The journey to Beirut took an unusually roundabout route, thanks to the brutal realities of low-budget travel. I was several weeks late arriving because of a dock strike in Venice, from where I was due to embark. It was the cheapest way for a student to travel: by rail from Birmingham, with the Channel crossing to negotiate, before arriving in Venice to board a Mediterranean passenger ship bound for Beirut via Alexandria. I had visited Venice before, and then as now I was struck by how the waterways cut the city into a hundred island blocks on the sea, with the waves splashing against the pathways and glistening in the light as the canals framed the city in its picturesque charm. The traffic noise and frenetic pace that dog modern city life are absent in Venice, where the water lanes reduce transport and communication to the silent punting of painted gondolas.
Meanwhile I took in as much of the art and sights as I could wish, only to run out of walking options as well as the token meal vouchers I was given while the strike lasted. At first sun-girt Venice, ocean’s child and queen, as Shelley put it, stirred warm memories of my island childhood, only to dissolve them in the urban milieu of a bustling tourist destination. You get about at the pace of the gondolas plying their winding rotation on the canals. I spent many idle mornings in Piazza San Marco until I was reduced to counting the grey pigeons in my head before tucking into banks of pasta and tomato salad. Vivaldi had never sounded more mellifluous than when on a stroll on the Lido. I visited churches and found them largely empty, except for elderly Venetians saying the rosary and making votive offerings. The younger generation seemed to keep their distance from religion, while the old people who went to church cared not a farthing for things theological. Indeed, Venice’s religious imagination has been consummated long ago in music, art, paintings, and architecture, and now bids us stand and watch, and “lean and loaf at our ease,” to paraphrase Walt Whitman. The Scottish landscape, echoing with the sounds of imaginary bagpipe music, could not have seemed more different or far away from Venice. In time the strike ended, and we finally weighed anchor and steamed out of the harbor.
What has come to be called the Six Day War of June 5-10, 1967, had taken a terrible toll on Beirut by the time I arrived there in the summer of 1968. Lebanon could not escape the forces unleashed by the debacle of the Six Day War, and the evidence of it was visible in the growing number of Palestinian refugees who were creating a severe strain on Lebanon’s social and political fabric. The leader of a militant Palestinian faction, George Habash, persuaded Yasser Arafat that a new anti-Israeli struggle was urgently needed as a replacement for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s defeated Arab nationalism. For that Jordan must first be taken over to thwart what Habash called “reactionary Arab regimes” that are willing to do the bidding of Israel and the United States. The calculation that made Israel and Jordan equal targets of Palestinian fury would soon engulf Lebanon, rocking the delicate balance among the various religious groups in the country. The fine-tuned mechanism of representation in parliament and in the leadership structure, in which long-established religious communities shared power, was suddenly jolted out of its axis. While still reeling from that, Lebanon saw its problems exacerbated by the strains on its southern border with Israel, where Palestinian camps in high ferment were multiplying.
Lebanon’s kaleidoscope of religious clans includes Christian Maronites, dominant in government since independence; Muslim Sunnis, who prospered in business and shared political power; the Druze, who hold a faith incorporating aspects of Islam and Gnosticism; and Muslim Shiites, for whom Lebanon offered a secure base. The politics of cantonal harmony these groups practiced in effect collided with the politics of armed resistance of refugee Palestinians, and it threw Lebanon into violent swings of fortune. It also brought Lebanon closer to Syria’s sphere of influence. Lebanon had separated from Syria to preserve its diversity; now that diversity might be the reason for Syria to intervene in its affairs. The political horse trading that was the standard métier of the country’s leaders now threatened to choke them with the explosive potential of unstable Palestinian grievances. The quota system of power-sharing and the residential separation of East and West Beirut could not bear the strain of new transient refugees and their demands of regaining their occupied Palestinian homeland.
At the time people spoke proudly — and with some justification — of Lebanon as the Switzerland of the Middle East, vaunting Lebanon’s Levantine reputation as a center of business, finance, the entrepreneurial spirit as well as the corresponding cantonization. That reputation seemed well and truly sealed by Lebanon successfully managing to slip the dragnet of the Arab nationalism Egypt’s President Nasser deployed with the creation in 1958 of the short-lived United Arab Republic. My friends there were convinced that Lebanon was exempt from the troubles of its neighbors, and that, even if there were obstacles and occasional breakdowns, the basic institutions of civil harmony remained sound.
The modern history of Lebanon is a palette of leftover components of Ottoman imperial rule, the legacy of the League of Nations French mandate that administered the country after 1920, and pragmatic elements of the modern secular Arab awakening as represented, among others, by the American University of Beirut. Ottoman rule rewarded loyalty with legitimacy; the French mandate offered a buffer against total Islamic assimilation; Arab modernism provided strong cultural foundations. A thriving middle class emerged to reap huge benefits from the resulting social stability. The French had provided the institutional framework when they separated a religiously polyphonic Lebanon from a mainly Muslim Syria, guiding it somewhat uncertainly to independence in November 1941.
As it was, full independence came in stages. The French transferred full powers to Lebanon in 1944, with the final withdrawal of French troops occurring in 1946. Simmering tensions between different Muslim factions, however, erupted into civil war in 1958. Kamal Jumblat and Saeb Salam as faction leaders engaged in an insurrection against the government of President Camille Chamoun, a Maronite, who favored close ties with the West. To save his government, Chamoun turned to President Eisenhower who sent in U.S. troops in July to restore the government’s authority.
I was intrigued by how pre–civil war Lebanon came to ration religious privileges without turning religion sectarian. The reasons are easy enough to find. Lebanon’s special status as a multicultural, multireligious communal democratic system made it an oddity in the region. In terms of its pluralist heritage Lebanon is too important to be given up to the rival interests poised to tear it apart, and yet too small a country to be able to resist outside influences. Its most effective weapon was to make others believe that its survival was in their interest, too. Sadly the country could not command such deference. In the aftermath of the bloody civil war and after the Americans left, the ancient Christian communities embarked on a mass exodus, leaving a shrinking portion of their co-religionists to tend the flickering flame of survival and hope in their ancestral land. It was crucial to its survival that this remnant preserved its religious heritage.
I was impressed by the role of religion in Lebanese public life as an astute recognition of an interesting fact. The alternative of a French-style secular state would have been extremely damaging to the country, inflaming sectarian factionalism and political fragmentation. As it was, the clan factions that erupted into violence from time to time were a reminder that clans were important political players in the country. This fact was acknowledged by the system of communal politics that allowed a robust entrepreneurial culture to develop, with banking, finance, trade, and insurance enjoying a solid reputation. Religion was present in Lebanese life without stifling or inhibiting it, so that in that sense Lebanon can perhaps be said to be the gift of religion and also the curse.
Yet this arrangement had an ironic side: the Lebanese establishment restricted religious expression to approved representatives. Communal stakes in the spoils of office turned religion into a calculus in the proportional distribution of the goods of public entitlement. Religious groups acceded to their portion of public goods on the basis of the weight the groups carried in society. This system recognized Maronite and Orthodox Christians without turning Christianity contentious. Muslims, for their part, commanded a considerable political asset in this situation by virtue of the fact that they could boast of a centuries-long tradition of imperial power in the region. Christians did not have such an advantage, nor did they have strong allies elsewhere. The burden and indictment of being a Christian Arab is that in spite of the faith’s ancient Arab roots, there is little sympathy for the cause in the West or elsewhere. The West’s domestication of Christianity severed its Middle Eastern roots completely.
Given all these factors, the idea of Lebanon is not much more than a political convenience in which governance is a function of inter-clan compromise and consensus. The notion of an ideological state and its proliferating command structures is all but impossible to achieve. In Lebanon communities precede the state as the means and end of territorial integrity, and to that extent Lebanon is an important functional variation on the theory of political sovereignty. Social tolerance as a function of the religious status quo fits well into the politics of shared power; in the end, each group knows that it will occupy its allotted seat at the table of power. The house of politics is a multi-cameral structure, with the whole less than the sum of its parts. Communities made the religious wager for a group stake in government, and that excluded the idea of religion as a matter of private conscience and individual liberty. It is not the way the West has come to understand religion, but in Lebanon it is the only way.
At the time the Lebanese seemed rather sanguine about this state of affairs, even though its novelty struck me as something that deserved careful exposition to promote understanding and appreciation of it — if not to deter Lebanon’s enemies, at least to encourage its friends. It would be a great pity if secular scruples stood in the way of admiration for the country’s unique religious experiment. At a conference I attended in 1972 in the exhilarating mountain setting of Broumana, national religious leaders spoke with swagger about Lebanon as an exemplary model of interfaith harmony and tolerance. It should serve as a beacon of hope for the rest of the world, the leaders declared. It was all too easy to imagine hearing in all that effusive output a not-so-subtle reference to Lebanon’s designated place in scripture: the Lord planted the cedars of Lebanon full of sap to give shade to those who please him (Ps. 104:16; Ezek. 31:3-5). Yet a hint of approaching upheaval seemed to hang over the national glow, for barely three years later the adversary clipped the cedars and plunged Lebanon into the civil war that uprooted ancient confidence and shook the nation to its very foundations. What went wrong so suddenly?
Some three years before the Broumana conference, a consortium of Protestant church and mission groups approached me about conducting a series of public lectures in a setting near the American University of Beirut. In the months of preparation for the lectures I met regularly with church leaders to shape the lectures and publicize the events. At one meeting someone expressed a measure of nervousness about the delicate nature of what we were proposing to do. The last time someone had given a public lecture on Christian-Muslim relations, he was deported as a religious nuisance. Was I running that risk, too?
Because of the politics of religious partition, the establishment would not countenance a public reckoning with religious claims, especially if it implied that conversion was an option. It was a reminder that religion can be deemed useful without regard to truth claims. This does not mean that religion is just a political commodity, but that we can draw on its social capital without attending to its truth claims. So religion carries political weight, and politics uses religion as reinforcement. But that is the sticking point. Religion as public expedience may foster forbearance as an asset of civil harmony, but that cannot be the entire rationale for being religious. To require religion to be useful risks converting it into currency for a clientele eager to use it as such, so that being religious is politically expedient, while being expedient pays communal dividend. For some two hundred years Protestant missions in the Middle East came upon this communitarian view of religion with mounting incomprehension and frustration, much to the corresponding befuddlement of Arab Christians and others. Lebanon evolved as a modern society with religion central to its national purpose. I wondered whether the modern West could learn a lesson here as it confronts its own interfaith challenge.
Regardless of the mounting tensions, the lectures went ahead, with fruitful exploration of the political limits of religions. In the end there was no deportation — in fact, there was general appreciation on all sides for the attempt at interfaith understanding. We had underestimated public interest in a friendly conversation about matters of mutual interest and concern. As a Muslim scholar once put it, Muslims wish to dialogue, but they don’t know how, while Christians know how to dialogue, but they don’t wish to. It may be an overstatement, yet the observation contains a grain of truth. There is a great deal in Islamic religious sources to underwrite a strong program of engagement in interfaith dialogue; the Qurʾan devotes considerable space to Jewish and Christian subjects. At the same time there is a great deal in Christian traditions that hinders such engagement, such as fragmentation, the conservative-liberal cleavage, nationalism, and secularism. The colonial legacy and the nationalist response pose an impediment to both sides. In this sphere Muslims and Christians stand in mutual need of each other. To the suspicious mind, however, dialogue is a covert assault on vital truth claims.
Yet rather than give up the attempt at dialogue altogether, I felt we should insist on it, precisely for the reason that in the absence of dialogue suspicions would linger and impede mutual appreciation. Yet before long it became clear that the intricate arrangement Lebanon had created for the purpose of domesticating religion to make it politically useful left people little room to appreciate religion’s capacity for expanding horizons beyond those only of communal or personal self-preservation. As a commodity, religion can serve the cause of expedience, undoubtedly, but also, in a less salutary way, it can become inflated sectarian currency for inter-communal strife and enmity, as would be demonstrated all too well in the country’s civil war.
The Lebanese civil war affected me in personal ways more strongly than I was prepared for: I had bad dreams about the bloodshed and felt generally deeply anguished on account of it. That surprised me greatly, and I can only put it to the fact that children of my generation in the Gambia had Lebanese neighbors and friends. A Lebanese man married a distant relative on my mother’s side. We grew up with Lebanese children, and when I was going to school I was befriended by the Bou-Jowdi family who followed my progress even after I came to America to study. The Mahdi, Milky, Diab, and the Musa families were well established Gambian families in their own right. These and other families straddled the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian lines, and through them Lebanon planted itself in our consciousness and feelings.
Pre–civil war Beirut was mesmerizing in its Mediterranean flair and cosmopolitan style. My roommate was a delightful Palestinian fellow student, and beside him I made deep friendships with Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Armenian fellow students. I was enrolled both at the AUB and at the Near East School of Theology (NEST), which gave me a wide circle of acquaintances and friends. I hit it off with the women who constituted the NEST kitchen staff, so meal times, memorable in any case for gourmet dishes of falafel, kibbeh, hummus, and tabouleh, were also fond social occasions of conversation and laughter. The Arabs are a generous, passionate, and loyal people with a gift for family and friendship; it was a privilege to get to experience that. And it was an important setting in which to pursue my studies in Arabic and Islam.
It was my good fortune to meet people across the great spectrum of Lebanon’s social life. Michel, a French Marxist scholar, was professor of economics at the Jesuit St. Joseph University in Ashrafiyeh. He was a fellow passenger on the voyage from Venice. He and his wife, Brigitte, extended a standing invitation for a weekly lunch in their home during that year in Beirut, a boon even in the best of times, let alone for someone on student ration. Michel eventually returned to France to take a chair at Grenoble when, regretably, we lost touch with each other. Huda, a member of the Armenian Orthodox Church, was a fellow student at NEST who opened her flat for a student Bible study group to meet there regularly. It afforded a unique opportunity of community experience in an informal setting. Cheerful, generous-hearted, and willing, Huda was appreciated by all her fellow students. I was especially grateful for the opportunity to experience something of the mystery of Armenian Orthodox worship, as well as learning about the trials and tribulations of the Armenian people.
George Torro was a delightful fellow student — from Aleppo, if memory serves me right. With a mischievous sense of humor and a zest for life, George had been a flight attendant with Middle East Airlines before he embarked on theological studies. He was as entertaining as he was fun to be with, sharing with us the gossip and tales he had gathered on his travels. Milad was an Egyptian student from whom I learned much about the Coptic outlook, inwardly serene though outwardly buffeted. Yousef was a mature theology student from Baghdad who worried incessantly about the family he left behind, particularly with the political state of affairs in the country. Bannipal was an Iranian theology student with a passion for movies, of which Beirut had an endless supply. He would fill the corridor with the lyrics of recently released movies — Oliver! was a favorite. The women students loved Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra as well as the Beatles, and everyone loved Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian pop icon still at the height of her popularity, whose ivory voice was the perfect pitch of Arabic eloquence and diction.
Elham, a friend from AUB, was the very personification of the rising generation of Arab women’s advancement. She introduced me to the university’s tennis courts and to Beit ed-Din, the palace of Lebanon’s emir during Ottoman rule. Founded by Emir Bechir II Chehab, the palace took thirty years to build and has remained a showcase of nineteenth-century Oriental architecture. With its strikingly beautiful arcades and brilliantly colored mosaic floors, Beit ed-Din was being promoted at the time as a rising tourist attraction. In its heyday Lamartine, the French poet, once stayed there. Bright, lively, and cheerful, Elham eventually immigrated to the U.S., where she married and founded a successful international consultancy business concerned with improving the lives of women in the Middle East. It was her way of dealing with the anguish of her much-misunderstood people.
Beirut was on the international lecture circuit. Several visiting speakers passed through in my time, among them Iris Murdoch at the local British Council and, at the NEST, Rabbi Elmer Berger, executive vice-president of the American Council for Judaism, whose criticism of Israeli policies made him a thorn in the side of Jewish groups and endeared him to Arab audiences. He gave a seminar based on his famous University of Leiden lecture called Prophecy, Zionism, and the State of Israel, which was published with a foreword by Arnold J. Toynbee. I learned later that Rabbi Berger was founder of a school of thought in the U.S. that created a devoted following among liberal Jews but also attracted its share of criticism in many Jewish circles. In his Leiden lecture, however, Berger was arguing for the rescue, as he understood it, of the age-long Jewish eschatological tradition from the rough-and-tumble politics of Zionism. His eloquent passion for Judaism’s sovereign ethical law evoked the spirit of classical prophecy of such figures as Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Amos. Rabbi Berger was impressive in the way he carried his learning with unaffected humility and humor. His work is important in showing the biblical foundations of church-state relations and their modern significance — “the prophets were not parochial,” Berger observed. And his acute, pithy remarks would be no less trenchant on the issue of Shariʿah as public law. As Toynbee noted in his foreword, there is a glimpse in Rabbi Berger of the truth of scripture that Israel may yet instruct the nations in righteousness. The impression was that the friends Berger won for Israel he did by persuading them to exchange enmity and violence for reason and dialogue. Yet it is all too easy in a polarized world for axe-grinding to make short shrift of Berger’s subtlety and nuance, precisely the appeal of his discourse of reasoned persuasion.
The brisk book trade in Beirut created a book-lover’s paradise, with old classics in Islamic studies available in affordable printings. That may be taken as a sign that Beirut was as good a place as any from which to assess the prospects of a rapprochement with the Muslim world. If Beirut was the best place for intercultural understanding, it would serve us to come there and learn. But if Beirut was an object lesson of the hardnosed limits of intercultural tolerance, we should regroup and look for another way.
The sense I got in Beirut, from Lebanese and expatriate alike, was that the West is deeply resented, not because the West is bad, but because the West is untrustworthy. Arab friends, many of them admiring of the West, nevertheless felt that the West would never give Arabs the benefit of the doubt, let alone sympathy. Western missionaries who had successfully assimilated into Arab culture and been rewarded with genuine Arab friendship felt this cultural burden more acutely than most other Westerners. A close English missionary friend who had spent most of his working life in the Arab world and enjoyed the privilege of Arab friendship felt the weight of the cultural distrust of the West very deeply, not because he regarded himself as entitled in any sense to the trust of Arab friends, but because the distrust stood in the way of mutual affirmation. With humility and gratitude to the Arabs he had forsaken his homeland to make his home in the Middle East, and yet an invisible barrier kept him at arm’s length. A guileless man, he never flagged in his effort of trying to bridge that barrier.
For diametrically opposite reasons, Christian and Muslim Arab friends alike shared a certain wariness of the West. Christian Arabs felt that associating with Western Christians made them twice victims: it emphasized their status as outsiders vis-à-vis both the Arab world and the West. They keenly felt the attitude Churchill expressed about the gap with Arab Christianity. For their part, Muslim Arabs resented the West for its imperial power, before which they felt powerless and humiliated. In the conflict with Israel, the West repulsed every attempt by Arabs to overcome this humiliation and reassert Arab pride, leaving the Arabs with rankling resentment. Muslims saw evidence of Western encroachment and its insidious influence in Muslim societies. According to this view, the weakness of the Muslim world is the result of a nefarious plot by the West to encircle the Muslim world and to emasculate Islam, regarded as the only force left in the world able to challenge the West’s dominance.
To paraphrase a Palestinian Muslim scholar, Islam attracts the fear and hostility of the West because Islam has shown that it can compete well with the West with respect to the West’s imperial and global ambitions. What the Arab world does not have is the dubious power of the West to entice, to tempt, to bamboozle, and to corrupt Arab youth with the fruits of Western decadence. A book of Muslim testimonials published in the 1970s, for instance, plays with the provocative thought that the long-suffering Muslims will be more than amply rewarded when in time the West is finally brought to its knees by its own excesses. Look at what happened to the Mongols after they had consumed themselves with ravaging the Muslim world, the authors write. The Mongols fell on their knees and prostrated before the God of Islam, and it is just possible a similar fate awaits the West, may it please God, the book concludes.
Yet for all this distrust and contempt, the larger story of Arab attitudes toward the West is a complicated one, a sort of love-hate relationship that swings with ebbs and flows in the political tide. Whatever the eventual outcome of this intercultural encounter, many observers at the time were convinced that it was important to deal with each challenge one at a time rather than to attempt a sweeping realignment of relations. According to these advocates of Realpolitik, it would be a mistake to raise hopes of a strategic advance in relations between Christians and Muslims. Realism requires the acknowledgment of difference while welcoming concrete opportunities of mutual understanding, building trust by taking on one task at a time. Relations here should be based on relations among people, not on the truth claims of the traditions that happen to share a common world.
It is hard to quibble with that down-to-earth view of dialogue, with its logic as lucid as it is engaging. Yet Beirut taught me about its limitations and risks, too. Simply confining religion to the user-friendly world of what is needed and expedient risks allowing suspicions and stereotypes rooted in truth claims to accumulate and to fester unseen. In that subterranean world, what is left unsaid will come to haunt and to trip protagonists on both sides when relations are threatened. As noted, Arab Christians paid a heavy price for this expedient use of religion: it was expedient for the West to discount these Arab Christians as a liability in the West’s dealings with the wider Arab world. Put on the defensive, Arab Christians projected themselves as Arabs, not as Arab Christians anymore. Their ambivalence about being Christian is a price they willingly paid to recover and embrace their Arabness with its accepted Islamic connotation. Perhaps one of the most prominent figures of this ambivalence is Edward Said, whose lyrical defense of Islam in his widely acclaimed book Orientalism was buoyed by a correspondingly incriminating view of the Christian West — in spite of his own Arab Christian heritage. On any balanced view, this is a partial, if not a partisan approach, one that, perhaps, the West deserves for ideological reasons. However, as a prognosis of the future, or even of self-scrutiny, it is fainthearted.
Many of those who are dissatisfied with the personal aspect of intercultural encounter or with the particular Lebanese brand of communitarian politics find the alternative of dialogue as the encounter of civilizations more attractive. It should be remembered, however, that many Lebanese in education and business spoke eagerly of Beirut as the meeting ground of civilizations, where a flourishing culture of encounter and admixture took place. Yet Beirut became the setting for a tragic anticlimax of dashed hopes and failed expectations. The civilizational approach can elevate the terrain of encounter, persuading people not to give in to pervasive antipathy, but it can also risk becoming the self-serving platitude of the elites. Beirut at least was engaged with religion as affecting real issues in real time, not with religion as merely an academic exercise.
I listened with great interest to what J. Spencer Trimingham, the British scholar of Islam and of Arab Christianity, and at that time a member of the History Department at AUB, had to say about Islam and the West. Married to a Palestinian, Trimingham had no illusions about the truculent nature of the issues dogging intercultural relations. On the contrary, he was a living expression of the tension: he had devoted his whole professional and personal career to fostering understanding of the Arab world among his fellow Westerners, only to find in the last years of his life rejection by those he had regarded as friends and colleagues. The hardball world of politics did not suit him, which was partly why I found his work attractive.
Of the two books Trimingham was writing at the time, only the one on The Sufi Orders in Islam has survived and has continued to be reprinted. The other one, Two Worlds Are Ours: Time and Eternity, has not. The clue for that may be found in the subtitle, where Trimingham speaks of repossessing “the Christian Gospel freed from the tyranny of the Old Testament reference.” Heated controversy met Two Worlds Are Ours when it was at long last published, and in the end that controversy consumed it. Critics attacked it in turn as Marcionite and anti-Semitic, with the latter charge packing the knockout punch. The book was seen as a pro-Palestinian sellout. Shy and reclusive by nature, Trimingham was the least confrontational of people, and the reaction floored him.
Scrupulous to a fault, Trimingham shunned public spectacle, and, instead, sought shelter in research, scholarship, and meticulous documentation. Free of clutter, his study and desk were among the tidiest I had seen among scholars anywhere. Friendships were important to Trimingham, and he was in equal measure surprised and hurt by his friends’ reaction to Two Worlds Are Ours. Yet nothing mattered more to him than that the Arabs should receive a fair hearing in the West. He was puzzled that friends, taking offense at the speck in his work, should see it as more significant than the beam of justice to which Arabs were entitled but denied. Furthermore, Trimingham’s interest in Arab Christianity contributed to the controversy: he brought to the surface the unwillingness of the West to acknowledge the legitimacy of Arab Christianity even when pointed out by one of the West’s own Christian scholars. The very fact of his Christian profession provoked Thomas Hodgkin, a lapsed Quaker, to criticize his work in spite of the fact that both of them were strong supporters of the Arab cause.
Trimingham, who was a pioneer of the study of Islam in Africa, defined the interfaith challenge as a question of whether in time Christianity can do full justice to the genuine values of Islam, with a similar challenge for Islam with respect to the values of Christianity. Trimingham said the challenge calls for a truer humility in the Christian than that involved, say, in conquest, and for the Muslim, in jihad. Trimingham cautioned against snatching at adventitious elements in the two religions to create the illusion of solidarity. Truth need not be agreeable or convenient to be valid.
Although I never asked him, I was curious about what Trimingham thought about the place of religion in Lebanese life. I suspect that his evangelical scruples would have made him unhappy with the cantonal status quo in which truth claims were subordinate to political entitlement. He would have preferred for religion to be divested of interest politics. As he wrote elsewhere, the transcendent figure of Christ remains the point of departure for Christian action and reflection and becomes the specter of what anticipates Christ in society. The church, Trimingham pleads, must not become a clan holdout, but must be sacramentally present in the world, “answering each cry of the human heart [and] offering recreative possibilities,” for which there can be no substitute. He thought the Muslim dhikr was totally different, valid as an emotional exercise designed to achieve ecstatic union with the Self-existent, but not as transforming sacrament. On this initial reading, national communities as they have been constituted in Lebanon seem a hindrance to Trimingham’s conception of Christian witness as an expression of individual faith commitment. Given his expertise in African Islam, Trimingham could have shed light on the role of religion as personal faith, a role different from that of religion as customary practice and “the law of nations,” as a classical Muslim jurist put it. At any rate, as I said, I never did engage him directly on the question.
On the matter of the ambivalent attitude of colonial governments to missions, Trimingham’s Sudan experience was relevant. In a study on the subject, Trimingham notes that regulations adopted in 1933 excluded missions from any part of the Sudan recognized by the government as Muslim. Furthermore, in Christian schools established elsewhere, Muslim children were forbidden from receiving Christian instruction without authorization by their parents. Lord Cromer came within a whisker of banning the distribution of Bibles when he forbade publicity promoting their sale. The government published regulations concerning conversion, taking due care to ensure Muslim involvement in the decision-making process. It amounted to an officially sanctioned restriction on conversion from Islam. The publicity alone exposed the convert to public opprobrium, and the elaborate procedure of verification discouraged all but the most persistent and foolhardy. Given that Muslim leaders were inclined to regard the colonial administration itself as invalid on account of its infidel status, administrative ordinances touching on religion carried little weight unless they reflected Muslim demands. At the outbreak of the First World War, the Governor-General summed up the policy of patronage of Islam in an address to the ʿulama. He said the government had facilitated the pilgrimage to Mecca, subsidized and assisted the men of religion, built and encouraged the construction of new mosques, modernized Islamic law, and trained Muslim magistrates to preside over Islamic courts.1
Disheartened by the poor prospects of a Western breakthrough in this state of affairs, Canon W. H. T Gairdner, a senior missionary, pointed out that colonial rule remained an offense to the Muslim conscience regardless of appeasement and other forms of blandishment. For all its restriction of missions, colonial rule continued to be perceived by Muslims as an objectionable instrument of Christianity. In the Muslim mind, secularism and Christianity both suffer from the inseparable liability of infidel guilt. This is at the root of Christianity’s credibility crisis in Muslim eyes, making the religion a double target of colonial suppression and Muslim opposition. Sudan was among the clearest examples of that fact.
Lord Cromer was not himself immune to the taint of infidel stigma. When on behalf of the administration he donated £30 to the sheikh of the Omdurman mosque, the sheikh declined to acknowledge the gift. When asked why, he replied with scorn, “Do you think I would say ‘thank you’ to a káfir?” The sheikh was apparently unmoved by the threat to bring his remark to Lord Cromer’s ear. Trimingham says that missionaries are not justified in blaming colonial administrations for the failure of Christianity to make gains among Muslims. He puts that to Islam’s intrinsic resistance and to the foreignness of Christianity. Trimingham could have added that Islam’s natural political proclivity enabled it to secure the collaboration of colonial rule, whatever the complex nature of that alliance, while, without that political favor, Christianity came under a cloud. The differential outcome of colonial rule was that Islam prospered while Christianity faltered. Christianity was quarantined.
It is worth pondering how, in its encounter with the modern West, Islam’s political gains have helped or hurt the cause of a Christian reconciliation with Islam. What Trimingham calls the foreignness of Christianity may be more about the foreignness of a privatized Christianity over against Islam’s political orientation than about missions as foreign sponsorship. The emphasis on the will and conscience of the sovereign individual in Christianity removed it from political life, at least as an organizing principle. In the Muslim code, however, the sovereign individual is a misnomer. Perhaps in the unforeseeable future Muslims may forgo territoriality and its politics willingly and embrace privatization on moral and ethical grounds; it would show how faith can thrive without being armed at the same time. Should such a change of heart ever take place, it would break the intercultural deadlock, and open the way for deep, genuine exchange.
Reflecting on these and other issues concerning Islam and the West, I found myself rehearsing the views of earlier writers, with a measure of personal foreboding at daunting challenges ahead. Taking stock of relations with Islam through the Crusades, Ramón Lull challenged the church to embrace a different path. “It is my belief, O Christ! That the conquest of the Holy Land should be attempted in no other way than as Thou and Thy apostles undertook to accomplish it — by love and prayer, by the shedding of tears and blood.” That sentiment echoes Francis of Assisi, who went to Egypt in a friendly gesture of meeting with the sultan. For his part, Hendrik Kraemer, the Dutch Protestant theologian, argued that sustained engagement with Islam should not be driven by the motive of spiritual conquest or success but by the urge toward faithful and grateful witness to God. Such witness needs to be carried out by taking due account of Muslim understanding of din and ummah, of the religious sphere and faith in the social order.
What all this amounts to is the recognition of the need for a religious truce with Islam without that foreclosing on the need and value of joint action. As Pascal said, if we were to do nothing but for certainty, we would do nothing for religion, for it is not certain. Another way to phrase this is to say that if we cannot be religious until we are fit to use religion well, we would make religion an excuse for not being religious.
On a brief stopover on his trip to India, Tom Beetham visited me in Beirut to find out how I was doing. We ended up one early evening on a sidewalk café on Hamra Street, where I rehearsed with him my experience of life and my hopes for the future. We ranged over a wide terrain, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tom agreed that the issue was likely to bedevil relations with the Muslim world, and with the Arab world in particular, but he also noted that it was an issue that was rather remote from the concerns of the churches in Africa. Tom encouraged me to continue with advanced studies in Islam after a period of internship working with the churches. He knew Spencer Trimingham from an earlier period and was pleased that I had linked up with him at the university. By nature observant and perceptive, Tom felt that the politics of Palestine and the challenge of interfaith dialogue required different skills and motivations, and that I should be careful not to confuse the two.
I filled out my experiences with a road trip to Syria, first to Damascus and then to Aleppo. In the drive north from Damascus through Homs, I saw evidence of what used to be known as the Fertile Crescent now wilting under the heavy hand of a socialist command economy: collectivization had reduced all that rich arable land to a dust bowl. The high rise buildings in Aleppo where the government housed the workers were similarly in a dilapidated state of repairs. The Baʿath Party had sown seeds of ideological control and reaped a harvest of idle incompetence with the economy in shambles. To mitigate this state of affairs, the government proceeded to uncap a gush of anti-Western vitriol to redirect responsibility for failed policies, letting the people starve on inflated resentment of a remote, impregnable enemy. I had just discovered in Beirut The Development of the Monist View of History (1895) by Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918), writing under his pseudonym as N. Beltov, whom Lenin praised for his role in helping “to educate a whole generation of Russian Marxists.” Plekhanov is a must-read for any “intelligent, real Communist,” Lenin said, because Plekhanov’s work “is the best in world Marxist literature.” Those high-minded words were fresh in my thoughts when I embarked on my trip to Syria, then in the pro-Soviet camp. The reality on the ground, however, belied the elegant theories of scientific socialist sophistication. The students I encountered in Damascus, for instance, might bristle with state propaganda but, out of reach of surveillance, they swaggered in secret with Arab pride and Islamic achievement. For all the heated calumny their critics heaped on them, the Ummayads created in Damascus the structures and organs of the first Arab empire, with Spain representing that achievement in the Western sphere. Drawing freely on Byzantine models of state and society, the Ummayads showed the value of intercultural encounter, and bequeathed to their successors no less an obligation. Damascus still shimmered with reminders of its past glory.
The Syria trip turned out to be the thematic conclusion of my Middle East experience, though that was not how I had planned it at the beginning. In Syria the Arab cause wore the care-worn face of a disenchanted nationalism, of socialism lavishly subsidized with near-empty promises, and of regional interests inhibited by a common, pervasive sense of confusion. Yet it was a face that was also etched with memories of a proud history and a rich cultural heritage, of a goodwill shared with all humanity. All the glittering rhetoric of political grandstanding could not dim the hope of a better life, and with it the primordial urge of a people to control their own destiny. One wonders why the Baʿathist leaders persisted with trying to force square pegs into round holes, particularly when so much dead wood went into the ideological design of those pegs.
With this perspective I could reflect on the fact that the modernist project, at least in Lebanon, did not seem destined to bring about the rout of religion. In spite of Baʿathist secularism nearby, religion was still standing. However bedraggled and worn down, religion had survived its bruising encounter with a variety of adversaries, including dogmatic nationalism. The survival of ancient religious communities in the Middle East was impressive testimony to this fact, and, in spite of looming threats, reason for not giving in to despair. It calls to mind a well-known Qurʾanic verse to the effect that what we consider ours in worldly things is ephemeral, whereas the things of God are imperishable (má ʿindakum yanfadu wa má ʿinda-lláh báqin, 16:98). After all, the human heart, Augustine reminds us, is made for God.