by Adam Seligman
There were many moments in the 2007 ISSRPL that lend themselves to reflection and more focused and analytic attention. It is however perhaps best to begin with what is most personal. Relevant here is the interaction with Abd Abu Omar and his daughter Nur in Bursa on Saturday the 7th of July.
Among the many different aspects of this encounter that lend themselves to reflection is how ambiguity and ambivalence are built into social life and as there is not ability to fully define or understand a situation or an encounter; interpretation, the drawing on existing assumption, the imputation of reasons, meanings, interests and strategies is always part of what we bring to almost every encounter. Moreover, these assumptions, sets of reasons and interpretative grids are not only individually produced, but to great extent reflect our own collective presuppositions, prejudices and the “ground” upon which we stand when we are forced to approach and deal with and make sense out of an always changing, never-fully-given-to-understanding reality. “Explanation is where the mind rests” says David Hume. This resting place is, more or less, Durkheim’s collective representations: the emic, internal, language of each community. This place is, moreover, connected to the sacred space of each community, where outsiders do not enter. It would not be possible to enter this place without, at the same time, sharing in the collective experience of the sacred.
All of these aspects actually came to play a role in the interaction with Abd which, in turn, highlights them in what may be useful ways. Abd lectured us on the Thursday and joined us on the trip to Bursa. He did not join the group in any of its group events (except possibly one lecture in Istanbul, I do not recall) in Bursa (on Friday night or Saturday morning) and was, (by mistake it later turns out) asked to join in the group processing meeting on Saturday afternoon. Immediately prior to the meeting two other lecturers were asked not to join the meeting as they had not been part of group dynamics prior to the meeting and just before the meeting I had asked the tour guide to please leave, as the meeting was really closed to the group. (I will not address at the moment if that decision regarding the other lecturers was a good one or not, that is another matter). Thus, I registered a bit of surprise when Abd showed up at the meeting with his daughter. In truth I did not know how to react. I felt strange asking him to leave, but also felt it was unfair for him to be present while we had asked other lecturers not to participate in the meeting. [I should interject at this point that at the very beginning of the school I raised the issue with the whole group, if people who were here for a few days only should be part of activities like processing. There were divergent opinions and we let it rest without coming to a decision. This was a mistake on my part. It was too early for the group to know enough to make an informed decision as a group and I should have just decided, together with the other staff members, based on experience of previous years.]
In the event, and with the Abd and Nur present I opened it to group discussion. People took very different positions. Some claiming that he was here and so should remain, others claiming that a group has every right to close itself, to have its secrets and, in essence, to posit boundaries. One, very perceptive comment was that the whole discussion was unseemly, taking place in front of Abd and his daughter and I should simply have gone up to them and asked them to leave in a personal and quiet discussion. Indeed when this was broached I had to ask myself why I did not do this. After all, I had no problem asking the guide to leave in just such a manner. Why then could I not have done the same with Abd. Now there may be many reasons for this. My own feeling was that it was because I consider Abd a friend (though I do not agree with his politics at all). He has been a guest in my house. I have arranged for him to speak at Boston University. I have come to his defense publically when Jewish groups attempted to have him expelled from the USA and I have organized meetings in my home with him as a guest speaker. I have also had him speak in my daughter’s Jewish school. I have been a guest in his house, have eaten in his living room and even prayed from there facing the Western Wall. All of this, to my mind, made it very very difficult for me to ask him to leave the group. My inability to do so led me to open it up to group discussion.
While these were my own reasons, it is important to note that other interpretations were certainly being offered by other members of the discussion. In fact as I later heard, one of the small groups that met following the larger discussion – a group, interestingly, made up of Jews, Palestinians, Israelis, Jordanians etc. saw the difficult not as Adam’s relation with his friend, but of a Jew ejecting a Palestinian. Now I must admit that when told this, I was surprised as it certainly was not in my mind as the event unfolded. But that is not to say it was not or could not be a dimension that many experienced. After-all the Jewish/Israeli/Palestinian knot of complexities was very much with us. On Thursday, at the movie Journey to the Sun, one of the Turkish fellows reacted very strongly, saw it at first as anti-Turkish propaganda and one of the first things she said was: “What about the Palestinians?” This was off topic and I pointed out that 2 years ago we did a summer school in Israel and she was welcome to speak to the participants to see if a fair presentation of the problem was offered. The reason I am mentioning this incident following the movie is to show that the matter was very much before us. It was before us as well for in synagogue on Saturday one of the men given an honor had the prayer for the dead said for his son who was killed at the terrorist attack on Rehov Emek Refaim in Jerusalem 4 years ago. This was explained to the participants of the school who were at the synagogue. (I must add here that, as I was on the bimah at that moment, having just been given an honor and was near the man, I was very moved. It was for me a very very difficult moment, similar in many ways to what I had experienced a year before in Newton when I was leading prayers in the synagogue and the summer school group entered. It is the moment of de-centering, when you recognize that the groups you belong do have, at times, very different agendas and they are simply irreconcilable and you must live with that).
Thus, and whatever may have been my personal and individual reasons for not being able to simply walk over to Abd and ask him to leave, it was clear that on a collective level of how the whole event was experienced; it was experienced in different ways by different people and at least one possible interpretive grid had little to do with the personal relations of Adam and Abd and was, rather, refracted through a much broader lens of the conflicts in Israel and Palestine.
Now, at the same time all this was going on, something else was going on as well and this something else was much more interesting to me than the actual discussion over Abd and his daughter. (By the way, Abd had no problem with leaving and had a very good and important discussion with Suzanne Stone during this time which benefited both greatly. I am hoping that in the future he will join us again and for a longer and more involved period of time). For what was of great interest to me was if the group would be able to posit boundaries. In my understanding, only if the group could posit boundaries and so admit the possibility of exclusion could it really be a group. I recognize that I may well be wrong here, but I am not a universalist. I do not believe in universal, unlimited, trust or love. I think our ability to trust and to develop feelings of responsibility for the other is extremely circumscribed and for me the discussion over Abd’s participation was actually a test of the group. Would the group be able to posit boundaries and so define itself as a group (with, pace Rahel’s strictures, a minimum amount of trust). Or, would the group remain open and so, by necessity, define the terms of trust and mutual responsibility that could develop among its members to what is generally taken as acceptable in say, the usual academic, global conference situation. For me this was actually a very very critical moment in the developing dynamic of the school and for this very reason I refrained from weighing in or attempting to influence any decision the group would make. I even refrained from looking anyone in the eye, not to influence anyone in any way.
As we all know the group voted overwhelmingly to ask Abd and Nur to leave, with the hope that there would be no hard feelings (as I do not think there were at all) and the expectation that Abd would be with us in future school. The group then broke into smaller units to discuss what had transpired.
So what is the point? What can we learn?
A number of things strike me as important. For one, reality is ambiguous if only because it takes place in the continuum of time. We can never know the whole context of any interaction or any event. Indeed, there is no “whole” context. Events take place in time and time is history. Where does one stop in tracing the etiology of a particular event? Again, Hume: “Explanation is where the mind rests”. There is no final or totally explained event. There is only the place where we stop asking questions. This place, in turn, can be very different for different people. Moreover and to no small extent, the mind “rests” in the space of collective representations (to use Durkheim’s phraseology). This, by the way, is what makes the summer school such a difficult and exhausting experience for us all. We bring together people who very much do not share collective representations. We cannot just muddle though on the assumption that everyone is basically the same. It becomes clear that we are not (sure, we are the same in our needs, but that is true for us and chimpanzees as well). We live in very different collective universes, do not share these representations and our minds “rest” in very different places. Moreover, we are forced to unpack these explanations and view the very fragile and particularistic basis for our judgments (judgments that outside the school, we assume to be of universal validity – such that any “reasonable” person would share).
To hark back to last year’ story of the cross in Mostar. We experience events and even words differently. Most of the time we do not really understand one another, but most of the time it does not matter. We are not pushed, or forced to either understand or recognize the failure of understanding. We thus exist in an “as if” universe of a reality that we take as shared, even if it is not. In the school we are pushed to uncover the cracks in this shared illusion and recognize just how much is not and in fact, perhaps, cannot be shared. (We should recognize that this issue came up again and again, not only in Bursa over Abd – but accompanied us throughout, in our discussions over the Alevi community, over Sunni Moslems refusing to eat the food of the Alevis, over the issues connected to the Nation of Islam and indeed over the complicated web of ethnic and religious identities in Turkey). Then comes the interesting challenge. Can we live together even as we recognize that we do not share a collective “resting place” of the mind?
This is why, for me, the issue of boundaries and the self-definition of the group was of such importance. For if the group could posit its own boundaries (which it did) it was an indication that shared experience or practice (in this case of participation in the school) could allow people with very different sets of collective representations (and so, of course, very different ideas of what is sacred), to come together – sharing a common, circumscribed purpose – even if they did not share an overarching set of ‘cosmic’ or embracing meanings.
I think we are on our way to understanding how this can happen as well as demonstrating that it can take place and this is no mean achievement.
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