An Alternate Witness

For those who would say that Islam is restrictive to women, and especially those who say that Shi'ism is the worst of these, I recommend this interview from my friend Chris's blog.

...since Election Day, I have been part of more and more conversations with Muslims in which it was either offhandedly agreed that Obama is Muslim or enthusiastically blurted out. In commenting on our new president, "I have to support my fellow Muslim brother," would slip out of my mouth before I had a chance to think twice.

"Well, I know he's not really Muslim," I would quickly add. But if the person I was talking to was Muslim, they would say, "yes he is." They would cite his open nature and habit of reaching out to critics, reminiscent of the Prophet Muhammad's own approach....

Asma Gull Hasan's article in Forbes Magazine, My Muslim President Obama, reflects many of the reasons I've also heard here in Jordan about why people here are so excited to see Pres. Barack Obama in the White House.

...Most of the Muslims I know (me included) can't seem to accept that Obama is not Muslim.

Of the few Muslims I polled who said that Obama is not Muslim, even they conceded that he had ties to Islam. These realists said that, although not an avowed and practicing Muslim, Obama's exposure to Islam at a young age (both through his father and his stint in Indonesia) has given him a Muslim sensibility. In my book, that makes you a Muslim--maybe not a card-carrying one, but part of the flock for sure. One realist Muslim ventured that Obama worships at a Unitarian Church because it represents the middle ground between Christianity and Islam, incorporating the religious beliefs of the two faiths Obama feels connected to. Unitarianism could be Obama's way of still being a Muslim.

I've heard this from many imams and sheikhs in the United States, when I say that I am Unitarian Universalist. "Oh, Unitarian? Well, that's practically Muslim!" Initially, it always strikes me that this is merely because the translation of Unitarian into Arabic, tawHeed, means "unity of God" (as opposed to trinitarianism: Father, Son and Holy Ghost), which is a central tenet of all Islam, or "oneness with God" which is the ultimate goal of Sufi Islam. But on further reflection, it becomes apparent that Unitarians and Muslims have a very simliar agenda of social justice, too, and see the world in a very similar way. There is an aya (verse) in the Qur'aan that says, "I have made you into tribes and peoples so that you might know each other better," and this is very much like the Unitarian view of the world: that all the varied cultures and religions of the world help us to understand ourselves, our communities, and our common humanity better.

The rationalistic, Western side of me knows that Obama has denied being Muslim, that his father was non-practicing, that he doesn't attend a mosque. Many Muslims simply say back, "my father's not a strict Muslim either, and I haven't been to a mosque in years."

This reminded me of all the times in the village that my students' mothers would say, "Do you see how Maryah dresses? Are you paying attention to how Maryah treats others? Have you noticed that she put her sweater back on because she thought your father was coming through the door? She's a much better Muslim than you are! Why can't you be as good a Muslim as Maryah?" They all knew I wasn't Muslim. One mother even suspected that I wasn't a believer of any sort, but it didn't stop her from telling her daughters that I understood Islam and lived the tenets of Islam better than they did!

Sometimes even the girls would say it to each other. Some of the neighborhood girls liked to come and cook lunch at my house once or twice a week. (It was a great deal for me, because they cooked, washed up, and scrubbed my floors to thank me for having them!) One day we had a particularly large group of the cousins over, and they kept saying they wanted to make more food, and I kept saying, "It'll be enough, it'll be enough!" And when we had all eaten our fill, there was no food left on the mat on the floor. The oldest of the cousins said, "Maryah, you cook by the sunna!" Sunna are the traditions of the Prophet Mohammad and his Companions. "Why is that?" I asked. Safa' replied, "The Prophet Mohammad said that one should never make more food than one can consume in one sitting." Of course, this made perfect sense in the Eighth Century Arabian Peninsula, without refrigerators to keep the food from spoiling. "You, Maryah, never make more food than you can eat in one sitting. We never do that. Our mothers always make enough for several meals."

Asma Gull Hasan's article, however, gets right to the heart of one of the things I love most about Islam. The most important thing in Islam is intention, and when it comes to Judgement Day, one's actions and one's intentions count equally towards one's eternal reward or punishment. Even if one was not a practicing Muslim, but had all the right attitudes towards his brothers and God, one can still achieve Paradise. I think this is what Ms. Hasan means when she says Pres. Barack Obama is a Muslim. He is a generous, well-intentioned man who tries to help others and create a more just local and global community as much as he is able, and this is the very heart of Islam.

It started with Taylor Mali. I wanted to go back and hear "Like Lilly Like Wilson Like," to relive that moment where he says,

And the eighth-grade mind is a beautiful thing;
Like a new-born baby's face, you can often see it
change before your very eyes.

I can't believe I'm saying this, Mr. Mali,
but I think I'd like to switch sides.

And I want to tell her to do more than just believe it,
but to enjoy it!
That changing your mind is one of the best ways
of finding out whether or not you still have one.
Or even that minds are like parachutes,
that it doesn't matter what you pack
them with so long as they open
at the right time.
O God, Lilly, I want to say
you make me feel like a teacher,
and who could ask to feel more than that?

Before I knew it, I was on YouTube, watching Taylor Mali pontificate on "Miracle Workers":



YouTube is addicting, it's no secret, and I got sucked in, watching Taylor Mali work his magic on the first episode of Def Poetry Jam with one of my favorite spoken word pieces, "What Teachers Make":



What can I say? I'm a teacher at heart! But once I was listening to Def Poetry, I was reminded of some of the more weighty poets that I love who have appeared on Def Poetry. I actually saw Amir Sulaiman for the first time at Indiana University - Bloomington at an event hosted as part of Muslim History Month by the Muslim Students Association, where he put 9/11 in perspective with "Danger":



But when it comes to putting 9/11 in perspective, no one has more lyrically expressed a perspective quite like hers better than Suheir Hammad in "First Writing Since":



Please, lose yourself in Def Poetry and other such spoken word on the Internet. I can spend hours listening to this kind of thing!

There's such a Catch-22 in all this conversation here in the Middle East about President Obama's character, intentions and potential actions. People are asking each other if President Obama really wants change in the Middle East, whether he really is the idealistic humanist democrat that his words portray him as, and how much the people who voted for him really care about his Middle East policy. I am also hearing and reading a lot of debate as to whether President Obama will rise above domestic concerns (read: the economy) and American self-interest (read: AIPAC) to engage his administration in the politics of the Middle East, if so, will the Congress support or impede him in such an endeavor, and can the United States even accomplish the peace, freedoms and prosperity that Arabs hope Obama will bring to their region. Many people here are optimistic, like the newest Jordanian blogger I'm following, The Arab Observer. Others are less trusting of rhetoric, including my friend Kinzi and many who responded to the Observer's opinion.

There's certainly plenty of debate as to how much power the American government has over the issue of Israel/Palestine, or of democratic and human rights reform anywhere in the region. Certainly the United States pumps plenty of money into controversial regimes in the region, starting with Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but definitely not ending there! If America cut off the tap, would that weaken oppressive regimes enough to be overthrown by the will of the people? If so, would the United States extend the same humanitarian aid to a regime that had overthrown America's former allies?

There's no doubt that foreign aid is needed in Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. If the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were to suddenly stop all its programs in part or all of the region, humanitarian crisis would surely follow. Saudi Arabia and Iran may have the oil resources to provide some sort of substitute for USAID, but would they extend that aid? If so, what strings would be attached, and how would people in the Middle East or beyond react? Judging by the reaction to Iran's support of Hamas and Hezbollah, which do provide extensive and vital social services in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon, I think the reaction of the Western powers would be far from desirable.

On the American side, there are plenty who question why we should help people in the Middle East who don't seem to want to help themselves. Of course, Black Iris made an eloquent argument in the post "Somewhere Near the Israeli Embassy In Amman...." for why it is so difficult for people in this region to press for change and reform from within. On the other hand, change and reform will never be successful if they are imposed entirely from without.

The whole debate reminds me of an amazing experience I had as an undergraduate at tiny Goucher College in Baltimore. Professor Emeritus Froehlicher, who had a dramatic life that included working for the resistance to the Nazis, and then coordinating the translators and interpreters at the Nuremberg Trials, convened a group of professors, most from the Modern Languages Dept, and me and my former roommmate. We each read the opinion pages of newspapers in different languages, and convened to share what we had found. One French professor invited the Johns Hopkins University professor who was teaching her Arabic to bring us the Arab perspective, and he showed us magazine after magazine calling for America to bring an end to Egypt's and the region's woes. America, he said, was the only country with the political, economic, military and cultural power to effect real change in the Middle East, and if Americans really believed in their founding principles, how could they not save the Middle East? He had to leave early, but it's the rest of the conversation that has really stuck with me.

Prof. Froehlicher had grown up under the Nazis. Most of the other teachers in the room had grown up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Russia. They started describing how they had felt the same way about America. If America really wanted to cover the world in democracy and freedom, why weren't they doing anything? Why wasn't the United States using its superpowers to tear down that wall, to fix their problems in the Soviet states and satellites?

But what really brought down the Berlin Wall, and ultimately the Iron Curtain? It wasn't American democracy and power. It wasn't American President John F Kennedy saying, "Ich bin ein Berliner," or Pres. Ronald Reagan saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Perhaps America and its presidents served as an inspiration, or as that vital ray of hope, but in the end, it was the people behind the Wall, behind the Curtain who brought it down. It was the grassroots resistance movements of the Polish Spring, the Velvet Revolution, and the Catholic Church. It was the ordinary East German citizens who chose to believe a bureaucratic error and converged peacefully on the wall. It was the lowly East German borderguards who made the humanitarian choice to disobey their standing orders to shoot anyone trying to cross that border. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, America may well have facilitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, but nothing America did directly caused it.

I hope that people in the Middle East take inspiration from Barack Obama, as Americans are doing, and do find the audacity to hope. But it is incumbent upon us all to remember that hope alone will never be enough. It is our responsibility, as Mahatma Ghandi said, to be the change we want to see in the world. It's not enough to believe in change; you have to work for it.

Yesterday I tried to wax eloquent on what I believe Americans know, don't know and want to know about the Arab world. Today, let me show you this book review of What the Arabs Think of America by long-time Middle East correspondent Andrew Hammond. I'm not impressed with the quality of the reviewer's writing, but I think Hammond's book must be an interesting read, and one that supports my own observations that, whatever Arabs may think of American policy, they do like Americans.

A year after the publication of the entertaining and well researched “Popular Culture in the Arab World,” Andrew Hammond has come up with another engaging title: “What the Arabs Think of America”. The author strongly dispels the notion that after Sept. 11 the Arab world — and especially Muslims — hates America. This book tries to show there is hardly any connection between the way Arabs feel toward American policies and American culture.

Anyone traveling through the Middle East is bound to notice signs of American consumerism, a lifestyle embraced by a large majority of Arab youth. According to the UN Arab Human Development Reports, about 38% of the population of Arab League member states are minors. Nowhere is this more visible than on Arab TV screens where western entertainment appeals to youth. Free-to-air satellite channels offer around the clock US sitcoms, reality TV, chat shows and movies.

Other reviewers have been more eloquent in their description and review of the book.

Review

“This is a well-documented and timely volume since there are currently few other works dealing with the same subject. The book is based on the author's....thorough knowledge of Middle Eastern countries, their history, and politics before and after 9/11/2001; interviews with Arabs of various political persuasions and social strata; his own witnessing of events; and writings of political analysts and novelists.”–MultiCultural Review

“[a] timely and informative study.”–Arab News

Product Description

For hundreds of years, pilgrims to Mecca have paused in the narrow mountain pass known as Mina to cast stones at the three pillars of the Jamaraat in a symbolic casting out of the Devil. Recently, someone added graffiti to the central pillar, four Latin letters of the English script - Bush. These days, Americans and America provoke strong opinions from Arabs of all sorts, from politicians and journalists to the ordinary men and women of 'Arab Street'. Their voices aren't always heard in the West, but for over a decade British journalist Andrew Hammond, based in the Middle East, has been listening to what they have to say, and in this book they are heard loud and clear. Many of the issues are political. What do the Arabs think of American support for Israel or its close relationship with Saudi Arabia? How have they reacted to the American occupation of Iraq? But American influence in the Arab world isn't limited to politics. What is the Arab view of American film, television or the latest hip-hop or rap music? And what, for that matter, do Arabs think of Americans themselves, their life-style, attitudes and character? Incorporating interviews with individuals of all sorts from all over the Arab world, What the Arabs Think of America gives voice to the unheard partner in a relationship in crisis. After an introductory chapter describing the historical background, six chapters are devoted to issues of crucial importance to Arabs: 1) 'Domestic America' (exploring Arab enthusiasm for American pop culture, admiration for the US as a land of freedom, and ambivalence about religion in America); 2) 'The Palestinians' (showing how US policy towards Israel and Palestine has come to dominate Arab views of the US in recent years); 3) 'The Iraq Project' (articulating Arab theories about American motives for the invasion and reactions to the occupation, including the Abu Ghraib scandal); 4) 'Peace with Egypt' (highlighting the general Arab view that America's brokerage of the 1979 Camp David agreement deliberately split the Arab world in its opposition to Israel); 5) 'The House of Saud' (reviewing Arab distrust of the close relationship between the ruling Saudi royal family and the US since the monarchy allowed US companies to drill for oil in the 1930s); and 6) 'The Sudanese Card' (exploring Arab dismay at American support of south Sudanese Christian separatists at war with the Islamic north). A short chapter speculating on likely future developments in the Arab-America relationship concludes the book. A Chronology, Glossary (of Arab institutions, political parties, historical events, etc.), Biographies (of key Arab figures) and Bibliography help orientate the reader.

So for those of my friends in America who are interested in learning more about what the Arabs think of us, and for those of you who are worried about my safety in this time of protests, I think this book would both be accurate and reassure you.

In my second year of Peace Corps, I taught English to the first, second and third grade classes. Perhaps the freshest of my first graders was Sarah, the daughter of an Arabic teacher who lived right next to the school. Sarah's sister Selsabeel was the star of my third grade and the darling of the teachers' room, and Sarah was determined to be different from her sister. I'm sympathetic to this; my sister was in a very similar situation, and eventually she transferred to another school to avoid being compared to me!

Sarah was clearly one of the fastest learners in my class, but determined not to let anyone know it. Sometimes I would walk around the room and ask the girls to point, say, to the number 3 in their books. With a big smirk, Sarah would point to the 4, the fox, the pencil, the 2, the ball.... Sometimes I'd wait for her to point to everything else on the page, and then ask her again to point to the 3, and she would start over, pointing to the fox, to the 1, to the pencil, to the 4.... Anything but the 3, which made it obvious that she knew exactly where the 3 was, but was determined not to let me know it. In addition to trying to act dumb, Sarah did her best to be disruptive. I would turn around to write on the board, and hear some little girl's voice, usually Bulqiis or another of my best students, say, "Miss Maryah, Sarah's sitting under her desk again!"

Every morning, when I entered the first grade classroom, Sarah would ask, "Miss Maryah, do you love God?"

"Of course I love God," was always my automatic response, and I would start class. Though an agnostic with polytheist inclinations at home in my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Maryland, in Jordan I described myself as a Christian, at Peace Corps' suggestion, and because UUism is hard enough to explain in English!

One morning, however, Sarah tried a different tactic of distraction as I entered the classroom. It was midmorning, with early morning flurries and no heat in the school, and it was cold! As usual that winter, I was wearing pants over second-hand Eighties stirrup pants, two wool sweaters, a wool cloak and my mother's gift from my trip home to Maine the summer before: a big fleece hat . "Miss Maryah," said Sarah in her chipper little voice, "you shouldn't be wearing that hat! You should be wearing a headscarf!"

Without really thinking about the fact that these were only first graders, most of whom had seldom left the village and probably never met another real, flesh-and-blood non-Muslim, I said, "I'm a Christian. I don't have to wear a headscarf." With older children, this was often (but not always!) sufficient explanation.

Immediately, though, another little girl asked, "What's a Christian?"

"Christians are of a religion like Islam," I said. "They worship the same God, but they have different customs. For instance, they don't wear headscarves." I thought this ought to do it: a fairly simple, non-judgemental statement that no parent could take offense to as prosthelytism, with carefully chosen pronouns to not dig myself too deeply into my habitual white lie of being a Christian.

Not so. "Miss Maryah?" asked someone else. "Are you a heretic?"

This hit a little closer to home, and perhaps made my response a little more vehement than necessary. "No, no!" I said. "Christians are People of the Book; they worship the same God as the Muslims. Christians aren't heretics."

"Miss Maryah?" asked yet another first grader. "Are you a pagan?"

Cringing inwardly, I said, "No, no!" Things were starting to get out of hand.

"Miss Maryah?" someone else inquired. "Do you love Satan?"

With a quick "no," I started class with our usual full-body review of the four verbs they knew in English. "Alright, ladies. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Jump! Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Turn around."

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Bedouin village in northern Jordan, it bothered me to no end that no one every said "shukran," the word we had been taught in training to mean "Thank you." In fact, my neighbors and students would laugh when I said "shukran," and ask me why I used that word so often. Even more bewildering to my new community was the way I would say, "No, thank you." They would protest, "But I didn't do anything! I just asked a question!" It was a long time before I began to appreciate the nuances of thankfulness in Jordanian culture, and to recognize that I was being thanked, but in ways that were so culturally strange to me that I did not initially recognize my neighbors' gratitude.

Months into my service, I began to complain to my closest colleague and friend, a Muslim American raised mostly in Pakistan, about the lack of gratitude for the work I was doing. It was she who explained to me the Evil Eye and related customs, which were also prevalent in Pakistan. It was, she said, considered very bad form to give compliments or thanks, because this might foster a sin of pride and bring down the Evil Eye upon the recipient. I found the idea of the Evil Eye strange and, I must admit, backward. Nevertheless, I used the mantra I had learned as a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholar, "Not better, not worse, just different!" and tried to accept that I would not be receiving thanks for my work.

In fact, as I eventually recalled, they had told us in training that we would probably not be thanked for our work. They had told us that the things we would do in the community would not fall outside the realm of the community's expectations of us, and thus would not merit thanks. Also, they pointed out, we would be invited for tea and meals, to engagement parties and weddings, and this would be because the community appreciated our efforts there. However, our trainers were primarily Jordanian themselves, few had even traveled outside the Arab world, and few had lived in the villages, where life is very different from the capital city, Amman. Over time, I began to unpack the cultural norms that they could not recognize behind their own descriptions of how Jordanians show appreciation.

Jordanian life, especially among families in the smaller villages that tend to be of nomadic Bedouin origin, operates on a basis of collectivism. In the desert, the individual perishes without the support of the community. Even in the villages of the semi-arid regions, Jordan is one of many cultures where it truly does take a village to support an individual. Under such conditions, everyone always helps everyone else.

Sometimes the girls next door would come over for English help while I was cleaning, doing laundry or cooking, and I would say that I did not have time just then, and they should come back later. Often their mothers would then come knocking, and the mothers would say, "If you are going to live among the Arabs, as an Arab, you may not say no when you are asked for help." They would explain that even when someone called the house, asking for the mother of the house, and she was a mile down the road visiting a friend, whoever answered the phone would say, "She's right here! Just a minute," and run down the road to fetch her. Once it had been pointed out to me, I saw that exactly this was the case.

I started thinking about "Thank you," and what it implies. To say "shukran" in Jordan is to imply that someone did something for me that was not needed or expected. Giving me a cup of tea is not occasion for "shukran;" guests expect to be offered tea. Receiving a plate of whatever my neighbor had made for lunch is not an occasion for "shukran;" she was also sending plates to her inlaws, and she considered me her spinster sister. "Shukran" is for an unexpected gift, or something above and beyond the daily exchange.

In time, I noticed that, while I was not being thanked, thanks was constantly being given. A daughter of the house would serve tea, and the guest would say, "God bless your hands." A child would bring home a high grade on an exam, and the parents would say, "God's will is done!" A neighbor would give us a ride home from school and we would say, "God have mercy upon you." We had been taught all these phrases in training, and been told that they were an important part of village life and courtesy. At first I avoided such phraseology; as a secularist who has not declared faith in any God, it felt fraudulent for me to use such God-speak. Eventually I came to understand what our trainers had known intuitively, that all these phrases meant "thank you," but by thanking God, there is no danger of attracting the Evil Eye. It was not until I had studied Islamic law and tradition more closely in graduate school that I realized an even deeper significance of the practice. If they thanked God for the things I had done, I would remain sufficiently humble, and I would understand that my place was to work for the good of the community, promoting the good and forbidding the evil, which is the essential core of Islam.

Living with the Bedouin in Jordan and learning their language and idiom helped me to see the world in a new way. As I embark on an academic career leading to a career as an Arabic interpreter, I find myself wondering about the interdependence of interpreters and the peace process. If I am the linguistic liaison between Arab and American parties, and at the end of negotiations, the Arab says, "God's will is done!", it may be unwise to translate this literally, because the American party is likely to understand this as a statement of religious conservativism, whereas perhaps the Arab's meaning is closer to "Thank you." Likewise, in English, perhaps it is worth considering how sincere my own "thank you"s are, and what cultural baggage they carry.