GISC Summer 2024 Fellowship Spotlight: Mostafa El Sharkawy

Tell us about your summer, where and when did your fellowship take place?

This summer I had the opportunity to travel to Tunisia for an exploratory fieldwork trip towards my dissertation. I visited Tunisia during the month of May to meet and interview academics, activists, journalists, international development agency officials, and politicians with the aim of grounding my research project and making important advancements towards the building of my theoretical framework and planning for empirical testing. In this project, I hope to build and test a theory about if, how, and when religious institutions, like mosques, discuss political violence with the aim of shaping the public opinion of its adherents.

With a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, Tunisia emerged as an important and relevant case. While the country stood out over a decade ago for its successful transition to democracy following the Arab Spring of 2010-2011, Tunisia faced many socio-political challenges immediately after including several high-profile terrorist attacks between 2013 and 2015. Besides having a massive impact on Tunisia’s tourism industry, the terrorist attacks and the environment in which they proliferated caused massive political instability. One of the main things I was interested in during my fieldwork in Tunisia was asking about this period and especially asking people how their local religious leaders behaved during it. I also wanted to learn, more broadly, about the nature of religion, religiosity, and religious institutions in Tunisia throughout its modern history.

During my fellowship, I spent considerable time in Tunisian mosques with the aim of gaining a better understanding of their day-to-day affairs, their networks and governance, and the relationship between leadership and mosque-goers. Among the mosques I visited was Al-Zaytuna Mosque in central Tunis - it is one of the oldest mosques in the country and synonymous with Tunisia’s Islamic education. I spoke with several of those who frequented the mosque and attended a few of the sermons that took place at the mosque, including, of course, the Friday prayer sermon. Visiting popular mosques such as Al-Zaytuna was valuable insofar as it uncovered norms and common knowledge that a high-profile mosque is expected to share and disseminate. It was my visits to regular mosques in the suburbs of Tunis and in Sfax and Kairouan that taught me more about local mosque governance and the extent to which Tunisians respected and listened to local religious authority. Among the many interesting things I learned from those visits where I spoke with Imams, mosque staff and mosque goers was that many mosques have public libraries attached to them. These are separate from mosque libraries which house religious texts predominantly, but contribute to the understanding of mosques as local religious institutions with a wide net of social and community networks that extends through channels like libraries, food banks, school systems, etc.

I also spent some time in the archives in Tunis which was a very interesting experience and integral to understanding the modern history of religion in the public sphere in Tunisia. The capital is home to many archives, including the National Documentation Center which keeps a detailed archive of national newspapers since independence. I explored this section of the archive extensively to account for how discussions about religion were formed by national politicians, from Tunisia’s first and longest-serving president Habib Bourghiba to Islamist leaders in the 2011-2013 period.

How did the GISC 2024 Summer Fellowship help you?

The GISC 2024 Summer Fellowship was instrumental in allowing me to travel to Tunisia and be able to explore several important cities and regions during my time there. In addition to the capital Tunis, I was able to visit the historically important Islamic city of Kairouan and the site of interesting contemporary Islamist mobilization, the coastal city of Sfax. The ability to travel across the country and capture the immense variation in the development of religious institutions and religiosity is integral to my research and would not be possible without the GISC Summer Fellowship. Additionally, the fellowship assisted me in being able to spend time in the national archives and take with me copies of archival records to be used in the dissertation project.

What is your favorite thing that you learned this summer?

Perhaps favorite is not the right word for this, but one of the more interesting things I learned this summer was the reach of the national Quran society. As I began to understand the extent to which the Islamist Ennahda political party had been stifled and restricted by the current regime. With that in mind, I began looking out for and learning more about the national Quran society, which emerged as a relevant channel for mobilization given that much of the influence of religious institutions is inextricably linked to the rise or fall of the national Islamist movement in the country. This society, primarily concerned with hosting and managing memorization and recitation competitions for the Holy Quran, is likely one of the only national avenues through which religious ideas, some of them political in nature, could be discussed in a somewhat open forum in Tunisia today. It was quite difficult to speak with members of the society during my summer fellowship, but I look forward to exploring this institution more in future trips to Tunisia.

What advice do you have for future Summer Fellows?

Take risks and enjoy your time out in the field as much as you are able to. I think some of the best progress I made toward my research during my fellowship was when I just tried things out. While this sounds like advice most applicable to fellows traveling for a research project, I think for every summer fellow it is important not to lose sight of the fact that it is ultimately a fantastic opportunity to experience a new place, learn about it, and hopefully contribute to it.