Do we not sometimes meet people, who though they have illustrious titles and impressive academic degrees bore us with their dullness and disappoint us with their cultural ignorance, their gullibility and their inability to see beyond their noses?
Do we not often meet persons, from modest social backgrounds, with modest formal education, who impress us with their wisdom, their self-assurance, their knowledge, their deep perception and their ability to read between the lines?
Perception, poise and world savvy cannot be acquired by spending years in the confines of academic institutions, where rote learning is the norm and archaic teaching the practice. Nor can they be attained by passing one’s life in a closed, secluded society, where one is over protected and the outside world is kept at bay. They can only be obtained by interaction with people from various backgrounds and contact with different world cultures. A long walk through the labyrinth of life, a constant strive to untangle life’s interwoven threads, a good understanding of life’s intricacies, an unrelenting attempt to develop one’s ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood and continuous efforts to sharpen one’s analytical skills can lead to wisdom.
I am one of those old fashioned people who enjoy reading a book, a magazine or a newspaper while holding a hard copy in my hand. I always look forward to the weekend, when I have time to read my favorite newspapers and catch up on news that I miss during the week.
I buy my papers and magazines at a little shop close to my home. If I am late picking them up, the friendly shop owner saves them for me. It is a privilege regular customers enjoy.
Madame Savante opened her shop thirty years ago. She is wise, knowledgeable and possesses a superb sense of humor. She is not a university graduate, but she is interesting and has rich life experiences. She was born in Africa to a French family, had traveled extensively in her young days and speaks three languages fluently. She was widowed during World War 1 and had to raise two children on her own.
Her insight and her understanding make one wonder if she reads most of the printed materials she sets her hands on before parting with them. She likes to discuss politics and social issues with her customers, when time permits. On weekends, her small shop resembles a debating society.
She does not hesitate to express her true opinion about the press. She calls international correspondents, who report events with accuracy and depict the facts on the ground with precision, “rare gems”. She calls columnists, who embellish their stories, twist facts, use distorted logic to support controversial points of view, “cheer leaders”. She refers to writers, who search for problems, promote suspicion, pour oil on burning fires and create animosity between the Muslim world and the West as “scavengers,” and “hate-merchants”.
She likes to compare the press to the world of fashion. She calls journalists, who veer with the wind of power, flatter and praise the mighty in order to win favors “fashion designers”. She refers to their writings as “made— to-measure items”. She describes regions that are constantly in the news as “classics” and others that periodically catch the attention of the international community as “les nouvelles collections”.
To Madame Savante, the Middle East is a classic. It was fashionable in the past, it is fashionable today and it will be fashionable in the future. It is the cradle of three great world religions and it hosts shrines holy to Muslims, Christians and Jews. Its history is fraught with stories of invasions, cruel occupations and wars of liberation. It has rivers of fresh water, seas of warm blood and wells of flowing tears. It is an important laboratory for testing new weapons and upgraded war machinery. It is also the regions with the world’s largest oil reserves.
During the war on Afghanistan, she used to say that Afghanistan was the new fashion for fall and winter 2001. When Iraq was invaded, she reminded customers that interest in Afghanistan had waned and that the land of the Euphrates was “the in-thing”.
She was over the moon when leaders of the G-8 countries met in Scotland last July. She advised her customers to forget Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East, where there were so many tragedies, so much death and so much bloodshed and focus instead on the black continent. Africa, she said, had just become “a la mode” and that, with its wealth of diamond, gold and oil and a history of slavery, occupation, civil wars, famine, ethnic-cleansing, draught, poverty, corruption and fatal diseases, it was bound to become “classic”. She prayed that the place that witnessed her birth eighty years ago would not sink back into oblivion, once it had greased the spinning machine.
Madame Savante was disappointed when London won the bid to host the Olympics. She said the city of clouds had nipped the hopes of the city of lights in the bud and, as a patriotic French woman she had taken a firm oath not to spend her 2012 summer holiday in the British capital and never to eat fish and chips on Fridays.
The lady was very sad and truly sorry, but not surprised, when London was attacked last July. She lost her smile when Sharm El-Sheik was hit by terrorism a few days later. She reminded her customers that long before Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism struck India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Japan, Spain (prior to last year’s train bombing) and Egypt, yet no war on terrorism was declared. She regretted that for years the West wrongly believed that terrorism was a national, regional or a Middle East problem, with no global repercussions. She wondered if London’s suicide bombing could raise a belated awareness that we lived in an interdependent world, shared a common destiny and that the war on terrorism could only be won if just and fair solutions are found to chronic, international problems.
After King Fahd, may Allah rest his soul in peace, was buried, I wanted to find out how the world reacted to our loss and what people in the West thought of the simple, democratic burial of an eminent Muslim king and the seamless succession. I also wanted to read commentaries written by critics who had rarely portrayed our culture in a favorable light. I bought eight newspapers and two magazines. A customer gazed at me in amazement and asked why I bought so many papers, when most were in the habit of exaggerating or distorting facts. He advised me to save my money, follow his example and purchase one newspaper only everyday, because the more I read the more confused and the more depressed I would become.
In the evening, after I had finished reading the newspapers, I remembered the advice of the sensible stranger at the newspaper shop. I also remembered the famous popular American humorist, writer and lecturer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better know by his pen name Mark Twain, who once said “never let school interfere with your education”.
Had Twain lived in the 21st century, read our newspapers and witnessed the mess our world is in he might have added, “take what you read with a grain of salt. Never let the press influence your mind or interfere with your sound judgment”.
Madame Savante is right. It is a world of fashion.
— Ibtissam Al-Bassam is a staff member of UNESCO. The views expressed are hers.
