universidade

Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS.

Contato: silvia.ferabolli@ufrgs.br

estudos internacionais • Belo Horizonte, ISSN 2317-773X, v. 8, n. 4, (dez. 2020), p. 97-109

académicos involucrados en este tema, a reexionar sobre sus prácticas ped-

agógicas y sobre el conocimiento que están promoviendo (o inhibiendo) con

sus propuestas de investigación y procedimientos de enseñanza. Baseado en las

técnicas metodológicas de observación participante y análisis crítico del plan de

estudios, este artículo concluye que la socialización de los eruditos brasileños

en la literatura anglosajona sobre el Medio Oriente debe estar mediada por una

postura crítica hacia cualquier conocimiento parroquial que pretenda ser global.

Cuando no se toma tal posición, los académicos pueden volverse más reproduc-

tores de los discursos producidos en el Norte sobre la región que pensadores del

Sur Global, capaces de ofrecer a sus estudiantes un espacio para la producción

de conocimiento que sea signicativo para ellos como estudiantes brasileños.

Palabras clave: Oriente Medio. Mundo Árabe. Pedagogía.

R

Este artigo descreve e analisa as experiências de duas professoras brasileiras no

ensino de História e Relações Internacionais do Oriente Médio e do Mundo Ára-

be, tanto na graduação quanto na pós-graduação. Essencialmente, este artigo

é um exercício de comparação entre os limites enfrentados - mas também as

possibilidades encontradas - pelas autoras no desenvolvimento de suas ativi-

dades como professoras latino-americanas promovendo o estudo do Oriente

Médio e do Mundo Árabe no Brasil. Seu principal objetivo é auxiliar os acadêmi-

cos envolvidos com essa temática a reetir sobre suas práticas pedagógicas e

sobre o conhecimento que estão promovendo (ou inibindo) com suas propostas

de pesquisa e procedimentos de ensino. Ancorado nas técnicas metodológicas

da observação participante e da análise crítica do currículo, este artigo conclui

que a socialização de estudiosos brasileiros na literatura anglo-saxônica sobre o

Oriente Médio deve ser mediada por uma postura crítica em relação a qualquer

conhecimento paroquial que se pretenda ser global. Quando tal posiciona-

mento não é assumido, os acadêmicos podem se tornar mais reprodutores dos

discursos produzidos no Norte sobre a região do que pensadores do Sul Global

capazes de oferecer a seus educandos um espaço de produção de conhecimento

que seja signicativo para eles como estudantes brasileiros.

Palavras-chave: Oriente Médio. Mundo Árabe. Pedagogia.

“In everything dierent from each other, nothing could cloud the friendship of

the two Turks, the Syrian and the Lebanese - they were of fraternal and enemy

nationalities”.

Postface by José Saramago to the novel by Jorge Amado, The discovery of America

by the Turks (1994)

Introduction

The teaching and scholarly research of themes related to the peo-

ples that have been called “Turks” in Latin America in general, and in

Brazil in particular, is a relatively recent albeit rapidly developing eld

in universities throughout the region. In the main Brazilian universities,

Arabic language and literature were the rst programs to be established.

They beneted from the strong Arab immigration to the region and the

important mahjar

literature developed in the rst 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

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.

Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reecons on a dierent worldview

research lines in History, Anthropology, Political Science and Internation-

al 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 en-

countered 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 per-

spectives 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 under-

graduate 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 specics that need to be discussed, if what is

sought is a dierentiated 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 dene

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 dierentiated academic-intellectual engagement (FERABOLLI, 2015).

In order to promote this necessary dialogue, this study employs partic-

ipant observation and critical curriculum analysis as its main methodologi-

cal techniques. The paper is divided as follows: the rst 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 eld 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 Amer-

ican professors promoting the study of the Middle East and the Arab World

in Brazil. Its main aim is to oer productive insights in order to help schol-

ars involved with these subject-matters to also reect on their pedagogical

practices and on the knowledge they are promoting (or inhibiting) with

their research proposals and teaching techniques.

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estudos internacionais • Belo Horizonte, ISSN 2317-773X, v. 8, n. 4, (dez. 2020), p. 97-109

A 2017 quantitative and qualitative research piece focusing on the

Brazilian academic research on the Middle East, found that the Universi-

ty 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 Interna-

tional Relations, the contrary could be observed in regard to UFRGS, and

other federal universities where the Middle Eastern studies were imple-

mented more recently and typically in the International Relations cours-

es. Therefore, the universities and programs chosen for this study hold

very distinct realities in regard to when and how these programs were im-

plemented. 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).

International Relations of the Middle East and the Arab World at UFRGS

The argument developed in this section is that destabilizing the

Middle East discourse as a zone of perennial conict in university class-

rooms 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 specic focus on intra-Arab relations

allows for more frequent use of concepts such as “cooperation”, “develop-

ment”, “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 rst eight years of existence,

eighty-ve Master’s dissertations and fty 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 coun-

try studies. This small number of dissertations included at least three on

Brazilian foreign policy to the Middle East or Arab countries, one on Af-

ghanistan (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, conicts and wars.

No Doctoral thesis on the AW/ME has been defended since the founda-

tion of the PPGEEI. It is dicult 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 ow of Arab-Brazilian

101

Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reecons on a dierent worldview

trade exceeds US$ 19 billion per year (CÂMARA DE COMÉRCIO ÁRA-

BE-BRASILEIRA, 2019) and that there are at least 11 million Brazilians

of Arab descent living in the country (VIANA, 2020), this indierence

seems even more troubling. This is not to suggest that trade ows or dias-

pora 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 rst semester of 2019, a course was taught at the PPGEEI

with the specic title of “International Relations of the Arab World”. The

objective of the professor responsible for the course was to build a dier-

entiated perspective for the so-called Middle Eastern studies. She did so

by rst dening 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, conicts 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 reication of the Arab region as a zone of perennial conict

(although writing about conicts was not forbidden). When writing their

papers, they were also invited to avoid, wherever possible, themes re-

volving around regional conicts or “proxy wars”, where Arab actors are

presented as mere puppets in the hands of the so-called global powers.

In the rst round of presentations of the proposed articles, in the

fth 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 dierentiation 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 Rela-

tions/ International Strategic Studies students, resulting in the non-ques-

tioning 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 stud-

ies – between Arabs, Iranians, Persians, Muslims, Turks, Jews and Israelis

were already clear. Nonetheless, the focus on regional power disputes, es-

pecially involving non-Arab actors, did not change. The hostile relations

between Iran and Saudi Arabia seem to exert a special fascination on stu-

dents, who understand these relations to be fundamentally mediated by

102

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the opposition between Sunnis and Shiites. At the end of the semester, in

the fteenth class (totaling 60 hours/class), the nal versions of the pro-

posed papers were delivered and the themes covered by them were exactly

the ones that follow: the smuggling of migrants in Libya and the Europe-

an 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 eort to explore spaces for intra/inter-Arab cooper-

ation, issues of Arab economic development, and the increasingly active partic-

ipation 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 pro-

duction 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 diculties

Brazil faces in expanding bilateral trade and establishing more complex forms

of strategic relations with its Arab partners, whether in the areas of social tech-

nology transfer, educational exchanges, and the development of joint research

to solve or mitigate costly problems for both Brazilian and Arab peoples, such

as desertication, 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 rst year that the International Relations

of the Middle East was taught as an undergraduate module at UFRGS.

At the rst class, it becomes clear that students enroll in the course

because they want to “know more” about the Middle East and the expec-

tation of the kind of “more knowledge” that can be built in the classroom

is certainly dierent from that of the PPGEEI. The professor in charge of

the course during the two semesters it was oered (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

103

Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reecons on a dierent worldview

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 ex-

actly the topics that they wanted to know more about.

The professor then suggests building a course that reverses the log-

ic on which these naive knowledges are based, in the language of Pau-

lo 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, investi-

gating the colonial origins of this poverty, but also analyzing the eorts

of post-colonial states to overcome underdevelopment; c) seeks an analy-

sis of the Sahara not as a barrier between North and South Africa, but as

a bridge linking the continent and, within this perspective, drawing at-

tention 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

dening which states are able or not to handle nuclear weapons are high-

ly 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 me-

dia (a view that is internalized by students) and demonstrating how they

stand up to, negotiate, and resist patriarchy; f) proposes the comprehen-

sion 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 the-

matic units built around the themes of dierentiated state formations,

the construction of national and supra-national identities, the search for

development, South-South cooperation, and also regional conicts

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 be-

tween Turkish and Iranian secularism; the Westernization of Muslim fash-

ion; 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”

knowledge. As

dictated by the rules of Orientalism, this kind of knowledge seeks more to

explain “what went wrong” in the Middle East

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 unders-

tands 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-go-

vernmental international organizations

or ﬁnancial bodies, for example) in

order to set public and security agendas

worldwide.

6. For a critique of who/what determi-

nes what is legitimate knowledge in

the Social Sciences in general and IR in

particular see Mignolo (2002); Alatas

(2003); Connel (2012); Tickner (2003).

5. See Lewis (2002).

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estudos internacionais • Belo Horizonte, ISSN 2317-773X, v. 8, n. 4, (dez. 2020), p. 97-109

Arab history teaching and research at USP

In July-August 2006, the Arabic Language, Literature and Culture

course of the University of São Paulo (USP) decided to inaugurate the two

disciplinary elds of Arab History and Philosophy, until then complete-

ly absent from the University of São Paulo. The context at that moment,

which impacted heavily over several of the university’s Arabic professors of

Lebanese origin, was the Israeli invasion and bombing of the south of that

country. The idea was that the best, possibly the only, means to contribute

to a less stereotyped view of the Arabs in the local press, was to promote

knowledge. The development of the eld of Arab History was expected to

help answer the frequent demands from the media - and distortions - that

had grown exponentially since 9/11. The understanding of Arab history

should help to explain that fundamentalism was not part of any a-histor-

ical Arabic nature or eternal Islamic character, but, rather, a specically

modern phenomenon, with its origins, causes, and main locations.

Given the growing inuence of the theory of the “clash of civiliza-

tions”, elaborated by Samuel Huntington in an extensive article in Foreign

Aair (HUNTINGTON, 1993)

- where he stated that world conict would

from then on be determined by irreconcilable cultural dierences, mainly

between Muslims and Christians or the so-called “Judeo-Christian civili-

zation” - it was important to treat the relations between Muslims, Chris-

tians, and Jews, in an historical and in-depth manner. Throughout the

history of the Arab-Islamic caliphates, moments of communal tensions

did occur, and some controversy does exist in regard to modes of taxa-

tion, among other norms and regulations, but there is no register of sys-

tematic persecution against Christian or Jew for the sole reason of their

religious or cultural origins. Far from the misleading idea of a menacing

empire, Islamic political-administrative structure was built on the basis

of the institutionalization of tolerance in regard to the so-called “peoples

of the book”, that is, those who shared common biblical roots, derived

from supposedly the same divine revelation, attributed to the same God.

The mode of government orchestrated by the Arabs under Islam, made

coexistence possible between religious groups considered unequal, thus

being viewed as an historically advanced model for the period in which it

was formed (seventh century A.D.), even if absolutely insucient for cur-

rent days in which the most radical equality between peoples would be

required. The exercise of tolerance in regard to dierent religious groups

was not however an Arab invention. It had been a common practice un-

der the rule of Persian shahs, who did not expect their Cristian, Jewish, or

pagan subjects to convert to Zoroastrianism. But under Arab and Islamic

rule the institutionalisation of tolerance in relation to those considered

dhimmis

- with all its limitations - was consolidated as a mode of govern-

ment. Religious tolerance played a crucial role in the subsequent intellec-

tual and scientic development, from the eighth to practically the twelfth

century A.D. The rst Arabic translators of the Greek philosophic man-

uscripts were Christians, such as Husayn Ibn Ishaq, in the IX century. In

Al Andalus, more than tolerance per se, there ourished a rich symbiosis

between Muslim, Jewish and Christian culture.

7. The concept of the “clash of civiliza-

tions” was not created by the Harvard

professor Samuel Huntington, but based

on a previous article by Bernard Lewis,

published three years earlier, The roots

of Muslim rage. The Atlantic Monthly,

n. 266, September 1990. In 1996,

Huntington consolidated his theory in

the book The Clash of Civilizations and

the Remaking of World Order. New York:

Simon & Schuster, 1996.

8. In Arabic dhimmi, or Ahl al-dhimma,

refers to the “protected peoples”, as

described in the paragraph above.

105

Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reecons on a dierent worldview

It has been well established that the almost 800 years of Arab pres-

ence in the Iberian Peninsula contained a long period of unprecedented

cultural ourishing, that left humanity an important precedent of coex-

istence and legacy in terms of philosophical, scientic and literary texts.

It is also well known that the Jewish philosopher Maimonides wrote his

main treaties in Arabic. However, some authors would prefer to view Al

Andalus as the exception to the rule, rather than to historically explain

its decline. For reasons that vary, some tend to look back at the Arabs in

a teleological manner, attributing, for example, the lack of democracies

among the Arab countries today, to an allegedly backward, authoritarian,

and violent nature. For others, more sophisticated one must admit, the

question that arises is that which was condensed by Bernard Lewis (2002)

in the title of his above mentioned book What Went Wrong? In both cases,

however, the argument stems from the view that the Arabs had been un-

able or unwilling to modernize.

The idea of a certain “Arab incapacity to modernize” reveals an

ideological construction that intentionally ignores the political and ad-

ministrative ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century, islamic reform-

ism a few decades later, and the Arabic literary movement that grew at

the turn of the twentieth century mainly in Beirut and Damascus (all of

which are topics discussed in the second semester of the Arab history

course), as well as the various intellectual tendencies in dispute in the

main Arab countries of the Middle East throughout the twentieth centu-

ry, centered around Marxism, nationalism, and fundamentalism. It also

ignores the foreign domination, and local political forces, sometimes in

dispute, others in governing alliances. Finally, it ignores that which the

murdered historian and journalist Samir Kassir states clearly in his book

The Arab Disgrace (KASSIR, 2006), i.e. that the nahda

, or that which he

chooses to call “modernity” among Arabs, was very much alive and ac-

tive up until the 1970s. Had the Lebanese author been alive at the time of

the 2011 uprisings, he would have had quite a bit to say about the rebirth

of the nahda, even if only to once more explain its defeat and suppres-

sion in face of the authoritarian tendencies of the nationalist tradition

(as with the military in Egypt or the Baath in Syria) or fundamentalist,

such as ISIS or the dierent groups supported by Saudi Arabia, and acting

throughout the region.

It is not our intention, nor would it be possible, to discuss here all

the topics covered by the Arab history program, which begins in the

pre-islamic period, and makes its way up to the beginning of the twen-

tieth century. As for the disciplines of Modern Palestinian History, The

History of Modern Egypt, and Arab Nationalism, they cover the XIX-XX

centuries, and focus on specic regions of the Middle East. The Arab his-

tory program was conceived to allow the students to acquire basic and

fundamental knowledge, such as understanding dierent timeframes,

managing the periods in Arab and Islamic history, understanding the

historical relations between the Arabic language and Islam, between re-

ligion and politics from the every origins of the umma,

Arab expansion,

cultural ourishing, nineteenth century reformism, the local answers to

colonialism, up to the origins and rise of fundamentalism in the nine-

9. In Arabic, awakening.

10. In Arabic, “community of destiny”

or “community of faith”, e.g. the

community built by Muhammad and his

successors, of those who embraced or

accepted Islam.

106

estudos internacionais • Belo Horizonte, ISSN 2317-773X, v. 8, n. 4, (dez. 2020), p. 97-109

teenth to twentieth centuries. At the same, we discuss some of the basic

concepts in Arab history, that are peculiar to the Arabic scenario, and

can only be understood in that context. The program, however, soon be-

gan operating on a dierent level. While building a corpus of knowledge

among students who had never before studied any Arab history, it also,

inadvertently, deconstructed a considerable amount of accumulated ste-

reotypes - as if two parallel programs were developed, one explicit, and

the other, resulting from the critical assessment of the subject proposed.

In slightly more than a decade since the beginning of the Arab his-

tory program, we have realized that the undergraduate students could

identify, almost intuitively, some of the narratives linked to domination

and colonialism, reproduced either in the media or in history texts. Ac-

cordingly, we have never faced any special diculty when working with

the students on the more specic, and possibly more polemic, bibliog-

raphy related to the history of Palestine. On the contrary, we have had

typically excellent discussions on the meaning of the nakba

, and of the

most recent historiographic advances in the eld, in classrooms of 50, 60,

or more students from all over campus, and not only from the Arabic

course. This discipline begins analysing nineteenth century ottoman and

mainly rural Palestine, then shifts over to nineteenth century Europe to

study anti-Semitism, and the conditions of the Jews in the shtetle

of the

Czarist pale of settlement, out of which Zionism would grow as one of

the movements proposing emancipation. Then back to Palestine again.

That is, the subject is dealt with in a manner that includes, and does not

erase its inherent complexities.

With the undergraduate students, we also discuss Eurocentric pe-

riodization, which divides history into ancient, medieval, modern and

contemporary periods, or classications related to economic (feudalism)

and cultural models (renaissance), that not only do not take Arab history

into account, but in some cases exclude it. The renaissance, for exam-

ple, is usually studied as an exclusively European process in history, in

spite of the role played by Arabic philosophical texts - both translations

of texts from ancient Greece, and treaties written by the most import-

ant Arab philosophers of the time.

When Saint Thomas Aquinas began

reading Aristotle, he did so initially through the lens of the writings of

Ibn Sina. Throughout the “Middle Ages”, the Arabs not only “preserved”

but developed the knowledge transmitted through the ancient Greek

texts. As stated by Jack Goody (2008), the so called European renaissance

would be better understood, not as the outcome of classical Greek cul-

ture, but as the continuation of cultural development in Islam as in Chi-

na, regions which were extremely advanced, socially and culturally in

that period of time. The perception, on the part of the students, of the

profound European ethnocentrism implicit in the theoretical corpus and

basic concepts of History, opens the path for a paradigmatic shift, which

begins with the perception that development is not an exclusively Eu-

ropean movement (from Greek civilization to the advent of capitalism,

in a manner that excludes non-Europeans from civilizational progress)

and leads all the way to the deconstruction of the idea of a world divided

between East and West.

11. In Arabic, most commonly translated

as catastrophe, although the term refers

to a human feeling of deep misery.

12. In Iídiche, meaning the small Jewish

villages of the Czarist pale of settlement

(approximately current-day Lithuania,

parts of Poland, Belarus and Ukraine).

13. The ﬁeld of Philosophy in the Arabic

course is led by professor Attié Filho,

and to understand some of the work

developed in that ﬁeld at the University

of São Paulo (ATTIÉ FILHO, 2002).

107

Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reecons on a dierent worldview

However, the systematic study of the critique of orientalism is con-

ducted in the graduate studies program. As a result, in 2016 an edition

of Tiraz, the magazine of the Program of Graduate Arabic and Jewish

Studies, was published with a selection of texts written by the students

(TIRAZ, 2016). The articles demonstrated how these young researchers

were already applying the theoretical and conceptual framework of the

critique of orientalism to their research, as demonstrated not least by the

topics chosen to investigate, but also the selection, and treatment of their

sources. From the point of view of Brazilian researchers, the critique of

nineteenth century European orientalism relates, in historical terms, to

the ethnocentrism that accompanied and justied, three hundred years

earlier, the domination of the indigenous peoples of America (WALLER-

STEIN, 2007), and, in current days, to the position on the margins of the

developed world which we (scholars in Brazil and Arab countries) cer-

tainly seem to exercise in common.

But diculties do tend to occur when we receive graduate de-

gree candidates who have not attended the Arabic course, or, in some

cases, are not trained historians. The researcher of Arab history must

be trained in both Arabic language and the methods of History - a long

process which should ideally be initiated as an undergraduate student.

Today, our Masters candidates have only two years to complete their

thesis, and the PhD candidate, four. The time span in both cases is not

nearly enough if the candidate lacks one or another basic formation.

The lack of adequate training may also reveal itself in a tendency to

reproduce, a-critically, misguiding concepts and views, present in so

many of the texts available. The thesis advisor certainly has double the

responsibility when this happens, and should be aware of how frequent

it is for young researchers of Arab and Islamic history to end up with

an ideologically tainted work, be it under the inuence of the theory

of the clash of civilizations/orientalism, be it under the inuence of a

militant pro-Arab standpoint - to mention but the extremes. The pro-

cess of deconstructing the highly stereotyped view of the Arab World

is not intended to generate its diametric and extreme opposite, but, on

the contrary, to generate the conditions in which research in Brazilian

universities may actually take advantage of the absence of the mode of

imperialist designs which marked the birth of academic studies of the

Arab Middle East, and still largely determine current relations with the

Muslims of Europe.

Finally, our student mobility to and from the Arab universities is

still very timid, but a couple of academic exchange agreements have al-

lowed our students to complete their Arabic language studies, mainly

in Egypt, but also Morocco and Oman. The agreement we had with Al

Quds University, Palestine, did not work due to the fact that Israel does

not concede student visas for those applying for Palestinian universities,

but other agreements should make up for that unprecedented setback. To

complete his or her formation at universities in an Arab country, where

our students will be able to experience the culture, the dilemmas of the

dierent, although in so many aspects, comparable world views, is a very

desirable and fruitful encounter.

108

estudos internacionais • Belo Horizonte, ISSN 2317-773X, v. 8, n. 4, (dez. 2020), p. 97-109

Conclusion

A comparative approach to the experiences narrated above, in two of

the largest Brazilian universities, revealed that students’ interests in the AW/

ME related topics is not substantial and might be growing in quite the wrong

direction under the inevitable inuence of the North American security ap-

proach. The limitations in both size and capacity of these programs are to a

great extent due to the lack of funding and to the virtual absence of stimulus

for the development of exchange programs between faculty and students on

both sides of the Atlantic. Arab embassies in Brazil have shown virtually no

interest in promoting such exchanges, and Brazilian universities have also

faced limited capacity to fund programs that could build knowledge and de-

velop elds of intellectual, economic and social interest among Latin Ameri-

ca and the Arab World – regions that are actually so close to each other.

With an estimated population of at least eleven million citizens of Arab

descent, Brazil is home to the largest population of Arabs outside the Arab

world. The members of the League of Arab States, together, represent the

third largest destination for Brazilian world exports. The Arabic language

has long been spoken in Brazil, beginning during the period of slavery when

thousands of Muslims capable of communicating in Arabic were brought to

the country as slaves. It then reached its peak with the massive immigration

of Christian Arabs to Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century. Bra-

zil’s trade balance with Arab countries has been favourable to Brazil for a long

time, even in the case of the big oil exporting countries. Brazilian exports of

manufactures – from refrigerators to cars, buses and airplanes – nd in the

Arab market important partners for high added value South-South trade.

As this article demonstrated, the socialisation of Brazilian scholars in

the Anglo-Saxon literature on the Middle East must be mediated by a crit-

ical posture towards any parochial knowledge that pretends to be global.

This critical positioning is a pre-requisite for them – for us – to evolve from

mere reproducers of the discourses produced in the North about the region

to actual thinkers of the Global South capable of oering their – to our –

students a space of knowledge production from our place in the world. It

also showed that destabilizing the Middle East discourse as a zone of peren-

nial conict in university classrooms requires direct and systematic inter-

ventions 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. As it was seen, however,

sometimes this has proven not to be enough. As shown comparatively, by

the above related classroom and research group experiences, one might

nd it necessary to actually instigate debates around the question of repre-

sentation, particularly media, literary, and historiographic representations.

Finding commonalities between Eurocentric or other ethnocentric repre-

sentations of both “the South” and “the East” has proven to be a very stim-

ulating process, one capable of highly engaging the students, and promot-

ing important avenues for open-end learning in terms of critical thinking.

Ultimately, the Brazilian academic community must be continuously

reminded that colonialism, imperialism and wars are not part of the history

of Brazil’s relations with the Arab World. Therefore, why should Brazilian

109

Arlene Clemesha, Silvia Ferabolli Studying the Middle East from Brazil: reecons on a dierent worldview

students follow the Anglo-Saxon textbooks, curriculum and syllabi on the

Middle East, unremarkably stued with wars, battles, and other domestic

or international conicts, most of them consequence of the very relationship

of this region with the old and new colonial powers? It would be more pro-

ductive for Brazilian students to get to know those peoples who have been

developing peaceful and cooperative relations with us for decades – if not

centuries. And these peoples are Arabs, and to know the historical process

that constitute them as Arabs and how they relate to the world in general, and

to the Global South – Latin America and Brazil in particular – i.e., to our stu-

dents’ place of belonging in the world is essential for the development of deep-

er and more comprehensive relations between Brazil and the Arab World.

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