The course “Q Question, Fah Fahama” offered a colloquial and accessible introduction to the social sciences concerned with interpreting life around us and how we experience it.
The course was primarily based on studying a series of short articles about philosophical and critical ideas, written in Egyptian colloquial Arabic by Dr. Shehab El-Khashab — Professor of Visual Anthropology at Oxford University — under the title Al-Fahama (“The Great Understanding”).
Each article introduced a specific concept by a particular philosopher or critic in fields such as history, geography, economics, art, or language, and explained both the importance of the concept and the core problematic question raised by that philosopher or critic.
Each question was intended to spark discussion about the concept and its relevance. That’s why every article began with a question — questions being the “oil” that powers the gears of Al-Fahama, a fictional machine invented by poet and cartoonist Salah Jaheen in his satirical cartoons to mock traditional, rigid ways of understanding the world and its systems.
The task in this course was to try to change that traditional way of thinking by using different tools of reasoning to help us better understand the world we live in today.