Who I am and where I come from should not matter in the context of this message. But for those who will still wonder, my name is Farouk Grissom. I am the son two Americans, who moved to Lebanon in the 1990s with the intention of staying for a short season. They stayed for 22 years. Their motives were numerous, but boil down to these: my father opened the Middle East office for a multinational quality management company, and stayed in Beirut until he handed it off to the manager he had trained for the job. 3 years into their stay in Lebanon, my parents had 3 children, all enrolled at various stages of their early education. Finally, my parents make major decisions through prayer and an attempt to discern where they feel God’s call for them, even at times where the reasoning is not fully clear. I think it would be fair to say they stayed as long as they felt God wanted them to stay.
I lived in Lebanon until I graduated high school, after which I traveled to the US for college, after several brief stints at international NGOs during a gap year. Although I have not been back to Lebanon since then, it is a mysterious but unshakeable reality that Lebanon, and many of its Arab counterparts, hold a dear place in my heart. I have found myself keeping up my Arabic, befriending Arab immigrants in the US, and working with Arab startups as part of my professional career. In all these realms, I find myself motivated by a deep sense of caring, in ways that are completely irrelevant to my interests (why bother at all?). I am not Arab. I would not care to be something that I am not. But, and perhaps I will say here that there is also some sense of God’s will on my life, I want to help the Lebanese and Arab peoples.
My family moved out of Lebanon in 2017, right before things began cycling out of control. In the few years after their departure, Lebanon experienced hyperinflation, a massive explosion that rocked the country, all in addition to worldwide coronavirus crisis. Even with a brutal 30-year civil war, multiple wars with neighboring Israel, and the occupations of colonial powers, the past five years of Lebanese history have been the most difficult for its people to endure.
It is with this context that I turn to this essay, where I hope to lay the groundwork for my philosophy - a doctrine for Arab prosperity.
The Arab world is deeply imperfect. No one will truly deny this. And yet, all places and all peoples have struggled through flaws at some point in time.
The Arab world has historically held varying levels of significance on the world stage. In its Golden Ages, it produced timeless literature, beautiful architecture, and enduring mathematical and scientific advances. Today, much of what has defined the modern Arab world boils down to two items: oil, and the conflict with Israel.
The Arab world, like many if not all regions, could become something deeply admirable. There are measures of this, from GDP to life expectancy to satisfaction surveys. The specifics of this would be tiresome to debate, so I will simplify it this way: we all have a feeling, deep down, that things could be better. What exactly that looks like doesn’t matter - what matters is the ideal of it, the ideal of something that is the best possible version of it.
So we can establish here, that the Arab world is not at its ideal, that it might have been in the past, but that it could reach an ideal again.
So let us outline three core principles to drive this ideal. Three may seem like too few. But these are the result of years of thought, discussion, and questions. I hold that these three are in fact powerful enough to turn our gaze in the direction that should be drawing our gaze, should we truly dream of what could be. The astute reader will notice a religious vein in these - this is not accidental. Nor is it intentional - it is merely the set of answers that I found satisfactory in the face of the brokenness I saw firsthand when governments, currencies, and goodwill collapsed, to the detriment of many.
- Character is the foundation
- Love your neighbor
- Love your enemy