Harvard Professor Answers Middle East Questions

I'm Tarik Massou from Harvard University.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Middle East Support.

[upbeat music]

Alright, let's look at the first question.

Here's a question from @PatrioticMommy1.

Anyone know what Middle East countries are saying

about the US bombing nuclear sites in Iran?

Lot of Arabs in particular don't like the idea

of the United States bombing a Muslim country

in conjunction with Israel.

That's a very powerful strain of public discourse

in the Arab and indeed Muslim world.

But on the flip side, a lot of Arab countries

are afraid of Iran.

They're particularly worried

that the Iranians will use the strength

that they derive from a nuclear weapon

to assert their dominance over the region,

and so they're not necessarily that opposed

to the United States using its military power

to thwart Iranian nuclear ambition.

Here's a question from Quora.

If you had to make a timeline of major events in the history

of the modern Middle East until today,

what events would you put on the timeline?

The modern world begins in the 15th century

according to most historians.

So you're asking me to pick six events over

the last 500 years?

That's really hard to do.

The first is 1453, when Mohammed II conquers Constantinople

renaming it Istanbul, and that really is the beginning

of the Ottomans rise to power.

They conquer the entirety of the Arab world

and it remains under their control for the next 500 years.

The second point I would put there is in 1492,

the Spanish Reconquista.

The Spaniards force out the Arabs

who had been controlling Spain since the seven hundreds.

Then I'd come to 1744, a local tribal leader

in Central Arabia, Muhammad Al Saud forges an alliance

with a local religious leader

named Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Wahhaab,

and that gives rise to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia

whose leaders are the descendants of Al-Saud.

The other thing it gives rise to

is very puritanical understanding of Islam

that we call Wahhabism, the radical ideology

that eventually finds expression

in organizations like Alqaeda.

Then I'd come to 1798, Napoleon invades Egypt,

one of the beginnings of Western colonialism

in the Arab world.

The next date I'd come to is 1897,

and that is the date of the first Zionist Congress

that decided that the way to cope with the scourge

of antisemitism in Europe was for the Jewish people

to have a homeland in Palestine,

which in the Bible is the ancestral homeland of the Jews.

That sets in motion the very tragic struggle

that we're through today between Palestinians and Israelis.

Then we come to 1908, and that is when they discover

in the Middle East the commodity that makes it so vital

to the world, and that is black gold or oil.

The Middle East is the world's largest producer.

The last date, I'm gonna say the end of World War I.

It's really when the modern Middle Eastern state system

comes into being.

The British and the French and the allies take over

this part of the world, and they draw the borders

that today are the source of so much conflict.

Let's take another question.

Dill_Chips asks, it's been a bit more than six months

since the Assad regime fell.

Have things improved in Syria?

It really depends on who you ask.

This is the current president of Syria, Ahmed de Sharaa.

He was the leader of the militia

that ultimately forced Assad out of Syria,

and his militia is actually an offshoot

of an organization known as Al kigh-duh

or as Americans call it Al-Qaeda.

It's a measure of how terrible things were in Syria

under Assad, that this man Sharaa could be viewed

by the majority of Syrians as a savior.

Though Sharaa has made a lot of the right noises

about wanting to establish a democracy,

about not wanting to see conflict with Syria's neighbors,

most notably Israel.

He has been pretty brutal internally.

So, there was a crackdown against Alawites,

it's a religious minority from which Bashar Assad came.

Another religious minority that's located in the South,

the Druze are also coming under violence

from militias associated with Sharaa's government.

Are things in Syria better than they were

when Bashar was around?

If you ask this handsome gentleman, things are great.

Let's take another question.

@FulhamFrenchy asks, is Turkey part of the Middle East?

The Middle East starts in the west in Morocco

and ends at its Eastern most extent either in Iran

or depending on who you ask in Afghanistan.

Some people say that actually the Middle East

is just this part,

and we should refer to this as North Africa.

So some people will say the Middle East and North Africa.

Regardless of which definition you want to use,

Turkey is of course in the Middle East,

but a little part of it right here is actually in Europe.

Turkey has been torn between two camps,

one camp that says Turkey is absolutely part

of the Middle East.

It is one of the biggest and most powerful

and historically consequential Muslim majority countries,

and another camp that says Turkey is European

and it needs to become more like Europe.

The founder of modern Turkey,

a guy named Mustafa Kemal Ataturk said, look, World War I,

we were totally defeated by the Allies

because the Turks were on the side of the Germans.

The way we can never let that happen again

is to become like the Europeans who defeated us,

Ataturk instituted all kinds of reforms

to make Turkey more European.

One of the big things he did,

in Turkey, people used to wear a hat that looked like this.

It was called a fez.

The reason that lots of Turks wore it is because

it's a hat that you could wear and still pray

because it didn't have a brim.

And Muslims touch their forehead to the ground

when they pray.

Ataturk was so keen on making his country European

that he banned that headgear

and said people needed to wear fedoras and hats with Brims

in order to become more like Europeans.

That struggle between Ataturk's vision of Turkey

and a more traditional Middle Eastern Muslim version

of Turkey exists to this day.

Bigedcactushead asks, why has the US Navy failed

to stop the rag-tag Houthis from attacking ships

and protecting the shipping lanes?

That's a good question, Bigedcactushead.

To answer it, it would be helpful

to look at a topographical map of the Arabian Peninsula.

So the Houthis are located here in Yemen.

It's very mountainous terrain.

It's sort of ideal terrain for a militia

that wants to hide from its enemies.

It's very difficult for the Saudis or the Emiratis

or for the United States to actually hit the Houthis.

The only way that you could actually guarantee

that you would stop the Houthis would be a ground invasion,

and this terrain is very difficult.

Here's a question for Quora.

Why hasn't democracy been working in the Middle East

so far in so many countries?

The only democracy that exists right now in the Middle East

is the state of Israel.

Lots of people argue that even the state of Israel

isn't a perfect democracy

because it occupies several million Palestinians

who don't get a vote, and it's an important question

as to why that is the case.

Some people point out the United States hasn't necessarily

been friendly to democracy in the Middle East.

We've got all kinds of alliances with Arab leaders

who are not democratic and who are not friendly

to democracy, and that suits us just fine

because we sometimes worry that if there was democracy

in the region, it would bring to power a kind of populace

and nationalists who are not terribly friendly to the West.

So another set of arguments says,

Islam itself is not necessarily friendly to democracy.

After all, remember the prophet Muhammad,

the founder of Islam,

was actually not just a religious leader.

He was the ruler of the Muslims

and last time anybody checked,

he didn't subject himself to a vote.

And then the third set of answers

has to do with the nature of Middle Eastern economies.

Many of them are heavily dependent on oil,

and when you've got oil,

it means you basically pull your wealth out of the ground

and sell it to foreigners.

And what it means is you don't have to tax.

Remember no taxation without representation.

So in the Middle East you have the kind of the opposite,

no demands for representation without taxation.

This one is from Smexyrexytitan.

It's what is happening in Gaza, truly a genocide.

Here's what is incontrovertible.

There is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza

of massive proportions.

People argue about the exact number

of people who have been killed.

Is it 50,000?

Is it more?

Is it less?

They argue about whether there's actually a famine going on

in Gaza or just the beginnings of a famine.

But the fact of the matter is that Gaza is today one

of the most grim places on the planet.

The death and destruction that have been meted out

on that very small territory,

on those very long suffering people is just extraordinary

and there is nobody with a heart

who cannot feel extraordinary pain and grief

upon looking at the pictures of what's coming out of Gaza.

The question though of whether what is happening in Gaza

is a genocide is actually a kind of technical question

of international law.

So there's a case right now before

the International Court of Justice,

accusing the Netanyahu government of committing genocide

against the Palestinians.

And the International Court of Justice hasn't yet ruled

on that, but they have determined

that there is enough evidence to allow the case

to go forward.

In other words, they've concluded

that there's merit to the claim.

Some of the merit to the claim they say is found

in the statements of Israeli leaders.

Can look at the statements

of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in one early speech,

analogized Palestinians to Amalekites,

which is a group in the Bible that fought the Jews

and had to be defeated.

There's Israeli security officials who have referred

to the Palestinians as human animals.

Even the president of Israel has said there's no such thing

as an innocent Palestinian

because they voted for Hamas 20 years ago.

On the flip side, Israelis will point to almost every one

of those statements and say they weren't meant to apply

to Palestinians at large.

They were meant to apply to Hamas.

They say, Palestinians, we don't think Palestinians need

to be eradicated.

We think Hamas needs to be eradicated.

On the one hand,

this feels almost like a technical question, you know,

let the courts decide what is genocide.

But if you look at how this question has really torn apart

so many Americans on college campuses, et cetera,

it's because on both sides of this question,

are normal good well-meaning people

who each have deep attachments to one side

or another of this conflict.

So this is probably hardest question you could ask.

Ottersintuxedos asks,

why is there so much oil in the Middle East?

You really have to go back millions of years.

What is now the Arabian Peninsula

was actually a kind of warm and shallow sea

that was full of plant life.

That plant life ultimately gets sedimented

layer upon layer, subject to tremendous heat and pressure,

and turns into the hydrocarbons that you know and love.

And what's particularly unique about the Middle East

is not just that there's a lot of oil,

but it is very easy to access.

So it's very close to the surface.

It's not as simple as sticking a straw on the ground

and sucking, but it's close.

So it's very cheap to extract

and that's why the Middle East is really

the gas station of the world.

Here's a question from the NoStupidQuestion subreddit

asked by ulteriorkid32,4.

The United Arab Emirates has the lowest crime rate

and the most influx of millionaires.

What is their secret?

The United Arab Emirates secret really comes down

to what I call the three Ls.

Location, law, and lubrication.

With location, this is where the UAE is located

in the Arabian Peninsula.

It really is at the crossroads of a lot of global trade.

The leaders of the UAE recognized this in the 1970s

and eighties and they doubled down on turning their country

into a global trade and logistics hub.

They built one of the world's great airlines.

If you wanna fly from New York to anywhere in Asia

or South Asia, odds are you're gonna fly through Dubai.

So the United Arab Emirates

has some of the most business friendly laws in the world

and they enforce them.

If you go to the UAE now and you, for example,

sign a contract with somebody in the Emirates,

that contract is gonna be enforced.

Then we come to the third ingredient in the UAE success

and that's lubrication.

And by this I mean oil, the UAE is oil rich

and they use that oil money

to make their country into the kind of place

that would attract millionaires and foreign investors

and turn it into one of the most exciting parts

of the Middle East.

@Ryann57429 asks, what's the origin of the conflict

between Israel and Palestine?

So, let's look at a map of this conflict.

When we talk about Palestine,

we're generally talking about this territory,

the West Bank of the Jordan River,

and this territory here,

the Gaza Strip on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

When people talk about the land from the river to the sea,

this is what they're talking about.

Jordan River, Mediterranean Sea.

The basic reason for this conflict is

that you have two peoples who are both indigenous

to this land between the river and the sea,

and who cannot agree on whether to share the land

or divide it or how share it or how to divide it.

One of the complications here is that

for most of the last 2000 years,

there's only a very small Jewish presence there.

The majority of Jews having been expelled

about 2000 years ago after the destruction

of the second temple in Jerusalem.

The Jews scatter throughout Europe,

and we all know the history of the Jewish people in Europe,

which is one of great tragedy and triumph.

But ultimately, by the 19th century,

the Jewish people have been experiencing

so much antisemitism in Europe,

that a powerful movement emerges to resettle

the land of Palestine.

And so Jews start returning in large numbers

in the latter half of the 19th century,

and they invariably start to bump up against the Arabs

who had been living there.

In the very beginning,

when Jewish immigrants from Europe show up,

they have pretty good relations with the Arabs

because the Arabs find in them source of employment.

Arabs were agricultural workers, farmers,

and so they would work on the lands purchased by the Jews.

A little bit later on, some of the Jews who immigrate

to Palestine have a different idea

about how they wanna live.

They say, we don't wanna depend on Arab labor.

We wanna become self-sufficient.

And if you're an Arab faced with this new kind

of Jewish pioneer, you are gonna be upset

because they're actually boycotting your labor.

Another driver of the conflict between the Arabs and Jews,

is that a lot of the Arab land was actually owned

by wealthy landowners who didn't live in Palestine.

They lived in more cosmopolitan parts of the Ottoman Empire.

And so when Jewish immigrants showed up

and wanted to buy land, absentee Arab landowners were happy

to sell it to them, selling the land out from under

the native Palestinian Arab farmers who were working on it.

So this was almost a perfect storm guaranteed

to create a very durable conflict.

Mad_Season_1994 asks, What is it about Dubai

that so many dudes find appealing

and always wanna go there?

One of the ways that Dubai

has attracted so much global talent

is by making the country really fun.

So if you were to go to Dubai, you'd really find it

to be the playground of the Middle East,

some of the world's greatest restaurants,

hotels and dance clubs and other entertainments.

I, for example, went to SeaWorld in Abu Dhabi

and it was amazing.

There's the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa.

Really crazy building projects

like this development that's made out up

of reclaimed land in the Persian Gulf.

You can't exactly reenact the plot

of The Hangover movies there,

but it is a very open society.

But there is of course, a less appealing side to it.

If you are, for example, an Indian guest worker

who's been brought in to Dubai

or to any of the cities in the Arabian Gulf

from Doha to Riyadh

to build some of these gleaming skyscrapers,

you're not having such a good time.

You're making money to send back to your family,

but you may be living in conditions that are not humane.

It's not all fancy nightclubs

and Michelin starred meals

for all of the young men who are in Dubai.

This one is from the IsraelPalestine subreddit.

How would a two-state solution even work?

That's a great question.

When we talk about a two-state solution,

we're generally talking about a Palestinian state

in the West Bank and Gaza.

Right off the bat, there's two big problems that emerge.

This Palestinian state would be non-contiguous.

Got a part here and a part here,

and they're separated by Israel.

How do you deal with that?

How do you actually have free passage of Palestinians

from this part of their territory

to this part of their territory without the Israelis feeling

that having a bunch of Palestinians pass

within Israel proper is a security threat?

Another problem that jumps right off the bat,

the Israelis say, If we also give away the West Bank

and we have no security presence in the West Bank,

then the entire state of Israel is vulnerable,

because there's lots of high lands here in the West Bank.

Israelis say, Whoa, we're gonna seed the highlands

so that the Palestinians can just launch rockets

in artillery against us,

but that's not even the half of it.

Another problem is that this map is a little bit misleading

because if we look at a detailed map of the West Bank,

this is not one undifferentiated mass of Palestinians.

The Israelis have since 1967, been settling

the Palestinian territory of the West Bank

with Jewish settlers,

and there are now about 750,000 Jewish settlers

in the West Bank.

How would it work?

Would you have to expel the Jewish settlers?

Can they remain in a Palestinian state and be safe?

There's a lot of technical details

that have to be worked out.

And so when you ask how would

a two-state solution even work?

I'd say today in 2025, my answer is, I don't know.

I also don't know of any other solution to this problem.

Here's a question from NateNandos21.

Why does the Middle East have so many wars?

If you were to look at a map of the Middle East,

you would see that the borders

between Arab countries look like straight lines.

You can almost see the British

or French colonial officials standing there

with a ruler and a pen drawing these borders.

And that looks very different from the borders

between European countries,

which tend to follow natural formations

like mountains or rivers.

That leads to two kinds of conflict.

The first is conflict between states,

countries that don't necessarily like

where the border was drawn when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

In part that was because they didn't like

where the British drew the border,

and then it also to conflict within states.

If you're a Kurd,

and you are included in this entity called Syria

that the colonial powers drew,

you may be thinking, this is not real.

I'm not really a Syrian.

We could have drawn this border in another way

that would've given me an independent state of Kurdistan.

@tarianrd asks, What is the difference

between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims?

The main difference between Sunni

and Shia Muslims really goes back

to the early days of Islam.

The religion,

which today counts 1.8 billion people among its followers,

was started in the early seventh century

by a man named Mohammed,

who is revered by Muslims as a prophet.

When Mohammed died, the Muslim community

was divided about who would lead them.

Some people said,

Oh, the prophet Mohammed has this good buddy

and father-in-law named Abu Bakr.

He should be the one to lead the Muslim community.

Whereas others said,

Well, the Prophet Mohammed's cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib,

is more suitable for leadership.

There was civil war, and the Shias today

are basically the descendants of those who supported Ali.

They were called Shiat Ali, the partisans of Ali.

And today they make up about 10%

of Muslims concentrated in Iran and Iraq

with large populations in Lebanon,

large population in South Asia.

There's definitely conflict between Sunnis and Shias.

For example, Iran and Iraq fought a war

through the 1970s and early '80s,

but of course, there's lots of Shias in Iraq

who fought against Iran.

So the idea that the conflict between Iran

and other countries is about Iran being Shia

and the other Arab countries being Sunni,

that's a very contested idea.

Here's a question from @zenith_6_nil.

Why is Islam always linked to terrorism?

One of the arguments that you might hear

from other scholars of the Middle East

is that Muslims are often linked to terrorism

because Western commentators

have some prejudice against Islam,

and that's why they're much more likely

to call violence by Muslim's terrorism

and not apply the same name

to violence committed by any other religious group.

Others will point out

that in the last a hundred years or so,

inhabitants of Muslim lands have had a lot of reason

to meet out violence against Westerners.

After all, the Middle East was subject after World War I

to a series of occupations by western countries,

and there's still a very strong Western presence

in the Middle East that a lot of Arabs chafe under.

We saw this expressed most clearly

on September 11th, 2001,

when Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center.

Their argument for why they did it

was that this was in retaliation

for oppression and violence against Muslims.

But there's another group of scholars

who say that the root of the Islamic connection

with terrorism really goes back

to the essence of the religion.

And they'll point to chapters in the Holy Text of Islam,

this beautiful book, the Quran,

which exhort Muslims to engage in Jihad

or Holy War on behalf of the Muslim community.

Some people say that Jihad really here needs

to be understood metaphorically

as a struggle against your inner demons.

But others say that, No, when the Quran talks about Jihad,

they are talking about fighting wars

in order to spread the religion of Islam

or to rid Islam of the domination

or oppression of non-Muslims.

Here's a question from the AskHistorians subreddit.

Why did the US really invade Iraq in 2003?

What's the real reasons behind the war?

So remember, the Iraq War of 2003 was brought to us

by this gentleman, George W. Bush,

and it was to unseat Saddam Hussein,

who was the dictator of Iraq.

There were a couple of big reasons offered

for why the United States needed to invade Iraq.

The first was that Saddam Hussein

was somehow implicated in 9/11.

There was also an associated fear

that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons

of mass destruction, most critically nuclear weapons.

One of the reasons people think

that the war in Iraq was fought

for other than its stated reasons,

after the invasion,

we found Iraq didn't have any weapons of mass destruction.

So clearly there was something else going on here.

Critics of the war, of course, make a third argument

that it was all about that oil.

And if you ask a second question, which is, did it pan out?

You'd have to conclude that on almost every metric,

the Iraq War was a failure.

We didn't get any oil.

We got rid of Saddam Hussein who was an enemy

of the Iranians and basically empowered allies

of the Iranian regime.

And the collapse of Iraq gave rise to all kinds

of terrorist groups that continued to wreak havoc in Iraq

and in Syria in particular, even to this day.

This one's from Lotuswongtko.

I heard Iran was really very rich in the 1960s.

Was it true?

Iran was rich in the 1960s and it's still rich today.

Remember, it's a major oil producer.

One of the other things you'll hear about Iran in the 1960s

was that it was very liberal.

You'll see people share photos

of women in Iran in the 1960s wearing mini skirts

and having beautiful finely-coifed hairstyles,

and contrasting that to today

where women in Iran are kept under very tight restrictions

with respect to how they can dress in public.

And that really is a result of what happens in Iran,

I would say starting in the 1950s.

So in 1953, Iran is actually a constitutional monarchy.

There's an Iranian leader named Mohammad Mosaddegh

who decides to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

This is the major oil company that's producing Iranian oil

and it's owned by the British.

America decides to cooperate with the British

and overthrow him, and we do.

But what happens as a result of that

is that America invests very heavily

in an authoritarian regime led by the king

who called himself the Shah,

and that was a very restrictive regime.

They were pro-Western, they were modern,

but they also did not brook any descent.

And it all explodes in the 1979 Iranian Revolution led

by this man, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

And this guy was a religious scholar who believed

that the proper form of government

is for religious scholars to rule,

and he set himself up as Iran's supreme leader,

and inaugurates what is now known

as the Islamic Republic of Iran,

a country that is run on their understanding of Islamic law.

This is from @Salenophile48.

Why are there American bases in Qatar?

Because look at where Qatar is.

It is in such a strategically important territory.

You've got Iran here, you've got the oil of the Persian Gulf

that flows through here.

So it's very important for the United States,

which wants to ensure the free flow of oil

and the security of its allies from Iranian adventurism

to have a military presence there

to keep the oil flowing and to keep the peace.

SocraticTiger asks,

Why did America become pro-Israel in the 1960s?

So if you're to ask a lot of Palestinians,

they would find that to be a weird question.

They would say America has been pro-Israel

from the very beginning.

After all, the UN vote that results

in the international global recognition

of the state of Israel,

the US played an important role in lining up the votes

for the state of Israel.

The US is one of the first countries

to recognize the state of Israel.

The question is right,

that something does change in the 1960s

where the alliance between the United States and Israel

becomes much stronger.

And I would say a big part of that is the Cold War.

During the Cold War where the US

is locked in the struggle with the Russians,

we're looking for allies around the world.

And in that point in time,

the Arab countries didn't look like great allies.

The oil-producing countries

of the Persian Gulf were definitely pro-American.

But then you had countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq,

where they were much more naturally-aligned

with the Soviet Union,

both because they were kind of leftist in their orientation,

but also because they saw the United States

as the successor to the former imperial powers,

whereas the Soviets talked about ending colonialism

and liberating the peoples of the global South.

Israel, in contrast,

looks like a natural ally of the United States.

Culturally, there are similarities

because so many Jewish people came from the West.

There's a large Jewish community in the United States,

and the state of Israel at that time,

unlike any of the Arab countries, was a liberal democracy.

Here's a question from the AskMiddleEast subreddit.

What is Israel's main goal with invading other countries?

Would the Middle East be more peaceful without them?

The Israelis actually fight for wars against the Arabs.

The first is the War of Independence in 1948,

which the Palestinians called the Nakba or the catastrophe.

The end of that war results in the map

of Israel looking like this.

The Jewish state has captured all

of the green territories except for this actually,

this is the Golan Heights,

and this territory here, the Gaza Strip is controlled

by Egypt and this territory here

at the West Bank of the Jordan River, including Jerusalem,

is captured by the kingdom of Jordan.

Then there was a war in 1956

in which Gamal Abdel Nasser,

Nasser as he's called in America,

he nationalized the Suez Canal.

And so the British and the French,

with the connivance of the Israelis, attack Egypt.

They are eventually pushed out

because the United States sides with the Egyptians.

Then in 1967, Israel launches a preemptive war

against its Arab neighbors,

and that's because Nasser,

that dictator in Egypt was saber-rattling.

His rhetoric was always very bellicose.

He talked about throwing the Jews into the sea.

So the Israelis would say in 1967,

the reason we quote, Invaded other countries

is because we were facing a threat

from those other countries.

At the end of that war,

they had captured not just the Gaza Strip,

they captured the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt.

They captured the West Bank from Jordan,

and they captured the Golan Heights from Syria.

It wasn't until 1973 when the Egyptians launch

an attack on the Israelis

in order to recapture the Sinai Peninsula,

that the Israelis lose Sinai ultimately

as a result of a peace deal

that they make with the Egyptians.

1982, the Israelis invade Lebanon

because the Palestinian resistance movement

had relocated to Lebanon,

and was launching cross border raids against Israel.

The general rationale

that Israeli security analysts will give you

is that all of these cross-border conflicts

that Israel is involved in are in order to fend off attacks,

that even includes the war in Gaza.

Hamas uses their control of Gaza

to launch rockets in Israel,

and then when October 7th happened,

that too is another reason

why the Israelis say they have to wage this war.

There's lots of people who point to the conflict

between Arabs and Israel

as the main source of conflict in the region.

It's a major source of conflict,

but it's not the only conflict in the Middle East.

And you ask this question,

would the Middle East be more peaceful without them?

The natural answer to is to say,

well, why stop at the Israelis?

The Middle East could be a lot more peaceful,

the world could be a lot more peaceful

if there weren't any people.

Where you have people, you have conflict.

Here's a question from Playful_Interview753.

Why the heck are the Saudis building a futuristic city

in the middle of the desert?

The question is referring to a city

that the Saudis are building that is called NEOM.

This is supposed to be a futuristic city

with beaches that have glow-in-the-dark sand,

a hundred mile long linear skyscraper.

One of the ambitions that the Saudis have

is to really establish their country

just like their neighbors in the Emirates did

as an attractor for global talent.

The Saudi Arabia that I grew up in

was a very conservative society.

So when I was growing up in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s,

women weren't allowed to drive.

Women had to wear concealing black garments

when they went outside.

And if you were unlucky enough to be caught outside

during prayer time and you didn't go to the mosque,

there would be religious police who would strongly suggest

that you go and pray in the mosque.

The current crown prince of Saudi Arabia,

Mohammed bin Salman, is trying to change this.

And so this project of building this big glitzy city

is an attempt to signal very powerfully

that Saudi Arabia has changed

and the new Saudi Arabia has arrived.

Here's a question from the Afghanistan subreddit.

Why does the Taliban wanna stop women from doing anything?

So the Taliban are the religious fanatics

who currently run Afghanistan.

They adhere to a particularly puritanical brand of Islam

that believes that women's place is in the home

and not experiencing equal status with men.

This is a problem most acute in Afghanistan,

but we see it to greater and lesser extent

throughout the Middle East

and indeed throughout the Muslim world.

Lots of people will point out

that in most commonly-accepted understandings

of Islamic law, women are recorded a subordinate status.

They may not be as extreme as the Taliban,

but for example, one aspect of Islamic law says

that women should get less inheritance than men.

The testimony of women in court

is worth less than the testimony of a man.

I personally don't feel that there's anything within Islam

that is inimical to equality for women,

but lots of conservative Muslims don't think that way.

This is from the Explainlikeimfive subreddit.

Explain like I'm five,

the difference between kosher and halal.

Kosher is the dietary regulation followed

by adherent Jews,

and halal is a set of dietary regulations followed

by Muslims.

There's lots of similarities between the two.

Kosher, you don't eat anything that has to do with a pig.

The same in Halal.

There's some areas where halal goes further than kosher.

So for example, in Islam,

it is not halal to consume alcohol,

whereas it is kosher to consume alcohol for Jews.

And there are other areas

where kosher goes a lot further than halal.

So for example, in kosher dietary laws,

you're not allowed to mix meat and milk.

In Islam, there's no such restriction.

So a Muslim can have a cheeseburger, an adherent Jew cannot.

In Judaism, for example,

you're not allowed to eat shellfish.

Most Muslims think eating shellfish is totally fine.

One of the reasons they overlap is because Islam,

like Christianity, descends from Judaism.

There's all kinds of ways

in which you can observe

the practice of contemporary Muslims,

and see how it's so similar

to the practice of contemporary Jews.

For so many hundreds of years,

Islam and Judaism develop together.

When the Muslims dominated Spain,

Jews and Arabs created their individual religious laws

in conversation with each other.

And that period of cooperation

and that common genealogy is what makes

the conflict between Muslims and Jews today

so much more tragic,

but it's also what gives me a little bit of hope

that one day they'll be able to transcend it.

I gotta say, those are some

of the toughest questions I've ever faced.

That's probably tougher than the toughest Harvard classroom.

Thank you for watching Middle East Support.

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