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Ken Dorph in Istanbul. COURTESY KEN DORPH
Ken Dorph in Istanbul. COURTESY KEN DORPH
Ken Dorph resides in Sag Harbor, but he lives in the world.
In the financial sector, his work as a consultant in the Middle East has him traveling the globe much of the time, and it’s made him something of an expert on the culture. On consecutive Thursdays, April 20 and 27, he will give a pair of lectures at Bay Street Theater sharing some of the insight he’s gathered, with a focus on the theme of the “Hidden Cosmopolitanism of the Arab World.” The 7 p.m. talks, which will include a question-and-answer session afterward, are co-sponsored by the Sag Harbor Center for the Arts. Tickets are available with a suggested donation of $20 and are available through the Bay Street box office by calling 631-725-9500, or at baystreet.org.
In addition to his work in finance, including with the World Bank, he’s lectured or led panels on the Middle East at a variety of colleges and at the annual C3 U.S.-Arab Summit. He teaches an occasional seminar on sharia compliant home finance at the Wharton School.
Not surprisingly, Dorph was abroad when he agreed to sit for a recent Zoom conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You are in Istanbul.
And very cool apartment. Kind of funky. I think it’s an artist who … it’s two floors with a great balcony.
I’m coming back from Riyad, and I just love Istanbul. I was in a hurry, but on the way back, I said, “I’m going to spend a day and a half in Istanbul.”
Yeah, I mean, this is probably the seventh or eighth time I’ve been in the city. But what it is, I think, first of all, the topography. Any city that’s mountainous, next to the water, is … maybe it’s my Norwegian heritage … seagulls, and ships passing through, and you can hear the horns of the boats.
It’s one of those cities, I think there are, like, four or five cities that people must visit if they can while they’re alive. And I would put Istanbul in those five.
Q: And is it safe there?
Safer than America. It is. I mean, when Americans say that, I’m, like, Florida is not safe!
It’s funny, because we were talking: I’m the only American on the team in Riyad. People were saying they’re getting afraid to go to America, the Arabs and the Europeans.
We don’t have any concept. We are a dangerous country. Of the wealthy countries, we’re the most dangerous.
Q: So, this pair of talks at Bay Street — why in Sag Harbor? And who is the audience for these talks?
Sag Harbor, because I live there, and I really would like to explain to as many people as I can on the East End, what I do and what I see. I think it’s important to break down the barriers with the Arab world.
The genesis of this talk … it was in the beginning of COVID, and an old friend of mine, Howard, that I’d consulted with around the world, literally, knows that I know the Arab world very well. He was running a national program of adult learning. He said, “How would you like to speak about the Arab world? What about Middle Eastern finance?” And I went, “Boring.” So he said, “I’ll give you a week. What would you like to talk about?”
So I thought, what do I think the biggest misconception is about the Arab world? And there are many, but one misconception, I think, is really powerful: this question of cosmopolitanism. Like the idea that Europe and Israel are centers of diversity and tolerance, and the Arab world is ISIS, people killing everyone who’s not like them.
And that is not my experience at all. For one thing, I find the Arab world to be very tolerant and diverse, especially certain parts of it. And I also think that where it has lost tolerance has actually been in reaction to things that have happened in the 20th century — that, in fact, in the 19th century, the Ottoman Arab world was far more tolerant than Europe and the United States.
The Ottomans, for example, in the 1870s, during the Tanzimat period, made discrimination against religion against the law. They changed it. We weren’t five years out of the Civil War, barely, and we still had slavery.
So the United States was really an outlier in terms of how it treated minorities, and Jim Crow, until the 1960s. I think of the Americans as being latecomers, if you will, in terms of accepting … oh, of course we’re a very heterogeneous society, because of our immigration, but this part of the world — and I’m in Istanbul, which is a phenomenally tolerant place — has been, for a long time, quite cosmopolitan.
However, that was severely damaged by several things that happened in the 20th century. And I think the biggest one was European colonialism of North Africa. And when the Ottoman Empire was dismembered, it really was very damaging. Carving out a Christian state in Lebanon, and a Jewish state, obviously set things in a very different path, because it broke it up into religious states.
And then, of course, oil, the incredible influence of oil, and making the places like Saudi Arabia, which had been the most conservative, the most rural, the most distant from the cosmopolitan centers, became all of a sudden the center of power. That had a huge impact … it really upset, overturned, the cosmopolitanism that had existed.
I think if my fellow Americans understood this better, they’d be more sympathetic. And also they’d realize the role of Americans and Europeans in destroying the cosmopolitanism of this part of the world.
Q: That was one of the things that struck me about the description of your talks. The description said there is a historical tolerance in Arab society that was “deeply and negatively impacted by the Western intervention.” So that’s in a variety of ways, both economic and social?
Yeah, political, social, economic. I mean, of course, the war in Iraq is the most recent example.
I have come to see, and it’s something I feel passionately about, that cosmopolitanism, the idea that you could live in a society that’s diverse … I grew up in Brooklyn, with friends who were Jewish and Jamaican and Chinese and whatever, and we all got along. And the reason that we didn’t fear each other is because there was a sense of prosperity, of possibility and of curiosity.
And as you know, when people are attacked, like 9/11, or anytime they’re attacked, they tend to revert to their tribes, whatever that tribe may be.
And that’s what concerns me. How do we get beyond that? How do we begin to say … humans have two sides. We have fear and curiosity. They’re both very much a part of us when we see someone who’s different. I have always personally tried to err on the side of curiosity. I’m not a fearful person.
I think that really came right from my mother, honestly. And I have found that curiosity brings you far more pleasure, and also begins to build bridges that begin to attack that fear, which leads to violence.
Q: It breaks down the barriers, right?
Absolutely. Anyway, so that was the genesis of it, and why the two different talks.
The other thing is this whole question of Muslims. You know, you hear Muslims are violent people, or all this nonsense. And I have actually found Muslims in my own experience to be quite tolerant. I mean, Muslims historically have been far more tolerant of Jews and Christians, than Christians have been of Jews and Muslims. I mean, any scholar of the world will tell you that’s a fact. It’s not my opinion.
And I think people need to understand that I’m not blaming Christians — I’m not blaming anybody. But at least if you understand the history. When someone says Islam is a violent religion or something inane like that, someone can say, “What are you talking about? Christianity is a violent religion. All religions are violent religions, if you’re going to just look at their violent parts.” There’s also, most religions are peaceful most of the time, which is also true of Islam.
… There was a flourishing of Jewish culture in the Arab world. Most Jewish scholars will tell you that the greatest inflorescence of Jewish culture tended to be among Muslims, whether in Istanbul, in Spain, in North Africa. And I saw this. I saw how it was quite different. And, of course, that was changed by the creation of Israel. And that really shattered things for obvious reasons, because the Jews became a fifth column in the Arab countries. But it did exist. It did exist.
I guess I feel that if Jews and Muslims got along for centuries, Jews and Muslims can get along again in the future. It’s a question of how we organize the pain of the creation of Israel, and of the Palestinians. What do we do about that, to make Jews and Muslims kind to each other again?
Anyway, so I wanted to talk about how non-Muslim minorities are treated in the Muslim world, both by Quranic law, but also contrasting it with Europeans — the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, etc. And, again, I’m not saying Europeans are bad — that’s not my argument. It’s just that when people say Arabs are bad, and they’re European Christian, I’m saying, woo, this is complicated.
Then the other issue, with gender, when people talk about the Arabs, the first thing people tend to say is that they cover women in burkas, they throw gay people from roofs. And that is absolutely not my experience. I’ve had women in very high positions in places like Egypt and Pakistan. Saudi Arabia was always the outlier, but that was also the country that became the most powerful, thanks to American oil and weapons. And that had a real effect on the Arab world. Our influence on giving the most conservative country the most power actually had a big transformative effect.
But even that’s changing. I have just come from Saudi Arabia. I am flabbergasted how much it’s changed in the last four or five years. Women now drive, they don’t cover themselves. They’re part of my team. It is another country from four years ago when I first arrived there. It is barely distinguishable from Dubai, except for the alcohol. And even that you can get surreptitiously.
So it’s very complicated. And including the issues of same sex is also complicated.
Q: So let’s talk about gender first, the subject of your first lecture. Let’s talk about some of the misconceptions about the Arab world. As a gay man, you’re traveling in that world — have you experienced any kind of negative impact?
No, and I think that for many years, most people who Google me know that I’m gay, since 2000, since Google happened. I don’t think people really care. It’s something … in a lot of the world, not just the Middle East, a lot of the traditional world, the sexual aspect people don’t want to know about. There’s more the question of the importance of marriage, of opposite sex marriage for continuation of the family, of the tradition of honor and all that stuff. Sexuality is a separate question.
And, of course, that has changed in the West, in last 20, 40 years. It’s a very brief history. So I try to understand it here, “here” meaning not just the Arab world but the non-Western world, because this is a very big issue of how things of gender are changing.
But I’ve also found that, in my personal experience, a lot of what … I lived in Sicily and Malta before coming to Tunisia, and I found they were far more similar to each other. The way the geography of women, the positions of women — women in the home, men outside — that was very Mediterranean. So I don’t see it as Muslim versus Christian. I see it more Mediterranean versus Scandinavian, for example. That was what I saw.
Then when I was in Sicily, it felt exactly like North Africa, the way that society was organized women having more power in the home. Now that’s changed in Sicily. It’s also changed in North Africa.
So I don’t see it as Muslim versus Christian. I see it as much more complex than that.
Q: And when we talk about religion, which is the other lecture, what’s something that would surprise Americans when it comes to the Arab world’s views on religion?
I guess that it’s very diverse. I’ve met Tunisian and Saudi and Egyptian atheists. I mean, there are fewer than, probably certainly, France, but I’ve met them.
And I’ve met people who were … five years ago, about 75 percent of the population of Turkey fasted during Ramadan. Now, it’s about two-thirds. And in Istanbul, it’s less. There is a secularization happening all over the world, not just the Muslim world. And it’s certainly happening in the Arab world.
And there’s always two opposing camps. There are those who regret that change, and they’re those who want to be part of it. And that’s certainly true in Turkey and Tunisia and Egypt and Morocco and Saudi Arabia.
I’m trying to think of the thing that people would think most surprising. One thing that always struck me is ignorance about Islamic law. When I would talk about the low crime rates, because the Arab world generally has low crime … I’m more afraid of violence in the United States. I was held up at gunpoint in Minneapolis a year ago. A guy put a gun to my head and hit me in the head with a gun. The United States is a frightening place. I mean, I’m good with, I like the United States, but I’m aware of crime there. I’m aware of the guns.
So the places I go, it’s among the more violent, you know what I mean? It’s less violent than Mexico or South Africa, but it’s far more violent than the Arab countries.
How do I perceive it? Here, I leave my laptop, I go to the bathroom, I don’t think about it. You know what I mean? And people would always say to me, “Oh, oh, that’s because they chop off their hands.” And I’d say, “No, actually, the only place they have sharia law for crime is in Saudi Arabia, maybe Kuwait. All the other countries — Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Jordan — have something similar to Napoleonic code.” It’s very similar to French law, especially in North Africa. So there’s absolutely zero cutting off of hands.
Q: So what is it?
So it is culture. One of the things that struck me in Tunisia … like a lot of more traditional societies, it’s an honor and shame culture, like Japan, where if you commit a crime, and attacked a society with very strong social bonds, you bring shame upon your family. It’s a big deal. The U.S. is so extremely individualistic. For better or for worse, we are the most individualistic country in the world.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, a woman was murdered and raped by a man she didn’t know. It was news for two months. It was so shocking. And I was thinking, that happened yesterday in New York — and the day before. You know what I mean?
So it’s not about punishment. I mean, it could be about religion. Maybe people fear the afterlife. But to me it’s more about … a lot of people go to the mosques because they want to be perceived as pious, but they also want to be part of some larger thing than themselves. I think that’s a big thing.
I love the United States — don’t get me wrong. I love my country. But it is extremely individualistic, I think, to a fault. And one of the things about the Arab world, it has a very strong sense of social cohesion. And Islam does that. I mean, I fasted two years during Ramadan. And the biggest power of the fasting, for me, was the sense of participation with everyone else. It was amazing that everyone was going through the same thing you were. That everyone was wishing they had some water, that everyone was grumpy at 5 o’clock.
It’s this feeling of shared purpose that I think Americans have a harder time with. I mean, as a general rule. I don’t know. I don’t want to be down on the United States, because I love the United States — because I think that the individualism can also create things. You’re not going to have Steve Jobs [in the Arab world]. But we also suffer from that individualism. We suffer from it. It has positive and negative.
But I think that the reason that crime rates are low is not because of Islamic law, but because it’s a very strong sense of social cohesion. Again, the wars disrupt this. The violence has been terrible. And I think my greatest regret about the American involvement in the Middle East … you know, our military budget is about a thousand times bigger than our diplomatic budget. And that to me is … it makes me so ashamed. Since we only have hammers, we keep hitting nails, whether it’s Libya or Palestine or Iraq.
In Iraq, it’s 20 years now since that horrible mistake. I just met on the train, on the tram coming across the bridge, a Syrian refugee. And I know that Syria fell apart as a direct result of the American invasion of Iraq. It was a spillover. And it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because Syria had its problems. But it was attacked. They have been completely broken. And it’s our wars.
Why do we find it so easy to attack Arab countries? We haven’t attacked any Latin American countries or East African countries or southeast Asian countries in a long time. And I think it’s a real ignorance of Islam and of Arabs.
Q: It allows us to think of them as the other.
Exactly. Which means less than us, and therefore not quite human. Isn’t that why?
Q: In the description of your lectures, one of the interesting things that I read was that you asked the question, what is an Arab? I’m struck by that, in part, because I think there’s an equivalent question locally where we talk about the Latino community all of the time, without acknowledging that within that community, there are multitudes of cultures.
Absolutely.
Q: And languages. And that’s also true of the Arab world. So — who is an Arab?
Someone who speaks Arabic and who thinks that they’re an Arab.
Q: It’s that simple.
It’s a linguistic and cultural group. It’s not an ethnic group. It’s not even a religious group. Until the 20th century, about 20 percent of Arabs were not Muslim. So it’s really a linguistic group. And I’ll describe that in the first talk.
Q: But that misconception is a big part of the problem, right, with the interaction with Western countries?
Absolutely, yeah. It’s funny you say that about Latinos, because since I’ve worked so much in Latin America, the word Latino, to me, is it’s the same thing. It’s a Spanish-speaking group — and a Black Brazilian, and a Mexican of Nahuatl background, and a Cuban of Spanish background are as different to me as Chinese and Indians. But they just speak Spanish. There is a certain coherence to Spanish-speaking culture, it’s true, but it’s not that strong. It’s more of an artificial grouping.
Q: It makes it easier for us, right?
Yeah, I understand why people … look, I think of people as being Arabs because I speak Arabic, you know what I mean? But I think there has been, in the last 20, 30 years especially, a growing cohesion among Arabs, partly because of Western hostility. When someone says, “We hate you because you’re Polish,” all of a sudden you feel Polish!
Q: Language is so excluding, isn’t it? It creates a lot of these walls. Just the pure language barriers I think contribute to that.
Yes, which is why I’m looking forward to the future, when we have these little medallions that we put on, and instantly translate. And you could be speaking Mongolian, and I know what you’re saying without thinking about it.
Q: So when you say “hidden cosmopolitanism,” it seems to me that what you’re saying is that it’s more like hidden from Western culture.
Yes, correct. And also, I think, it has been diminished by the many shocks to the Arab world in the 20th century. So I think it did diminish. It absolutely has diminished, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead.
I guess that’s what I mean. Hidden both from Americans, but also latent, and it certainly was diminished. It’s the only way I can think of it, was definitely shattered, the cosmopolitanism existed here 100 years ago, by these tragedies. The tragedy of British and French colonialism, later American colonialism, of the creation of Israel and Lebanon, but especially Israel, for a lot of reasons. And then oil. Those are the three biggies that really, really broke the Arab world that existed.
It was moving away from the Ottoman Empire, and was going toward becoming a more secular and tolerant place. And then it got smacked by forces much more powerful. And it still hasn’t recovered.
