Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Then, in the early 1950s, a group of Egyptian archaeologists working in a Yemenite mosque unearthed the manuscripts of the Muʾtazilite school. It was a cache of ancient texts, mostly theological but with enough philosophy in the mix to help explain the subsequent glories of the Islamic Golden Age. For the first time, scholars had direct access to Muʾtazilite writings.

  The discovery intrigued me. All my life I had heard about the heyday of intellectual life in eleventh-century Baghdad, but like all versions of the Golden Age, this one was always long on reputed glory and short on detail. The dearth of extant documents made serious intellectual histories of the era little more than educated guesses. The discovery of these old writings now opened a window into the period. Flipping through the printed text, I felt myself standing up against a monolith of intellectual power, something I could sink my teeth into.

  By the end of the two-hour seminar, I had discovered my entrée into Islamic philosophy. The Muʾtazilites impressed me with their extremely high level of clarity and rigor; at once I felt the power and depth of their argumentative method and analytical treatment of philosophical topics. Professor Sabra, likewise, came across to me as a penetrating scholar of vast erudition. He had studied under Sir Karl Popper (like Wittgenstein and Warburg, Popper was also a German-speaking Jew), and had picked up Popper’s particular spin on logical positivism. This came out in Sabra’s meticulous search for meanings and relations in the words and lines of the text, all of which immediately struck a chord in me. I resolved to ask him to supervise me in my further training.

  Afterward, I introduced myself to Professor Sabra and told him I would like to attend his seminar on a regular basis. He agreed. On the train back to Oxford, I felt as if my future stretched out clearly in front of me. Lucy had one more year to go to finish her degree. I would study with the Egyptian in London, and Lucy would visit me on weekends.

  • • •

  Sure enough, I graduated, moved into my aunt’s place in London, and enrolled at the Warburg.

  The Warburg Institute was attached to the University of London, which I liked from the first, not least due to its radical heritage. It was inspired by Jeremy Bentham, who despised the aristocratic and clerical prejudices at Oxford and Cambridge, and believed that knowledge should be open to all. The university also had some old English eccentricities I liked, such as the fact that after his death, Bentham’s body was stuffed and stored in a wooden cabinet. Dressed formally for the occasion, it was carted out at official functions.

  Working in the library came as second nature to me. The books there were arranged to mirror Aby Warburg’s underlying hunch that ancient mythic, artistic, and intellectual patterns survived into the modern world through transformation. Having been raised in Jerusalem, I was familiar with the idea that ancient patterns take on fresh life in new times.

  It took only a few months, however, for my plan to study with Professor Sabra to fall apart. The Egyptian professor received a chair in the history of science at Harvard, and he promptly left for the United States. Once again, the line fastening me to my moorings had been cut.

  What was I to do? Move back to Oxford with Lucy? Go back to Jerusalem? I decided to stay in London, where I had free rent and probably more Islamic texts at my fingertips than anywhere else in the world.

  Reading a text and understanding it are two different things. More difficult still is, in the spirit of Warburg, to set it in the context of what preceded it, and what followed. Reading the texts was the easy part; they were in classical Arabic. But I found the arguments presented in them baffling, as if a different kind of mind had employed my native tongue in a totally incomprehensible way. Nevertheless, I set off on a journey into this strange literature, prodded on by the hope that if I could solve the puzzles inherent in these writings I could make sense of the rise and fall of the Islamic Golden Age. Maybe buried somewhere within these cryptic writings was a thread joining medieval Islam with the modern West. Could such a thread, and not politics or armed rebellion, be the key to a new Arab renaissance?

  Over the course of that year, these writings became more and more familiar to me, and not because I learned the art of deciphering an alien way of thinking. It dawned on me that in their own way, these ancient theologians and philosophers were in pursuit of answers to the very questions that had been plaguing me since I first picked up Bertrand Russell. Is what we call “reality” something independent, or is it something we construct? Do we have free will? What is perception? What is justice? Can we expect any of it in this life?

  I became a partisan in the battle of clashing philosophies, in feuds being slugged out among atheists, mystics, agnostics, and pious fanatics. During a single afternoon I could side with the freethinking Hellenistic philosophers, then shift my sympathies over to the theologians. It was an exhilarating clash.

  The fight started during the reign of al-Maʾmoun, the Abbasid caliph (813–33). One night, al-Maʾmoun met Aristotle in a dream. The Greek philosopher encouraged him to translate the great books of the world into the sacred language of Arabic. The caliph subsequently set Christian and Muslim translators to work. The lost wisdom of the Greeks began to come alive again for the Arab world, like a mummy rising from the dead.

  Traditionalists weren’t convinced this was such a great idea, and in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries an acrimonious tussle broke out within theology over the influence of Hellenistic culture on Islam. The Muʾtazilites believed that Greek science had a universal validity, while their adversaries the Ashʾarites insisted that since all knowledge was already contained in the Koran, all that was needed was a better understanding of Arabic and the exegetic methods. This battle between “Greek” reason and “Islamic” revelation looks at first glance like any fight between modernists and traditionalists, free thinkers and the fire-breathing Khomeinis of the world.

  As I soon discovered, there was much more to this than meets the eye. At one stage in my relentless pursuit of Islamic philosophical texts, I zeroed in on the quintessential anti-philosopher al-Ghazali.

  A giant in the Ashʾarite tradition, al-Ghazali knew philosophy as well as his opponents—maybe better. This can explain the bad reputation he earned among philosophers for launching his lethal assault against them. Al-Ghazali taught that philosophy had nothing to contribute to religious thought; even worse, he asserted that Greek metaphysical speculation was deleterious to religion. Philosophers had nothing to contribute to revelation, and should limit themselves to lower-order questions such as those in the field of logic. By pounding away at philosophy with such masterful skill, al-Ghazali sealed its fate. Pure philosophy eventually withered away and died in the Islamic world.

  If this was the whole story, al-Ghazali should be ranked among the worst foes of free inquiry. But as I continued to dig, a far more sympathetic picture emerged. He was a professor and a judge, and as head of the University of Baghdad, he had one of the most prestigious jobs in the most glorious city on earth. At one point—I imagine him leaning back in his chair and staring out the window down at the Euphrates River—he realized that there had to be something more to life than prestige and honor and hashing out old philosophies. Aristotle bored him. A number of more existential questions tormented him, none of which could be answered by his living out his days in smug bourgeois comfort.

  So he gave it all up—family, position, reputation—and launched out on a Wanderjahr in search of knowledge. He had the courage to stick his neck out and to give up everything for the sake of free inquiry. The journey eventually led him to a small ascetic cell inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

  In Jerusalem he wrote his mystical book The Jerusalem Epistle. Truth, he now concluded, could be obtained only through an ecstatic and visionary state. (Even if he didn’t use the expression, what he was really talking about was the Greek notion of Thaumazein, the sense of wonder at the miracle of Being, and a miracle that can’t be bridled by syllogisms.) Logic was too weak a tool to grasp Being; only G
od, our limitless Creator, could contain it. In Jerusalem, al-Ghazali turned into a Sufi. He and Heidegger would have gotten along.

  Intellectually, the way he arrived at his mystical conclusions was daring and rigorous, and the more I studied his work, the clearer it became that his so-called rejection of philosophy had actually opened up Islamic culture dialectically. The spirits of Occident and Orient came together in a room cheek by jowl within the Dome of the Rock.

  I was most intrigued by two of his contributions. First, by ridding theology of Greek metaphysics, he didn’t slam the door on thought but rather looked for different ways of conceiving theological knowledge. By separating imagination from logic, giving each its due, he taught that we can have access to higher truths only through analogy, metaphor, and intuition. Moreover, by restricting logic to the sciences, he helped pave the way for the first renaissance in the study of nature since antiquity. In spite of himself, he cracked open the door to allow Greek scientific thought to flood into Islam.

  There was one other thing I learned about al-Ghazali: he invented a new way of conceiving miracles. The followers of Aristotle denied the possibility of miracles. If the essence of an object—say, a drop of water—is inherent and immanent, that is to say, if no matter how deeply you explore the drop you will always find “waterness,” then there can be no way of turning water into wine. Or, to use a political example, if two sides of a conflict have essential differences, even God can’t bridge their differences. If nothing else, as the creator of natural laws, God must be consistent. If Q inherently contradicts P, it will always do so.

  To account for miracles al-Ghazali adopted atomism. Borrowing from the ancient Greek thinker Democritus (known as the “laughing philosopher”), he argued that the world and all the objects within it including our soul, are composed of discrete, featureless, and interchangeable “atoms.” These atoms take on various shapes, so if God chooses to turn water into wine, all he has to do is shift the atoms around a bit. Or, going back to politics, hatred may seem as immutable as Dr. Johnson’s stone, particularly in the Middle East, where blood feuds can keep it going for generations. Yet, emotions are not Aristotelian essences, but can be transformed through an act of will. It’s up to us to turn hatred into understanding. No matter how hopelessly entrenched two parties seem, their feud can be solved through an act of human will.

  Chapter Eight

  Sunflower

  WHILE I WAS DELVING EVER DEEPER into Islamic philosophy, and Lucy was finishing her degree in the classics, we did what many pious people frowned upon. We formally announced our engagement.

  Lucy’s mother was already on board when I set out to break the news to my parents. Father said nothing when I went back to Jerusalem. He preferred to watch the debate with Mother from a safe distance; as a man who chose his battles carefully, and knowing that Mother was engaged in a losing fight, he preferred to stay silent. Mother’s resistance was weak from the beginning, and she gave the impression of someone fending off my arguments—that love was more important than tradition or background—less out of conviction than out of protocol; she had to put up a bit of opposition before embracing Lucy, which she soon did. So did Father.

  Whereas arranged marriages were still the norm in Palestinian villages, in a city like Jerusalem, romantic love was accepted, so long as it was between people of the same religion and background. Even my parents, as enlightened as they were, thought it best that Lucy convert to Islam. If we wanted to return to and live in Palestine, they reasoned, conversion would make life easier for us.

  Lucy agreed. Her parents were atheists, and as such the church didn’t figure in her life, except as a musical institution. Stepping into Islam didn’t, therefore, involve the problem of stepping out of something else. What helped was the painless simplicity of the conversion process: all she had to do was state that Mohammed was the Prophet—as was Jesus, for that matter—and that there was no other god but God, which to Lucy’s thinking was a logical truism. If God really existed, she reasoned, how could there be another one? (Years later, the famed Harvard logician W.V.O. Quine jestingly assured Lucy that her reasoning had been perfectly sound.)

  A far bigger hurdle for Father was financial. As a married man, I was becoming an adult. As such, I had to be prepared to stand on my own two feet, and to support myself. I, of course, concurred, as I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for my parents’ financial help. In our culture, it would have been ludicrous and humiliating to do so. Father then reminded me of my lack of marketable skills. If I wanted a family, I would need to find myself a career. The time had come for me to get serious about my life.

  My brother Zaki and my two sisters, Munira and Saedah, were all prospering in the distant sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi. My sisters’ husbands worked in contracting, and my brother was becoming a confidant of the sheikh. These were prosperous years in the Gulf; fortunes were being made, and my siblings were reaping the benefits. “Come to Abu Dhabi!” they all kept saying. “Here you can have a fat salary, a new apartment, and a big American car.”

  It was an enticing offer. Life in London, with little money, no adviser, and an MG that no longer ran, couldn’t go on, while a job in the oil business could prove I could support myself. And I knew so little about business and the real world that I managed to convince myself that I could spend a year with my siblings and leave with a million dollars in the bank.

  Lucy and I decided that I would head off to Abu Dhabi alone, and that she would join me after the wedding. And so I packed my belongings and flew off to Abu Dhabi, where I stayed with my brother in his apartment overlooking the Gulf. Zaki arranged a job for me in the Public and Government Relations Department of an oil company with offshore concessions.

  The Yom Kippur War—in the Arab world it is known as the Ramadan War—broke out just after I arrived. It was October 1973, and I recall the dizzying atmosphere in Palestinian neighborhoods when news came of the heroic advances made by the Syrians and Egyptians; wild cheers erupted when Anwar Sadat’s armies breached the ostensibly impenetrable Bar Lev Line. Initially it seemed like a reversal of 1967. This time our side sprang the sneak attack, and it was we who were advancing.

  No one paid much attention to General Ariel Sharon’s extraordinary counterattack, which cut off the entire Egyptian Third Army, or the fact the Arabs had to impose an oil embargo on the countries supporting Israel to get the Americans to stop the Israeli advance. Psychologically, none of this mattered. The war was like the Battle of Karameh on a gigantic scale. The Arabs had shown that the Israelis were mortals after all. We won by not losing.

  The wedding took place the next summer. It was held at my parents’ home and presided over by Father’s friend the gentle Sheikh Sa’d el-Din El-Alami, the mufti of Jerusalem.

  Crowds of family and friends thronged our garden. The first order of business was the guardianship. Tradition required that Lucy have a Muslim guardian to accept her into the faith, and Sheikh El-Alami agreed to do this. The conversion, clearly a perfunctory act, was next. Yes, she said with a straight face, there was no god but God. Minutes before the wedding, the grand mufti asked her to repeat her lines. It was over in five minutes. Lucy’s mother and brother, standing with my parents in the front row, looked amused.

  Another preliminary act was the legal contract stipulating a financial guarantee to Lucy in case we divorced. Traditionally, the bridegroom puts in writing that in case of divorce, his bride would get his house, his flock of goats, a car, an olive grove, or some other asset. It is an Islamic insurance policy.

  And so the two of us stood before the mufti and announced our agreed-upon guarantee: one freshly plucked sunflower. The mufti’s eyes opened wide in incredulity. Never before had he heard such a thing, and he asked us to repeat it. “I promise Lucy one freshly plucked sunflower,” I stated again, this time loud enough for our guests to hear. Snickers broke out among some of my friends, who had expected me to pull some sort of prank.

  After the ceremony, Lucy and I dro
ve off to a hotel run by a church in a nearby village that had served in the past as a pilgrim’s station. The hotel was set on top of a hill lush with cypress trees in the pastoral surroundings of Jerusalem not yet ravaged by the cancerous spread of Israeli settlements, bypass roads, power lines, and the security barrier. We arrived at that special moment when the sun is about to set, and its golden light spreads over the hillsides, rocks, and trees. We were served a simple dinner and a bottle of local Palestinian wine under the trees. We couldn’t have been happier.

  The next day the scene shifted from bucolic simplicity to a raucous beach party in Gaza. Some of my mother’s family there were wealthy farmers with beachfront property. Tents were put up, servants placed the meat of slaughtered sheep on open fires, and a group of traditional musicians performed hypnotic songs. Lucy’s mother had never imagined that such an Oriental carnival would serenade her youngest daughter into married life. There were no Oxford dons in tuxedos and tails on the beach that day, only gallabiya-clad Arabs reclining on the sand.

  After a week’s holiday in Beirut, Lucy and I, this time together, left for Abu Dhabi.

  The best part about living amid the gilded tents of a sheikhdom was spending time with my brother Zaki, whose intellectual reach, expertise in music, love of books, political grasp, and facility with different languages and cultures were all woven through and through with extraordinary kindness. It was his humanity that prevented his successes from going to his head, for he seemed to me totally unaffected by the incredible network of social and professional relations he had built up with local sheikhs and foreign nationals alike.

  As it turned out, the job with the oil company was the first and only one I would ever have in the so-called “real world.” The 1973 war had been good for oil. Petrodollars flooded into the Gulf as a result of the oil embargo, and Western companies, eager to benefit, lined up to strike deals with oil-producing governments. It was an exciting time. Due to the war, changes were afoot in the relationship between oil companies and governments. The oil companies naturally wanted to maintain their total private ownership; by contrast, nationalists were calling for total nationalization. Wisely, the government decided to shift over to a more collaborative system that would keep the expertise of foreign companies in the country while ensuring that the wealth produced by oil benefited the country. I learned a lot about the give-and-take of the negotiations: being a fluent English-speaker, I was brought in to help broker deals.