Companion text to A Crooke's short video:
"Opening a Path to Hearing Others with Alastair Crooke"
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By Ricardo Oskam
In Northern Italy last week, former British diplomat and intelligence officer Alastair Crooke delivered the opening session at the gathering that concluded the Solari Builders pilot course, sharing lessons learned from a lifetime spent listening to and negotiating with people the West has decided it does not need to hear from. Crooke joined Catherine last May to discuss “Civilization at the Crossroads,” and this week, he is kindly allowing us to publish his fascinating talk on cross-cultural understanding for Solari subscribers.
To begin with, Crooke recounts how, fresh from university, a mentor told him that his mind had become “a perfectly polished Cartesian retort”—and that the kindest thing anyone could do was smash it. His mentor explained that the Western mind pins facts to a clothesline of empirical data and rationalizes its way to a conclusion, triangulating forever between subject and object. While this has made the Western mind a powerful instrument, it has quietly deleted the metaphysics of most of humanity. For a Muslim, Crooke notes, the world is not inert matter waiting to be measured; it is alive, luminous, and a presentation of the divine. To negotiate with such people, you must first accept that they do not think as Westerners do. We are well advised to seek complete understanding.
Crooke’s biography provides clues as to how he honed his listening and negotiation skills. Born in Ireland and raised on a farm outside Harare (in what was then Rhodesia), educated in Switzerland and Scotland, Crooke spent his early career under diplomatic cover with British intelligence in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Cambodia, Colombia, Pakistan, and across the Middle East. He later served as Middle East adviser to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and from that seat helped broker de-escalations and military withdrawals in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the negotiations that ended the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. In 2004, Crooke founded Conflicts Forum in Beirut, an effort to open direct dialogue between Western policymakers and entities like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. (He pointedly refuses to use the word “terrorists.”)
The heart of his lesson involves the discipline of perception. Drawing on the works of mystic-philosopher Ibn al-‘Arabī, Crooke urges us to see with both eyes, hear with both ears, and understand with our whole being—catching not only what is said but what is left unsaid, and answering argument with empathy rather than rebuttal. In short, he invites us to reassess how we perceive and embrace the world around us. To take back control of how we spatialize our world and expand consciousness—rather than let it be filled with hypermaterialism and prejudice—is the quiet, sovereign work each of us can begin.
As we move through these times of unpredictable change in a world that is indeed alive and intelligent, Crooke’s insights offer each of us inspiration to create our pathway forward.
Full Report: https://solari.com/opening-a-path-to-...
