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Fictional works are commonly considered to function as a window to the world, and towards other worlds. Most of my students, however, do recognize the potential of literature and the arts for the understanding of the Arab world, past and present. The Potential of Studying and Teaching Literature and the Arts Yet, Middle Eastern history, for instance, is still widely disconnected from European history, and Arabic literature is rarely studied as part of world literature.Īrabic literary studies are, thus, doubly marginalized: first, as part of Arabic studies that lag behind the bigger, ‘systematic’ disciplines, and second, as a field that deals with fictional works and aesthetics and, accordingly, remains undervalued in comparison to other, seemingly more utilizable, fields within Arabic studies.
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In the last decades, scholars in area studies have increasingly adopted theoretical and methodological approaches from the ‘systematic’ disciplines, thus contributing, both empirically and theoretically, to the broader field of history, literary studies, etc. These disciplines, as a number of colleagues stated back in 2006, “ persist in delegating the study of non-European cultures and societies to regional experts and institutionally small disciplines, such as African, Asian, and Oriental and Islamic Studies”.
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On a broader scale, knowledge production concerned with world regions beyond Europe and North America is marginalized, as it is typically not included in the ‘systematic’ disciplines, such as history, philosophy, political science or literary studies, that are mainly focused on Western contexts. In the last twenty years, the number of professorships that are dedicated to the philological discipline ‘Arabistik’ (Arabic studies) has considerably decreased at German universities, with only one professorship currently dedicated to modern Arabic literary studies, to the benefit of ‘Islamwissenschaft’ (Islamic studies), a discipline that mainly uses methods from history, religious studies or social sciences. The broader public discourse, too, is mainly focused on these kinds of topics. In our field – Arabic, Islamic or Middle Eastern studies –, students tend to choose topics related to political Islam, social movements or Islamic law, as those seem more likely to provide job opportunities. If the humanities in general are commonly perceived as less apt to address actual challenges or produce ‘utilizable knowledge’ than the social, natural and life sciences, this is even more so for disciplines dealing with fictional works and aesthetics.