Christians in the Middle East

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, the wonderful thing about your Lordships’ House is that it never fails to surprise, to entertain and to inform. At the moment I am a little let down by tears because this is by far the most interesting collection of speeches that I have heard in all my time in this House—but I should have known that because the right reverend Prelates are extremely well educated and well informed. They absorb information in a way that even a wet sponge cannot do. What is it about them? First, we are not going to let them go from this House. We need them and have always needed them, as the knowledge that has been imparted to us today demonstrates.

I would like to thank the most reverend Primate for surprising me. I suffer from many disadvantages. I was christened into the Church of Scotland, but no one bothered to tell me until maybe 10 years after the war. My Christian name is Malcolm, after St Columba, the dove of peace. My family motto is “Deus Providebit”—God will provide, with a hand holding a cross crosslet. I was not quite sure what the three little crosses were until someone said, “Perhaps you could cheat a bit and call them church, law and Parliament, the three great estates”.

The school that I went to, Winchester, surprised me the other day. I was not adequately academic to be academically active, but I got a note advising that they had bought a copy of the first edition of the King James Bible. I then found to my surprise that one of the earlier headmasters had actually translated it and had pointed out that there were dangers in translation in terms of misinterpretation. Even the brochure, or little leaflet, that I got showed many examples of complete misinterpretation.

So I go back to the power of the word—the written word, the spoken word—and,

“the Word was with God”.

What I fear may happen in these days between church, law and Parliament is misunderstandings and misinterpretations between religions, particularly those that are based upon the written word. Hence, I shall not stray too far into the people of the book, because, unfortunately, the books that I was going to read yesterday at some length did not arrive from the Library in time.

I have done many things in my life, but for a long period I was chairman of the Committee for Middle East Trade, responsible for trying to encourage and develop trade in the Middle East. This meant that the Foreign Office would recommend that you went to the most awful places because no one else could go there. Among other things, I had to go to Iran without a visa to try to sort out the problem of The Satanic Verses. I was picked up and taken to Isfahan, the holy city. I had an Islamic lawyer; I had a mullah; I had my own team, whose English was not perhaps quite as good as my own, and we had room for misunderstandings. But we sat to decide and discuss what should happen next.

In that, I suddenly learnt that people quote things. My quotations would have been:

“Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine”.

I used to have to learn things parrot-wise—14 lines, a sonnet each week—and also in German. Often I did not know what they meant, but I had learnt them and then I could trot them out for no reason.

In my time in the Middle East dealing with trade, we found that, every time there was some problem, you would have a debate and a discussion of the Word and the writings—Old Testament, New Testament and, of course, occasionally the Koran. Trade was the advantage, because it is the duty of every good Muslim to trade. That, I had never heard in religion before, but it would mean that when you were talking with someone in a souk, next door to him would be a Jewish trader with his children being trained. There was no problem in the trade. You looked at the old trade route and you found that, in general, it was not emotion or religion that caused the problem; it was temporal matters such as territorial gain.

We have failed to recognise or note today the tremendous importance of our own British colonialism or empire over Middle Eastern territories for a long period. We were there mainly because of the opportunities for the development and creation of added value to resources. We forgot, too, that the Arab world—which I tend to refer to it as, rather than the Middle East—was based historically on trade. They were the first slavers, seeking above all white slaves, who were at a far greater premium. They were the ones who sailed the world. They were the first navigators. There is an ancient culture there that is difficult for many people to understand. Over my time, I have been drip-fed and I have appreciated the knowledge and learning that comes with it. The trouble is that if you are not properly trained in these matters, you can suddenly find yourself one day in the Sinai desert in the middle of a minefield where you have been asked to develop a hotel called Hammam Phar’oun—Pharaoh’s Bath—on the very spot that Musa or Moses took his staff, stuck it in the ground and water came out, having just passed across the Red Sea at low tide. As you read these books you realise that each generation alters the text slightly and there may be misinterpretations. At the end of the day, surprisingly enough, it is the written word that has power. We can look at treaties, we can look at everything else and we can look at people.

We used to say that the Foreign Office was all Arabist. They used to drop the “W” from the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, because he was always right. I would find myself in Petra having meetings with people or at the bottom of Jordan with Alec Douglas Hume, whose speeches we should not forget, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher. We were trying to work out the future. I was picked up by plane and taken back to Oman. The next day I was being flown by King Hussein in his plane back to England. He said, “We are in the air now so we can talk freely”. I asked why and he said, “We are between heaven and earth”. You could talk very openly with these people and I found that there were three postures—the official, the religious and the personal. In all these territories, which I got to know very well, I would look at the trade routes. I would be amazed that the Jewish faith was particularly popular in Dakar, Senegal. As you moved across the Atlantic, the same was the case in Sao Paulo and you realised that it was due to periods of migration or persecution that moved whole nations.

I do not fear too much about the future of the Middle East as it is, but I feel that there are so many opportunities and misunderstandings and we must look back to the books. Islam says that he who kills shall surely himself be killed, and that he who forgives from a position of strength is more honourable than he who forgives from a position of weakness. When I read this debate, a little tear will come to my eye. We have had a remarkable collection of speeches so far. It will be difficult to differentiate between the speech, the sermon or ultimately what will become the saying.