The Islamic Enlightenment

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1:11To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. Hey there, welcome to the podcast. It's John here. It's Dawky Book Festival season, so we're going to be bringing you some special episodes recorded there over the weekend. And this one is particularly timely. In light of what looks like war breaking out between Israel and Iran, Mac talks to author and historian Christopher the Balag about modern-day Iran and the Islamic Enlightenment, the social movements, reforms and revolutions that transfigured the Middle East from the early 19th century to the present day.

1:54While the Muslim world has often been accused of a failure to modernise and adapt, Christopher de Belang charts the forgotten story of the Islamic Enlightenment, where modern ideals and practices were embraced across the region, including the adoption of modern medicine, the emergence of women from Purda, and the development of democracy. This is a fascinating conversation about our understanding of Islam and its relationship with the West. Have a listen. Christopher de Beleng

2:30Christopher I really mean it the book is exceptional and we're going to talk about that we're going to get into the book very very quickly but I want now first you speak Persian you know Iran extremely well you have relations in Iran give me your take on what's going on last night I'm not a big drinker but last night when I had digested the latest news from Iran. I went back to my hotel and I had a pint of your wonderful Smithicks and a chaser, a double green spot. I don't often do that, but I needed something to to steady my nerves. I lived in Iran for many years in the early 2000s. I'm married to an Iranian.

3:20My mother-in-law is in Tehran now, along with many friends, acquaintances, people I know. We are in touch with them. They are remarkably strong, remarkably resilient. They are caught between the proverbial devil and the deep blue sea. But I'm also a journalist and a historian, and so I will try and push aside my feelings on the subject and try and provide a little bit of clarity. Iran had many chances This Islamic Republic had many chances To reform and to embrace What we might call international norms The vast majority of Iranians have wished that to happen But a small number of people in power Saw it as their duty but also saw advantage in perpetuating the harshest and the hardest aspects of the revolution.

4:38And what we see now is a battle between that very tiny minority growing ever tinier as they hemorrhage support at home and an equally vile aggressor who is aggressing Iran, not because Iran has a nuclear weapon, not because it is about to have a nuclear weapon. Iran is actually quite a long way from a nuclear weapon. But for the furtherance of, I believe, mostly domestic political agenda. So, overnight, the Israeli attacks, And I'm going to be talking almost entirely about the Israeli attacks because we should not imagine for one moment that what the Iranians are capable of doing after 25 years of the most punitive sanctions in the world, militarily, is anything comparable to what the Israelis have.

5:38What we have in military terms is a David and Goliath situation. And yes, the Iranians do send missiles into Tel Aviv. They attack using drones, but the vast majority of this ordinance is stopped before it lands. So there are casualties, highly regrettable casualties, but compared to what's happening in Iran, this is nothing. So I'm going to talk mostly about what's happening in Iran. Overnight, the Israelis intensified their attacks, which had been restricted to extremely sophisticated, highly impressive targeted assassinations of very important people in the Islamic Republic, including nuclear scientists.

6:22And they expanded them to start attacking fuel depots, oil installations, and other targets that are civilian in nature. And this indicates that the Israelis are not, as they say, simply interested in attacking military and nuclear infrastructure, but they're interested in paralyzing the country, bringing it to its knees, and perpetuating what they fondly believe will be a revolution that will work in their favor. These are all highly speculative postulations that I from with 25 years of experience I cannot predict how they will end except to say that I have a bad feeling at the pit of my stomach I think the Netanyahu has played Trump we've seen that before Trump came as the peacemaker he's now possibly going to find himself dragged into a regional war that he is ill-equipped to fight.

7:32If you look back at regime change in the past, regime change in the past was a disaster, but there was a plan. The plans never worked because the premise was false, but there was a plan. I don't see a plan now. This is like regime change in Iraq, for example. In Iraq, which I observed close quarters and I saw it dissolve and disintegrate. And Syria similarly. And Afghanistan. So the long game here, to the extent that there is one, I wrote a piece yesterday and it is really emblematic. No one has made this point before and it seems like a trivial point. But the American administration refers to their adversary, who is called Ayatollah Khamenei, a very bad man in my opinion, Ayatollah Khamenei.

8:20They just call him the Ayatollah. They can't get their heads around his name. There was a guy before him who launched the revolution, he was called Ayatollah Khomeini. So there is a slight similarity, like between Thompson and Timpson, but you'd expect the Iranians to kind of, or anyone, to get their heads around that and say, yeah, we realise there's a difference between Mr Thompson and Mr Timpson. But this American government that is the head of the most powerful, the greatest country in the history of humanity, cannot be bothered to understand the difference between the leader who is there now and the leader who was there before, which gives us a profound window into the way that this is being dealt with.

9:08Not to read your adversary, not to understand your adversary, not to understand his weak points and his strengths, not to think of him as a human being within a structure that itself is formed of other human beings but simply to impose your own blinkered and highly highly limited juvenile vision of the world is not going to lead us to a good place so essentially we have three protagonists we have mr khamenei we have mr netanyahu and we have mr trump and together we will all see how they resolve this situation it could go in many different directions and And predictions are for mugs. So I'm not going to even try.

9:54It's funny, when you were talking about Khomeini, I was just thinking how people pronounce Taoiseach here. It's quite interesting. You get all these foreign ministers coming and saying Taoiseach, Taoiseach. Anyway, let us talk about the Islamic Enlightenment, because I want to come back to Iran. And I want to come back to what's going on right now. But I want to take us back. So the basic proposition of the book is, was there an Islamic Enlightenment? was it like the European Enlightenment? When did it happen? Where did it happen? And why did it run aground? I suppose this is where we're trying to take this discussion.

10:29You open up the book in Cairo with the invasion of Napoleon's forces. So let's just start there. But before that, I want to just ask something, a personal question. What drove you to become personally involved in Turkey, in Iran, in the Middle East. You know as a young man where was this sort of conversion? It was born out of a desire to travel and also a conviction that being monolingual, operating in the English language is itself restrictive. It shuts windows and a desire to understand and communicate, primarily to communicate with other people. So when I left university, having studied what was then fondly known as Oriental languages, I went to India, and I worked as a journalist there.

11:26And then I fell into a job in Turkey. And eventually, I ended up moving from Turkey to Iran, which was then experiencing this extremely exciting phase of reform that could have led us to a very different position than the one we inhabit now. And I spent 14 years outside the United Kingdom and I was animated, as I said, by a desire to travel and a desire to communicate. And also, I am very tight with money. That's very honest. I'll see at the bar later, you'll be playing the first round, okay? and you see that green spot, it's really expensive, can have a double. And I quickly realized that if you arrive in a place and you're intending to stay there, you can do one of two things.

12:16You can employ a local to interpret for you, or you can get your head down, learn the language, make a fool of yourself, go into interviews, get laughed at, but eventually you'll know the language. And I chose the second option. and for me it was it's a very profound principle that has helped me enormously and so I have managed to pick up languages and if they're not perfect then they're good enough and it breaks down barriers it establishes a basis of respect and it establishes credibility and so as a journalist and then as an author as a historian simply as someone who roams around the place this has been extremely important.

13:00Now that could have happened in South America or it could have happened anywhere. It just so happened that happenstance directed me towards generally towards the Islamic world. And so my interest in the Islamic world deepened. And I started as a journalist to see or to pose the question, why is what I see now, what I see now? And the answer is invariably because of what happened then and so having as they say written in many cases the first draft of history following all the wars on terror going to afghanistan going to iraq dipping my toe into the arab spring all of these events around the region i decided to to go deeper and i remember a very precise moment when I always used to enjoy going to see French diplomats because as a foreign correspondent you you spend a lot of time with diplomats you spend a lot of time as much as you can with local people and local politicians and you basically get the outside view and the inside view and you you try and make sense of things and I always used to enjoy going to see French diplomats because they struck me as extremely rigorous they always learned the language of the country they were in, but they also had very strong opinions.

14:22Generally concerned with the superiority of French culture, cuisine, sex, everything. Yeah, all the good stuff. But also very stimulating. And on more than one occasion, I would be discussing some aspect of the development of a certain country or the inability of a certain country to reach the norms expected of it by the so-called international community. And my French diplomat would say, Mais vous savez, Monsieur de Belay. The problem here is that these people never had an enlightenment. And having spent some time cogitating over that, I started to think, well, that's an interesting idea. I wonder if it's true.

15:09And so I started to delve a little deeper. And I found that what my French diplomat friends regarded as an absence of an Enlightenment was something very different. It was something that didn't correspond to their idea of an Enlightenment. And also they were highly colored, their opinions were highly colored by what was happening in the French mainland with respect to immigrant communities and so the the conclusion that was drawn was that this vast more than a billion people had somehow been excluded from an indispensable rite of passage which was to have an enlightenment and everything to do with it the reformation that came before the renaissance that preceded that all of these rites of passage towards modernity towards civilization they'd somehow been excluded from or they'd willingly even worse they'd willingly excluded themselves from and this seemed to me to be an inadequate way of looking at history and so I started as I say to delve deeper and to find out a little what if there wasn't an enlightenment what there was and I found there was something that you could indeed called call an Islamic enlightenment which is a slightly a provocation to my French diplomatic friends but also something that I believe to be true.

16:32So the Enlightenment, just to put a little description, it's a combination of scientific inquiry, mathematical precision, changing tradition from modernity, talking about human rights, talking about democracies, etc., etc., that we broadly experienced, let's say, 1600-odd towards the beginning of this century. The book starts in Cairo in more or less 1800, year 1800. Let's start there. So 1798 is when Napoleon invades Egypt, an Ottoman province. Napoleon representative of the most forward-looking, radical, dynamic civilization in the world. Egypt, fairly representative of what had become a deeply atrophied, deeply undynamic, hidebound, tradition-based society and polity.

17:31And in brackets, I want to say that this Islamic enlightenment that we're going to discuss stems in many senses. And for those protagonists who were involved in it, their champions, the people who populate my pages, for many of them, the roots of the Islamic enlightenment go back to an earlier manifestation of Islamic culture when Islamic culture was indeed the progenitor of all the great ideas. So just have a little think about the 200 years or so when Abbasid Baghdad was the center of the world, the navel of the world. Byzantine scholars were arriving from Constantinople complaining about the stifling orthodoxy of the Byzantine mind.

18:11Sanskrit ideas were arriving from India. And this great military machine and civilizational machine was expanding all the way to china all the way to um north africa and south as well and so we have a moment where rationalism inquiry philosophy is spreading its fruits across all areas of society whether that be artistic intellectual uh universities everything it's a fantastic time to be alive and a very very exciting one so fast forward to egypt 1798 and you have al azar the greatest theological college in the islamic world is like a it's like an impoverished version of do the boys hall it's just so hidebound and so concerned with tradition so unable to change the way that people think.

19:12And you can sum this up by the, there's a word called ijtihad in Arabic, which means the dynamic interpretation of Islamic law, essentially according to the time. Briefly, what happened between the time that the Islamic mathematicians are playing with algebra as titled. We are dealing with Roman numerals. They are miles ahead of us in philosophy and science, etc. We're talking 11th, 12th century. What happens in those two centuries preceding Napoleon to shut everything down? This is going to telescope a lot into a couple of sentences. But essentially what happened is that there was a fragmentation in the Islamic world.

20:00There was the Mongol invasions which laid waste to a great many cities, achievements, ideas There was a rise of Islamic movements from Arabia that were concerned Said what's the problem with our society now? And they started to say well the thing we've lost we have to go back to the time of the prophet And going back to the time of the prophet is what it says on the tin So novelty, change, all of that has to go. Innovation, all that's gone. All that has to go. All that has to go, back to the purity. So this is the position we are in 1790. And then Napoleon arrives in with this extraordinary revolution of fraternity, of liberty, of equality, of democracy, of a massively radical shift for Europeans, let alone for the Arab world.

20:54And he arrives in and what happens? So reform movements or processes of national regeneration don't happen in times of serenity. They happen in an emergency. So this is an emergency. And this emergency of European imperialism knocking on the door saying, you have things that we want and we're quite happy to obliterate you in the process is something that spurs people to action. So this is the reaction that Napoleon and the expansion of European imperialism provokes across the Islamic world. Essentially, what you have is a venerable tradition, a venerable civilization, very knowledgeable about what it was in the past, now being shown up by the Europeans as impossibly opposed to innovation.

21:44And so what happens is these initial first contacts and you see that in Cairo, you see it militarily first. My god, we've just been destroyed by something called an infantry square. Should we find out what that is? Because all we're doing, we're still flying across the plains on these fast little ponies, carrying scimitars and muskets that we can barely fire. So let's find out what this... And the French arrived with high precision. High precision and the latest state-of-the-art equipment and also tactics. And so the Battle of the Pyramids, which is the kind of set piece immortalized by many French artists, shows the pyramids in the background and these picturesque Mamluk horsemen being blown away by the disciplined French infantry.

22:34So this is the first thing that starts people thinking. And then Napoleon sets up an administration. he has brought some of the most brilliant minds of the late 19th century, mostly 25, between 25 and 35-year-old young guys, scientists, philologists, lexicologists, doctors, medical doctors, archaeologists, and he basically lets them loose, and they produce these volumes called The Description of Egypt. And the description of Egypt describes Egyptian greatness in the past, and it describes Egyptian torpor at the moment. So you have this classifying mind, this archivist's mind, and all of this rubs up against the Egypt of the time, and people start to think.

23:25So this is maternity versus tradition. That's where we are. And again, this country's gone through this. All countries go through it. But in the Islamic world, it's very sudden. It's very rapid and the contrast is unbelievably stark. Unbelievable. So how does Egyptian society change? I then want to go on to, because the book takes three major cities, Cairo, Istanbul or Constantinople, and then back to Tehran. So let's go briefly. How did the Egyptians change? What happens in Istanbul? What happens in Tehran? And where do we end up late 19th century? There are commonalities between all three places.

24:02And the reason I chose these places is that they proved to be the catalyzing territories in the Islamic world, the territories to which the rest of the Islamic world looks. And so they're hugely influential. I'll not overlap between the two. I'll try and do the difference between the three. But in the Kyrene context, we can talk about the men of religion. They're the leaders of society. They are the people who have to interpret the world for the masses, most of whom are fantastically illiterate Literacy is terrible It's 3 % in Cairo then It's something like 40 % in London at the time I mean, it's massive So the men of religion, and there are three men of religion who I deal with in some detail Their first reaction is one of outrage Where did it go wrong?

24:55How did we offend God? The second reaction, and this is down the three generations of these guys that I talk about, the second reaction is, well, what can we learn? And if we learn, is that dangerous or is it going to help us? Because if we learn, are we going to become like the infidel? Or are we going to be able to better protect ourselves from European imperialism? And the third is, we'd better get with the program. So let's go to Paris, wearing our robes, which is what happens in 1828, when this extraordinary chap called Riffel Tathoui goes to Paris. He spends two years in France. He learns French and he comes back with all these ideas.

25:35And when he comes back, Egypt has been taken over by an autocrat. And autocrats are very important in this story. a modernizing autocrat called Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Ali brings him into this new administration Muhammad Ali is modernizing the army Muhammad Ali is deciding perhaps we don't need to suffer so many deaths from the plague every year Muhammad Ali is saying the army when it goes on maneuvers or when it goes to war all it does is the the most important thing it's it spreads is syphilis what about what about um finding out what syphilis is and how we can stop that and dissection is happening, did the prophet not say you cannot dissect a dead body?

26:17Does Islamic tradition not say a dead body feels each incision just as a human being does? How are we going to get around that? And so these people in the administration, in culture, in education, are starting to grapple with these ideas and they're coming up with fudges and elisions and compromises. very often this process of reform goes in fits and starts. There are some dramatic moments, but essentially what happens is that I have to tell you that what you're doing or what I'm telling you to accept is actually fine with God. God's fine with it. So at every stage, the Enlightenment, I mean, we kind of forget in the Christian world that the Enlightenment was a culture war, you know, in parentheses between religious people and non-religious people.

27:05So this is exactly what's going on. But the hand of religion is much, much heavier in these societies. So the reformers have to negotiate every single bit of the Enlightenment. And yet, they're getting there. They're getting there. And the tradition of atheism is very weak. There was atheism, there was agnosticism back in the day when rationalism was allowed to breathe, but now it's coming back. And so what you find is people starting to question the sphere in which religion should have a role and they're trying to make it smaller and so in istanbul we have another autocrat he's a sultan he's called mahmoud ii he does the same thing he has to destroy like peter the great destroyed the strelzi his kind of praetorian guard because they were holding up innovation and he has to destroy the janissaries who had been in the ottoman heyday, the most feared and modern fighting force in Europe, he has to literally get them into a square and shoot them dead.

28:06And so there's a lot of violence, and there is a lot of opposition. But at the same time, there are things happening that are remarkable. So in Istanbul, for example, I start the book by talking about Jane Eyre. And I imagine the idea of Jane Eyre, the book, or indeed the person being transplanted to the Islamic world at the time that that book was written. And I realized that none of what Jane Eyre does would have been possible. She wouldn't have been allowed to be a teacher. There weren't many schools and there were certainly no schools for girls, no female school teachers. She would probably not have been able to read.

28:45She wouldn't have been able to send a letter which gets her her job. She wouldn't have been able to take a carriage across the country to take up her new position she would not have been able to fall in love with the man she wants to fall in love with she would not have been mistress of her own destiny and so by the 1850s all of what i've just said no longer obtains and women are being educated and there are newspapers and there are steamships and people are laying railway tracks and the economies of the Middle East being integrated with global patterns of finance and consumption and all of these things lead to enormous results.

29:32Language, how are we going to deal with all these new concepts, these new devices, these new principles without reform of language? The Ottoman language is just the most ridiculously convoluted, stuffy. I mean, someone looked at an Ottoman document at the period before reform and it was running to 13 pages and they found that you could get the gist in a single sentence. It was just so full of... Don't worry, I've interviewed writers like that too. You're like, catch the bleeding point for God's sake.

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32:39So we have an enlightenment. The 19th century is a revolutionary period across the Islamic world. We are arriving on the cusp of the First World War. I know we're moving quickly, but it's all to play for. But yet there is still a large empire called the Ottoman Empire running the show up to the borders of Iran. What does the First World War do to this enlightened Islamic world? Okay, before I answer that question, there is something that I need to interpose, and that is before the First World War, we have constitutional movements, we have the establishment of parliaments, we have the writing of modern constitutions in Egypt and in Iran and in Turkey.

33:27The statesmen who came up with these are highly influenced by European models. They are fully on board with the idea that the sovereign needs to have less power. They are fully on board with the idea that the people need to have more power. They're discussing women's rights are bubbling to the fore. This is a period of intense ferment. It's highly destabilizing, but it has so far, with the exception of Egypt, which was invaded by the British in 1882, because the colonial powers, actually, they didn't mind this modernizing movement. But when they found an autocrat, what they said was, can we lend you some money?

34:11This is the Suez Canal story. All of it. All they did, these guys, was borrow money and then go and then fritter it away on ridiculous gadgets and go on huge trips in which they spent two months. They took over the top two floors of the Georges V in Paris, and they spent, you know, and then the creditors said, well, can we... And that was the way that the foreign interests managed to gain a foothold in all of these territories. But anyway, to return... So we lent them money, then allowed them to go bust and bought everything at a discount. Yeah. Classic finance. Classic finance. Right. So on the cusp of the First World War, we have possibly a mirror image of Europe going on in constitutional affairs, media affairs, civil liberties, etc.

34:56What I want to get to the point is, where does it go wrong? And that's my own prejudice, where does it go wrong? Because I'm assuming this linear progress is right. Where does it go wrong where we get to a fundamentalist regime in Tehran, where we started, etc.? So, the last section of the book is called The Counter-Enlightenment. And The Counter-Enlightenment, I explain basically, precisely that. The roots of The counter-enlightenment in the Islamic world start with the First World War, which obliterated the Ottoman Empire, laid waste to much of Persia, caused immense movement of people, impoverished large areas of the Middle East, and then resulted in the carve-up of the Middle East, principally by Britain and France.

35:47And with the carve-up of the Middle East by Britain and France, what had been a wary relationship of respect, tinged with distrust, but nonetheless a great deal of admiration turned among the peoples of the Middle East, among the elites of the Middle East, people who were driving the process of reform into something much more hostile and much more suspicious. and what happened after the First World War is that the governments of those Middle Eastern countries that survived or indeed emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire and Iran was was never formally colonized. Turkey as we now know it was never formally colonized.

36:35What they did was they had to choose between something that was modern but also deeply authoritarian they cleave to the sort of Mussolini model or as we go forward something that started to reject all those values that we associate with the enlightenment as deeply destructive as something that was out to destroy the roots of civilization and culture and so culture by culture I mean culture in its very widest sense and so you start to see the rise of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood starts in Egypt. It was started as a self-help organization. It started doing community work, but it was very much animated by a sense of hostility to the British who controlled many of Egypt's resources.

37:26And it started to articulate this growing sense that to ape or follow the Westerners in every detail was somehow wrong and not in fact in our interests. At the same time, in Turkey and Iran, you have authoritarian ex-military men who are very interested in Westernization, but in a very selective form of Westernization. So what we will do is have a very modern army. We'll have a bureaucracy. We'll have a school system. We will rewrite the past in order to create an edifice of national greatness upon which we can build current aspirations. But at the same time, we don't want people arguing. We don't want people creating dissent and trouble.

38:14And so we'll squash those people. This is the sort of the Ataturk model? The Ataturk model, the Reza Shah model. Okay. Now, again, these are variants of what we're seeing in Europe, what you said, the Mussolini models, sort of corporatism, big business, government, sitting down, coming to deals, and stability being a key factor, keep everything stable. What were the catalysts for propelling us towards the present? You know, post-Second World War, what are we seeing that begins to allow the upper hand to be acquired by those who want to go back to the Prophet. Where we end up where we are now. How did we end up where we are now is a complicated situation because it is no longer possible.

39:08And my book deals with Tehran, it deals with Cairo, and it deals with Istanbul. By the way, we're only skimming over because we are time-wise, but it's extraordinary detail. And the characters that I go into, and this book is primarily trying to trace the development and the actions of the characters that I find most interesting. But what they're doing is they're basically inhabiting these three centers, but then all of these ideas have spread. And so it becomes almost impossible to talk about the Islamic world. You have to start talking about the Islamic worlds, and it's not so centralized. And so we have different and conflicting currents happening in different places.

39:48So it is possible when I talk in a negative way about what's happening in the 1950s and 1960s to also find examples of things that are going in precisely the opposite direction. What we're talking now is a less centralized Islamic civilization, one that has many more sources of inspiration. But if we want to return to the mainstream and we want to think about the thrust that the Islamic world is following in the 50s and 60s, we have to start with the deep sense of unease and injustice and the rhetorical rallying cry that was provided by the creation of Israel. And that becomes a rallying point and it becomes, in many Islamic eyes, a definitive proof of the ill intentions and the bad faith of those Westerners who were all along saying, you know, you've got to be democratic, you've got to go with the majority, you have to start having elections, you have to start moving towards a representative forms of government.

40:59And so the creation of Israel was enormously catalytic to movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and other movements of resistance that formed. And there was a cleavage in society in Iran and in Turkey between this growing, pious, quite often rich, affluent, because they were doing well out of economic reforms, but at the same time they felt that they'd been sold, their culture had been sold down the river by Ataturk, for example, who introduced so many cultural reforms that people, I mean, the simplest way of looking at it is to say he changed the alphabet. So from one day, one generation to the next, people couldn't go to the graveyard and find their parents' graves.

41:47Because they couldn't read the script. They couldn't read the script. So there was this enormous dislocation that was taking place. In Iran, there's an extraordinary character called Jalal al-Ahmad, who I have a great deal of time for. And his sense of cultural dislocation was expressed in all these different ways. He was a drinker. He was a leftist. And he also was a great admirer of early Zionism. And he saw in Israel and the whole spirit of the kibbutz, something really admirable. He also spent time in America. But then he came back and he looked at what was happening in Iran. And he found that this top-down, state-dictated modernisation was creating shell people.

42:30People who were wearing suits, people who were crossing there. Which wasn't done. Wasn't done. Sitting at tables, holding knives and forks. But we're Iranian. What have we lost here? And this sense of having lost something led him in a kind of voltfast that now seems very significant to say, we've got to bring the mullahs back. our culture is fundamentally expressed through our religious observance. And he was by no means a religious fanatic. But he said, we've got to give some more time to the mullahs. They've been trampled on, all their lands have been taken, all their influence, they've been derided, they've been made fun of.

43:11So variants on this were happening across the world. In Turkey, a young boy called Recep Tayyip Erdogan was growing up at the peak of the Ataturk. Yeah. He was post-Atatürk, kind of this is a secular country. Any overt shows of religiosity have to be banned. Women in offices cannot wear the headscarf. And he was growing up a poor boy in Istanbul and he became part of a movement. And then he took over a movement that was ultimately seeking to reverse all of those reforms. In the name of tradition or in the name of Turkish integrity or Islamic integrity, what are they selling? Because it's very interesting, because we're talking about what Harold Wilson, the white heat of technology.

44:02You're talking about technological change, you're talking about cosmopolitanism, you're talking about the sort of stuff that our country experienced in the last 20 years. And lots of people saying, we're missing something. Yes, Ireland got rich and yes, we got secular and we got cosmopolitan. but something is lacking. You hear this all the time. People chat about it all the time. And you're saying in the Islamic world that something was there all the time. Because what fascinating book, you say that for intellectuals in the 70s, for example, in the 80s, the arguments were between capitalism and communism.

44:33These were the two big, we're either going this way or this way. Nobody saw the third option, which is religion, which everyone thought was dead and buried. And it emerges with gusto in the 1980s and subsequently. So when the Islamic revolution took place in Iran in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini said, neither east nor west. And that cut through all the language barriers and all the sectarian barriers in the Islamic world because everyone recognized it. We've been caught up in the Cold War. We've had to choose. We've had to either be in the Soviet camp or the U.S. camp. And actually, fundamentally, we don't belong to either of those camps.

45:14As for this slightly detached view that we need something else, I think it's more visceral for many people. I think it is, we're turning our back on God. God created us. He will be angry. And it's a much simpler equation. And I think the simplicity of that equation was very, very attractive. and it was used by politicians and it was exploited by politicians. And I think in Turkey, they were not so removed from the experience of their parents and grandparents. And they were chafing under this educational regime, this cultural regime. You turn on the television, it's all about secularism. It's all about the white heat of technology and that kind of advance.

46:01And they felt that they had lost something. and they started to feel assertive about that thing that they had lost. And to take it even further, they in their eyes were vindicated by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the calamities that were unleashed in the name of Western democracy, in the name of dignity through consumerism. and they feel vindicated by the erosion of those values that made the capitalist revolution great for a short period of time. And they feel vindicated. So now when I see people in the Islamic world chafing against authoritarian rulers or indeed sceptical of Islamism in the political sense, I don't think that they necessarily think we want to be actually just like America.

47:02I don't think they do. I'm not sure what the political program is. And I'm not sure without having the space in which to discuss and elaborate a political program, you would necessarily know what it is. But if we were to take, for example, the case of Iran, which is now live, it is possible that the Islamic Republic is now under severe threat. it is possible that after 46 years that republic will come to an end. Then the idea that I know what's going to take its place is ludicrous. No one knows what it's going to take its place. No one knows what the demands of the Iranian people will ultimately be.

47:45We've got one example maybe before the Soviet Union, where people said, don't worry, it'll be fine, it'll all transition, it'll be grand. And of course it wasn't. But armed now, remember you said at the top you've no idea how to analyse this. Armed with what you've just spoken about in the last hour. An enlightenment, a betrayed enlightenment, a sense that there's some other third way, that third way is religious. Do you think the European mind, our mind, and the Islamic mind are fundamentally askew in the sense that, I come back to Israel. Israel is, in essence, in the Islamic mind, a European construction, a European entity.

48:29Do you think we're much further away from any sort of understanding now than when you maybe set foot first? I think we possibly are. I think the declining credibility of the Western model, both economic and social, has contributed to that. And I think the excesses that are now being permitted, particularly by Israel, on the part of Israel, are going to exacerbate that as well. I'm always very wary about talking about the Islamic mind or the European mind because I know many people who are of Muslim faith, who inhabit Europe without any trouble at all, indeed are profoundly productive and constructive members of that society.

49:17So to suggest an irreconcilable divide, I think, is wrong. I think there are historical reasons why one might find oneself on the opposite side of the room from someone who ostensibly is from the other civilization. But I see no structural reason, no intrinsic reason. Indeed, the whole argument of this book is that that division... This whole clash of civilizations, you don't buy that at all. It doesn't exist. I think history is largely to blame. I think that the way that politicians have decided things, the way that rulers have led their people, has, to a large extent, decided that. If I can't give you an answer to that question, David, it's because I'm simply overwhelmed by it.

50:06And I just simply cannot feel my way through to give you an answer in all good faith. Ladies and gentlemen, Christopher de Beleng.

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