YouSaid · the spoken record

Janine di Giovanni

lines on the record: 35
first: 2021-12-10
most recent: 2021-12-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, it's not for us. I mean, you know, Middle East experts look at somebody and say, well, why didn't you? I didn't write it for you and I. I wrote it as an oral history. And in fact, when I got the Guggenheim, they said to me, we are giving you this because you are writing about a people, you are writing a document which will last 100 years. So my purpose in writing this book is to take these stories to collect them and to bring them to life for people who don't know about Christians in the Middle East. And so that we cannot let them disappear so that they will never vanish.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jerusalem in the Christian quarter. I feel such a profound sense of history and of just the earth that I'm walking on, how ancient it is, how sacred it is, how holy it is. So I really think all of us have this obligation to protect them.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's been just absolutely extraordinary, and I think he can send a very strong message. And along with that, maybe other interfaith leaders, other imams, other rabbis, you know, basically saying these are vulnerable people. It's almost like something that an anthropologist would do if these are the last tribesmen in an island in the South Pacific, you would want to preserve their ways, their language, their culture. But these Christians are the birthplace of Christ. It's the land of the apostles. It's where the prophets walked. It is so powerful. And even I say to my friends who aren't religious at all, when I am in”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About our Catholic brethren, our Christian brethren in Iraq, but I had no idea how bad it was. Now you and I are in the middle of our Middle East bubble. So we're aware of every minutia that happens. And I tend to think that everyone else is as well. But look at the news. When did we last hear news about Lebanon? When did we last hear news about Gaza? When I went in August, my friend said to me, you're the first journalist that's been here in months. Papers don't want it. newspapers bury it in the back pages. Television news doesn't get any coverage. So I think our first step is we need to bring awareness of this. Second, we need support from Christian communities around the world. They have to band together to support their brethren. And third, I think we need more stringent policies from Western governments to protect them. And I so agree with you. I think the Pope...”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Communities, Christian communities around the world. The evangelical church in America, as you know, is extremely powerful and unfortunately linked to the kind of Trump right-wing pro-Israel, when I say pro-Israel, I mean the settler movement. I don't mean we agree the state of Israel deserves to exist, but what I don't agree with is the encroachment of land and the subjugation and lack of human rights for Palestinians. But I think the Christian communities around the world should be propping up these vulnerable people. France is a Catholic country, Spain is a Catholic country, Italy is a Catholic country. They can all not only raise awareness. So the first step really, we have to raise awareness. So many people aren't aware of this. I gave my book to my mother's priest in a very small Catholic community. He wrote to me and said, thank you for this.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in a strange kind of way, they were the more pious. They were the ones. The more they said no, I'm going to mass, and they would build churches in shop fronts. It was incredible, just like a little store, a bodega. You know, they would fill with a crucifix and some holy oil and some incense. And that was a church to them. And they, to me, feel like, in a sense, the real descendants of Christ.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And I think, you know, the position then that those Egyptian cops are in, and again, I put myself in their shoes. It's not my job to criticize them or to condemn them. I just think what would I do if I was them if I felt that slowly this way of life was coming to an end? And Egypt, again, like the socioeconomic conditions are so different because I was with very wealthy Christians who said to me, look, let me be frank with you. I speak four languages. I went to the French Lyc ⁇ e. My family has money. We own factories. Yes, okay, I feel different, but I'm fine. If everything goes wrong, I can move to France. The poor who really, you know, whose churches are burnt down while they're in them, who are beaten on their way to school, who are deprived of their faith.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Militarily, I mean, I lived through the war in Bosnia, another tragedy, another podcast. We could discuss Bosnia is about to blow up again because when wars don't end properly, well, no war ends properly. When it ends as unfairly as Bosnia did with no transitional justice and no kind of peace for the victims of the genocide, no recognition of it, then inevitably it would be bound to come back and it is now. So Lebanon I'm so worried about Lebanon and I'm so worried about Egypt. General Sisi is terrifying. I'm worried about the Gulf countries capitulating to Israel. So I guess my answer is instead of a change, I see we've gone backwards in the 30 years I've been working there.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything will happen in that area. Iraq breaks my heart because in the Saddam days when I first started working there, there was this climate of intense fear. And you remember that. I mean, people were afraid to do anything. I remember the day Saddam fell. My friend that I worked with, I remember we went to get my satellite phone. They used to seal it with ceiling wax. The Mukabarat who had opened it for me, he wasn't there. He had run away to Damascus as a lot of the Bathists did. But she said, I said, Saddam's gone. You're free. And she said, oh, no, no, no. They're drone. She didn't say drone. She said, planes up in the sky with listening devices, so we still have to be careful. This is a highly intelligent woman. I think that just shows how deep the fear was. Syria? The world's forgotten the war. There is still a war going on. Bashar is one.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Situation. I mean, the UN said 10 years ago by 2020, Gaza will be unlivable. It's 2021. We're almost 2022. What really frightens me is the complacency. You know, even the liberal Israelis who are really fighting people like Betselem and Gishan, people that are really struggling to bring change. They're tired. They've been working for so hard and there has been zero, if not anything, it's worse. The US has pulled out of any kind of peace negotiations. I mean, Obama was basically the last of it. Then we had Jared Kushner, that great Middle East expert. I fear that Biden, you know, he's directed by Kamala Harris. Of course, Kamala Harris gave a keynote speech at APAC, the biggest Jewish lobby in America. Her husband is very pro-Zionist. So I think he's taking his direction from her. So I don't think...”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say it's the lack of shift in Palestine. I mean, to me, this is the greatest tragedy because I remember being a very young woman, very naive, basically my first trips to the Middle East 30, 31 years ago. And it was the first intifada. It really changed my life because I wanted to be an academic. I never wanted to be a journalist. It was never my intention. And by the way, I've never been that kind of reporter who I admire, but I'm not who can really stick a microphone in someone's face and kind of get a scoop. That's not my thing. I like to sit with people for a really long time, months, years if I can, and let them tell their story. It's not my story to tell. It's their story. So I'm just a kind of vessel. But the greatest change I would say is the lack of change in Palestine. In fact, worse. This last trip to Gaza, and I've been to Gaza dozens of times, I've never seen it so bad.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I have to be honest with you if I was faced with ISIS or torture or my children being sold in a marketplace or living in my home with a huge N written over my door Nazarene or facing torture or the lion's den, I think I would go. I don't know if I would have the courage they had. So I really wanted to paint a picture in this book of tenacity, of determination, of resilience. And then it just happened that COVID hit. And I think COVID was very much about resilience as well. Our own individual resilience, our society's resilience, and what remains. So in the end, it was a very strange, I mean, I really set out to write an academic book about Christians in the Middle East. And in the end, it became a kind of internal journey of my own faith and my own fear and my own resilience.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I got there, there was this minute community of Jewish Russians speaking Yiddish. They still spoke Yiddish. When you pulled into the train station, it had Hebrew letters, Hebrew and Russian. And I spent two weeks with these people. And that, I think, was my first kind of obsession with how minorities cling, how their faith, their religion, their identity, their presentation is so vital to remain. At that time, the Jewish agency, which is basically the agency that tries to bring Ethiopians to Israel or Syrian Jews to Israel, was actively recruiting them. Come to Israel, beautiful weather. We give you everything. Why stay in this horrible...”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So together we went down these streets and we talked to people. And then finally he found a building that had a star of David over it. And little by little it was detective work. He found the family. He celebrated, I think, a Shabbat dinner with him. And I remember thinking, how did they cling to this thing which is so important to them? And then I remember that many, many years ago, in the early 90s, I went to a part of Russia called Biro Bijan, which was before the state of Israel was founded. The Jewish homeland. It's a far corner of the far what was the Soviet Union, literally on the Mongolian border, to get there. I had to fly to Korea, take a flight to Habarosk, and then to take a two-day train into Siberia.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think an Iraqi official said to me something which made so much sense to me. He just said, and he is a Shia. He said, without the Iraqi Christians, there is no Iraq. And in the days literally, like weeks before Saddam fell, I worked with a Jewish colleague, a journalist, who had set out to find the last Jews of Baghdad. Now, of course, the Jews of Baghdad were eradicated in the 50s and then the 70s, but there were a few families left, but living very under the radar. And my friend's mission was literally to find them because his family were Iraqi Jews who had been expulsed in the fifties, I think.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Poor cops, those in Minya, have it much, much worse. Their churches are being burnt down. They're being firebombed. They're actively discriminated against, mocked, persecuted. What really strikes me is how they cling on. And when I was a little girl at Catholic school, we used to study the martyrs under the Roman times, and I couldn't grasp their courage how they'd be sent to the lion's den. I mean, or how they would be tortured, or how they would pray in catacombs, how they would retain their faith despite enormous obstacles. But these Christians that I'm writing about are doing the same thing, and yet they cling to it. They will not abandon it because it is such a huge part of their identity. So if they leave these Gazan Christians, these rocky Christians and they go to Canada or the US. They're leaving their ancestral land.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Gaza suffers from many things, it's the economic situation, it's the restriction of movement, it's the bombing, the last bombing in May was absolutely disproportionate use of force. Egypt. So, Egypt is really interesting because depending on class, because you can get these very wealthy Christians, Christian cops in, let's say, Heliopolis in Cairo. And they go to the French Lyce and they have good jobs and they live more or less the way they like. But there are still laws enshrined in the Egyptian constitution which prevent Christians from holding high offices in government, military, and the military's an arm of the government. So in one way or another, they are still discriminated against, the marriage laws, the inheritance laws.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economically so hindered, so trapped, so repressed, so subjugated, of course they're going to rebel. And whenever I have a discussion with an Israeli who says, but they're so full of hatred towards us, and I said, what would you do if you were born in a refugee camp? If you saw your father taken away in the middle of the night, if every opportunity you wanted was taken from you, if you were utterly powerless, how could you live with anything other than a desire to be free? So Gaza, the Gazan Christians eight hundred of them, shrinking rapidly. They can't get, we're coming into the Christmas season, so they like to go to Bethlehem to be with their family. They can't get permits to go, or worse, the Israelis will give them one.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was in Gaza in August, and one thing that always strikes me about Gaza is the level of intellect and of education, even the poorest people in the worst refugee camps send their kids age four to kindergarten. They tell them that, you know, the Israelis can close our borders, but they can't close our minds. And I get these young people who are just remarkable. And I think if we could give them outsourcing, if we could turn Gaza into a Chennai, for example, give our outsourcing, our banking to these people, if we built up their economy, if we took the yoke of oppression off their shoulders, Christians and Muslims, and we developed economies for them, then we give them actually a chance that independence, economic independence, which might eventually lead to peace, as long as their”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The book, so I'll talk a little bit about the book In the Vanishing, I broke it down into four communities Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Gaza. And over the overall themes was that they were all endangered, they were all vulnerable to eradication. Climate change came in later. I mean, I had not realized the extent that Iraq was vulnerable. I think the UN gives it, it's the third most vulnerable country. 31% desert. Droughts, floods. But even worse, when I started looking into the farmlands in Nineveh, which had been a great resource for many of the Christians, ISIS was”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at all. And I think we're moving, the US is moving, you know, I was born in America, but I left when I was very young. I returned in 2017 at the height of the Trump years. And I'm not saying this dramatically, but I really feel traumatized by what I saw because America in my mind, the romanticism of America, the democracy, the freedom of speech, was all wiped away by the hate rhetoric, by the racial inequality that was a level that I hadn't even seen since childhood the civil rights movement and most of all the isolationism. You know, we're not really, it's not really politically correct for us to criticize President Obama and looking back, of course, he was a miracle compared to what we have now. But he did not do much in the region. He did try to stand up to Netanyahu, and I think he was about the only president that did. But I think he kind of left a legacy.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even that should give us a sense of how they need to be protected. So let's be pragmatic. You're a political scientist. How can policy directly protect these people? So right now, the big worry, of course, is the Iranian militias and the Turkish airstrikes. And there we're talking about the Iraqi Christians now. Gaza is something else, Egypt something else. How can the US do better? I say US, but let's say the Western, let's say the international community, how could we do better? How can we ensure that these endangered people are protected? You know, I'm going to ask you. You run the entire Middle East division of Chatham House. What would you do if you were speaking to President Biden and Boris Johnson? What would you put into place to protect them?”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that the U.S. has to have some kind of policy, especially in northeast Syria. Some, first of all, Pope Francis' message was a message. It was a very clear message. We are watching. We are seeing what is happening to you. You are not alone. I have this really beautiful memory. And I wrote about it in the book of going to mass in Mosul right before the invasion. And it was in that beautiful church, Assyrian church. And I came inside and people were praying and singing Aramaic. And Aramaic, the language of Christ to me is so moving. Someone said to me, it's very eerie. And I said, no, no, no, it's profoundly emotional because it's an ancient language. And it shows how ancient these people are. They're the descendants of the prophets.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely not, especially not under the Trump regime. I mean, the Abraham Accords, which doesn't directly affect the Christians, but it does affect the region, were disastrous, and it is extraordinary how many right-wing Americans feel that it disproved peace to the Middle East. And they have no conception of how it alienated the Palestinians entirely from something that concerns their future. I think that American foreign policy right now, I'm a bit disappointed in President Biden. I mean, ecstatic, we finally got rid of Trump. I'm worried he might come back in some incarnation if it's not him, someone very much like him.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Case of the Christians, it came very quickly, and ISIS went from village to village, burning, raiding, destroying the churches, trampling the crucifixes, and they moved north, the Christians moved north. Those who could got out to the diaspora where they have many relatives in America or Canada or Scandinavian countries, the UK, wherever they could go. But those who choose to remain ended up near Dohuk in camps or many of them were sleeping on the streets in Irbil and Ainkawa. I remember thousands of them sleeping underneath the statue of our lady in the middle of the square, seeking some kind of protection. So since then, repairing that kind of trauma has been, even though money has been poured into it, I think this sense that they are so vulnerable really needs to be recognized.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So their land in the Nineveh plain were that many of them had been farmers, it had been a kind of breadbasket of rock, was suddenly very threatened. Isis came June 2014. I was in Baghdad at the time. And it's, you know, when I take myself back to that moment, I'll never forget it. I was lying on my bed in my hotel. I was listening to the BBC. People were hysterical because ISIS did not come from nowhere. You and I knew that. We saw that as far back as 2012 in Syria. But people remain in their homes until the last possible moment. And this is something I've learned from many, many years of working with refugees. I always say to them, why did you wait? And they always basically say the same thing. We didn't think it would come to our home. We thought that it wouldn't affect us. We didn't think that war would come to our country.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Means that they would have to find another part of the world, the diaspora would be again spread even wider. So what were their conditions like? So each country I did, I chose them for very specific reasons. And I did not choose Lebanon. And many people said to me, why not Lebanon? Because where there are so many Christians, because Christianity in Lebanon is so much further assimilated than these other countries. Christians are very amalgamated into the political, the social, the economic sphere. They have their own issues, but they're not nearly as peripheral as Iraqi Christians, Egyptian Christians, Gazan Christians, and Syrian Christians. So let's look at Iraqis. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, I think they felt particularly vulnerable. Their villages, they were sandwiched between the insurgents, the Sunni insurgents, and the Kurds.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking back at history, there are ways that people can drive out dictators. And I think possibly the Christians who join the demonstrations, and you're right, there were many, especially in Syria. The rallying call in Syria was we want our freedom. They wanted to know that their vote actually mattered. And for 40 years under the Assad, no one's vote mattered. No one had a voice. So I think they got caught up in the heady realism of it. However, let's look at Aleppo. The siege of Aleppo, Aleppo finally fell in 2016 to government forces aided by the Russians bombing campaign, which was horrible. Many of those Christians were Armenian Christians who already had this transgenerational trauma of their own genocide. So therefore, being driven out again, and many of them did leave, some stayed, but very few, to be driven out of their homeland again.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really interesting because a Christian from Aleppo told me something which really surprised me. He said, you have to understand we Christians really enjoy the rule of law. It's extremely important to us that we know boundaries, that we know you can do this, you cannot do that. And under Bashar, in his case, we felt that there were rules. If we followed them, then we would be all right. We wouldn't go to prison. I think when the Arab Spring came, I think in so many ways the Arab Spring toppled so much for people, those first heady days in Tunis. And people could see what happened, that they could actually drive out a dictator. And actually, if you go back to Yugoslavia in 2000, a group of students ousted Slobodan Milosevic in a kind of bloodless coup d'etat.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the tradition of the desert saints and the Gnostic Gospels and St. Thomas. So it led me down a road, a kind of mystic road. And I was heavily watched everywhere I went, I was, you know, I had my guy trailing me taking notes. But that was my first experience of the Assyrian and the Chaldean communities. And what really struck me was their determination to cling, to stay, no matter what. But they were terrified. I mean, they knew that if Saddam fell, they didn't know what would come next. And there is this rather strange and possibly precarious agreement, semi-agreement, that Christians have made with dictators. Saddam Hussein protected the Christians. Bashar al Asad has protected the Christians. And Mubarak in Egypt protected the Christians. So the big fear is if these strong men fell, what would come next? Would it be the black flag? Would they be completely exterminated? And then, of course, we had 2014. The Islamic State.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really wanted to highlight to you that the misery of, let's say, Aleppo and Gaza bombs don't distinguish between Christians and Muslims. The 11-day bombing in May, which was horrific in Gaza, killed more than 260 people, 67 of them children. Doesn't matter if they're Christian, Muslim, Baptist, they're humans. So above all, especially when it came to the Gaza chapter, which was probably the most closed community. That was the hardest one for me to infiltrate. There's only 800 Christians left in Gaza, and I've worked in Gaza since the first Intifada. I wasn't really aware of them. I mean, I knew, of course, in Bethlehem, in Nazareth, and in the Galilee, plenty of Palestinian Christians. But in Gaza itself, I hadn't realized the extent of the history. Of course, Gaza had been entirely Christian until the 4th century.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good Christians, good pious Christians are being driven out of the Holy Land by bad Muslims. So this was something that I really, really tried hard to grasp and to try to portray it. And more than anything, what I really set out to do was to give an oral history of people who might not be here in a hundred years' time to kind of maintain their stories, their tradition, their culture, because it is, as you know, so incredibly rich and vibrant. And the mosaic of the Middle East would not be the same if they are not there. They add so much to the society.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's massive. And it's also, I think the fact that they're in their ancestral lands and that they're caught between this terrible dilemma. While I was writing it, it was also the height of the Donald Trump years. So I was extremely sensitive to the fact that I did not want this to be a book that pit it Muslims against Christians because it would be too easy to say they're being driven out because Muslim extremism by certain radical forces, but also by climate change, also by migration, also by economic forces, because they don't have the industry to keep the young people there. So that was a really tough battle because I knew the evangelical community in the US who of course are linked to Trump, who of course are linked to the pro-Irael lobby would seize this as an opportunity to say,”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To 2003 and the invasion of the American troops in Iraq. And so in a strange kind of way, it really helped me, it changed the focus of the book. So as you know, it became much more personal. And it became about my own journey into faith and resilience. Because above all, I think the book is about resilience, how these ancient communities remain in their ancient lands when they have been through the centuries purged, subjugated, they've suffered plagues, they've suffered from armies who wanted to destroy them, yet no one ever has. But the thing that really struck me was speaking to various political scientists who do more quantitative research in the region saying that given the numbers and how they're dwindling of Christians, especially in Iraq, that in 100 years time they would be no more. Which is a very disturbing thing”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the book started out when I decided to write it. It came from a long history of working in the region with Christian communities. But it really came to a head during the 2014, the time of ISIS. And then what really pushed me into it is I had finished the fieldwork. And then COVID came. So actually when I sat down to write it and had my desk and my notebooks and my pencils and my pens, the world was gripped in this kind of sense of great uncertainty and fear myself included. I don't think I've ever felt so frightened as I did in those first initial weeks of COVID, and it was all about facing the uncertain, which of course is what faith is about. And it somehow connected me to all of those people I had spoken to over the years.”
2021-12-10 · Intelligence Squared · Keeping the faith in the Middle East with Janine di Giovanni · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT