Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Some evenings I spent with people my own age. With my rudimentary Hebrew, I tried my best to follow what they said. From the bits and scraps I was able to piece together, what impressed me most was their idealism. They earnestly believed that the kibbutz was forging the New Moral Man. Theirs was no less a political project than a humanistic one, in which all people, men and women alike, were to live a life of freedom and equality, without a trace of capitalistic rapacity, with wealth distributed according to need.

  After a month, I left the kibbutz with even fewer certainties than before. The kibbutz was a microcosm of what was best about the nation that had rooted itself deeply in the same country I had been taught to believe was my own. The standard kibbutznik was a model humanist and socialist, a person I had no choice but to admire. At the same time, he was an elite soldier trained to fight my people, and me. Nor did this kibbutznik have any conception of the steep price we Arabs had paid for his freedom. What I took from the experience resembled the way I felt decades later reading Amos Oz’s book: that at least until 1967, we had hardly existed in the minds of these fine people. This absence wasn’t a product of malevolence or ill will. Physically, we simply weren’t part of their world, with most Arabs having been cleared out twenty years earlier. Morally speaking, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind. Their humanism never had to face us.

  The rest of the summer was rounded off with a summer fling, and evenings spent in a West Jerusalem café with members of the local leftist-revolutionary group Matzpen, Hebrew for compass. I also spent a lot of time thinking about the kibbutzniks. They were without question fine people, despite their blind spots. Didn’t we have our own? I concluded from all this that ignorance, rather than some undefined evil intent, had to be at the core of our conflict.

  The next academic year at Oxford (1969–70), Lucy came into my life. I had already heard of Lucy—every philosophy student at Oxford had heard of her. Her reputation around campus was as a free-spirited Renaissance woman: a brilliant classicist, a flutist, and a member of the famous Oxford amateur choir, Schola Cantorum. To top it off, her father was the great philosopher John Austin.

  The first time I set eyes on her, I was smitten by her fair skin and hair and her striking, tall elegance. It was at a party I was throwing with Ahmad, in my room at Christ Church. She’d dropped in for a few minutes with a couple of friends who knew Ahmad. But it was not until that summer that I really got to know her—and that was not in Oxford but in Jerusalem. She had come to join a dig in Gaza, and as luck would have it, she ended up (through a mutual Oxford friend) having lunch at my parents’ house! From then on, each time I saw her back at Oxford, my attraction to her grew. Now I spotted her wearing tight pants and a trendy jacket, now it was a sexy skirt and high black boots; now she was in a pub, now in a classroom. I had to know her more closely.

  It finally happened under unlikely circumstances. I was just leaving a Laundromat, and there she was, coming in! Waiting for her clothes to be washed gave us time to strike up our first conversation. Later I invited her to listen to some of my LPs. It was somewhere between Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” that we both knew we had hit it off. With that issue settled, we listened to Dylan.

  We began seeing each other almost daily. We went to the cinema, took long treks in the surrounding countryside, picnicking or eating at old-world English pubs; we went on some camping trips and punt rides; and at the Trout Inn, a pub on the riverbank oozing with character, we talked about our lives. (They say that the pub helped inspire Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.) I became a religious devotee of the Schola Cantorum choir and attended all of their concerts in the various Oxford churches. On a whim, at mid-term, we drove in Lucy’s Hillman to Scarborough, made famous by Simon and Garfunkel. I can still hear her singing the lines as she drove:

  Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

  Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

  With the academic year nearly over, I assumed I wouldn’t see Lucy for months. We had tried to arrange for her to come to Jerusalem on another dig, but it didn’t work out. Then one day, I spotted her on the street. I was sitting in the passenger seat of Jay’s roadster, and I shouted out a hello. She waved for us to stop, and once we did she told me excitedly that she was heading to Israel for the summer, on a tour with the Schola Cantorum. “You see, we are destined to see each other in Jerusalem,” she said in classic English understatement. I hadn’t been so pleasantly dumbfounded since my journey across No Man’s Land.

  It was the summer of 1969, and Israel had now occupied the West Bank for two years. If the nobles, intellectuals, and pan-Arabists were still wringing their hands in despair, the masses were taking the occupation in stride. Tourists were flocking back to Jerusalem, many of them free-spending Americans. The shops were full, and there was more money to spend than ever before. Construction projects began again, just not on my uncles’ five-star hotel, which was still a hulk of naked concrete and rusting rebar.

  At the family salon the big news was my cousin Salim’s arrest for planting a bomb—a dud—in a bus station. Salim had grown up in the Old City with his widowed mother. His father had died when Salim was a boy, leaving him and his mother impoverished. As often happens, poverty made Cousin Salim easy pickings for an ideology promising quick revolutionary solutions. He joined the Palestine Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) just after the Six-Day War, and was sent into the hills of Hebron for training as an insurgent. He was only seventeen when the order came from the leadership for him to carry out the thankfully failed “operation” that would earn him a life sentence in prison.

  Beyond this, there was the usual talk. No one in the salon said a word about peace with Israel, and everything I heard echoed what the Arab states had come out with during the conference in Khartoum in August 1967. (As if rubbing Aladdin’s lamp, Arab politicians thought the three magical words “No! No! No!” could erase the humiliation of defeat: No peace with Israel. No recognition of Israel. No negotiations with Israel.) All talk was about reestablishing the cease-fire agreement that had existed between 1949 and the outbreak of the June war. They wanted the wall back; No Man’s Land had allowed them to hide the reality of the Jewish state behind a veil of concrete, as one might hide an object of shame.

  Arafat’s name was now guaranteed to pop up at some point in the evening; King Hussein’s almost never. I got a good laugh from an uncle one evening when he showed me a copy of a letter apparently written by a deceased great-uncle to his Jewish lover thirty years earlier. The great-uncle’s letter promised his mistress a home in the Goldsmith’s Souk, our ancient family property that had been destroyed by the earthquake in 1927. The promise may have been the great-uncle’s commentary on their relationship. Less humorous was how my uncle got hold of the letter. It seems that the woman’s Israeli relatives had unearthed it and were now claiming possession of the house.

  With the old borders gone, a trip to the beaches of Tel Aviv was as simple as getting in a car or boarding an Egged bus. That summer was the first time I traveled inside of Israel with both of my parents. We drove the Volvo to Mother’s childhood home in Wadi Hnein, near the Israeli city of Lod. When we arrived, my mother stifled a hurt cry, for the only thing left was the gnarled tree she used to swing from as a child, its unhappy boughs coated with an oppressive layer of dust. As for the villa, there wasn’t even detritus left from the dynamited walls. The famous orange groves were nowhere to be seen. Surprisingly, Grandfather’s grave in Ramle had survived amid the rubble. By its side in the same cavern, the ghost of the Sufi master had mysteriously protected it.

  • • •

  During the summer, two exciting but wholly unrelated events occurred, the first of which could have easily turned into the apocalypse. One bright sunny day, an Australian fundamentalist Christian named Michael Rohan tried to burn down the Al-Aqsa mosque. It took ages for the municipal firefighters to reach the mosque, so hundreds of volunteers tried to put it out
themselves. I was one of them, as were Father and Mother. An angry crowd broke out in the chorus, “Down with Israel!” As I was carrying a bucket of water into the third most sacred shrine of Islam, I noticed a fellow Arab, blood running down his nose and face, swinging his arms at Israeli soldiers. “Who’s that?” I asked a friend. “What do you mean ‘Who’s that’? It’s Faisal Husseini.” Faisal was ten years older than I and ran in different circles. I had heard from Father that he was working as an X-ray technician. Judging by his bloody nose, I also gathered that he carried within him a good dose of militancy, inherited from his father, the great Abdel Kader el-Husseini.

  The maniac’s fire destroyed a thousand-year-old wood-and-ivory pulpit that had been sent from Aleppo by Saladin. At his trial, Rohan justified the arson because, in his words, he was the “Lord’s emissary.” Declared criminally insane by the court, the “Lord’s emissary,” before being deported, was sent to an Israeli mental hospital, built on the ruins of the former village of Dir Yassin.

  The other event was seeing Lucy. This time it was my turn to show her my city and country. My parents still didn’t suspect that I was desperately in love with her. To them she was just the daughter of Walid Khalidi’s friend, the famous Oxford philosopher.

  In the fall of 1970, I began my final year at Oxford uncertain as to what to do with myself upon graduation. The atmosphere in England at the time was an unusual mixture of vibrancy and decay. There were the Beatles and the Stones, MG roadsters and Graham Greene novels, Pink Panther and James Bond movies. The BBC aired the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1969. But Britain was also a dying empire. Every year new countries emerged, while England was buffeted by strikes. When my father was a student in the 1930s, graduates saw the vast world open to them. There was still an empire to run. Now if students were lucky they could end up at one of the new red-brick universities in Leeds or Birmingham.

  Lucy and I grew closer by the day, and we began to discuss marriage. On a whim—I think we were discussing Hegel—two weeks before classes started we decided to head to Heidelberg, in the Black Forest, where we felt we had to walk the Philosophers’ Path.

  I bought an old MG convertible for a hundred pounds, and despite the dire warnings of a local mechanic who said it wouldn’t make it out of town, we drove it across Europe. We shipped the car to Ostend, and drove from there, mostly camping along the way. After Heidelberg, and with frigid air seeping in through the threadbare vinyl roof, we pushed the car up Alpine passes. It was somewhere in the mountains that we finally decided to begin spreading the word that we wanted to get married.

  Falling in love changed everything. It wasn’t only the heart palpitations that took me by surprise, it was Lucy herself—what she stood for, and what she stood against. I loved, and still love and admire, her spiritual depth, her fortitude, her sharpness of mind, determination, and sagacity, and her down-to-earth simplicity. To use a worn-out cliché, she was both my soul mate and my partner in crime.

  Loving Lucy meant running headlong into family and cultural taboos specifically engineered to prevent mixed marriages. My family was far away and could thus be kept in the dark about our plans for the time being. Lucy’s mother was a different story. An accomplished philosopher in her own right, Mrs. Austin taught at St. Hilda’s College, and was far too sharp to miss anything. (I once went with Lucy to London to hear her mother deliver a paper at the Aristotelian society on “knowing one’s own mind,” so titled in response to the fashion at the time of writing on “other minds,” and on knowledge more generally.) Lucy’s way of introducing to her mother the subject of our marriage was to pit me against her mother, who had a formidable mind, in a discussion of philosophy. It was a frankly frightening proposition, and I thought of a hundred ways to get out of it. Did Lucy really want to endear me to her mother, or was this a litmus test for a family of philosophers? With fear and trembling, and no choice but to go along, I agreed to this philosophical encounter.

  Her mother’s house was in a village called Old Marston. The house was set in a large park and close to a pond that attracted wild birds. Lucy sat smiling in a corner with her nose in a book, while I did my best to pass family muster. Whether by dint of conviction, or due to her daughter’s unyielding determination, we finally got her mother’s nod of approval.

  One day, over the Christmas break, I passed by the pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis once upon a time met every Wednesday to discuss their fantasy books. It was there that I hit upon the idea of writing a fairy tale. One thing was for certain, it wasn’t going be like The Hobbit, a Christological story of good and evil. My story was going to be about love: my love for Jerusalem and my hope that I could return to my country with Lucy and raise our children in a place where Jews and Arabs were equals. (I still thought there was a good chance of this actually happening.) Writing the fable injected me with such intense pleasure that I couldn’t stop—that is, until I lost my way at the end and didn’t know how to awaken the knight in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

  One morning, back at school, Lucy came by the teahouse for a surprise visit and caught Avishai and me in the act: we were scribbling out some possible solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on napkins. What Avishai didn’t suspect was that I was picking his brain for an elegant ending for my fairy tale.

  Over my three years at the university most of my reading in philosophy was in the house specialties at Oxford: logic, continental philosophy, and the philosophy of language. Being engaged to the daughter of one of the greatest philosophical minds of the generation did wonders for my motivation. Lucy kept me on my toes.

  I had no doubts about the greatness of European civilization. Nevertheless, as graduation approached, I began to think of ways of bringing together this European heritage with the greatness of my own heritage. Was there perhaps some hidden treasure buried in Islam comparable to the astounding intellectual feats I’d been studying about in Leibniz, Locke, Spinoza, and Descartes, to name just a few?

  Another question dogging me since high school was about the sources of Islamic civilization. How did an austere religion conjured up by Mohammed, an illiterate tribesman, emerge in full gallop in the high culture of Baghdad? It took Christianity 1,200 years to come up with an Aquinas. Islamic culture produced a raft of comparable minds within two hundred years of Mohammed’s death. Already by the ninth century, Muslim intellectuals were debating in Arabic the respective merits of Plato and Aristotle.

  Politically, I was faced with a more painful question. How could a civilized nation rooted in Palestine for well over a thousand years be so easily plucked out and chased away at gunpoint? By now I knew this wasn’t because of the inherently superior intelligence or even the malevolence of our enemy. What was it then?

  I didn’t have any answers. What I now had were some skills and tools I could use to find out. I began toying with the idea of studying Islamic thought, perhaps even the Koran. At Oxford there was no one who could guide me. The Philosophy Department swarmed with disciples of Wittgenstein and Austin, along with every other aspect of philosophy besides Islam.

  One day I made a discovery.

  Through a close friend I met a graduate student by the name of Fritz Zimmerman, a German specialist in the field of Greek and Syriac transmission of ideas and texts into Arabic. The first time we sat down to talk, I confided to Fritz some of my questions, and at once he invited me to accompany him to a seminar in London. The seminar was held at the Warburg Institute, which was originally founded in Hamburg by an eccentric German Jewish genius and bankrolled by his rich brother, who also helped move the institute’s library to London before the Nazis could seize it. Once every two weeks, Fritz attended a seminar there led by the Egyptian philosopher and historian of science Professor Abdulhamid Sabra.

  On the train down to London, Fritz told me more about the Warburg Institute. He described Aby Warburg, its founder, as the quintessential Jewish cosmopolitan. The central idea animating the library War
burg created was that various cultural roots, mostly subterranean and thus invisible, continue to link up modern civilization with the medieval and ancient European cultures, and with the even older cultures of the Near East and the Mediterranean. The Warburg Institute Library embodied this unbroken esoteric tradition. For someone trying to come to grips with his own Islamic heritage, I was captivated.

  When Fritz and I arrived at the Warburg, five or six people were sitting in a room reading a manuscript by a theologian from the eleventh century by the name of Abd el-Jabbar, who had composed treatises on subjects such as perception, epistemology, free will, and justice. El-Jabbar had belonged to a theological school called the Muʾazilites, the impeccably dressed Professor Sabra explained. The Muʾazilite school taught that human beings have a free will and are, as a consequence, entirely responsible for what they do. Adherents refused to use God’s sovereignty as a cop-out. God didn’t dispense rewards and punishment arbitrarily, independently of humans’ deeds and misdeeds. According to the Muʾazilites, God was no Oriental despot; nor was he a puppeteer sitting on a cloud and pulling our strings. This radical view of human freedom sounded distinctly modern to my ears.

  The Muʾazilite rationalists ran into opposition from the more traditionalist Asʾarite school, whose adherents considered God so omnipotent that he could disperse rewards and punishments willy-nilly as he chose. The traditionalists won the day, and suppressed the rationalists and their writings with such inquisitional thoroughness that for more than nine hundred years all we knew about the former was what we heard from the very critics who had been instrumental in driving the Muʾtazilites into extinction in the first place.