Finding Old Nubian, or, why we should divest from Western tongues

In this essay, I venture to describe my own trajectory, through linguistics and continental philosophy, to becoming a philologist specialized in the Old Nubian language, in tandem with a broader analysis of the destabilizing powers of philology that resonate in both deconstruction and psychoanalysis: the problem of the material carrier of writing as that which eventually determines the reading, the humbling idea that the most abstract thought of Plato can be traced to a crumbling fourth-century papyrus. In parallel, I also address the current state of Nubiology and how I have inserted myself into the field as an advocate of both accessible scholarship and a re-anchoring of the scientific field within the local political and social context of Egypt and the Sudan

Women in Management and Leadership in the Olympic Movement in Muslim Majority Countries: An Empirical Evaluation of Huntington's Clash of Civilisations Typology

This article was published in the International Journal of the History of Sport [© Taylor & Francis (Routledge)] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2012.724775This article seeks to evaluate whether there are differences between Samuel Huntington’s ‘civilisational groups’ of countries in terms of women’s leadership of Olympic organisations. The article draws on two questionnaire surveys which evaluate the electoral practices and outcomes of Olympic bodies (i.e. National Olympic Committees and International Federations) relating to gender equity and governance, with a specific intention to compare the role of women in the leadership of such bodies between Islamic societies and non-Islamic contexts. The vehicle for analysing the data employs Huntington’s well-known but controversial civilisational typology which identifies nine major cultural civilisational groups (including Western and Islamic states). This allows the authors to explore the extent to which differences may exist between Western and Islamic societies and others, with regard to women’s roles in leadership and governance of Olympic bodies. Differences between Muslim, and other religious groupings on the one hand and secular liberal democratic groupings on the other, are often assumed to reflect the distinction between tradition and modernity, and sport is seen in the literature in large part as a product of modernity. However, results of the statistical analysis of women’s roles in senior positions in NOCs in particular, do not reflect Western ‘superiority’ in terms of women’s representation. This article thus casts doubt on the appropriateness of considering the Islamic norm as traditional, and the Western norm as modern