Corridors
Corridors
UPDATE: The India-Middle East-Europe transportation corridor may be the talk of the town, but it will likely go the way of the last three Asia-to-Europe connectivity projects touted by the west - to the dustbin. Here's why.
Published in 1923, The Prophet became a perpetual best-seller, birthed a genre, and marked the poet as retrograde, sentimental, and florid. In September 1923, Alfred A. Knopf brought out a slim, hundred-odd page volume. The publisher did little to promote it, yet its first print run (some twelve hundred copies) sold out within a month—unheard-of for a poetry volume, then and now.
War of Economic Corridors: the India-Mideast-Europe ploy
By Pepe Escobar
The India-Middle East-Europe transportation corridor may be the talk of the town, but it will likely go the way of the last three Asia-to-Europe connectivity projects touted by the west - to the dustbin. Here's why.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a massive public diplomacy op launched at the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, complete with a memorandum of understanding signed on 9 September.
Players include the US, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the EU, with a special role for the latter’s top three powers Germany, France, and Italy. It’s a multimodal railway project, coupled with trans-shipments and with ancillary digital and electricity roads extending to Jordan and Israel.
If this walks and talks like the collective west’s very late response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched 10 years ago and celebrating a Belt and Road Forum in Beijing next month, that’s because it is. And yes, it is, above all, yet another American project to bypass China, to be claimed for crude electoral purposes as a meager foreign policy “success.”
No one among the Global Majority remembers that the Americans came up with their own Silk Road plan way back in 2010. The concept came from the State Department’s Kurt Campbell and was sold by then-Secretary Hillary Clinton as her idea. History is implacable, it came down to nought.
And no one among the Global Majority remembers the New Silk Road plan peddled by Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in the early 2010s, complete with four troublesome trans-shipments in the Black Sea and the Caspian. History is implacable, this too came down to nought.
In fact, very few among the Global Majority remember the $40 trillion US-sponsored Build Back Better World (BBBW, or B3W) global plan rolled out with great fanfare just two summers ago, focusing on “climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality.”
A year later, at a G7 meeting, B3W had already shrunk to a $600 billion infrastructure-and-investment project. Of course, nothing was built. History really is implacable, it came down to nought.
The same fate awaits IMEC, for a number of very specific reasons.
Pivoting to a black void
The whole IMEC rationale rests on what writer and former Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar deliciously described as “conjuring up the Abraham Accords by the incantation of a Saudi-Israeli tango.”
This tango is Dead On Arrival; even the ghost of Piazzolla can’t revive it. For starters, one of the principals – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman - has made it clear that Riyadh’s priorities are a new, energized Chinese-brokered relationship with Iran, with Turkiye, and with Syria after its return to the Arab League.
Moreover, both Riyadh and its Emirati IMEC partner share immense trade, commerce, and energy interests with China, so they’re not going to do anything to upset Beijing.
At face value, IMEC proposes a joint drive by G7 and BRICS 11 nations. That’s the western method of seducing eternally-hedging India under Modi and US-allied Saudi Arabia and the UAE to its agenda.
Its real intention, however, is not only to undermine BRI, but also the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), in which India is a major player alongside Russia and Iran.
The game is quite crude and really quite obvious: a transportation corridor conceived to bypass the top three vectors of real Eurasia integration - and BRICS members China, Russia, and Iran - by dangling an enticing Divide and Rule carrot that promises Things That Cannot Be Delivered.
The American neoliberal obsession at this stage of the New Great Game is, as always, all about Israel. Their goal is to make Haifa port viable and turn it into a key transportation hub between West Asia and Europe. Everything else is subordinated to this Israeli imperative.
IMEC, in principle, will transit across West Asia to link India to Eastern and Western Europe – selling the fiction that India is a Global Pivot state and a Convergence of Civilizations.
Nonsense. While India’s great dream is to become a pivot state, its best shot would be via the already up-and-running INTSC, which could open markets to New Delhi from Central Asia to the Caucasus. Otherwise, as a Global Pivot state, Russia is way ahead of India diplomatically, and China is way ahead in trade and connectivity.
Comparisons between IMEC and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are futile. IMEC is a joke compared to this BRI flagship project: the $57.7 billion plan to build a railway over 3,000 km long linking Kashgar in Xinjiang to Gwadar in the Arabian Sea, which will connect to other overland BRI corridors heading toward Iran and Turkiye.
This is a matter of national security for China. So bets can be made that the leadership in Beijing will have some discreet and serious conversations with the current fifth-columnists in power in Islamabad, before or during the Belt and Road Forum, to remind them of the relevant geostrategic, geoeconomic, and investment Facts.
So, what’s left for Indian trade in all of this? Not much. They already use the Suez Canal, a direct, tested route. There’s no incentive to even start contemplating being stuck in black voids across the vast desert expanses surrounding the Persian Gulf.
One glaring problem, for example, is that almost 1,100 km of tracks are “missing” from the railway from Fujairah in the UAE to Haifa, 745 km “missing” from Jebel Ali in Dubai to Haifa, and 630 km “missing” from the railway from Abu Dhabi to Haifa.
When all the missing links are added up, there’s over 3,000 km of railway still to be built. The Chinese, of course, can do this for breakfast and on a dime, but they are not part of this game. And there’s no evidence the IMEC gang plans to invite them.
All eyes on Syunik
In the War of Transportation Corridors charted in detail for The Cradle in June 2022, it becomes clear that intentions rarely meet reality. These grand projects are all about logistics, logistics, logistics - of course, intertwined with the three other key pillars: energy and energy resources, labor and manufacturing, and market/trade rules.
Let’s examine a Central Asian example. Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – are launching a multimodal Southern Transportation Corridor which will bypass Kazakhstan.
Why? After all, Kazakhstan, alongside Russia, is a key member of both the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The reason is because this new corridor solves two key problems for Russia that arose with the west’s sanctions hysteria. It bypasses the Kazakh border, where everything going to Russia is scrutinized in excruciating detail. And a significant part of the cargo may now be transferred to the Russian port of Astrakhan in the Caspian.
So Astana, which under western pressure has played a risky hedging game on Russia, may end up losing the status of a full-fledged transport hub in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea region. Kazakhstan is also part of BRI; the Chinese are already very much interested in the potential of this new corridor.
In the Caucasus, the story is even more complex, and once again, it’s all about Divide and Rule.
Two months ago, Russia, Iran, and Azerbaijan committed to building a single railway from Iran and its ports in the Persian Gulf through Azerbaijan, to be linked to the Russian-Eastern Europe railway system.
This is a railway project on the scale of the Trans-Siberian – to connect Eastern Europe with Eastern Africa and South Asia, bypassing the Suez Canal and European ports. The INSTC on steroids, in fact.
Guess what happened next? A provocation in Nagorno-Karabakh, with the deadly potential of involving not only Armenia and Azerbaijan but also Iran and Turkiye.
Tehran has been crystal clear on its red lines: it will never allow a defeat of Armenia, with direct participation from Turkiye, which fully supports Azerbaijan.
Add to the incendiary mix are joint military exercises with the US in Armenia – which happens to be a member of the Russian-led CSTO – cast, for public consumption, as one of those seemingly innocent “partnership” NATO programs.
This all spells out an IMEC subplot bound to undermine INTSC. Both Russia and Iran are fully aware of the former’s endemic weaknesses: political trouble between several participants, those “missing links” of track, and all important infrastructure still to be built.
Turkish Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, will never give up theZangezur corridor across Syunik, the south Armenian province, which was envisaged by the 2020 armistice, linking Azerbaijan to Turkiye via the Azeri enclave of Nakhitchevan – that will run through Armenian territory.
Baku did threaten to attack southern Armenia if the Zangezur corridor was not facilitated by Yerevan. So Syunik is the next big unresolved deal in this riddle. Tehran, it must be noted, will go no holds barred to prevent a Turkish-Israeli-NATO corridor cutting Iran off from Armenia, Georgia, the Black Sea, and Russia. That would be the reality if this NATO-tinted coalition grabs Syunik.
Today, Erdogan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev meet in the Nakhchivan enclave between Turkiye, Armenia, and Iran to start a gas pipeline and open a military production complex.
The Sultan knows that Zangezur may finally allow Turkiye to be linked to China via a corridor that will transit the Turkic world, in Azerbaijan and the Caspian. This would also allow the collective west to go even bolder on Divide and Rule against Russia and Iran.
Is the IMEC another far-fetched western fantasy? The place to watch is Syunik.
Read The Cradle article here.
Kahlil Gibran: Godfather of the “New Age”
Published in 1923, The Prophet became a perpetual best-seller, birthed a genre, and marked the poet as retrograde, sentimental, and florid. In September 1923, Alfred A. Knopf brought out a slim, hundred-odd page volume. The publisher did little to promote it, yet its first print run (some twelve hundred copies) sold out within a month—unheard-of for a poetry volume, then and now.
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet was a slow but steadily growing burn, one that has continued, year on year, for ten decades.
Interspersing twenty-six short prose-poetic pieces with original illustrations, The Prophet has made Gibran the third-bestselling poet in history—behind Shakespeare and Lao Tzu. To date, The Prophet has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide (over 10 million in the United States alone) and has been translated into more than a hundred languages.
Kahlil Gibran wrote once of his desire “to write a book that heals the world.” Published exactly a century ago, The Prophet was that dream’s fruition.
Yet The Prophet has always been and remains uniquely troublesome, and to call it the bestselling “poetry book” of its century might be misleading. Is it poetry? Or is it (in today’s language) Inspirational Fiction, wisdom text, a spiritual guide of New Age wellbeing or self-help? Perhaps (to deploy a paradox, Gibran’s favorite device) it is all these things and none of them.
Gibran wrote once of his desire “to write a book that heals the world.” The Prophet was that dream’s fruition. Yet his other work—eight English language collections and more books, poems, and other writings in his native Arabic—is largely ignored in the Anglosphere. The Prophet is thus a bestseller with an almost anonymous author. Gibran’s book has outlived him in more than one sense. Though it has had the kind of afterlife of which he himself can only have dreamed, there is in this a strange irony. Gibran was so successful in his likely aim—absorbed into the figure of “The Prophet,” imitating the unknown authors of scripture—that, for many readers and lovers of his book, he remains irrelevant.
It is a very different story in Arabic, where Gibran is held to be a crucial modern innovator, a transitional bridge between the conventions and strictures of a more classical tradition and a newer, freer, romantic sensibility. In Gibran’s case, the adage of the prophet without honor in his home country is inverted. In the West (where Gibran made his home and sought recognition) academic and “literary” opinion regards his concerns and their treatment as utterly anti-modern. He is, indeed, heretically retrograde: fancily faux-Biblical, extravagantly overwritten, vague, naïve, sentimental, and whole lot of other things, terms often directed in baffled rage at Gibran’s apparently undeserved popular appeal. The year 1923, after all, saw the debuts of Wallace Stevens and other modernist high priests in the United States and came hot on the heels of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses the year before. In his adopted tongue, at least, Gibran was an artist out of time.
He was born Gibrān Khalīl Gibrān bin Mikhā’īl bin Sa’ad, in 1883, in the mountain town of Bsharri in modern day Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Raised a Maronite Christian by tolerant parents in a country riven by religious and ethnic factionalism, Gibran’s mind was exposed early to a diversity of worldviews, and he wove them into his work. When he was twelve, he emigrated to Boston with his mother and siblings, leaving behind his father, who had become an increasingly violent drunkard. They lived in the immigrant districts of Boston’s South End, where Gibran went to public school with Chinese and other immigrant children.
Gibran was a dreamy, beautiful, and artistically talented boy, both in writing and drawing, and he came to the notice of other artists and social workers in the city. It was through admirers, for whom he was something of an “exotic,” that Gibran got his first exposure to Western and avant-garde arts: Wagner, Whitman, Nietzsche. He returned to Lebanon at fifteen for four years of schooling, then made his way back to Boston in 1902. In 1911, he moved into a small studio in New York where he stayed for the rest of his life, writing and drawing––and, increasingly, drinking––for long, late hours in what came to be known as his “hermitage.” Before that, in 1908, Gibran trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, and ultimately produced over 700 visual works in his lifetime, seeing himself in the same poet-artist lineage as his hero, William Blake––whose writings he called “so far the profoundest things done in English…the most godly.”
Gibran had published two English works—and more Arabic ones—before The Prophet, both also published by Knopf. They shared the same form of prose poems written in aphoristic, oracular style. Knopf himself did not particularly seek to market The Prophet, expressing bafflement at its success: “I haven’t met five people who ever read Gibran.” Each year, though, more copies sold. By 1938, with an American populace in need of spiritual guidance in the face of economic depression and political instability, the book sold over 100,000 copies. During the war, it was distributed to soldiers in a pocket-sized Armed Services Edition—the only poetry book to be so selected. By 1957, the book had sold a million American copies. The 60s were its apogee—at its height, 5000 copies were selling a week—and it became, in effect, a counterculture alternative to the Bible.
A sampling is enough to give a sense of Gibran’s register of language and address, as well as The Prophet’s (virtually non-existent) narrative. It opens:
Al-mustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn onto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth.
Before the prophet’s departure, however, the townspeople gather to see him off. “A seeress” named Almitra requests:
Yet this we ask ere you leave us, that you speak to us and give us of your truth. And we will give it unto our children, and they unto their children, and it shall not perish.
And so, Al-mustafa obliges, each chapter being a sermon based on different questions about the basic and essential matters of human life: love, marriage, children, food, work, houses, business, law and order, beauty, education, faith, death. The tone of these lines—the grandiloquent epithets, some archaic diction, rarefied Biblical cadences replete with Biblical ‘Ands’ and Whitmanian deployment of repetition, both terse and ripe, and humorlessly sincere—give a good flavor of the whole. Alongside the Christian influence of his upbringing and the language of the King James Bible, Gibran drew on the Islamic tradition and Sufism that he had also observed in Lebanon, alongside Buddhism, Hinduism, Blake, Nietzsche, Whitman, and the Transcendentalist, Romantic and Symbolist writers.
“The teacher,” Gibran writes, “does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind”—a strange message for a book of apparent wisdom.
What, then, of this prophet’s philosophy? It will certainly read differently for different people, but there are a few clear threads that read as very modern indeed, for good reason. Gibran played a hardly insignificant role in shepherding us toward the contemporary miasma of “spirituality without religion.” What he managed, for many readers, was to write the sacred text for modern values, which is sometimes a suspicion of all values in and of themselves.
In Al-mustafa’s teaching, the real and essential “truths” as to how we should live our lives cannot, in fact be taught. This is the essential, and characteristically paradoxical, teaching of The Prophet. The prophet we seek tells us that we do not need him.
“The teacher,” Gibran writes, “does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.” It seems a strange message for a book of apparent wisdom, and yet it is one entirely fitted for the twentieth century reader (justifiably) full of doubts about the nature of authority—and not merely of the religious sort. From his teachings on the nature of children (“Your children are not your children…And though they are with you yet they belong not to you”) to the nature of love (“All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart”) the same refrain recurs: that truth comes only from within.
If all this sounds woo-woo, vague and mystical, it’s because it probably is—but only in the same way that Gibran’s inspirations were too. The message—that everything also contains the elements of its opposite, and that oneself is both irreducibly alone and inconceivably part of a larger whole, that we do not learn, but mysteriously “discover” our inner selves—may be obvious or meaningless depending on one’s sensibility. It is also, for many, a profoundly, mysteriously, bafflingly true fact about the experience of living. Such simple and bottomless truths are so hard to express that they can seem obvious—and so become clichés upon utterance. Gibran’s book is one such attempt to express and revivify these truths. Whether he succeeds or not is subjective, but (to follow the number one rule of criticism) he ought not be criticized for not writing the sort of work he was not attempting to write.
Perhaps a way to see The Prophet afresh today is instead to reverse the trend of killing Gibran the author from his work, and to bring him properly to the picture. Many accuse him of pandering to an America that was spiritually exhausted, curious, hungry for rejuvenation with “Oriental” spiritualities, but still wanted flattering and to be spoken of in ways it could understand. As the Arabic literature scholar Nadeem Naimy, nephew of Gibran’s friend Mikhail Naimy, writes: “To be an emigrant is to be an alien. But to be an emigrant mystical poet is to be thrice alienated.” If his book is read as the work of a Lebanese Christian from a majority Muslim nation, struggling to free itself from a crumbling empire, living in an adopted country where he would forever be seen in one or another form as other, we can begin to place it in more solid ground.
The othering of the young Kahlil by enthusiastic artistic circles in Boston, and later New York, in which he was treated by many as “the prophet” avant la lettre, must have left some complex imprints on him. On the one hand, he clearly internalized the philosopher-poet-priest image such patrons projected onto him. It became an inseparable part of his identity, his sense of artistic calling. On the other, this strangely self-observant, self-consciously “Eastern mystic” image is likely to have further complicated his relationship to his Arabic and Lebanese heritage. “I’m a false alarm,” he told a friend—disavowing, for once, his own grandiosity. His end, precipitated by alcoholism, speaks to this inner malaise. He died at 48 in 1931, of cirrhosis among other complaints.
Yet the tortured attempt to speak across culture, resolving a crisis of identity in universal terms is still meaningful. It will only become more so as migration and intercultural confusions become the inescapable human trends of a warming century. Two contemporary readers of Gibran, the actress Salma Hayek, who produced an animated feature of The Prophet in 2015, and the doyenne of Instapoets Rupi Kaur, who wrote a foreword for The Prophet’s 2019 Penguin edition, both likened encountering the work to a wisdom-filled conversation with their grandfathers—from Lebanon in Hayek’s case, and in Kaur’s, India.
Indeed, the success of popular poets, like Kaur, on Instagram and elsewhere in what Global modern literature and media scholar Aarthi Vadde dubs “the digital literary sphere” is equivalent to the word of mouth success of The Prophet, independent of the literary establishment. This is not to mention the many successful novelistic careers launched via web publishing and self-publishing ventures—including, now, Tik Tok. As Vadde points out: “If the novelists strive to entertain, the poets aim to inspire. Each group builds massive followings that operate entirely outside the professional literary circles that dictate prestige.” Kaur’s work is shared and spread, by millions, freely. It proves that there is more than one way for poetry to mean. In his early, democratic virality, Gibran certainly proved prophetic.
Gibran’s poetry lives publicly in a way poetry largely ceased to do in the West throughout the twentieth century. His verses on love and marriage have been vows at weddings for the “spiritual but not religious;” read as solace by the incarcerated; recited at Mandela’s funeral. It must also be one of the most oft-given books in the world, presented both in times of celebration and sorrow.
There is no doubt that Gibran is a godfather of the “New Age,” and that it was his sincere—if grandiose—wish “to write a book that heals the world.” What is often sought in “inspirational” texts, whether the Gospel of John or The Secret, is not “inspiration” so much as authority—something that will bolster or expose what was already within us by the affirming voice of an “other.” As a text, this is what The Prophet is essentially about. As the poet himself put it, “No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story failed to indicate that Lebanon, a majority Muslim country, has long also been home to other large religious communities.