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Three Surprises at the Launch of ‘We-mind vs. Me-mind’
Perhaps because I accompanied my wife and author Jessica Lutz as she found, tested and ordered her ideas over the past seven years, I need little to convince me that her latest book contributes a powerful new way both to understand and also to run our human world.
Still, I was in for more than one surprise at the 6 July publication launch of We-mind vs Me-mind: A New Vision for Success in Leadership and Life here in Brussels. Most of all, I was bowled over by how the strong women guest speakers had already made Jessica’s breakthrough language their own.
First up was Helene Banner, from Germany and the youngest person ever appointed a EU spokesperson. After a successful decade in European institutions, she has now, like Jessica, dedicated herself to solving the dilemmas faced by many women leaders as they fulfil their ambitions for promotion but lose faith in the often blinkered, hierarchical organisations they serve. Because of the mismatch she felt in the workplace – always being pressured to speak, act and even laugh differently from what came naturally to her as a woman – she gave her new platform a tongue-in-cheek name: Let’s Just Be Imperfect, Ladies!
Beyond the gender lens
“I felt, when reading your book, as if you were speaking from my heart,” said Helene. “You are finding words here for what many us women feel. So many of us feel represented and recognised by this term that you have coined, the We-mind rather than the Me-mind. This is what I call the more feminine approach to leadership: leading by building alliances rather than thinking in hierarchical terms; building teams; working for win-win situations with women’s empathy and their sensitivity to others, acknowledgment and anticipation of what others may think. When you coined it as the We-mind vs the Me-mind, I was like: Thank you so much! You found a term to go beyond the gender lens. That is such a breakthrough!”
Next to speak was Georgia Brooks, whom the newspaper Politico had just two days before named one of the most influential 40 people in Brussels. Of British and Egyptian heritage, Brooks founded and leads The Nine, a club for women members only, and she had invited Jessica to launch We-mind vs Me-Mind in the garden of The Nine’s beautifully re-appointed belle époque townhouse barely one hundred metres from the European Commission. Georgia fully agreed with what Helene and Jessica were trying to get across.
“The tide is changing. People are waking up to realise that we have to do something,” Georgia told the capacity audience. “The great resignation is happening. Middle to high managers, female, are leaving …. If companies really want to attract and keep their strong female talent it is a question of training and work culture. You come in as a young woman, you are ambitious, you are keen to progress. Then there’s a little bit of, like: No, no, stay down stay in your box. We are taught to stay in our lanes, be good girls, colour within the lines. Then [others] are rewarded for being a little bit cheeky, a little bit naughty, breaking the rules. [Former British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson is a great example of someone [who is] so Me-minded.”
Reframing leadership
My second surprise was how much Helene and Georgia agreed with something that I had tried and failed to argue against while Jessica was writing the book. For me, the idea of We-mindedness seemed most useful as a new way of looking at human interactions, which might then nudge us all to a more collective approach. Jessica disagreed. She firmly believes that We-minded leadership can become a credo of an active, whole new style of management for both women and men. So did her two co-speakers, I discovered.
“What Jessica does very well is to reframe ‘What is leadership?’, ‘What is success?’ and to move beyond the more gendered stereotypes and roles,” Georgia said. “It is very important for women to own the room and to step into their power and presence. Which is not to say we have to be like men …. It’s more about the team spirit, it’s about all of us who can … move the conversation together as opposed to individuals on plinths, the very siloed approaches and individualistic goals.”
Including men was another argument that resonated strongly. As Jessica points out in the book’s preface, her inspiration to write the book after returning to Europe from a reporting career in Turkey followed her surprise “that the battle for equality was still not settled in the West. At the same time, it bothered me that usually the only explanation given was to blame the men, the ‘patriarchy’, for blocking us with a glass ceiling. I had worked among men all my life, and always enjoyed it. I love men. So that argument didn’t sit well with me, even though I’m the first to acknowledge that sexism can seriously hamper a woman’s career.”
Jessica wanted her years reading up on the science of it all to find language that would go further than the usual debates. “Many men switch off the moment we start talking about gender. I do too,” she said. “This is more about two different value systems, that we all have. We all have a We-mind and a Me-mind. We lean to one of the two sides. Men tend to lean more to the ‘me’ side. But that’s not a dogma. There are 40 percent of men who are more We-minded, and 15 percent of women who are more Me-minded … Our definition of leadership is very Me-minded. I believe, and I think I have also found scientific grounds to say that the We-mind can be just as good as a leader as the Me-mind.”
Helene also spoke of her frustration at the way men usually felt as if the question of differences between men and women’s approach to life and work were nothing to do with them, either because it was unfamiliar territory that made them nervous or because they believed that quotas for women managers were blocking their careers. Jessica’s approach, she believed, offers a new way forward.
“Thank you for introducing us to language we can use to share how we feel as leaders in our workplaces … Thank you for finding the words and for speaking on behalf of so many women who often go to work stumbling [against] the glass ceiling, thinking: I’m not tough enough yet, I have to become more assertive, I have to hide my emotions, I need to cry in the bathroom not the boardroom,” she said. “In your book, you are giving us permission to be in our We-mind, to feel confident as We-minders to change the world and workplaces.”
My third surprise
My own many discussions with Jessica over We-minded values have left me in no doubt that giving them more weight would improve the state of the world. Indeed, her research and writing has buttressed my own enthusiasm for the ultimate tapping into our common We-mind: democratic reforms that would give everyone a chance to contribute to policy making through random selection, or sortition.
But none of this prepared me for my third big surprise of the launch event. It is traditional in the Netherlands, from where Jessica comes, to give a first copy of the book to somebody whose contribution the author truly values. In the months before the event, Jessica had discussed a few names – for instance, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo, whom Jessica met at the launch of his book The Age of Women: Why Feminism also Liberates Men – but I didn’t know what she had done about it.
So, after she told the audience how the Prime Minister had declined her invitation, it was a shock to hear Jessica calling me up to be that honoured person. Suddenly there I was: a somewhat Me-minded man standing in front of an audience largely of women to receive a book mainly about women from a woman. My eyes were not dry as I stammered through my admission that indeed Jessica had long converted me to her way of thinking. But neither, our daughter Scarlett informed me later, were the eyes of several others in the audience.
Long live that moment that Jessica formally delivered her We-minded idea to the world in such a We-minded way.
Click here:
- To buy the book on Amazon.com (available as Kindle/ePub or print-on-demand at your country’s Amazon platform, )
- To read the preface of We-mind vs Me-mind
- To read more about the book on Jessica’s website
- To see a multimedia Instagram story on the launch
Iraqi Kurdistan: an audience in the palace
Being ushered into the presence of a country’s most powerful person is a highlight of any trip. In Iraqi Kurdistan, that means visiting Masoud Barzani, former president and leader of the biggest political-military movement.
Thanks to the chance to travel in the company of Jonathan Randal – revered here for his book on the Kurds and reporting for the Washington Post – that also means being picked up in a motorcade of black limousines and swept up to Barzani’s palace on the smooth first fold in the mountains that rise north of the capital, Erbil.
Jon told Barzani how grateful he still was for Barzani’s role in saving him and an embattled group of foreign reporters whom Barzani helped make it out of Iraqi Kurdistan safely in 1991, just ahead of advancing Iraqi troops. Barzani then reminded us of how one day in 1996 he’d been in his home village of Barzan, its houses then still flattened piles of rubble after being blown up a decade before by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein when Jon suddenly appeared in front of him with a first rapid-fire question: “What are you doing here?” To which Barzani remembered replying: “This is my village. What are YOU doing here?”
It’s a good question. Jon, now 89, usually says that the Kurds were his last reporting love because, however desperate their predicament, they could laugh at it and make him laugh too. I was once again with Jon that day in Barzan, and remember how we stopped on the potholed road, jumped out of the pretty white Suzuki jeeps that we’d driven over from Turkey and astonished Barzani’s entourage by wandering up to talk – interrupting what they’d hoped would be a day off in a tense period of soon-to-turn-deadly internal Kurdish political rivalry.
My contribution to our palace visit was a memory from further back: a gift of two pictures of Barzani as a young guerrilla leader in the mountains in 1985, when the Iraqi Kurds became tangled up in the Iran-Iraq war. Barzani remembered that day too. “Our headquarters was half an hour away and the Iranians told us a group of their senior commanders were coming. So we hurried over,” he said. “Then we found the Iranians had brought a group of journalists. The Iranians were very keen to make it look like we were fighting alongside them.”
In the shifting Bermuda triangle of Kurdish geopolitics, Iran, like Turkey, is now occasionally bombing bits of Iraqi Kurdistan to underline its discomfort with Kurdish issues and to provide distraction from domestic problems. But nearly forty years since my first visit in that Iranian helicopter, it’s the only place in the Middle East I can think of where the same man still presides over his people. A lot has improved, with roads, airports, some international recognition and construction everywhere. Many enduring and apparently insoluble problems remain, of course, yet Iraqi Kurds still manage to laugh at some of them.
The Turk Does Exist – and With a Many-Faceted Identity Too
“The Turk Does Not Exist” – for sure, I was set a provocative assertion to address in my speech at Amsterdam’s De Balie cultural centre. But in fact there are lots of ways to answer that question, given the dozens of layers of Turkic cultures, 1,500 years of history, and an ethno-linguistic geography that literally girdles the globe. Here are the answers, maps and slides I brought to my 3 June talk, which was part of the 2015 Holland Festival.
Riding the authorial roller-coaster
See on Amazon.com
“How’s the book doing?” All authors gnaw at this question before answering, no matter if our book sold 100,000 copies (but the last one sold a million), if 2,730 lovingly produced volumes of our self-published work still lie wrapped in brown paper in the garage, or if the book, in everyone but the author’s eyes, is doing perfectly fine.
Not many writers can give the straight answer that the questioner usually expects (“Oh, it sold 10,802 copies in the first 14 months,” for instance), for the simple reason that nobody seems to know this figure. Only by accident, for instance, did I or (apparently) the publisher learn that the 4th updated edition of my co-authored Turkey Unveiled actually sold out in a couple of months after publication in December 2011. A reprint was quickly ordered up. Yet, now that Dining with al-Qaeda is two years old, I would like to know how many copies have been sold. Where to start, though?
Who wants to believe the amazon.com weekly sales tracker at “author central”, informing you occasionally that you sold no copies of any book whatsoever in the past week? (However you do, of course, allow yourself a pat on the back when it says that last week a dozen of copies of one of them suddenly sold in one town – this week’s thank yous to Houston TX, Boston MA and Washington DC!).
The perplexing vagueness continues with publishers’ weird accounting. After Dining with al-Qaeda came out in March 2010, I was astonished by the several thousand copies reported sold in the first half-year statement from Thomas Dunne/St Martins Press. Tearing open the full year’s statement with premature glee, I then discovered that the number had fallen by more than one third. Bookshops had apparently sent back what they couldn’t sell, leaving a good total in readers’ hands, but still, well, less than before. From previous books I know that actual royalties roll in much later, taking years to pay off any advance. Even then the math never seems to add up – and, as an agent once told me, publishers make money long before authors pay off their advances.
So, I admit it, I’m not one of those lucky few authors who actually make a cash profit from writing books. That gives me a weakness for what my old Crisis Group boss Gareth Evans disparaged as time-wasting “psychic income”.
My first installment of this virtual revenue came from launch tour events in New York and Washington DC and elsewhere, that happy period when for a historical moment Dining with al-Qaeda was #1 in amazon.com’s ‘Middle East books’. More gratification came from reviews in the media. And even if they didn’t write about it, many former reporting colleagues seem to have actually read the book and enjoyed it.
Secondly, I’m proud to say that readers on amazon.com give it an average 4-1/2 stars in the US and 5 stars in the UK. Please indulge me by sharing some of their views:
“A superb book” (Arabourne); “the author’s transparency of thought [shows an] ability to get into the Arab mind, in all its complexity” (David Schlosberg); “a valuable journey … first-rate understanding of the interplay of history, politics and culture” (BlueRidgeVa); “As an American woman who has lived for 15+ years in the region, I consider this book to be a must-read for Westerns who have never traveled to the ME” (L. Campbell); “I was caught up in the moment” (S. McGee); “The smells, dust, noise of the Turkish, Arab or Iranian streets burst from the book’s pages” (F. Brauer). Some see flaws, too, and if you insist on reading those, all can be found here.
I’m offered even better psychic income from invitations to discuss Dining with al-Qaeda with readers. The book never had academic pretensions, but one of my hopes while writing it was that new students of the Middle East would find it a fast track to understanding the context of their dry historical studies. So I was delighted to learn that Bucknell University in Pennsylvania made the book required reading for students of the International Relations of the Middle East. I then had great fun talking to the class via Skype under the watchful eye of their guide, award-winning academic Juliette Tolay, answering questions about what it felt like to see, hear and taste the Middle East – and why nothing changes as quickly as Westerners often hope.
I enjoy the steady demand for more traditional talks on the themes of Dining with al-Qaeda. Book clubs sometimes ask me along (my favorite audience), for instance a heady dinner in Brussels with several of the finest minds of the new European External Action Service. Most recently I spoke to four score grandees at the monthly Writers’ Lunch of the Oxford & Cambridge Club in London.
This occasional blog, of course, is another way for me to keep enjoying the book. At this two-year mark, about 26,000 people have visited.
Intriguingly, amazon.com’s tracker shows that book shipments plummeted for several weeks after January 2011, as stories of the Egyptian revolution predominated and the killing of Osama bin Laden in May made Americans think that the al-Qaeda chapter of their recent history had closed. Nevertheless, this year the book is coming out in French, probably as Rendez-vous avec al-Qaeda (Presses de l’Universite Laval, Quebec), translated by Benoit Léger. I’ve posted a translated excerpt about Syria (in French here, the original English here).
So French readers will soon also, I hope, discover the broader perspective that 30 years of traveling and reporting gives to, for example, the past year of Arab revolts and uprisings. Is it really an Arab spring, or merely the latest twist of familiar pieces in the Middle Eastern kaleidoscope? Allez-y! Découvrez par vous-même!
11 May book talk & cocktail at Kadir Has University, Istanbul
All welcome!
The final lecture of the 2010-2011 Kadir Has University Culture and the Arts Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of American Culture and Literature, will be presented by Hugh Pope, who will discuss his most recent book, Dining with Al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East.
Hugh Pope has been engaged in the broader Middle East for three decades. He read Persian and Arabic at Oxford University and has written from 30 countries during 25 years of travels as a foreign correspondent. From 1997 to 2005, he ran The Wall Street Journal‘s news bureau in Istanbul, and he has reported for the Independent, the Los Angeles Times, BBC and Reuters as well. His two previous books are Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey (1997, a New York Times «Notable Book,» co-authored with Nicole Pope), and Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World (2005, an Economist «Book of the Year»). Pope has lectured widely, including invitations to speak before London’s Royal Academy of Arts and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Presently he serves as director of the Turkey/Cyprus project of International Crisis Group.
For further information call (0212) 533 65 32, ext. 1344.
Buy from Amazon.com
Date: Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Time: 6:00 PM
Cocktail: 7:00 PM
Place: Fener Lecture Hall
Kadir Has University
Cibali, Istanbul
C-SPAN Book TV interview on Dining with al-Qaeda
I’d never been to an authors’ book fair before, and it was sobering to appear alongside 90 writers at the National Press Club’s annual jamboree in Washington DC in November. As we gathered for the opening reception, we sized each other up. I have to say we didn’t look particularly diverse, notable, or even interesting as a group, except for one of our number who was determined to make the most of the occasion. His book had a picture of a gorilla on the front cover, and he made us notice this by holding it out in front of him as he swept through the cocktail crowd with a full-size dummy ape in evening dress piggy-backed onto his hips. Plenty of people’s drinks got spilled as he lurched about.
Otherwise most of us, I reckon, had a pretty furtive look. Conceiving a book, finding an agent, landing a publisher, writing the text, rewriting it, getting the book accepted for publication, managing the editing process, planning the promotion, and now, finally, selling the book, is, in the end, a pretty harrowing experience. We were the survivors, I agreed with a cheerfully agitated fellow-author, Steve Light, a New York kindergarten teacher and artist with a picture book called “The Christmas Giant”. But we all felt we had to keep an eye on the others for ideas on how to make our pitches more attractive, and waited for our turn with media out to cover the event (C-SPAN Book TV’s three-minute interview with me about Dining with al-Qaeda is here).
As we practiced potted accounts of the best possible interpretation of our publishing success, one group of authors seemed set above the rest of us. This was clear right from the nametag get-go. Writers who might be ambassadors, doctors, professors, priests, lords or ladies got no titles in front of their names. But if you were a cookbook writer, you got to be “Chef”. One or two even wore a white coat and chef’s hat, so that everybody could spot them from a distance. As we moved into the ballroom where tables were set out with piles of our books, their other advantages became clear. Spotlights illuminated the long line of authors touting books like SOS! The Six O’Clock Scramble to the Rescue: Earth-Friendly, Kid-Pleasing Dinners for Busy Families. This meta-kitchen was where the energy was, where everyone clustered. Several even had big bowls of pre-cooked offerings to tempt the passing crowds to linger, chat and feel more like buying the book.
I had a good spot in the center of the room, but felt in the shadow of the glamorous cooks, towards whom the eyes of people walking past were naturally attracted. There wasn’t much I could do except wait until someone approached me. I wished that, like the chefs, I’d put on some professional gear, the flak jacket that still lies unused under my bed at home, for instance. Perhaps I could also have found a battered helmet and put a plaster strip over its rim and scrawled “PRESS” on it in Arabic. After a while I realized that since I couldn’t beat the chefs, I should join them. “Dining with al-Qaeda” is of course in the mealtime category, and when the eyes of a passing soul paused on the title, that was my chance: “No, it’s not a cookbook, but it does have a really interesting account of what it’s like to eat a Chinese meal with someone who knew the September 11 hijackers …”
My pile of books gradually and gratifyingly diminished. I suppose that at least half the people in the world are not likely to find your book to be just right – I know that only a few books in an average bookshop appeal to me. Indeed, the National Press Club had chosen very few other books on foreign affairs, let alone the Middle East (full list here) — the closest to that category I found was a book about the CIA and a novel about Little Egypt, Illinois.
On the other hand, it was fun chatting with the kind of people who did want to buy my book. A lady told me she was writing about the fate of journalists who could no longer support themselves by working in the media. An elderly man related how he’d set up the Peace Corps program in Turkey, becoming godfather of a galaxy of Americans who grew to be prominent in introducing the country to the world, from historian Heath Lowry to guidebook pioneer Tom Brosnahan. Best of all, I met several younger readers for whom I really wrote the book, students starting out in their discovery of the Middle East.
With a series of people stopping by my table for anything for one to ten minutes, I honed my message about what the book was about (and learned that if someone hasn’t bought your book after five minutes, they are probably not going to). Perhaps this is what the publishing world should do before anyone starts to write: organize a book fair in which publishers wander from table to table and hear writers making their pitch. Or perhaps that’s what the publishers’ rejection system is actually trying to imitate – if only they’d just say “no” straight away, instead of leaving us nervously waiting months for their message telling us “this is a fascinating and important book, but we’re going to pass”. Anyway, when C-SPAN’s Book TV reporter and cameraman suddenly turned up at my table, I was in full flow, and about as clear as I can verbally get (the result is here). And perhaps even better, an agent appeared in front of me and said she was interested in my work, flattering my vain authors’ idea that one day I might be able to earn a living from all this books business.
The reality is, of course, that most of us have to have day jobs. I had to leave the book fair early to rush off to the airport (and board the second of Turkish Airlines’ superb new Boeing 777 flights direct from DC to Istanbul). So I don’t know what the final score was for the evening. At least as successful as the chefs was my neighbor to the right, a former senator had been in constant demand for his colourful tome about What Washington Could Learn from the World of Sports. On they other hand, my neighbor to the left, New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, shifted only a few copies of her ‘Boiling Mad’ book on the Tea Party movement. But then she hadn’t turned up.
In the end it seemed that, with my pile of books about halved, I’d roughly equaled the performance of nearby James Zogby, a pollster and long-standing Arab voice in the American wilderness. Throughout the evening he had looked predisposed to be disappointed with the world as he stood behind his new volume telling Americans about what Arabs really think. Still, who knows what makes what happen in publishing? Perhaps it was something at the Press Club book fair that helped him hit a vital jackpot two weeks later, a sweet review in the New York Times…
9 Nov 2010 at National Press Club, Washington DC
Dining with al-Qaeda has been selected as one of the books on show at the National’s Press Club’s annual Book Fair & Authors’ Night on 9 November 2010! This year the jamboree showcases 90 journalist-authors who sign their books that have appeared in the preceding year. NPR’s Diane Rehm is the honorary chairperson of the event, which runs from 5.30pm and ends “promptly” at 8.30pm. I will be joining the authors gathered at the 13th floor ballroom of the National Press Building near Metro Center at 529 14th St NW, at the corner of F & 15th Sreets NW in downtown Washington. Hope to see you there!
Launch in Istanbul
The Istanbul launch of Dining with al-Qaeda will take place on at 4pm on Thursday, 16 September 2010, at the Istanbul Policy Center in Karakoy, the heart of the grand old Ottoman banking district. Co-hosts are the Istanbul Policy Center, Hurriyet Daily News and Homer Bookshop. The introduction will be by Joost Lagendijk, the former Euro-MP from Holland and one of Europe’s most famous faces in Turkey, now at Sabanci University. Author Hugh Pope will sign copies and give a talk about the book too. Below is a map with the formal invitation from HDN’s Michael Wyatt. All are welcome to come along, just RSVP to the address below!
For those who can’t make it and want a copy of Dining with al-Qaeda in Turkey, Homer Books (details here) nearly always has the book in stock at its shop just round the corner from Galatasaray on Istiklal Cad., and is ready to courier it to any Turkish address for little extra cost.
Dear Friends/Sevgili Dostlar,
Joost Lagendijk, Senior Adviser at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, along with David Judson, Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review Editor-in-Chief, and Ayşen Boylu and Tolga Ölmezses of Homer Books, cordially invite you to join Hugh Pope for the launch of his new book, Dining with al-Qaeda: three decades exploring the many worlds of the Middle East.
Joost Lagendijk, Sabancı Üniversitesi Istanbul Politikalar Merkezi’nde Kıdemli Danışman, David Judson, Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review Genel Yayın Yönetmeni, ve Homer Kitabevi’nden Ayşen Boylu ile Tolga Ölmezses, Hugh Pope’in yeni kitabının, Dining with al-Qaeda: three decades exploring the many worlds of the Middle East, tanıtımına sizleri aramızda görmekten mutluluk duyacaklardır.
Mr Pope will greet guests and sign copies of his book on September 16th 2010 at 4:00pm at Sabancı University İletişim Merkezi, Bankalar Caddesi No:2 Minerva Han, Karaköy, Istanbul.
For map, click here.
Please RSVP to cbalcioglu@sabanciuniv.edu<
Can Balcioğlu
Project Administrative Officer
Istanbul Policy Center at Sabancı UniversityTel: +90 212 292 49 39Güler Turunçoğlu, Michael Wyatt
Business Development Associates
Hürriyet Daily News & Economic ReviewTel: +90 (0)212 449 69 97
‘Intelligence and wit … with [a] characteristic smile’ – Washington Report
I didn’t realize that I was perceived as having a ‘swashbuckling style’, but reviews don’t get much more flattering than this Adam Chamy take on my April presentation of Dining with al-Qaeda at the New America Foundation. It was published in the Music and Arts section of the July edition of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, pages 52-53.
LONGTIME foreign correspondent Hugh Pope, currently director of the Turkey/Cyprus Project at the International Crisis Group, discussed his new memoir, Dining with al-Qaeda, at an April 23 event hosted by the New America Foundation, International Crisis Group, and Foreign Policy Magazine. Pope, who has spent more than three decades in the Middle East as a traveler, journalist and student of Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages, said one of the most important things he has learned is that the Middle East is not a monolithic “Islamic World.” With intelligence and wit, the British journalist fielded difficult questions concerning ongoing political changes in the region.
Clearly, war correspondence in the Middle East is not for the faint of heart. Pope’s perilous assignments included reporting on the Lebanese civil war and the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Even as a polyglot, he encountered difficulty in finding reliable and safe sources in a region dominated by autocratic, media-sensitive regimes and a sometimes hostile Arab street.
The author of Dining with al-Qaeda really did dine with a member of al-Qaeda soon after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. At the time a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Pope met in Riyadh with a young militant who’d worked in Afghanistan and had helped prepare many of the hijackers for their deadly mission.
In addition to dangerous assignments, Pope said he’s faced editorial room intrigues as a result of pressure by powerful pro-Israel lobbying groups and a media-sensitive Bush administration.
“Most journalists are honest,” Pope said, “and what you read in the newspaper is mostly right, but it is not the whole story. You do have to search for other sources of information to compare and think about what you are hearing and take a variety of points of view.”
Expressing optimism about the changing narrative surrounding Israel and Palestine, Pope noted that several mainstream media outlets have reported issues that would have been wholly taboo during his tenure as a Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent. Likewise—citing the example of Turkey and the power of the Internet on young people in the Middle East—he seemed cautiously hopeful about the gradual prospects for media, social, and political freedoms in Ba’athist Syria, and with the prospect of elections in a post-Mubarak Egypt.
As for his swashbuckling style of foreign journalism, Pope—with his characteristic smile—joked that a life like his would probably be unrealistic in the future, given the dangers, costs, and demise of traditional reporting, but praised the potential of Twitter and bloggers as tools for future journalists.
Pope’s memoir is available from the AET Book Club for only $19. To order, call (202) 939-6050 ext. 2 or visit <www.middleeastbooks.com>.
—Adam Chamy
Oxford, Cambridge and some places in between
The fortunes of my books among British readers has always felt complicated by my ambivalent relationship with the United Kingdom. I love the high English liberal culture of my parents and my education, but I never fully connected to England itself. Perhaps this was because I spent the first decade of my life in South Africa, and the three decades since leaving Oxford University in the Middle East and Turkey. On top of that, my former wife was Swiss, my present wife is Dutch, my daughters went to French and German schools, and I have almost always preferred the rigour and vigour of working for Americans. My lack of a true anchor in Britain may be why my first two books seemed to do better in U.S. and international markets than in England.
So it may prove for Dining with al-Qaeda as well. High-octane UK publications like the Economist and Prospect Magazine have reviewed it (here) and excerpted it (here), but the book is not yet formally published in Britain. Independent stores like Daunt Books and the London Review Book Shop display and stock the US edition published in March, as does amazon.co.uk, but if asked about it, mainstream bookstores scratch their heads or announce that it has been ‘sold out’.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist when invitations arrived to give public talks about the book in May in three English venues: the first a presentation of the themes of the book to a dozen friends of International Crisis Group over dinner in London, and then talks in Cambridge and Oxford.
I was met at Cambridge station by Ata Akiner, president of the university’s Turkish Society and the prime mover in inviting me to speak. We first headed to Magdalene College, where I was greatly looking forward to staying. If my life had taken a different turn, I would have become the fourth generation in my family to be a student there; but, bruised by high 1970s drop-out rates in Oriental Studies, and probably wary of my rebellious school record, the college had dismissed my application to study Persian.
Talk at Department of International Studies
Akiner and the Turkish Society proved the perfect hosts, setting me up in a delightful senior fellow’s room overlooking a leafy courtyard on a sunny afternoon that was flattering every corner of Cambridge’s lawns, gardens and lilac-garlanded stone walls. We then gathered followers to my talk in the Department of Politics and International Studies, and it became clear that Cambridge now helps prove a paradox: its collection of ethnically Turkish students from Belgium, Germany and England were another example of how the Turks of Europe can sometimes appear more cosmopolitan and borderlessly ‘European’ than Europeans themselves. They were also efficient in broadcasting news of the talk and directing people to the lecture hall through a departmental labyrinth. Even at this time of finals exams and gorgeous weather, they also defeated elite institutional ennui and filled every seat in the room.
Euroturks dining at Pembroke College, Cambridge
Dr. Geoffrey Edwards, the Reader in European Studies who introduced my talk, then spoiled me and the Turkish Society with a formal dinner in the hall of Pembroke College, replete with gongs, academics in flowing gowns, Latin graces, long silver-decked tables and a gorgeous light flowing in from windows opening out onto the honey-coloured quadrangles all around.
Geoffrey Edwards, Hugh Pope, Ata Akiner
Edwards turned out to be following the same lonely path as I do in trying to draw attention to the benefits of EU integration, and Turkey’s role in that, and gave me new strength in my conviction that Europe needs more unity rather than less.
Two days later I headed over to Oxford, where my invitation was of a different nature. On being called up several months before to be asked if I would contribute cash to my old college, Wadham, I had said I had little money to spare but would be happy to give something in kind – a talk to the new generation of Oriental Studies students, perhaps. Within an hour my offer had been accepted. Wadham Arabic student and lead organizer Jessica Kelly filled a fine new room on the front quadrangle with an impressive number of students, and wrote up a pre-talk interview published in the student newspaper Cherwell (here). A lively barrage of questions ranged from my views on the film the Hurt Locker (more here) to a discussion of why, after I described International Crisis Group’s efforts to mobilize information behind policy recommendations, academics did not make the same effort to be currently relevant and accessible.
Oxford was looking so beautiful that I happily lingered for two days more, punting on the river, lunching on a lawn near the Oriental Institute to chat with students about what post-Orientalists like us can expect from the world. I also took in a Balliol college lecture by Rory Stewart, an Etonian, Balliol man, army officer and diplomat, who, after writing successful books on his experiences in Afghanistan (The Places in Between) and Iraq (The Prince of the Marshes), has now stormed into the British parliament. By chance I sat exactly in front of him as he spoke, which doubled the impact of his words. He sports a well-trained memory, a clear rhetorical style, a confident strutting around and leaning on the lectern, a well-cut suit with a dashing extra waist pocket, and a political ambition that is only highlighted by his quotations from T.S. Eliot about the need for humility. I was soon convinced me that he has his sights firmly on Britain highest political office.
Good for Rory Stewart. I found myself agreeing with all his arguments about the need for a far lighter footprint for troops in Afghanistan, and his account of the hypocrisy and irresponsibility that led to the build-up of troops there in the first place. Above all, I appreciated his attack on the great theoretical and academic infrastructure that continues to justify these self-defeating Western deployments, a mesmerising mixture, as he pointed out, of paranoia and megalomania.
His comments about the UK’s predicament, and the misrepresentations of Middle Eastern reality that make it so hard to change policies, mirrored he arguments I make in Dining with al-Qaeda about U.S. policy and American media. I hope that in our different ways, people like us pushing together will in the end result in some better understanding of how to let the Middle East become a more constructive place.
Hugh Pope 