Alastair Crooke urges the West to try to better understand Muslims.

By ROBERT F. WORTH


BEIRUT, Lebanon - Talking to Islamists is the new order of the day in Washington and London. The Obama administration wants a dialogue with Iran, and the British Foreign Office has decided to reopen diplomatic contacts with Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group based here.

But for several years, small groups of Western diplomats have made quiet trips to Beirut for confidential sessions with members of Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist groups they did not want to be seen talking to. In hotel conference rooms, they would warily shake hands, then spend hours listening and hashing out accusations of terrorism on one side and imperial arrogance on the other.

The organizer of these encounters is Alastair Crooke, a quiet, sandy-haired man of 59 who spent three decades working for MI6, the British secret intelligence service. He now runs an organization here called Conflicts Forum, with an unusual board of advisers that includes former spies, diplomats and peace activists.

Mr. Crooke has spent much of his career talking to Islamists. In the 1980s, as a young undercover agent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he helped funnel weapons to jihadists fighting the Soviets. Later, he spent years working with Hamas and Fatah as a negotiator for the European Union, and helped broker a number of cease-fires with Israel between 2001 and 2003. He earned a reputation for courage and tenacity, but in person he is disarmingly polite and mild-mannered.

The mission of Conflicts Forum, which he founded in 2004, resembles a kind of blueprint for the Obama administration’s current outreach efforts: to“open a new relationship between the West and Muslim world.”

Yet Mr. Crooke, who is legendary for his deep network of contacts among Islamist groups across the Middle East, is not sanguine about the prospects for mere dialogue, especially with Iran.

“I think there is a real fear there will be a process of talking past each other,”Mr. Crooke said.“The Iranians will say,‘we want to talk about justice and respect.’The U.S. will say,‘are you willing to give up enrichment or not?’”

To get past that impasse with Iran, and with Islamist groups generally, the West will need to change its diplomatic language of threats and rewards, Mr. Crooke said.

Mr. Crooke has spent the past few years trying to explain that to suspicious Westerners, in a stream of articles, speeches and conferences. Recently, he has taken his explanatory efforts a bit further. In a new book,“Resistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution,”he avoids the most controversial subjects, like Israel and the status of women in the Islamic world.

Instead, he focuses on what he calls the core of the Islamist revolution, which he defines as a metaphysical resistance to the West’s market-based definition of the individual and society.“It seemed to me there was a real need to understand what was happening inside Islamism better,”he said.