Lingua Franca and the Glory of Civilizations

Years ago, I was discussing the miseries of living in an underdeveloped country with a philosopher-to-be friend of mine. For some reasons, we both were mad at the circumstances under which we were living. In between his furious words he quoted a deeply moving hemistich that always resonates with me. Today, I came across that poem by coincidence and could not resist reading it to the end. The poem is penned in Persian by one of the greatest poets of all time, Saadi. It is ineluctable and very unfortunate that its deep insights will be lost in my poor translation.

Neither to a lover nor a country give your heart, 

Boundless is the planet, and countless its crowd.

Having read the poem, which passionately encourages geographic mobility, I wondered what the situation of the civilized world was at the time with respect to borders, intercultural exchanges, and tolerance towards other nations or tribes.

More importantly, I was interested in knowing how on earth at a time with extremely limited means of mobility and limited opportunities for intercultural dialogue, the poet kept encouraging the readers to travel and settle in other places. Having this in the back of my mind, I came to read a passage in the Story of Civilization. 

It is a great passage that shows how the dominance and monopoly of one language (in this case Arabic as the lingua franca of the Muslim world) facilitated mobility, cultural exchange, and mutual understanding, pierced through numerous cultural and linguistic boundaries, and perhaps contributed to the glory of the Islamic civilization at the time. I invite you to enjoy the passage. 

“Every scholar who desired a high standing at home had to hear the master scholars of Mecca, Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. This international of letters was made easier by the fact that throughout Islam- through whatever diversity of peoples- the language of learning and literature was Arabic; Latin had no wider realm. When a visitor entered a Moslem city he took it for granted that he could hear a scholarly lecture at the principal mosque at almost any hour of the day…. In a thousand mosques from Cordova to Samarkand scholars were as numerous as pillars, and made the cloisters tremble with their eloquence; the roads of the realm were disturbed by innumerable geographers, historians, and theologians seeking knowledge and wisdom; the courts of a hundred princes resounded with poetry and philosophical debate; and no man dared be a millionaire without supporting literature or art. The old cultures of the conquered were eagerly absorbed by the quick-witted Arabs; and the conquerors showed such tolerance that of the poets, scientists, and philosophers who now made Arabic the most learned and literary tongue in the world only a small minority were of Arab blood.... We gratefully omit their names, and salute their achievement.”

On Methodology in Law

The other days, I was talking to an American Professor of law. He said that during his academic life, he has failed to find a serious legal work in (contract, corporate, and financial) law written by a European legal scholar. In his opinion, in 1930s American legal scholarship stopped doing what European legal scholars are currently doing. And I could not but agree with him. 

Legal scholarship badly suffers from the lack of method(ology). When I compare the seminars I am attending in economics and finance with the ones I am attending in law, the latter seems to me the unintelligible utterances coming from clouded minds. Of course, economics and finance are the most progressive disciplines of social sciences, perhaps because many of their subject matters lend themselves to scientific or quasi-scientific methods. This, unfortunately, is not always the case in law, and expecting the legal scholarship to accommodate such methodologies would be too demanding.

To our regret, not only did the traditional legal scholarship failed to be inspired by the methodologies used in other disciplines such as economics and finance, but also it failed to develop a methodology of its own. Worst of all, some European legal scholars grew deeply pessimistic towards law and economics that tries to employ the methodologies used in economics to analyze legal phenomena. However, despite their deep skepticism towards law and economics, when they are asked for better alternative methods for analyzing legal issues, they seem to be miserably clueless.

A discipline without a methodology is arcane, boring, and, if I may say so, nonsense. As Yogi Berra once said, “If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”

Against Warmongering Rhetoric

With the Middle-East in turmoil, the Iran-Saudi rivalry at its peak, rampant manipulated national emotions and zealotry at their historical heights, and the exchange of threats on both Iranian and Saudi sides, all pieces of an impending war puzzle seem to be in place. But as most commentators would suggest, the probability of an all-out war is far-fetched, and Iranian and Saudi military threats are but strategic ruses for gaining an upper hand at the negotiating table over many matters of geopolitical importance.

Though history keeps repeatedly reminding us that many wars started just to gain a strategic advantage at negotiating tables, for the moment, let’s not be very much concerned about the politics of all this. What is disconcerting for me is the rise of hate/war mongering rhetoric among the relatively (and sometimes highly) educated people after the Mina incidents in which many Iranian pilgrims died.

Highly dysfunctional and opaque method of governance in Saudi Arabia is indeed a drag on the Saudi government to effectively and transparently attend to the concerns of all stakeholders of the incident and communicate its messages clearly. Needless to say, no dictatorship is immune to such dysfunctionality and it should not be taken personal. This is a point that needs not be explained as it is evident.

But what is not very clear is that we have to be especially careful where there is a misunderstanding between two undemocratic, non-transparent, and non-meritocratic governments. In open democracies, premature hard-line sentiments to such contentious incidents wither away in the process of open consensus building via institutions that replace sentiments and emotions with reasoned institutional responses. But when an undemocratic government lacking a decentralized deliberative system for decision making faces such an incident, no such mechanisms are in place and the probability of emotionally-driven and wrong reactions with potentially enormous catastrophic consequences is indeed very high.

Not only do those grave consequences originate from the lack of domestic bottom-up consensus building mechanisms, but also they may stem from the absence of proper channels of communication between the two undemocratic, dysfunctional rivals.

It is highly probable that the Mina incident was caused by a simple error. If so, legal mechanisms provide for redress. So far, I have not seen any indication in the media suggesting that there will be a legal or judicial follow-up for the incident. Instead, we see highly irresponsible harsh language and military threats in abundance even prior to any investigation on the causes of the incident being conducted. If anything, what we can learn from our eight-year war with Iraq is that war is and should always be the option of last resort.

Of course, politicians, military officials, and diplomats might have many reasons to use this type of language (mostly for strategic reasons), but ordinary citizens should avoid following suit. What might be right for a nation might not be right for an individual. Let me rephrase the great historian and storyteller of the 20^th century, Will Durant. Prejudice is fatal to an individual, but indispensable to a nation. 

The long term result of the propagation of such threatening language among citizens against other nations will be an epidemic of bigotry, racism, and xenophobia. 

My advice, if I may, to my compatriots is to let the politics and diplomacy take its course. It is indeed imperative not to let the political rivalries lower our moral standards and civic education as citizens, and drag us down into hatemongering. We are already paying politicians handsomely to take care of the corrupt and corrupting political issues in order for us to keep our distance from the toxic touch of politics. So, let the politicians do the dirty job for you.