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| The Middle East Viewed from the NorthPapers from the First Nordic Conference on Middle Eastern Studies, Uppsala 26-29. January 1989Edited by Bo Utas and Knut S. VikørAbout this volumeMiddle Eastern studies has a long tradition in the Nordic countries. While we need not go back to the medieval Viking contact with the inner Mediterranean and the Arab world, both Denmark and Sweden had relations with various Middle Eastern powers from the seventeenth century onwards. Denmark, a maritime power, traded in Moroccan and other ports in North Africa, while Swedish forces in central Europe came into direct military confrontation with the Ottoman empire, to which they were allied for a period.Thus, there is little reason to wonder that the universities in the region developed a Middle Eastern interest. Arabic was studied and taught both in Copenhagen, Uppsala and Lund already from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in 1760, a Danish expedition led by Carsten Niebuhr made marked contributions to Arabic studies. When the first university in Finland - then under Swedish rule - was established in Turku in 1640, even this distant institution was given a seat in Arabic. Norway, the fourth of the Nordic countries, developed this interest only later but can take pride in the fact that Carl Caspri's Arabische Grammatik, still one of the major authorities on Arabic grammar, was completed in Oslo (then Christiania) in 1848. The study of Middle Eastern societies and cultures is thus no novelty in the in the four countries. (The fifth Nordic country, Iceland, still has to develop this area of research.) In particular over the last two decades, the field has expanded tremendously, through the extension of traditional subjects as philology and religious studies, as well as through the development of Middle Eastern research in history and the social sciences. The various research milieus have, however, to a large degree remained isolated from each other. Many of them are small and vulnerable. Thus, the establishment of scholarly contacts and links between the various scholars and milieus is important for the development of this research. While each of the four countries may be too small to form a realistic basis for such links, the four together, bound together by language and tradition, can more easily form a natural unit for scholarly interchange. For this reason, a conference was called in Uppsala in February 1989, with the intention to bring together scholars on Middle Eastern topics from early Mesopotamia to the present day, and from the furthest Maghreb to steppes of Mongolia. The conference was loosely inspired by a smaller gathering in Lund in 1982. This time, the intention was to make this a lasting initiative, and the conference led to the establishment of the Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies, for whom it is thus the "First Nordic Conference". The present volume presents a selection of the papers presented to this conference, together with a survey of the papers we were unable to include in full. The intention is thus to give an impression of the breadth of research in the four countries. It is by no means an exhaustive summary; only a fraction of the scholars who are working in the field in the four countries could be included here, even in summary form. Most universities in the Nordic countries have some interest in the Middle East. Ten or eleven of them, however, have research milieus of such a scale as to be able present regular teaching in such subjects. They include the traditional centres of Uppsala, Lund, Helsinki and Copenhagen, as well as Oslo, Gothenburg, Stockholm and younger centres as Århus, Bergen and Odense. Research interests are wide in all institutions, but there is clearly a tendency for the more established centres to have a continuing tradition in philological and classical studies, while the younger universities have greater emphasis on social sciences. Arabic is currently being taught in nine of these institutions; Oslo and Bergen in Norway, Copenhagen and presently also Odense in Denmark, Helsinki in Finland and four universities, Uppsala, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Lund in Sweden. However, only Uppsala, Copenhagen and in the near future Oslo has teaching in Persian, and the same three in Turkish. Ancient near eastern studies (Assyriology and/or Egyptology) is well established in Helsinki as well as in Uppsala and Copenhagen, and the teaching of Hebrew and other Semitic studies has a long tradition in several of the older institutions. All universities have Islamic or religious studies in some form, while the history of the Middle East is taught as a specific subject only in Bergen; Copenhagen and Lund among others also have research in Middle Eastern history. In the social sciences, research is also being carried in a number of institutions, but perhaps with a particular concentration in Århus (Political Science) and Bergen (Social Anthropology). For Bergen, the special emphasis on studies on the Sudan may be noted in a variety of subjects. Uppsala, Lund, Oslo and Bergen all have degrees in Middle Eastern area studies, while there are only two specific Middle East area centres in the four countries, the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in Bergen and the Center for Middle Eastern Area Studies in Odense. The latter is currently the coordinating body for the teaching of Arabic in Denmark. This - in no way exhaustive - survey gives an indication of breadth of research interests that we may find reflected in this volume. In organizing the selection of papers from the Uppsala conference, we have chosen to present them in a roughly diachronic order. This highlights a certain division of interest; one the one hand a number of papers with themes from the early period ranging from the Pharaonic period to the twelfth century; on the other papers dealing with the present day and near past. Some papers cross this boundary, in particular those dealing with linguistic problems, be it the change between b and m in early medieval Arabic, and the classification of modern Jordanian dialects. Both papers in various ways are dealing with a dichotomy urban/beduin, written/oral, and show how such dichotomies influence the linguistic material and are in some ways spanned. Many of the papers dealing with the modern Islamic world are also treating a particular dichotomy or dialogue between the "Islamic" and the "modern". This may be in the question of "good" and "evil" among Turkish intellectuals, in the use of classical modes of theatre in modern Iran, in the Egyptian refutations of Khomeini and his use of Islamic terminology or in the defintion of what modernity and development means among school-children in Syria and Jordan. All these discuss the use of an Islamic discourse in a contemporary setting, and they show both the great variety of ways this discourse is used, but also the historical links and thus integrity of the Islamic themes and symbols that is taken up. A similar study of a fusion of a traditional and modern discourse, while not dealing specifically with the Islamic, can be found in Stagh's dicsussion of an Egyptan work of literary history in the 1960s. Seeing it in an inverse perspective, Schade-Pouslen questions the Western discourse on Islamism. One may also draw a link from these modern papers to some of the studies on earlier Islam, as in the integration of Islamic ideology and Iranian/Turkish elements in the Mirror of Princes literature of the twelfth century, which show the same duality of the integrity of discourse and its influence from other sources in the contemporary setting. Hultgård's study discusses the development of a Zoroastrian myth during the early Islamic period, but this can still be seen as the shaping of ideas and ideology in a changed setting. The first study in the volume, on the role of women priests in late Pharaonic Egypt, on the other hand, develops the relation between the myth and reality of these offices. Seeing the relation of ideology and reality from a more down-to-earth viewpoint, Melasuo discusses the problems that faced the Algerian authories in implementing the ideas of land reform. This paper has not become less relevant in the period since it was written, neither has Thordarson's concentrated study on religion and nationalism in the Caucasus. We close the selection of papers with the introductions given at the Maghreb workshop at the conference. By surveying the region from different fields of research, the four panelists merge their notes into a study of how conflicting tendencies based on group, region and the larger Arabic and Islamic world interrelate. We intended this volume as a "snapshot" of Nordic research as it was presented to the Uppsala conference. We have kept the papers as they were submitted in 1989, and added "updates" of research or bibliography in the form of a note at the end of each article or summary where applicable. At the end of the volume, we include a short presentation of the Nordic Society for Middle Studies which was established at the Uppsala conference. (From the Introduction) Read the Contents page this volume This book (first published 1992) is distributed outside Scandinavia by
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