I’ve written an essay for The New Yorker‘s Culture Desk about the fascinating research of Ahmad Al-Jallad, a scholar of Semitic linguistics and ancient epigraphy. The first few paragraphs of the piece are below, with a link to the rest on the magazine’s webpage. Some readers may also be interested in a piece I wrote about Mashrou` Leila last summer, which I somehow forgot to post here. There was also this post about the new Lebanese electoral law and the factors that led to its adoption.

A New History of Arabia, Written in Stone

By Elias Muhanna

Afew years ago, Ahmad Al-Jallad, a professor of Arabic and Semitic linguistics at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, opened his e-mail and was excited to see that he had received several photographs of rocks. The images—sent by Al-Jallad’s mentor, Michael Macdonald, a scholar at Oxford who studies ancient inscriptions—were of artifacts from a recent archeological survey in Jordan. Macdonald pointed Al-Jallad’s attention to one in particular: a small rock covered with runelike marks in a style of writing called boustrophedon, named for lines that wrap back and forth, “like an ox turning in a field.” It was Safaitic, an alphabet that flourished in northern Arabia two millennia ago, and Al-Jallad and Macdonald are among a very small number of people who can read it. Al-Jallad began to transcribe the text, and, within a few minutes, he could see that the rock was an essential piece of a historical puzzle that he had been working on for years.

The history of Arabia just before the birth of Islam is a profound mystery, with few written sources describing the milieu in which Muhammad lived. Historians had long believed that the Bedouin nomads who lived in the area composed exquisite poetry to record the feats of their tribes but had no system for writing it down. In recent years, though, scholars have made profound advances in explaining how ancient speakers of early Arabic used the letters of other alphabets to transcribe their speech. These alphabets included Greek and Aramaic, and also Safaitic; Macdonald’s rock was one of more than fifty thousand such texts found in the deserts of the southern Levant. Safaitic glyphs look nothing like the cursive, legato flow of Arabic script. But when read aloud they are recognizable as a form of Arabic—archaic but largely intelligible to the modern speaker.

The inscription on Macdonald’s rock included the name of a person (“Ghayyar’el son of Ghawth”), a narrative, and a prayer. It was the narrative that stood out to Al-Jallad. Reading it aloud, he noted a sequence of words repeated three times, which he suspected was a refrain in a poetic text. This would make it the oldest known record of literary expression in Arabic—evidence, however slim, of a written poetic tradition that had never been explored. (Keep reading)

What Gertrude Bell’s Letters Remind Us About the Founding of Iraq

Elias Muhanna | NewYorker.com (Culture Desk)

I first encountered the work of the British traveller, archeologist, and spy Gertrude Bell many years ago, while hunting in the archives for a Carmelite priest named Père Anastase-Marie de Saint-Élie, an obscure figure in the history of Arabic lexicography. “He’s a jolly monk, an Arab from the Lebanon straight out of Chaucer all the same and with a clear eye fixed on the main chance; very learned in his own tongue, he speaks and writes French like a Frenchman,” Bell wrote of Anastase, in a letter to her father on November 9, 1917. “I like him none the worse for his being in spite of his cloth, I’m persuaded, a rogue.” (keep reading)

The Contradictions of Reza Aslan’s “Believer”

A few years ago, a friend sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Reza Aslan is insulting you!” The message was an excerpt from an interview with Aslan, by then already a well-known commentator on religion, in which he was asked about the role that scholars should play in informing public debates about the Islamic world. “You can’t be trained to speak to the media in a weekend seminar before going on Anderson Cooper,” he said. “I honestly think that the best hope that we have is to foster a new kind of student, one who doesn’t spend eight years in the basement of Widener Library at Harvard poring over a thirteenth-century manuscript and writing a dissertation on the changes in the vowel markings of a sentence.” At the time, I was in the basement of Widener, examining half a dozen manuscripts and writing a dissertation on a fourteenth-century Arabic encyclopedia. The caricature stung, but I feared he was right. Less than a decade after 9/11, there was even more public hostility toward Islam than there is today; few scholars of religion had mastered the rhetorical tools to thrive in the arena of public debate. (keep reading)

The gist of the series is that the Assad regime was complicit in the creation of ISIS by allowing Islamists out of prison early during the uprisings; by not engaging them militarily during the war; by staging false-flag operations against government targets in order to justify military crackdowns; and various other strategies.

Gutman’s articles have been championed by opposition supporters and critiqued by regime loyalists. Here are a few thoughts and suggestions for further reading.

The most astute observers of the conflict have long recognized the alignment of certain interests between the regime and the most radical elements in the Islamist opposition. The rise of ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra has been disastrous for the secular political opposition, whom Assad was intent to portray as foreign-sponsored conspirators from the earliest period. (See here and here for two takes on the major speech of April 2011, in which the regime’s unwavering policy was first articulated.)

But those same astute observers, like the excellent Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, have also pointed out that an alignment of interests is not evidence of direct collaboration. Al-Tamimi wrote in 2014:

There is no doubt that the jihadi presence in Syria- whether in the form of ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, or the multiple muhajireen-led battalions- is useful to the Assad’s narrative on the rebellion as a foreign-backed “takfiri/Wahhabi” conspiracy against Syria. It is also clear that the regime has tried to exploit this presence to compel the opposition-in-exile at the Geneva talks into accepting that Assad should stay in power, and that the regime and opposition should instead work together to crush ISIS et al.- an opportunity that Assad hopes could quell the entire rebellion and reassert control over the whole country, which has been and remains his goal.

[…]

There is also no doubt that ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra have regime infiltrators. One should note an interview back in the summer with one Abdullah Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, an assistant to ISIS’ northern amir Omar ash-Shishani, in which he affirmed: “Indeed the [Islamic] state has become greatly infiltrated by the Syrian regime; and that has led to harm to the reputation of the state and shaking of its security.”

However, infiltration is hardly a surprise, and does not show a group is a regime agent. Infiltration amongst both the opposition and regime sides is only to be expected in a time of war, as when the predecessor of Jaysh al-Islam- Liwa al-Islam- was able to infiltrate regime ranks and perpetrate the suicide attack in summer 2012 that killed the Defense Minister. On the other side, former regime officers- leaving aside what their real loyalties might be- can be found across the rebel spectrum.

What to make, then, of Mr. Gutman’s articles? Insofar as they are based on interviews with defectors and the statements of foreign political officials who are party to the conflict, the articles are short on data and long on speculation. That’s unfortunate, because they have given regime apologists more ammunition for the claim that the Syrian uprising is nothing but a foreign conspiracy fueled by fake news and Gulf-funded think tanks.

Here’s another theory.

When the Assad regime released many of its Islamist prisoners from Sednaya Prison in 2011 — including individuals like Zahran Alloush, Yahia al-Hamawi, Hassan Abboud, and others who would go on to positions of leadership in Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam, and ISIS — it did so in full knowledge that the Islamists spelled trouble for the nascent uprising.

The intelligence services guessed correctly that the peaceful secular demonstrations would be overrun by violent former inmates, but they also thought that the Islamists could be squashed by the Syrian Army and the uprisings would come to an end. A few concessions would be offered to an authorized political opposition. The Syrian public would be spooked by the specter of jihadism and would line up behind the regime again. Everything would return to normal.

This was the gamble, and it had worked in the past. Using Islamists to start fires that the regime would put out was not a novel strategy; it was an old game that Arab governments had played successfully for decades. Just a few years before the 2011 uprisings, we saw the rise of a jihadi movement in Lebanon: Fatah al-Islam’s short-lived emirate in the Nahr al-Barid refugee camp. That group was widely seen as a tool of Syrian intelligence, used to throw the country into chaos in response to the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

Longtime Syria-watchers will recall that Hizbullah was adamantly opposed to the Lebanese Army’s assault on the camp, despite the fact that Fatah al-Islam was a Sunni salafist jihadi group that didn’t look so different from Jabhat al-Nusra today. The only reasonable explanation for Hizbullah’s opposition was that the party’s leadership knew that the jihadis were under the sway of Syrian intelligence.

So, using jihadi groups to further one’s political ends is not far-fetched, as a principle. It would have been a logical thing to do under the circumstances, given the regime’s successful infiltration of these groups (as Ali Mamluk admitted to US government representatives in a famous Wikileaks cable).

The gamble, though, was only partly successful. The uprising was quickly corrupted, but the jihadists would soon shock not just the regime but the rest of the world by rampaging all around the Levant and Mesopotamia.

By this point, there was no longer any meaningful connection between the regime and its jihadist foes. There was still an alignment of interests: Assad could claim, justifiably, that the opposition was dominated by the jihadists, and that the only way to deal with it was through military confrontation. But at what cost?

Some will say that the opposition would have been corrupted by jihadism whether or not the regime released those prisoners. They might be right; the conflict may well have been internationalized anyway. But if we’re going to play that game of scapegoat historiography, there’s enough blame to go around.

This is my personal speculation, which, as always, is open to critique. If you disagree with me, see how my friend Ehsani’s reading strikes you. And be sure not to miss this interesting radio interview with Roy Gutman and Joshua Landis.

Photo credit: Matthew Cassel, 2009.

A couple of years ago, shortly before the end of President Michel Sleiman’s term in office, I wrote an essay asking why Lebanon needed a President, given the relative powerlessness of the position. Here’s the payoff paragraph:

Twenty-five years after Ta’if inaugurated Lebanon’s Second Republic and nearly nine years after the Syrian departure gave us a new, mysterious set of protocols […] it is time to rethink the country’s principal institutions and symbols. The President today is responsible for safeguarding a Constitution that is consistently ignored, convening a national dialogue process that is ineffectual, and leading a Christian community that no longer thinks of itself as a single political unit. In this context, why should the identity of the President matter? 

I stand by this reading, but I wonder whether it underestimates the extent to which the presidency might possess powers not codified in the Lebanese Constitution. I’m thinking here of the symbolic authority of the office, which, though it may count for little in the case of a consensus figure like Michel Sleiman, is a political weapon that cannot be dismissed when wielded by a charismatic demagogue like Michel Aoun.

All of Lebanon’s political leaders derive their power in no small part from their uncontested charismatic authority within their confessional communities. Suleiman Frangieh made this point succinctly a couple of years ago in an interview with Marcel Ghanem:

What is it that has made the Shiites strong in Lebanon today? Is it that Nabih Berri has constitutional powers? Or is it because he’s a full-blown Shiite za’im? Any President has to be strong in his community so that he can say what’s what. The Christians’ problem is that we elect a President who stands there in front of Nabih Berri with five pages from the Constitution, and says: “I’ve got these five pages.” What strengthens a President is his strength on the ground, not what is written in the Constitution.”

Aoun will not have any extra privileges granted to him by the Constitution than Sleiman enjoyed, but he will have the benefit of a majority of Lebanon’s Christians solidly behind him, at least for the time being. And if the alliance between the Free Patriotic Movement and the Lebanese Forces holds up through the next parliamentary elections (a big if), the enormous bloc that they oversee in Parliament will be able to set the agenda.

Or, at the very least, their efforts to do so will force a conversation that Lebanon desperately needs to have, if it is going to confront its structural governance problems.

This is why I am feeling cautiously optimistic about Aoun’s presidency. Unlike his predecessors, Aoun has the electoral muscle behind him to make some significant demands. Will they be the kinds of reformist demands that his party ran on during the 2009 parliamentary elections, or will he use his sojourn in Baabda to build a patronage system to rival those of his allies?

I remember asking Alain Aoun in 2009 about how the FPM’s alliance with Hizbullah could coexist with his uncle’s desire to change the system. Alain replied: “Of course we want to change the system. But why not do it from a position of strength?”

Seven years later, the FPM’s strategy has paid off; they are now in that coveted position of strength. Aoun has attained the highest office that a Maronite Christian can occupy, a post he’s lambasted as ineffectual within a system that he has promised to overhaul. Politics in Lebanon may be about to become interesting again, for better or worse.

Hello, everyone. This blog has been a little sleepy for the past year or so, as I’ve wrapped up the long-running book projects that have kept me so preoccupied. With those now off my desk, I thought I’d try turning the crank and seeing if everything still runs here the way it used to.

Here’s an essay I wrote for The New York Times opinion page, about summers in Lebanon as a child in the late 1980s and early 90s. Maybe some of you will be able to relate to the experience described here. And if you have pictures of mountain views from your own grandparents’ balconies, share them in the comment section if you’re so inclined.

A Lesson in Emotional Geography

When I was a child, I spent most summers at my grandparents’ home in the Lebanese mountain village of Roumieh, overlooking Beirut and the Mediterranean coast. From the porch swing on the veranda, an expanse of umbrella pines and terracotta-roofed villages tumbled steeply toward the sea.

In the evenings, my grandfather would set up a tiny portable television outside to watch the news, and my grandmother would point out the constellations of lights across the hills, naming the villages and towns: “There’s Bhannes, near Bhersaf. Beyond them is Bikfaya, but you can’t see it from here.”

The mountain’s geography was mystifying. Elevation seemed to both stretch and compress space. Villages separated by a few hundred meters of fragrant air were as distinct as planets, while the great city by the sea seemed close enough to touch. Maps showed the road to my grandparents’ house neatly branching off the main street of the village. In reality, it torqued as it rose steeply up a hill, tracing a question mark toward the sky. (keep reading)

Wishing everyone a belated Mawlid al-Nabi Mubarak, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and all good wishes for a peaceful 2016.

**

Contradiction and Diversity

by Elias Muhanna | The Nation, January 11-18, 2016 issue

The medieval English allegorical poem Piers Plowman described the birth of Islam as the result of a clever hoax. Muhammad, it asserted, was a former Christian who had made a failed attempt to become pope and then set off for Syria to mislead the innocents. He tamed a turtledove and taught it to eat grains of wheat placed in his ear. In a scene reminiscent of the enchantment of Melampus, the Greek oracle who was granted the ability to understand animal speech when his ears were licked by snakes, Piers’s Muhammad mesmerized audiences by having the bird fly down during the course of his preaching and appear to whisper in his ear. Staging a moment of revelation from God, the false prophet led men to misbelief by “wiles of his wit and a whit dowve.”

In the centuries following Muhammad’s death in 632, many Christians like William Langland, the author of Piers Plowman, sought to make sense of Islam in the terms and symbols of their own faith. Was it just another schismatic sect led by a great here­siarch, as Dante portrayed it in his Divine Comedy? Or was it an ancient form of chivalry, a Saracen code of ethics? Did Muhammad’s followers think him a god? The figure of the prophet-as-trickster found in Piers Plowman was not the most outlandish attempt to explain the origins of Islam. Medieval French chansons de gestes attributed a welter of fantastical qualities to the cult of “Mahom,” including a pantheon of minor deities superimposed from Roman mythology.

University chairs in Oriental studies began proliferating in Europe in the 17th century and were soon followed by the establishment of scholarly associations and academic journals. By the late 19th century, European knowledge of the languages, histories, and customs of Muslim societies had advanced significantly beyond the scope of medieval apologetics, but the interpretation of Islam through the lens of Christianity remained a central current of Orientalist scholarship. As Shahab Ahmed writes in a major new study, the consequences of this approach and its legacy have made it difficult for moderns—­scholars and laypeople, Muslims and non-Muslims alike—to grasp the “historical and human phenomenon that is Islam in its plenitude and complexity of meaning.” Coming to terms with Islam—“saying Islam meaningfully,” as he puts it—requires making ourselves sensitive to the “capaciousness, complexity, and, often, outright contradiction” that inheres within the broadest possible range of practices, beliefs, representational forms, metaphors, and objects associated with Islam.

Ahmed, a scholar of Islamic studies at Harvard, died this autumn at the tragically young age of 48. His book is a strange and brilliant work, encyclopedic in vision and tautly argued in the manner of a logical proof, yet pervaded by the urgency of a political manifesto. It is, in a way, all of these things. For those who knew him, the peculiar ambition of What Is Islam? will not come as a surprise, because Ahmed had been at work for years on a much-anticipated and controversial study about the formation of Islamic orthodoxy. The surprise is that What Is Islam? is not that book. (continue reading)

Beirut #YouStink Protest, August 29, 2015. (Image stolen from stateofmind13.com)

Protesters from Lebanon’s #YouStink | طلعت_ريحتكم# movement staged a sit-in at the Ministry of the Environment today and vowed not to leave until Minister Mohammad Machnouk resigned from his post. The day ended with the police storming the building and forcing the protesters out.

I’m not in Beirut at the moment, so I’ve spent the past few days following the events on television, Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere. I’m struck by how readily the movement has ripped up the familiar categories of Lebanese political partisanship (March 14, March 8, Sunni, Shiite, Christian, FPM, LF, etc.) and replaced them with a call for knowledge-based solutions to universal problems. Perhaps the picture on the ground is different, but the reverberations online conjure up a great wave of disgust directed at the whole political stratum.

For example, when the FPM recently tried to smear one of the movement’s organizers, Assaad Thebian, as a cross-burning infidel, the move backfired badly (see Elie Fares and Emilie Hasrouty’s responses, in particular). Earlier today, when the M14 journalist Charles Jabbour wondered aloud why the Sunnis of Lebanon were not coming to a Sunni minister’s defense as he was “besieged” by protesters, his Facebook thread was trashed by disgusted readers.

Lebanon may not be witnessing the birth of a post-sectarian civil state but something unprecedented is taking place. The language of protest chants, placards, tweets, and media interviews is unlike anything we’ve heard in the past ten years. The Arabic speakers might be interested in listening to some of the protest rap that is coming out of the movement. My favorite is this tune by El-Rass and MC Nasserdyn (of the famous Touffar crew). The lyrics are brilliant and shocking in their audacity, even by Beirut’s cacophonous standards.

And for a taste of some ironic neo-tarab, here’s another recent anthem (“Kellon ya3ni Kellon” = “All of ’em means all of ’em!”):

Over the past few days, almost every party leader has given a press conference pledging his support for the protesters while warning them not to be co-opted by one side or another. So far, these warnings have sounded more like cries from the wilderness and pleas for relevance. I worry, though, about how much longer the protesters can hold their ranks before the inevitable infiltrations begin.

To follow the events online, I recommend Mustapha’s excellent #YouStink News page. For the best account of how Lebanon got into this mess in the first place, there’s this report by the indispensable Matt Nash.

I agree with this demand, but not because I think that Lebanon’s problems can be solved through elections. Dissolving Parliament carries with it the likelihood of further paralysis and stalemate, not the utopic rise of a generation of young and honest politicians who will safeguard the public trust. Lebanon has an abysmal record at negotiating political transitions. To recap the recent history of Lebanese government formations:

• 2009: Saad Hariri takes office as prime minister on November 9, after five months of trying to form a cabinet following parliamentary elections 
  
• 2011: Najib Mikati spends five months forming a cabinet after Saad Hariri’s government is brought down on January 12.
• 2014: Tammam Salam spends nearly 11 months forming a cabinet following Mikati’s resignation in 2013.

If tonight’s protests resulted in the dissolution of Lebanon’s Parliament, very little would change. The country has effectively been operating under a caretaker regime in various guises since early 2011. After the extension of Parliament’s tenure in 2013, its constitutionality became suspect in the eyes of many Lebanese. And when the Presidency became vacant in 2014, the hollowing out of the government’s legitimacy was complete.

This is why dissolving Parliament is the only reasonable option left. Lebanon’s public institutions have never seemed more like shoddy pieces of stage scenery since the Syrian Army’s departure in 2005. It’s no surprise that the real estate magnates, construction conglomerates, generator monopolies, banking titans, and patronage networks that effectively run Lebanon’s economy should be able to thumb their nose at the government like a bunch of schoolchildren having their way with a helpless substitute teacher.

Parliamentary elections will not bring an end to corruption or inefficiency; they likely won’t even solve the trash crisis in the short term. But no progress can be made on any front — waste management, the electricity supply, telecoms reform, infrastructure development — without a government that possesses basic legitimacy.

The demands of the protest movement are aligned with the desires of a majority of Lebanese. Will the Lebanese MPs or party leaders currently fawning over the movement on Twitter or Facebook submit their resignations from Parliament or withdraw their party’s ministers from Cabinet? If the movement gathers steam, I wouldn’t be surprised if the impossible starts to look possible.

Here’s a piece I’ve written for The New Yorker’s Culture Desk about a course I taught last semester at Brown and the interesting research project that emerged from it. First paragraphs below, followed by a jump. Come on back here to comment!

Hacking the Humanities

Last spring, I taught a literature seminar called “Before Wikipedia.” The subject was the history of encyclopedic writing, from ancient times to the present day. We read excerpts of Isidore of Seville’s “Etymologies” and Diderot’s “Encyclopédie” alongside works by Calvino, Sebald, and Flaubert.

The word “Wikipedia” in the course title seemed to attract an unusual preponderance of science majors for a seminar in comparative literature. There were physicists and mathematicians, a cluster of coders, an engineer, a neuroscience major. I teach at Brown, which has an open curriculum that encourages diverse course enrollments, but I’d never found myself in a room with so many young scientists patiently waiting for me to begin a lecture that I wasn’t planning to give.

In my experience, a successful seminar usually involves a mutiny quite early in the semester, when the students take over and my own voice is drowned out by the din of a crowded wheelhouse. This particular seminar’s discussions, however, began awkwardly. The silences I’ve learned to let hang in a classroom seemed unreasonably long. In the first week, I was further unnerved by an odd sound each time I’d turn to write something on the blackboard—the fluent skittering of fingers across twenty laptop keyboards, transcribing my scrawled words as though they’d be on an exam later in the week.

(keep reading)