Helal enjoys working with Rice. He appreciates her interest in hearing all points of view on a given subject and her understanding of the details. When I ask him what he makes of the words he often translates for her, like “freedom” and “democracy,” he is polite, but wary. “I cannot imagine that you can go anywhere in the world and ask people, ‘Do you want to be free?’ and they will say, ‘No, we really love to be prisoners,’” he says. The problem is not with freedom but with democracy, a concept that evolved in differing and idiosyncratic ways in the Western historical experience. “In the Middle East, they look at things and ask, Is it halal or haram,” he explains. “Is it approved by the religion or not? If you go to a Bedouin society and you tell them that the state will determine how you’re going to settle a conflict between you and your cousin, you must be out of your mind, because the most important and powerful tool to them will be tribal law, which is unwritten.” ~David Samuels

Indeed, there is a sense in which you do have to be out of your mind to accept as normal the idea that the state settles such disputes.  Anyone who surveys history has to know just how abnormal such an arrangement is, how much it contradicts so many of our instincts and customs and how ultimately fragile and contingent upon a certain ethos it is.  It is strange to read Mr. Helal’s statement, which expresses with perfect clarity a view of the world that appears to be not so very different from my own, and try to reconcile that with his work alongside a Secretary of State who believes in the “inevitability of democratic change” in the very same region.  One of them is right, and I do not think it is Secretary Rice.