Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Tocqueville (as a nobleman, his last name, when used alone, was unburdened by the "de" that attaches to, say, the lower-born de Gaulle) was deeply worried about what he called the tyranny of the majority, which "in the United States enjoys immense actual power together with a power of opinion that is almost as great. And once it has made up its mind about a question, there is nothing that can stop it or even slow it long enough to hear the cries of those whom it crushes in passing.

"The consequences of this state of affairs are dire and spell danger for the future." It was his best-known insight.

Few nations can muster the unity of Americans in times of crisis, as was shown in the aftermath of 9/11. But Tocqueville found another side to that unity. In America, he noted, "the majority erects a formidable barrier around thought. Within the limits thus laid down, the writer is free, but woe unto him who dares to venture beyond those limits....He must face all sorts of unpleasantness and daily persecution....In the end, he gives in, he bends under the burden of such unremitting effort and retreats into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth." (One thinks of the vitriolic attacks on the writer Susan Sontag for suggesting that the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards, and deploring the "unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators.")

Until recently, Sheik Hassoun was thought to be on the shortlist of clerics to become the Grand Mufti of Damascus, the most senior religious figure in Syria. But when I asked him about this, he shook his head. “I am in a struggle here with fundamentalists,” he told me.

We were seated in the reception room of the sheik’s Aleppo home, a modest dwelling generously stocked with religious tomes and elaborately embellished copies of the Koran. He had injured his back a month earlier and was hobbling about on a cane. He was, as usual, dressed in spare but elegant gray vestments and a striking white turban.

I asked how the U.S-led invasion of Iraq and its policy of spreading democracy in the Arab world had effected Syria. “The United States will lose not only Iraq but the Islamic world with its current policy,” he said. “This is because its government is standing with [Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon. Take Hezbollah. The Americans and Israel call this an extremist organization, but I know Hasan Nasrullah [the head of Hezbollah]. He is not an extremist. If anything, he is a bulkhead against extremists in his own party. Remember, when Hezbollah kicked Israel out of southern Lebanon, Nasrullah saved many churches there and prevented reprisal attacks against those who fought on the Israel side. This is extremism?”

The day after I spoke with Hassoun was Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, and the sheik delivered the sermon at Aleppo’s main mosque. His preferred tactic when dealing with orthodox calls for sharia, or Islamic law, is a frontal assault, and on this day he issued an impassioned plea for ecumenical modernity, referring frequently to Jesus Christ, a revered prophet in nearly all Islamic sects, as a model for good Muslims. “Know the real religion!” the sheik thundered to a congregation of nearly 4,000 worshipers. “Neither Mohammed nor Jesus would tolerate extremism. I ask [local fundamentalist groups] to recite pure Koranic verses and they cannot provide them. And the are preaching to you?” The show was videotaped for distribution on Arab satellite-news networks. In Syria as elsewhere, the culture wars have taken to the airwaves, and Sheik Hassoun had just delivered a blow for the moderate side.