“When you think about Islamic archaeology and archaeology in Cairo, you think of George Scanlon,” noted one of Scanlon’s former students and archaeologist Gregory Williams (MA) ’13, who is currently pursuing a PhD in Islamic archaeology.

Professor emeritus in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations (ARIC), the late George T. Scanlon (1925 - 2014) was a pillar in the ARIC department and AUC. He was fundamental in establishing the University’s program and curriculum in Oriental and Arabic and Islamic studies, especially within his field of Islamic art and architecture. Under his guidance, numerous generations of students have graduated and gone on to pursue successful careers in various corners of the globe.

Commemorating Scanlon’s great work in the field of Islamic art and architecture, his former students and AUC alumni decided to undertake an initiative to establish the George T. Scanlon Graduate Student Award in Arab and Islamic Civilizations, a merit-based award to recognize a distinguished MA thesis produced by an ARIC student in that given academic year.

“As we count ourselves among the privileged graduates who benefited from Scanlon’s dedication to his students and his multidisciplinary approach to the study of Islamic culture and history, we are committed to fortifying his most noble of characteristics by encouraging the research of future generations of historians following in the tradition that he helped establish at AUC,” wrote his former student Iman R. Abdulfattah (MA) ’04, PhD candidate at the University of Bonn and Islamic art historian at the Ministry of Antiquities, and Noha Abou-Khatwa ’98 ’01, PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and director of the Islamic Art Network, Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation, in their appeal to former students of Scanlon. The George T. Scanlon Graduate Student Award in Arab and Islamic Civilizations has so far raised more than $25,000.

Scanlon’s former students want to ensure that their mentor and dear professor’s name, memory and scholarly contributions are kept alive and thriving for years to come at AUC. “Such a prize recognizes Scanlon’s multidisciplinary approach to his various areas of expertise, but also ensures that he continues to be recognized in posterity for his manifold scholarly contributions,” said Abdulfattah. “It also shows a commitment to students, which was one of Scanlon’s most admiring attributes as an educator.”

Pioneering professors and mentors are an important part of AUC’s legacy. Faculty members like Scanlon made Cairo their home and AUC their family.  Commemorating scholars like Scanlon through named gifts and prizes is one way of keeping their names alive. “Much like the medieval waqf system, which Scanlon taught us, kept the memories of past rulers and sultans alive on buildings and material objects they patronized; named prizes are another way of immortalizing our mentors, through a perpetual academic and intellectual lineage,” said Amina Elbendary ’96, ’00, Scanlon’s former student and associate chair and assistant professor of Arab and Islamic civilizations at AUC. 

Scanlon’s 50-year teaching career at AUC has made an immense impact on all his students, scholars, fellow colleagues and researchers, and everyone who even encountered him briefly. He is remembered by his students as “opinionated, a wonderful teacher, great scholar who was incredibly generous and genuinely interested in his students” said Abdulfattah.

Building on from the work of the very famous K.A.C Creswell, Scanlon established a strong program in Islamic art and architecture at AUC. Several of his former students went on to become important scholars in the field. The theses they produced for their master’s degrees remain important works, which created a very strong reputation for AUC and the ARIC program. “Scanlon was one of the earliest scholars to bring archeology to Islamic studies. So, unlike Egyptology, Arabists were not traditionally trained to work with material culture much less to pursue archaeological work. He was a pioneer at that, and several of his students trained with him on site,” added Elbendary. 

Scanlon made learning at AUC more exciting and his love of Cairo, its monuments and history was contagious. “His impact was immense on steering interest to Islamic archeology in Egypt,” said Abou-Khatwa. “His analysis of what he excavated was brilliant and this is why it is indispensable to the study of medieval Egypt, as it filled in a lot of blanks. Most importantly his work documented and thus preserved for us the first Muslim city.”

Scanlon’s main life achievement was teaching and his relationship with students. “We want to keep that link with students going … as he used to say, ‘Keep the Faith.’”

Getting to Know Professor George T. Scanlon

Born in Pennsylvania on April 23, 1925, George T. Scanlon paved the way in areas as wide-ranging as salvage archaeology and scholarly writing. Throughout his career, he has been affiliated with several academic institutions in the U.S. and the UK including Princeton University, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, St. Anthony’s College in Oxford, the University of Michigan, and the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE). He first joined AUC during the academic year 1957 - 1958 and then returned in 1974 as a visiting professor of Islamic art and architecture; he was tenured in 1975 and continued to teach here until 2011 when he chose to retire.

A prominent American art historian, Scanlon was honored by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (Ministry of Antiquities today) in 2010 for his excavation work in Nubia and Fustat, and his publications related to these projects. Scanlon is the first non-Egyptian, medieval archaeologist to receive such recognition. Scanlon began working on the excavation projects in Nubia and Fustat in the 1960s, where he spent three seasons working in Nubia as part of the UNESCO campaign that aimed to salvage the archaeological sites threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. As head of the American Research Center in Egypt at the time, Scanlon was eventually approached by the director of the then Egyptian Antiquities Service to assist with excavation and preservation efforts focusing on Islamic art and architecture in Fustat.

Scanlon anonymously endowed the annual George Antonius Memorial lecture at the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College, now in its 37th year; he also gave generously over the years to key institutions that supported the study of the Middle East, such as the American University in Beirut and Middle East Medievalists. However, the Rare Books  and Special Collections Library (RBSCL) at AUC, his official home for the past 40 years, is where his spirit continues to reside. In 2008, Scanlon donated his personal papers, correspondences and the diaries that he has kept over the years to RBSCL.

Surrounded by great monuments, scholars and researchers studying in Cairo have an unparalleled opportunity to unveil the creativity of Islamic art and architecture. Impassioned by the significance of this dynamic field, Nadia Niazi Mostafa, friend of the University and parent of an AUC alum, has been supporting the study of Islamic art and architecture at AUC for more than a decade.

Mostafa’s love for Islamic art and architecture began in the early 1980s when she took classes in the field. In 1999, she established the Nadia Niazi Mostafa Endowed Award in Islamic Art and Architecture, presented to the winner of the best term paper or thesis. In the same year, she provided humidifiers for the climate-controlled rooms in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library (RBSCL), which preserve documents and antiquities that date back more than 100 years.

In 2001, Mostafa established the Nadia Niazi Mostafa Fellowship in Islamic Art and Architecture, awarded to an Egyptian student enrolled in the graduate program of the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations. The award is based on academic standing and financial need. “All students need support,” said Mostafa. “I know a lot of educated parents who wish they could have sent their children to AUC, but could not afford to. When I was taking courses in Islamic art and architecture, the department barely had enough students to keep it going. Having an annual award for the best thesis and a graduate endowment will help attract students to pursue their master’s degree in Islamic art and architecture, which is a very bountiful field that has not received the attention it deserves.” The fellowship has so far supported a total of 10 students.

Without this fellowship, Ahmad Abdel Aziz ’13 would have had to take a couple of semesters off to save money to pay University fees. “It [the fellowship] literally helped me continue the MA program. allowing me to expand my studies further in art and architecture," said Abdel Aziz. "The moment I got the fellowship, I felt like it is the first step of a dream coming true. AUC, by all means, offers the best education in Egypt. It is known for the education and social life it provides that enhances the personal and intellectual skills of students.”

Students enrolled in the Islamic art and architecture program have the advantage of working in RBSCL, which incorporates the holdings of the former Creswell library — one of the finest collections on Islamic art and architecture in the world. In further support for the preservation and conservation of Egypt’s intellectual and cultural heritage, Mostafa named the Nadia N. Mostafa Room in RBSCL on the New Cairo campus. The multipurpose room is used for specialized instruction, as well as for public seminars and lectures. According to Philip Croom, associate dean and director of RBSCL, “Professors in various fields and specifically Islamic art and architecture, which is our biggest area, come to this room to use our archival books that cannot be taken outside the library.” Additionally, it has hosted the inauguration of the Ramses Wissa Wassef exhibition titled, Ramses Wissa Wassef: The Architect and the Artist.

“The rare books and special collections at AUC are amongst the world’s most important collections,” said Mostafa, adding that these collections are a treasure and must be taken care of at all times. “Even if you can get enormous amounts of information on the Internet, they can't compete with the colored illustrations in a rare book, or the feel of the subject in a book.”

Mostafa believes that the time will come when all this wealth of information will be required, not only by museum curators, university lecturers, artists and decorators, but by novelists and playwrights. “There are thousands of historical novels written today about certain time periods in Western culture, but very few, if any, on the Arab and Muslim world. Hopefully, AUCians, with multi-languages, can help in providing writers and directors here and abroad with information on our rich heritage.”

In addition to Mostafa’s support for the arts, she has also been a steadfast supporter of the University through The AUC Annual Fund, which provides immediate funds to help sustain distinguished faculty members, support curricular innovation, maintain AUC facilities, as well as provide financial aid and scholarships.

Photo caption: Daad Abdel Razik, assistant director at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library; Ali Saleh, husband of Nadia Niazi Mostafa; and Nadia Niazi Mostafa

The Department of English and Comparative Literature (ECLT) in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences recognized three students at the 2014 Madalyn Lamont Literary Award ceremony for the most creative writing pieces in English. The Madalyn Lamont Literary Award was started in 1986 in memory of Madalyn Lamont, an instructor in the writing program, a poet and a women’s rights activist. The awared recognizes students with creative skills in narrative, poetry and drama writing. 

Lara Ahmed, Reham Abouelwafa and Bara Elhag are the three award winners for the 2014 Madalyn Lamont Literary Award, coming from different backgrounds but with a common passion for creative writing. “This award serves as a kind of motivation for me to write more,” said Ahmed, who submitted a short story titled "The Ventriloquist" about a man working a mundane job. A writer for the AUC Times, Ahmed believes that AUC consists of a lot of creative outlets, in terms of clubs, workshops, competitions and award ceremonies that help nurture and hone students’ creative writing skills. Ahmed is a freshman student at AUC, who is yet to declare a major.

Abouelwafa, the second award winner, is studying business administration with a concentration in marketing and a minor in digital media. In her junior year at AUC, Abouelwafa was rather surprised, yet extremely happy, to have won the award. “It feels great to get credit for something I really love doing, and it is a great opportunity to turn a hobby into something bigger,” said Abouelwafa, who submitted a short comic story about a magical refrigerator that grants you superhuman speed. “The only glitch is that you have to carry the refrigerator with you at all times, making it completely useless,” she explained. Abouelwafa has participated in several extracurricular activities on campus, and she is currently on an internship program at AUC’s Career Center, working as a graphic designer. Abouelwafa is putting together a portfolio of all her work so she can become an animator and perhaps open her own animation studio one day.

The third award winner, Bara Hatem Elhag, is a freshman student pursuing a degree in biology, but who enjoys an endless love for writing. “The story of winning third place is still surreal to me until now. I didn’t believe there was a chance for me getting past the nomination stage,” said Elhag, whose paper is about a fragile, old, frightened woman who believes there is a killer in her cellar. Elhag is currently applying for a summer internship at the Naval Medical Research Unit 3 (NAMRU-3), a biomedical research laboratory of the US Navy located in Cairo. According to Elhag, “AUC offers many venues for students to explore and display their talent, whether it be through exciting talent shows, or brilliantly constructed music practice rooms in the Center for the Arts, or, of course, something like the Madalyn Lamont Literary Award ceremony.” In addition to pursuing her passion for writing, Elhag hopes to work in medicine and “be the most beneficial world citizen I can be.”

The Madalyn Lamont Literary Award invites influential female speakers every year during the award ceremony held in the spring. This year, the guest speaker was Hoda Elsadda, chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Manchester. Elsadda serves as co-director of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW) in the UK, associate editor of the online edition of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, member of the Board of Directors of the Global Fund for Women, member of the Advisory Board of the Durham Modern Languages Series, and Core Group Member of the Arab Families Working Group. Elsadda is also the co-founder and current chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Women and Memory Forum.

List of Previous Distinguished Women Speakers
Leyla Doss, Egyptian activist
Suaad al-Sabah, Kuwaiti poet
Mona Amyuni, Lebanese professor of comparative literature
Mohsina Tawfiq, Egyptian actress
Arundhati Ghose, Indian ambassador
Shahira Mehrez, Egyptian designer
Doris Shoukri, professor of English and comparative literature at AUC

Language is often viewed as simply a means of communication, a tool for giving directions, delivering speeches or meeting people. But according to Reem Bassiouney, associate professor of applied linguistics, language is not just a way to communicate, but a principal means of expressing one’s identity, particularly during times of conflict.

“Language is at the core of who we are,” Bassiouney said. “It could be a classifying category for defining us, such as describing Egyptians as people who speak Arabic. But language can also be a way of expressing who we are.”

In her recent book, Language and Identity in Modern Egypt, Bassiouney argues that language is used in Egyptian public discourse to create a particular collective identity. By studying a variety of sources such as patriotic songs, films, blogs, TV talk shows, newspaper articles and novels from the 20th century until June 30, 2013, Bassiouney found that language plays an essential role in constructing an identity, essentially labeling who is an “authentic Egyptian” and who is not. “The main aim of constructing a distinct identity is to decide who is included and who is excluded from this large community called ‘Egyptians,’” Bassiouney explained. “Variables like language, ethnicity, locality, character traits and moral dispositions are criteria for inclusion and exclusion. There were numerous examples in this book of what I term an ‘exclusion-inclusion pattern of display’ by individuals in public discourse. This is defined as a pattern in which individuals display their stance of belonging or not belonging to a community, and also display their stance toward other individuals as belonging or not belonging to a community and nation. Individuals use social variables, including language, in this pattern of display.” To illustrate this point, Bassiouney noted how, during the January 25 Revolution, some loyalists tried to make the claim that the protestors in Tahrir Square were not real Egyptians because many spoke in English and were, thus, deemed as “not Egyptian” or “not representative of real Egyptians.” This rationale, she said, is steeped in social attitudes toward the English language. “While Egyptians rush to master English and teach it to their children, when someone is depicted as speaking English, his or her Egyptian identity is contested,” she explained. The revolutionaries, in turn, claimed that they were authentically Egyptian because of their command of the Arabic language, again showing how language expresses identity. Bassiouney pointed to the example of the Egyptian poet al-Jukh, who recited a poem on the Abu Dhabi television program, The Prince of Poets, using Standard Arabic, not Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, to “authenticate the identity of the Egyptians in Tahrir Square.” “I have now spoken,” he said. “My language is not English, and it is not even Egyptian Colloquial Arabic. It is the authoritative Standard Arabic, with all its powerful indexes.” Bassiouney argues that Standard Arabic is oftentimes associated with the Quran, Islamic jurisprudence and civil law so it connotes legitimacy. Because of this context, the poet employs Standard Arabic as an indicator for authentic Egyptian identity. “The poet al-Jukh had to use Standard Arabic to prove that the protestors were true to their cause and to Egypt,” Bassiouney said. “Through this poem, the revolutionaries in Egypt used language to show that they are indeed ‘real Egyptians.’” This, Bassiouney noted, is because language contains certain indexes, or connotations. Given certain contexts, Standard Arabic is often associated with legitimacy, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic is used to index authenticity, while an Egyptian speaking in English may connote respect or suspicion, she said. This concept extends beyond just code choice and even applies to smaller details, like the type of grammar used. For example, Bassiouney found that in several patriotic songs, the singers often use the third person pronoun (he, she, it or they), instead of the second person pronoun (you), to refer to a colonizer or an aggressive outsider. This was the case in Misr Tatahadath ’An Nafsiha (Egypt Speaks About Itself) by Umm Kulthum, when Egypt refers to colonizers in the third person plural, or in the case of the song Habibti ya Masr (Egypt, My Love) by Shadia, in which the person who does not understand Egyptians is referred to in the third person singular. “In my view, this manipulation of pronouns is intentional and intends to undermine the aggressive, unfriendly, unsympathetic outsider, while appealing to the insider or sympathetic outsider,” Bassiouney affirmed. “In that sense, even the use of certain grammatical constructs expresses who the real Egyptian is and who is the ‘other.’ This way, linguistic resources are employed to index attitudes and ideologies through a stance-taking process.” Bassiouney hopes that this research will provide non-Egyptians with a deeper understanding of the perspectives and actions of Egyptians. “It’s important for outsiders to know about public discourse in Egypt because sometimes for an outsider, you can sound aggressive or snobbish if you don’t understand the context of a discourse of any country,” Bassiouney explained. “When you do, you are then able to understand why people are behaving the way they do and why they are making these decisions. It becomes easier to deal with people. My hope, on a broader sense, is that this research will facilitate communication between people from different cultures. It’s important for Egyptians to think about how they learn everything. You know who you are, but it’s good to know the mechanism about how you reached ‘who you are.’”

Scholars typically study modernity in Egypt in the 19th century, when Muhammad Ali, who is widely regarded as the founder of modern Egypt, made significant reforms in the military, economic, educational and cultural spheres. Less studied is what came before: the 18th century. Examining this period in Egyptian history, the Annual History Seminar, organized by the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations, will discuss the theme, “Before the Modern, After the Medieval: Egypt and the Middle East in the 18th Century.” The event will be held from March 28 to 29 in Oriental Hall, AUC Tahrir Square.

“Historians of Egypt have, for years, researched the events and transformations that occurred in the country throughout the 19th century,” said Amina Elbendary, assistant professor of Arab and Islamic civilizations. “And even though much debate has occurred over periodization, all concur that this century witnessed the transformation to modernity in Egypt and the Middle East in general. This year’s Annual History Seminar aims to study the 18th century in the history of Egypt — and other provinces of the Middle East/Ottoman Empire — from the perspective of early modernity and the late middle ages. It aims to ask the question of where it is that the 18th century fits in this narrative of the birth of the modern? Did Egypt in the 18th century belong to the medieval world? Or was it part of the early modern world?”

Participants include professors from AUC, Cairo University, Misr International University, New York University and France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique. The papers to be presented discuss the 18-century transition to modernity in the Middle East through topics as diversified as diplomatic treaties of the late Mamluk period, intellectual history during the early modern period, changing city life, development of guild histories, changing concepts of time and the spread of clocks, literary developments and new genres, and intellectual interactions during the French occupation of Egypt.

Established in the early 1990s, the Annual History Seminar initially served graduate students at the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations, but has since expanded to include young historians from national universities throughout Egypt. The event also attracts European, American and Japanese scholars residing in Cairo who are keen on expanding their research and knowledge.

“During the two-day seminar, young scholars, often including graduate students, have a chance to present and receive feedback on their research, engage in discussions with faculty from various universities within Egypt and abroad, and expand their intellectual horizons,” said Elbendary. “The seminar encourages a multidisciplinary approach to the study of Egyptian and Arab history through a focus on literary analysis and revisions of social, economic and cultural histories.”

For the full program,click here. For inquiries, email [email protected].

Photo courtesy of the Rare Books and Special Collections Library and Archives