https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/33374 2026-04-10T13:41:44Z 2026-04-10T13:41:44Z El-Khairy, Omar https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/33680 2018-09-13T01:38:26Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: American dreams of reinventing the ‘orient’ : digital democracy and Arab youth cultures in a regional perspective Authors: El-Khairy, Omar Abstract: The histories of foreign influence in the Middle East have come to be dominated by numerous military interventions. The dominance of hard power has helped mask the equally influential role that ‘softer’ forms have had on shaping local cultures and societies. The construction of the ‘Orient’, as what Edward Said called a ‘living tableau of queerness’, has been ripped from the pages of Goethe, Flaubert and Renan, and is now presented through a new mixture of government, NGO, philanthropic and private flows (Said, 1988: 103). This chapter, therefore, attempts to construct an alternative genealogy of interventions in the Arab region by putting non-militaristic and diplomatic techniques at the heart of the story of influences to shape the character of the contemporary Middle East. The particular role of educational support and training, which is often sold as a benign and benevolent practice, has historically been central to such cultural strategies. This is evident from the growing influence of foreign universities in the Middle East during British and French colonial rule, to the development of philanthropic funds, Fulbright scholarships and the restructuring and re-facultisation of university departments under the auspices of the United States – whose influence in the region has come to replace that of the former colonisers in the post-Cold War era. Moreover, such processes have been considerably affected by today’s era of globalisation, with its increasing spread of North American universities across the globe and the more general trend of the privatisation of higher education. These global processes are having a considerable impact on present trends in the development of higher education in the Middle East.

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Karam, Imad N. K. https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/33672 2018-09-13T01:38:32Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Arab youth, education, and satellite broadcasting Authors: Karam, Imad N. K. Abstract: This chapter explores the complex intersections between Arab youth, satellite broadcasting and informal education in the Arab region, with particular focus on the extent to which youth favourite television programmes act as sources of cultural and moral education. Informal education is a lifelong process within which the individual acquires attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from his/her closest surroundings including family, work, leisure, and the mass media (Guseva and Kravale, 2006). In this chapter, informal education refers to the learning and acquisition of knowledge, information, values, behaviour and lifestyles associated with young people’s interaction with and experience of satellite television. Contrary to arguments in the Arab public discourse1 that youth’s exposure to satellite television, and especially entertainment programmes, is ‘corrupting’ and at best ‘bad education’, this chapter argues that satellite broadcasting is an important source of informal education for youth. It provides them with opportunities to learn and enhance their knowledge about many issues whether political, social, economic, or cultural, and thus, contributes to their intellectual enrichment, personal development and self-esteem. The Arab public discourse, which is dominated by the elder generation, is filled with warnings that youth consumption of television is passive in nature, and that young people are merely absorbing materials they are offered (Amin, 2000; Abaza, 2001; Al-Fawi, 2001; Jum‘a and Al-Shawāf, 2005). Concerns revolve around issues which might affect the formation of their identity in a negative way – in particular relating to what is seen as economic affluence, moral permissiveness, corruption, and a reduced sense of Arab cultural identity. However, this chapter argues that youth responses to television involve interpreting what they see, not just absorbing the contents offered. In this, I agree with Giddens (1993) that “TV watching, even of trivial programmes, is not an inherently low-level intellectual activity; that young people ‘read’ programmes by relating them to other systems of meaning in their everyday lives” (p. 451). The chapter reveals that youths acknowledge the influence satellite television has on their lifestyle, values, and behaviour, and consider it is necessary for their education and personal development. This is seen either as a positive force (wanting to emulate) or negative (rejection of what is portrayed on screen). Either way, the data collected show a conscious rather than passive viewing, which leads to the conclusion that youth are an active audience, critically assessing the programmes on offer. They also contend that programmes provide them with access to information and experiences that can contribute to their learning and therefore help build their value-system and lifestyle in general, even more than do the school or the home. In the developing world youth is a stage of life that has only recently begun to receive focused attention, mainly because of high demographic rates in this sector of the population, and consequently the latter’s political importance (Lloyd, 2005: 1). The use and meaning of the terms ‘young people’ and ‘youth’ vary around the world, depending on political, economic and socio-cultural context. Also, sociologists and psychologists have different opinions in determining the characteristics of this stage and its length. Yet, it is generally agreed to be the stage where the most significant changes in youths’ interests, social behaviour and tendency to freedom and individuality occur (Al-Askary, 2001). In this chapter, individuals aged between 16 and 27 years old have been interviewed to probe youth engagement with media in Arab society. The study of the role of the media in youth education is not devoid of problems. The complexity of the process involved in media consumption makes it more difficult to methodologically measure the effect of media on youth education. Neither large-scale surveys nor detailed experiments replicate or reflect that actual experience of viewing and reading (Street, 2001: 93). It is also very difficult to separate the influence of media from all other social, psychological and educational factors involved in the formation of personality. It is my view that inadequacies inherent in audience studies analysis are due to the fact that media stimuli routinely interact with other social stimuli. Disentangling these multiple influences is extremely difficult and as a result clear evidence of direct media influence is difficult to obtain (Croteau and Hoynes, 2000: 242), still less to quantify. By employing qualitative techniques, this chapter is moving away from inherently inadequate approaches which measure and quantify media effects in an attempt to disentangle different media influences, towards an ethnography of discourse, of attitudes, and opinions as well as perceptions of youth audiences. Popular media texts such as entertainment programming (reality TV shows, soap operas, movies, music, etc.) were initially approached by researchers throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (cf. Ang, 1991; Hobson, 1982; Morley, 1980) as sites in which ideological discourses around class, gender, race and power were produced, organized and negotiated (Tincknell and Raghuram, 2002: 200). In doing so, the agency involved in the sense-making processes that audiences bring to their understanding of textual meaning was emphasized. Thus, audiences were seen as active agents, not passive subjects, in their consumption and enjoyment of popular texts, and the process of understanding was one of negotiation rather than imposition (ibid.). To explore selective aspects of the above issues, research was undertaken between 2005 and 2008 amongst a cross-section of Arab youth in Jordan, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Palestine. The main method of data collection was focus group interviews. Twelve focus group interviews (totalling 86 participants in mixed and non-mixed gender groups and numbering on average seven participants in each) were conducted with young Arabs in the focal countries. This is both an ample and still a manageable size for qualitative research. While representativeness is not an objective in qualitative research, when making a generalization about Arab youth it is important to aim for a fair representation of variation within the Arab population. Therefore, care was taken to choose equal numbers from both sexes, as well as informants from a mixture of socio-economic groups, such as the seven young people from the poorer Cairene neighbourhood of Manshiet Nasser.2 Participants were randomly selected by using the snowballing technique. The chapter offers some analyses of the discourses underlying the aspirations of Arab youth and their views on media and education.

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Mehran, Golnar https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/33671 2018-09-18T07:38:25Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Representations of Arabs in Iranian elementary school textbooks Authors: Mehran, Golnar Abstract: The identification of being Arab in the Iranian psyche depends to a great extent on the definition of the Iranian identity. Who is an Iranian? The answer to this question was relatively easy during the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979). Schoolchildren learned that they were Aryans, proud of their rich pre-Islamic heritage rooted in the glory of the Persian Empire. The sons and daughters of Cyrus the Great, “the King of the Nation” (Lamb 2007: 355) and the author of the “oldest declaration of human rights” (Moradi Ghias Abadi 2007: 8), Iranians belonged to a civilization that once ruled a great proportion of the world. Prerevolutionary formal education emphasized belonging to the Iranian nation as a source of pride, with clear lines of demarcation from Arabs. The Islamic Republic of Iran, established in 1979 after the overthrow of the late Shah, presented schoolchildren with a totally different world view. Almost overnight, the children of the revolution were told that it was not the Iranian nation but the Islamic umma (community of believers) that was to be their source of pride. Students learned that what mattered was no longer the boundaries of a land called Iran, but a sense of belonging to a vast community called Islam. Iranianness was replaced by Muslim-ness. There was no longer a division among Iranians and Arabs based on language and race, but a strong unity founded on a common religion. Paradoxically, however, Iranians continued to separate themselves from the majority of the Muslim umma through their faith and language. While undermining Zoroastrianism as the original religion of Iran, and replacing the pre-revolutionary language that pointed to the “Arab conquest of Iran” in the seventh century as the “invitation of Arabs to believe in Islam,” the leaders of the Islamic Republic have ensured that Iranians remained distinct by keeping Persian as the formal language and Shi‘ism as the state religion. The pendulum continues to swing in Iranian politics even today, from emphasis on Iranian-ness to Islamic unity, at the center of which is the Arab world. Both voices have been heard in Iran in 2009; solidarity with the Palestinian victims in Gaza during the Israeli bombardments while, at the same time, blaming the late Shah for the loss of one of the “former provinces of Iran”, namely Bahrain, were part of the sentiments expressed by Iranian politicians. The school, as an important agent of socialization, plays a significant role in shaping the minds of the younger generations. It is true that the family, peer group, media, and the Internet present themselves as strong rivals, yet this does not negate the impact of formal education especially during the primary school period. The socialization role of the school has long been recognized by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The post-revolutionary Iranian authorities have used textbooks as key instruments of political and ideological education, charged with teaching the younger generations about the values and attitudes deemed appropriate in the construction of the “new revolutionary society.” Textbook content has, therefore, been used to represent the political, social, and cultural values of the régime. Postrevolutionary textbook content has been the focus of various studies addressing such diverse topics as ideology (Shorish 1988, Siavoshi 1995); identity (Higgins 1985); gender roles (Touba 1987, Higgins and Shoar-Ghaffari 1991, Ferdows 1994); nationalism (Ram 2000, Kashani-Sabet 2002); and socialization (Mehran 1989, 2007). This chapter focuses, more specifically, on constructions of the image of Arabs in elementary school textbooks in Iran. The primary school level (ages 6–10) has been chosen since political education, as an institutional form of political knowledge acquisition, first takes place at the primary level. Realizing that elementary schooling is the first and at times the only exposure of Iranians to formal education, the Islamic Republic has made every effort to disseminate the dominant political ideology through primary school textbooks. The centralization of the Iranian educational system, and the use of standard textbooks throughout the country, despite linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity, highlights the importance of textbooks. Description: Includes Index

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z Farag, Iman https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/33669 2018-09-13T01:38:27Z 2010-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Going international : the politics of educational reform in Egypt Authors: Farag, Iman Abstract: In the nineteenth century, the French thinker Ernest Renan (1823-1892), used the expression ‘Latin Averroïsm’ to describe and qualify western philosophical doctrines of the thirteenth century that came to know the Aristotelian legacy through Muslim scholars and philosophers. In his seminal work, Thinking in the Middle Ages [Penser au Moyen Âge], the philosopher Alain de Libera, adds that ‘Latin Averroïsm’ constituted a kind of intellectual movement around the Sorbonne and contributed significantly to the shaping of the role of the Sorbonne’s intellectuals. Indicatively, in its time, what has come to be known as ‘Latin Averroïsm’ was rather known as ‘Arabism’. De Libera insists that this was not an East versus West encounter, or a unilateral transfer of knowledge. It rather illustrates the fact that intellectuals in Medieval societies in Europe and the Muslim world were sharing debates across religious divides, around questions of faith and reason (de Libera, 1991. See also Le Goff, 1985).1 More recently, Benjamen Fortna locates late Ottoman educational experiences in a global context, showing similarities to France, Czarist Russia, China, and Japan (Fortna, 2002). It was around the 1820s that the ruler of an Ottoman province— Egypt—sent groups of students to learn abroad. He also opened the door to foreign experts and scientists. A recent chapter in what seems to be a continuous dynamic was recently written when a conference was held in Cairo to discuss and praise the role of foreign academia in the Egyptian university.2 Such a transfer of knowledge and scientists is closely related to European colonialism and to cosmopolitanism, with their paradoxical and complex relationship. This interaction was not limited to East/West encounters and did not concern only secular knowledge and modern institutions. If ‘international students’ are considered to be one of the main features of higher education internationalization, one should mention earlier forms. Indeed, prestigious institutions devoted to the study of religious sciences, such as the millennial Al-Azhar mosque in Egypt (founded in 972), were quite used to ‘international students’ hailing from as far as Java or Senegal. Such student mobility needs to be considered within the framework of an ‘Islamic universalism’. We assume that knowledge and its dissemination was always shared and transmitted across borders, gaining new dimensions and interpretations, with every move over space and time. Learners and masters also moved across borders, carrying books, tools and ideas. They were able to argue, to agree, to disagree and to communicate. In this respect, revising early forms of globalization, either imperial or colonial, leads to reconsidering internationalization of knowledge as a new phenomena. However, one should note that the invention of nation-states has definitely affected the relationship between qualification and occupation, and hence the transfer of knowledge: ‘Latin Averroïsm’, or ‘Arabism’ as it was known, did not need accreditation, and neither did Indonesian Azhari scholars need to qualify for the job market. This does not mean that early forms of knowledge were free from all types of legitimation. However, the modern conception of degrees and qualifications, which is closely related to a specific political power, has its effects on knowledge transfer in contemporary times. This historical backdrop raises several questions about the ongoing internationalization of education and higher education. What is new about it? Does privatization constitute the bedrock for internationalization? Is it the expression of the allegedly universal shift from Phase 1, autonomous knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to Phase 2, ‘knowledge for the market’ (Gibbons et al., 1994)? Is such a shift, whose description has been popularized by Michael Gibbons, and whose implementation has been endorsed by international organizations, a simple and innocent description, or is a doctrinal prescription? Who ‘should learn to pay’, to quote the title of Colclough’s (1991) visionary article … and to learn what? Is it always relevant to constitute ‘global educational policies’ as an autonomous research area, disconnected from ongoing forms of exchange? Who is able and willing to compete on the international level? How far can education go in claiming to be an ‘international social system’, where the interplay between knowledge and power takes place within and beyond nation states? What does the internationalization of education and higher education mean outside the US and ‘fortress Europe’? Assuming that the educational question addresses political, cultural, as well as social resources, how should one conceive its internationalization? How are global agendas translated into indigenous languages? How should we analyze the translation of presumably global norms into local practices? The Egyptian case provides some insights into these questions. Egypt has a highly centralized educational system, and historically, education was central to the project of nation-state building. Social as well as technological progress, social and gender equity, as well as citizenship could only be achieved through education. An Egyptian model was diffused among some other Arab countries. Today such a model is depicted as being on the verge of collapse, its high degree of success bearing the seeds of its own failure. As in other countries of the world, new goals are defined and implemented for Egypt, paraded under the banner of the ‘knowledge society’, often relying on foreign agencies and credit. Such reforms generate resistance, adaptation, as well as clients and neo-experts (Mazawi, 2007). In what follows, we will propose the hypothesis that one of the strategies adopted to play the internationalization game is the adoption of a common language. We will first examine Egyptian educational reform projects inspired by a global agenda, and how these serve as a vehicle for new discourses, notions and concepts. We will then examine, more specifically, the Egyptian debate about the ranking of universities. Finally, we will address the issues of evaluation and quality assessment and their dissemination through ‘new’ institutions as well as ‘old’ techniques of power.

2010-01-01T00:00:00Z