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Interview with Prof. Dr. Aline Schläpfer
Since 1 August 2024, our SNSF-Eccellenza Professor Aline Schlaepfer has been appointed as Associate Professor at the Unité d'Arabe of the University of Geneva. In this interview, she gives an insight into her upcoming work and looks back on her project and her time in Basel.
Dear Aline, we congratulate you warmly on your professorship in Geneva. What does it mean to you to return to your home town?
Thank you! I once heard that in today’s world, “home” is where your computer automatically connects to the internet. For a researcher whose scholarly legacy almost entirely lies on a computer, this metaphor carries significant weight! And in this sense, the University of Basel is a real intellectual home for me. That said, Geneva is where I was trained in Middle Eastern studies. Having been shaped by its academic environment, I am familiar with the expectations and needs of future students in this field. I hope to be able to meet them, while building bridges with my previous experience in Basel, the USA and the Middle East.
What will be the focus of your teaching and research there?
As my colleagues have argued, in various parts of the globe, including Switzerland, the Middle East is often perceived or addressed as “a problem to be solved” (Boissière & Morvan 2022). While I do not underestimate the tragedies individuals and communities experience across the Middle East, there is a moral risk, I believe, in establishing a systematic equation between the Middle East and the question of violence. This is why I seek to highlight aspects of life that exist beyond and below this violence. Reading Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) encouraged me to think beyond the concept of injury alone. She writes: “Of course, injury is one thing that can and does happen to a vulnerable body (and there are no invulnerable bodies), but that is not to say that the body’s vulnerability is reducible to its injurability.”
In my own research and teachings, I focus on intellectual history and the circulation of ideas from and to Arab-speaking spaces. In particular, I am interested in the historical profession – or the “historian’s craft”, as Marc Bloch (1949) termed it. I focus on how Arab historians in the 19th and 20th centuries began integrating new methods of studying history within a positivist framework, alongside traditional approaches inherited from Islamic history, mainly following the annalistic style. While intellectual productions from early Islamic history have been extensively studied, modern and contemporary Arabic historiographies have received relatively little attention. This is what I do in my current research and that I intend to develop in the coming years.
In my teachings too, I will focus on the intellectual legacies of Arabic speaking spaces, in a historical perspective. For example, next semester I will teach a class on a century of history in Iraq entitled “Iraq from Faysal to Daesh, a century of political social and cultural transformations” (in French: “L’Irak de Faysal à Daesh, un siècle de transformations sociales, politiques et culturelles”). During each session, students and I will examine a poem that echoes the political issues addressed in class, as poetry is and has long been a central tool of political expression in Iraq. Similarly, in another class I will teach on memoirs and autobiographies written in Arabic, we will be paying particular attention to the historical value of ego-documents, and we will ask how the genre of memoirs can contribute to historical knowledge, particularly in relation to the narratives of ordinary lives.
You worked in Basel at the seminar of Near and Middle Eastern Studies for four years, what's next for your project "Ottoman Afterlife in New Arab States"?
The great benefit of an afterlife is that we don’t really know when it will end! But more concretely, the SNF project, as well as the rest of the team will remain in Basel, until 2025.
In the team, Jasmine Benhaida doctoral thesis focuses on the Ottoman legal legacy in Jordan during 1919-1929, based on handwritten Sharia Court records in the city of Al-Salt, the inaugural capital of Jordan. Fares Damien’s doctoral thesis focuses on the formation of South Lebanon, going back to the transition between the collapse of Ottoman administration and the French Mandate until the formation of the Lebanese Republic. Finally, Muna Asenwar, who joined the team with a start-up scholarship from the department (G3S), focuses on the influence of political Islam on history-writing in Arab spaces since the 1970s, in particular about the Ottoman Empire. In my own book project, I am interested in how Ottoman history is used by Arab intellectuals as a tool to contest the new political order established by European powers in the post-Ottoman Middle East, in particular in mandate Iraq.
If you had to recommend Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Basel, what would you emphasize?
The specificity and great value of the curriculum in Near and Middle Eastern studies in Basel is the solid bilingual curriculum (Arabic and Turkish), which draws historical, literary and political connections between Arab-speaking and Turkish-speaking spaces. This dual approach aligns with current trends in our field and provides a much-needed expertise in today’s context, where Turkey has become increasingly involved in regional politics following its foreign policy shift in the 2000s, including in Arab-majority and Muslim-majority countries.
Another distinctive feature of the Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Basel is its affiliation with the Department of Social Sciences. This collaboration, and the frequent interactions with social scientists whose work focuses on contemporary issues, drew me to more directly engage with the dialogue between the past and the present, and how they can inform each other. And above all, for me it was a powerful reminder that history is also a social science, although history programs are more often than not located in the humanities departments.
And last but not least, I would like to emphasize that the Program in Near and Middle Eastern Studies is an exceptionally dynamic scientific environment, with many new research projects and scholars coming from abroad. Students at all levels have the opportunity to attend scholarly conferences, workshops, and research seminars, and to engage with leading scholars about the current trends of research in the field.
The Middle East is a focal point of world politics. Experts are in demand, but at the same time this role is also very challenging to fulfil. What can be in your eyes the role of science and where are its limits?
I think there are two types of challenges in the field of Middle Eastern studies: human and scientific. On a human level first, events in the region are often a cause of worry, stress, and at times grief. During peak crises in particular, much of our time is dedicated to seeking news and updates, and sharing emotional support with our colleagues. On a scientific level, the constant immediacy of political developments drives us to strengthen our knowledge in ultra-contemporary politics, even if our scientific comfort zone initially lies in – for example – early modern Abbasid history or literature. We therefore naturally tend to adopt a more interdisciplinary approach.
When it comes to the potential of science, when media address a burning topic, they often reduce it to an “either/or” narrative. For example, with the 2011 Revolution in Egypt in the context of the Arab spring, one of the first debates was about whether the revolution was caused by social media, or not. Numerous studies in anthropology and history have followed, shedding light on a very complex interplay of factors, like social disparities within Egyptian society, the impact of rising bread and gas prices, among others, as well as the function of the media (traditional or social) in political claims. These questions were also compared with previous revolutions, in 1919 and 1952, offering new perspectives. By looking at the phenomenon from a different angle, these studies allowed to uncover important aspects of Egyptian political life. Retrospectively, when one talks about the Egyptian Revolution today, the initial binary question has disappeared and been replaced by more constructive ones, showing that research has succeeded in its efforts to reorient the debate, with new theoretical perspectives and content, as well as more nuances.
Similary, with the current situation in Israel and Palestine, the situation is much more complex than Israel Defense Forces vs. Hamas. It has to do with social and political processes that have been going on for decades. So the role of research is to shed light on these processes, and thus to reorient the debate towards new questions, beyond superficial binaries. I am confident that in the long term, these efforts will bear fruit, because scholars are patient and resilient. In this sense, although I am not an ethicist – which means that I don’t have an informed position on whether there is a limit to science or not – I believe that science can be an open category, as long as it is conducted according to certain ethical standards.