Teaching Plato in Palestine: Can Philosophy Save the Middle East?

In the Arab Quarter of Jerusalem. Photo by David Marcus

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 the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s former chief representative in Jerusalem, but by training a philosopher (and, I think, by nature, too). “Only philosophy” the friend quotes him as saying at the Shlomo Pines memorial lecture he gave in West Jerusalem three years before. Six months later, when I return to Montreal, I’m almost convinced that he’s right.

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 al-Quds since 1995. 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. 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. But most of all, I’m curious to see the reactions of the Palestinian students. I expect the issues to resonate quite differently with them than they do with my students in Montreal.

Although I’m less optimistic than Nusseibeh about what philosophy can do, I’m looking forward to discussing the texts with the students. Unfortunately, the available Arabic translations of Plato are based on a nineteenth-century English version, itself more a paraphrase than an accurate rendering, which the translators sometimes painfully butcher. No doubt, in this respect, things have changed for the worse since the Middle Ages. From the eighth century to the tenth, excellent translations were made of Greek scientific and philosophical texts. 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. This, moreover, was not the project of some isolated intellectuals; it was a large-scale enterprise carried out under the patronage of the political, social, and economic elite of the Abbasid caliphate. After the Greeks, the next significant period in the history of philosophy and science thus unfolded within Islamic civilization. Its main intellectual centers were Baghdad, the residence of the Abbasid caliphs, and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain).

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 intel...