Well, good evening, everyone, and welcome to make a start. My name is Michael. I have the pleasure of being the director of the Middle East Centre here at St. Anthony's College at the University of Oxford this year. And I'm delighted to welcome you to not what is not just the first event in the Friday seminar series, the Michaelmas term, but also the first in the Friday seminar series for this academic year.
For those of you joining us for the first time, the Friday seminar series is the focus of the Middle East Centre, the Macy's weekly programme in Michaelmas and Hidary terms of the autumn and winter to spring terms here in Oxford. It is a series which we have held for years and decades. And this really gives us an opportunity to host the most some of the most exposed, engaging speakers to discuss the Middle Eastern and North African region.
We have traditionally held a series of the Middle East centre itself. But over last year, we've been obliged for obvious reasons, connected with covid to hold the series remotely via Zoom or certainly all of last year. We will be holding this term seminar again on Zoome, but we plan to return to doing the series in person from the start of A to return in January. Now those of you in or near Oxford, that will hopefully come as welcome news since you will be able to attend the seminar in person.
But I also wanted to say to those of you who are based further away, we are making preparations to live stream the Friday seminar series, which means that you will be able to attend the lecture virtually. And indeed, I wanted to thank all of you who have loyally and regularly attended the Friday seminar series on Zoome over the last year. And I hope that by live streaming you can continue to join us.
But we will be basically running the event both virtually and in person, which we like to think gives us the best of both worlds. We usually have a theme for the Friday seminar series, and this term will be focussed on the topic of the environment and the Middle East. We have a roster of of great speakers to address this issue this term.
And I just quickly run through the speakers we will be having later in the series next week, a week today, October 22nd, we have Saddam Hussein, who will be talking the politics of water scarcity in the case of Jordan. And we week in third week on October the twenty ninth, we have Jamie Thanis and he's speaking to the blue clad Finnick authoritarian environmentalism in Tunisia. And it's after lights on November the 5th.
We have one of our own community, Manala's Shehabi, speaking about environment, discounted energy and economic diversification plans in the Gulf. On November 12th, Martin Biglari will talk about air pollution, toxicity and environmental politics in the history of Iranian oil. National nationalisation. Week after that, on November the 19th, Michael Mason will be coming here to speak about failing flows, the politics of water management in southern Iraq on November 26.
We would have lecture on climate and colonialism in modern Palestine, historical ethical perspectives that will be given by Neta Cohen. And we finished the series on December 3rd with a lecture by Christian Henderson. As you will see from a list, we will be covering a large range of themes, countries and regions and even slightly historical periods, which give us a flavour hopefully of the topic.
And I think this reflects the breadth of issues both covid and impacted by the environment in its broadest sense. And we've tried to treat treat the environment in its broadest sense, because I think there is a tendency, I think, to parcel off environmental issues all on their own as a discrete subject and field to be dealt with separately.
And I think, moreover, the Middle East and North Africa is perhaps the region of the world where environmental issues have traditionally had the least prominence, largely because of a greater attention paid, of course, to other issues. So with that in mind, we therefore thought it might be a nice idea to kick off this seminar series by asking some of the academics based here, the Middle East centre itself to talk about how issues related to the environment relate to their own research.
I know that in the past, a number of people have said that whilst they very much enjoy bringing external expertise into the centre, they would from time to time like to hear more about the work and research of academics based at the Middle East centre itself. So here we have an opportunity to talk about that and talk a little bit about some of the research actually being done in the central moment.
So therefore, I'm very I'm delighted to welcome three of my colleagues here at the centre, Walter Armbrust, a social anthropologist. Laura Minyon, a fellow in Turkish sommat Lasama lecturing contemporary Islamic studies, all of whom will say about how the environment is fitted in and relates to their own research. I will also say something at the end about how it relates to my own field of research.
So. With all that said, I'd like to turn first to my colleague, Walter Armbrust, to talk about the environment in his own research Walter. Thank you, Michael. I'm going to begin by sharing my screen, OK? Our goal is to relate environmental issues to our own research. So let me begin by reading the last paragraph of my book, Martyrs' and Trickster's and Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution, published in 2013 just before the pandemic began.
It was written in an uncharacteristically apocalyptic tone. The defining feature of a liminal crisis is pure contingency, to put it differently. We can never be entirely sure what will emerge from the void. Sometimes it is monsters rather than the angels we hope for. I remain convinced that good things emerged along with the naked violence. It will take time for the good things to rise to the top, but rise they will, even if it turns out to be too late to save the world.
When I wrote that last line, I was thinking of global warming or more precisely of the inevitable result of unfettered capitalism, a capitalist economy is only thought to be healthy if it's expanded. For centuries, economic expansion took place through forcibly assimilating new parts of the world into the capitalist system. But now the entire world has become part of the capitalist system. It's been that way for some time. There are no new unassimilated territories to bring in.
The world is a closed system, and therefore further expansion can only come through more intensive extraction of resources leading to more global warming. That, in a nutshell, is why there is simply no solution to global warming. That includes the continuation of capitalism. The notion of market based remedies to the climate crisis is nonsense. I want to relate this political economic dynamic to Egypt and my book was about the unintended outcomes and revolution understood as a limited crisis.
And it was about the often bad things that emerge when politics become fluid rather than fixed into the normative pattern. But this doesn't mean that one can simply dismiss structural factors. The contingent situations I wrote about can't occur unless people feel a need to rise up. So one way that I have on occasion described the cause of the January 25th revolution as opposed to its unintended outcomes, is to say that it was a revolution against luxury housing.
More precisely, the deep dissatisfaction that caused Egyptians to rise up against the government. 2011 was connected to the way both the state and the private sector allocated resources in the decades prior to the revolution. This was particularly acute in Cairo and other major cities. So a good way to understand the cause of the revolution is to appreciate the dynamics of how urban growth is managed, as you can see on this table. Cairo has a population of roughly fifteen point six million.
It could be more or less because defining the boundaries of the megacity is never a simple endeavour. This population is distributed over four thousand four hundred seventy nine square kilometres. But the important thing is to appreciate the quantity, to appreciate as the trajectory of the city's growth.
You can discern this by looking at subcategories, I'm sure the older parts of Cairo, Cairo and give the governor governorates and parts of California governor governorate and this includes both the formal and informal housing is where 15 million of Cairo's fifteen point six million inhabitants live there. Ninety six percent of the population. And they occupy 31 percent of the space.
The newer parts of Cairo, much more suburban and designed for affluence and automobile owning population than older parts, has a population of around six hundred thousand. That's four percent of the population of greater Cairo, occupying 31 percent of the space. I think I said 30 percent should have been 69 percent. So, yes, it's 15 million people and sixty nine percent. Four percent and thirty one percent.
The point of the comparison isn't exactly just that the relation of space to population expresses a growing gap between rich and poor. It does to some extent, but it doesn't in the sense that most well-off people, in fact, still live in the older parts of the city. Rather, the point is that the trajectory of Cairo's growth has been towards moving up into the desert.
And this has been the case for decades, going all the way back to the Nasser. But building cities in the desert has had a number of consequences. One is that it has been a massive failure in terms of getting the population of greater Cairo to actually disperse itself into these new urban areas.
The second consequence of Cairo's urban trajectory has been that it sucked resources away from where most people actually live and put them into areas where a few few people live, which means more money for luxury housing, less for education, health care and housing that people can afford in the places where they actually live, work. Another consequence of current trajectory is that this allocation of resources creates both opportunities for political alliance making as well as tensions.
A political economic dynamic of the decade prior to the revolution was that the private sector was better situated to benefit from urban growth than the military, a particularly acute issue in the context of the transition. Everyone was expecting from the military connected to Hosni Mubarak to his son Gamal, his proclivities lay entirely with the private sector. That dynamic has been decisively altered in the years after the January 25th revolution.
As you can see from my table after the row giving data on the new desert cities, there's another road for the new administrative state, which is sometimes described as a new capital city because the plan is to move many of the government's vital ministries out of Cairo and into a new megaproject. This idea has been on various drawing boards for decades.
But it was during the Sisi era that it was fast tracked and repackaged as something bold and dramatic and also, not coincidentally, more substantial involving the military. The new administrative city is a giant block radiating out from Cairo to the east, towards the Red Sea cities of Suez and so on its own. It's intended to occupy a space of around 700 square kilometres.
In contrast to the 14 hundred square kilometres occupied by the existing desert cities and the 3000 square kilometres where 96 percent of greater Cairo lives. With the exception of the 6th of October city, all of the existing desert cities are far below their planned population.
Capacity's a sobering fact. If you've ever been caught in a traffic jam to or from one of these otherwise opulent areas, it's a safe bet that the new administrative city will also never approach its planned capacity of six point five million inhabitants. But this doesn't mean that it won't consume vast resources. And this is where the environment comes back into the picture.
Promotions for this new administrative city, imagine it as bigger, taller, flashier and just plain better than anything Egypt has seen before. There's a lot of talk about monorails that that's pretty nice. Neighbourhoods are energy, but also golf courses, beautiful vegetation and water features in the desert. Whatever reality emerges, the primary truth is that the new administrative capital will be another destination, accessible primarily by motorised transport on concrete roads.
Just like all the other desert cities that have been built over the past five decades. The giant towers visible in the advertising literature, if they're ever built on the scale envisioned, will require constant air conditioning, obviously increasing demand for electricity. Egypt has great potential to produce renewable energy from hydropower, solar and wind and at least officially ambitious targets for generating power from clean, renewable sources.
But most of Egypt's electricity is generated from fossil fuels, and Egypt's demand for electricity has been rising six point five percent a year. Egypt could meet its renewable energy targets and still end up producing more electricity through fossil fuels than it does now. And industrial scale renewable energy generation isn't necessarily carbon neutral. It requires producing steel for giant windmills, in other words, mining and generating electricity somewhere else.
It involves transporting power generation materials across the globe. By some estimates, shipping causes 17 percent of global CO2 emissions. It requires mining lithium for batteries to store solar generated power. The promotional images of lush gardens in the administrative capital may or may not be fantasy, but the fact is that there is no water for anything in that area. It has to be pumped uphill from the Nile or pumped up from non rechargeable underground aquifers.
All of Egypt's new cities, including the new administrative city, are environmentally dubious or even environmentally disastrous. I started off by saying that the link to my own research to environmental issues was through politics, specifically the way that resource allocation enhance the power at the expense of others in Egypt.
That can be seen as a structural factor that led to the uprising of 2011, which quickly was named a revolution by those who participated in it, and which led to the assumption of power by a far worse regime than the one that was in power when the revolution began. And the Sisi regime has essentially doubled down on the environmentally dubious megaproject strategy that the Mubarak regime had been following. But I don't want to suggest that Egypt is an exception.
You probably noticed in my table displaying data on Cairo's population, I included a comparison with Metropolitan Omaha, Council Bluffs. That's where I grew up. The point of the comparison is not to dramatise Egypt's damaging carbon footprint. It's just the opposite in terms of its per capita carbon footprint. Omaha is far, far worse than Cairo in per capita terms, maybe even in absolute terms.
It has more miles of carbon generating concrete roads in Cairo and roughly one personal automobile per driving thought, whereas in Cairo, only about 10 percent of the population used cars. So the problem is that the Cairo is an environmental centre. It's that the trajectory of Cairo is urban political economy is to be more like Omaha. And of course, the aspirational models that come to mind more readily are Dubai or we are but Omaha sort of just as well.
When I left Omaha in 1978, the population was around half a million. It's doubled since then. More roads, more cars, more energy generated for larger and larger houses.
Nebraska is an ecological disaster, and though it's never had a revolution, the urban political economy of Omaha was destructive enough that maybe it should have had to make Omaha what it is today required building interstate highways right through the fabric of the city, as in the rest of the U.S. that required displacing residents and carving up neighbourhoods,
particularly those African-Americans and other minorities. The highways were a necessary condition for what we often refer to as white flight, one of the most damaging and violent trends in contemporary American history. And so my final thought is that the solution to the disastrous environmental trajectory of both Omaha and Cairo and indeed the entire world is political as long as a healthy economy is seen as synonymous with expansion.
All cities will continue to feed warming except for a small downturn in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 caused by the Korona pandemic. Global output of greenhouse gases continues to rise. That will only end when it is widely recognised that reversing global warming and capitalism are incompatible and that recognition is nowhere on the horizon. So thank you very much. Well, that was fascinating, if rather a rather sobering.
But we will look out if there is a revolution in Omaha. You heard it here first, but thank you. Thank you very much. Well, I move on to a colleague, a Turkish fellow, Lauren Minium, Turkish studies fellow, Lauren. Yes, hello, thank you, Michael. Well, being a literary scholar, I cannot really claim that I have any expertise regarding environmental questions or the current climate crisis.
However, I like the idea of today's exercise, inviting me to reflect on where or and how my own research and teaching that are mostly but not exclusively focussed on the late Ottoman and Early Republic and Turkish literary world intersect with environmental concerns. I need to stress here that I am not at all aiming to to give a comprehensive overview of the representation of nature and the exploration of environmental issues in modern Turkish language literature.
Rather, what I will do today is more like reading excerpts from a long book recording interesting instances of texts expressing what we might want to call the form of environmental language. As we have only a limited amount of time for our discussion today, my focus will be on the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Obviously, the works of contemporary novelists such as the late Yashar Kamahl or indeed Latifiya, ticking off a vast opportunities for anyone who wishes to pursue an equally critical approach of literature. Both have been widely translated into European languages, even into English, and are relatively well known beyond the flexible boundaries of what we might call toco phonier.
Much of what I will refer to today goes back to an earlier book of mine published in Istanbul in 2009 with the title I'm not touching on this one here.
So that means footnotes moving to the main text. And this book was partly based on articles that I had written at the time for the literary supplement of the daily newspaper and the literary magazine called Evidence that has actually been banned in two thousand in one of the chapters of the book was entitled And It's a long title and I love long title at the time to let the market demand the soldiers that I could not last,
which in English could be contrarian notes on into culturalism and the left that does not wish to become a machine. Now those amongst you who are a little familiar with the work of the socialist poet next will recognise the reference to the futurist futurist poem. I want to become a machine from a poem which I think was you wrote in nineteen twenty three and that was a celebration of industrialisation and of the mechanisation of production.
But in the early 2000s, on the eve of what we call today the climate crisis, it was obvious that this type of celebration of productivity and in certain ways of humanisation, of labour was not compatible with the type of slowing down of of of downsizing and what the French called the questions that was required to solve the ecological crisis, as at the time I was teaching 19th century Ottoman Turkish literature, the university in Ankara,
I have been struck by the fact that the expression of environmental concerns had been up to a point, the significant aspect of the critique of modernisation that was characteristic for the writings of religiously conservative authors or some of them. For instance, in Panzeri Telemaque text inspired, as the title suggests, by finials Telemaque Methodic Efendi, who at the time had been sent into internal exile in A.
So we are in 1870. So while he was praising intellectual and physical labour in this work, he put also emphasis on the need to respect the earth, the soil especially, and its fruits. Without such respect, the land would cease to be fertile ground. Now, if we were, to use today's political terminology, Methodic would be called an Islamist. But as we know, this is not at all a very useful term.
But similarly, although it has dark aspects, another religious, conservative and nationalist in this case, namely reluctant to truc Anatolian socialism as a notable environmentalist agenda, the writings 60 70 years after Nematzadeh to share his dislike of modernity, leading him to develop a critique of it that put a strong emphasis on the need to respect the eco system.
But if we go back to two Republican times, it would probably not come as a surprise that it is pioneers of science fiction into this who would express a certain amount of environmental anguish. Here, I will evoke the words of authors who can by no means be described as conservatives, but who drew this topic, portraits of the Future World, unlike other texts of speculative fiction of the era.
These texts are not concerned about the impact of political, economic and industrial modernisation on national, cultural or religious identity and on the future of the Ottoman state. But rather they focus on the impact of technology and of industrialisation on the future of humanity. Jalaluddin, in an untitled short story. At the end of his story, he stood by his department's history of the future. Until our committee play the earthlings and thrifty quality of this short story really upset.
This must be an illusion. This must be a dream. Paint a pessimistic future. The pessimistic picture of the future of humankind. Industrial colonisation of the seas and the oceans. The disappearance of seasons, the robotisation of everyday life. The destruction of human intercourse. The vanishing of the differences between human beings and robots, between men and women. And the installation of totalitarian governments are common themes in these three works.
If some developments such as to join the unity of humankind, the disappearance of ethnic, national and religious differences, longevity, longevity, well, I can never pronounce or even eternal life could see significant advances. Some, at least to some of us. This is not an opinion that would have been shared by these three authors. It was the end of the world as they knew it and a world they loved.
But not all visions of the future were pessimistic. We have to turn to another religiously conservative author, namely Moulana Daftari, and his science fiction novel Riada tracking the progress and dream that we published around 1915. So although the author celebrates industrial industrialisation, much emphasis is put on the absence of pollution in the Islamic State of the Future.
For instance, non-polluting engines that work with air and water are considered amongst the inventions of the New Age, which is indicative of an environmental consciousness. A similar environmental agenda, but rooted on secular grounds, can be witnessed in the giant utopian story hired to help feed the world or the life imagined. The narrator recounts the story about a group of people escaping civilised society and building a utopian commune on a distant island on this island,
which reminds of paradise. The humans live in harmony with nature. Although the social order of the village is based on egalitarian and communal foundations, the layout of the houses, the four o'clock tea drinking ceremony and piano recitals tend to remind of life in an idealised English village, but somehow Midsomer murders without the murders. Another problem is, of course, the continuation of the patriarchal order of violence.
In this respect, U.S. story reminds of English pastoral literature with the conservative core U.S. Giants village of Foma intellectual's resembles a kind of ivory tower built far from the realities of an ever changing world. The tower where an English teacher would feel more comfortable than an Anatolian miner. And Keat and I will conclude here literature in Turkish at the turn of the 19th and 20th century presents many examples that could help us nourish not only Turkey.
A reflection on the current climate crisis. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Lawrence, and for a very a wonderful example of how themes that we wouldn't necessarily immediately associate with environment, the late 19th century Ottoman history and literature are actually extremely relevant to the topic of the environment.
It also shows us. That we tend to think that the environment has been a very modern and very recent preoccupation, but as you so beautifully illustrated, these concerns have been there for a long time. We tend to think of and I think we look and contemporary and modern things. We think of these things as being very new, that they've been there for a while. And we like to think it makes sense that we do history well as well and give you the historical conception.
Thank you very much, Lauren Sommer. al-Hasani Lezama. Thank you so much, sort of really giving us quite a lot of breadth to, you know, the the subject, whether we're starting in urban Egypt today or going into the mists of history, as it were, for for the modern Turkish republic, my own sort of interest in the environment comes through the writings of the Ulama, the kind of a preoccupation of my own.
And so I'm going to be briefly sharing my screen to talk about one of these scholars whom I've begun to explore his works. I'm starting with this scholar who's going so easily, although he's one of the scholars I'm studying. He's based in the country of Qatar, a tiny country jutting out of the Arabian Peninsula, which actually, according to Wikipedia in 2013, had the largest per capita usage of energy in the world.
So in a sense, it's quite a pertinent sort of place to be concerned about the environment. And I suspect I mean, that's the latest data we have on Wikipedia from 2013. I suspect that it's maintained those sorts of levels. And what's fascinating to me is the number of countries from the Persian Gulf that are occupying the top 10. They basically make up the majority in terms of Muslim countries, Muslim majority countries, even, you know, Brunei, their Islam and the United States is number 10.
So Omahaw isn't doing quite so bad as it were. But I think that this brings to the fore that there is a kind of massive inequity in energy in the Middle East itself. So we have this is very well known, but the petrochemical sorry, petro monarchies in the Gulf obviously have a significant amount of oil wealth and that allows them to consume on a level that is really unimaginable for most of the world.
If I recall correctly written in this list falls under. So there is a nineteen thousand kilojoules of energy sorry, kilograms of oil equivalent. And Britain is somewhere in the range of, I think two to three thousand. So and the US actually, as you can see here, is around 7000, as you can see there. So just give us some sort of context to the amount of energy consumption that we have. That said, given the size of these countries, the energy consumption is minuscule compared to the global north.
So that inequity is something that I'll briefly allude to as well. Turning to corroborees sort of book for a moment. So we actually wrote a book when I was little. I'm sort of surprised. Not surprised isn't the right term. But I was just thinking when Lahane described the 2000s as being the sort of early reflections on the environment, although he wrote this book in the year 2000, it was published in the year 2001.
So I'm referring to this as a scholar is now in his 90s, is retired from public life, not really writing anymore. So this book may be a little dated, but it's one of the sort of recent historical texts that I'm looking at just to reflect on the question of the environment. And so, you know, in this book, which sort of you can actually download the entire book from his website currently just put it up there.
I'm not sure the copyright situation is, but presumably his publishers are entirely aware of this in this book. I just wanted to sort of allude to how he is trying to draw on the Koran and the Hadith as a traditional island, as a scholar who is a graduate of the Azur and an Egyptian domiciled in Qatar, but someone who is also highly influential in various forms of media over the course of his career.
And it's fascinating to just to briefly translate this verse on the top of the screen soon and briefly, hopefully that's going to help people be able to see it a bit more clearly. And this is a very strong from the Koran where it says, you know, call to your lord and be amongst those who are aggressing. And then in a sense, this is the set of verses that he wants to highlight wellat of civil liberties here, don't create corruption.
And after it has been brought into a state of health, as it were, MetroHealth and whatnot, but it's interlinking that with one's sort of commitment to worship of God and worship God with. And with hope, indeed, God's mercy is close to the bone to those who are upholders of accidents, and then this verse is sometimes quoted as explicating a kind of Koranic conception of how the water cycle works.
It says he is the one God is the one who sort of spreads the winds as kind of glad, glad tidings and the manifestation of his mercy. And then it takes the clouds from one place to another and it revives dead us. It's a fascinating energy. It's quite poetic. And I'm not doing justice to it, obviously in my off the cuff translation. And then it says that the water descends and through it the sort of fruit come forth from the earth and we gather any kind of ritual motor and.
That's how we revive the dead in a sense such that so that you may reflect now. And related to that is this verse which is often quoted in the context and the environment. And it's worth remembering, you know, this is a workable I believe is a revelation that came fourteen hundred years ago.
And so although historians will look at this and say, OK, this was obviously speaking to its own context to draw on sort of the idea of Moshe Halbertal and the notion of having these canonical texts, which you believe to be speaking to you in every moment. In a sense, someone is saying, well, this applies to our treatment of the Earth in our own time.
The whole facade of the human body being, like I said, that as the sort of corruption has manifested on the on the land and in the sea due to what the hands of men have brought you, the lady, I mean, in order to give you a taste literally of some of the corruption in the sense that you have engaged in in order, it says in the third person, in order for them to return to God, in a sense. And so, you know, these sorts of evocative verses can be seen as quite general in their purpose.
But another switch back to her boyhood. But at the same time, they actually do provide enough sort of reflective material for him to develop a system, as it were, that he explicate over 264 pages in this book and he does this relatively early. So I wanted to just start off with kind of explicating Karbo is sort of a brief having a brief overview of his ideas in this regard.
But I wanted to perhaps the next three minutes or so, if that's right, if I'm OK for time, just outline in brief some of my own reflections on some of these sorts of questions in how they relate to Islamic studies, particularly in the traditional guise as own Sharia.
So the sort of in places like the US here, which is the Arab world's pre-eminent centre for Islamic learning, based in Cairo and the historic centre of learning that is definitely older than Oxford, you know, they study various Uloom Sharia meaning disciplines or, you know, fields of knowledge that are related to the Sharia in some way, whether it's Koranic studies, Hadith studies, Islamic legal studies or a whole host of other sort of theology and all the rest of it.
And I just wanted to sort of mention that a number of these fields have direct sort of things to say in a sense about the environment and can be extrapolated from and this is in a sense, the the major challenge that modern Muslims are going to have to reflect on as they sort of respond to the environmental crisis. Um, so we've seen some verses from the Qur'an cited by Karlovy.
But you have Hadith from the Prophet as well, such as a Hadith where the prophet exhorts his companions, don't waste water even if you're at the bank of a river at the bank of the flowing river. That quite literally and in this regard, in a sense, what you have is the you know, there are these principles that can be drawn or that are found across a variety of traditions, principles of moderation, principles of abstemious.
There's a lot of which will be expressed in Islamic law, but more usually would be expressed as values in a sense, to use modern terminology as ethical values that we would embody sort of that Muslims would embody in their own sort of personal lives. And that usually manifests in. The tradition known as Sufism, or at least in certain elements of that sort of a tradition, and so in a sense, you know, these religious values which Islam may share with other religious traditions.
The prophetic traditions of Koranic, you know, the Koran and the Hadith, as it were, will provide a lot of food for thought, for people to reflect on how to engage in moderate living, kind of the opposite of impulse of a capitalist consumption led culture. And in many respects, I would argue that those sorts of traditions are probably what Muslims can draw on.
But at the same time, given the sort of the status of the global south and the global order, it's not necessarily they that need to particularly prioritise this as a set of values. And finally, I just wanted to highlight I mean, I was meant to mention this with respect to those actually quite cognisant of that global south north divide.
He actually, in his discussions, took talks about the global north as being the major consumers and that the global south in many respects, and he criticises the way in which governments accept these kinds of policies, will take the weight of the global north for a fee and thereby dramatically damage the sort of the environments,
the proximate environments of this country. And in that sort of context, I think it's important to highlight and conclude on this point that a lot of the people whom we're thinking of in this echoes what Malta was saying earlier in the Middle East region are not really in a position to do a great deal about it, about that situation and are, you know, less the producers of the global climate crisis and more the recipients of the global climate crisis.
And that's something I think those of in the global north need to think about. Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks very much for another fascinating talk and links in well with the previous two ones. And I think you highlighted as you hit yourself that this is a growing field of interest and scholars of Islam about the relation to the environment. And it fits in in all sorts of other ways with the sort of issues that you're looking at.
Thank you. Finally, let's turn just to say something about my own research and what I've been working on, looking more towards political issues and looking particularly at the Maghreb, the region. But I carry out research on I recently completed a book on Algerian politics that I hope will be coming out in February. And the book surveys politics across the spectrum. But environmental issues come to the fore.
And part of the book and I think show how these issues are feeding into a much broader patterns of politics and broad aspects of politics than actually we commonly realise. And I think this is not not unique to Algeria, but we see it in other places. I'd be interested to see where that will spread.
It really the bit part of my book in which these issues come up is it is is not a book where I examine unrest and protest movements, but it occurred in some of Algeria's more distinct regions over the past 20 years, in particular in January 20, 30, 15 in the town of Salaat, deep in the Sahara and south of Algeria, there were protests following a visit by the National Minister for Energy Use USA to the region who was there to inaugurate new gas wells near the city.
Now, while the development of new resources might have been expected to have attracted local popular support rather than hostility, it was the nature of the wells being inaugurated that attracted substantial local ire, euphemistically termed Algeria's first nonconventional gas wells the government. For them, they were, in fact, Algeria's first foray into the exploitation of its apparently substantial shale gas resources.
As we know, use of a technique of fracking to eventually extract these resources had provoked global controversy over its alleged damaging effects on local water resources and possible provoking ground tremors. Environmentalists, activists and salaat were also many of whom actually worked in the oil and gas sector locally, which I find very interesting.
The fact that these were people who were very familiar with energy issues and therefore much more, much more aware and informed about the sort of the negative side. These weren't uninformed activists, the people very engaged actually in the industry themselves. But many of these activists were the first to raised vocal objections to the plans against the wells and were able to mobilise a thousand local residents to protest in the days that followed the minister's visit.
Now, these protests grew over the days and weeks, followed soon drawing an estimated 15000 people to them in a city with a population barely twice that number. So nearly half the population came onto the streets to protest against the potential of fracking. Moreover, large supportive demonstrations were held in other southern towns and cities, mobilising an estimated four thousand people in the city of Tamanrasset.
Five thousand joining a march in Wagler where activists have begun to mobilise against shale gas exploitation. The previous June, there was particular resentment in these demonstration that the fact that the Algerian authorities had allowed a specifically French company total to test unconventional extraction techniques and these techniques were not permitted in France itself.
Now, this has resonance is not just in the fact that France, of course, was the former colonial power in Algeria, but much more significantly, it was the south of Algeria where the French had been permitted to carry out nuclear weapons tests in the 1960s. And thus the return of total evoked very important and very resentful memories amongst a lot of the population of the South.
This French involvement did indeed allow protesters to characterise the fracking as a neocolonial project and thus frame their movement as one protecting national sovereignty. Environmental concerns activist spearheaded the protests we've seen over the inauguration of these projects, but they tapped into widespread concerns, a broader issues of marginalisation and the absence of benefits enjoyed by people of the region in the exploitation of these rich local resources.
Protesters argue. But despite the strategic importance of a region with its gas and water resources, actually insula is next to one of the largest reservoirs in the Sahara Desert. There had been little development in the region and even the exploitation of conventional gas had brought scant local benefits to a local population, even though these were things that were exploited locally. Local people saw very little and referring to the perceived environmental damage.
Fracking for shale could do, one local activist argued. Shale gas will take what little we have and we don't want it. Now, the combined pressure of a protest likely contributed to the dismissal of the architect of shale gas project. Energy Minister Yusuf used to be a May 20 15, said it cost him his job ultimately. And such was the popularity of the of the protests that other groups and activities became involved.
And they prompted an attempt to hold the first major protest by opposition groups and parties in the capital, Algiers, since the Arab Spring. Now, very interestingly, other slightly more unusual political groupings also began to be seen to involve themselves in environmental issues and could be seen as jumping on the bandwagon. And there was an attack in March 2016 on a gas facility by the city of Inshala by what was the largest jihadi group in the region,
al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. And this group rather unusually justified the attack on the on the gas facility as an attempt to protect the environment and discourage further shale gas exploration. So you were getting the jihadis coming in on on the environmental issue. Now, it was rather implausible that this was claim, but I think it's perhaps better explained by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb its desire to align itself with a major local grievance.
But it does show the power of these grievances. However, such an endorsement was was not welcomed by the main protest movement, as you can imagine, because it then subsequently had to fend off the inevitable official accusations that somehow concerns about the environment were about terrorism. Every time we find too often in the region that there is a movement that the authorities don't like, they try and link it to terrorism.
And this was the routine setting for this. However, as a result of all of this pressure, the authorities announced that the exploitation would be delayed for a number of years, perhaps five to 10 years. But following a successful campaign of repression and cooption of the protests, they receded and the shale gas initiatives were revived in late twenty seventeen.
However, the protests themselves were revealed in the context of a huge national protest movement, what became known as the Iraq, but developed across Algeria. In twenty nineteen, it secured the resignation of a sitting President Bouteflika, an enormous crisis in Algeria, and one of the weekly protests in January 20 20 was explicitly devoted to calls for the government to abandon its plans to exploit shale gas,
which were condemned in the protests. There were banners and chants that week that was the theme of the weekly protests. And there were, they argued. But what was really happening there was their attempts to sell Algeria to multinational corporations and especially the French.
So overall, in this way, we can see that environmental concerns have found their way into wider politics for expressions as diverse as a national protest of the Hirak which dominated and rather surprisingly, al-Qaida's franchises in the region. So that gives you a hopefully a taste of how it's affected Algerian politics and quite such some more unusual ways. Now, we have just about a few minutes left to raise any questions that anybody would have with any of our speakers want to contribute,
if you would like to have a question. There is a question and answer panel you'll see on the screen. If there is anything you'd like to ask, do please put a question that's now I see there is one question that's come through. I can just look at that one. Which from I'll allow you briefly to talk about maybe an easy one. Can you hear me? Welcome, member. How are you? Yeah, good. How are you? Thank you very much. So I'm sorry, I couldn't I didn't see the Q&A section there.
But yes, my question would be to Professor Lowe next. Thanks very much for this wonderful talk and for this brief survey of kind of the depiction of environmental concerns as reflected in Turkish speculative fiction. My question was, if Professor Lawrence sees a utopian impulse and a revitalisation of utopian blueprints, then Turkish literature, especially in literary dystopias that illustrate environmental and ecological breakdown.
Thank you. So I think you're probably referring more to to to to recent fiction. Yes, fiction in 20th and 21st century life, but I mean as also kind of as you referred to, kind of the beginning of 20th century.
Yes. Now, I think I mean, the that the post to thousands more generally in the Turkish literary world has allowed the development of a whole series of jars and of fiction that have been very much marginalised before then for a variety of reasons and certainly speculative fiction, science fiction, dystopic fiction is one of them. And in the context of some of these developments, quite naturally, the question of the environment is is quite high on the agenda.
So I would say more than ever, probably. Thank you very much. I suppose this is something we can talk about, because I know you work on those topics. Yes, yes. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm looking to see if there are any other questions. I don't think they are, but thank you very much for your question. And I'll draw the session to a close. I just want to thank our speakers. Thank you for joining us. And I hope what the session has done a number of things.
It's shown that the concerns about the environment spread across a whole range of aspects and dimensions in the Middle East, and that the way we understand the Middle East and North Africa, the Middle East centre taps into a lot of those concerns. And the way we look at the region more broadly, even beyond environmental issues, varies in different ways. But there are many, many common themes coming through.
We can see those things coming through, concerns about local communities and communities, about not having control over what is happening, concerns about the rate of technological change, changes wrought by actually bring benefits that local people see. These are perennial concerns, and I'm sure that be brought up again and again throughout our throughout the programme as we speak. And just to say that we will be starting the series with the individual speakers next week.
And please join us this time next week at five o'clock for her husband, Hussein will be speaking on Jordan and Water. And please, please join us. And we wish you a good weekend. And thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Bye bye.