From Babel to Dragomans

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the great historian of the Crusades, Steven Runciman:

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.

I just started reading Bernard Lewis' book From Babel to Dragomans. In his introduction Lewis writes:

As a student of the Middle East, my interests and training were primarily historical rather than -- as with most of my predecessors, teachers and contemporaries -- philological and literary. I did however serve a brief apprenticeship in these disciplines and am profoundly grateful for having done so. The first and most rudimentary test of an historian's competence is that he should be able to read his sources, and this is not always easy, as for example when the language is classical Arabic or the writing is a crabbed Ottoman bureaucratic script.

And that is not all. The historian of a region, of a period, of a group of people, or even of a topic, must know something of its cultural context, and for this literature is an indispensable guide.

Runciman and Lewis are examples of great humanists, masters of language and history, who can act as dragomans -- diplomatic interpreters of and advisors on the languages, peoples, culture, ethnicities, religions and history of the Middle East -- to help Westerners understand the conflicts that are taking place in that region today.

Wikipedia defines dragomans as follows:

A dragoman was an interpreter, translator and official guide between Turkish, Arabic, and Persian-speaking countries and polities of the Middle East and European embassies, consulates, vice-consulates and trading posts. A dragoman had to have a knowledge of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and European languages. ... The office incorporated diplomatic as well as linguistic duties—namely, in the Porte's relation with Christian countries—and some dragomans thus came to play crucial roles in Ottoman politics.

In the chapter From Babel to Dragomans, from which his book takes its title, Lewis writes about how dragomans assisted European diplomats in understanding the workings of the Ottoman Empire:

On whom did the embassies rely? They drew on a rather different group of people, whom it has become customary to call Levantines. The word levantine comes from Italian -- Levante is the sunrise; people who come from the east are politely called 'people from the sunrise' levantini. ... The Levantines flourished for several centuries. They were overwhelmingly Catholic by religion; mostly they spoke Italian. Many of them seem to have been of Italian origin, though they intermarried freely with Greeks, especially with Catholic Greeks, and they formed a more or less self-contained, autonomous society, not only in the capital but also in many provincial cities, since dragomans were needed not only at the embassies but also at consulates, vice-consulates and trading posts and the like. Both embassies and consulates relied very largely on Levantines to do these jobs.

Recently, Ali Khedery, who speaks Arabic fluently, served as special assistant to five American ambassadors in Iraq and as senior adviser to three four-star commanders of U.S. Central Command, and was the longest continuously-serving American official in Iraq, established a consultancy to facilitate interactions between Western governments and businesses and their Middle Eastern counterparts. His description of the services of his consultancy, named Dragoman Partners, is a reminder of the important intermediating function played by dragomans throughout history:

For hundreds of years, international trade in the Middle East went through the dragomans, licensed guides and cultural experts in the Ottoman capital. As new upheavals sweep across the region, bringing new players to the fore, the need for intermediaries in a complex environment has risen again.

We are a multilingual multicultural strategic consultancy with decades of experience at the highest levels of business and government. We serve international clients as a bridge between East and West, introducing businesses to new markets and new leaders while guiding them through the opaque politics and regulations of the region. We also assist sovereign clients in pursuit of development and prosperity as advisors on geopolitical and economic matters.

[NOTE: In a recent blog post, I linked to Khedery's penetrating discussion of how we lost Iraq.]

The interpretive (in the broadest sense) services that can only be provided by "dragomans" like Khedery, Lewis, and Runciman remind us of the enduring value of an education in the Humanities. America relies too much today on high-tech intelligence gathering through channels like the NSA, drones, or satellites. Scholars like Runciman and Lewis and diplomatic aides like Khedery remind us that the gathering of real intelligence can only be done by gaining an intimate familiarity with the languages, literatures, cultures, ethnicities, and religions of the people we wish to observe.