Date: Dec 18, 2018 Source: The Daily Star A Beirut-Tokyo axis of nonviolence Chibli Mallat At the University of Tokyo on Nov. 17, 2018, an unusual assortment of Middle Eastern and Japanese scholars met over a conference on “nonviolence as strategy, and nonviolence as future.” One oddity or novelty of the discussions came from the convergence of interest in nonviolence from scholars of vastly contrastive interests. Another came in the keen interest of “Islam and gender” female professors of the Middle East in Tokyo and Kyoto in the reading of an Arab Spring as the fount of a new philosophy of history, a philosophy where nonviolence was the anima of revolutionary break with a violent past. A third novelty was the contrastive context of overwhelming violence in the Middle East since World War II, and the rejection of violence in Japanese domestic and foreign policy for the same period, embodied most symbolically in Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. Within this context, religious nonviolent figures such as the Syrian “alem” (traditionalist scholar) Jawdat Said and political leaders such as the Burmese Aung San Suu Kyi were presented with the paradoxes inherent to the specific interpretation of the Quran by Said as a message of characteristic nonviolence, against a reality where Islam and other Middle Eastern monotheistic religions are exploited by Daesh (ISIS) and Middle Eastern governments to justify vast massacres and the killing of political dissenters In the case of Burma, the transformation of a nonviolent political leader like Aung San Suu Kyi into a withdrawn and quietist approach to the deporting of thousands of Rohingya Muslims was the subject of a lively debate between the proponents of efficacy in politics the withdrawal of the Amnesty International award for her silence, as opposed to her calling for international mediation to consciously compensate for her inefficacy to counter the military domination in Burma and the vast anti-Rohingya sentiment common in the non-Muslim majority of Myanmar. There is no magic wand that can turn an academic discussion into a solution to an increasingly violent world, except that, perhaps for the first time in history, a symbolic axis of nonviolence ran from Beirut to Tokyo on the strength of the nonviolent nature of the early days of the Arab revolutions. It also marks a shift to universalism of a key debate for the future of the planet from traditional European-American academia and policymaking to an Asian-based academic and activist commonalty based on a future of a nonviolence philosophy of change. Characteristically also, the leadership for the conference had been instilled by female Japanese public intellectuals who appreciated the centrality of women in the modern Middle East, and across Asia, while remaining intent to avoid essentialism. To avoid essentialism is to privilege the fight for nonviolence by women to the exclusion of men, while acknowledging forms of gender-based brutality inherent to the authoritarianism of “strong men” (such as those in Egypt imposing virginity tests), rarely of “strong women.” The birth of a Beirut-Tokyo axis of nonviolence is one symbolic response to the characteristic retreat of the human rights agenda globally, and the looming confrontations unchecked strong men are threatening the planet with, namely the return to a state of savage disorder which ended up in a devastating world war. Chibli Mallat is an international lawyer and law professor based in Beirut, author of “Philosophy of Nonviolence” (Oxford 2015), which provided the occasion to the Tokyo seminar. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 18, 2018, on page 6.