Earlier this year, Neil Douglas-Klotz helped co-ordinate the Edinburgh International Festival of Middle Eastern Spirituality and Peace. He believes that the West’s interventions of the Middle East have been, at best, ignorant of the Middle Eastern mind and, at worst, manipulative for its own benefit. The recent history of violence and human tragedy on all sides has produced an extreme climate of fear and mistrust. Any peace efforts must deal with this climate of fear before any effective agreements can be made.

In his book, Desert Wisdom, Neil Douglas-Klotz refers to a plan offered by an American Sufi Mystic that addresses these points. Born a Jew, Samuel L. Lewis (1896-1971) studied the spirituality of the Middle East ex-tensively along with his Sufi work. Lewis felt that only careful confidence-building efforts on spiritual, semantic, economic, ecological and cultural fronts would effectively prepare for long-term, political solutions. Lewis’s plan, endorsed by many former UN officials, including Gunnar Jarring and Robert Muller, addresses these points:

Spiritual: place all the religious, holy places in the entire region under inter-national protection, including the Old City of Jerusalem. All people should be protected in worship. Semantic: obtain agreement from all parties in all peace processes to use terms consistently. One side’s security’ cannot be another side’s terrorism’. Words used as weapons to escalate wars of public relations prevent all sides from dealing with one another at the bargaining table.

Ecological and Economic: to hold regional conferences to resolve the fair use and trade of natural resources in the Middle Eastern bioregion. Cultural: the West should officially sponsor cultural exchange on all levels with the Middle East, including tours of music, dance and art. It should seek to educate its people as much as pos-sible about Middle Eastern culture. With the same goal, it should sponsor exchanges of citizen diplomats. For information about the Mystic’s Peace Plan: Desert Wisdom: Sacred Middle Eastern Writings from the Goddess through the Sufis’. Translations & Commentary by Neil Douglas-Klotz. Published by HarperCollins ISBN 0 06 061996 1