Thomas Jefferson believed that no generation can rightly bind another. He meant in debt as well as in law.


"Nothing then is unchangeable," he said, "but the inherent and inalienable Rights of Man."
Jefferson and His Time, Volume 6,
The Sage of Monticello,
By Dumas Malone, p443.


On 22nd January, 2008, when I took the stand in Court 3 at Huddersfield Magistrates' Court, West Yorkshire in the UK I glanced down and saw a card taped there which read, "oath for Christians and Jews". Why I was on the stand is irrelevant to this introduction (I was there as a defendant, ultimately successful). What matters is that there was no card saying, "oath for Muslims, Hindhus, Buddhists, Atheists or followers of Apollo". The usher said there is no difference. The oaths are the same. The usher was wrong. They are not. If they were all the oath need say for anyone would be, "I swear to tell the truth".

No Act of Parliament can make an oath mean the same thing to different faith groups nor to each individual. Justice can be about understanding as well as assigning guilt and exacting retribution. With understanding the perception of guilt and desire for revenge might leach away. But space must be opened for truth. Faced by that card at Huddersfield Magistrates' Court how can non Christians and non Jews believe they will participate in a system of justice that leads to understanding? Does Tibet have an oath for Buddhists and non Buddhists? Different people and faith groups and non faith groups see truth differently, not only their deities and absence of deity. Calvinists and Episcopalians place Christ and Truth in different frameworks, and what the Court hears needs to take that into account. How can it?

If the usher meant only you and everyone is abiding by the law of the land in which you live, where the land includes the brain you own and your intellectual bench marks, then that might have been an ok explanation. Might have been, but not wholly. Because the truth can actually result in the perpetuation of a lie, and was it then the truth? In such a reckoning there are lies but no perjury.

This is a world of abstractions I have opened. One that perhaps only philosophers might untangle, and the Thomas Jefferson I have quoted was, according to his distinguished biographer, Dumas Malone, impatient of philosophising and abstractions. Odd, really, when one thinks he put his name to the American Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776. That was indeed a work of abiding and contested philosophy.

In England, Scotland (with its bewildering verdict to the English of not proven), Wales and Northern Ireland (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), there has been a debate for some years about what multiculturalism means and about civil liberties. Judging by the stand at Huddersfield Magistrates' Court the debate skimmed over that place. How should the UK handle the issue? What should the oath in a Court of Law be and how might one convey its meaning?

Perhaps on this topic Israel, Gaza and the West Bank might have some lessons for the UK. There the Arab and Jewish minds meet and Western and older influences vie. Although the Right Reverend Riah H. Abu El-Assal interviewed here is involved in a civil case with his Bishop and successor in Jerusalem I did not ask him how competing influences impacted what oath he took, but I do ask about his legal dispute, a microcosm reflecting some of the troubles of the region in which he lives.

I ask him about his role as a peace activist. Who or what in his mind are/is ought to be held most responsible for the region?s troubles and for the current stand off between Israel and Palestinian activist groups both within and without the law.

I did not ask him: Is it Britain that is partly to blame, given its past role in the creation of Israel; is it American dollars; arms deals; or Israeli intransigence; is it Germany for having made Zionism make sense; or every society that has taken affront at Judaism and its rituals? Or was it the Babylonians and the Assyrians? The Romans? Who ought properly to be being prosecuted for suicide bombings? And are the bombings aimed at the targets? Are they actually suicide bombings at all?

Does Jefferson's philosophy hold any insight for the Bishop or is it too tainted by the acts of America in the present? That would be a shame because philosophy ought to be able to shake off the shackles of history, and, for that matter, religion, divinity, politics and science (a word that now has a different meaning to the one Jefferson would have understood, despite his meticulous recording of meteorological conditions). Plato's cave presents an essence of humanity that is as comprehensible today as it was two and a half millennia ago. It is a trans cultural metaphor with present freshness.

History can have few such pretensions. It is a product of its time and place, and within that time, as an academic discipline, it can be good history or bad history. It is made of those things which individuals consent to have made public or pertains to those who are living a public life, selected by themselves as MPs, say, or who as public servants write memos about public policy that are destined to be made public once the events they relate to have become the past. At its best the discipline of history is an end in itself. No lessons for the present. Simply and wholly an accounting and analysis of the past, taking due account of the quality of the sources and likely missing sources.

History binds and burdens the region in which Bishop Riah lives and works. Religion and awe and admiration for its holy places add passion to the situation despite efforts that Rome, Canterbury and Mecca make to remove some of the burden from people living their lives in the tiny countries that make up the region. A bishop, then, particularly one from the worldwide Anglican community, is a good person to question about the intersection of the sacred and the profane in the region given his life as a clergyman, aspiring politician (nationally aspiring, practically accomplishing in the General Synod) and peace activist. So we ask below what Bishop Riah thinks about the Arab peace initiative, Annapolis, President Carter's visit and Tony Blair. I asked the Bishop if he thought history must always bow to a Marxist interpretation - where means of production of goods and food and commerce are the dominant shaping factors. Such forces are not always apparent to participants in events.

The interview includes also some guest questions. What impact would introducing Western Democracy to Saudi Arabia have on the region asks Gabriel Laycock, a trade unionist from Halifax in West Yorkshire. What does the Bishop think of Tony Blair's efforts on behalf of The Quartet, asks Anne Isseyegh, an artist from West Yorkshire in the UK, and what arrangements, asks Fred Pearce, the deputy editor of Science, People & Politics, did Bishop Riah make to protect Mordechai Vanunu and from journalists when Vanunu sought sanctuary in the Cathedral after his release by the Israeli authorities. Helen Gavaghan

Top