Ideas - How guest-host power dynamics shape migration

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

What do you owe to a stranger who arrives at your door? In ancient Greece, hospitality (or xenia) was seen as a sacred moral imperative. Someone who defied the obligations placed on both host and guest risked the wrath of the gods, or even outright war. Today, the word xenia has largely fallen out of use, but its opposite, xenophobia, has been a driving factor in contemporary politics for years. IDEAS explores ancient traditions of hospitality in this second episode of our five-part series, The Idea of Home. *This episode originally aired on June 14, 2022.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. There's a huge old forest that kind of separates Poland and bellars. In November 2021, Canadian lawyer Petra Mollar traveled to the border between Poland and Belarus. You kind of feel like you're in some sort of strange fantasy-slash-horror movie when you're walking through these woods because it's really damp, the light is really dappled and low. Everything is very wet.

Some people have made it across the border. They're hiding in the forests along its length. Behind them, a hostile Belarusian border force ahead of them, a Europe where they're not really wanted. thousands of asylum seekers, mostly from the Middle East, were trying to reach Europe. Poland set up an exclusion zone to force them back. Attention, attention. The police inform. Destruction of border infrastructure is forbidden.

You will face criminal charges. My team and I, like, we were dressed pretty well and we were cold within minutes. So imagine if you're hiding in this forest for a week or two with children, with, you know, know, people who might be sick and need medical assistance. This woman is severely hypothermic and, we're told, pregnant. You know there's people hiding around you, but you can't find them.

You just feel very, really, like, just helpless. But in that forest, Petra Mulder was struck by the hospitality local people showed to strangers. People started putting, like, green lights on their front porches to signify that this is a safe house for people who are on the move and crossing through Polish territory. Hello. We are not some police, okay?

Don't worry. It was almost like a choice, you know, like people were forced to reckon with what it means to be a human, you know, in these times. Like, do you open up your door to somebody or do you not? Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. This is the second installment in our special series, The Idea of Home. In this episode, we turn to notions of hospitality in Haudnoshone treaties, ancient Greek tragedies, biblical warnings, and Islamic teachings to discover what we owe to strangers.

When a traveler would come to the outside of a Puerto de Chonay village, the longhouse villages would have been in a clearing. When a visitor came, it was expected that they would light a fire at the edge of the forest. The community would send out two people to go and meet that person and ask why they were there and to engage with them. But as I understand, they were also going to wipe the dust out of it. of their eyes, wipe the dust out of their ears, and offer them water, because as they had been traveling, they had been gathering dust, and so they needed to have the community offer them cleanse and space. And so that's how the guests into a Horareschone village would have been welcomed. So Saigo, Ruth Green Nonios, Horitoshone Yogongue, Genagate, Genoa de Sota. My name is Ruth

Green. I am a Horedishone person who identifies as a woman, and I am from the people of the Flint Nation or the Ganakage. I see it as part of my responsibility as a Hordera Shone person to remember teachings of hospitality. And those sorts of teachings are embedded in virtually every indigenous culture that I've spoken with. The earliest place, we have about democracy in Greece, have at the center of them, hospitality. My name's Elena Asayev and I'm a researcher interested in notions around migration, hospitality, and displacement. I'm also an archaeologist, and I use the ancient world to kind of rethink approaches to some of these subjects also in the modern world and how the two have a dialogue

with each other. So it seems that at key moments in history, ways of expressing relationships between people ourselves, and also where there is power, where there's agency, and who has right to what, how our communities define, seems to include issues around hospitality. But today, that word seems strange and old, perhaps. And today, it just seems that not hospitality, but migration is taken center stage. We've spotted another small rib, which appears to be a migrant. At least 430 migrants across the English Channel to the UK. yesterday, according to the Home Office, a new record for a single day.

Who we exclude, who we deny hosting to matters, but not hospitality. That is not something you see in headlines. The government says it was taking substantial steps to tackle the unacceptable problem of illegal migration. And I think with that comes the assumption that the other and the outsider has always been repelled, always feared, and that is something we accept through time. Well, actually, when we look through historical trajectories and myths at our oldest Greek myths, that's not the oldest myths, but that's the oldest Greek ones we have written down, hospitality is everywhere. Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. What we get in the Odyssey, which is our earliest kind of written Greek text, Homer supposedly wrote it down

and it's about a journey of Odysseus coming from Troy home. It took a long time to get there, about 10 years. Many cities did he visit. He suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home. And the whole story is about him coming to doorsteps, him coming to shores and he's either being hosted or not. What kind of people have I come amongst?

Are they cruel and up? uncivilized, or hospitable and humane? So when he shows up at the house of Aratei and Alkinuas on the island of Skaria, he passes the threshold. Till he reached Aratei and King Alkinuas. Then he laid his hands upon the knees of the queen. And begs her to give a hospitality, and no name is asked of him. That scene from the Odyssey also echoes the Islamic tradition of hospitality, where...

The obligation of hospitality is such that you can't even ask a guest to leave or inquire about their reasons for being there, you know, until they've stayed under your roof and eaten your food for three days. My name is Basit, Karim Akbal, and I'm an assistant professor of anthropology at McMaster University in Hamilton. I work generally in the areas of political anthropology and the anthropology of religion, and so I teach courses on forced migration. and violence. There's a hadith or a saying of the Prophet, he says that Islam began in strangeness

and will return to strangeness just as it began. Bad al-Islam ghariban, so good tidings to the strangers. This image of early Islamic hospitality, I mean, it goes all the way back

to the Prophet Muhammad's flight to Medinam. The Meccan tribes where it had been persecuting the Muslims and the Medinans had contacted him. pledged to accept him as a prophet.

The persecution intensified, including assassination attempts, and so eventually he left for Medina to escape. And the people of Medina welcomed him. That act of flight came to found the Islamic calendar itself. It also founded a new kind of community. As we counted in the prophetic traditions, the first act that he did arbitrating between these different tribes

was to join them one to the other in a kind of fraternal relationship, not only between the different tribes that he encountered there, but also between those who fled the Mahajirin and those who were called the helpers in Medina, the Ansar. It's the way the world moves forward. Without welcome, without hospitality, all you have is walls and gates and bars. You never have the ability to open.

yourself to open a community. My name is David Goldstein. I'm a professor of English literature at York University, where I also run the creative writing program. In the Hebrew Bible, the lineage of the Jewish people begins with a moment of hospitality. So Abraham is sitting at the door of his tent and he sees three men coming towards him across the plane. And when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door. His first reaction is, oh, you know, here are some guests. We've got to feed these people. I will fetch a morsel of bread and comfort ye your hearts.

So he invites them in. He pushes Sarah aside in the kitchen and says, I'm cooking this meal. And he took butter and milk and the calf which he had dressed and set it before them. There's a lot of deep power behind that experience of saying, I don't know who these people are. I don't know what they're going to do for me or to me. But they need to be cared for, and I will be the one to care for them. The punchline is that the angels are there to give Abraham the message that Sarah is going to have a child,

and that child's going to be Isaac. And Sarah thinks that's hilarious because she is way past childbearing age. And so when she hears the angels say this to Abraham, she bursts out laughing. And the angels sort of respond to it in this kind of gentle but also force. way. Like, you better believe us. It's true. Is anything too hard for the Lord? And maybe that's the moment where Sarah and Abraham are like, huh, who are these guys? We forgot to get ID.

But I think the lesson of it, therefore, is, what if Abraham hadn't let them in, right? Then that never would have happened. And Isaac never would have been born, and there would actually have been no lineage of the Jewish people. But it's also a reminder that you just don't know who's going to come through that door. It could be the God, right? Or the God's emissary, which is something the Greeks say over and over. It's a very Greek idea about hospitality, too, that the stranger could also be Athena. There was a real belief that the gods, in fact, the greatest gods, Zeus, protected strangers and

protected or guests and protected those seeking asylum. And if you were inhospitable to these strangers, horrible things could happen, either to you personally or to your whole community. So one of the interesting or odd things we find is that, for example, environmental crises like tidal waves or earthquakes are often traced back to somebody being inhospitable. to refugees. Or the biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which comes immediately after the story of Abraham welcoming the angels.

Even though that story has been interpreted as proscription against male homosexuality, some scholars argue it was originally about the dire consequences of in-hospitality. The two angels arrive at Lott's house. Lot is Abraham's nephew. recently moved into the city. He's still a foreigner there. He welcomes them in, but does so really nervously. He says, getting quick. Turn in, I pray you, into your servant's house, and you shall rise up early

and go on your ways. They're like, no, no, we'll sleep in the public square. It's fine. He's like, oh, no, you won't. Lot is really, really open to extending this hospitality in the tradition of his uncle and the tradition of his pastoral culture. But he's doing it. He's doing a it in a way that shows us that he knows that this is not the tradition of the city he lives in. The Bible is really clear. Every single person comes to the door. The men of the city compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people from every quarter. Everybody is part of this anti-hospitality racket. So they show up and they demand that those guests be turned out of Lott's house, basically so they can rape them.

Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we may know them. It's an incredibly violent situation, but it's also the polar opposite of what hospitality means, right? Not only are we not going to welcome these people, we're going to violate them in all of the deepest ways we can. The Abraham and Sarah story, followed by that of Sodom and Gomorrah,

amounts to a biblical one-two punch. From basically a scene of unconditional hospitality, you segue directly into the opposite of that, into a situation of such darkness that it shows you very clearly what the collapse of hospitality looks like. It looks like a rain of fire. He looked towards Sodom and Gomorrah,

and toward all the land of the plain. And lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. But those ancient warnings to extend hospitality, no matter what, represent an ideal. And ideals have a nemesis, politics. What have you learned about what happens to the ideal of hospitality, when it meets the politics? the vagaries of everyday life. Oh, I mean, forget it. Like, it goes out the window immediately.

Like, one of the great topics of literature is when hospitality fails because it does it all the time. It's always at risk. It's always uncomfortable. It's always something a little bit dangerous or just kind of nasty. It can always be turned to negative ends.

A lot of our life as a society is about protecting ourselves and never having to be vulnerable. And in a hospitality event, you have to be vulnerable. This openness is the vulnerability of a skin exposed in wounds and outrage. Vulnerability, the way I look at it, is very much in line with the French philosopher Immanuel Levinas. And he looks at vulnerability as a radical openness, like a wound, if you will, on your skin exposed. My name is Fatima Ibrahim.

I'm an English professor for Southern New Hampshire University. So this kind of openness is susceptible to danger or violence. Open like a city declared open upon the approach of an enemy. Openness and vulnerability, danger and violence. These tensions are contained in the word hospitality itself. We maybe don't always fully realize that the word, itself embeds both its meaning and its opposite, because the word hospice originally meant guest in Latin, and it means host, obviously. However, also in later Latin, it came to mean enemy.

And if we think about the word hostile, the word host is actually in that word, right? And so guest, host, and enemy all essentially derive from this one term. It brings the kind of weight of what the hospitable action is into sharp relief because we're not just welcoming our buddy. We're welcoming somebody who we don't necessarily know and who could cause us harm sometimes, you know, to the point of death. And as a guest, we're entering into a relationship that might be a little bit questionable, might be worrisome, might even be a real threat once we become vulnerable to somebody else's house and somebody else's rules.

Is that what French philosopher Jacques Derrida meant when he said there's always a bit of hostility and hospitality? Derrida always starts from the etymology and from the root of the word when he's trying to build his layers of meaning around concept. And I think he was endlessly fascinated by the way in which hospitality and hostility can't be peeled away from each other. We know that there are numerous displaced persons who are. are applying for the right to asylum without being citizens.

It is not for speculative reasons that I'm interested in unconditional hospitality, but in order to understand and to transform what is going on today in our world. How did he define unconditional as opposed to conditional hospitality? So, Derry Dahl is really interested in this concept that there is such a thing as unconditional hospitality. It's impossible to actually reach for it to exist in the human world, but that's the philosophical concept that he starts from. And that idea of unconditional hospitality is that when someone enters your space and you are in a position to take care of them, that you do so no matter what, no matter who they are, no matter what you know about them,

that there's just an unconditional yes. Even if the other deprives you of your master's, or your home, you have to accept this. It is terrible to accept this, but that is the condition of unconditional hospitality, that you give up the mastery of your space, your home, your nation. When we talk about conditional or transactional hospitality, what is the power dynamic? So the philosopher who really tries to think through the question of conditional or transactional hospitality is Kant, Emmanuel Kant.

He does not believe for a second that there's an absolute hospitality. No, no, no. The way you deal with hospitality is you measure your own risk assessment and you think about how dangerous it might be for you, what the rights of the other person in your household or in your country are, and then you negotiate all of that. So the power dynamic becomes about who's in charge, who's in control, and they are able to set the boundaries of hospitality and sort of, okay, you can be here, but only if you agree to abide by these rules. There are a lot of arguments in early modern England in particular,

but it happens all over the place, about how far hospitality should extend. Is it an ideal that covers everybody or is it only open to people that you trust? And in many cases, it was easier for people to welcome strangers if they looked and acted like them and not like strangers. Oh, no, no, no, only good English Christians. Nobody else deserves hospitality.

That kind of exclusivity persists in our own age. Rightfully being praised right now for opening their doors to people from Ukraine displaced women and children mainly. But these same countries are now being asked to explain why that warm welcome is not being felt by all, specifically displaced individuals who are Muslim or people of color. Already, we have heard stories of Nigerians, Indians, and Lebanese residents of Ukraine, also fleeing the assaults being pushed back from boarding trains to escape Kiev, also getting stuck at borders.

So I wrote a paper called the vulnerability of Anglo-Islamic hospitality in the early modern period. Fatima I examine the way. that hospitality occurred when the English traveled to the Ottoman Empire. And in that context, things could get fraught for both guest and host. The host could be vulnerable in the way that somebody could come in and invade the land, or more privately, if a guest comes in and doesn't respect the host's codes, whatever they may be. In terms of a guest, the vulnerability a guest may feel, in this case, we're looking at the British who come into the Ottoman lands as merchants or diplomats or just foreigners or

travelers. And they feel the vulnerability of trying to secure or preserve their English national identity. So that vulnerabilities felt on the guest in terms of becoming less English and more Turkish. And then you have the example of the chaplain William Beidolph who traveled to Aleppo at the request of the East India Company. And he writes about a time when he is offered food and shelter in sort of like a lodge, what you'd consider a motel. And the food and shelter offered to him is free of charge. The founder ordained that all travelers shall have their entertainment there of his cost.

He alloweth them bread, pilaf, and mutton. And he absolutely refuses to accept it for free and insists on paying for it because by paying for it, he's asserting some control and thinking that, you know, lest I assimilate too closely with these Turks, I better put down some payment because that means that I'm securing some distance between me and the Turkish host. We, scorning relief from Turks, sent unto the village where, besides our own provision which we brought with us, we had also other good things from money. And this particular bidalph, he actually brought with him his own chef.

as well and, you know, had the chef prepare his own food. So there's an example where there's an aversion to share a meal with the Turkish host because any kind of immersion into the Ottoman empire was often considered a turn to Islam or what the common phrase was to turn Turk. To turn Turk didn't just mean to convert to Islam, but any sort of interest in Turkish culture. So eating food, traveling there, wearing the clothes there, all of these things could indicate that somebody was close to apostasy, if not full-on conversion. So that vulnerabilities felt in terms of anxious fear of not being able to preserve one's nationhood and Christian selfhood at the point of Muslim contact.

You can see. the same anxiety playing out in 17th century Britain and the way it responded back then to a newcomer to its shores. Coffee. Interestingly, the Quran, which was first published in English, was in 1649, and the first coffee house came to England around 1650. So some of these writers would consider the introduction of coffee, they would associate that with the introduction of the Quran. And in fact, the many writers against coffee believed that drinking coffee, which first of all was a dark substance, could turn you physically dark, but it would also mean a moral degeneracy because at the time, unfortunately, you know, dark skin equated to moral degeneracy.

So you would be sinning inside your body morally, but also physically you would be, you know, They called it the Mahometan berry, and they ascribe to it this mysterious power that could put you under a spell to convert to Islam. The anxieties about coffee have waned. Because, well, now there's a coffee shop at every corner. The fear that a host society could be diluted or altered by offering hospitality is still very much with us. So once you have that openness, then the consequence of that is some kind of absorption. And so when you come away from that transformation, it could be positive or it could be negative. And so there's that fear of coming away changed.

You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada across North America on Sirius XM. in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayad. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important.

At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.caps.cavers.caiasts are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.cair to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often.

You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca.a. You're listening to The Stranger at the Door, a documentary about the politics of hospitality across time and space. It's part of our special series, The Idea of Home.

In a guest-host relationship, it's usually the host who has the power. Something that comes up in Arab Islamic poetry, but also in French political theory as well, that there's a way that this host-guest relationship is also reversible. This is a living room in the far north of Sweden. It's where a Syrian couple who derived as refugees are now hosting their Swedish neighbors. If you are not a host, you are a guest. It's like that.

The hosts are Ibrahim Muhammad Hadd Abdullah and Yasmin Mahmoud. My name is Ibrahim. I'm 33 years old. I studied the law. Then I became a political activist against the dictatorship against the dictatorial regime in Syria. Now I'm working as a teacher. My name is Yasmin. I'm from Syria. I'm Alachite. I have been living here in Sweden will be six years. Yasmin and Ibrahim fled Syria when the civil war started in 2011 and ended up in a completely expected place. They told us you will be going to an area called Bowden in northern Sweden. We tried to Google it, where is it, and we knew nothing about it. I remember we asked one of the security people in the camp,

where is Bowden? He told us it's here, pointing at the map. So we said, wow, it's far, and it's cold. We heard it was going to be minus 30. We have come from an area where the maximum was minus one. There's a pig difference. When we first arrived, we noticed it was a military. When we first arrived, we noticed it was a

military area. There were tanks and planes, and the army was present in the city. We had escaped war. We wanted to be around civilians to have a freer life. All the time, I feel like it's not my homeland. I don't feel I belong to that country. I don't feel because I feel myself like a guest all the time. So Yasmine and Ibrahim recreated the living room, or as it's known in Arabic, al-Madhaafa. What were you taught about hospitality? The question is, what is the lesson or the duress

or doleuze that you owe to a stranger who arrives on your doorstep? I remember to any person who'd come on the bed and dock on the I remember in my father, as I can't say we're a

place, it's not meant to go to the I remember in my childhood, Al Madafa was a sacred place in the home. It was prohibited

for us to play inside it. This was a sacred place in the home that is always ready to welcome guests, expected and unexpected guests. I'm not expected. And there, you can talk free. No one of them will tell the police, the secret police,

about what's your viewpoint about the politic situation in your homeland. And it's the first free place we had in all the Arab communities. Since we arrived in Sweden, we haven't been able to leave behind this thing we're accustomed to. That is part of our values. We can say that our home is open. Our Madafa is open, and we're still receiving guests. When Yasmine and Ibrahim first arrived in Bowdoin,

they lived in a building called the Yellow House. No one lived there, only a refugee family. If you say the Yellow House, it's mean a bad area here in Buden. But they invited people to visit them there anyway. We welcomed the first person. The first time she saw her. saw us or heard our names, she was afraid. You could say there was

Islamophobia. How how did you know how when she heard the name Ibrahim Muhammad? She was shocked. Her face showed it. Wow. So we started to

welcome her. She came here. After that, I recall she started calling us her Syrian family. I am going over to my Syrian family. It wasn't going to be possible for us to change the stereotype about us or our community without having opened our Madafa. So she was the first person. After her, we started to invite the rest.

One of the people they welcomed was architect Sandy Hila. When I was a kid, my nickname from my own family was Tfadalou Inna. Which means welcome at our place. Yeah, exactly. And indeed, I always felt that that hospitality is a way of life. My name is Sandy Hillal. I am a co-founder of the artistic practice called Dar, decolonizing architecture, art and research.

And my artistic practice is located between art, architecture and politics. Sandy had come to Bowden to work on a public art project about migration. I arrived to Bowden the moment that I know that I would be arriving to Sweden, to live there with my family. So it was not any easy arrival for me. It was like an arrival to a place where I know that it will become home. I am a Palestinian origin, but I studied in Italy architecture. And I have to admit that living in Italy for 13 years,

and accepting the proposal of integration of the Western society that if you will learn to be like us, we accept you, and this is the way to be integrated. And I speak Italian very well. I miss Italy more than my Italian husband. I cook very well Italian, yet Italian I never became. So my question was, I will arrive to Sweden, which is a very far away culture comparing to the Italian one.

What are my chances to try again to become a Sweden? I first went to the Yellow House, where I meant to do the project, and I began to meet with many refugees, but, you know, coming from a work where I worked for more than a decade with Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, where, of course, if you go there, you would understand that there is a very strong political subjectivity and political agency. You arrive to Budin, and you perceive that. the exact opposite, no people sitting in their rooms, passively waiting for the government to release their papers. She met person after person in Limbaugh, waiting not just for the papers, but to be able to leave Bogen and move south.

In one small, gloomy room, she had a conversation with an Iraqi refugee that led her to a revelation about hospitality. We were sitting in a very very much. very awkward way, on the bed, only one room, very, you know, I was deeply sad and feeling alienated and strange. And he was telling me that his wife would be arriving and that he cannot wait for them all as a family to go to Malmo. And I think that I was so depressed and telling him, my God, everybody wants to go to Malmo. I mean, nobody of you wants to live here. And he says,

you know what? Maybe you should meet Yasmin and Brahim. Many people, Ibrahim, come to Boden as their first place of arrival, and then they leave. What made you stay? Yes, I like that question, actually. Good. Yeah. We could in that short time create our community.

and that's all because of Al-Modafa and Al-Modafar role in our life. So we just could have many friends. We could get a new and a good house in the city because our relations, which we just create in Al-Madha. When I saw Yasmin and Brahim hosting us, I felt power coming back to the room. and I thought what is going on here, right? So why I do feel differently?

What is it that I felt in this room that made me feel that it is completely different than all the rest of the alienation that I felt all around me? And in there, the project began to come to me. Maybe what I would miss in Sweden is to be a host and is only to accept myself as eternal guests as they want me to think that I would be. With Sandy's support, Yasmine and Ibrahim created a community living room, a space where other refugees could exercise their right to host.

It was very simple. There was a yellow carpet surrounded by pillows with Arabic writing. These words, these would mean to be a great, like taras, a word, mean a lot to us as Arabs, like heritage, return, refuge,

emigration. It was fundamental to give a refugee the right to host. In Al-Maddafa, a person could show off their culture. They would make traditional food, perhaps make traditional coffee or tea, and host whoever they wanted. Maybe here I want to take one very important sentence for me that came in the Islamic Hadith that says, Addiafa, Therathetou Ayam and ma'a'ad, for Sadaqa.

Means hosting is three days and after that it becomes Sadaqa. Like a charity kind of idea. Yeah, a charity. Exactly, exactly. Your hospitality, the third day, transformed into charity. So the question is, if we arrive to a place,

the fourth day, who we are if we don't move between guests and hosts, Do we accept ourselves as charitable citizens, or do we want to act and add to the society? It's making me smile because it is so poetic and so true and such a good question. We evolved the idea and wanted to host politicians. As Arabs, we have fear from politicians. So we wanted to break that barrier between the refugee and the politician. The refugees started hosting the politicians, sit at the same table, to speak with him, to debate him. He could even force the politician to follow his tradition and habits in eating. So here we are switching the direction of power, even if only

for a few hours. in Arabic comes from DAFA. And in Arabic, DAFA means adding, hosting become a tool for us to demand our right to add to society instead of only understanding themselves as people that needs to be integrated and therefore assimilated and become similar to the people in the place. I actually see this as part of how I welcome my students. I do a lot of work with people who are new to Canada. And one of the things I say to them all the time is, please, please, on this territory, I feel it's your responsibility to teach your children your language, to ensure that your children

and you keep practicing and knowing who you are, that is actually part of the responsibility to coming to this land. Haudnishone Scholar Ruth Green. It's not about adopting or erasing who you are to try. Truly be hospitable means that we would want people to not lose who they are. Just like we're not going to lose who we are as Hodor de Chonet. Ruth Green returns to the two-row wampum belt, which the Haudenoshone gave to the Dutch when welcoming them to their territory.

This belt is five bands of white beads, purple beads, white beads, purple beads, white beads, white beads. Mine's little. But the idea is that as this belt, could be a mile long, the two parallel lines of purple would never meet. And so as I've been taught, these purple beads represent the Hodoroshonee worldview in one set of purple beads and those who have come to join us on this land in the other. You know, some people say it's a river, and we travel down the river in our canoe and the ship. The most famous phrase from the two-row wampum belt is,

As long as the river flows, as long as the sun rises, this friendship will continue. But the first bit was really important. It didn't start with as long as the river flows. It starts. You say you are like our father and we are like your son. But we say let's stand together as brothers and as long as a river flows. and as long as the river flows, as long as the sun rises, these will be our relations.

As I understand, that's a resistance to the colonization, but still a welcoming to build relationship. We have to be vulnerable to allow someone, a guest, to enter our home. homes. It can also be taken advantage of, of course, as happened with the settlers and the era of colonization. How does that change or affect your notion of hospitality? I agree. We have been greatly taken advantage of. However, I also see hospitality as part of being human. And so if I stop being hospitable. I've allowed white supremacy to take something else for me.

Hosting is something that belong to all of us. And I think that if we will give up with this, we are giving up with our own humanity and being able to interact in dynamic, you know, where we are moving between different power dynamics and we are hosting each other constantly, right? But in the 21st century, who has the right to host? I myself have been hosted in a huge number of very difficult places, creators who I visited in Calais or Borgil Barajni camp in Lebanon and Dehya camp in Palestine. And I know that a lot of those people, I don't have the right to host because of my state. I would love to host them, but I can't. Hospitality has always been political, according to historian Elena Asayev.

But the politics of hospitality have been complicated by the. the rise of the city-state, and later the nation-state. So perhaps one of the best examples for that is one of the tragedies called the Suppliant Women, which was written by Ischalus in around the late 460s BC or performed in the late 460s BC. May Zeus, the eternal suppliant, smile in mercy on this suppliant band, sea lifted from the slender sand that masks the mouth. of the Nile.

It's a bit of a weird story. I mean, there are these 50 daughters of Deneas. Let's leave that aside how he got 50 daughters, but they are from Egypt. And these 50 daughters are escaping a forced marriage that their cousins from Egypt are insisting on, and they flee to Argos. Outcast from that diviner land

by Syrian gardens fringed, we fly in exile. And in Argos, they land on the shores, and they and their father are at the altars, which is like a sanctuary, a protected space by the gods. So as long as they stay by the altars, they are protected. And they request hospitality or some kind of refuge from the king of Argos. And there's a very interesting change that I think, if you don't mind,

I can read a little bit of the play that captures exactly its change. So this is lines 365 to 75 for the listeners who might be interested in. in tracking that? What the king responds to their original request is he says, you are not sitting at the hearth of my house. It is the city as a whole which is threatened with pollution. It must be

the concern of the people as a whole to work out a cure. And so until I talk to all the citizens about these things, I cannot make you any promises or offer help. Now, in response to that, the suppliant women say to him,

You are the city, I tell you, you are the people, ahead of state, not subject to judgment. You control the altar, the heart of the city. From your throne, you are the one who rules on everything. Be careful, you do not pollute the state. Now, what's interesting in that is the question is, where is the threshold? Unlike Odysseus, who comes to the knees of Arte, who comes to the door of the house, they are not at any door. They are at an altar.

And then there's the question of who is this king? Does he represent the people? Why does he have to talk to the people? Is it not his community? And what that's all about is the question of whose responsibility is it in a democratic state? So all of a sudden, it kind of moves that responsibility. It also distances those who request asylum or hospitality from the people who are able to give it.

In the modern world, that distance is huge. We all live in a terribly unjust world, the world of borders and states of passport control and checkpoints, and it's a world of borders in which people's rights are intimately tied to their citizenship. And so living in this world, there's also these ethical injunctions and teachings that people try to inhabit in various ways. But the capacity to practice these traditions is already compromised. In accounting for maybe how the nation-state has shaped our concepts and our approach even to hospitality, I'd think maybe of a crisis that erupted at the border between Jordan and Syria while I was doing my field work there in 2018, where the Syrian regime had turned its attention to the south of Syria and was bombarding the province of Dar'a.

A bloodbath in the southwestern Syrian rebel stronghold of Dar'a. Russian and Syrian government jets and helicopters hit an estimated... Eventually nearly 100,000 people would reach the border with Jordan, seeking some kind of recourse or safe passage, and for a long time, Jordan had an open border and would allow refugees across. But this time, the government declared that the border would instead stay closed. This was a very public declaration that it was not going to match or it was not going to meet that obligation of hospitality. We do fill the agony of the Syrian people and the agony of our Syrian brothers, but there

are Jordanian priorities that we have to arrange, such as the security of Jordan. So honestly, we can't take the risk. Different social media streams started to fill up with people, you know, lamenting and supplicating and realizing the extent of basically of their very, you know, abandonment by the world system and the world of borders. On the other hand, within Jordan, thousands of people across the country insisted that, no, that in fact this obligation of hospitality of offering refuge, in fact, had to be met. Ordinary Jordanians in the border city of Rantha started a grassroots campaign this week to collect aid. Donations have poured in.

The Jordanian people are poor. Families come with their children carrying little stuff, whatever they can offer. We call upon the international organizations neighboring countries to stand by Jordan to rescue the Syrian brothers. And ultimately, there was enough pressure in the government, including from some Islamic organizations

and Islamic charitable organizations, that they finally found a way to compromise. They wouldn't open the borders, but they allowed aid to be sent across the border. I wonder if maybe I could bring in the Achenazi fisherman. Ache is a tiny fishing community in Indonesia. There was Rohingya refugees in 2015 at sea. And Indonesia refused to take them.

The international community also refused to take them. So they kind of appealed to the fishing community of Ache, which is the closest kind of coast that they were near. And the Ache fishermen, and this is despite the fact that they were told to not act, despite the fact they were almost threatened if they acted, still went and took in and brought these people from this stranded boat to their community. Local authorities say the fishermen found the group of 94 refugees on their rickety wooden boat, six kilometers off Sumatra on Monday.

And by doing so, they laid claim to the right to host. They acted in a sovereign capacity. They were asked, will you host us? By becoming the host, they are also taking sovereign action. And that's what they did. And that makes us expand the notion of what sovereignty is. When in conversation afterwards, and this was something that was carried up by Anne McNevin and Misfach, they basically said that there is a customary maritime law, which I think in their own language is Hukum Adat al-Laot.

And breaching that code means that all seafarers are risk. So we come back to that notion of reciprocity, of interdependence, of a recognition that there's a bigger world beyond the nation state. This is a really big question, but what do you think it would take to move away from conditional, transactional forms of hospitality in our own time? and perhaps practice something that's closer to the truer form of hospitality. Oh, that's a tiny question. What do you mean? That's easy. Yeah, I mean, obviously it's impossible, which is what makes it fun. I mean, there will never be an absolute hospitality that's practicable as long as there's people, I think. But that doesn't mean that setting it.

as a goal isn't a good thing. I think that the movement of human community in the modern world has generally been away from openness and towards closeness, towards atomization, towards the nuclear family, towards smaller groups that are distrustful of other groups. Hospitality is one of the key ways in which we fight against that,

which we open back up, in which we acknowledge and recreate the community that we are all held in. On Ideas, you were listening to The Stranger at the Door, a documentary about the politics of hospitality across time and space. This was the second installment in our special series, The Idea of Home. The series is produced by Pauline Holdsworth. Readings by Tom Howell, Greg Kelly, Muhammad Killani, Matthew Laysen Rider, and Nahid Mustafa. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas.

Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad. Go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.