Articles

It may be no more than a small mountain project, but the laying of the cornerstone on Saturday, August 8, for a center serving children with special needs in Bcharre, a town of 24,000, is nonetheless a “major undertaking” for those who have embarked on it with limited means but a profound awareness of its necessity. The center is the flagship project of the Bishop Philippe Chebaya Foundation, named after a priest who served for 40 years as principal of Bcharre’s public school before being ordained a bishop late in life. A priest running a public school: the case is unique in Lebanon. The anomaly is due partly to Bcharre’s distance from Beirut, but above all to the fact that Father Philippe always refused to be paid for his work as principal. During the darkest years of the war and the Syrian occupation, he had turned the school into his monastery, sleeping and eating there. On reflection, it is hardly surprising that he is revered as a saint by generations of villagers who owe their education and social advancement to him. Indeed, all of Bcharre is steeped in the memory of this man, who could be strict, but whose kindness in the end, and whose smile, quickly erased any memory of the frowns a school principal must sometimes wear. The modest scale of the project does not detract from its generosity. Jesus himself teaches us this through the “widow’s mite.” Leo XIV has just praised the efforts that, however modest, bring people of goodwill together and contribute to the unity of the human community. Henri de Lubac spoke of the “unknown saints” whom the Church will never formally venerate, but whose existence “helps ensure that our world is not a hell.” The “Greater Lebanon,” whose founding was commemorated at the recent beatification ceremony for Patriarch Howayek, is itself one of the smallest countries in the world. The project will add to a “Maronite stronghold” in the heart of the northern part of the Mount Lebanon mountain range. It is a small town known for its forest of thousand-year-old cedars and as the birthplace of the poet Gibran Khalil Gibran; a place also chosen by the Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother Teresa to plant a few seeds of holiness. The project is funded by the German government and the Kindermissionswerk “Die Sternsinger” association. Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rahi, despite his age, made the journey to sprinkle holy water over the ground and the walls under construction, and to bury in one of the future rooms a precious relic of St. Charbel, whose native village, Bkaa Kafra, can be seen from its windows, together with the four volumes of a catechism Father Philippe wrote for his students – the only fortune he left behind. “This land is holy.” Walking along a dirt path through an orchard of fruit trees, I slow my pace to walk alongside the woman who has just uttered these words. We are heading in single file toward an open grassy area, where chairs have been carefully arranged and speeches are to be given. “This breeze is Father Philippe’s breeze, too,” the woman adds. In his remarks, Patriarch Rahi will speak of Father Philippe, with whom he was close, as a saint. He does so in the spirit of an earlier age, before the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints existed, when the sensus fidelium was enough to recognize a deceased holy person as a saint. The patriarch will also speak tenderly of the little “verbs of God,” those with Down syndrome, who, throughout their lives, experience in their own bodies the Redeemer’s redemptive suffering. The center will be able to accommodate around 50 children. Joseph Chebaya, Father Philippe’s nephew, who runs the foundation, will work to bring it to completion with donations he gathers here and there. The Philippe Chebaya Foundation hopes it will serve as a beacon for all the villages surrounding the magnificent Holy Valley, the Kadisha, which it overlooks. The sun sets, and the mountain peaks surrounding Bcharre are draped in crimson, mauve and pink. In her remarks, Yasmine Raya, the chargé d’affaires at the German Embassy, will graciously say that she hopes to return once the building has begun welcoming those for whom it exists. An elegant way of assuring its founders that her country’s support will continue through the completion of the project and beyond.

The Trump Administration displayed a troubling and unusual passivity last week in the face of aggression (and arrogance) from the radical wing of the Iranian regime and its proxies — both in the Strait of Hormuz and on the front opened by the pro-Iranian Yemeni Houthi militia against Saudi Arabia. It was against this backdrop that a mutual defense pact was sealed this week between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, widely seen as a kind of Sunni NATO against Iran. The past week in the Middle East will likely be defined by a single image: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signing a mutual defense pact on Friday in Mecca — a location of profound symbolic significance. It is hard not to see this as an alliance of Sunni powers arrayed against the mullahs' regime — weakened by its recent war with the United States, yet still capable of causing considerable harm, as demonstrated by its attacks on neighboring Arab states and the aggressive posture of its proxies. The signing of this trilateral defense pact coincides with the activation of the Yemeni front against Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb area, and with the blockade the pro-Iranian Houthi militia is attempting to impose on Saudi ports. This new alliance has also become a priority for its signatories because the American ally appears to be seeking a way out — one that would not be too humiliating — that would allow it to disengage entirely from the Iranian conflict in order to protect its own interests. If this apparent US withdrawal actually materializes (which has yet to be demonstrated at this stage), it would mean that the Trump Administration had effectively given up in the face of the Iranian regime, leaving its radical wing free to stage a comeback by rapidly rebuilding its military apparatus and infrastructure — not only economic, but above all nuclear and ballistic. The scope of the defense pact Returning to the trilateral defense pact: it sends a message in several directions. Ankara was quick to clarify that the alliance is not directed against any particular party, while Riyadh stressed that it was not linked to any nuclear ambitions — given that Pakistan is a nuclear power and that the US Secretary of Energy recently announced a forthcoming agreement with the kingdom on civilian nuclear development, something the US president has made contingent on peace with Israel. The development of this landmark alliance will need to be closely watched in the weeks and months ahead, especially since the signatories speak of "deterrence" — by what means, and against whom? The three signatories also stated that the pact is open to other nations. Already on Saturday, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan declared that Egypt could soon join the new alliance, according to AFP. No reopening of the Strait of Hormuz in sight Friday's signing came at the end of a week of truce — or rather, American military passivity. That did not stop the mullahs' regime and its Yemeni ally, the Houthis, from continuing their aggression. A guided-missile destroyer patrolling the operational area of the US Navy's 5th Fleet in the Gulf. (Centcom) The Revolutionary Guards launched an attack over the weekend on an oil tanker belonging to the United Arab Emirates in the Strait of Hormuz, and over the past twenty-four hours, the Houthis first struck a refinery at Aramco's facilities in Saudi Arabia, before firing multiple missiles and drones on Saturday against the area around the Yemeni port of Mokha, targeting both port infrastructure and civilian facilities (homes, a hospital, etc.). According to an initial toll, the bombardment killed seven people and wounded 35 others. Late on Saturday evening, the Houthis resumed their intense shelling of the Mokha port area. It is worth noting that this week's attacks — on the Emirati tanker, the Saudi Aramco refinery, and positions held by the Yemeni government allied with Saudi Arabia — prompted no American response. As for the negotiations that were supposed to resume on Monday, as President Donald Trump had announced in exchange for calling off a US military operation against Iran, they never took place — the Iranians having refused any contact with the US administration! Iran's conditions put to Washington Regarding the hypothetical reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards stated over the weekend that it does not depend on an agreement with Oman, but rather on the United States accepting their conditions — thereby putting the ball back in Washington's court, which continues to refuse the imposition of any toll on maritime passage. The Iranian conditions announced on Friday included: an end to all "threats and insults directed against Iran" (!), a halt to all wars on all fronts (including Lebanon), the lifting of the blockade on Iranian ports, the withdrawal of all American forces from Iran's neighborhood, the payment of compensation for damages caused during the war, the lifting of all sanctions, and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. Two young Iranian women pose for a photographer while eating ice cream at a summer fashion event — an unusual sight in Tehran as residents take advantage of the ceasefire. (Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via AFP) This unchanged belligerent rhetoric can likely be explained by the fact that American threats have remained empty all week, despite Iranian attacks (direct or through proxies) on vessels in the strait — at least six — with no response whatsoever from the US military. In this context, it is worth noting that according to Israel's Channel 13, the head of US Central Command, who has been visiting Israel since the end of the week, conveyed a message to the Israeli government indicating that Washington wants the Jewish state to put an end to military operations in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza. Israeli leaders reportedly responded that Israel will not hesitate to directly strike the Iranian regime if it resumes building up its nuclear and ballistic arsenal. Finally, to close out this regional file, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei made headlines three times on Saturday. He reportedly held a meeting with Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian, appointed Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr as political adviser, and designated Mohsen Rezaei — a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and former head of the Revolutionary Guards — as his representative on the Supreme National Security Council. Lebanese-Israeli negotiations at an impasse This week was also significant on the Lebanese front. Over three days, from Tuesday to Thursday, the seventh round of direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel took place, held for the second time in Rome (at the US Embassy) rather than in Washington. This seventh round was already off to a bad start, given Israeli statements — particularly those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — that suggest a clear lack of intention to withdraw from Lebanon. While the unofficial reason is a hardening of rhetoric ahead of the Israeli legislative elections scheduled for October, and Netanyahu's desire to distance himself from anything that might upset public opinion or his hardline allies, the official reason is concern over a potential rebuilding of Hezbollah's military capabilities in evacuated areas. All indications coming out of the Rome talks point to a lack of meaningful progress and no new concrete measures, even though the Lebanese delegation's primary objective was to define new pilot zones for Israeli withdrawal and Lebanese army deployment (under the framework agreement signed in June). So much so that the next round of talks, scheduled for early September, now appears to be in jeopardy. One might have thought all was (nearly) lost, were it not for a Reuters report on Friday citing an unnamed "Lebanese official." According to this official, Lebanon and Israel "have agreed on a shortlist of countries capable of sending troops to verify Hezbollah's disarmament." He did not reveal which countries are on the list, but the agency noted that the final decision rests with the United States. Meanwhile, southern Lebanon has seen a genuine escalation over the past few days. Hezbollah continues to act as though it is observing the ceasefire, but it appears to have unofficially resumed operations. This was evidenced by an explosion in the village of Taybe that killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded others earlier this week. It was the second such incident in just a few days. Israel's response came swiftly. For the first time in several weeks, the Israeli army issued an evacuation order for a southern Lebanese village — Mansouri in Tyre — which has since been subjected to near-constant bombardment. Israeli strikes, which never truly stopped, are intensifying daily, particularly around what is described as a major Hezbollah military complex on the hill of Ali el-Taher. Even more worrying, Israeli incursions into Lebanese territory are resuming. The one drawing the most attention this week is a growing incursion near the village of Zawtar el-Charqiya, just steps away from one of the pilot zones evacuated in July where the Lebanese army deployed — Zawtar el-Gharbiya. As a result, the two armies have found themselves dangerously close in recent days, at a time when a Lebanese soldier was wounded by Israeli fire in Mansouri while attempting to reopen a road.

Since the Ain al-Rummaneh bus incident in 1975, which served as the symbolic spark of the war, the Lebanese people have been caught in an unbroken cycle of organized fear, rather than occasional fear. This falls within what some thinkers call the “economy of fear” or the “politics of fear,” in which fear becomes something that is manufactured and managed, rather than merely a spontaneous emotion. Fear performs three dangerous functions here: First, it paralyzes collective action. When a society lives under the permanent threat of war, civil strife, collapse, or an external or internal enemy, its primary concern becomes individual survival rather than collective action. The possibility of organized resistance to any form of domination or occupation consequently begins to disintegrate. Second, fear reproduces narrow communal loyalties, because it drives people to seek protection within their primary groups of belonging: their sect, their leader, their party. Fear thus becomes a mechanism for reproducing the very system that is supposedly responsible for the crisis. Finally, under the sway of fear, everything becomes justifiable: weapons beyond the control of the state, the suspension of the law, repression, corruption, and even dependence on foreign powers, because “the circumstances are exceptional.” We thus enter a state of exception that never ends. Our history bears witness to recurring stages in the manufacture of fear: The civil war: fear of the sectarian other. Successive occupations: fear of the external enemy. The post-2005 period: fear of assassination and chaos. Since 2019: fear of economic collapse. Regional wars and wars of support: persistent fear and anxiety over existence itself. The problem, then, does not lie in the existence of real dangers, for such dangers do indeed exist, but in transforming them into a permanent structure for managing society. Nor does it lie in the fact that the population has succumbed to fear, but rather in the fact that this fear has often been fabricated, amplified, or exploited in ways that prevent any genuine moment of emancipation. The ultimate result is what might be described as a society living in a permanent state of psychological emergency. If fear is produced as an instrument for controlling the political sphere, its deepest effect lies in the redefinition of the human being within that sphere itself, something Giorgio Agamben’s theses on “bare life” capture with particular precision. In the Lebanese context, this involves not merely spreading a climate of fear, but transforming the citizen into a biological being stripped of protection, living in a gray zone between law and non-law, where rights are suspended in the name of security or sectarian necessity. In this sense, the “economy of fear” intersects with what Michel Foucault calls “biopower,” which does not merely control bodies, but reproduces them within systems of discipline and surveillance: the prison, the hospital, the school, the barracks… The Lebanese case, however, reveals a further shift: instead of life being managed with a view to improving it, as in classical models of biopower, fear is managed in order to keep life at its bare minimum, at the level of “survival” rather than “living.” The Lebanese individual thus approaches the condition of “bare life,” in the Agambenian sense, constantly exposed to exceptional sovereign decisions and deprived of any prospect of legal and political stability. This convergence between the production of fear and the stripping of human beings of their political status gives rise to an invisible structure of governance, in which the social contract is replaced by the logic of permanent emergency and a “politics of neglect” prevails over the exercise of power itself. More than that, it becomes a management of deterioration: of the economy, healthcare, education, emigration, and even the Beirut port explosion… If the “state of exception” provides the theoretical point of departure for understanding the transformation of sovereignty in the Lebanese context, it does not represent a mere temporary legal condition. Rather, it has established a permanent structure of governance within which the relationship between power and society is continually reshaped. In this sense, the “manufacture of fear” can be regarded as the practical extension of the state of exception, since the suspension of legal and institutional rules can only be sustained through the continuous production of a climate of threat. In this context, the citizen ceases to be a political actor and instead becomes the object of emergency policies, governed by the logic of individual survival and severed from any shared contractual horizon. Dismantling this system therefore requires more than simply restoring the rule of law. It requires restoring the political meaning of life itself, that is, reintegrating the individual into the sphere of citizenship beyond the logic of exception and fear. Fear thus becomes an invisible instrument of governance, reshaping collective mindsets and entrenching what might be called a “permanent psychological emergency,” in which anxiety is continually reproduced as a structural condition of precarious stability. This process does not rest solely on the existence of objective dangers. It also feeds on a social vulnerability rooted in deep divisions and the absence of a shared national narrative. Dismantling the economy of fear therefore entails not only exposing its mechanisms, but also rebuilding trust and institutions and producing an alternative collective meaning. Hezbollah’s Role In this context, the mechanisms of domination cannot be understood without addressing the role of Hezbollah and the policies it has imposed on Lebanon, in conjunction with the ruling establishment and with the support of the Syrian regime and Iran, particularly during the period when this axis exercised absolute dominance, a dominance that is now visibly receding, especially since the fall of Assad. A crucial philosophical and legal distinction arises here. A rigorous distinction must be drawn between a “state of emergency,” which derives from the law and is regulated by constitutions within clearly defined limits and conditions, and a “pre-legal state of exception,” imposed by this axis as an open-ended fait accompli, without limits or safeguards. In the latter case, laws and boundaries were swept aside and rights stripped away, entirely transforming the role of Lebanon’s Constitution and institutions. Instead of serving as a shield to protect society, under the weight of this domination they were reduced to little more than an official and legal cover for the abuse of power and the entrenchment of authoritarianism. The parallel sovereignty exercised by Hezbollah did not stop at the legal control of individuals. It penetrated, insidiously, into “bare life” itself, stripping it of value and exposing it to the violence of arbitrary sovereign decisions. Consequently, this “bare life,” viewed through the prism of the “exception,” became the vital fuel sustaining Hezbollah’s exercise of sovereign power, which perpetuates itself through the continuous production of a repressed and domesticated “biopolitical body,” subjected to absolute control under the cover of law and a false sovereignty designed to prevent any form of dissent. This logic has manifested itself concretely in the assassination of intellectual and political activist Lokman Slim in an area under Hezbollah’s control; in the events of May 7, 2008, when weapons were used domestically to impose political equations through the force of a fait accompli; and in the obstruction of the judicial investigation into the Beirut port explosion and the open threats made against judges. Such practices have entrenched a principle of total impunity and effectively nullified the sovereignty of the Lebanese judiciary. Through this systematically engineered fear, human beings in Lebanon have been reduced to the condition of “bare life.” Political opponents are exposed to physical elimination, accusations of treason, or symbolic forms of condemnation that effectively strip them of protection. Meanwhile, citizens from Hezbollah’s own support base are themselves exposed by being thrust into cross-border regional wars, whether through military intervention in Syria or the unilateral opening of fronts of attrition, without authorization or cover from their state, reducing them to mere biological fuel for a transnational project. This exposure has not been confined to individuals. It has also extended to the very structure of the Lebanese state and to neighboring states, whose sovereignty has been violated through the legitimization of illicit smuggling routes, the usurpation of the decision over war and peace, and the transformation of borders, along with the usurped sovereign decision itself, into open arenas for advancing military and security agendas entirely outside the frameworks of international law and the political contract. State and society alike have thus been left at the mercy of an exceptional sovereignty that feeds on the eclipse of law and the perpetuation of fear. Ultimately, the visible and continuing decline of this axis, both regional and domestic, is opening a breach in the wall of the permanent “state of exception” and providing an unprecedented historic opportunity to free human beings in Lebanon from a condition in which they are left defenseless before arbitrary power and restore them to the protection of the law. Yet the military and political decline of the militia and the Iranian project does not automatically entail the immediate restoration of state sovereignty. Such a restoration faces another formidable barrier within the political establishment itself: the structure of Lebanon’s “deep state.” This “deep state,” sustained by networks of sectarian interests, factional power-sharing, and systemic institutional corruption, constitutes the hidden bureaucratic and financial extension that originally enabled militia domination to emerge and endure. It is this structure that now refuses to relinquish its gains and forcefully obstructs the effective implementation of judicial accountability mechanisms, structural reform, and the building of genuinely legitimate institutions. Accordingly, the future of the Lebanese state and the restoration of its full sovereignty cannot be achieved merely through the retreat of parallel arms or the weakening of their regional sponsors. They depend on a deeper and more complex battle: dismantling the deep state’s clientelist system. Putting an end to the exposure of human beings and the nation to arbitrary power requires moving from the realm of “terror and military salvation” to that of “citizenship, law, and the cleansing of public administration.” Without dismantling this infrastructure of disguised authoritarianism, sovereignty will remain little more than a deferred promise, while Lebanon’s future will remain caught between a weakening armed power and a deep state that refuses to be born anew.

A precarious — and unsettling — calm has prevailed for nearly 48 hours across the Levant and Gulf region, following attacks launched earlier this week by the Iranian-backed Yemeni Houthi militia against Saudi positions along the Yemen-Saudi Arabia border, as well as against areas held by Yemeni loyalist forces under the government recognized by the international community. These loyalist units were set to launch major offensive operations against Houthi positions overnight Friday into Saturday morning. The only notable security development on Saturday, August 8th, was an attack carried out by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps against a UAE tanker in the Strait of Hormuz region. The UAE condemned the attack, describing it as an act of "Iranian piracy." Later in the day, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan strongly condemned the Iranian aggression. Saudi Arabia held Iran responsible for "the continued disgraceful aggressions and attacks on vessels." Qatar, for its part, stressed the "need to put an end to Iran's unjustified acts of aggression." The IRGC raises the stakes Alongside this security development, Saturday was marked by three critically important statements that, taken together, paint a clear picture of the current situation surrounding the Strait of Hormuz crisis. At midday on Saturday, the spokesperson for Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stated bluntly that the restoration of free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz was contingent on the United States yielding to Iran's conditions. In the evening, the Supreme National Security Council — the top body currently making major strategic decisions — issued a communiqué explicitly laying out six conditions for the United States ahead of any reopening of the Strait of Hormuz: a halt to all threats and insults directed at Iran; a permanent end to all wars in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine; the lifting of the blockade on Iranian ports and the withdrawal of all American forces from Iran's vicinity; the payment of compensation for damages caused by exchanges of fire; the lifting of all sanctions; and the unconditional release of all frozen assets. The president's candid remarks Against this backdrop, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stated bluntly on Saturday that "the decision on war and peace lies in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps." "The decision to stop the war or continue it rests with Iran's military command," the Iranian president emphasized. These remarks suggest the eclipse — or even the disappearance — of the role of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, who is, in principle, responsible for making decisions of such strategic magnitude. It is worth recalling that earlier in the week, President Pezeshkian had stated that contact with Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei had become extremely difficult. In a telling sign of the deep socioeconomic crisis Iran is facing, the Iranian president noted in his Saturday statement that "it is no longer easy to bring goods into the country, and we must find other ways to achieve this goal." In any case, political circles were awaiting, on Saturday evening, President Donald Trump's response to the conditions set by the IRGC for agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini. The first lecture, entitled The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Isma ʿ ili Neoplatonism , is presented here in its revised and expanded essay form, published as a ten-part series. The series explores the intellectual landscape of Islamic Neoplatonism through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broadly Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by an emanationist metaphysics, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the tradition of Peripatetic falsafa , and al-Kirmānī within Ismaʿili theology. Despite these different intellectual settings, their systems remain in continuous dialogue on the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody contrasting approaches to the political, illuminating different ways of understanding the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the ordering of the community. This article is the second installment of that ten-part series. II - Falsafa as a Form of “Philosophical Religion” The emergence of falsafa is inseparable from a complex history of translation, misattribution, and conceptual convergence. One of its decisive moments lies in the attribution to Aristotle of texts that he did not author, most famously the so-called Theology of Aristotle . This work is in fact an Arabic adaptation of Plotinian material, ultimately drawn from the Enneads of Plotinus, likely mediated through the paraphrastic interventions of Porphyry. As a result, the early falāsifa came to believe that Aristotle himself endorsed a doctrine of emanation. This misattribution was no mere historical accident, but rather an event with profound philosophical consequences; it created, one might say, a potential for receptivity that facilitated the synthesis of these distinct traditions. It allowed the falāsifa to synthesize Aristotelian and Platonic frameworks under a unified metaphysical horizon. Emanation became the key conceptual bridge: it provided a way to reconcile the eternity of the world with a strong doctrine of divine transcendence, while simultaneously elevating the divine beyond the Aristotelian “unmoved mover.” The Theology of Aristotle and the Neoplatonic Aristotle This can be traced back to Aristotle himself. While he defines God in the Physics as a functional necessity of a mechanical universe, the First Unmoved Mover or a “Kinetic God,” he nuances this in the Metaphysics , or “First Philosophy,” with a more noetic and even psychological definition. Here, he defines God as noēsis noēseōs (Thought Thinking Itself). Since God is the most perfect being, His activity must be the most perfect activity, contemplation, and His object of contemplation must be the most perfect object: Himself. Unlike a physical “push,” God moves the world as an Object of Desire ( erōmenon ); the heavens move in an eternal circle because they “imitate” the perfection of the divine mind. Moreover, in his cosmological works, the distinction between the “sublunary” (earthly) and “supralunary” (heavenly) spheres introduces a more “material” divinity, where the divine is often associated with the eternal nature of the celestial bodies themselves. Finally, in the Ethics , Aristotle defines the life of God as a state of supreme happiness consisting of pure theōria . This is where Alexander of Aphrodisias and the falāsifa found the justification for the Active Intellect. The equation was simple: if the human intellect can engage in contemplation, it participates in the divine nature. Thus, the famous Theology of Aristotle (أثولوجيا) was misattributed to the Stagirite; nonetheless, a “disseminated” theology of Aristotle already existed across his authentic works, envisioned physically in the Physics , metaphysically in the Metaphysics , and ethically in the Ethics . This “open door” allowed for a transition from a strictly analytical, “cold” Aristotle to a noetico-mystical one. The internal tensions within the Aristotelian corpus served as a creative opening, allowing for a philosophical contamination that synthesized Peripatetic logic with Platonist and Hermetic metaphysics. Alexander used the gaps in Aristotle’s Ethics and De Anima to solve the problem of how a “self-thinking” God interacts with human minds. By focusing on the Active Intellect, Alexander argued that the human mind, the potential intellect, is “activated” by a single, external, divine Intellect. For the later falāsifa , Alexander provided the “secular” or “natural” mechanism for how prophecy and philosophical insight work, grounding them in the structure of the mind rather than in pure mysticism. While Alexander was looking at the mind, Plotinus and his student Porphyry were looking at ontology, the nature of Being. They saw Aristotle’s God in the Metaphysics , Thought Thinking Itself, as “too low” because “thinking” implies a division between the thinker and the thought. They argued that there must be something higher: the One. Porphyry is widely credited with trying to harmonize Plato and Aristotle. He took Plotinian ideas of emanation and “packaged” them in Aristotelian language. This paved the way for the Theology of Aristotle . By reading Plotinus through a Porphyrian lens, the falāsifa believed they were reading the “true, deeper” Aristotle who had finally solved the problem of how the One becomes the Many. For Plotinus and Porphyry, this necessitated a move toward Emanationism. They “saved” Aristotle from his own mechanical limitations by subsuming his Thought Thinking Itself under the higher unity of the One. At this juncture, one is tempted to view Neoplatonism, taken as a whole, not as a separate system, but as a form of “Mystical Aristotelianism.” In this light, the Neoplatonic project becomes the ultimate Neo-Aristotelianism, providing the “noetic” engine with a “mystical” fuel. Porphyry of Tyre, the disciple of Plotinus, is particularly relevant here; he is credited with the monumental task of harmonizing Plato and Aristotle. Together with Alexander of Aphrodisias, these two figures stand as the twin precursors of falsafa , establishing the intellectual horizon that al-Fārābī and Avicenna would later inhabit. Hermeticism found a home in the Aristotelian framework through the concept of the Active Intellect. If the human mind can “connect” with a divine, cosmic intellect, as Alexander of Aphrodisias suggested, then philosophy is no longer just logic; it becomes a mystical journey. In this hybrid system, the divine is no longer merely “that which moves without being moved,” but becomes the absolute source from which all levels of reality unfold. At the center of the Neoplatonic influence lies the figure of the One in Plotinus: a principle beyond being, beyond thought, and beyond predication. The One is not an object of knowledge but the condition of all intelligibility. It is “hidden” within intellect as a source is hidden within a flowing river, accessible only through a progressive stripping away of intellectual determinations, culminating in a kind of ecstatic return beyond discursive thought. This radical transcendence proved deeply attractive to the falāsifa , because it offered a model of monotheism that was both philosophical and absolute, one that seemed to ground unity beyond the limits of Aristotelian metaphysics. Within the Islamic intellectual field, especially at the intersection of Neoplatonism and Ismaʿili thought, this structure was further intensified through a quasi-Gnostic vocabulary. Reality becomes hierarchized into levels of illumination and concealment, where salvation is linked to knowledge ( gnosis ). From the One to the Gnostic Temptation In its most radical forms, Gnostic cosmology divided humanity into categories, of which only the Pneumatics, those endowed with spiritual insight, could achieve true liberation. Classical Gnosticism often portrayed the material world as a prison, created by a deficient or ignorant demiurgic power, sometimes identified with the God of the Hebrew Bible. In such systems, matter is inherently corrupt and salvation consists in escaping the material order. A more moderate, “assimilated” version of Gnosticism, later absorbed into Christian patristic theology, reinterprets the material world not as evil in itself, but as a created order that has been disfigured by sin. Here, matter retains a positive role: it becomes the site of incarnation, and thus participates in divine providence. It is precisely within this tension, between Neoplatonic transcendence, Aristotelian structure, and residual Gnostic dualisms, that falsafa takes shape. It inherits a vision of reality in which the divine is radically transcendent, creation is structured through necessary emanation, and salvation is reinterpreted as intellectual ascent. At the same time, it seeks to preserve monotheistic coherence by rejecting outright dualism while still retaining a deeply hierarchical and stratified cosmos. In this sense, falsafa is not simply a translation of Greek philosophy into Arabic, but a creative reconfiguration of multiple intellectual genealogies, Aristotelian, Platonic, Neoplatonic, and late antique religious, into a single metaphysical architecture of emanation, intellect, and return. Falsafa as Philosophical Religion For many years, my research has been centered on the intersection of political philosophy and what I would call philosophical religion. I take this category seriously. In this sense, falsafa , as a tradition, is, simpliciter , a philosophical religion. It should not be reduced to the secular wing of the Islamicate intellectual world, especially when contrasted with the scholastic theology of kalām or the jurisprudential reasoning of fiqh . While the falāsifa were ostensibly committed to Aristotelian rationalism, they inherited a “contaminated” framework that pulled them toward an inherent Gnostic temptation. Although they rejected the radical Gnostic view of matter as inherently evil, they remained haunted by the image of the soul as an exiled intellect. Here, we should not neglect the contradiction between Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. Plotinus argued that the material world is beautiful because it is an image of the divine. He rejected the Gnostic idea that the world was created by an “evil demiurge.” While Plotinus shared a similar “atmospheric” concern for the soul’s ascent, he was the author of a polemic titled Against the Gnostics , attacking their “un-Greek” disparagement of the cosmos and their “arrogant” claim to a private, non-rational salvation. Yet, ironically, the Porphyrian synthesis stripped away much of this polemic. What remained was a “contaminated” Aristotelianism that, despite Plotinus’s intentions, functioned as a bridge for Gnostic motifs of intellectual exile and divine return to enter the medieval Arabic tradition. The Soul in Exile: Gnosis, Prophecy, and the Active Intellect Despite Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the “form” of the body (hylomorphism), the falāsifa , influenced by the pseudo- Theology of Aristotle , often treated the soul as a celestial stranger. This is most visible in Avicenna’s Poem of the Soul (the ʿ Ayniyya ), where the soul is a “thick-feathered dove” descending from the high places into a “ruined cage,” the body. This is a purely Gnostic motif dressed in philosophical language. The Active Intellect acts as a “Saviour-Knowledge.” By connecting with it, the philosopher undergoes a gnosis that liberates the intellect, but not typically from the “darkness” of matter. Instead of the material world being a prison to escape, as in ancient Gnosticism, al-Fārābī views the Virtuous City as the site where the soul’s ascent is organized. The Gnostic “stranger” becomes the “Philosopher-King.” Rather than opposing religion outright, falsafa offers an alternative form of religiosity, less juridical, more contemplative; less centered on law, more on wisdom ( ḥikma ). Unlike modern secular philosophy, falsafa does not discard prophecy. It reinterprets it. Prophets become supreme knowers whose imaginative faculty translates intellectual truths into symbolic form accessible to the masses. Falsafa inherits and transforms traditions in which philosophy and religion were never sharply divided, especially in Late Antiquity. Even when it challenges the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo by defending the Aristotelian thesis of the eternity of the world, articulated through a Neoplatonic framework of procession and emanation, it nonetheless chooses to “baptize” its metaphysics as al-ilāhiyyāt (the divine sciences), particularly in Avicenna’s terminology. The Neoplatonic schema of emanation structures reality as a descending and ascending order. This cosmology provides a metaphysical equivalent to religious narratives of creation and return. From Avicenna to later thinkers, philosophy is conceived as a graded movement of elevation, from the sensible to the intelligible, from multiplicity to unity, and ultimately from dispersion to presence. In falsafa , knowledge is never neutral or merely speculative. It is fundamentally transformative: to know is to perfect the soul. In this sense, knowledge functions in a manner structurally analogous to religion, in which gnosis is inseparable from salvation. From Philosophical Religion to Cosmopolitics The boundaries of the falsafa tradition remain fluid, never unequivocally demarcated from either “para- falsafa ” or even “anti- falsafa .” Yet it must be understood as a philosophical religion. It evolved as an internal alternative within the Islamicate world; yet it was an alternative designated not merely for an “elite” in the social sense, but for “the Few” in a noetic one. The resonance with Gnostic categories, specifically the Pneumatics versus the Psychics or Hylics, is striking and structurally very similar. In the Gnostic tradition of Antiquity, the Pneumatics were those who possessed the divine spark and the capacity for gnosis . Similarly, in falsafa and the philosophical Ismaʿili traditions, these “Islamo-Pneumatics” are defined by their actualized intellect. This faculty allows them to perceive either the necessity beyond contingency and the eternity beyond the creation drama, or the “hidden” ( bāṭin ) meanings of the Pleroma and the primordial order, realities that remain “veiled” both to the common people ( al- ʿ awāmm ) and to the structures of exoteric Islam. Crucially, this philosophical religion is, in its very essence, a political philosophy, one whose scope extends well beyond its explicitly political chapters into the very core of its cosmological architecture. The question of the relationship between the Philosopher and the Prophet, an inquiry first articulated in Antiquity by Philo of Alexandria, remained central for thinkers such as al-Fārābī, Avicenna, al-Kirmānī, Averroes, and Maimonides. To borrow a term from Christian Jambet, though not without some displacement of its original inflection, this question remains bound up with a form of cosmopolitics : a totalizing vision in which the order of the city ( polis ) reflects, and is reflected by, the order of the universe ( cosmos ). For the falāsifa , cosmopolitics serves as the ultimate antidote to the “rule of the arbitrary.” Whereas arbitrariness implies a void of reason, a “will to power” devoid of ontological grounding, a cosmopolitical system asserts an immutable necessity inherent in the order of being. Moreover, if wisdom can only be attained by the Few, then, at the intersection where philosophers appear as crypto-prophets and prophets as otherwise-philosophers, the Pneumatics of Islam do not seek merely to navigate outside the world, as the Gnostics of Antiquity aimed to do. Rather, their mission is to “politically” manage the other two categories: the Psychics and the Hylics. Their primary aim is to safeguard the noetic order against those for whom the arbitrary is an ultimate God, an obsession that manifests as a rigorous, legalistic fixation. At the same time, their mission is to find ways to diffuse not philosophy itself, but its civilizing effects, ensuring that the light of the Pleroma might still order the lives of the many without being extinguished by their literalism.

The region stretching from Iraq to Lebanon, Syria and Israel, with the United States in the background, is undergoing a profound transformation in the function of weapons within the state. The broader trajectory points toward a redefinition of the role of armed force, whether through disarmament or its integration into security arrangements that go beyond the traditional concept of the nation-state. This reflects a gradual shift from a logic of hard sovereignty to one of managed security. At the same time, the contours of a new military-strategic bloc are taking shape in the region, where the Saudi and Turkish roles converge and whose influence extends to nuclear-armed Pakistan, against the backdrop of a sensitive Iranian repositioning. This convergence cannot be understood merely as a set of temporary alliances, but rather as part of a broader reengineering of the region, driven by a logic of “new imperial planning,” in which balances are reshaped by linking security, energy and economics within an interconnected network of interests. Within this framework, regional roles are being gradually redistributed. Iraq is being pushed to bring armed factions under control and redefine the relationship between the state and irregular armed forces. Syria is entering a phase of security restructuring within new international and regional arrangements, while Lebanon faces the question of the state’s monopoly over arms amid a profound structural crisis. Israel, for its part, is working to redefine its military superiority in ways suited to an increasingly interconnected regional environment, while the United States is shifting from managing wars directly to managing balances through indirect instruments and multilayered networks of influence. Iran, for its part, is experiencing an internal strategic divide between one current that regards confrontation as necessary to preserve its regional influence and another that sees integration into the new arrangements as less costly and more sustainable. This divide reflects a deeper crisis over the definition of Iran’s regional role, just as much as it reflects the pressures of a changing international and regional environment, particularly as its regional surroundings are themselves being reshaped militarily and politically. Economically, Eastern Mediterranean gas is emerging as a decisive factor in reshaping regional balances, from Israel to Cyprus and Egypt, with the potential for this dynamic to extend to Lebanon and Syria. This resource is gradually becoming a geopolitical instrument for redrawing maps of influence, particularly as Europe seeks to diversify its energy supplies away from Russia. At the same time, this transformation strengthens the position of the dollar, as energy is priced within the Western financial system, linking the strength of the U.S. currency to the redirection of energy flows toward areas under its influence. Russia, by contrast, is facing a gradual decline in its ability to use energy as an instrument of influence within the European market. Security and energy thus converge within a single system that can be described as “networked imperialism,” in which control is based not on direct occupation but on integrating states into complex networks of interests that constrain their decision-making autonomy and redefine the very concept of sovereignty. Regionally, the Middle East is no longer an arena of traditional conflict, but a central node in a network of overlapping global balances, where every military alliance is linked to an economic trajectory, every energy project has a security dimension, and every domestic transformation carries broader regional implications. In this context, Lebanon represents a concentrated expression of this interconnectedness, given its links to Eastern Mediterranean gas and the delicate balances involving Israel, Syria and the Iranian axis. Iraq, meanwhile, constitutes a sensitive balancing point between Iran and the Arab world, while Syria is becoming a geographic and strategic corridor for energy and influence. Israel, for its part, is emerging as a rising technological and energy hub in the Eastern Mediterranean. The United States, meanwhile, operates as a regulator from a distance, shaping the regional order over the long term. It does not always intervene directly, but it defines the broader framework through the global financial system, security alliances and energy networks. In this sense, it is shifting from managing conflicts to managing the overall architecture of the regional order. Ultimately, the current phase reflects a transition from managing power to redistributing it, as disarmament processes intersect with the rise of new alliances, energy becomes a decisive factor, and some traditional powers gradually retreat from their historical roles. This is how the logic of “imperialist interconnectedness” emerges as an overarching framework: states no longer operate in isolation from one another, but within an interconnected network in which geography and energy, security and economics, politics and alliances are intertwined, in a process that is redefining the very concept of power in the contemporary international system.