The Arab–Turkish Social Sciences Congress

When we gathered in Ankara in December 2010 for the 1st Arab-Turkish Social Sciences Congress (ATCOSS 2010), no one could have guessed that only a month later a series of revolutions would follow one after another in the Arab world. The participants from Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all heavily stressed the democracy deficit in their own countries. In all of them the traces of a clear search were visible.

We listened then to a series of papers on the transferability of administrations, accountability, the rule of law, the importance of democracy, and the dangerous dimensions of corruption in governance and in social relations. All these papers, each longing for a change in its own country, were at the same time heralding this change, this search.

Perhaps because of this, when we determined the second of the Congress, which we then planned to convene every year, in Cairo as "The new and non-governmental actors of change in the Middle East," no one could calculate that these very new actors would start a great transformation only a week later. But a demand, a desire, a yearning for change was making itself felt even then.

Perhaps in this respect the idea of ATCOSS began to fulfill its function from the very first time it convened. It made visible the picture in which change can be followed, named and perhaps its direction predicted. As Deputy Prime Minister Prof. Beşir Atalay put it in his opening speech, "Not every social scientist or every social science congress is fortunate enough to witness history so closely, even from within."

Also in the opening speech, Prof. Seyfettin Abdülfettah, a faculty member in Political Science at Cairo University, said that a special responsibility also falls on these social scientists who witness history. Transition-period social scientists have a special responsibility toward their own societies, beginning with the subjects they will choose to examine in the topics they take up. For witnessing brings responsibility with it.

At the First Congress it was underlined that the Islamic world had until now been only the object of social science. The Islamic world became a world about which science was done, which was defined through the science done about it, and over which, to the extent it was defined, a power, if only discursive, could be established. In the social sciences, and increasingly in all literature, it was called the "Middle East." This name was adopted by Muslim societies themselves as well. Yet whose east was it, whose middle east was the Muslim geography? It became possible to ask this as Muslim social scientists were trained. The same societies were also called "developing countries," "backward countries," "societies without history," "societies late to history," "societies without civil society, unable to experience revolutions, fatalistic and resigned to their fate."

All these definitions and depictions were not merely depicting Islamic societies, Turkish society, Arab societies; they were also constructing them, inventing as they defined. That is, they did not portray what is as it is, but rather, to some extent, expressed what they wanted it to be.

In fact, in these very states, that is, in their fatalistic and resigned state, in their ahistoricity and backwardness, they seemed more sympathetic, because they were both better suited to being governed and, in this state, looked a bit "exotic." But as Muslim societies raised their objections and showed the will to act with more dignity and more independence, they began to become unlikable.

From precisely this point on, the strange relations between Islam and violence began to become the subject of new social science research. Once again Islam began to be defined, and Muslims to be forced into a mold. The mass of studies now being done on Islamic societies, even if done in very good faith, ends up focusing on the relationship between Islam and violence, or on the relationships between Islam and democracy, Islam and human rights. It is true that in a way the Islamic world has been caught in a spiral of violence for quite some time, but where this spiral stems from is, truth be told, no secret either.

The presence of colonialism in the Islamic world has not been lacking for the last two centuries. We all now know better what kind of Orientalist literature was formed by the knowledge produced about Islamic societies in the early days of colonialism. In the postcolonial period, on the other hand, it is not possible to say that Islamic societies have been sufficiently bold in developing their own knowledge paradigms.

In this vacuum, the Western scientific world's production of knowledge about the East and Islam has continued, because the power hegemonies in these lands never disappeared. Again the equation between "knowledge" and "power" continued to operate, and, in Edward Said's famous phrase, the process of the "Middle East's becoming Middle-Easternized" continued without slowing. Today the need for the Middle East to produce knowledge about itself has become more urgent.

We are all together observing what kind of transformation of consciousness and social change the change in the media world, whose results are obtained relatively faster than in the academic world, is bringing about in Middle Eastern societies today. Let us continue tomorrow to look at this world, which in a way holds a special place among the prominent actors of the transformation in the Middle East.