Often great trees in the forest fall together, and great men leave us at roughly the same time. In the same week that the US lost Jimmy Carter, India lost its great leader, Manmohan Singh, one of the longest serving Prime Ministers of India. Elsewhere I have written about once meeting Jimmy Carter. But by luck I also had the chance to chat for a time with Manmohan Singh.

I had the honor of being seated next to him at a dinner. It was during a function held in Delhi by the Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan, an educational institution for Sikh and Punjab studies. Manmohan Singh was serving as President of the organization, one of the several assignments he accepted after his retirement as Prime Minister of India. A good friend of mine, Mohinder Singh, was director of the institute, and persuaded me to speak at a conference he organized in which Manmohan Singh was presiding.

It was after my talk that we gathered together for dinner in the garden of the institute’s grounds. It was one of those lovely Indian evenings when the heat of the day had dissipated in the pleasant breezes of an early evening.

I had many questions I wanted to ask the famous economist and former Prime Minister. After all, he was the architect behind India’s economic liberalization, which has led to the remarkable development the country has experienced in recent years. But like my conversation with former President Jimmy Carter, he first wanted to know about me. Why was I interested in the Punjab?

I told him that I had taught in the economics department at Panjab University in Chandigarh after completing my first set of graduate studies in religion and international affairs in New York. I lived in India for a total of three years or so, and fell in love with the Punjab.

His ears perked up. Manmohan Singh was not a very demonstrative kind of person, and ordinarily he wore a stoic, inquisitive expression that seemed seldom to change. In this case, however, he seemed to come to life.

“Economics, in Panjab University?” he said. What year, he wanted to know. I told him it was in the mid-1960s.

“I was there at the same time, in the same department,” he said, genuinely surprised.

“When Dr. Rangnekar was chair?” I asked.

“Certainly,” he said with what I took to be his version of enthusiasm. “S.B. Rangnekar was a great economist, and my mentor.”

“Mine as well,” I said, though I meant this in a personal sense, not an academic one. I was not an economist, after all, and was a bit out of my element in that discipline. I had come to the university on a study and service scholarship that paid very little. An arrangement had been made for me to stay initially in the bachelor faculty apartments, which gave me room and basic board, as long as I continued to maintain some relationship to the university. But what could I do?

One of the bachelor faculty members was an economist and he encouraged me to see the head of the department, Dr Rangnekar. I protested that I didn’t know anything about economics. “No matter,” my colleague said, “Rangnekar is a great fellow and if anyone can help you, he can.”

So I meekly went to see the important Dr Rangnekar, and he immediately set me at ease. He was a large, avuncular man who had a wonderful smile and a no-nonsense attitude to dealing with any problem put before him. He wanted to know what I could teach.

I told him about my innocence of economics, but I knew about international issues from graduate school and philosophy from college. “Political philosophy?” He inquired. Yes, I said, telling him I had taken a course in the history of political thought.

“Perfect,” Rangnekar said, exuding enthusiasm, “you’ll begin next week.”

“Begin what? I asked, genuinely puzzled. He explained that he had just created an honors school for undergraduates interested in enrolling in the graduate programs in economics at the University. He was chagrined at the low level of knowledge that burdened entering students in his graduate programs. He thought the problem could be solved in part by offering a year of special training in varied subjects, not just economics, to prepare students for graduate work. I would teach a course on political theory.

I indeed started teaching the next week, making up the course as the term went on. I went through the usual list of Western thinkers, beginning with Plato’s republic and then Machiavelli and Hobbes and Locke, and ending with Marx. I didn’t stop there, however, going on to cover what I thought were the most important Indian political thinkers, beginning with Kautilya’s Arthashastra, and culminating with Gandhi’s ideas about non-state socialism.

Rangnekar made my experience at Punjab University truly engaging. I discovered that it had the same effect on Manmohan Singh. He had done graduate work in economics at Panjab University shortly after India’s independence and the partition of the Punjab. At Rangnekar’s encouragement, he then went on to Cambridge for another MA. Later he would return to England for a PhD at Oxford, but in the interim, after Cambridge he returned to Panjab University, now in the new city of Chandigarh. There his old professor, Rangnekar, persuaded him to join the faculty for a couple of years. This was about the same time that I was there helping Rangnekar start an honors program for pre-graduate students.

Alas I don’t remember meeting Manmohan Singh at the time. Though if he was as taciturn and shy as he was later in life, I could easily have overlooked him. He had a depth that took some effort to discover.

At dinner, after a bit of quiet as we continued eating, I turned to him and ventured a comment. “If Rangnekar was your mentor, I can understand how you could rise to a position of great leadership unfettered by pride and bravado, with only the cheerful desire to help your fellow human beings. Rangnekar would have approved.”

Manmohan Singh paused for a moment, then looked at me and smiled. He didn’t say anything, but the smile spoke volumes.

I had a brief meeting with Jimmy Carter when I was a visiting professor at Emory University. A colleague who knew the Carter Center staff arranged the visit, and thought that the former president would be interested in my work on global terrorism.

The Center was in several acres of woods and gardens not too far from the Emory campus. It was a cluster of buildings, nestled in the foliage — a less pretentious setting than, say, the Reagan library in Simi Valley, which I had also visited. The Carter center was full of activities and events. It was much more than just a museum for a former presidency.

There was a lecture hall and conference rooms. Seminars and workshops were held regularly. There were also offices for projects, like peacemaking, the effects of global warming, and eradicating tropical diseases.

There was also, of course, a hallway of presidential photographs and the obligatory recreation of the oval office. My impression was that Carter did not in fact, work in that recreated oval office, since it seemed inordinately spotless and clinically neat.

My impression was correct. Carter’s actual office was in a different building. It was a nice spacious room with floor to ceiling windows looking out on the gardens and the Georgia woods. A version of the White House’s Resolute Desk stood in front of a wall of books. The desk was crafted by a local woodsman to look like the original.

Carter had been meeting somewhere else on the grounds, and came in a bit late, greeting me warmly. I had a list of questions I wanted to ask, many about the decisions to try to liberate the hostages in Iran when he was president. But before I could say anything, he began to ask me questions.

He wanted to know something about my background. I explained that my PhD was in political science but before that I had completed a degree in theology. He nodded, approving of the combination of interests in politics and religion.

Then he wanted to know how I got involved in studying terrorism. Apparently someone had briefed him that this was my area of expertise. I told him that I had lived in India for several years, in the area where the Sikh separatist movement erupted in the 80s, and I wanted to understand how religious commitment could lead to violence.

He said he had wondered the same thing. I wanted to ask him more about what he meant, but immediately he turned to the situation in the Middle East. Did I know anything about Hamas, he asked.

I told him I had interviewed the founder of the movement, Sheikh Yassin, and many of the other leaders. Carter wanted to know what my impression of them was.

Certainly committed, I said. They were unyielding on their view of the situation. They felt that their homeland had been invaded and their culture was imperiled. They saw what we think of as terrorism as defensive acts.

Yes, he agreed. He said he had met with some of them himself when he was in Israel. I wanted to ask him more about that, but he interrupted and asked me what I had learned from them.

I told him that many of them said that they wanted to live in peace with Jews and jointly share the region. They had nothing against Jewish people, they said. Their problem was with what they regarded as an oppressive government.

I said that I didn’t know whether they really believed this or they were just trying to impress me. But they said it in such a way to make me think that they were more open than we were led to believe. It seemed that negotiation was possible

The suicide attacks are horrible, I said. But I told Carter that I had the impression that even some of the leaders were conflicted about whether this violence was morally justified or even whether it was good political strategy. My sense was that the Hamas activists were not of a single mind, I said.

Carter nodded thoughtfully, and said that he had the same impression when he talked with members of Hamas. When he met with Khaleed Mashaal, the Hamas politburo chief, in Doha, Carter was told by Mashaal that he would welcome a Saudi hosted summit to negotiate a two-state solution.

I was eager to hear more about that. But then an aide came in and told the former president that his next engagement was due, actually overtime, and he had to go.

Carter said it was nice to meet me, and went off to his next appointment. As he was leaving I said I enjoyed meeting with him, and thanked him for all of the good work he had done as president and afterwards.

When I sat in the empty office for a moment after he left, I realized that I had not had the opportunity to forward a single one of the questions I wanted to ask him. Instead, he mostly wanted to listen to me.

For a moment I pondered whether this was a mark of greatness. I wondered whether it was not so much the elegant words we say, but how well we listen. Carter was a good listener. And a great man.

This is a podcast interview I did the week after the fall of the Asad regime in Syria, speculating on how the new government might develop.

It has to deal with multiple problems: uniting the disparate ethnic and religious groups within the country, keeping predatory groups and neighboring countries at bay, bringing the former torturers and executioners in the previous regime to justice, creating the infrastructure for policing and internal security, and designing a long-term plan for a future polity that combines democratic participation, free speech, and sufficient centralized authority to hold the whole thing together. That’s a lot.

The question is whether a relatively small group of militants are capable of the task. In their favor is the experience of al Shara (formerly al Julani) and his colleagues in running the Idlib region.

Idlib was reasonably prosperous and well run, though there was a wave of protest against al Shara/ Julani’s authoritarian rule and his habit of imprisoning his critics. He backed down a bit, and perhaps learned from that.

More troubling is his association with an extreme jihadi ideology in the past when he and the other leading members of the rebels were part of al Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate. It shared this standing with the Islamic State in Syria. But the two groups quarreled with each other and since then al Shara and his former al Nusra colleagues claim to have renounced their extremism and embraced a more moderate pro-nationalist posture.

We’ll see how all this works out.

[Picture: Ahmed al Shara, known as al-Julani, as the Emir of al Nusra, and more recently as the liberator of Syria]

In a lightning move, Syrian rebels charged down from their small territory in northwestern Syria. In ten days they captured the major cities of Syria: first Aleppo, then Hama and Homs, before victoriously entering Damascus. The fifty-year Assad rule had suddenly come to an abrupt end.

Bashar al-Assad loaded his family onto an airplane at six a.m. and flew off to safety in Russia. The rebel leader, Mohammad Abu al-Julani, marched triumphantly through the streets of the capital city. Syria was free.

But free for what?

The origins of the rebel movement, Hamat Tahrir al-Sham – HTS, “the organization for the liberation of al-Sham” (Syria, Iraq, and adjacent regions, also known as the Levant) — are in al Nusra. It was one of many groups that surfaced in response to the Arab Spring uprising against the Assad regime in 2012. It then quickly affiliated with al Qaeda.

Another movement in Syria, the Islamic State led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was also affiliated with al Qaeda. In an effort to create solidarity between them, the al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri commanded Baghdadi’s group to merge with al Nusra. Baghdadi refused. He broke with al Qaeda and went on to create the powerful Islamic State that dominated eastern Syrian and western Iraq for several years.

The al Nusra movement in time also tired of its association with al Qaeda. In 2016, the young leader of al Nusra, Ahmed al-Shara, known by his nom de guerre, Mohammad al Julani, broke ranks with what remained of al Qaeda after Osama bin Laden’s death. He downplayed the jihadi rhetoric in favor of an emphasis on the national liberation of Syria from the Assad regime. This enabled him to forge a new coalition of rebel groups under the banner of HTS.

So now that the 42-year-old former jihadi militant is now the new leader of Syria, the question is what will he do? What is next for Syria?

Unification is part of the agenda. Al Shara (formerly known as Julani) represents a tiny sliver of the Syrian population. His movement is aligned with Sunni Arabs, who constitute the majority of the country, so that will help. But Sunni Arabs are hardly a unified constituency. Then there is a sizeable percentage of Syrian Christians and Alawites (a Shi’a offshoot) along the Mediterranean coast. Kurds control vast sections of the northern and western parts of the country. ISIS is still present and still bitter over their break up with al Nusra years earlier. Also there are former al Nusra supporters who refused to go along with the moderating style of Shara and formed their own militant cell.

Gaining the support of all these groups, even their tacit accession to HTS’s power, will be challenging. Then there is the need to reconstitute the government after decades of dictatorial rule. Will Shara simply slide into office as the newest dictator, or will there be an effort to reform the governmental process? Does democracy stand a chance?

We will be waiting to get answers to these questions. So far Shara has appeared to be conciliatory. He has assured Shi’a that their sacred shrines will be protected and has promised Syrian Christians and Alawites safety. He has ordered his armed forces to protect government buildings and keep them from being looted, and he has allowed the Prime Minister –who stayed in Damascus after Assad fled—to continue the functioning of government until there is a transition.

But a transition to what? Now that he is in power, will Shara return to his old jihadi ideology and try to impose his own idea of an Islamic State? There are several possibilities:

The ISIS model. Shara could assume he has a mandate to recreate Syria around his own ideology and impose a dictatorship and a rigid Islamic order.

The Saudi model. He could declare Syria to be an Islamic state and impose an autocratic regime while allowing some flexibility in rigid Islamic codes of behavior.

The Iranian model. He could try to resuscitate the trappings of democratic rule while maintaining a fairly conservative Islamic social order.

The Iraq model. His movement could constitute itself as an Islamic-leaning political party and contest elections, negotiating with other parties to create a coalition government.

The Ukrainian model. Shara could emerge as a nationalist hero, admired by all sides, and put his ideology aside while he created a new democratic order.    

While Western observers yearn for the last outcome, it will probably be some variant of the other ones. The hope is that whatever form of polity and social order emerges out of the new regime it will not lead to chaos and even more bloodshed. The Syrian people have had enough of both. They deserve better.