MENA - A mosaic richer for its diversity. A discussion between soldier and scholar, Lt. Gen. Sir Simon Mayall, and Prof. Nader El-Bizri, covering Lebanon and Syria, extremism, economics and religion, and the crisis and tragedy of Gaza.
Professor Nader El - Bizri
Professor El-Bizri is Senior Research Fellow at The Warburg Institute. Professor Nader El-Bizri’s principal research expertise is in the study of the classical Arabic sciences and philosophy, with their Greek sources, and their adaptive assimilation in the European milieu from the High Middle Ages, passing by the Italian Renaissance, and up until the early-modern period. He served as the Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Sharjah, and he has been a longstanding Affiliated Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and an Associate of the Senior Combination Room at King’s College Cambridge. He was also a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in History of Science and Philosophy at Durham University in 2021, and a tenured full Professor of Civilization Studies and Philosophy since 2012 at the American University of Beirut. He serves on various editorial boards of academic publishers internationally. He practiced as an architectural designer in London, Cambridge, New York, and Beirut. He has received various international awards and honours, including the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences Prize in 2014, and has been elected as a Mellon Global Liberal Arts Fellow in 2017 at Claremont McKenna College in the USA.
Lt. General Sir Simon Mayall KBE CB
Lt. General Sir Simon Mayall has had a distinguished 40 year career in the British Army, during which he served in Germany, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia. He also held several high level appointments in the policy world of the Ministry of Defence. By family background, academic inclination and professional choice and circumstances, he served much of his time in Arabia. He spent three years on secondment to the Sultan of Oman’s Armed Forces and was the Operations Officer for the 1st UK Armoured Division during the liberation of Kuwait in the first Gulf War. Having studied Modern History at Oxford, including a specialisation in the Crusading period, he also wrote a book on Turkish Security Policy, and completed a thesis on Jihadi ideology for his Masters at King’s College. In 2006 he was the Deputy Commanding General for the Multi-National Corps in Iraq. Having been both Assistant Chief of the General Staff, and Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Operations), he set up the post of Defence Senior Adviser for the Middle East, in which appointment he was responsible for the new Royal Navy base in Bahrain, Britain’s first permanent military base East of Suez since 1971. His last appointment was as Prime Minister Cameron’s Security Envoy to Iraq and the Kurdish Regional Government after the fall of Mosul to Islamic State in 2014. Knighted in 2014, he also holds the US Legion of Merit for service in Iraq.
Sir Simon has written two books: Soldier in the Sand, A Personal History of the Middle East (2020), and The House of War (2024) a history of the clashes between Islam and Christendom over 1300 years.