Peace is Possible

Religion at its best nourishes love, tolerance, empathy, and altruism

Contents

• Outside the box
  • Personal Peace
  • I Have a Dream
  • Israel, Land, Security, and the Failure of Domination.
• Times of Peace
  • The Golden Age of Beirut
  • The Ayyubid Dynasty
  • The Long Peace

• Outside the box
  • Personal Peace
    
    There is a state of consciousness where a person is at peace with oneself, everyone else, and with the whole world. Problems are met, not with blame, anger, hatred, scapegoating, hopelessness, or fear, but with a calm, creative problem solving technique that’s grounded in objective reality.
    
    Loving-kindness meditation, traditionally called mettā, is usually taught as a deliberate practice: silently wishing peace, safety, health, and happiness for oneself and others. But the deeper state it cultivates — peace with oneself, goodwill toward the world, and a softened sense of separation — can sometimes arise indirectly.
    
    A person may discover it through music, prayer, walking, knitting, gardening, rowing, or any activity that quiets the mind and joins attention, body, breath, and environment.
    
    In my case, it came through rowing. While relaxing my mind, I concentrated on rowing technique and the behavior of the boat. After perhaps 20 two-hour sessions, I found myself constantly at peace with myself and the world. I had not set out to learn loving-kindness meditation, but had trained many of the same capacities: calm attention, non-resistance, bodily awareness, patience, humility, and harmony with something larger than the ego.
    
    Loving-kindness can begin as a meditation technique and become a state of being. The Greater Good Science Center, University of California, Berkeley is a good source for further information
    
    
  • I Have a Dream
    
    Enough people — both religious and secular — live loving-kindness to transform public opinion and create NGOs that make taxation unnecessary.
    
    The nations of the world cooperate to fight climate change and make AI safe.
    
    War becomes obsolete.
    
    The nuclear arsenal is repurposed for cheap, nearly inexhaustible thorium energy and a small amount of the energy is used to blast the most dangerous waste into space – until
    
    The Von Neuman constant for commercial fusion power goes to zero.
    
    
  • Israel, Land, Security, and the Failure of Domination.
    
    A nation cannot create lasting security by permanently dominating another people. Israel has real security concerns, and Israeli civilians have suffered terrorism, war, rocket attacks, and hostage-taking. But Palestinians also have real rights: safety, land, dignity, political freedom, and self-determination. The tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that one people’s fear has too often been used to justify another people’s dispossession.
    
    
• Times of Peace
  
  • The Ayyubid Dynasty
    
    The Ayyubid Dynasty, founded by Saladin in the late 1100s, was far more than a military power. Although it is best remembered for fighting the Crusaders and recapturing Jerusalem in 1187, it also strengthened government, trade, religion, education, medicine, architecture, and urban life across Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and nearby regions.
    
    The Ayyubids built fortresses, mosques, schools, hospitals, and public works. Their cities — especially Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, and Jerusalem — became centers of scholarship, craftsmanship, commerce, and religious life. Artisans produced metalwork, ceramics, glass, textiles, and decorated manuscripts. Scholars studied medicine, astronomy, mathematics, law, theology, and logic. Philosophy continued, though often within religious and scientific learning rather than as a separate secular tradition.
    
    Trade was central to Ayyubid prosperity. Their lands connected the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, Arabia, East Africa, and Central Asia. Merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, scholars, and craftsmen moved through Ayyubid cities, spreading goods and ideas.
    
    The Ayyubid world was also pluralistic, though not in the modern democratic sense. It included Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Turks, and others. Different communities often kept their own religious leaders, customs, languages, and local institutions. Christians and Jews were generally protected but legally unequal.
    
    The Ayyubids strongly promoted Sunni Islam, especially after ending the Shiite Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt. Even so, their society remained multilingual, multi-religious, and culturally rich. Their lasting importance lies not only in Saladin’s victories, but in their role as builders and defenders of a sophisticated medieval civilization until overthrown by the Mamluks after 79 years.
    ~
    Under the Pomegranite Tree, by Tarik Ali is an insightful historical novel about Islamic life under the Crusaders.
    
    
  • The Golden Age of Beirut
    
    Beirut’s “golden age” refers to the period between the 1950s and the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. During these years, the city became one of the Middle East’s leading centers for finance, culture, education, tourism, publishing, and diplomacy. It earned a reputation as a liberal, cosmopolitan hub and was often called the “Paris of the Middle East.”
    
    Why Beirut prospered
    
    Several factors contributed to Beirut’s success:
    • Strategic location: Beirut connected Europe, the Arab world, and the wider Mediterranean.
    • Political openness: Compared with many neighboring countries, Lebanon allowed greater freedom for business, media, publishing, and intellectual life.
    • Strategic location: Beirut connected Europe, the Arab world, and the wider Mediterranean.
    • Political openness: Compared with many neighboring countries, Lebanon allowed greater freedom for business, media, publishing, and intellectual life.
    • Financial role: Oil-rich Gulf states increasingly used Beirut’s banks, services, schools, and communications infrastructure.
    • Banking and education: Banking secrecy laws attracted capital, while institutions such as the American University of Beirut helped establish the city as an intellectual center.
    • Cultural influence: Beirut became a major publishing and media hub for the Arab world.

What life was like

The city was known for its cafés, hotels, beaches, nightlife, universities, newspapers, and multilingual culture. Beirut attracted students, journalists, artists, businesspeople, and political exiles from across the region.

However, the glamour masked significant problems:

• Large gaps between rich and poor.
• Refugee camps and impoverished districts existing alongside luxury neighborhoods.
• Deep sectarian divisions beneath the cosmopolitan image.
• Unequal access to the benefits of economic growth.

For elites and educated professionals, Beirut offered exceptional freedom and opportunity; for many poorer Lebanese and Palestinian refugees, the experience was far less prosperous.

Diversity and sectarianism

Beirut was highly multi-religious and multilingual, home to Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, Druze, Armenians, Palestinians, and others.

Political stability depended on the 1943 National Pact, an unwritten agreement that distributed power among religious communities. While this arrangement helped maintain balance for a time, it also entrenched sectarian identities and made political reform difficult.

As a result, Beirut was genuinely diverse, but its coexistence rested on a fragile political system rather than a strong shared national framework.

Why the golden age ended

The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) brought the era to a close. Several pressures converged:

1. An outdated political system that no longer reflected demographic and political realities.
2. Economic inequality and regional disparities that left many communities feeling excluded.
3. The Palestinian issue, especially after the PLO established a major presence in Lebanon.
4. Foreign intervention by Syria, Israel, Iran, the United States, and others.
5. The rise of sectarian militias, which gradually replaced the authority of the state.

As violence intensified, Beirut split into largely Christian East Beirut and largely Muslim West Beirut, and the city’s integrated social life collapsed.

Core lesson

Beirut’s golden age was both real and fragile. The city achieved remarkable cultural, intellectual, and economic success, but that success rested on a weak political system, persistent inequalities, and unresolved sectarian tensions. When those pressures intensified, the cosmopolitan surface could not hold, leading to civil war and the end of an extraordinary era.

• The Long Peace

The period is often described by historians as one of the longest sustained intervals of peace between the Roman and Sasanian Empires. It began with the settlement negotiated between Emperor Theodosius I and the Sasanian king Shapur III in the 380s—usually dated to 387, though some scholars argue for 384 or 389—and lasted until the outbreak of the Anastasian War in 502. For more than a century, Roman-Persian disputes were settled by negotiation rather than hostilities and the frontier was remarkably stable by the standards of Late Antiquity.  

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