Behind the mask of perfection hides the flawed truth
How many times have you heard people repeating this sentence before,” you would not see this in the western world,” or “If he was a westerner you wouldn’t have seen him act this way.” But why do Human Rights defenders in the Arab world constantly base their criticism on comparing between two different societies? Why are they deliberately trying to spread the view that their own society is a less civilized society that is a million miles away from the western perfect society?
Although Canada is a multicultural society, the statistics of census of population have shown that the total number of interracial couples in 2006 was only four percent from the total number of 7,482,800 couples there. Also, the Canadian security intelligence investigations had conducted a poll in 2009 that have shown that racial crimes are up by 42 percent than it was in 2008, while the most common crimes were racial crimes with more than a half of the total number of hate crimes; religion, and sexual orientation had their fair share of the total hate crimes as well, with numbers of 29 percent that was reported to be crimes because of religion and 13 percent were crimes because of sexual orientation.
I can never forget a story I was told, of a young Saudi whose mother was Canadian, and his father was Saudi. He told me that when his father was studying for his Ph.D. around 30 years ago he met a Muslim Canadian woman with an admirable conservative personality.
One day he decided to ask her hand in marriage, so following his Islamic teachings and traditions, he went to her father’s house to ask for his blessings and agree to him marrying his daughter. Filled with hope and optimism he sat with her father expecting nothing less than warm open arms welcoming him to their family.
Yet the answer was far from what he expected; he saw a hesitant old man desperately trying to give a convincing reason for his refusal. He said, “You are from a totally different background you can never understand nor give my daughter the life that she deserves.” The man left the house unconvinced and with a broken heart and he thought to himself, “if we are both Muslims and with the same level of educational and intellectual background then how is it possible that I will not be able to understand her? How would I not be able to make her happy?
A few weeks later he asked the young woman he wanted to marry, why didn’t her father accept him? After insisting on knowing the true reason behind his refusal, the answer came to him as a shock; she said that he refused the marriage simply because the man’s skin is brown, it wasn’t because he was from a different background or ideology as he claimed before.
The determined young Saudi went back to the father’s house and spent many hours telling him that the Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) was strictly against racism, and as a Muslim it was his duty to accept and follow the teachings of the prophet.
He said, “give me a good reason and I promise you I will never step foot in your house again, just don’t let that reason be a racial one.” After many attempts the father gave up because of his daughter’s pressure and reluctantly agreed to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to that man.
The story shows that good and evil, acceptance and racism, tolerance and sectarianism exist everywhere. That Plato’s utopia is a fairytale far from our reality, and that both in the Arab and the Western world there equally exists those who are far from perfect, those who feed their souls on hate, but also there are those who are enlightened individuals who want to make the world a more peaceful place for us all.
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