Our guest, Omar Saif Gobash, is the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the Russian Federation. In addition to being a member of the diplomatic corps of the United Arab Emirates, Ambassador Gobash sponsors an... important prize, the Saif Qobash Bonnepaul Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and he is also a founding trustee of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which works in collaboration with the U.S.
Department of State. with the Booker Prize in London. Ambassador Gobash studied law at the University of Oxford, and he's joining us on the occasion of his new book, his important book, Letters to a Young Muslim, that discusses the ways that Muslims today might think about dealing with the contemporary world and about avoiding some of the pitfalls of militants and radicalism. Ambassador Gobash, there's a common view here in the United States, that Muslims tend to favor blind devotion over reason. That reason somehow is not part of social life, it's not part of intellectual life, that the tendency among Muslims is to fall back on blind devotion of one way or the other.
I think there's also a tendency in the United States to think that Muslims, on the whole, gravitate toward authority. authoritarian politics, that there's no sense of popular participation, no way of thinking that democracy and the Islamic world are compatible with each other. Both of those two important questions are addressed in your book. You talk about those various questions dealing with the contemporary Islamic world, and I wonder if you could say something about each one of these two points. What role do you think?
that reason and critical thinking plays in the religion of Islam. Great. We were having such a friendly conversation in the green room. Now we're on. You've thrown me in really at the deep end.
Two very, very big subjects. And growing up in the Gulf where we had a tremendous amount of change over the last 40 years, even more, 40, 45 years, I'm not sure how many years. For me, it was very interesting to see that I, you know, as a Muslim, I'm always looking at the way in which we practice our religion. And it did occur to me at times that it was a very rule-based religion. To the extent that when I meet Muslims from other parts of the Arab and Islamic world and they speak of the spirituality of Islam, it kind of surprises me because at least when I was growing up, there wasn't very much spirituality to be discussed.
It was all rule-making. rule observation, investigating which rules apply to which situations, and then, of course, the most important thing, not following the rules yourself, but monitoring the behavior of other people around you and your best friends in particular. And it was always a great thing to sort of point at your friend.
This is, you know, when we're young, early teens and sort of say, ah, well, you know, I don't think you're fasting. Surely you swallowed some of your saliva. And, you know, this is impermissible.
And so we would condemn. each other and this was a lot of fun. Yeah, but after a while I began to think that surely there must be some more to this. And I think part of it is that part of the problem relates to our local culture in the Gulf States, in the country.
kind of the Arabian Peninsula, there was never really enough wealth to start sort of getting romantic and philosophical and spiritual about things. It really was hand-to-mouth and quite a tough existence. When we speak to our elders, they will tell us that we are completely spoiled. We live in a world full of, you know, sort of consumer products, tremendous amounts of, well, wealth.
Maybe not personally, but I mean, our societies were very, very wealthy. comparison to the way they used to be. And so I think there's kind of a conflict there between the old, very traditional rule-based approach and now the desire to have something a little deeper. I'm not sure if that answers your question, but it's my attempt.
The other thing you were asking about, you were asking about democracy. First, though, I wonder if we can pursue this business about critical thought and religion just a little bit. You assert in your. your book that one of the crucial elements of human existence is the fact that The world often entails gray areas, that things are usually not black or white, and that one of the things that sometimes happens in the Muslim world is that decisions are made on the basis of something being...
all good or all bad, but that in fact an opening should be left for gray areas. Well, yeah. One of the things I try to avoid in the book was sounding like I was making, you know, coming up with platitudes.
And what I try to do is to relate it to some some of the ways in which we hear traditional clerics and scholars of Islam and imams talking about the world, as though there were clear moral answers to every single situation. And from what I discovered, there are competing kind of moral claims on us, and it's not always so straightforward. And I wanted to see that kind of being expressed in the Arabic language and in the community that I was a part of. And one of the key issues that I found was very difficult was, overlay of very clear moral categories and rules that would include or exclude you.
And then the fact that my mother was Russian and still is Russian. And this somehow caused a problem for many of the people who I regarded as very close friends and almost partners in faith. They accepted me.
They rejected my mother. And they insisted that I also reject my mother. And I thought, you know, there are so many different ways.
in which the mother is exalted in Islam and yet here were my close friends telling me that I had to distance myself from a Russian mother and so this the that was an immediate gray area that came up the other thing was that you know the whole set of assumptions that we we look at each other and we say okay well this person is a homogeneous kind of ethnic character therefore his Islam must be clear and and and perfect whereas this one is half half Arab half something else else, we have to doubt, especially if his mother is Russian. She may have given him the wrong ideas. The foundations aren't completely there, and therefore we have to always put a large question mark over this person. And I think when I was growing up, it was a very homogenous society, and it was difficult to kind of find myself in it, to identify with it entirely, even though I did try.
And so I took time out and I went away to the U.K. where multiculturalism was a big multiculturalism was alive and well, and you could disappear into your own studies and not worry about things. But now that I come back to the Arab world, and in particular the Gulf, now I see that actually multiculturalism is alive and well, or it's being tested in our own communities. In the Emirates, we have 90% of the population that are foreign. And so we are being forced to interact with the outsider in a way that is different from simply having a relative who is a foreigner.
We now depend on the outsider. Our economy depends on the fact that there are so many people who are coming in either working in our economy or contributing by visiting as tourists. And so it forces us to rethink our relationship to non-Muslims and non-Arabs.
I think that is my attempt to answer that question. And in your book, Letters to a Young Muslim, a book that's written in the form of letters. letters to your son, some advice, some general wisdom that you might give to a young person.
You point out the importance of tolerance, the way the role that tolerance plays, not only in society, but in thinking about life, thinking about important questions. Yeah, you know, the word tolerance came to me, but I actually think, you know, I meant much more, but it's a big ask of people to do more than tolerate. But I did think that my particular example of being ethnically half Arab.
Arab and half European or half Russian, was a primary example why I was personally invested in the idea of tolerance. I'd been chased by ethnically pure young men and spat out and beaten. But I accept all of that in a certain context.
We were teenagers. It was all in the spirit of fun, I suppose. But once you're an adult and you think to yourself, okay, why is it that certain people people are targeted because they don't fulfill this kind of ethnic or religious standard. And then I realized that actually most of us were marginal and most of us didn't fulfill this ethnic or religious standard. And the fact that there's only a very, very small group of people in each of these societies who holds up the standard that then tells everybody else you're not quite good enough.
And I thought actually that there's some way in which we can maybe reverse it, at least in my own psychology, to reverse that and say the majority of us are marginal. different in some ways. way and in fact we are the ones who set the standard in our diversity and it's the it's the it's the guy and usually it is a male who insists on ethnic and religious purity who has got the wrong end of the stick and so I thought that this was some way in which we can maybe maybe make an argument from within as to why we should be tolerant. It is a tricky problem, though, isn't it, when we think about religion?
Because religion at least claims to be wrestling with truth. And the notion of being tolerant about truth... truth or not truth seems trickier than being tolerant about haircuts or tolerant about kinds of music. Yeah, absolutely.
That's a tough one. How would you solve it? How would I solve it? Well, I think you've pointed to an important problem. Plato, you remember, all the way back talks about justice being a social relationship, being about rather than some individual.
So I wonder if tolerance, as you say, tolerance in the United Arab Emirates, tolerance in a community might be the way to think about these things every bit as much as tolerance among individuals. Yeah, and he also said stuff about truth as well. And in a way, this whole idea of touching on the idea of true Islam, which is often thrown around by Western and Islamic leaders, the idea that there is some kind of disembodied, abstract notion of Islam that exists somewhere out there, and if only we had the right kind of understanding, we would be able to achieve it.
I think actually that if not a a dangerous idea, it is an idea that is quite tricky. And I think that you're right, that another approach is to say that actually, in this case, Islam as an abstract idea only means something in the context of a community. And it's only through community that we actually begin to understand what it means to practice Islam.
And I think that the idea of some kind of abstract truth is what causes all of these political problems and social problems, that somebody thinks, I have attained the truth. and therefore I have some kind of right to now dictate to all the others. And I think that's why we were talking about a little earlier on about the idea of a loyal opposition within the political sphere.
That, you know, if you look at Islamic political theory, there doesn't seem to be a place for dissent within kind of Islamic political theory. That you have the wise religious leader, you have the ulama, you have the scholars of Islam who are guiding the leader, who is a political figure. And essentially, that's it. You know, it's between them. It then becomes a political struggle over power.
And it gets, there's no place for the common man to stand up and say, well, you know, why don't we try something slightly differently? Because they're immediately accused of going against the core tenets of the religion. I wonder if the Iranians have succeeded here. It does seem, and I don't want to overstate this, but it does seem to be a pattern. in Islamic history that once a new interpretation grows up or once a smaller community takes shape that community pulls out and forms a territory of its own rather than being tolerated inside the existing community.
There seems to be an element of exclusion that goes on. Yeah I suppose that's true and I think we're very lucky in the Emirates and looking over the history of the Emirates for the last 45 years basically from the time of its foundation. We're very lucky in that there was a kind of instinct amongst the ruling family of Abu Dhabi and then the other Emirates that fell in line essentially.
That didn't come with kind of abstract theories or an attachment to a pure kind of religion as we see in some of the other countries of the region. And there was strangely, I think, if we look back, there was a strange focus on community and actually caring for one another in a very tough environment. That led to, with the discovery of oil, it led to the social contract that we think of where wealth is spread in different ways.
Initially, it's land grants. Then it's jobs. Then it's contracts.
Now, the social contract really revolves around excellent possibilities for education, health care, and the infrastructure to actually build your own business or your own kind of life. And there are different communities. of Muslims inside the United Arab Emirates.
I know that there's a Shay'i community. Are there any other communities besides Sunnis and mainstream Shay'is? You know, well, I'm not sure, to be honest.
I think there is an Ahmadiyya Presidents, which should be significant simply because most of Sunni Islam regard them as beyond the pale. But you know, there are a whole host of other denominations and I think there are 70 churches in the UAE. There's a Russian Orthodox Church in Sharjah. and you know Hindu temples. So yeah, we, especially with the rise of ISIS, the UAE government has really taken the lead in promoting the idea of tolerance.
You know, we have a minister of tolerance who's a wonderful woman. We have this great display of different kinds of faiths in the Emirates. And we have participation of the royal family in the various kind of key events within each of those denominations.
It's very interesting to see that. Now, this is, again, it's an expression of a kind of instinctive acceptance of the outsider. How do we then translate that into kind of political or religious theory or theology is a different matter.
I don't think we've reached the stage where we actually can reason with, you know, sort of scholars from the region to say this is why we do it. And currently it is really kind of a political edict expressing the feeling of the. tribes of the area. I was struck reading your book about how important you think it is for individuals to come to conclusions, for individuals to exercise reason and to make up their minds about important problems, even important problems of the religion.
It struck me a little bit like the tendency that takes shape in Europe when Protestantism emerges as individual beliefs, as individual determination of what the correct interpretation is. You see anything like that going on in your ideas? Well, yeah, I do. I do. I mean, I haven't really spent much time thinking about Western Christianity, but from the little I know, there is kind of an echo there.
One interesting point was a few days ago I got a comment online saying, you know, don't talk about the individual. It's a Western concept. And I smiled because the person who wrote this to me was writing in English, which is a Western language. He was writing as an English speaker.
an individual. He didn't have a group with him. And he was writing using Facebook, which is a technology invented in the West, based on the idea of you as an individual coming forward.
So, you know, I think we have to look at the way technologies are operating in our lives. We have an interest. I want to explore this in much greater detail.
There is a very interesting relationship that we have with technology. And one of the leading clerics of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qaradawi, recently said, we do not need, we as Muslims do not need to develop technologies. The West was created for us to do that.
And I was astounded at this position. One of the leading spiritual figures of political Islam says the West is there to do things for us. And clearly he has no understanding of technology and the way technology really forms our lives to a large extent, makes the choices for us.
And so I thought to myself, well, either we're doomed or if we open our eyes, we're actually, we have a great opportunity. here. And I've thought that in particular, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are fantastic mechanisms to allow us in the Middle East, in the Arab world, where we have very patriarchal societies, to begin to reflect on ourselves. And it can be done in a very selfish way. You know, you want to have better pictures than your friends.
You want to show off on Facebook. All of a sudden, you know, you have a vested interest in developing this personality online. And I find that it's actually happening.
And for me, it's very exciting. I see this as a kind of, it's almost a Trojan horse of individualism in the Arab world, and particularly the Arab world. I also think that it's very important the way the Arabs develop an understanding of religion because of the critical role that the Arabic language plays in Islam. So what happens within our societies in the Arab world will have an effect on global Islam, right? And as you know, there are authorities that find this extraordinarily threatening.
that think that with the new technology and with internet and with different scholars being able to issue edicts in different parts of the world, some of those edicts may conflict with each other. Some of those edicts may be politically unacceptable. Authorities like the Al-Azhar University in Cairo or like the Council of Senior Scholars in Saudi Arabia have started to claim that we need to crack down on all of these individual interpretations that are floating around the internet.
Well, I find it interesting. I mean, that's a kind of a regressive move which is not going to I doubt that it will succeed. It doesn't make sense.
I think they should really ride the wave of the breakdown of authority and try to establish something that doesn't rely on kind of authoritarian religious rulings. I think that there's a tremendous chance for more progressive clerics to engage with their audiences, as some of the more extreme clerics are engaging with their audiences and feeding them the kinds of things they want to hear. But there is There is an, I think that there is a sign up. Majority of Muslims who are interested in a more productive approach to the world who are not listening, sorry, are not hearing the correct or appropriate messages from their religious leadership.
And I think that there is a set of Muslims who are more interested in a values-based approach to life as opposed to a rules and regulations approach to life. And they are not being served. So I would be really pleased to hear of clerics who, instead of...
responding to every single, in many cases, ridiculous request for a fatwa, that they would actually turn around and say, you know, this is clearly not the realm of religion, this is not of interest to Allah or, you know, the Muslim nation. Just decide for yourself. But actually, I mean, the clerics, to a large extent, spend their time delving into every tiny little issue, partly because it satisfies their, I think, sense of power. and relevance.
I did, this is the World Affairs Council of Northern California, I know people are interested in political things, and I did mention the comments that you make in your book, Letters to a Young Muslim, about the prospects for democracy in Islam and democracy. in the Islamic world. And I wonder, sometimes scholars of the region claim that in Islam there is no distinction between religion and public life. There's no distinction between the role of government and the role of religion.
religious authority. And I wonder if you think there are two different arenas. Do you think there's an arena of politics that somehow lies outside the religious domain?
You know, it's actually a very interesting question. And I always used to think that our problem was the division between religion and politics. And it occurred to me that the problem is actually much greater, that it's the division, is there any life outside of religion? And so, you know...
If you look at the constitution of certain Islamic states, they will say that Islam is everything. And quite recently, something very interesting happened. I think it was in the context of Saudi Arabia and women driving cars. And I think it was the deputy crown prince who said recently, bad news and good news, I'd say, that women are not likely to be driving anytime soon.
However, the reason is not religion but culture. And for me, that was a fundamental statement where he actually divided between the realm of religion and the realm of culture. And I think actually one of the tasks that we need to engage in is to actually begin to delineate, to actually say, well, what is it that falls under religion?
Because that means that we're handing over a certain kind of public power to the clerics. And then what is the rest of life? And how do you actually do that?
And I think there are, I mentioned this in the book, that there are prophetic traditions that sort of point at that idea. And we really need to be kind of philosophical about it and figure out how we can actually divide between the two. And I think that it's very exciting to say that I obviously want to be, I want to see how we can almost limit the sphere of religion to a healthy realm, and then see how the rest of the world or how the rest of life functions.
You mention in the book that in Egypt, when the Muslim brothers take power through elections, after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, and when Mohamed Morsi is elected president of Egypt. You at least mentioned that the Muslim brothers seem to have a hard time managing power, seem to have a hard time governing. And I wondered if you care to elaborate on that just a little bit. Do you suppose there's something about the Muslim brothers or about the notion of radical Islamism that makes it difficult to govern in a modern state? Kind of, because I think they've got an issue with causation.
I think that the problem is that they believe that if you pray hard enough, God will intervene and solve your mundane kind of municipal problems. God will help, but you've got to do it yourselves. And I always think that when they kept coming up with the idea that Islam is the answer to all of our problems, okay, it is in a certain realm, but not when it comes to the garbage. I mean, I mean, if you remember, the garbage was really collected by the Zabbalin and their huge garbage-eating pigs. And the Muslim Brotherhood decided to execute all of the pigs because they were haram.
And in Egypt, that occupation is done by the Christian community because the Christians can deal with the pigs. And then the pigs were taken away from the Christians, which was really not fair. And this led to a huge crisis in the garbage collection industry.
And, you know, you can't pray your way out of that. You can work your way out of it. You can think your way out of it. And I... And I think that this is, it's a kind of a mechanism that all Islamist parties, or the majority, okay, of Islamist parties will use to say, all right, well, we tried our best, but you weren't pious enough, and so we're going to try again.
And this belief that the responsibility for changes on God and not ourselves primarily is kind of an obstacle. Now, if they change that approach. It'll be very interesting. But then they will become more technocratic, in which case, why are they religious parties? What are they doing?
What kind of religious values are you bringing to the municipal matters? I wonder if it's possible to have an Islamist party that... operates according to the principles of liberalism, that operates according to principles of tolerance and interaction with opposition, perhaps as a loyal opposition, perhaps not. Leonard Binder at UCLA wrote an important book called Islamic Liberalism in which he claims this is possible. Could you imagine Islamic liberalism?
Well I'm not, well I can imagine it but I can't figure out the details. I think it's difficult to figure out the details. For me, the question was always, why do Islamists want political power? Is it because they're interested in imposing a certain kind of moral life and moral standards on us? Or is it because they're interested in getting people to get jobs and work and develop?
And so for me, it was always a puzzle. And my instinctive feeling is that they're actually much more interested in governing our moral lives. And because there's only a limit to how much you can do there, it's...
it requires more and more repression and higher standards and more accusations of a lack of faith. So in that sense, I'm very puzzled by why Islamists want political power, other than for the pleasure of power. We've noticed certain liberal democracies in the region turning increasingly to Islamic authoritarianism.
And in Egypt, when the Muslim Brothers take shape in the late 1920s, they largely take shape as an opposition movement to a liberal regime, so as an alternative to liberalism. So the notion of Muslim Brothers and liberalism sits uneasily together. But I'd be willing to argue that in Syria, in the late 1990s, up in the early 2000s, the Muslim Brothers go quite a long way in the direction of being a liberal party, organizing for elections, tolerating free speech, and so on. Yeah. Again, I'm not entirely convinced that that is because they believe it.
I'm worried that, as in other cases in the broader Middle East, that these are all mechanisms that Islamists use to attain power and then impose the truth. And again, I think it's less loyalty to the individual Muslim member of their community and more loyalty to some kind of corporate Islam that needs to be defended from all outsiders and all threats. And the more...
The more attention that we give to this disembodied Islam and the threats that it faces, I think the greater the problems that we will face. I personally don't think that Islam is under attack globally. A lot of people talk as though it were.
And I think that what happens is that when we have this disembodied idea of Islam, we have a bunch of people trying to chase after it and control the narrative for the rest of the Muslim world. And saying, okay, well, Muslims need to do X, Y, and Z in order to defend the name and the reputation of Islam globally. And we need to fight the West. We need to fight Russia. And we need to fight China.
And for me, none of that makes sense. I think it's a distraction from the actual problems that we Muslims face in our own societies. Richard Bullitt at Columbia University has written an important book, whose title escapes me right at the moment, showing, arguing that Islam and Christianity are not the same.
are very closely related to each other, share many values, share many kinds of orientations, and that therefore Islam and Christianity are certainly both Western religions as opposed to other religions around the world. Do you suppose that there are elements of what you're talking about in Letters to a Young Muslim that you saw when you were in Britain that you think permeate Christian society as well? Um... You know, I was quoted actually on Abu Dhabi TV a few days ago saying that there is no contradiction between Islamic values and Western values. I actually, you know, I'm a universalist, and I actually believe in moral progress.
I think some... People, a large number of kind of traditional scholars, are caught up in a particular worldview that the world stopped developing morally in the 7th century. And, you know, so what they're trying to do is to pull us back to the 7th century in every possible aspect of life.
And, you know, if they were to be consistent about that approach, then they would give up on their Twitter feed, and they would give up on their computers and their Mercedes, and they would give up on sort of financial power achieved through Islamic banking, for example. Just... So I think very recently one of the top scholars in Egypt said what we need to do is not live the religion of the 7th century but the values of the 7th century and the values of the prophet.
And the values of the prophet were one of moral progress at his time. He didn't live for 1,000 years. He lived approximately 60 years.
And in those 60 years, there was a certain moral kind of trajectory. And that's the way I think we should be looking at things, to say that women's rights stopped with the death of the prophet is, I think, an unfair way of cherishing his project. And if you think about the position of women before the message and before the prophet actually intervened, it was an awful position in comparison with what we see today in terms of rights. But that doesn't mean that we can't go further.
And I think, again, this is not something that I'm declaring as the absolute truth. I'm saying that we should actually just consider it. And we should think about how we can think of our moral lives as moral progress as opposed to moral perfection stuck in the 7th century.
I'm enjoying our conversation very much, Ambassador Gobach. But we have audience members. And one of the audience members picks up on the comments that you made about tolerance. You made the important point that very often we talk about tolerance. But tolerance may simply be a baseline.
There may be more that's required for intellectual life. life, there may be more that's required for democracy than simply tolerance. Could you say a few more words about what you mean by tolerance or what, in addition to tolerance, might be important to tell a young Muslim or a young person of any faith?
To be honest, I think tolerance is an extremely low standard. Given simply our self-interest, our interdependence, the fact that so much of what, at least in the Arab world, we live off, we live off the Western products. You know, I I don't think our oil would have any value if it weren't for Western drillers and Western technologists who actually figured out how to use it. So this dependence and interdependence is absolutely fundamental.
I think there are moral implications for that. Tell me, how is that question going again? So just for instance, in the United Arab Emirates, there is certainly tolerance.
There is certainly a good deal of acceptance of different communities and different faiths. Do you suppose there might be something even deeper that would be required for democracy or for intellectual progress to take place than simply tolerating others? No, you've got to welcome it. But I also think that to tolerate another is to clearly define the boundaries between yourselves. And I actually don't think that those boundaries really exist or are valid anymore.
And this comes in the realm of ideas especially. And so often you will be told. told, well, those ideas are not Arab ideas and they're not Muslim ideas, therefore they must be rejected. Like this person who said, don't talk about the individual, that's a Western concept.
And actually, I think if you close your eyes, you'll think a ton of things. There are so many different thoughts that you might have, whether you're sitting in Ghana, in a Chinese village, or in New York City. And so in that sense, I do not like this idea of ideas having an origin. and ideas having a nationality and a religion and therefore being discounted. And I think that there are enough kind of, again, going to the prophetic traditions.
The prophet said, for example, seek knowledge even if you need to go to China, meaning a tremendous distance far away from your home. He didn't say seek war even if you have to go to China. He said seek knowledge.
And so in that sense, the idea of knowledge and the idea of sort of our knowledge versus other people's knowledge just sort of breaks down. And so I think that's another reason why, that's another argument for basic kind of understanding with others. In the United Arab Emirates, I know the government is sponsoring a wide range of universities, a wide range of institutes, an effort to try to cultivate intellectual interaction between, let's call it, Western scholarship and let's call it local scholars.
What kind of... kind of product do you see coming up? of that interaction? Well, I think one of the key institutes that we set up is the New York University branch.
And I was personally involved in that, and I remember being very deeply affected by the events of September 11th. things that I wanted to do was to see a meeting of minds, a kind of intellectual exchange between Manhattan in particular. There was some pushback.
I remember getting a letter from an Islamist group denouncing the idea of bringing Western universities to us, to the Middle East. And I thought to myself, you know, again, here is where you can be very particular about things and say, you know, this is kind of intellectual imperialism. But if the intellectual gift that you are given is one of query and questioning, then you can turn that back on the so-called intellectual imperialist and question them.
And I think that is an incredibly powerful tool, particularly in our part of the world. Now, the problem, though, is that, you know, when... When we have outsiders and Westerners coming to the region, they themselves are incredibly tolerant and liberal and sensitive to local culture. And so they don't challenge us. And it becomes this kind of funny kind of relationship.
Why is the Westerner here if they're not challenging us? And we get caught up in this kind of strange dynamic where we're waiting to be challenged. Our kids are waiting to be challenged, but they're not being challenged because of sensitivities. One of our audience members points out that it's often said that Middle Eastern conflicts and Middle Eastern problems result from the active involvement of foreigners, that Western powers come in, outsiders come in, and contribute to the...
polarization of the region and even contribute to the radicalization of the region do you suppose that any of the conflicts grow out of the intervention of outsiders I think you know it's credit to our warring factions that we managed to not only entertain the world but bring in every single non-interested party and Syria is a perfect example of that what starts off as Arab killing Arab unfortunately turns out into a great superpower rivalry between the U.S. and and and Russia alongside you know regional powers as well and one of the really shocking things is that what what starts out as an Arab-Arab conflict which should be solved at the Arab level, ends up being solved by non-Arabs. So who are the key players in the Middle East? The Israelis, the Turks, the Iranis, the Russians, and the Americans.
And we find ourselves in the Arab world saying, well, when are we going to sit at the table? Well, it's your table. So I think the responsibility lies with us. I think that, you know, other countries do get involved, but it's really because of some astoundingly good lobbying that we all engage in.
The Russians are certainly active in the region at the moment. active not only in Syria, but active in the Gulf as well, as ambassador to Russia. Do you see an important role that Russia is playing in the region at the moment? The Russians are not particularly actively engaged with the Gulf itself, but But yeah, as you know, it's very closely engaged with what's going on in Syria. It's a difficult question.
You know, on the, I suppose to the credit of Russia, Russia did not intervene directly in Syria with forces until four years into the crisis. And in a sense, I mean, from what I read in my interactions with the Russians, the reason that they intervened was a fear of Islamic radicalism. and the number of Muslims from the Caucasus regions who are actively engaged in ISIS and who are actually leading some of the battalions that ISIS has, I think, is a cause for concern.
But the other thing is, I suppose, the unfortunate kind of abdication of, I don't know, abdication of responsibility, but a rejection of involvement from the United States. And, you know, the perception was the United States was ready to... allow the situation to continue on a low flame for however long it was necessary, neither supporting the Free Syrian Army enough to defeat the regime, but continuing to support it.
So difficult situation. Whatever, I suppose, ends the crisis should be welcomed. But the terms on which it's going to be ended has got to be very, very carefully figured out because because if the situation is not ended with all of the parties, including the Gulf states, involved, then it will set the seeds for further conflict, especially if it...
...allows Iran to continue its subversion of the region. The conference in Astana was supposed to begin today, I believe, the conference involving Russia and Iran and the major stakeholders in the Syrian conflict. But the militant Islamists were not invited along, so they were excluded from this peace process.
Do you suppose that's a wise move to exclude the militants? I think the militant Islamists are Jabhat al-Nusra, which is a branch of Al-Qaeda. Send the invitation if you wish.
And ISIS, which I think is currently otherwise occupied. But it's a diplomat. Can you imagine a peace conference that does not include all the parties involved in the conflict? Well, yes, I can imagine it, especially if you discount these groups as really being parties to it.
I mean, they receive funding from somewhere. If you can cut off that funding, they disappear as real parties to the conflict. The way I see it, at least, is that they were very much proxies for other entities.
One of the members of the audience asks whether the Islamic State counts as a kind of consequence or manifestation of the success of the Islamic State. success of political Islam or whether the Islamic State should be seen as part of the failure of political Islam? I suppose maybe we can sort of combine that and say that it is the successful failure of political Islam because it certainly succeeded, but nobody really wants it to continue to succeed.
And it scares the hell out of everybody in the sense that it's such a nihilistic, dead-end kind of political model. It's a very strange political model. What does it want?
Can you tell me? Well, what we see in Tunis, for instance, what we see in Tunisia after the uprising is that an Islamist party gets elected into parliament, takes over the government, and then tries to run the country for a while but gets assailed from all sides, gets assailed from a militant direction as well as from a secularist direction. I suppose that would always happen if an Islamist party took over. Well, can I say, the other thing that was interesting about what happened in Tunisia is that the Anato Party decided that they were going to separate politics from religion.
And I remember finding this absolutely fascinating. And I looked at what the head of the Anato Party said. And he basically said, I have decided that we are going to separate politics from religion.
It's an edict. It's an authoritarian style of dealing with a particular position. It taught us nothing.
It showed us nothing. He didn't give us any indication as to why. It's not a model or a precedent that can be followed for any reason other than expediency. And so I think, again, political Islam, whether it's what we see in Turkey or what we see in Tunisia, is not being faithful, I'd say, to the possibilities of political Islam. They're just, I mean, can you tell me that I should be happy that they split the political from the religious when they gave no reason for why or how other...
Other parties might be able to follow that. There's no religious logic behind it or underneath it. One of the audience members reminds us that we've had an election in the United States. And in the election in the United States, Islam didn't come off very well. There were many things that were said about Islam.
There were many negative stereotypes. the religion. I wonder if you have any advice for us at all about how to combat some of those stereotypes, about where to begin to engage with people who have such a negative image of the religion. Well, I mean, this has been kind of percolated for quite a long time, I'd say. From the late 1990s, of course, September 11th had a major effect.
And then, I suppose, the rise of ISIS and terrorist incidents across Europe and even in the U.S. What I think, and of course, as a non-U.S. citizen, it's easy for me to give advice to my fellow Muslims in the U.S. But what I would say is that I think...
The Jewish community also didn't come off so well. The African-American community has been suffering quite a great deal. And my beloved Mexicans were really tarred.
And so in that sense, I think that the Muslims are not entirely isolated from other communities that are also being denigrated, I suppose. And I would say to... The Muslim community in the U.S. This is the time, and I've seen it happening actually in the last few days, this is the time to actually demonstrate integration with the U.S. society and to get involved in not... fighting simply for Muslim recognition and Muslim rights and the protection of the Muslim community, but actually to start thinking in terms of Islam as a religion of universal justice and being interested in what is happening to the Mexican, what is happening to the Mexican people.
happening to women and what is happening to the Jewish community as well, as well as the African-Americans. So I actually think that, you know, there is a very, from my understanding, my reading of American history, there's a great tradition of engagement in these issues. And if, for whatever reasons, the Muslim community hasn't been entirely involved, well, today, now is the time to really step up. Again, you know, I'm saying this from a distance, but I don't want, I as a Muslim, Muslim don't want to think of myself as particularly special and deserving of some kind of rights when other people actually have to fight for those rights.
If we need to fight, then fight in a peaceful manner, obviously. Your book, Letters to a Young Muslim, is written to perhaps one of your sons, perhaps both of your sons. You could have written such a book for almost any audience.
Why did you think it was important to write the book to a young person? Well, I'll tell you. because the book was written mainly I'd say to my 15 year old self and many of the questions that are in the work I'm addressing I'm addressing the concerns that I had as a child My children will say to me, you know, Baba, you're very old, you're 45, so on.
And I say, well, you know, I'm actually stuck at the age of 12 because that's essentially where I started questioning the world around me. And many of these questions remained with me. And so one of the reasons why I thought it was important to write it is that if I, after, you know, 30, 33 years of kind of thinking about these issues, didn't manage to come to any immediate answer straight away, it took a long, long time, then I would like...
like to do the service of providing a kind of a basic framework for some kids in today's age, where things are moving much faster, there are much greater pressures on them than there were when I was 15, that this would perhaps be kind of a resource for them to hold on to and say, okay, well, some other people have gone through this. Here are the words that I can put on the feelings that I'm going through. Here are some labels for some of the issues that I face. And here's a kind of a...
analysis that may help. You know, I'm hoping that many people will read the book and disagree and say, well, actually, this is what I felt. But at least it kind of provides a basic skeleton of ideas that young Muslims can hang onto. I wanted to get the discussion away from the binary, oh, I'm a Muslim and I'm a good Muslim and I follow all the rules, or I'm a bad Muslim and I'm ashamed of myself and I'm going to hide. And that's what I hope I've done here.
Well, partly due to your personal background and partly due to your career, you are wonderfully multilingual, and I'm sure your family and your sons are as well. This book, an audience member notes, was composed and distributed in English and wonders if the book is available in Arabic, might become available in Arabic. Do you suppose the message would be in any way different if and when it appears in Arabic?
The book will appear in Arabic. I wrote... I wrote it in English, it's true.
And I will not change a word, actually. The idea that we should say one thing in one language and another thing in another language is, I mean, in diplomacy you have to do that. You have to do that very often. You have to soften things, and in particular when it's between the Russians and the Arabs, it's very interesting to see the different perceptions and how people sort of react.
to perceived insult. But this book I tried to write in a way that was polite enough to the people that I disagree with, with the idea that I'm inviting them to partake in a discussion. And in particular, I think you'll find that I have an issue with the clerics and the way they treat knowledge, the way they treat their power and authority. And what I'm saying to them is actually we may be able to, we may be able through certain mechanisms of discussion, will actually reach a greater moral. moral state.
We will have a more consistent kind of ethical base to what's happening in the Arab world. I hope that happens. I wonder that sometimes as well. I know that the scholar Tarek Ramadan At St. Anthony's College, Oxford has been writing important work about changes in Islam and the way Islam might work in the contemporary world, but many of his writings are in English as well.
and I was able to hear one of his lectures in Qatar and the lecture was given in English to a huge crowd and I just wondered what you make of the difference of presentation, the difference of meaning if this book, when this book comes out in Arabic. Well look I mean I... See, I would hope that people read it, and I would hope that there would be some kind of reaction.
And I'm assuming that there will be, amongst a certain class, there will be a negative reaction. There are a few words that I use that have this kind of... very powerful negative effect in the minds of certain scholars. Those words are kind of liberal values, the reference to liberal values, the reference to doubt, and the reference to philosophy. those three ideas immediately translate into atheism in the kind of traditional Islamic circles.
So if you talk about doubt, doubt is seen as a mechanism to make people turn to atheism. Whereas actually I think what's happening is that the inability of the scholars to relate to 21st century life and all of the complexities that our youth in the Arab world are facing, that is probably a greater reason for young Muslims to... turn away from Islam.
And I think actually, unfortunately, that's what's happening, is that there is this kind of binary, good Muslim, bad Muslim, in or out. And I was speaking to a very well-known scholar of Islam who also has a research institute, and he had done research on growing atheism in Egypt after Morsi's performance in the presidency. And that's something that we need to also investigate. What is it that's causing people to leave?
Islam. I mean actually we might find that those people have something very interesting to tell us about where the traditional scholars are failing us. Do you suppose that there's any part, a questioner asks, is there any part that non-Muslims could play in combating the militants and the extremist interpretations of Islam? Do you suppose this is a problem, a contest inside Islam, or is there something that could come from outside? I, you know, I always look to my own responsibility and the responsibility of the communities that I belong to.
It's very easy, well, to ask outsiders to contribute is to apportion them some of the responsibility. And I'm simply not interested in sort of engaging with that. I'm much more interested in if I have a certain amount of energy of speaking to my own community and thinking about the ways in which we can improve ourselves. So, you know, thanks for the offer. But, you know, I think we should do this ourselves for the most part.
A high school student in the audience is interested in studying world politics and becoming a diplomat. Do you have any advice for someone who wants to be the kind of diplomatic representative that you've been able to be? I became a diplomat accidentally against my will. And I do many things against my will. against kind of the tradition of diplomacy.
So if you want to be a diplomat with an interesting life and some moderate success, represent a small country and don't follow the rules. I think that's probably the best advice I can give. But do you suppose, so we are in a moment when information can be transferred around the world in an instance.
Do you suppose diplomats still play an important role? I will ask you to defend your income at this point. Absolutely, because if you've noticed in the last few days, we've discovered that full.
False information can be transferred across the world and instantaneously too. So, yeah, sometimes the individual diplomat working on the ground, actually speaking to the person who is being described in the world press, it does have an effect. In Russia in particular, do you find that Russia seems to be well aware of what's going on in the rest of the world, or do you find Russia going off on its own trajectory? I agree.
You'd be surprised how well informed they are. They have a remarkably deep understanding of the way capitalism operates as well. And I think that must have something to do with the materialist upbringing back to the Soviet Union. Now that they've sort of removed ideology, they can see... things for what they are.
They're exceptionally well informed and you may not like this but I actually think they're remarkably restrained in their reactions and I remember asking one of the top writers in the room, I don't know if you've heard of him, he's a great writer, he's a great Russians, you know, how do you deal with all of this criticism that's coming at you from the Western press? And he said, oh, but this has been happening for 200 years. We know that this is the function we play in global politics.
So I'm like, great. You've got thick skin. Yeah. But the United Arab Emirates, you were in the United States. You were modest in your description of your own country.
The United Arab Emirates has resources to use, has influence to use in world affairs. What role do you think the United Arab Emirates can play in the contemporary world? Well, I think in the Middle East, I think there are a few countries, and the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, is one of them that is an example of what you can do with the basic components of Arab and Islamic societies, which is, you know, we... We have the traditional kind of rhetoric of Islam.
We have natural resources. We have sort of desert countryside. And we have tribes.
And yet we've managed to do something quite wonderful with our set of factors. We expect that, you know, we look at a country like Libya and we think you've got exactly, you had exactly the same kind of components. And you could have built a society that actually was a little...
more coherent. And so what we try to do is we try to demonstrate by example or lead by example. We would hope that some of what we do is kind of taken up by some of our Arab neighbors. There is a deep pessimism across the Arab world in both politics and religion suggesting that there is absolutely no way forward. The Emirates and some of our neighboring states as well have demonstrated that there is a way in which Arab societies can govern themselves.
themselves productively and with a certain amount of justice. And it's all a work in progress. The country is still very young. But in a sense, that's no excuse. We have access to all of the best information and kind of technologies in the world.
By technology, I mean very broadly political technologies as well as kind of social programs that we could use, and we are trying to implement them. Your neighbor, Saudi Arabia, has exercised some of its influence in world peace. politics through religious means, by spreading education, by spreading preaching, by opening up the pilgrimage to different countries around the world.
Does the Emirates exercise a blend of religion and diplomacy as it exercises influence in world affairs? No, I don't think so. Saudi Arabia has a particular responsibility, being the origin.
of Islam and being the protector of the two holy shrines. So in that sense, Saudi Arabia has a completely different set of obligations. The Emirates, I think what we're trying to do is we're trying to project a certain kind of, well, I mean, essentially we're trying to project our own society across the region.
Our relationship with Egypt is particularly important. Our support of the traditional institutions of Sudanese. Islam, which are slowly but surely liberalizing and opening up to all kinds of knowledge. And as a university, it's exceptionally important for us. Our relationship also with Morocco and Morocco's approach to traditional values and cultural values is also important.
So in that sense, I think we're doing stuff. We are also working quite hard on fighting extremism. We have a couple of centers in the Emirates where we deal with both anti-extremist messaging, and also where we work with radicals to de-radicalize them to the extent that we can.
The Saudis have been experimenting with that as well. Could you say just a couple of more words about some way in which those institutes have been combating extremism? Yeah, I can't really speak very much about the Saudi experience, other than to say that, from what I understand, it requires, there's this idea of reintegration.
radicals into Saudi society. So they are exposed to lectures and a certain kind of theology. And it's a kind of an argument-based approach. I think, again, these are all experiments. Nobody has figured out how to de-radicalize people.
So it's very difficult. Hopefully, what they'll do is they'll gather experience and be able to spread some of that knowledge. I personally think that the idea of...
It's so difficult to... bring somebody back after they've experienced the rush of the adrenaline of being God's warrior. And I think that maybe if we introduced a few more disciplines into the analysis, so if we thought of radicalization in the same way that we think of addictions, sort of drugs and gambling and alcohol, then maybe we might be able to see how to moderate some of that.
Thank you very much. Our guest has been Ambassador. Omar Saif Ghobash, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to Russia. We're delighted that you joined us this evening.
Thanks very much. Thank you.