Syria and the Middle East

Baroness Afshar Excerpts

Monday 1st July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Afshar]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, for this very timely debate. We all seem to have heard different things in the Minister’s statement. I got the impression that the Government were intent on negotiations and that the idea was that there should be quiet diplomacy before any kind of action. If I have heard right, I would applaud that and am very grateful because that was what I was going to suggest at the end of my speech.

The most important consideration about intervention in the Middle East is whether it would help yet another “fundamentalist” group of religious people. In my experience—both as a teacher of Islamic law and of courses on the Middle East, and as someone born and raised in Iran—it is when religion rather than citizenship becomes the badge of identity that death, destruction and the complete misuse of faith become evident.

I do not recognise the presentation of these borderless countries in the Middle East where people do not know their identity and they wonder about modernity. I had the good fortune to be born and raised in Iran in the century when modernisation and secularism were very much part of people’s experience. Not only was I raised as a secular person, with my religion accepted, but so were my mother and grandfather. In our family there are at least three generations, going back to the very beginning of the century, of accepting secularism without undermining faith. I grew up as a Muslim and used to fast with my one non-secular grandmother, who was very religious, but at the same time I was sent to a Catholic school run by the sisters of St Vincent de Paul. I was then sent to a Protestant school in the UK and subsequently went to a secular university at York. At no time did I ever feel defensive about my religion or the lack of it. When I was growing up, our life was patterned by Islamic feast days and fast days but, at the same time, by the Persian new year, which dates back 6,000 years to the Zoroastrian era. Muslims, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians—people of any religion and none—lived, worked and intermarried. They had no problems—so much so that I learnt a great deal about Christianity through my aunt’s sister, who is a nun in the UK and has headed a convent. It seems to me that celebrating diversity, at least in Iran, goes a very long way back.

I also fear that I will have to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Desai, who I admire greatly. It seems to me that the Iran-Iraq war was not about religion but was very much about borders and fear of religion. That fear of religion is exactly what we are seeing right now in Egypt. Egyptians are beginning to realise what fundamentalism, or any “ism”, means. I would suggest that Islamism, as experienced in Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere, and Zionism, as experienced in Israel and elsewhere, have nothing to do with the teachings of the holy books. They have everything to do with grasping an identity, misinterpreting the texts and imposing a climate of fear, including fear of the other—those who do not have our religion. I had no idea who was a Shia or a Sunni and I still do not among all the Muslims with whom I work, and work very effectively, in a country where—thank heaven—Muslim women can sit in the House of Lords and be Ministers. I would like to wish very much the same thing for much of the Middle East.

That is where any intervention on the part of the Government that would advantage any religious group—Sunni, Shia or whatever—is going to be highly counterproductive and would actually cause more damage than not intervening at all. It seems to me that much of the Middle East is waking up to the fear of Islam and of what it can do. That is why the Turks are in the streets and why the Egyptians are in the streets. There is a real uprising from among the people themselves. They do not need to be told and certainly do not need intervention that would help a particular religious group and give it any kind of advantage. The situation in the Middle East is tumultuous enough and things are going from bad to worse. The very last thing that we need as Middle Easterners is for any Government to help one group rather than another. Of course negotiations are difficult and of course it is not easy to be peacemakers but, in my experience, what the British are fantastically good at is quiet diplomacy. That is where they are sans pareil. There is no other group I know who can work so effectively under the radar.

The experience of Afghanistan shows that, after years of war, we finally have to sit down with the Taliban and talk to it at a time when it seems impossible. There is no such thing as impossible in diplomacy. What is needed is quiet undercurrents of help, assistance and conversations. Please do not arm yet another group of fundamentalists. That, I think, would be a mistake.