The other day I met Mr. and Mrs. A at a reception. They had never set foot in the Middle East, never had any close contact with an Arab or a Muslim man or woman, never studied theology, never read any translation of the meanings of the Qur’an, yet they were very critical of Islam and its followers and demonstrated a clear lack of understanding of Arab culture, the Muslim world and the situation in the Middle East.
Mr. A asked me all sorts of questions about the teachings of my faith. Mrs. A inquired about what life was like for women in my home country. They doubted the truth of my answers, which did not corroborate the inaccurate information they had acquired from the writings of authors known for their negative feelings towards all that is Arab and Muslim.
Mrs. A was confident that her knowledge of my part of the world was extensive and believed she possessed a magic recipe for promoting peace and security in our volatile region. Mr. A bragged that his interpretation of the sad events in Iraq was correct and his prediction of the future of the country was accurate. They were both of the opinion that all Middle East political and social problems would be solved if Arabs and Muslims dumped their backward culture, and adopted the values, the customs, the dress and the lifestyle of the “civilized world”.
The short encounter with the arrogant couple reinforced my deep conviction that cultural ignorance, cultural arrogance and cultural chauvinism are an axis of evil that must be fought and defeated.
Alexander Pope said, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” I wish to add that hubris, reliance on inaccurate information, dependence on wrong interpretations, lack of respect for world cultures and misunderstanding the real facts on the ground are fatal.
It is regrettable that our understanding and appreciation of world cultures is limited and our interpretation of many historical facts is often biased or distorted. It is a pity many Westerners acquire most of their information on the situation in the Middle East from sources controlled by an influential minority that has a finger in every important pie. It is sad that truth has long been buried under a mountain of lies and heaps of inaccurate information.
For example, from war zones and occupied territories we receive conflicting reports that leave us with more questions than answers. Different correspondents give us different accounts, different politicians paint different pictures, and different historians tell different stories. Many sources of information have lost their credibility, many official statements are hard to believe and many reports hard to decipher.
Our confidence in a number of influential figures has vanished. The integrity of many journalists is subject to question and the professionalism of many reporters is at stake. We no longer believe what we read and no longer trust what we hear.
In the unending war on terror, we do not know who is winning and who is losing, whether victory is favoring the militias, the militants, the insurgents or the forces of the coalition. Whether the mayhem in Iraq is a sectarian conflict or a full-fledged civil war. We do not know who is in a quagmire: The well-equipped army, the warring factions, or perhaps both. We do not even know what constitutes victory or what democracy and freedom really mean.
Every now and then a leaked classified document adds to our confusion and a new piece of information underscores the limitation of our knowledge. Were we not all surprised at the revelation by the New York Times that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had told President Bush before he resigned that the administration’s strategy in Iraq was not working and proposed changes, including possible troop reductions?
Every day scores of Iraqi civilians are injured or killed, yet nobody knows the exact number of the dead, orphaned and handicapped. Thousands have been arrested and placed behind bars, though their guilt has never been established. Detainees at Guantanamo Bay are phantoms. Their numbers are not revealed, their names and their identities are not known and their crimes might remain forever a mystery.
Leaked information tells us that many of the so called “terrorists”, languishing in prisons since God knows when, are innocent civilians, who were abducted and sold for a substantial sum of money.
In the not too distant past, suspects were innocent until proven guilty. Today they are pronounced guilty the moment they are captured and have no recourse to legal process and no hope of a fair trial.
In our confused and confusing times, a substantial majority is searching for the elusive truth and eager to escape from the state of ignorance it is stuck in.
Charity organizations, human rights groups and interested wealthy “global citizens” may wish to consider establishing travel agents specialized in the organization of cultural tours to places where bloody violence and deadly conflicts rage. Such tours would include visits to modern important sites: Infamous prisons, where innocent suspects are tortured, humiliated and forced to admit crimes they had never committed; cemeteries, where masses of innocent victims have been buried; hospitals short of electricity and clean water, where patients have surgeries without anesthetic and doctors perform miracles with the help of primitive surgical instruments; families who have lost their shelter and their loved ones, or whose loved ones have lost a leg, an arm or their precious eye sight in conflicts that could have been avoided.
Tourists would have a chance to listen to heart-breaking stories about the suffering of innocent citizens and be given an opportunity to participate in any funeral of their choice, from a list that grows longer by the day. They would be encouraged to frequent places, where they would rub shoulders with severely injured men, women and children and be allowed to see dead bodies of babies, shot and killed with weapons made in the West.
Tour brochures would include the, bloody, heart-breaking pictures of innocent victims of our endless war, which Western media often conceals with enviable excuse of “out of respect for its sensitive public.” Trips to the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq and Lebanon would be highlighted and highly recommended to individuals, who aspire to become specialists in Middle East affairs.
At the end of their cultural tour, tourists would realize that the young soldiers, who kill unarmed men, women and children, demolish homes and smash livelihoods, risk their lives in the process and are themselves the victims of politicians, who have never set foot in a battlefield and who never place their own children in the line of fire.
They would understand that the Arab culture is too deeply rooted to be eradicated and Muslim traditions are too cherished to be wiped out. They would see for themselves that Arabs and Muslims are proud of their way of life and would not trade it for any other. They would discover that Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic, because they themselves are Semites. They would agree that might is not right, that invading sovereign states is not just and that destroying cities with sophisticated weapons and killing innocent citizens with cluster bombs would never make the world a safe place.
Above all, they would acquire the precious skill of distinguishing between truth and falsehood and develop the rare capacity of spotting a lie the moment it shows its ugly face.
