It is no secret that the history of Arabic studies at Oxford is inseparable from British imperialism. Our department’s name change in 2022¹ did not paint over its orientalist past – nor should it, or did it, try to. 

On the surface, times may have changed since the study of “oriental” languages and cultures was believed to be an important arm of British imperialism in the region; ‘part of the necessary furniture of the empire’ was how Lord Curzon phrased it when he called for the creation of what is now SOAS. ²And, in more recent history, Arabic studies in the UK have not been as explicitly tied to the political agenda as they have been in the US (where funding is directed towards languages deemed “critical” for national security)³. Yet it would be wrong to assume that the field has shed its imperialist clothing and metamorphosed into a bastion of cultural appreciation and innocent learning. It can be easy, when so much of what we study appears distant from such modern-day realities as politics or economics, to forget that this is the very fabric that our institution is woven into. The current attacks on higher education in the US are a poignant reminder that the dreaming spires we surround ourselves with are in fact part of the real world. 

No one can deny that universities now function as businesses, subject to neoliberal market forces. Where our money goes is therefore of huge importance. The University of Oxford website lists its endowment as amounting to £1.9bn. The endowment assets of colleges add up to £6.4bn.⁴ The power we yield here is far from trivial. Currently, and despite ongoing protests, the university invests in companies as implicated in Israeli genocide as Elbit Systems and Rolls Royce.⁵ Israel’s actions mirror those of colonialism, and not incidentally; it itself was born of Western imperialism and is based on an expansionist-colonialist ideology. Remind me: at what point did the imperialism of this institution end? 

Divesting from these companies is not out of the question. Trinity College Dublin has shown us that.⁶ The university chooses to continue to fund a genocide. Just as it chooses to subject students that protest it to extended, inordinate, and unlawful, disciplinary proceedings. (Such was the case for the Wellington Square protestors, whose case was dragged out across a year, pursued again by the university after the Met Police dropped it, and in the final round of proceedings, dropped after the university broke its own rules.)⁷

The Arabic department, as long as it remains silent, remains complicit. I would argue that this fact is more damning for us than it is for any other department. In not speaking out in support of the Palestinian cause, the department is tacitly agreeing to take part in the ethnic cleansing of the very group it seeks to study – rather, the very group it relies upon to study. We cannot ethically justify studying the language and culture of a people whose killing we are complicit in. Just as Israel is a modern imperialist state, such an action is a direct continuation of this institution’s colonial heritage, and proof that it never really went away. 

Amongst the individuals within the department, I see much support for Palestine; many of the students and tutors I know are outspoken on this. I see their names on petitions calling on the university to divest, or against its treatment of student protesters. In writing this, I don’t mean to diminish the significance of any of this. Rather, it is with this knowledge that the individuals of the department are – by and large – against the political stance of the university that I believe we must turn our attention to the structures that hold these individuals in positions of complicity. 

As Edward Said writes, “political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination, and scholarly institutions – in such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility.”⁸ The first step is to look at the legacy that we – as students of Arabic – have inherited in the face. We must recognise that this legacy not only represents the past but defines our current situation too, most notably in our support – financial and otherwise – of a modern colonial and genocidal state. Then, it becomes imperative that we act, by applying pressure to the university and colleges to divest from complicit companies, and to instate an academic boycott, cutting ties with Israeli universities and institutions.⁹

1.  From the Faculty of Oriental Studies to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. ↩︎
2.  (As quoted in) Edward Said, Orientalism (Penguin Random House, 2019), 214.  ↩︎
3.  As Arabic is described in this report: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1104092.pdf  ↩︎
4. https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/organisation/finance-and-funding (31.8.25) ↩︎
5. https://oxfordbds.github.io/data/primer.pdf ↩︎
6. https://bdsmovement.net/news/trinity-college-dublin-becomes-first-university-west-comprehensively-cut-ties-israel#:~:text=Trinity%20College%20Dublin%20Becomes%20First%20University%20in,to%20no%20contracts%20with%20complicit%20Israeli%20suppliers. ↩︎
7. https://www.cherwell.org/2025/06/12/oxford-university-drops-disciplinary-case-against-oa4p-protestors/ ↩︎
8.  Said, 14. ↩︎
9.  See the demands of Oxford Action for Palestine.  ↩︎