The Interviewees
Interview with Michael Vatikiotis, September 2025
1- You received a doctorate from the University of Oxford and your research was on the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. Why did you pick on this region rather than your ancestral region of the Middle East for this research?
Initially I wanted to study the Middle East, where my family comes from – and follow in my father’s footsteps. Become an Arabist. However, the university I attended in London was unwilling to allow me to study Arabic part-time, so I was instead persuaded to study somewhat easier languages from Southeast Asia – Thai and Indonesian. And so, my career and my life were diverted by chance. Instead of making the Middle East my area of specialisation; I wrote an undergraduate thesis on Sukarno of Indonesia. I ended up in Thailand doing research for a PhD on ethnic diversity in Northern Thailand.
2- In 2004, you published The Spice Garden a novel set in the eastern Indonesian islands of Maluku. The story follows two friends, a Catholic priest and a Muslim trader, who confront a sudden and terrifying outbreak of religious conflict. Was this novel following an earlier bout of violence in the region or perhaps a reminder and warning for the future that this region like the Middle East is highly mixed in ethnicities and religious affiliation and the path to harmonious co-existence is narrow and open to provocations from both within and from outside?
The novel was based on real events surrounding the outbreak of vicious religious violence that erupted between Christians and Muslims in 1999. This foreshadowed the sectarian and extremist violence we witnessed after 2001 globally.
3- In 2007, you published Singapore Ground Zero, a second collection of short stories, addressing misconceptions about Muslim fundamentalism. Do you think the media distortion of the causes and different manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism is a bigger danger than the movement itself?
Yes, I think that was part of the problem – rooted mainly in the post 2001 US-led war on terror that painted Islamic movements as dangerous and extremist. Some were, of course, but inevitably it generated dangerous generalisation from which the world has yet to recover. The way that the Palestinian movement, for example, is now seen through the lens of Islamic extremism, when in fact not all Palestinians are Muslim. In fact, the early founders of the Palestinian movement were often Christian and on the left.
4- The head-title of your last book and the subject of your talk is ‘Lives between the lines’. What ‘lines’ are you alluding to – borders of nationality and belonging or the infamous lines drawn by foreigners across the Middle East, or is it deliberately vague?
Essentially Sykes Picot and the lines, real and imaginary, that were used by the imperial; powers to carve up the Middle east after the end of the Ottoman empire, which bore no relation to the relationship between communities on the ground, eventually leading to lines of conflict between them.
5- You state ‘I was inspired to write this book by the waves of desperate migrants fleeing to Europe from the war zones of Syria and Iraq. Their plight reminded me that my own family fled war-torn Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and found sanctuary in the Middle East.’ So was this a journey of discovery for you as you built on family stories through your own research on archives, photos and documents? What surprised you the most in this journey?
It was a voyage of discovery, despite having visited the Middle East as a youthful tourist, student and later a journalist. I embarked on the research – and the journey – against a background of rising numbers of migrants fleeing the Middle East. I found it ironic that my own family of Greeks and Italians fled Europe in the mid-19th century to escape war and instability, much as Syrians and countless others have since the first decade of the 21st century. My family ended up in Egypt and Palestine, which back then offered security and a chance to make something of their lives. How the world has changed!
6- Your great-grandfather Yannis Vatikiotis is buried in Acre, the first member of your family to settle in Palestine, yet he came from the island of Hydra which led the Greek revolution that led to the creation of a rather chaotic and economically barren Greek state. He clearly wasn’t the first ‘economic refugee’ who sought sanctuary in multi-ethnic Ottoman territory. Do you think he would have had no internal conflict of loyalties as our modern concepts of citizenship are so fixed?
My great grandfather Babar Yannis migrated to the Ottoman empire and married a Palestinian woman from Nazareth but was a loyal Greek. So much so that during the Greco-Turkish war of 1897 Yannis decamped from Palestine and sought refuge in Cyprus for the duration of the war. He always held a Greek passport – after all, his relatives in Hydra were heroes of the revolution.
7- Your book captures the essence of this Levantine milieu in the Middle East, people with fluid identities speaking multiple languages: each community serving their own interests rather than a greater whole in a sprawling empire without boundaries. It was clearly a profoundly privileged and unequal social order for the Levantines. Do you think the germ of its decline, both for the community and the greater Empire perhaps, was in that unequal pecking order as Levantines by their foreignness were equipped to perform the trade connections with overseas and be protected through capitulation privileges?
The capitulations were clearly unjust; they permitted foreigners to be tried in their own courts, which essentially meant escaping true justice. Speaking for my mother’s Italian Jewish family in Egypt, they did not see themselves as outsiders. Egypt was their home and by their enterprise Egypt prospered, as they did. There were something like 300,000 Italians and Greeks in Alexandra alone by the turn of the 19th century; they built and ran the city, but did not rule. Later, they were not part of the colonial elite, occupying a similar position to that of the Chinese and Indians in some parts of the European colonial far east.
8- European powers clearly had their own predatory agenda with the withdrawal of Ottoman rule across the Middle East in the early 20th century. Do you think things were made worse by divide and rule policy, a template already in practice in earlier colonial settings and no clear vision for long-term nation building where France, Britain and later Israel had their own narrow interests to pursue led by greed?
I think Levantine society started to unravel with the rise of Arab nationalism after the end of WW2. The minorities, especially Europeans, Jews and Armenians became easy targets for Arabs in search of a new identity, one that simply didn’t adhere to the same pragmatic tolerance of diversity that endured in Ottoman times. It didn’t help that Europe supported the formation of the state of Israel and the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs, 700,000 of whom were forced to leave after 1947.
9- On your website you have fine photos of the former house of your great uncle Samuele Sornaga built in the 1930s, located along the Pyramids Road on the outskirts of Cairo. Was this confiscated by the Nasser government with their revolution of 1952 and if so did the family get any compensation when in 1974 Egyptian courts ruled those seizures to be illegal?
I am not sure if it was confiscated or sold. Ultimately it was sold to the Kuwaiti royal family, to whom it belongs today. When I last visited in 2019, it was unoccupied. I understand it is for sale. Several students of art and architecture have gained access to the villa with its ornate tiling in the Islamic style, despite the Tuscan exterior. Like my great uncle’s villa at the Sornaga ceramics factory in Helwan, the buildings survive, albeit in decay slowed only by the dry desert climate which is kind to brickwork generally.
10- Do you feel any heritage within you for that Levantine identity and if so how do you think it has influenced you and your decisions and the way you look at the world?
I most definitely identify with Levantine culture and heritage. I grew up surrounded by it in terms of how my parents and extended family interacted with others, despite being transplanted. It was only later in life, as an adult, that I started to understand and appreciate the differences between Levantine and Mediterranean culture, in the Greek and Italian context. The hybrid nature of Levantine culture makes for more a fluid identity and the ability to blend and adapt to any given context. This ability to shape shift in terms of identity has served me well living in Asia.
11- Do you believe all conflicts are solvable and do you think some of your personal experience in South East Asia could be put to use, if you are called on, in the Middle East?
As a mediation practitioner I used to believe that all conflicts are solvable, even those in the Middle East! Lately I have become more concerned about the limits of dialogue and diplomacy. It seems that every conflict benefits from impunity and the failure to apply international law; the parties to conflict can draw on support from external forces to fend off efforts to constrain the use of force, even in the face of massive loss of life. Perhaps in the future wars will end only after the application of stringent sanctions and physical intervention. The idea of reaching agreement to stop fighting through reasonable dialogue and compromise is sadly becoming more and more implausible in today’s world.
12- You state in your book that ‘the elegant grandeur of downtown Cairo’s late-nineteenth century layout and architecture survives, but barely. The darkened entrances to once-stately apartment buildings along Kasr el-Nil Street gape like aged, toothless maws’. This clearly is sad but do you think the decay has now reached a point of no-return as the conditions in Egypt mean the substantial influx of cash required to renovate down-town Cairo will not come as that playground was built for communities that no longer exist?
I would like to think that Cairo’s grandeur can be restored – and I hear that some of this is happening. The Egyptian government today puts great store by the building of infrastructure, though this is mainly in the form of roads and bypasses to srev the country’s gawdy new capital.
13- Your family left the Middle East in the 1950s along with thousands of other Levantines and this clearly came with multiple traumas, mostly never recorded. Were you able to feel that level of anguish as you went through family records, or interviewing elders of the family? Does your general optimism when it comes to conflict resolution maybe a reflection of disasters can be redressed through rebuilding, as clearly your family were able to establish new lives elsewhere?
My family was fortunate that the trauma associated with their forced re-location in Europe was mainly emotional and not physical. They managed to rebuild their lives in Italy, Greece and the UK, some of them further afield. My paternal grandfather never recovered from being uprooted from Palestine. He moved to Greece calling himself a refugee. He refused to emigrate to the US, or the UK for that matter, because he blamed the West for the calamity of the Nakhba. None of my family ever really felt they belonged in their new surroundings.
I remain optimistic that Levantine culture in some form can be revived to help the Middle East recover from decades of conflict – for tolerance and pluralism are the key ingredients of any peaceful society.
Interview conducted by Craig Encer