Teaches Plato in Palestine
Fraenkel, Carlos
CAN PHILOSOPHY save the Middle East? This, I learn from a friend upon arriving in Israel in February of 2006, is the thesis of Sari Nusseibeh, not only a prominent Palestinian intellectual and...
...It is, however, central for understanding the interpretation of Islam and Judaism as philosophical religions...
...One street I lived on is Rehov ben Maimon, named after Maimonides, whom many consider to be the greatest Jewish philosopher...
...To be sure, the truth is one...
...It is interesting to note in this context that Nusseibeh himself taught Islamic philosophy at the Hebrew University in 1979-1980...
...And there are many intermediate positions, one of which we take up in class: the integration of religion into a rationalist framework...
...The controversy reached a climax after Nusseibeh claimed in an article ("What Next...
...To begin with, though, the dialogue doesn't have to be with the West...
...THE CONTROVERSY about Nusseibeh's commitment to speaking with the "enemy" is old...
...This position underlies a further joint effort: the proposal for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that he signed in 2003 with Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet...
...There's Israel's occupation to worry about, and there are plenty of despots in the region who need to be chased away...
...it is also one of God's names...
...After being an undergraduate at Oxford, Lucy converted to Islam, married Nusseibeh, and turned into a leading activist for peace and nonviolence in Palestine...
...For now, the more basic problems of life have put on hold the dissemination of wisdom...
...After a couple of sentences, Nusseibeh interrupts me, asks critical questions, presents arguments for the contrary position...
...WITH LEBANON (and, well, Iraq), Palestine comes closest to a democracy in today's Arab world...
...In the instructions he left to a student about which philosophical works are worth studying, he does not recommend a single Jewish author...
...There was plenty of confusion about what is right and wrong in Socrates's time...
...Then a second taxi takes us to the university...
...Promoting collaboration with Israeli universities is important to him...
...I choose to live in Rehavia, one of the oldest quarters in Jewish Jerusalem, known as the quarter of the professors, because many European academics and intellectuals (Martin Buber, Shlomo Pines, Gershom Scholem, among others) originally settled here—scholars "with a worldwide reputation," as Amos Oz recalls his father whispering into his ear every time they spotted one on their walks through the neighborhood: "I thought that having a worldwide reputation was somehow related to having weak legs," writes Oz, "because the person in question was often an elderly man who felt his way with a stick and stumbled as he walked along...
...For al-Farabi there is no conflict between the two...
...But what about Buddhism, for example...
...The students recognize the affinity between Socrates' ideal of a life based on knowledge and Plato's description of the just person as one ruled by reason...
...In order to give a home to philosophy in the Islamic world, one important task was, of course, to clarify its relationship to religion...
...This seems, in fact, to be the implication of al-Farabi's argument...
...If, for Socrates, being just depends on knowledge of justice, Plato now raises a more fundamental concern: do we have good reasons to choose justice over injustice...
...According to the interpretation we agree on, justice consists in two things: the ability to determine rationally what is best for you and the ability to implement it...
...To a student's question, why not rely on the notion of justice transmitted by religion, I reply by asking how one can make sure that this notion is correct without examining it...
...When, on the other hand, he speaks of "al-haqq" (truth) as the criterion for accepting what is written in the books of the philosophers, they automatically identify it with Islam, but without at first seeing the twist that, for Averroes, Islamic views are true because they correspond to philosophically demonstrated propositions...
...Without sophrosyne these will oppose the instructions of reason and in the end gain control...
...But the personal encounter may well be the beginning of such a process by calling the stereotypes into question...
...So far so good...
...But these students cannot even get to Jerusalem or Gaza...
...Maimonides did the same for Judaism —a religion founded, he argued, by philosopherprophets, which not only forms the moral character of those who live according to its laws, but also directs them to the intellectual love of God—to physics, the study of God's creation, and to metaphysics, the study of the Divine...
...With this the students agree...
...Hence, the Socratic question, what really is piety...
...The most important requirement that alFarabi's prophet must fulfill is intellectual perfection...
...This, she told me, led her to philosophy...
...1328...
...soldiers, tanks, and warplanes...
...As a Socratic, you only want to make sure that your teacher or preacher got DISSENT / Spring 2007 35 it right when he explained to you the meaning of piety, justice, and other such things...
...During our first meeting, Nusseibeh explains to me how he thinks the concept should be applied in the region...
...It consists not only of reason but also of irrational emotions and desires...
...She is the daughter of the Oxford philosopher John L. Austin, author of one of the classics of analytical philosophy, How to Do Things with Words...
...The next thing" he tells me, "is that they will put me on trial...
...The streets in Rehavia are named after prominent Jewish scholars of another time and place: medieval thinkers whose intellectual world was decisively shaped by Islamic civilization...
...Dissolving them requires something like Socratic examination...
...for reasons that I think are contingent, it originated in Greece...
...One suggestion I make in the introductory class is that the West and the Muslim world have enough shared traditions to conduct an open discussion...
...But note that this is not about opposing knowledge to religious tradition...
...Whereas the philosopher knows what justice is, the stories make the concept concrete by telling about exemplary just gods or human beings...
...In this way they convey a less accurate but still useful notion of justice to nonphilosophers...
...THE FIRST TEXT we look at is Plato's Apology, discussing Socrates' claim that "it is the greatest good for man to talk about virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me testing myself and others...
...Of course, the suspension of stereotypes and prejudices is not enough...
...I ask...
...Ideally I would like to see the students travel and discover the world for themselves," Nusseibeh tells me, "spend a month in Florence, learning Italian, visiting art galleries and monuments, and reading Italian literature...
...for the unexamined life is not worth living...
...In the end the Parliament comes together, the class is cancelled...
...The key is knowledge and how to make use of it...
...Because the students did not distinguish between al-Farabi's position, which he was defending for the sake of argument, and his own position, he was perceived as trying to promote a heretical concept of prophecy...
...The philosophers, on the other hand, would only at first be educated according to this program...
...Because it is the most symbolic time for attacks, control is correspondingly tight...
...Administering al-Quds under the present circumstances is a permanent exercise in practical reasoning: "Nothing is predictable," he says...
...Maimonides wrote his philosophical works in Arabic, the idiom of science and philosophy of his time...
...God's absolute unity excludes any change in God...
...DURING THE MEETING (and also later in class) the prayer beads of a sibhah run through his fingers, not, I think, because he's reciting al-Asma al-Husna (the "Beautiful Names," that is, the ninety-nine names of God...
...My idea is to discuss Plato's political thought with the students and then look at how medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophers built an interpretation of Islam and Judaism as philosophical religions on Plato...
...Al-Razi, who refers to Socrates as "my Imam" in his philosophical autobiography, rejected the authority of revealed religion almost a thousand years before Voltaire, arguing that God provided all human beings with reason sufficient to guide them in life, and so there's no need for additional guidance by prophets...
...It looks more like a way to relieve tension, like the cigarettes that he smokes one after another...
...On one occasion, he tells me how he persuaded his British wife, Lucy, to move with him to East Jerusalem...
...How many exchange and scholarship programs between Western and Arab schools and universities could have been established...
...I suggest that in Socrates' view living a virtuous life depends on grounding one's life on knowledge...
...But instead of engaging Averroes, they take him to be talking about something other than Islam...
...Her father worked full time, and when she was three months old, her mother went back to work as a flight attendant...
...DISSENT / Spring 2007 39...
...A religious Muslim feels the need to justify the life he or she chooses and to explain why it is superior to that of others...
...For the medieval philosophers could apply Plato's model to their religious tradition by interpreting the stories and laws of the Torah or the Koran as a pedagogical-political program that philosopher-prophets had worked out to guide the nonphilosophers in their religious communities...
...Socrates' idea of a good time sounds as strange to my Palestinian students as it does to my students in Montreal...
...Its main intellectual centers were Baghdad, the residence of the Abbasid caliphs, and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain...
...a meeting at Nusseibeh's office...
...A few days later an article appeared in the student journal accusing him of introducing "a new prophet at Birzeit...
...Rehavia scholars with weak legs and worldwide reputations would run into difficulties here, I'm afraid...
...During the discussion, one student in a sense turns the question around: "How can a secular citizen of a liberal Western democracy live an examined life...
...Only philosophy" the friend quotes him as saying at the Shlomo Pines memorial lecture he gave in West Jerusalem three years before...
...A day before my departure, I call Nusseibeh to discuss the final grades of the students...
...Most of the time, the class discussions are lively and focused...
...They realize then that anyone who fulfills a certain set of conditions could have written the Koran...
...The beating took place on the campus of Birzeit University near Ramallah, where he was a professor of philosophy at the time—after a lecture he gave on liberalism and tolerance...
...I am not talking about one civilization "educating" another...
...She became fluent in Arabic, called her nanny "mother," and spent much of her childhood with the nanny's family...
...Although I'm less optimistic than Nusseibeh about what philosophy can do, I'm looking forward to discussing the texts with the students...
...In fact, he has a theory that allows for a 38 DISSENT / Spring 2007 form of religious pluralism, though one quite different from those advocated today...
...the solution of the conflict seemed possible—it was actually about to happen...
...The excited media display blood, missiles, and body parts...
...32 DISSENT / Spring 2007 Like Averroes, his equally famous Muslim colleague, Maimonides was born in twelfth-century Cordoba, which two centuries before had been the most sophisticated place in Europe...
...He sounds depressed...
...This, moreover, was not the project of some isolated intellectuals...
...With Averroes and Maimonides, we finally come to the application of al-Farabi's model to the interpretation of Islam and Judaism as philosophical religions...
...The secretary calls me back...
...Are they able to do so because as rational beings they can understand and evaluate an argument without regard to the background of the one who makes it...
...It was al-Farabi who first articulated this idea in the context of Islam...
...Averroes interpreted Islam as a philosophical religion...
...The Republic brings a host of questions...
...Six months later, when I return to Montreal, I'm almost convinced that he's right...
...they would later replace its content with scientific knowledge that in turn can be defended by an allegorical interpretation of DISSENT / Spring 2007 37 the religious texts...
...For if religion on one level is an imitation of philosophy, there is no reason why a set of true philosophical doctrines cannot be represented by parables and metaphors...
...1138), whose "treatises are all good for the person who understands...
...34 DISSENT / Spring 2007 Nusseibeh likes to challenge the students' intellectual habits...
...that "all rational people" in the region must admit that peace can only be achieved under three conditions: that Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, that PalestinDISSENT / Spring 2007 33 ians give up the right to return to Israel, and that both sides agree on a shared government of Jerusalem...
...It's a radical question in an Islamic context (or a Jewish or Christian one for that matter...
...for example, that there is an absolute limit to human understanding or that God can hear although God has no ears...
...The students have no major objections to looking at the literal content of Judaism and Christianity as imitations of the truth, because Islam takes both to be based on valid (if superseded) revelations...
...But in many ways they are like all students I've known: some excel, some do well, some do poorly...
...at Harvard with a thesis on the metaphysics of the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna...
...The ummi issue gets us into a lively discussion...
...If Buddha was an accomplished philosopher and poet, there's no reason, on alFarabi's grounds, to say that Buddhism is not a religion that, like Islam, contains the truth, but imitates it in a different way...
...No doubt, in this respect, things have changed for the worse since the Middle Ages...
...All of my students take care not to stray from the straight path...
...you need sophrosyne, that is, self-control in addition to wisdom...
...After completing my Ph.D., I left Jerusalem in 2000, shortly before Arafat, Barak, and Clinton met at Camp David...
...A week before I leave, Nusseibeh tells me about the declaration of the Palestinian Union of University Teachers that he should be dismissed from al-Quds for "normalizing ties with Israel" and "serving Israeli propaganda interests...
...But most of all, I'm curious to see the reactions of the Palestinian students...
...The administration of the university is not a light burden...
...In this sense Jews and Muslims could not only speak to each other as philosophers, but could also accept each other's different religious commitments...
...Of course, democracy doesn't depend only on sharing knowledge...
...He remains silent while his son Absal and Huda Imam, the director of the Center for Jerusalem Studies, relate in detail how, on the way back to Jerusalem from a poetry reading in Ramallah, they were interrogated for hours by Israeli soldiers...
...They inspect the classroom before he comes in and wait outside until the class is over...
...Hence they often argue that "according to Islam" this or that is the case...
...To set up my first meeting with Nusseibeh, I call his secretary, who informs me that he's in a meeting and gives me the number of his assistant, who likewise informs me that he's in a meeting, and gives me the number of another assistant, who again informs me that he's in a meeting...
...Does philosophy provide a language through which people can communicate even if they do not accept each other's religious commitments...
...the problem is that Israel doesn't let the students cross the border...
...WE MUST, THEREFORE, clarify what justice actually means for Plato...
...The discussion goes on along these lines for a while...
...Saying in public that reason demands that the land be shared made Nusseibeh (whose mother's family lost everything in the 1948 war) a traitor in the eyes of many Palestinians...
...It was an impressive achievement: one civilization appropriated the knowledge of another and turned it into the basis of a vibrant intellectual culture of its own...
...It's only ten minutes away from the center of East Jerusalem, but now one has to take two taxis to get there: the first takes you to al-jidar, the controversial wall Israel is building, a massive piece of which, about five meters high, suddenly grows out of the street...
...Back then there was real optimism...
...Later they recognize 36 DISSENT / Spring 2007 similarities between the government of Plato's best state and theocratic institutions in Iran such as the Supreme Leader, the Council of Guardians, and the Assembly of Experts...
...Simplifying a bit, one could say that these are the two sides of alFarabi's religion: knowledge and education...
...He wants to get them thinking, not just writing down Dr...
...One purpose of my stay here is to teach a seminar at al-Quds University, the Palestinian university in Jerusalem, together with Nusseibeh, who has been the president of alQuds since 1995...
...In reaction to the boycott of Israeli academic institutions declared by the British Association of University Teachers in 2005, Nusseibeh signed a joint statement with Menachem Magidor, the president of The Hebrew University, in which they "insist on continuing to work together in the pursuit of knowledge...
...More than half of the students miss the class after Israel's independence day...
...Continuing to smoke cigarettes even though you know they cause lung cancer is an example...
...From the eighth century to the tenth, excellent translations were made of Greek scientific and philosophical texts...
...I hope to raise some basic questions about philosophy and its relationship to politics and religion and also to open a new perspective on the contemporary Middle East...
...We wait for a moment until a group coming from there has safely made it...
...Fraenkel's words of wisdom, and there's no better way to achieve that than by having two professors disagree in the classroom...
...Most eloquently this comes out in the title "the second teacher" (the first being Aristotle...
...Al-haqq" means "the truth" in Arabic...
...solemn faces making solemn statements...
...My first class is to take place on the same Saturday as the first session of the new Palestinian Parliament in which Hamas has an absolute majority (for Israel and the West a most unwelcome surprise of what was for once a democratic decision...
...This program includes, for example, religious stories and laws...
...To illustrate what may have led someone like Socrates to question traditional moral notions, I tell how a friend described the beginning of her philosophical quest...
...ON THE WAY BACK to Jerusalem, Nusseibeh tells me that he ran into real problems when he taught al-Farabi in the 1980s as a professor of philosophy at Birzeit University...
...CARLOS FRAENKEL teaches in the Departments of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at McGill University, Montreal, where he also developed an interdisciplinary program that looks at how Greek philosophy interacted with the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious traditions...
...But there's a problem that the students become aware of after a while...
...925) to that of Ibn Taimiyya (d...
...Thus, a funeral ritual considered pious in Greece was considered an abomination in India and vice versa...
...In the end, distrust prevailed...
...Sometimes, out of curiosity, the students ask me personal questions...
...Among the more absurd rumors I hear on campus is that he only continues in office because the Israeli Security Service, the Shin Bet, protects him...
...asks one of the students...
...She was born into a Jewish family in Jerusalem...
...He thus puts considerable effort into developing a pedagogical-political program as a replacement of philosophy for those who are either not yet philosophers or who are not philosophers by nature...
...Getting to the campus at Abu Dis, a suburb of East Jerusalem, turns out to be a challenge in itself...
...But isn't the fact that they were able to locate the same philosophical-scientific worldview in both Islam and Judaism a kind of indirect proof of it...
...next, my bag is examined and I am given an electronic bodycheck...
...The intellectual configurations of both were mainly shaped by the encounter of monotheistic religion and Greek philosophy and science...
...It's not the first attempt to get rid of him...
...Next we turn to the question of whether al-Farabi's concept of God would allow for miracles at all...
...Obviously, children, but also many adults, are in Plato's view unable to guide their lives consistently by knowledge...
...but neither my Jewish background nor my ties to Europe, Israel, and North America have a negative impact on our interaction, at least not that I can tell...
...They range from that of Abu Bakr al-Razi (d...
...that is, God cannot want to interrupt the course of nature now if God didn't want to do so before...
...He holds lots of meetings...
...it does not leave much time for philosophy...
...So he tries to bring the world to Abu Dis...
...it was a large-scale enterprise carried out under the patronage of the political, social, and economic elite of the Abbasid caliphate...
...Taken allegorically, true religion and true philosophy coincide...
...For anyone who is serious about democracy in the Middle East, isn't this the way to go...
...Faced with nonviolent Palestinian demonstrations, the majority of Israelis would soon recognize that there's no justification to continue the occupation...
...Nusseibeh and Lucy met at Oxford, where he did his undergraduate degree in philosophy, before going on to complete his Ph.D...
...I've never seen him without his bodyguards...
...This is an idea I also discuss with the five young men and three young women who have registered for the class...
...After class, Nusseibeh usually gives me a ride back from Abu Dis to Jerusalem...
...But to the extent that democracy means selfdetermination on the basis of informed choices, developing tools for choosing and sharing information about available options seems the right thing to do...
...But why didn't God just equip Muhammad with intellectual excellence instead of breaking the normal course of nature...
...In this sense, sophrosyne seems to be the key to the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only to break the vicious cycle of violence that holds the two sides captive but also to support the idea of nonviolent resistance...
...As an example I mention Herodotus's account about how the encounter of Greeks with other cultures led to the insight that the local customs informing traditional behavior were not universally valid...
...Intellectual resources within Islam allow it to engage in a debate with itself...
...But he hasn't given up on inquiring into God and Nature...
...At first, the students struggle to grasp that Averroes is actually setting forth an Islamic view...
...If al-Farabi is right that divine revelation means attaining complete knowledge, then indeed only a miracle can make an illiterate person into a prophet...
...The example of the Iraq War seems to make one thing clear: democracy can hardly be imposed by force from the outside...
...We talk about many things...
...Can you give me an example...
...At first view, much here seems adverse to a life of contemplation...
...At age fifty-seven, he says, "I do want to understand for myself how it all hangs together before the end...
...Now, in order to eat lunch at the Hebrew University, I have to pass a fourfold control: at the entrance to the university, a guard goes through the bus looking for suspicious passengers...
...What does Socrates mean by the "examined life," and why is it so important...
...Even Socrates' excitement about the afterlife stems from the opportunity it will offer to "examine" the great poets and heroes of the Greek past...
...You can discuss what exactly justice is, but not whether walking on "the straight path" (as the Koran puts it in the first Sura) is good for you...
...But I've found ways to integrate the two," he explains, "by analyzing philosophically the problems I encounter every day...
...crying families and angry bearded men...
...And "democracy" is what the students unanimously reply when I ask them about their view of the best constitution—before we get to the Republic...
...But it certainly was integrated into the culture of the region long before the tribes that settled in Europe were seriously exposed to it through Latin translations of Arabic texts...
...after I leave the bus, my passport is checked and the letter attesting that I'm a visiting scholar carefully read...
...Surely we would have reliable translations of Plato to work with...
...In fact, one of the two top students in the class is a member of the Hamas faction on campus...
...In order to act justly, for example, you must know what justice is...
...For the Palestinians this is a particularly painful experience of the imbalance of power...
...After some debate, most students agree that this seems no less valid now than it was at the time of Maimonides and Averroes...
...through teaching sophrosyne that permits us to translate the insights of reason into practice...
...Al-Farabi saw himself and was perceived by later philosophers, both Muslim and Jewish, as the one who renewed the intellectual project of Greek philosophy in the context of Islam...
...No doubt, there are many reasons to be suspicious about Plato's intellectual elitism— the radical division of humankind into philosophers and nonphilosophers...
...They seem also free of stereotypes...
...Surely many of the questions they ask and associations they have are different from those I'm used to at McGill...
...That's the challenge that keeps him going...
...But if he eternally willed a miracle to occur at this time," a student suggests, "then the miracle doesn't imply a change in his will...
...About five young security officers participate in the procedures...
...On the Palestinian side, this stance meets with little appreciation...
...One must," Maimonides claims, "listen to al-haqq from whoever says it...
...How many books could have been translated into Arabic from the hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States put into the Iraq War...
...The prophet provides philosophical instruction to the philosophers in his community and pedagogical-political guidance to its nonphilosophers...
...how is this compatible with the claim that Muhammad is ummi—a term normally rendered as "illiterate" and taken as a proof for the divine origin of the Koran: for how could an illiterate person have been the composer of such a sublime book if not through a miracle of God, becoming as it were the channel for what the angel Gabriel dictated...
...I think the reason for this is that, although stereotypes and prejudices are probably not dissolved, they are at least suspended once we get to the level of personal dialogue...
...finally, the bag is examined again at the entrance to the student restaurant...
...Plato was much less optimistic (after all, Socrates was put to death for trying...
...950) who "excelled in wisdom," for example, or Ibn Bajja (d...
...Growing up between two narratives that contradict each other led to confusion, and confusion led to the wish to find out for herself what is right and wrong...
...In other words, rejecting a proposition of an ancient philosopher in the name of Islam means to reject it because it is philosophically flawed...
...The masked aggressors belonged to his own political party, the Fatah faction of the PLO...
...The same young woman admits that she would choose injustice over justice once we have clarified Plato's thought experiment, according to which the just person is poor, sick, and ugly and the unjust not only rich, healthy, and beautiful, but also exempt from punishment...
...for he takes the prophet, the founder of religion, to be not only the leader of the community but also a philosopher— in other words, something quite close to Plato's philosopher-king...
...But it pays to be persistent...
...Since then, he tells me, he has never entirely rid himself of the odium of a heretic...
...She was often absent for days, so my friend grew up with a Muslim Palestinian nanny...
...If things would work just fine I'd be happy to go back to a life of contemplation...
...Yet they see how difficult it is to defend the choice of justice for its own sake...
...we arrange (what else...
...Ibn Taimiyya, at the other end of the spectrum, rejected not only certain philosophical positions as incompatible with religion, but attacked even the use of logic as a Greek adulteration of pure Islam...
...Whereas the philosopher's actions are guided by the knowledge of what is good, the laws also prescribe good actions to nonphilosophers...
...Of course he does not praise them because they are Muslims, but because they are good philosophers...
...Maimonides and Averroes received the same philosophical-scientific education and became the last two major representatives of the Arabic rationalist tradition in medieval Spain...
...It makes him a bit jealous when I tell him that I'm sometimes bored with too much contemplation in peaceful Montreal...
...but there can be many imitations, some of which may be as good as others...
...On another occasion, we talk about education and democracy...
...If someone proposes a definition of an animal species, explains the meaning of justice, or works out a proof for God's existence, what matters is not whether he is Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or anything else, but whether what he says is true...
...Although al-Farabi speaks of prophetic religion, he never quite explicitly speaks of Islam...
...For the former you need wisdom, for the latter, however, wisdom is not enough...
...After the Greeks, in particular Aristotle and his commentators, the philosophers he praises are all Muslims: alFarabi (d...
...As a consequence, she experienced the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians from both perspectives: the often humiliating treatment of Arabs in Israel, for example, or the pain and anger when one of her aunts was killed in a bus by a suicide bomber...
...I wonder, though, if the permanent state of collision, affecting all aspects of life, must not at some point ignite philosophical reflection...
...And isn't it obvious that nonviolence would secure the entire world's sympathy for the Palestinian cause...
...Unfortunately, the available Arabic translations of Plato are based on a nineteenthcentury English version, itself more a paraphrase than an accurate rendering, which the translators sometimes painfully butcher...
...Averroes would reject either proposition...
...It's mostly a question of going beyond the monolithic interpretation proposed by Islamic fundamentalists in order to rediscover the wide variety of positions that were defended in the history of Islamic thought...
...Citizens in the West, on the other hand, neither experience confusion nor the need to seek, like Socrates, for objective standards as long as they take freedom to mean that each individual chooses how to live according to his or her personal preferences and assume that all choices are of equal value...
...through Socratic examination that probes the fundamental notions informing our life...
...During a break one of the young women shows pictures in class, some of which I and the other men are not allowed to see because she appears on them without the veil...
...They point out the similarity to a genre of apologetic literature widespread in the Islamic world today: books that through interpretation locate modern scientific insights in verses of the Koran...
...To be sure, philosophy did not originate in the Middle East...
...In 1987, he was severely beaten up after helping to arrange the first meeting between PLO members and members of Israel's right-wing Likud...
...When it's our turn, I'm warned to be careful...
...Taken literally, however, religion is an "imitation of philosophy" During our first class on al-Farabi, the students ask me how they are doing in comparison with my Montreal students...
...After the Greeks, the next significant period in the history of philosophy and science thus unfolded within Islamic civilization...
...The gap between the Islam they know and this philosophical interpretation turns out to be quite difficult to bridge...
...During the semester several top scholars and artists visit to give lectures, such as Joseph Raz, a leading philosopher of law, and director Peter Brook, who brings in his troupe from the Bouffes du Nord theater in Paris to stage a South African play— half comedy, half tragedy—about life under apartheid...
...Al-Quds University is on strike because salaries have not been paid...
...buildings in ruins and damaged cars...
...Another is the inability to conquer your anger in the face of an aggressor, even though you know that not hitting back would serve your interests better...
...Al-Quds also has a campus in the Old City...
...We go through some standard examples from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where things were done that the agents claimed to be just and religiously motivated but whose justice is obviously doubtful...
...At my last visit, more than three years ago, only one old man briefly looked at the bag and asked, "Are you armed...
...As disagreements among Aristotle's disciples show, philosophers can also make mistakes...
...Although I have neither a stick nor a worldwide reputation, I'm again renting an apartment here, after having already spent three years in the neighborhood as a graduate student...
...Despite Nusseibeh's silence, the complaints about the behavior of Israeli soldiers at roadblocks are a recurring theme throughout my stay...
...When they learn about Plato's contempt for democracy, they are at first surprised, not unlike my students in Montreal...
...Socrates was enthusiastic about converting all citizens of Athens into philosophers who grounded their lives on knowledge...
...But even if the Middle East is not yet ready to be saved, philosophy has an important contribution to make—through rational arguments that can be understood and evaluated without regard to religious or national commitments...
...An employee who works in the university's administration shows me how to climb over the wall of the neighboring garden to the other side of al-jidar...
...For Plato the human soul is a fairly complicated thing...
...The students are confused— precisely the effect for which he's aiming...
...For example the theory of relativity," one of the students answers...
...This, I learn from a friend upon arriving in Israel in February of 2006, is the thesis of Sari Nusseibeh, not only a prominent Palestinian intellectual and the Palestinian Liberation Organization's former chief representative in Jerusalem, but by training a philosopher (and, I think, by nature, too...
...Although most of the students accept the idea that it is important to examine religious notions in a Socratic manner, their commitment to the truth of Islam leaves no room for confusion...
...At our first class meeting I don't get very far with my prepared introduction...
...Not even those who reject the claim that philosophy is universal can denounce this as "Eurocentric...
...I expect the issues to resonate quite differently with them than they do with my students in Montreal...
...WHEN I LEAVE Israel, the region is once again a war zone...
...Neither Averroes nor Maimonides openly subscribes to al-Farabi's religious pluralism...
Vol. 54 • April 2007 • No. 2
