On the Margins: Gender and Academic Freedom at Cairo University

Implicated in wider conflicts over modernization, democracy, and tradition, gender studies has become a flashpoint for academic freedom in Egyptian universities.

By Hoda Elsadda

In 1906 pioneers of Egyptian enlightenment met at the house of national leader Saad Zaghloul to lay the foundations for a university to lead the country into the modern world and foster a cultural renaissance. The Egyptian University, now Cairo University, was formally founded two years later, thanks to the efforts of a group of independent and enlightened men and women. Un-fortunately, their vision has not been easy to sustain. In the years that followed, their successors have had to struggle continually, not always with success, to defend the university as a self-governing institution that encourages freedom of expression. In more re-cent years, political and cultural challenges to academic freedom have become especially apparent in the field of gender studies.

Struggle for Control

In 1925, when the university came under the direct authority of the minister of education, the state and the academic community began to confront one another over academic freedom. A famous struggle erupted in 1926 over the prominent writer Taha Hussein’s book about pre-Islamic poetry. Hussein was accused of heresy because he argued that most pre-Islamic poetry was actually written after the coming of Islam, and he disputed some of the stories mentioned in the Quran. The whole university supported Hussein, and his colleagues later elected him dean of the faculty of arts. In 1932, however, the government transferred him to the Ministry of Education. Again, the decision was resisted: students went on strike, and Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayyid, the president of the university, resigned. The crisis was resolved when Hussein returned to the university as dean in 1934 and Sayyid came back as president in 1935.

During this crisis, a series of laws and decrees had begun to emerge to enhance state control over the university. A new law passed in 1933 decreed that deans were to be appointed by the education minister, not elected as Hussein had been. The 1952 revolution signaled a further curtailment of the independence of universities. The new military regime initiated a series of measures restricting civil and legal freedoms to eliminate potential political opponents. In September 1954 professors at Cairo University known for their unfailing commitment to democracy became the target of a vengeful attack after they called on army officers to return to their barracks in support of democracy. Seventy professors were expelled. A law passed in 1956 further tightened the grip of the new regime on academic institutions.

The struggle over the independence of universities continued. In 1972 the efforts of pressure groups within institutions led to revision of the law regulating the appointment of deans. Faculty members were to vote for dean, but the president of the university retained the right to appoint the dean out of the three professors who obtained the most votes. In 1994 the law was again modified, placing the appointment of the dean totally in the hands of the president of the university, who is appointed by the minister of education. Under such circumstances, can the university provide structures of protection for researchers working on controversial topics? The answer is, sadly, no. Universities are at the mercy of the ups and downs of state political struggles.

Gender Studies

Constraints on research are particularly apparent in the field of gender studies. Conflicts over the position of women in society, or the "woman question," have been at the heart of debates over modernity and tradition, social change, national independence, democracy, the independence of research institutions, and so forth. In fact, the first academic freedom crisis to erupt at Cairo University was related to gender. It was triggered by a Ph.D. thesis written in 1913 by writer and philosopher Mansour Fahmi on the position of women in Islamic history. Fahmi was one of the first men to be awarded a scholarship by the Egyptian University to study at the University of Paris. The administration of the Egyptian University heard of the controversial character of Fahmi’s thesis and asked the University of Paris to postpone Fahmi’s defense of it. The defense was not postponed, however, and Fahmi obtained his doctorate and returned to Egypt. He started teaching while attempts were made to hush all news of his thesis. Eventually, word got out, the university came under severe attack by conservative groups, and Fahmi was expelled. He returned to the university seven years later, but he had lost his courage and did not produce much of note.

Over the course of the century, the situation did not improve much. There is a serious lack of research on gender in the Middle East in general and in Egypt in particular. Most such research is carried out within what are known as development circles in the Middle East. Cairo University has no specific courses devoted to the exploration of gender issues; departments of sociology, history, and psychology remain divorced from the recent advances in gender studies in those fields. Departments of languages, especially the English department, have started to incorporate some courses on feminist literary criticism, and an increasing number of graduate students are working on gender-related topics. Yet all the courses that deal with gender are actually meant to tackle other issues; gender is incorporated solely because of the efforts of individual members of staff.

Women’s studies programs at American universities originated as a result of a strong women’s movement that formulated questions that needed to be answered through research. That has not happened in Egypt, where there are no strong women’s groups that have the power to design a research agenda and to lobby for it. National research institutions have deteriorated generally because of a scarcity of resources, confused state policies, and the innate contradictions in the liberal project of modernization. But there is one serious impediment to research on gender that is specifically gender related, namely, the ambivalent attitudes of the Egyptian intelligentsia toward "the woman question," an ambivalence that has stayed with us since the end of the nineteenth century. Advocates of women’s rights are still stigmatized as westernized; they allegedly propagate ideas that aim to dismantle the very essence of Arab culture. Islamic tradition needs to be safeguarded from these external influences by preserving the sanctity and the values of the Arab family. When women’s issues are discussed, we inevitably find ourselves talking about cultural identity, the relationship between the East and the West, national interests in a global context, modernity, and tradition.

Variations on these ideas are expressed not only by the so-called conservative representatives of Islamist movements, but also by representatives of the secular factions in Egyptian society. Attitudes toward women in the Arab world reveal many of the ambivalent feelings and contradictions vis-á-vis the modernization project that formerly colonized states have adopted. Research on gender collides with some of the deepest fears in society. We are not just up against patriarchal anxiety about female power; we are also confronted with the cultural insecurities of postcolonial nations that are always on the defensive pertaining to issues of identity and their relationship with the outside world. These fears facilitate the manipulation and exploitation of gender issues in political struggles between conflicting forces in society. In this environment, no institution is capable of providing a secure and supportive environment for researchers in the field.

The best research on gender in Egypt has been initiated by pioneering individual researchers as well as small and marginal women’s groups. These groups are on the sidelines because they lack the power, resources, and opportunity to have any kind of widespread influence within the current sociopolitical context. Yet their location in the margin allows them the freedom and the creative space that is denied to others working within state-controlled, or even high-profile, civil institutions. In light of the current political situation and the inherited misconceptions about gender, I join my voice to feminist, postcolonial intellectuals and advocate a politics of the margin. The margin as a strategic location allows for space and time to accumulate a strong body of knowledge to support future efforts for more freedom.

Hoda Elsadda is professor of English and comparative literature at Cairo University and a founding member of the Women and Memory Forum, which encourages the reading of Arab cultural history from a gender-sensitive perspective. This article is an abridged version of an essay titled "Gender, Democracy, and Censorship: The Limits of Academic Freedom at Cairo University," forthcoming from the University of California Press in Is Anyone Listening?" Independent Voices on Human Rights in the Arab World, edited by Anthony Tirado Chase and Maryam Elahi.

Printer-Friendly Page