My friend, the historian Basim Musallam, died last summer at the age of 82. I first met him in 2011, at my interview for a research fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge. Basim asked me what I took to be a hostile question. ‘Isn’t this all very parochial?’ My presentation had been about theories of ideology. To the extent that it was based in any tradition, it was a German one – quite exotic relative to the heavily analytic philosophy department at Cambridge. It hadn’t seriously occurred to me or anyone else I knew to think much about philosophy beyond Europe and North America. Perhaps that was what he was getting at. He had probably also noted my decidedly limited geographical range: from Ipswich to Cambridge, where I had stayed from my undergraduate studies to the then-looming end of my PhD. I found out only much later that when he was on a candidate’s side, he would deliberately ask a bastard question. This, he believed, would put him in a better position to fight for the candidate later on. Basim was always thinking strategically.

Making a mental note that this person clearly didn’t like me, I replied that yes, it probably was very parochial, and in ways I couldn’t even see (that being the nature of parochialism), but that if they gave me the fellowship then perhaps I would put some of their money toward becoming a bit less parochial. I got the fellowship, and for three years barely moved beyond the square kilometre containing the college and a couple of nearby pubs. But I did spend much of that time learning Arabic, with Basim. This wasn’t part of his job or mine. He had largely retired from teaching, and Arabic had nothing to do with my research. But it wasn’t long before I decided that there were few better ways to spend time, especially once I persuaded Basim that our lessons should be accompanied by beera.

As Vice-Provost, Basim was in charge of inducting new fellows into the ways of things. His approach in my case was to lead me around the college by the hand as though I were a small child. I tried to tell him that since I had been a student at the college for several years, there was no need to show me how the cafeteria worked, but that did not put him off. He explained at length about the importance of timing when getting fish on a Friday (if you came too late it would be ‘tired’, having been sitting there ‘since I don’t know when’); there was an aside on the rate of ‘traffic’ of the fish across the counter. I listened politely and at some point must have made the mistake of asking a question, because I then found myself in the common room with Basim explaining the sectarian system in Lebanon. Two hours later I emerged blinking into the fading light. Basim wrote relatively little in his career, but he could talk, there was no doubt about that (as one of my students would later discover, having nipped out for a quick cigarette break during a timed practice exam only to receive an impromptu lecture on Aristotle’s Historia Animalium). If you ever heard Basim announce that he was about to give you a ‘capsule summary’, you knew that you might as well sit down.

There is a tendency nowadays to regard talking ‘too much’ as entitled, even oppressive – an expression of privilege and an act of domination. But as Basim demonstrated, talking can be an act of generosity, a gift rather than a demand or an imposition. Basim was there, talking to you, when he could be doing all sorts of other things. He thought you were worth talking to – in fact, he thought that pretty much everyone was worth talking to. That wasn’t because he was undiscerning or naive. He didn’t hold back about the many ‘shits’, ‘hustlers’ and ‘idiots’ in our midst – the verdict always tempered with a compassion that made it, if anything, more damning. ‘He is an idiot. Haram’ (roughly, in context: ‘Poor thing’). ‘He is a total hustler. Well, everyone has to make a living.’ ‘He is a suffering human.’ He could spot from a mile off academics who only cared about their own advancement, not their students or their colleagues, let alone anything larger like an institution or a community or a political movement. Basim had no illusions about any of those but he believed that, flawed as they were, they should be protected – that the world would be worse otherwise. He talked as he did not because there was any particular gain for him, but precisely because he rejected instrumentalism. Strategy had its place: there was no virtue in acting without thinking, or letting consequences be damned. But thinking exclusively in terms of means and ends – every action weighed in terms of returns on an investment – was corrosive. He was perfectly aware that in one sense he was ‘wasting’ his time, but he was going to do it anyway because it was a more generous way to live.

Not talking was at least as important to Basim as talking was. He understood the value of the companionable silence. He thought as much, if not more, about the things he didn’t say as about the things he did. This is another area where he was at odds with the prevailing culture, which valorizes and even demands perpetual disclosure. Got a problem with someone? Talk to them about it – what could possibly go wrong? Basim’s view was that talking was quite likely to make matters worse. Talking could do a great deal of good but it could also do a great deal of damage; there was no inherent relationship between talking and truth or reconciliation. In this he went against the grain of not just a therapy-speak-saturated popular culture, but also an assumption of liberal political thought: that dialogue and discussion exist on a higher plane, above the fray of the ways people use and misuse each other, and that under the right conditions they hold the solution to all conflict. People, in Basim’s view, were simultaneously intractable and brittle creatures (being hard to change did not mean being hard to hurt). They were also knowable only in an imperfect and fallible way (‘The other person is a stranger’, he would often say). Dealing with others was a bit like doing surgery in the dark: there ought to be a strong presumption in favour of non-intervention, and any intervention should be approached with extreme care.

It would be easy to see this as a liberal doctrine of respect for and tolerance of the individual, but that is not how Basim saw it. He had no time for the likes of Rawls, whose political theory he saw as a peculiarly American fantasy (parochialism of the worst kind). Liberalism had no monopoly on ideas like privacy and respect for difference. Basim would often cite a story told by the eleventh-century Muslim philosopher Al Ghazali about the second caliph Umar. One day Umar climbed over the wall of a man’s house to find him with wine and a woman, engaged in a forbidden act. As Umar began to upbraid him, the man replied: ‘Granted that I have committed an offence, but you have committed three offences: God said “Do not spy”, and you have spied; and He said, “Enter houses through their doors”, and you came in through the roof; and He said, “Do not enter other people’s houses without first asking their permission and saluting them”, and you have failed to do so.’ The prohibition on tajassus (‘spying’) meant, Ghazali argued, that one should not interrogate even a known drunkard with a bottle-shaped bulge under his cloak: after all, even sinners needed vinegar and olive oil.

The point of this was not reducible to: ‘Hey, Islam is more liberal than you thought.’ Basim at any rate came (like his friend Edward Said) from a Protestant Christian background – although I don’t think he was a religious believer. Nor was he espousing a vapid doctrine of liberal ‘neutrality’. His position, as I understand it, was that you didn’t have to be neutral (whatever that could mean), or to believe in an exaggerated idea of the goodness or rationality of the individual, in order to see the perils of coercive or intrusive forms of intervention (Ghazali was perfectly clear that drunkenness was a sin; it was just that spying was worse). Nor did this mean washing one’s hands of involvement in the lives of others (as if that were possible). The Islamic doctrine of hisba (‘commanding what is good and prohibiting what is bad’) – the context of Ghazali’s remarks – teaches the opposite. The point was that intervention was never neutral, and never to be taken lightly.

The individual that Basim believed in, unlike that of liberal individualism, was a fundamentally social one. Human idiosyncrasy was always inflected by culture, without reference to which people and their behaviour could not be properly understood. Basim’s habitual recourse to cultural explanations – ‘He is a poor boy from the North’; ‘He is German, after all’; ‘She is a Russian girl who went to America’ – was another respect in which he was out of kilter with contemporary norms, which tend to look askance on such generalizations, regarding them as bordering on political incorrectness (something about which Basim, as a self-identified ‘darkie’, had zero inhibitions). Observing a passing hen party, he would shake his head and say simply: ‘Gender.’ Understanding the individual as social was also about acknowledging the inherent fragility of people, their dependency on the things that hold them up. You might think you would be better off cutting various ties, but you were likely underestimating the extent to which those attachments were holding you together. The structures that sustain us may differ from one person to another, but none of us is self-supporting.

The premium Basim placed on structure and stability, and his reticence about interventions that might imperil these, extended to his approach to politics. I didn’t understand that at first. If his emphasis on respect for difference could be mistaken for liberalism, his emphasis on stability could sound conservative. I had encountered it as a reason why nothing other than a variation on the status quo was sensible or thinkable. But that was not what Basim meant. A lifelong champion of resistance and liberation in the Arab world, he had been involved in an attempt to overthrow the government in Lebanon when he was still a teenager, and although it had failed and led to him being put in a concentration camp, he never expressed any regret. Nor was he in any way what people call a political ‘moderate’, either in the context of Arab politics or British (when Corbyn became Labour leader, Basim went around for a time theatrically ‘congratulating the British people’ on having at last attained something resembling a politics).

I think Basim’s point was partly about a rejection of what he saw as an ignorant moralism devoid of broader political analysis, as exemplified in the logic that simply because a political entity is bad or oppressive, the correct and principled thing to do is to oppose and ‘condemn’ it, regardless of what that posture entails in the current global configuration of power, and regardless of what might happen if that structure were destroyed (consequences be damned). What was to be avoided at all costs was the destruction of whole societies. He would often run through a list, punctuating it by pounding his fist on the table. Libya, thump, destroyed. Yemen, thump, destroyed. Iraq. Syria. Lebanon. Thump, thump, thump. Destroyed, destroyed, destroyed. Here, once again, he was out of step, not only with the political mainstream but also with much of the left. Not to be cheering on the ‘Syrian revolution’ or calling for arms to Ukraine was to risk being cast as an ‘Assadist’ or an unreconstructed ‘tankie’ – someone still labouring under the crass logic of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Basim would have said that the lessons of recent history pointed the other way. In the case of Ukraine, as in Syria, an initial flurry of compulsory ‘solidarity’ and ‘standing with’ has been followed by a quiet forgetting, when the damned consequences, predicted from the start by those deemed beyond the pale, materialize. Gradually, what was unsayable becomes sayable and then received wisdom, without acknowledgement of the shift, and hence without introspection about any misjudgements that might have been made. Then the next war comes along and the cycle begins again.

Basim’s caution was not defeatist or resigned. His point was not that change was impossible, nor that we should be content with the lesser of the available evils. For instance, he had no truck with the argument, made after the invasion of Iraq (and many times since), that we must re-elect Labour ‘to keep the Tories out’: the right response, on the contrary, was to ‘teach the bastards a lesson’. His position was about the direction of travel. Would this or that course of action bring us nearer to, or further away from, where we wanted to be? Would it advance the struggle or set it back? This had nothing inherently to do with pessimism or optimism; it was about the proper way to approach political questions. The global context was in fact quite important; it was not principled or admirable but merely stupid to close one’s eyes to it. If a clear-eyed analysis of that conjuncture led to pessimistic conclusions, this was a problem with the world (and in particular, the world order that the United States and its attack dog, Israel, had made), not the approach itself. The way Basim put it to me, it was part of the tragedy of the Middle East that a situation had been imposed which placed those who might wish to overthrow oppressive local rule in what were often impossible dilemmas. That was part of the reason why the world had to change: why Zionism and US imperialism must be defeated.

Basim’s emphasis on stability and restraint was also about cautioning against what he saw as the temptation among activists to over-extend themselves in ways that did not do them or the movement any favours. He subscribed to a kind of everyday materialism. No matter how committed, we were all, ultimately, embodied beings. Food was important, and Basim had a lot to say about it (he could talk about aubergines in particular at astonishing length). So was the weather (you did not plan political actions in the rain). So too was sleep. The fate of Palestine did not depend on whether the encampment in Cambridge continued for one more week, or two, or three. What mattered was to preserve your ability to act when the occasion demanded it, in whatever form that might take: to sign the open letter or the motion, to go to the rally, to be there when the police came to evict a student sit-in. As he put it to me, close to the end of his life: ‘It is a long fight.’

What Basim wrote displayed the same qualities he embodied as a person – the same sharpness, the same irreverence toward received wisdom, the same attention to the complexities of human beings and to the ‘texture of everyday life’ (in the words of his friend Tarif Khalidi). His book Sex and Society in Islam (1983) overturned the ingrained assumption that birth control was an invention of Western modernity. Rather, as Basim showed, contraception and abortion were an ‘ordinary part of life’ in medieval Muslim societies. But the point was not merely to shatter a bit of dogma and stereotype. As ever with Basim, the details mattered: the particular methods that were used (olive oil and tar featured heavily); the particular ways in which men and women negotiated the question (contraception was permissible, but there were conditions, such as the woman’s consent to its use – she had a right to children, should she want them, as well as to sexual pleasure). Around the time of the publication of Sex and Society,Basim also wrote and featured in a series of documentary films for Channel 4, The Arabs – a Living History (1979–83), of which he was justly proud.

If Basim later suffered from writer’s block, it was certainly not for a lack of things to say. He inaugurated a one-man oral tradition, his agora the fellows’ coffee area. He created this environment with characteristic cunning. Knowing that certain elements within the community were ideologically opposed to the idea of anyone getting anything for nothing – least of all the staff and students, whom they seemed to regard mainly as an annoying impediment to the transformation of the college into a corporate conference centre – Basim bought two coffee machines for the graduate student common room, and put one of them in the fellows’ area. When questioned about the expenditure, he said that the machine was ‘on loan’ from the graduate students – but that he could remove it if it was unwelcome (‘No, no!’, came the reply). The free coffee created the desired effect: a venue which encouraged that definitively non-instrumental activity – milling around. There, Basim took the opportunity to do what he did best. Like a Levantine Socrates, he would collar his victims and interrogate them – except that Basim asked much better questions. Rather than demanding an abstract definition of ‘virtue’, he would ask a fellow who had begun to pontificate about Putin, for example: ‘Are you aware that your government has been bombing Yemen for the last five years?’ Not everybody appreciated this of course. Nor did everybody appreciate Basim’s brand of satire. In one speech to the governing body of the fellows, he suggested, in response to a proposal to accept some dodgy Saudi endowment, that if we were really going to enter such an association, we should ask for something more substantial in return: the college should acquire . . . a bomb. (‘No, really!’ – those who knew him can almost hear him saying.) That oral tradition has now come to an end. Those of us who miss Basim’s voice are grateful that he made those films, so that we can hear it again.

Read on: Edward Said, ‘Narrative, Geography and Interpretation’, NLR I/180.