Steven Runciman's Crusades, the liberal arts, and the Syrian civil war

I have been reading Steven Runciman’s masterful three volume History of the Crusades.

When the term genius is used these days, almost invariably it is applied to a student of mathematics or the sciences, an Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, or Alan Turing. Most assuredly, these individuals are geniuses of the highest order. Steven Runciman is a genius of a different kind, a genius of the liberal arts.

In order to understand the greatness of Runciman, one might start by looking at the appendices of his Crusades, in which he lists the principal sources for his history. There are Greek, Latin, Arabic, Armenian, and Syriac sources. These are just the principal sources. Runciman’s history also integrates the work of modern historians writing in languages as diverse as English, French, Italian, German, and Russian. The Wikipedia article on Runciman states:

It is said that he was reading Latin and Greek by age five. In the course of his long life he would master an astonishing number of languages, so that, for example, when writing about the Middle East, he relied not only on accounts in Latin and Greek and the Western vernaculars, but consulted Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian sources as well.

In brief, Runciman was a genius at learning languages, both living and dead. He reminds us that the study of the liberal arts begins with the study of language. It is not possible to be a serious student of the liberal arts without being a serious student of languages.

But, it would be a slight and an insult to Runciman to label him as just a genius of languages. His command of the geographical, ethnic, political, religious, military, artistic, architectural, and economic factors in the patchwork that was Europe and the Middle East at the end of the first millennium is breathtaking. That is, Runciman's mastery of many languages enabled him to become a master of history, too.

As a historian, Runciman reminds us why the Middle East is such a complicated place, a region where waves of Persian, Jewish, Greek, Latin, Byzantine, Arabic, Turkish, Islamic (Sunni and Shiite), Christian (Orthodox, Monophysite, and Nestorian), Armenian, Mongol, and European (Frankish, German, Italian, Norman) influences have washed over the land at various times. We come away from his history convinced that there are no easy answers, that all attempts to cut the Gordian knot of the Middle East are in vain. The forces that shape the Middle East of today are the same forces that have been in play for centuries and they will remain in play for centuries to come. Our only hope is to fully understand all sides (for example, through the study of ethnicity, religion, and language) and to try gradually and gently to shape and influence them.

This evening, I also happened to view a video on the Weekly Standard entitled “Who Killed the Liberal Arts.” In this video, essayists Joseph Epstein and Andrew Ferguson discuss the “origin and value of a classic education.” I think Runciman’s Crusades provides a clear answer to the question of why the study of the liberal arts is so important. At this very moment, Syria is once again being torn apart by war. Certainly, the picture is complicated and we do not know for certain all the forces that are involved. But, it is apparent that one element in the struggle is the enmity between Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite co-religionists of the coastal region around Latakia and the Sunni majority in the inland. Wikipedia reports:

The Alawites, also known as ... Nusayris ... are a prominent mystical religious group centred in Syria who follow a branch of the Twelver school of Shia Islam. They were long persecuted for their beliefs by the various rulers of Syria, until Hafez al-Assad took power there in 1970. Today they represent 12% of the Syrian population and for the past 50 years the political system has been dominated by an elite led by the Alawite Assad family. During the Syrian civil war, this rule has come under significant pressure.

Latakia, or, as Runciman refers to it, Lattakieh (the ancient city of Laodicaea), is one of the main strongholds of Assad’s Alawite followers and was one of the cities that witnessed the struggle over the Holy Lands that played out during the First Crusade. The 10th and 11th centuries, the time of the First Crusade, was also the time when the Alawite sect sprang into existence. Wikipedia goes on:

The Alawites themselves trace their origins to the followers of the eleventh Imām, Hassan al-'Askarī (d. 873), and his pupil ibn Nuṣayr (d. 868). The sect seems to have been organised by a follower of Muḥammad ibn Nuṣayr known as al-Khasibi, who died in Aleppo about 969. In 1032 Al-Khaṣībī's grandson and pupil al-Tabarani moved to Latakia, which was then controlled by the Byzantine Empire. Al-Tabarani became the perfector of the Alawite faith through his numerous writings. He and his pupils converted the rural population of the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range to the Alawite faith.

It is clear, then, that we cannot understand what is happening in Syria today without understanding its history. In America, we naively tend to think of the events in Syria in terms of an “Arab Spring;” the “masses, yearning for freedom,” are being “oppressed” by a “tyrant,” and are staging a "revolution" to overthrow him; all will be well once the despot has been removed. In reality, what we are witnessing is merely the latest episode in an age old struggle between Shiite Alawites and Sunni Muslims; the removal of Assad may do nothing to cure this enmity. Consider, for example, the words of a Sunni cleric:

Yusef al-Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar and has been a leading voice supporting the Arab Spring, warned that Iranian Shia were trying to "eat" Sunni Muslims, who are a majority in the Muslim world. He referred to Alawites, the followers of the Muslim sect to which President Bashar al-Assad of Syria belongs, as being "worse infidels than Christians or Jews". He also used the deliberately contemptuous term "Nusayris" when talking about them. He was particularly critical of the roles played by Iran, which is largely Shia, and the Lebanon Shia militia Hizbollah whose name translates as Party of God but which he called "Party of Satan", in supporting the Assad regime. "There is no common ground between the two sides because the Iranians, especially conservatives, want to eat the Sunni people," he said.

We are incapable, then, of understanding the events in Syria today without a thorough understanding of the dynamics of the centuries-old history of Shiite Alawites and Sunnis in Syria. It is through the work of great historians and polyglots and masters of the liberal arts like Steven Runciman that we gain this understanding. That is why the liberal arts are still so important.