1. Going Beyond Intercultural Dialogue

The notion of guardianship is not present in Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Reference Huntington1996)Footnote ³ – how could it be? – and also not among the well-intentioned promoters of civilizational dialogue who approached UN organizations or gave addresses at the UN. There is the example of Austrian philosopher Hans Köchler (b. 1948) who in a Letter to UNESCO spoke of the ‘dialogue entre différentes civilizations’ (1972) and eventually received the UN's support in organizing a conference on intercultural dialogue.Footnote ⁴ A famous UN address on the subject was delivered in 1998 by then Iranian president Muhammad Khatami and entitled ‘The Dialogue Among Civilizations’. The idea was not without precedents in Iran. We may mention the organization by the same name inspired by French Muslim philosopher Roger Garaudy, of which a branch was founded in Iran under the auspices of the Shahbanou, Iran's last Empress.Footnote ⁵ And there is the even earlier Safa Khaneh Community established by Ḥājj Āqā Nur-Allāh (d. 1927) in Isfahan in 1902. It served as an interfaith centre at a time when no such institutions existed in the West. These were all morally worthy and scholarly commendable initiatives. What I have in mind, however, is not a mere matter of intercultural or interreligious crossings; it goes beyond engaging in dialogue and creating cultural or political alliances. The guardian assumes the moral responsibility not only for the continuing existence of other civilizations but also for their thriving and flourishing. Essentially, guardians provide a ‘shared home’, whether a physical dwelling or a space in the cultural, spiritual, or intellectual life; they make themselves available as ‘hosts’.

2. ‘Guardian Civilizations’: The Different Demands of Verticality and Horizontality

Before looking into the notion of guardianship as an ethical concept, I will introduce two historical examples of what I call guardian civilizations. One is the Islamic civilization in its classical period (predating the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258), and the other is the civilization that the Italian-born Renaissance had aspired to create. In different ways, they both go back to the Platonic Academy, not to its glorious beginning with the larger-than-life founder but, oddly, to the Academy's end. If asked, most people in academia would reply that the school was founded in Athens in or around 387 BC. However, it is unlikely that they know that Plato's Academy lasted continuously till about the time of Cicero. It reinvented itself later but eventually was closed down in the 6^th century AD. This historical detail was also pointed out by Bertrand Russell, who remarked judiciously: ‘At last, in AD 529, it was closed by Justinian because of his religious bigotry, and the Dark Ages descended upon Europe’ (Russell, Reference Russell1967, p. 61). In other words, the ‘inhospitable’ Byzantine emperor Justinian could not tolerate an institution that he viewed as a remnant of Paganism. But what happened to the last teachers and students of the Academy?

3. Linguistic Hospitality, Guest-Friendship, and ‘Hostipitality’

In many ways, every culture and every civilization that has been in contact with other traditions and populations is or has become a host, in whatever modest ways and at least for some period in its history. However, I am thinking about more than just sanctuary countries as in the case of Persia when it welcomed the last Athenian Platonists or, to move to a different world region, India accepting the Zoroastrians (the Parsis) fleeing forced conversion to Islam. There is a generosity that goes beyond offering shelter and securing survival. What else is there to share?

4. Mediation Starts from the Middle

On the one hand, the purity of Derrida's ideal of hospitality is the gold standard to keep in mind for anyone seriously considering to be a genuine host. On the other, its unconditionality impedes the implementation of the ideal, which is why he frequently referred to it as the ‘impossible’. This is where in a Derridian world the ‘hostipitality’ that dwells within hospitality traps hospitality. According to the French philosopher, there is ‘a non-dialectizable antinomy’ between the law of unlimited hospitality and the ‘laws’ of hospitality, i.e., rights and duties as defined by various cultures in legal, religious, or ethical terms (Derrida, Reference Derrida and Bowlby2000a, p. 77). Be that as it may, it is possible to remove the hegemony of hosts without making them obsolete; there is no hospitality without a host. One must turn to Hegel, the master of dialectics, to find the solution. The way out of the difficulty is not thinking in terms of two but three. And more importantly, rather than focus on the host and guest, which brings up the power imbalance problem, I propose to focus on the notion of guest-friendship as the mediating factor. This precludes the issue of power altogether.

While Ricoeur suggested a hospitable translator as the intermediate, which only put the burden on one of the players (the other two being the author and reader), I like to use a dynamic Hegelian structure to ensure a built-in mediation process, in which every element is an actor.

In Hegel's famous Lord and Bondsman dialectic, the emphasis is not on the opposites but on a unity that separated into two. That unity for Hegel is self-consciousness. Suppose we substitute self-consciousness with the notion of guest-friendship and understand that it is a relational term, without which there could be neither a host nor a guest. In that case, hospitality is placed in a very different setting. Here is a quotation from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in which I inserted the notion of guest-friendship where the original speaks of self-consciousness:

The ingenuity of the Hegelian dialectic turns each of the three terms into a mediating force. Both the ‘host’ and the ‘guest’ realize they need each other. No one is a host without the existence of a guest, and vice versa the notion of a guest presupposes a host; neither can exist without the other. What started with the dominant position of the host is transformed into a model in which the positions of host and guest are interconvertible, and transformation follows what Hegel calls ‘Aufheben’, meaning both sublation and preservation. The guest is as much a host as the host, and the host as much a guest as the guest. As the two actors in the relationship of guest-friendship recognize each other and themselves in the dynamic setting, they are transformed by the experience and realize that they are both hosting each other and are, therefore, both guests. To apply Hegel's notion of ‘sublation-preservation’, when guests ‘preserve’, they become their host's guardians, i.e., they host the host; and hosts find themselves their guests’ guests. Coincidentally, to ‘guard’ comes from old or middle French ‘garder’, which is derived from Proto-Germanic ‘*wardōn’ (meaning ‘protection’, ‘attention’, ‘keeping’), and Proto-Indo-European root ‘wer-’ (meaning ‘to heed’, ‘defend’).Footnote ²³ Remarkably, the transformative journey of this ancient Indo-European root that came to characterize the present notion of guest-friendship has been itself a multiple linguistic guest, while also serving as the host.

By contrast, there are no actors in Derrida's hospitality narrative, only static figures unable to embody the roles they are meant to fulfil. And yet, the notion of a unity that splits into opposites comes up in Derrida's linguistic reflections on hospitality. It lies precisely there where he underlines the common origin of hôte (host) and hôte (guest); they go back to the same root. However, no transformative event follows the semantic split for the simple reason that hôte and hôte do not engage each other. The major difference between Derrida's and my reading of ancient Greek hospitality is that I translate it as guest-friendship, which places host and guest in an interactive relationship; there is no friendship without a dynamic framing of the figures involved. The French language does not have an equivalent term, which may have suited Derrida's critique of the poor state of hospitality accorded the stranger, i.e., the North African immigrant in France. But it is not just the language that frames the event of hospitality in his philosophy; Derrida easily ventured into German when it supported his quest. It is significant to understand why he chose the Greek literary figure that he did. Derrida thus focuses on Oedipus as portrayed in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus; it gives him a protagonist who is never truly at home. Neither in his native Thebes nor his adopted Corinth is the tragic figure in a position to assert, ‘This is mine, I am at home’. At the end of his life, the only place that is his is the burial place he chooses himself in the grove of the Erinyes, near Athens. It is about this burial place, where Oedipus believes he will be redeemed from his tragic deeds (and where his death will be a gift of peace to the King of Athens who ‘hosted’ his dead body), that Derrida writes: ‘The guest (hôte) becomes the host (hôte) of the host (hôte)’ (Derrida, Reference Derrida and Bowlby2000a, p. 125). Sadly, the hosting guest he is referring to is dead Oedipus. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida plays again with a similar formula and imagines a guest becoming the host's host (Derrida, Reference Derrida, Brault and Naas1999, p. 42). However, what is missing is the transformative event that engulfs both the host and the guest, which is the only means by which the positions can become convertible. Again, mediation must start from the middle.

The plot in the Odyssey is very different. Ulysses returns to his palace in Ithaca after twenty years of wandering – as a guest. His son Telemachus receives him graciously without recognizing him. The son honours the stranger in the same way as he had done with the goddess Athena and defends him against the unruly suitor-guests courting his mother. These were uninvited – like Ulysses – but embodied bad guest behaviour. The takeaway message seems to be that Ulysses, who has been the guest of many hosts during his long home-coming, needed first to become a guest in his house before he could again be the host. By first being a guest, he ceases to be a stranger, and, once again, his identity and dignity are restored. However, when he eventually asserts himself as the host, he does not revert to the same position he occupied before he went to war – he becomes the ‘host-guest’.

Notably, except for Kant, none of the classical Western ethicists wrote on hospitality. In twentieth-century thought, philosophers typically resort to epic literature and poetry to develop their ideas. Thus Martin Heidegger used Hölderlin's poems as a foil to distil his understanding of dwelling and hospitality (see Winkler, 2017), a device that became a source of inspiration for Derrida. Similarly, Emmanuel Lévinas developed some of his views on the subject as a reflection on biblical stories (see Hatley, Reference Hatley2005; Katz, Reference Katz2005).

5. Journeying from Being a ‘Hostage’ to Becoming a ‘Guardian Civilization’

I introduced Arab and ancient Greek hospitality as models of guest-friendship. This, however, does not mean that all Arabs or all Greeks have always been hospitable or perfect guests. We may think of Paris, who was Menelaus’ guest and stole the latter's beautiful queen, or of the guests who ate Penelope and Telemachus out of house and home; in both stories, the violation of xenía, seen as an insult to Zeus, ends up being punished most harshly. Nevertheless, guest-friendship is understood to be an honoured way of life in both cultures affording individuals a social setting in which to realize themselves as moral subjects, whether in the position of the host or the guest. In current Western civilization, hospitality plays a minor role in the hierarchy of values and, as a result, does not contribute to stronger bonds within the fabric of society or among different societies. We use the expression ‘to be a gracious host’ but mean by it the kind of generosity extended for a limited time, usually for one evening. Hospitality is not presented as a value to strive for, whether culturally, intellectually, or religiously. We philosophers, at least some of us, praise it in ethical terms, but that does not change anything on the ground. Children are not educated to be hospitable and to delight in taking a step back, and we adults are not exactly acting as exemplary role models. How, then, can we, the nations of the world, become hospitable, which, to put it in no uncertain terms, would expose us to change when we come to reflect our guests and are thus made vulnerable?

Considering the countless past and present conflicts among civilizations and even within one and the same society, resorting to guest-friendship to overcome differences and incompatible claims seems a remote possibility. Nevertheless, in the same way that individuals are able to extend and accept hospitality graciously, the world's civilizations, too, can learn how to be each other's hosts and guests and thus become each other's guardians. Governments may be unteachable; societies, however, are capable of reinventing themselves. Think of post-WWII Germany: apologies, reparations, and collaborations paved the way to friendship with France, its historical enemy, and Israel, where the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants found a new home.

Let us think of a particularly complicated relationship, such as the sectarian one. How would one get Sunni and Shi‘a communities (or Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland) to be each other's ‘guest-friends’? The opposed parties in both settings are ‘hostages’ of their respective historical narratives and in need of a ‘wrong’ version of themselves to support their claim to authenticity. The challenge is to get the ‘hostile’ camps to think that maybe, just maybe, the other community might be embodying a valid version of the same core teaching. Even if a central authority acceptable to the opposed groups existed, ordering the two communities to give up their narratives would fall on deaf ears. On the one hand, the sectarian narratives are identity-building, on the other, they are also what keeps the communities in question trapped. They fail to recognize that no religion or school of thought is able to completely survey its sources and traditions, which is why there is necessarily a potential for multiple expressions. Thus, societies that reject the possible legitimacy of a competing narrative end up becoming hostages to a self-understanding in which every single feature, every ritual, and every source pertaining to their beliefs are considered ‘true’ and their sole ‘possession’. Any variant is branded eo ipso an error, or worse a heresy.

Clearly, the lack of communication between sectarian groups could neither be solved by promulgating a law to enforce hospitality. When Kant insisted on the right to ‘Wirtbarkeit’ in Perpetual Peace, he had in mind a stranger's right not to be treated with hostility, but he still gave the ‘Wirt’ (host) the right to reject the stranger. Although one can appreciate Kant denouncing the ‘inhospitable conduct’ of European colonial powers and requiring that laws regulate the relationships between states, hospitality as developed in the present narrative, i.e., as ‘deep hospitality’, needs to mean more than not harming the stranger or salvaging refugees from the sea as it is currently happening daily in most Mediterranean countries. The latter is mandated by international sea law and is, without a question, the right thing to do. Yet, it is different from the rescue provided by fishers who go out individually to save shipwrecked fellow human beings. They would not be breaking any law by staying at home, and yet, they rush out even on a stormy day because they see the refugees who are exposed to the elements as a reflection of themselves. Deep hospitality does not replace societal law regulating international hospitality, and these two do not necessarily complement each other either. They may influence each other mutually, but they operate in a different manner. Deep hospitality generates spontaneous, gratuitous acts of guest-friendship. It is a value, not a matter of being law abiding. However, it would be a mistake to expect that deep hospitality requires the kind of self-effacement and self-sacrifice typically associated with women in traditional societies. One finds this type of value-based model in Lévinas's call to recover the silent and withdrawn ‘feminine welcome’; traces of this thought are reflected in Derrida.Footnote ²⁴ His valorising of womanhood and maternity places the feminine, whether identified with concrete women or not, in a ‘pre-ethical’ realm or outside ethics altogether. It is much too close to how Hegel reflected upon the sacrifice of Antigone who followed divine (rather than human) law; it leaves women unable to develop their subjectivity.Footnote ²⁵ Lévinas's prose is of an eerie beauty and justly enhances the role women played in the biblical tradition but cannot inspire today's men and women to think of hospitality as a way of life. Men have no desire to renounce their subjectivity (there is no reason they should), and women have been silent much too long.Footnote ²⁶

The question thus remains: how does one evolve from being a ‘hostage civilization’, which to varying degrees applies to all societies, to being a ‘guardian civilization’? Moreover, what is one to think of societies that have deliberately isolated themselves and chosen to ignore other civilizations altogether?

6. An Adaptation of Qustantin Zurayq's Reflections on Change

During its communist period, Albania used to be Europe's hermit kingdom in the way one thinks of North Korea today; it actually drew its inspiration from the latter. Both countries can be considered hostage civilizations. They took hostage of themselves knowing that it would prevent them from advancing; priority was given to shutting out external influence. Qustantin Zurayq (also spelled Constantine Zurayk, d. 2000), a twentieth-century Arab philosopher and diplomat, was confronted with a similar challenge while reflecting on the multiple dilemmas the Arab societies of his day faced. The situation on the ground was less radical than in the hermit kingdoms. There were no closed borders, no economic restrictions, and control was not exerted over all spheres of life. However, on the whole, Zurayq found the Arab world stuck in a solely religiously defined tradition, a glorified historic past never to return, and a culture they were unable or unwilling to invigorate. He identified three binaries: modern vs religious tradition, past vs future, and foreign vs one's own culture. None of the binaries hold a solution; on the contrary, each presents a trap. Zurayq deemed the excessive attachment to the past a nefarious choice for those who wanted to preserve their culture and saw it thus as a matter of ‘retrograde reactionism’. Societies end up holding on to the form of tradition at the expense of its content; they attach themselves to the past, which leads to the neglect of the present and with that to the loss of creativity. By the same token, the negation of one's tradition and one's exclusive orientation toward the future prevents a critical review of the past and triggers the loss of one's cultural identity. Zurayq calls this option ‘recalcitrant futurism’.Footnote ²⁷ Upon analysing the dilemma ‘foreign or one's own culture’, he finds that the rejection of a foreign culture in favour of one's own leads to totalitarianism, breeds fanaticism, and generates cultural paralysis. Surprisingly, the uncritical acceptance of a foreign culture at the expense of one's own also produces cultural paralysis since the ensuing suffocation of one's roots prevents a creative response to the traits taken over from another civilization. Finding a ‘middle’ position is the way out of the dilemma. To put it in terms of the deep hospitality theory sketched in the present inquiry, both the refusal and the embracing of other civilizations create severe difficulties for the position of the host. The parallels to the hosting or not hosting of words and strangers are striking. On the one hand, the complete and uncritical espousal of foreign ideas erases the host; the ‘guested’ culture takes over. On the other hand, radical rejection bans the guest and turns the host into the master of a home soon to crumble.

Zurayq is being rightly perceived as a Neo-Kantian (see Kassab, Reference Kassab1999). Nevertheless, his attempts to mediate between the opposing poles of the binaries he analyses also reveal a Hegelian streak. Ultimately, the extremes are not there to showcase the dilemmas he identified but to offer a spectrum on which civilizations may calibrate their exact position. It allows them to seek at different times the vicinity to one or the other pole to suit their needs without losing their unique ‘character’, what Zurayq called ‘shakhsiyya’. When Zurayq wrote Fī Ma‘rakat al-Ḥaḍāra (On the Fight for Civilization, Reference Zurayq1964), his sight was on the Arab world. Nevertheless, what he says about the need to ‘fight’ applies to all civilizations, mainly since his understanding of fighting implies critical self-examination and examination of other civilizations. No civilization can survive as a stand-alone. It is precisely the encounter with other civilizations which secures one's future by responding freely and creatively to them. Self-preservation and the preservation of other civilizations are therefore inseparable in this world view. They are the soil upon which cultures thrive, and none is hostage to others or itself. They are in a continuous stream of exchanges and thus become civilizations on the move.

To go back to sectarian tensions, the goal is to make the Shi‘ite become the guardian of the Sunni Muslim and vice versa. This entails fighting in Zurayqian fashion for the other community's right to its narrative and thus preserving their own identity. As hostage civilizations they needed a negative foil to make sense of who and what they were. However, by becoming each other's host-guests they add a dimension to their self-understanding that says they could not be who and what they are without the existence of the other. After all, the other view could hold a shakhsiyya trait that has escaped them or can become an innovative further development, which might need reviewing, or was simply lost in their tradition. Similarly, at the level of civilizations with no common legacy, each holds both unique and shared features that may help other world civilizations sustain each other mutually or, better even, become each other's sustenance. Slavic culture and Slavic languages are hardly ever seen as repositories of human experience and wisdom in a Western context; this is another relationship in need of deep hospitality.Footnote ²⁸ However, a look at, for instance, Bulgarian ‘съхранител’ (sahranitel, with the meanings of ‘guardian’, ‘custodian’, ‘protector’, and ‘keeper’ reveals the root ‘храна’ (hrana, meaning ‘food’), derived from Proto-Slavic *xorna and possibly related to Proto-Indo-European *ǵr̥h₂nóm (grain).Footnote ²⁹ The same root is also contained in Bulgarian охрана (ohrana, meaning ‘protection’, ‘safeguard’, ‘safe conduct’) and съхранение (sahranenie, ‘safe-keeping’). The guardian is thus the one who keeps you safe by ‘nourishing’ you.

We are a long way from a world where civilizations are each other's cultural and spiritual ‘food’. If they were, no one would lack physical food either. Nevertheless, one ought to hope and dream. Hope is not a sign of weakness but, as Kant put it, an ethical obligation. It prepares the ground for change. And dreams? They sustain hope.