I met him for the first time one night in the fall of 1979. It was in the garden of his house in north London. What first caught my attention was his enthusiasm when talking about the Arab causes, which one does not expect from a Western academic who was pursuing his studies at the time at “the Institution for Eastern and African Studies”, which is affiliated with London's University. But Halliday was back from a mission of covering revolutions, from Zafar, to Ethiopia, to South Yemen. He was fond of these movements' abilities to change regimes, as he believed. The region was filled with talk on the Iranian revolution, and the name of Fred Halliday crossed my mind through articles he used to write at the time for Lebanese publications known for their affiliation with leftist parties. The first conversation between us addressed the Iranian events, and this served as the basis for an analytical article published by “Al-Majallah” magazine where I used to work. Halliday believed, as many Arab leftists did, that the Iranian revolution will be the key for the “big explosion” against tyranny and totalitarian regimes. So he did not hesitate to call it the “red revolution.” He was not only sympathetic with it, but he also used to pride himself with the fact that his book “Iran, Dictatorship, and Development,” which he published one year before the rise of the revolution, was a clear indication to where things were heading. But, despite this obvious sympathy, Halliday remained very accurate in his analysis, and capable of distinguishing between the personal position and the vision based on his realistic understanding of how things developed. Therefore, he did not hesitate to announce his abandonment of the initial ideas he espoused on the first days of the Iranian revolution. This was a result of the Iraqi-Iranian war, and he continued to consider afterwards that Al-Khomeini's revolution was responsible to a large extent for the division in the ranks of the Muslims. In his important book “Islam and the Myth of Confrontation” which was published in 1996 and considered a response to the “clash of civilizations” theory, Halliday believed that Al-Khomeini's talk on the “one Islamic nation” is no longer consistent with the daily actions of the Iranian revolution, after it turned into a system of government, which resulted in the major confessional conflicts within the Islamic rank, as well as the ethnic ones, such as reviving the nationalistic conflict between the Persians and Arabs. The change that occurred to Fred Halliday's ideas over 30 years reflects to a far extent the change that occurred to the convictions of many sides in our region, thanks to the backwardness from whose repercussions we suffer. The man was not dogmatic in the academic sense, but he was rather close to the daily concerns of the region on which he pursued his research. Furthermore, you would think sometimes that he hails from the region thanks to his high enthusiasm for its concerns and causes and the Arabic language which he speaks with a guttural voice and Irish accent that did not leave him, although he is an Oxford graduate. This is how ended up this “leftist”, whom I met for the first time around three decades ago, and with whom I used to continually disagree over the available space to publish his stands and opinions. He ended up defending the American occupation in Iraq and the American interference in Afghanistan. He grew to consider that the biggest calamity that plagued the Arabs was the nearly instinct-driven tendency among the public to support totalitarian regimes, ones that suppress the freedoms under the pretext of fighting imperialism and colonization! In his opinion, the effect which the interference of imperialism and capitalism could leave in some regions of the world could represent a force that aids progress, contrary to what the incumbent regimes do. As such, he considered the American occupation of Iraq as less harmful than Saddam's continuation in office. After the September 11 attacks, Fred Halliday emerged as one of the most defendant Western academic of Islam and the campaigns it was exposed to. In his lectures, he used to reiterate that the rigid picture presented by the enemies of Islam who hold extremist ideas against the Muslims, is a false image that does not mirror the reality of the vast diversity and pluralism in the Islamic history. His book “Two Hours that Shook the World” (2001) was a response to this wave of ideas and campaigns, particularly the controversy provoked by Samuel Huntington. Halliday argued that if there were any threat to the West, then this threat does not come from the Islamic world, but rather from the emerging Asian economic forces. My last meeting with Fred Halliday was before he left to Barcelona two years ago to work as a professor of political science at “Barcelona Institute for International Studies.” We met at a restaurant next to the “London School of Economics,” one of the most important political science schools in the world, where he used to teach. He told me, perhaps out of courtesy, that he felt that his stay in Barcelona, on the shore of the Mediterranean, will offset Beirut which he loved but could not live in. I used to believe that he recovered from his illness, but I realized that the disease had progressed when we tried to invite him to the annual events presentation which we were organizing at Al-Hayat. He apologized and said: “I am no longer [strong] as you once knew me.”
