Culture and Politics in the New Middle East

Introduction

Editörs

Social sciences have a peculiar history and problematic in the academia. Differently from the natural sciences, they directly deal with human being and society. Thus, ethnicity, gender and geography of the human beings as the experiment object have a great significance. In social sciences people are both the subject and object of their knowledge. It is well known that social science people are also influenced by the knowledge they produce because they define themselves through the knowledge they produce and each definition has a relative influence on the defining individual. It is difficult to find a scientific way to define the human being because each definition of human being turns into a project concerning the human being and began to work as a normative principle concerning what the human being must be instead of what the human being is.

This side of social sciences obstructs the knowledge produced to be freed off an ethnocentric and historical nature. Some schools in social sci- ences ignore their historical and cultural nature and begin to draw templates their own society and for other different societies as if the knowledge they produce is universal and meta-historical. On one hand, scientific disciplines emerged in the West, implying that their society is a perfect and universal model for humanity. On the other hand, they define other societies within the same framework of a ethnocentric world view. Therefore, it is relatively difficult to achieve an objective level of analysis in social sciences more than other concrete sciences. One of the characteristics of social sciences is the responsibility to think above one’s self, to recognize his limitations and to try to overcome these limitations.

It is obvious that in both Arab and Turkish communities social scienc- es have reached a certain acquis. However, the academia of both worlds seems to be unaware of each other due to interruption for most part of the last century. For example, in order to make an analysis on the issues in a neighboring country such as Syria as a neighbor of Turkey, Turkish social scientists refers to western sources such as English and French, because in Turkey there are not so many people who follow the social sciences in Syria as much as to make research on Syria. We have already distanced from the language of the Muslim world, i.e. Arabic language, and from a com- munity that we shared the same history and neighborhood. The scholars of Istanbul, Damascus, Cairo and Medina did understand each other through Arabic or Ottoman Turkish. However, the scholars of our time faced serious difficulties to understand each other.

All scientific disciplines in social sciences are the disciplines of knowl- edge and each must define their fields of interest through a peculiar method. In that respect they adopt a tendency to determine which problems they will address, which concept they will think by, which topics they will handle and the criteria concerning which kinds of knowledge are correct and which are wrong. With this consideration, most of the social sciences are the disci- plines trying to define and understand the new social relations created by the experience of industrialization-urbanization or modernization-globaliza- tion coming out of Europe in last two centuries.

However with the spread of westernization to the rest of the world through colonization, imperialism and modernization efforts, the Western oriented model of thinking was somehow internalized by other countries. This means that particular problems coming out within the Western context began to be thought as the problem of the whole world. Knowledge systems and scien- tific disciplines do not only have a descriptive function but they also build the world view and define our mental maps. As Edward Said also put it, all sociological theories emerging in a Western context have the capability of building a world based on Western perspective. This side of knowledge is not something easily avoidable. Michel Foucault shed the light very pre- cisely on this aspect of scientific disciplines.

While these disciplines perceive the problems coming out in the west as the problems of the whole world, they put the humanity into the frame of their questionable frame. When we adopt these scholarly frameworks without thinking over them, we loose our ability to diagnose our own prob- lems. However, these scientific disciplines should be adopted after a criti- cal review with a special attention to ethnocentric perspectives. Otherwise we cannot see ourselves outside an Orientalist perspective. Today unfortu- nately we cannot overcome this well internalized problem of Orientalism in adopting the critical approach to social sciences. Our Western oriented look at ourselves distorts our self-perception.

Many Western thinkers also attracted attention to this restricted side of Western social sciences. Within this frame, the problems stemmed from the fact that sociology, history and political sciences function in a West-centric approach. The Eurocentrism dominating social sciences created an inter- esting barrier before the non-western communities’ efforts to create their own social sciences. In this context, discussions on “local social sciences” has been done and it has been thought that these will contribute to the gen- eral social science framework for each community being aware of their own uniqueness to develop the conceptual tools for themselves. Undoubtedly here the models will keep its essence because in order to go beyond a dis- cipline once consolidated you should perhaps go to the beginning. However, it should not be cast out that it is not possible to take the experiences back. This issue in fact needs deep philosophical discussions.

All of these concerns perhaps constitute deep epistemological and philo- sophical answers for the question of “Why Arab-Turkish Congress of Social Sciences?” The ATCOSS can create a ground for overcoming this episte- mological problem via sharing the academic acquis between Turkish and Arab world. There is no doubt that the world is witnessing a big process of transformation through which the globe became a small village. New Com- munication technologies and new techniques are the main factors of this process. It became easy to follow what is going on and new developments appeared in any part of the world from the other part. The movement of knowledge, money, human beings and goods speeded with the develop- ments of transportation and communication technologies, requiring the world to adopt.

While the globalized world brings people closer to one another physically does not provide make us more knowledgeable about each other, guaran- tee the rapprochement of mentalities or solve our problems of stereotypes and misunderstanding. The more people get in contact the more they may get closer to one another in terms of mentalities. Instead of understanding and recognizing the differences people prefer closing down themselves and develop prejudices and antipathies against the other. Unfortunately, global- ization has such paradox as well. It is not to overcome this paradox because it signifies a problem coming at the very same time with the abundance ofknowledge. Social scientists should carefully focus on this and deal with these kinds of problems. This Arab Turkish Congress of Social Sciences is distinguished from other congresses as it has a vision and mission. The vision of ATCOSS is to fill the academic and intellectual gap between Arabs and Turks, explore common and different interpretations to the new out- comes in their societies, their region and the big globe.

The Question “Why ATCOSS?” has practical answers as well. It is inevi- table for the commercial and cultural rapprochement between Turkey and the Arab world to find correspondence. The strengthening impact of the re- gional integration with the abolition of visa requirements and the trivializa- tion of the borders which divided these communities for centuries on the all parties is obvious. The borders caused regional separation for centuries did not only remain as physical borders but they built thick mental walls as well. On one side of these walls were the Turkish perceptions about the Arabs and Arab views of the Turks have been produced and processed on the other side.

Indeed, the increase in regional exchange has enriched people of the region in all terms. Today visa requirements among countries are cancelled. A treaty of free-trade zones is signed by four countries of the region and it is expected that this free-trade zone will contribute to the total economic devel- opment of the region and even now this contribution can be observed. This exchange in economic and social areas gains prominence in spreading to a more comprehensive area such as academia. In fact, another dimension of these relations that concerns academia specifically should also be referred to. The scholarly world is shaped by activities aiming the universal search for knowledge. Both the tension between locality and universality and the solution of the tension can be diagnosed during this search.

The ATCOSS represents a big umbrella through which Arabs and Turks could meet, communicate, and learn from each others. This mission can be facilitated in annual meetings to be repeated in a different country each year. Specialists and theoreticians from both sides can sit on one table and let their mentalities to speak. Thus by time they could fill in the gap between them and share a common understanding to social and economic develop- ments in their societies. Intellectuals from Arab societies and Turkish societ- ies gathered to share their knowledge, experience and seek proper analyses for their social realities and seek solutions for problems in their societies.

From this starting point, an international academic group of the Arab Turk- ish Congress for Social Sciences insisted on collecting the fruits of a three- day meetings and sessions between Turkish and Arab intellectuals through this volume. Meetings of intellectuals are classified into pivots through which sessions were held, specialists in this aspects are brainstorming, talking, bargaining, defending their points till they reach common understanding and explore communalities between them. This book consists of nine pivots se- lected from the papers presented during the Arab Turkish Congress for So- cial Sciences in 2010. They range from Family studies to Media and Virtual Society to History and Development etc.

The first section is revolving around Multiculturalism, Education and Family Studies in this new Middle East. Maha Bali & Andrew Bossone’s pa- per discusses the ethical imperative of multiculturalism and interculturalism in today’s media environment and explores what role multicultural education can play in media and communications studies through a study based on foreign students in the American University in Cairo. In his article “Multicul- turalism and the Fall of the Subject Object Divide” Samir Abu-Zaid explores crucial reasons behind the fall of object subject divide by giving information on situation of contemporary social sciences. Nevine Soliman analyzes the deep roots of cultural heritage in the Middle East, namely, Egypt, Turkey and Syria. She highlighted the similarities and differences in their system of antiquities protection, particularly in aspects of cultural property definition, protective legal provisions, as well as their approaches to restitution. In her paper on gender equality comparing between Egypt and Turkey Sherine El- Alaily argues that gender issues have emerged as concerns of priority about development, arguing that gender equality is one of the signs of develop- ment in eastern societies as well. Also in this section, Ayşe Fildis wrote a paper on a phenomenon of honor violence that seems exclusive to Middle Eastern societies or Muslim societies. She tries to view the formative phase of religio-legal ethical codes for disciplining of female sexual conduct, which marks the boundaries of the institution of family in Muslim and Non-Muslim societies.

The second section is about Virtual Society and the (new) Media. Acade- micians try to explore what is new in their societies, the new developments that affected their culture, behavior by the (new) Media. In his study Mr. Saddek Rabbah shedding light on how social network platforms are repre- senting an alternative avenue to the elitist public sphere. He tries to explore the potential of social networking platforms in the Arab world to form a virtual public sphere, thus fostering democracy and empowering citizens to tran- scend the different kind of paternalism they have been experiencing since many decades. This study is drawn on examples from some Arab countries where social networking platforms are intelligently used to revitalize the po- litical and social life in significant ways. Aida Muhammed analyzes the im- pact of the Turkish soap operas (musalsalaat) on the Arab TV viewers. The popularity of this series is rising day after day and thus it is representing a phenomenon that needs a deep study. Bahadir Ileri also examines the im- pacts of Turkish soap operas among Arab populations by emphasizing the success of these soaps with audiences all over the Arabic countries. About the development of a cultural bridge between Turkey and the Arab world, Ahmet Uysal tries to establish the media depiction of why the Turkish soaps became so popular from the sociology of culture perspective. He elaborates what effects they seemed to have on Arab societies, especially on Arab youth and women. He elaborated the perceived socio-cultural bases of the production and reception the Turkish soap operas.

The third section deals with Development and Public Policies. Seek- ing the ways in which the corruption would be reduced, Amr G. E. Sabet suggests collective punishment and sanctions and “modified vendetta” as conceptual tools or mechanisms that may help in reducing the untenable problem of bribery among corrupt individuals. In the same context, Hamid E.Ali presents background on power of state and corruption and discusses the main contours of evolution of corruption, as well as movement from pre- modern to Post-modern corruption and possible ways to reduce the prob- lem.

The fourth section deals with the most popular and major issue of Islam and Politics. The issue became more visible after the coming of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and the emergence of new Islamic elites in the Arab societies. Yasin Aktay sheds light on Turkey’s journey with political Islamism and how it managed to maintain its Islamic culture within a secular political system. He tries to elaborate on the transformation of Turkish society in a theoretical framework, a framework that can be model for the new rising Islamic elites in the Arab world. He outlines the contours of the Turkish experience and ex- plores the specialties of the Turkish societies and the dynamic relations with Islamic and secular forces in Turkish society. In this section Birol Başkan also seeks to answer the question whether Muslim agency could play a key role in democratization by discussing the compatibility between democracy and Islam. The other contribution in this section is written by Hüseyin Çaldak & Kubilay Akman. In their articles, they discuss basic Sufi norms for ethics and moral values and their potential to offer answers to the challenges of modern societies, stressing that Sufi ethics would be benefit for people in modern life.

The fifth section focuses on International Relations and the Middle East. Heba El-Sayed studies the cultural neighborhood of Turkey as a fertile field for its new foreign policy. With a cultural perspective in studying international relations she focuses on studying the relations between nations and coun- tries from there inherited civilizations. Also in this section, Ashraf Abdul Aziz Abdul Kader focuses on the Iranian role in the Arab-Israeli conflict as a the third party that affects its course directly and indirectly. Omair Anas tries to study how Turkey made use of its soft power in Middle East as a foreign pol- icy tool by discussing is how Turkey’s soft power changed with the Justice and Development Party. In another important paper, Javier Albarracín Cor- redor elaborates the importance of cooperation between Turkey and Middle East in terms of social and economic aspects by focusing increasing trade and social contact between Turkey and the Arab world.

The sixth section consists of articles that elaborate Turkish-Arab Rela- tions more deeply. Concerning the relations between Turkey and the Arab countries, Magdy El-Sayed Hashish tries to study the American reaction towards the Egyptian-Turkish rapprochement in 1957 between the leaders Nasser and Mandaris. He investigates how the American superpower was intervening in regional politics to keep a favorable political context and to secure the steady flow of oil from the Middle East. Ragab El-Basil tries to study the role of Turkey in the Palestinian problem, one of the most critical and sensitive issues in the Arab and Islamic world. He studies the role of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey in defending the Palestinian side and their actions towards the Israeli violations of Human rights and their behaviors since its arrival power until to 2010. Introducing the readers to the linguistic and cultural communalities between the Egyptian and Turk- ish societies, Nahed Awny tries to find common words and common threads between both societies in her paper. Finally, this book is the first book to summarize one of the scholarly meetings that will be repeated every year under the title of the Arab Turkish Congress of Social Sciences (ATCOSS) where scholars from different backgrounds presents their findings, discuss their ideas and defend their points and gain new knowledge out of these meetings.