Last week the American University in Cairo, where I served as president until the end of last year, held a memorial service for Giulio Regeni, an Italian graduate student who went missing in late January and whose body was found more than a week later on the outskirts of the city. His body bore the unmistakable marks of what the Italian government called “inhuman” torture.
It is sobering to look back on the life of a promising young scholar, and to lament the circumstances in which he could have met such an appalling fate.
His death, however, reaffirms the signal importance of education and research in the Arab world, and the international community should make every effort to continue to support scholarship there.
As has been shown repeatedly over the years, it is difficult to be a scholar and conduct scholarship in the Middle East. The Qaddafi regime in Libya murdered what it deemed its opponents, particularly the educated elite, with impunity. The Iranian revolution targeted dozens of university students and professors it viewed as traitors. The president of the American University of Beirut was killed by gunmen outside his office in 1984. Algerian scholars were assassinated during the Islamist insurgency of the 1990s, and Iraqi college faculty members were gunned down on campuses after the U.S. invasion of 2003. And of course, in recent years, college students and staff members have been among the victims of violence across the region.
Egypt is unusual in that it is one of the very few countries in the Arab world in which there are hundreds of American academics working and conducting research and in which thousands of its own citizens are scholars and scientists with American university degrees. But in that country too, war, violence, and fear have bred suspicion and mistrust. “After all,” an unnamed Egyptian security official was quoted in The New York Times as saying of Regeni, “who comes to Egypt to study trade unions?” The implication — that only spies care about comparative labor history and, moreover, that there is something intrinsically suspect about efforts to acquire knowledge, establish facts, or exercise judgment — risks becoming a debilitating reality.
That is especially true if international scholars stay away. The U.S. government now has travel warnings — which recommend that prospective travelers “consider very carefully whether you should go to a country” — in effect for Algeria; Iran; Iraq; Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; Lebanon; Libya; Saudi Arabia; Syria; Sudan; Tunisia; and Turkey, though not for Egypt. Nevertheless, in a rare move, the Middle East Studies Association issued a security alert in February, advising its members to “reflect carefully” on travel to Egypt for research.
That is unfortunate, because without a robust international research community with a diverse and ambitious research agenda, we will not know how the kaleidoscope of languages in the region, represented everywhere from online comics to advertising billboards and streetside graffiti, shapes popular identities and aspirations in Cairo. Nor will we know how the composition of the local weather, climate, and sands affects the surfaces of solar panels and the prospects for renewable energies across the region, how local village feuds shape national political conflicts in western Libya, or whether conditional cash transfers are effective mechanisms for alleviating poverty in southern Egypt.
The professors in the Middle East working on some of those topics today do not enjoy the contemplative life of the absent-minded scholar. They and their students always have to, to use the language of the Middle East Studies Association, “reflect carefully” on what they do, day in and day out.
The future of the region rests on their ability to nurture the next generation of social, political, and economic leaders, and to cultivate and advance new ideas that will enhance the prospects for economic prosperity, social justice, and human dignity. And the next generation of young Egyptians — indeed, scholars from around the region — need to be exposed to the research methods and techniques that will permit them to pose important scientific and scholarly questions and provide novel and useful answers.
The international community, therefore, should resist the temptation to act on alarm and revulsion in counseling against collaborating with colleagues to foster education or conduct research in the region. It does no service to anyone to abandon pursuing the kind of research those who have been silenced had wanted to do, to advise against strengthening academic cooperation and exchange, or to stop insisting that education and research are social goods to which everyone should have access.
Instead, we should advocate the virtue and value of education and research proudly, confidently, and energetically, and be absolutely uncompromising in demanding the rights and responsibilities that sustain it, including freedom of information, expression, and association. Otherwise, we will find that intimidation works — a heartening message for the angry, resentful, and frightened of the region and a sad lesson for the next generation of scholars of the Middle East and North Africa.
