Introducing Students to Middle East 
Political Activists
Through the World Wide Web:
One Political Scientist’s Approach

Vickie Langohr, College of the Holy Cross

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Vol 33, No. 1, Summer 1999, (with changes in orthography to HTML standards). Copyright 1999 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America  

PARTICULARLY SINCE THE publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, the issue of representation has loomed large in the consciousness of many Middle East scholars as we ply our trade.  While this issue is undeniably important in our research, it may be even more crucial in our teaching.  Encountering students whose only exposure to the Middle East has come through the evening news places a heavy burden on a teacher to respond to prevalent stereotypes about the region and replace them with a more complex, contextualized picture.  One way to do this is to supplement the use of standard scholarly works on the region with primary documents in which a wide range of Middle Easterners "speak for themselves."  As scholars have pointed out in the Bulletin, the World Wide Web (www) provides many opportunities to do this in new ways.  As a political scientist I chose to provide students in my Government and Politics of the Middle East course with these types of primary sources by designing a project in which students studied the strategies and goals of political activists of many stripes, and the responses of governments to them, by consulting the websites of  political movements and newspapers.  

Rather than having my students read only scholarly studies of various political groups, I wanted the politics of the region to come alive by exposing them to as many primary materials from these groups as possible, including press releases, communiques, and campaign platforms and slogans.  Finding such materials in print form was very difficult; those materials that were readily available were often out-of-date, and the need to find these materials in English only complicated the matter.  By utilizing the websites of various activist groups and newspapers in the Middle East, however, I was able to circumvent this problem to some extent.  As the costs of creating and maintaining a website are substantially lower than those of circulating publications to an international audience, and as the cost of frequently updating them is minimal, I found that assignments based on these websites exposed my students to current information and analysis that would have been difficult to gain in any other medium.  And since the primary purpose of most of these websites was to publicize the group's cause overseas, it was possible, through a careful winnowing of possible sites, to find a good number which were either largely or wholly in English.

My course began with a (necessarily brief) overview of modern Middle Eastern history and then explored political developments in Iran, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, and Algeria.  While events in each country were repeatedly connected back to the broader themes of the course, each country was studied separately (except for Israel/Palestine, for obvious reasons).  The class was divided into groups of two or three students and our study of each country culminated in an oral presentation in which one of the groups introduced their colleagues to some form of political activism or discourse in that country.  These presentations were based primarily on the websites of particular groups.  As my class was 50 minutes in length, each group was given 30 minutes to present followed by 20 minutes in which they were to lead a discussion on the issues that they had raised; the presentation counted for 20 per cent of their overall grade in the course.  There were five presentations, but due to space constraints I will only discuss three in this article: presentations on Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), press censorship in Egypt, and Israel's Women in Green, a movement of  women opposed to the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories.

In order to give students some direction in interpreting the websites, I provided each group with a list of questions which they needed to address.  These questions were designed to push students to read between the lines (so to speak), to notice not just what a given movement's goals were but how it positioned itself to obtain them, whose concerns it seemed to be anticipating and addressing through the website, and what topics were noticeable by their omission from the sites as well as those that were covered.  For example, the FIS presentation was based on FIS's official website (www.fisalgeria.org).  This assignment revolved around several questions, such as "The FIS program published on the site includes the following statement: `FIS believes that Political Islam does not purport to play the role that Communism played for 45 years.' What does this statement mean, and at whom is it directed?"  And "What does FIS mean when it talks about Islamization in Algeria?  What concrete changes in personal behavior or political programs does it envision to make it happen?" The presentation on Women in Green, based on its website (www.womeningreen.org/home), asked students to consider, among other issues, that "many men in Israel oppose the peace process.  How does Women in Green explain why it is a purely women's organization?  What political clout does it gain or lose by limiting its membership to women when the key goals of the group are, arguably, not particularly related to the gender of its members?" 

The assignment on press censorship in Egypt followed a somewhat different format and was based on an analysis of articles in three English-language newspapers published in Cairo: Middle East Times, The Cairo Times, and al-Ahram Weekly.  These students were asked to read articles that had been censored from the Middle East Times, which are reprinted in their entirety on the Times' website (www.metimes.com), as well as some articles which The Cairo Times had been forbidden to print, located on the website of the Center for Human Rights Legal Aid (www.chrla.org/attack.htm).  They were then asked to read several recent issues of the Middle East Times and al-Ahram Weekly (www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/) but not The Cairo Times, which does not have an online version, and to answer the following questions: "What topics seem to be repeatedly censored from the papers?  Is all mention of these topics absent from the papers or do there seem to be ways that journalists can write about them which allow their stories to be published?" and "Were you surprised by the appearance of topics in the published versions of the newspapers which seemed that they should have been too politically sensitive to be printed? Why do you think the censor allowed their publication?" 

As I had hoped, these assignments and the access to relatively novel types of information which they provided sparked some very creative responses. I had told students that as long as they answered the questions I posed, they could structure their presentations in any way that they wanted, and they took me up on the challenge.  Equally importantly, they succeeded in going beyond the more superficial level of analyzing the stated goals of each group to examining more subtle questions of how the groups perceived their target audience and how they attempted to win it over.  The three students who did the FIS presentation constructed a dialogue (situated in the early 1990's) in which two of them played the role of FIS members attempting to convince the third, the representative of an unnamed western power, to pressure the government to convene new elections with FIS participation.  In analyzing the nature of the FIS arguments on the website, the "FIS representatives" in the dialogue sought to understand what FIS believed were the West's major concerns about its potential triump and to try to pre-empt them.  For example, they argued that FIS does not aspire to spearhead an Islamic revolution outside its borders and thus should not be seen as the post-Cold War's newest international threat.  The "representative of the West" responded accordingly, in what turned out to be a very lively debate.  

This type of in-depth analysis of an activist group's tactics and strategies similarly characterized the presentation on the Women in Green (WIG).  After perusing the large number of campaign posters, slogans, and press releases posted on the WIG site, these students concluded that the group's constant deployment of images of children and description of threats which the peace process purportedly posed to their safety was the most effective method that it used to reinforce its message.  The presenters decided that, rather than simply telling their colleagues that the movement used references to children to great advantage, they would show them how viscerally effective this type of propaganda can be.  The morning of their presentation, they draped the entrance to the classroom with a large banner covered with child-sized handprints in bright colors and the phrase "Mr. Prime Minister, shake hands with our children and not with Arafat!"  This was a direct copy of a banner posted on the WIG website which the group had recently used in an anti-Oslo demonstration at Benjamin Netanyahu's residence. 

The project on press censorship in Egypt was, to my mind, the most intellectually interesting of the five assignments, but it turned out to be the most disappointing as the subject for an oral presentation.  The presenters had little difficulty in ascertaining what subjects tended to get articles censored, and developed a very astute analysis of "tricks" that journalists used in framing discussion of these subjects so that they could be published. Understanding what issues are taboo in a country's political discourse and why, however, requires a high degree of familiarity with that country and, while I felt that the presenters learned a great deal about Egyptian politics through the project, it was difficult for them to communicate those lessons in a brief oral presentation to students who were less immersed in the details of Egyptian political life.  This type of project might well be more useful as a written assignment whose only audience is a teacher intimately familiar with that country's background; alternatively, all of the members of a class could be assigned the same project and then asked to compare their interpretations with each other. 

In summary, I found that using the websites of Middle Eastern newspapers and activist groups in my course was extremely fruitful on several different levels.  First, as in the case of the Women in Green banners and slogans, it provided students with access to information that would be difficult if not impossible to obtain in "hard-copy" form, such as the WIG banners and slogans.  Second, the fact that these websites were frequently updated gave students a feeling that they were studying events as they happened; the Women in Green presenters were excited to note that the night before their presentation they found a new press release on the WIG website commenting on new developments in the peace process which were only just being reported by American news outlets.  Third, it challenged students to interact with and develop their own analysis of issues rather than simply parroting analyses already spelled out for them in secondary texts.  In the case of the press censorship presentation, for example, access to the articles in question allowed students to come up with their own interpretations of why certain topics were censored rather than uncritically accepting the conclusions of academic articles on the topic. 

While the websites of newspapers and activist groups can be a useful source of analysis provided directly by actors in the region rather than by outside scholars, they raise representational issues of their own which need to be discussed with students.  The question of who the intended audience of the website is, and why, is one that particularly needs to be addressed.  While some groups with large popular followings maintain websites, others have ventured into cyberspace to compensate for a lack of support in their own countries,  and so teachers need to assess carefully just how representative a given group is of  political trends within that country and provide that context to students.  Similarly, the issue of why groups find it profitable to produce websites with significant components in English or other western languages is important for students to consider and can provide an interesting avenue for discussions of western influence in regional politics.

I would welcome comments and suggestions on how to improve my use of the www in my courses and would be happy to provide more information about the assignments I designed; I can be reached at vlangohr@holycross.edu.