Thank you for your question.
Because, of course, we have to consider that post-Arab uprisings elected leaders in most countries—maybe Jordan and Tunisia now being the exceptions—who have less credibility than they had before, rather than parliamentarians, we're seeing the emergence of non-state actors. As I described, they're the ones who are in conflict. They're the ones who are making these kinds of calls.
What I think might be important if you take a country like Egypt, one thing that could be helpful, if you're talking about the idea of delegations, there is an institution called Al-Azhar, for example. The head of this institution is appointed by the Egyptian state, and that's always been true, but it's a religious institution. As I mentioned earlier, an institution like this—even though its legitimacy and how much respect it has in the Sunni world is debatable—as a state institution, is an institution that the west could maybe deal with in the kind of forum and format you're talking about. Their credibility has been hurt over time. There's a big debate in this institution among the religious scholars about the role of the state in religion, about Islamic interpretation. Perhaps it could be a player in the kind of thing you're talking about.
These institutions exist everywhere. They exist in Lebanon. There are Shia institutions, Sunni institutions. They've all weighed in on these issues, but there is no centralized way for them to exchange their ideas.
Now that these non-state actors are transnational, what happens in Lebanon doesn't stay in Lebanon. What happens in Syria doesn't stay in Syria. There's even more of a need for these kinds of, not parliamentary, but religious institutions to come together to try to sort out some of these issues.
I'll just give you a small example. Two weeks ago here in Washington a delegation of tribal leaders from Anbar province came to lobby the United States government to ask for more help in fighting ISIS. Some of these kinds of organizations are not part of the state necessarily, but they have a lot of power within Arab societies. I think that governments need to deal more with these kinds of nebulous organizations.