Le Krak de Chevalier in Syria

Islam

I thought I would wade in to the discussion that has followed Barack Obama's well received, if somewhat generic, speech to the Moslem World.

I was brought up as a kind of assimilationist moslem. Both my parents come from Alawite families along the Syrian and Lebanese coast, in the border area. My fathers family are from Tripoli in Lebanon, and my mother is from a village near Tartus, in Syria. It is a fascinating area. Both these cities are old and have seen empires come and go since time began. First the Phoenicians, then Persians and Greeks. Rome was there. And France and the Crusader states. From the village my grandfather lived in you can see the Krak de Chevalier, which is the great crusader fort that overlooks the volcanic plain where they still farm the rich black soil today.

At any rate, as a young child I never remember my family ever being religious in any way. In fact, we seemed to practice a kind of cosmopolitan civic religion. Beirut was kind of like that. Every one seemed to lace their Arabic with French terms, particularly if you were, or aspired to, be a of certain. . . station. Bonjourmerci. The elevator was always the ascenseur- I just thought that was the Arabic word for it. So, as you can imagine, celebrating the joyeaux noel was just part of the landscape and I remember as a child that everyone in my kindergarten got a present from papa noel when he came to visit us at the end of the year.

And what I never really knew was that we were part of a very small ethnic minority that practiced a sort of unorthodox hybridized religion that wasn't really strictly Islam (at least not to many moslems there) and wasn't really Christian either. You'd have to imagine that the indigenous farmers and peasants who lived in the area, had to over the years be extremely adaptive in their, shall we say, spiritual outlook. If you are going to get along with the people with weapons who seem to come along every hundred years or so, it is always better to be flexible. So over time I imagine they must have evolved a kind of bastardized philosophy that allowed them to get along with just about everyone.

In any event, the other thing about this religion, is that nobody really knows that much about it- even the people who are supposed to practice it are kind of shielded from whatever real doctrine is operative. Weird stuff.

So we were, religiously speaking, kind of like Unitarians in a way. We kind of had this progressive, we are all in this together people, anodyne, generic faith that must have been colored to a large extent by the knowledge that we had descended from those who had a lot to fear about being persecuted by people with power.

We later lived in the Persian Gulf. Of course, as we all know, the Islam there very different from the wavy gravy, get along Islam of the Mediterranean. It was there that I eventually realized that I personally wasn't that into organized religion of any sort- but that is another story.

In any event, what is kind of interesting to me, in light of Obama's overture to the Moslem world is that, despite the criticisms that he is standing down from a more activist role in changing the Middle East, I think that what he is trying to do is something fairly radical.

A lot was made of the religious inflection in they way George Bush governed, but his approach to Middle East policy was actually remarkable in its agnosticism. Bush wanted to see the Middle East in terms of the State. It was the most convenient and advantageous frame of reference for his set of goals.

But what is obvious is the most people in the modern middle east have, again I'll use that word, a hybridized frame of reference that is constantly negotiating between Arab, national, ethnic and religious identities. This is part of what frustrates people in trying to pin the region down in one way or another. It is not dis ingenuousness on the part of Arabs, it is just that people here live in a very complex place precisely for the same reason that we are so interested in it. Its geopolitical significance has made life very interesting there for a very long time.

Obama has decided to engage the middle east on at least two fronts and his opening move was an illustration of his eagerness to engage Islam as well as the nation-state. By doing so he is proposing that the religion do something fairly radical but also something for which there is a long and storied precedent in Islam, which is that it should innovate its way out of its problems. In fact one could argue that core foundation of the religion was a series of innovative social policies that were transformational in their impact on pre-Islamic societies.

These societies were very similar to what exists in the region today, a highly complex yet weak and divided somewhat homogeneous group constantly negotiating with the great powers that surround and threaten. You had the two great spiritual organizations of the time, Christianity and Judaism, that were spurring the development of great civilizational projects and yet the Arabs tribes were just sort of drifting along.

Eventually, I think that whatever the leadership in these tribes, the must have come to the realization what they needed was really a big idea. They needed a great narrative that could give the group a coherence and inspire their people to develop their own civilizational initiative. And that was was so powerful about what Mohammad did for this area.

The Prophet was able establish a kind of cultural baseline for the tribes, organize them, codify a kind of social set of best practices that people could agree on because they were organic to the people there and develop a coherent world view that eliminated the tribal conflict that had beset the area for generations. And in order to do this he had to be totally innovative, he had to completely re imagine the Arabic social construct and sell it to a diverse leadership. And when that didn't work, he had to engineer hostile takeovers of the holdouts.

But there had to be a compelling upside, because as we have discovered, people in this area know how to resist if their leadership doesn't buy in to the plan. There is no way that Islam could have survived if it didn't present an innovative way for people to work together.

I think that at some level, Obama realizes the innovative potential of religion and this is what he is trying to unlock.

I think the United States can probably have a strong hand in promoting a different kind of leadership in the region, one that recognizes the hybrid character of the middle eastern world view, and one that can spur an innovative re imagining of the social structure of the middle east. The upside of this I think could be a lasting partnership with the United States in an area of the world that continues to be vital and represents a continuing drain on the resources of this country.

It not that I think George Bush was ineffective in achieving a certain goal set in the Middle East- in the contrary, I think he was effective. It is just that his goal definition and strategy was enormously inefficient in terms of available resources. In my opinion, one of the by products of trying to conceal the resource drain represented by Bush's Middle East strategy, was a loose monetary policy that sought to mask the cost of the war under a veneer of financial innovation. We saw were that got us.

The possibility exists that we could probably outsource the management of the middle east various factions that would be happy to work with us- provided our ground rules are clear. This is what the ottoman Turks did for almost six hundred years. It is what the British and the French did, although somewhat less successfully. You can't control an area for six hundred years by force of arms alone, there has to be a long term strategy that works organically.

I think that there are different kinds of empires. The ones that last are the ones that can present innovative case for how things should work- and one that has a big local upside for the people you are trying to convince. We ought to go ahead and set our sights for the long term in the middle east- because if we don't we will be paying too much for our engagement there for a long time to come. We ought to form partnerships in the region that get people innovating their way out of the mess they are in. Islam will be a big part of strategy that stands a chance of success.

Text of Obamas speech is here, at the Huffington Post.

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