This collection of essays shows Fred Halliday's depth, drive and wisdom
A few years ago the BBC asked Fred Halliday to look at a list of the British Muslim, Jewish, Arab and Zionist groups it had asked to comment on its Middle East coverage. What, it asked, should it do with their contradictory advice?
"Ignore it completely," snapped Halliday, "and ask yourself whether they should have any standing in the matter."
Fred Halliday, professor of international relations at the LSE, polyglot, engaged chronicler of the traumas of the cold war and Middle East and one of the few intellectuals to whom that overused epithet "citizen of the world" genuinely applied, hated the special pleading of tribal and confessional groups. He believed that the interventions of diasporas – whether Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, Irish or Cuban – invariably prevented the resolution of conflicts in their homelands. (Only English emigrants failed to lobby for the presumed interests of their native land, he noted, "though their spasms of collective inebriation and conformist ghettoised life-style abroad do little to enhance the reputation of their home country".) More pertinently, he supported universal values. His career had taught him that when a man began a sentence "speaking as a Muslim" or "speaking as Jew" he was invariably preparing to palm a race card from the bottom of the deck to trump the humane objections of his critics.
The intellectuals he admired were clear-sighted secularists who had freed themselves from the myths of their communities and traditions. Halliday had to free himself from the "community" of Marxist leftists of the 1968 generation, whose British wing failed so dismally to live up to its promise – and to the promises it made to itself. Part of Political Journeys, a posthumous collection of essays he wrote for the openDemocracy website, is a well-deserved laceration of the "anti-imperialist" left's embrace of counter-Enlightenment reaction. For Halliday, as for others, the moment when Ken Livingstone, the left-wing mayor of London, made common cause with Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a misogynist, homophobic and antisemitic rabble-rouser for the Muslim Brotherhood, represented the final stage of a long and foul-smelling decomposition.
Unusually for a modern western intellectual, Halliday saw women's emancipation as the "single most burning question of our times", and never stayed quiet when liberals tried to dignify the oppression of women with soothing words about "respecting cultural difference". This volume contains warm tributes to Iranian and Lebanese feminists who fought for the right to "speak, dress, work and love freely", and against the "re-masculinisation of political space that has swept the Middle East". In its grimmest essay, he asks whether the forward march of women has been halted, not just by the rise of religious bigotry in America as well as in the Muslim world, but by globalisation's attacks on the public services and welfare states women with children rely on.
To characterise this book as a "farewell to the left", however, is misleading on two counts. First, no conservative newspaper would have published Halliday. He remained an enemy of western policies old and new. Nowhere can he manage one good word for American foreign policy; he saw America's role in the Middle East as unremittingly disastrous. Second, his Marxist background and travels to the sites of revolts from Cuba to Yemen ensured that he understood the dynamics of revolution as well as any of his contemporaries. Repeatedly Halliday emphasises that the Islamic wave that began with the Iranian revolution of 1979 will not peter out, and that those hoping for a quiet life are likely to be disappointed. He writes with admirable hard-headedness from Iran on how the apocalyptic figure of Ahmadinejad follows the pattern set by his predecessors in Russia and China. All have engaged in late spasms of militancy and violence rather than compromise with reality as the failures of the revolution's utopian hopes became evident. Like Stalin with his purges and Mao with the cultural revolution, the heirs of Khomeini have convinced themselves that one last bloody heave will bring heaven to earth.
On this and a good dozen other topics, Halliday's writing goes far beyond the standard efforts of academia and the foreign press pack. Read him on the intransigence of IRA supporters in his childhood home of Dundalk – "I asked if anyone had changed their mind about anything in the past 30 years. He looked at me a bit askance and replied curtly, 'Of course not'" – or on the globalisation of ideas – "British surprise that the bombers who attacked London on 7 July 2005 were 'home-grown' missed the fact that there are very few purely home-grown things left" – or on the beauties and horrors of Yemen or on the effect of immigration on Barcelona, and you are likely to be awed by the depth of his knowledge and the breadth of his interests.
Halliday died last year aged 64 – far too young. But he lives on, and not only in his books and the memories of his friends and students. When the LSE first thought of lining its pockets with Saif Gaddafi's money, and allowing the dictator's son consultation rights on its North Africa Programme, Halliday warned his colleagues to back off in a long and prescient memorandum. Unlike Anthony Giddens and David Held, Halliday spoke Arabic and had seen for himself in Libya that the regime was a vicious kleptocracy, where nothing ran smoothly apart from the elite's demands for bribes.
To its disgrace, the LSE ignored him and began a process of "engagement", which can also be said to be a process of "collaboration". The LSE was planning to hold around now "a major conference in Libya on the subject of political reform in north Africa… a groundbreaking international event with academics and policy-makers from across the globe". It had to cancel the ground-breaking visit to its benefactors because the Libyan people ignored suborned British academics, who could never bring reform because they were not on their side.
The best tribute one can pay Fred Halliday is to say that he always was.