Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  The PLO and the Israeli government entered into a protracted period of trench warfare, with neither side prepared to take their dispute into the public forum of international law and justice. To fight the PLO, the Israelis used assassination and commando raids into Lebanon. On the propaganda front, their lobby scored a number of successes, notably in the United States. Their cause was helped along in 1976 when a book titled The Arab Mind, by the Israeli American writer Raphael Patai, appeared. (His The Jewish Mind followed the next year.) Included in its pages are such insights as: “Most westerners have simply no inkling of how deep and fierce is the hate, especially of the West, that has gripped the modernizing Arab.” The book also claims that Arab males are full of twisted sexual hang-ups. (Years later, Seymour Hersh referred to the book to help explain the torture conducted at Abu Ghraib.)1

  Given the circumstances, the PLO’s successes were even more impressive. Militarily, it had bases in Southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut and Tripoli. But compared with what the Israeli forces had, these were minuscule. Its real success was diplomatic, not military. In 1974, the UN invited Yasir Arafat to speak. I recall the famous images of Arafat swaggering up to the podium with his scraggly whiskers, crumpled fatigues, and empty holster. “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun,” he announced to the world. “Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” He got a standing ovation.

  In the same year, the United Nations General Assembly conferred on the PLO the status of Observer in the Assembly and in other international conferences held under United Nations auspices. The “PLO Observer Mission” promptly opened an office in Midtown Manhattan. The PLO soon began to speak, albeit in hushed tones and rarely without a fistful of caveats, the language of diplomacy and compromise.

  It was during my final year at Harvard, in 1977, while furiously scribbling away at my dissertation, that an astonishing thing occurred. Anwar Sadat, a man who had once referred to the Jews as “contrivers of plots,” embraced Menachem Begin, the Revisionist hawk who had blown up the King David Hotel. Even more astounding for me were the words Sadat spoke in front of the Knesset. There is “a psychological barrier between us. A barrier of suspicion. A barrier of rejection. A barrier of fear and deception. A barrier of hallucination around any deed and decision.” By his reckoning, the psychological barrier was “seventy percent of the problem.”2 I watched this momentous event on television while visiting Uncle Hazem, then Jordan’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York.

  Back at Harvard, the handful of members of the Arab Student Society, a “society” in name only, decided to debate the issue. We met only rarely, but given the political earthquake set off by Sadat’s visit, we duly came together. All over the United States, Arab student societies were issuing statements condemning Sadat’s visit to the Knesset as an act of treason to the Arab and Palestinian cause. The leaders of Harvard’s Arab Student Society wanted us to do the same.

  A friend of mine, an Israeli Arab named Shukri Abed, who had philosophical interests similar to mine, called me up and suggested we go to the meeting together. Once the meeting started, Shukri and I realized that the president of the society expected us to rubber-stamp a formulaic condemnation, most likely at the request of an apparatchik sitting in an office in Damascus or Baghdad. Both Shukri and I had actually been mesmerized by Sadat’s audacity, and we were not about to blindly support the resolution. We piped up and said so, which led to a nasty altercation. At one point I suggested to the Arab students gathered in the room that we vote the Arab Student Society president out of office. He stood there agape, not quite sure how to react. And before he regained his mental footing, we called a vote and kicked him out. By nature not a very good citizen when it comes to such groups, I never attended another meeting of the “society.”

  I was in America to get my Ph.D. and not to squabble over silly resolutions. My first two years were spent taking courses and preparing for my general exams. I will always be profoundly indebted to the scholars I studied under. Besides Professor Sabra, who presented in his classes and scholarship a coherent picture of the Islamic theological, philosophical, and scientific schools, there was Muhsin Mahdi, an expat of encyclopedic intellect. Professor Mahdi was a student of Leo Strauss, and over the years he had established himself as one of the world’s great authorities on Islamic political philosophy. I was still eager to deepen my understanding of general philosophy and logic, and the man who helped me immeasurably in this was the logician W.V.O. Quine. With him I explored my own father-in-law’s philosophy of logic and language, as well as Frege’s. I explored my old interest in the question of the will in a seminar paper I wrote for Robert Nozick. Professor Martha Nussbaum, newly appointed at Harvard, helped me understand the ways in which medieval Arab philosophers appropriated Aristotle. She still remembers (I stay in touch with her) her bafflement at my interpretation of Aristotle’s ousia (substance). One essay I wrote for another seminar was on Wittgenstein and the role of jokes in philosophical discourse.

  Meanwhile, Lucy did a master’s in Middle East studies at the Middle East Center. She studied Arabic and Persian, and did research on the economy of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. You could say she was preparing herself for her future life in Palestine.

  After two years of coursework, I had to commit myself to a theme for my dissertation. I thought about the philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c. 870–950), especially after, at Professor Mahdi’s prodding, I plunged into Leo Strauss’s brilliant commentary: “We may say that al-Farabi’s Plato eventually replaces the philosopher-king who rules openly in the virtuous city, by the secret kingship of the philosopher who, being a perfect man precisely because he is an investigator, lives privately as a member of an imperfect society which he tries to humanize within the limits of the possible.”3

  Though al-Farabi’s wisdom would become a permanent fixture in my later life—especially the bit about quietly doing your best to humanize an “imperfect society”—my choice fell on Avicenna (short for Abu Ali Aa Hosain Ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina), a philosopher born in the year 980 near Bukhara, in Central Asia, where his father governed a village on one of the royal estates.

  At thirteen, Avicenna went off to study medicine, and over time moved on to Greek thought. He was a polymath who wrote major works on logic, astronomy, medicine, philology, and zoology, composed poetry, and produced an allegorical autobiography called The Living Son of the Vigilant. (Lucy and I named our second son after Absal, a character in this fable that symbolizes the soul’s search for knowledge.)

  For months, I worked on my dissertation the way an artist chisels away at a piece of marble. In a work of love, you are so entirely absorbed in what you’re doing that there is no longer a barrier between you and your subject. That was how I felt. I wrote with a manic obsession, sometimes eighteen hours a day. Much of it was conceived during the graveyard shift of my new job with campus security. All night I skulked around, lost in my internal debate with my medieval philosopher, while innumerable thieves no doubt took advantage of my preoccupation with arcane issues of knowledge, selfhood, Being, and Truth.

  The fact that this early medieval thinker from a society that vanished centuries ago could speak so powerfully and directly to my own experience got me thinking. Maybe the intellectual giants of the Enlightenment, whose works had inspired me at Oxford to explore my Arabic tradition in the first place, could be better understood by bringing to light the Arabic tradition that underlay so much of Western philosophy. Despite Patai’s The Arab Mind, maybe there was a hidden symbiosis at work between two civilizations that seemed to have radically diverged and were often at loggerheads.

  I really thought I was on to something when Lucy’s mother came for a visit. One of my compulsions since the Warburg was to show the common heritage joining East and West. Far from what would later be known by American neocons as the “clash of civilizations,” our heritages are actually fed from common sources. Avicenna, went my hunch, was a prime instanc
e of this. Lucy’s mother had come to visit her new grandson, and I recall one day sitting on the back steps of our small apartment, explaining to her Avicenna’s system of perception, when she quizzically asked if I wasn’t really talking about Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. While I pondered this, she added, “You know, I believe Locke taught himself to read Arabic,” which wasn’t surprising, she continued, given the fact that one of the major texts being studied when Locke was at Christ Church (my own college at Oxford) was Avicenna’s main treatise on medicine.

  For over a millennium there has been an element of mystery surrounding Avicenna, and philosophers and exegetes have fought countless skirmishes over his so-called “Oriental philosophy,” an expression he used in distinguishing his own brand of metaphysics from Hellenism. Avicenna never spelled out precisely what he meant by it—hence a thousand years of philosophical head-scratching.

  What was Oriental philosophy? As a lover of riddles, I probably spent a hundred hours wandering around campus at midnight with my flashlight, pondering an answer to this. The hunch that eventually formed was that Avicenna cleverly imbedded his “Oriental philosophy” esoterically in his books, which scholars have traditionally read as meat-and-potatoes commentaries on Greek metaphysics. Solving the puzzle required reading “between the lines” of his Greek works, the way Leo Strauss read al-Farabi.

  My six-hundred-page dissertation attempts to do this. I should add here that the dissertation had a long afterlife, not as a book—I have not yet had time to work on making it publishable—but in my various efforts in the political arena. Much of my political work over the last twenty-five years leans on Avicenna’s profoundly humanistic system. Call it a system of human freedom.

  The most enduring idea that joyfully rubbed off on me is Avicenna’s theory of the will, whether God’s or the human being’s, and how this relates to the nature of the world on the one hand, and what we make of it on the other. The upshot of my study is that the Oriental philosophy can be grasped only by exploring Avicenna’s approach to the will.

  Unlike philosophers before him, such as Plato and Aristotle—who held that things in the world are what they are by virtue of some essential property they possess—Avicenna took a position philosophers today associate with Leibniz: that our world is one of many possible worlds. Simplifying it a bit, Avicenna insists that the world does not have an inherent nature; rather, it is what it is by virtue of an entity that is inherently necessary: God. God has willed our world into existence; being free, he could have willed a different world, or ten million of them.

  Avicenna goes further by insisting that our own conception of the world is similarly one of many possible conceptions. There is nothing inherently true about our epistemological system or logic. The human intellect, with all its seemingly immutable rules, is in truth a product of an external agency, namely the human will. Our knowledge is a construct of the will.

  The commonsensical question naturally arises: If the world is one of many possible worlds, and our knowledge of it is one of many possible systems of knowledge, how is it that our system of knowledge fits the world hand in glove? Doesn’t Avicenna’s position contradict our experience, and lead to utter relativism?

  Avicenna’s answer to this puzzle is simply God’s love and grace. Our knowledge of the world (one construct among many possible alternatives) corresponds with the world (one reality among many possible alternatives) by the grace of God.

  But what does this “correspondence” consist of? It is here that the “will” takes center stage. While it is true that our world is one of an infinity of possible worlds, and our mental construct is also one of many possible constructs, knowledge in fact corresponds to reality because both are the best possible choices. Our world is the best possible, and our construct of it is the best possible because of the will. What God wills is the best of all possible physical worlds, and what human beings will as an epistemic construct is the best of all possible systems of knowledge. How do we know this? We do so through faith in the moral will of God, and in the moral will of man. A “true” epistemological construct of the physical world is hence one that corresponds to God’s moral system. A moral vision is hence hoisted above scientific knowledge of the world. Ultimately, science takes its cues from morality and not the other way around, as logical positivists would have it.

  If Avicenna wasn’t taken up into mainstream Islamic tradition it was because he put his finger on a dangerous truth, and no amount of clerical fatwas can erase the fact that Islamic thought revealed man’s radical metaphysical freedom long before Spinoza, Leibniz, or Hegel woke up the Christian West from its cumbersome Aristotelian dogmatism.

  Avicenna’s original ideas, easily glossed over by a superficial reading of his main work, have profound implications not only in philosophy but also in politics. For example, his rejection of inherent identities leads to a theory of identity as a dynamic function of the will, whether that will be the identity of the self or of the nation. Far from being a priori objects set in place by some natural or supernatural Prime Mover, we are responsible for our own identities and actions. The self and the nation come about as acts of conventions and personal choice. From this it follows that we can use our will to change facts and situations that may appear fatalistically predetermined. All we need is faith, love, and a moral vision.

  It wasn’t a coincidence that I was concluding my sojourn in America with Avicenna’s moral theory of the will—the impressions I had formed at Monticello were still with me. More than anything else I experienced in America, Jefferson’s home and university symbolized for me a special kind of will. It wasn’t just the will to political independence that impressed me—even the most brutal political campaigns speak of independence. What stirred my imagination—and still does, especially after all the intervening years of violence and disappointment in my homeland—were the moral assumptions at work behind the American Constitution. With all his failings and contradictions, Jefferson believed in the dignity of the moral conscience, and that human freedom was a good in itself, not needing the sanction of tradition or religious authority. A revolution must have at its core a belief in the moral integrity of the individual; otherwise it will inevitably degenerate into despotism.

  This was an important intellectual breakthrough as I was preparing for my return to Palestine.

  Chapter Ten

  The Lemon Tree Café

  IN 1978, I was approaching the age of thirty. I’d been away from Jerusalem for the last twelve years, and I wanted to go home. You could say I felt the urge to be in my own country the way an American does to be in his, free to wander among familiar sights, to watch the native birds, and to educate my son in an Arab milieu. Intellectually, who wouldn’t have preferred the life of a scholar at a major university in the West? But I felt a duty to help educate Palestinians who couldn’t go abroad. As long as the Palestinians were struggling for their freedom, my personal priorities came second. Once the problem got solved, I could follow more individual ambitions. That’s the way Father had raised me to think.

  This was also the reason that when Birzeit University in the West Bank offered both Lucy and me jobs, we accepted with alacrity. We were hired to teach in a cultural studies program in the Great Books tradition. An American-educated Palestinian philosopher ran the program, whose initial inspiration came from Hugh Harcourt, a professor at the American University of Beirut whose scholarship and dedication were an inspiration to us all.

  My auspicious prognosis of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict—that a gradual and organic process would lead to a single Arab-Jewish state—led me to take up a suggestion made by my friend Guy Stroumsa, who had returned to Jerusalem the same time I had, to teach a course on Islamic philosophy at the Hebrew University.

  Having worked on polyglot thinkers such as Avicenna, who easily bounced around the world picking up knowledge wherever they could find it, I relished the prospect of returning to a land of contrasts. I picture
d Israel-Palestine (I jokingly dubbed it “Palest-El”), with its population of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, with its invigorating clash of opposites, as an ideal place to engage in the sort of open dialogue that had frequently churned up renaissances in culture in the past. And as a teacher at both an Arab and a Jewish university, I could rattle my students’ smug certainties just as mine had once been shaken up. Like small ticking bombs set to go off, students—taught the secrets of self-thought, self-will, and self-creation—could help forge the Jewish-Arab state of my dreams.

  “Fat chance,” said Mother when I shared with her my vision, her Chesterfield cigarette lightly balanced on a crystal ashtray.

  Lucy and I arrived in late summer to give ourselves time to settle in, living with my parents while scouting for a place of our own. Father, now sixty-five, was as much on the go as ever, traveling widely and speaking his mind. His was becoming a favorite address for Israeli and foreign officials seeking to figure out what Palestinians were thinking. It was the Camp David Accords that really put him back in the spotlight. In September 1978, Carter, Begin, and Sadat spent thirteen days in the hardwood forests of Maryland. The breakthrough in their talks gave the Sinai back to the Egyptians, while the Israelis got a peace treaty with the leading Arab state. What this meant for us was less clear.

  The agreements hammered out by Carter, Begin, and Sadat raised expectations that serious talks between Israelis and Palestinians were imminent, and people assumed that in such a scenario, Father would be a key figure. Rumors circulated that Shimon Peres, then leader of the opposition, had given him a note to pass on to King Hussein regarding the “Jordanian option,” namely that Jordan and the West Bank should be rejoined into a federation. My father denied the rumor, and even if Peres had given him such a note, he probably wouldn’t have delivered it. As I mention earlier, Father was a staunch pan-Arabist who believed in toeing the Arab line. The Arabs had designated the PLO as the “sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” and my father, holding his nose, had gone along.