WELCOME to Saudi Arabia, the country that has kept its friendship with the United States of America over the decades since that historic meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, spanning over 12 American presidents and four Saudi kings.
Welcome to an Arab world full of hope in your presidency; and welcome to the world of Islam where hearts and minds expect a better understanding of “them” by the type of person you are, Mr. President. It is certain that during your visit to the region topics and issues of security, oil and nuclear proliferation will get the lion’s share of your schedule — with precious little time left to look beyond the briefing books and beyond the pressing crises and into the open hearts and minds of those welcoming you.
But why such an overwhelming hope and expectation in you Mr. President?
Some earnestly feel that they can relate to the same frustrations you had felt for young black men growing up in America. The emotional wrestling match they had to go through, where blackness, in your own words Mr. President, was, “at best a refuge, at worst a trap. Where the only thing you could choose as your way out was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent.”
It was not too long ago that Richard Wrights described the predicaments of blacks in his novel “Native Son”. The greatest threat to the hero of the novel, a kid from Chicago named Bigger, arises when two people try to befriend him, to treat him as an equal. Their attitude threatens the identity which white society has thrust on him — the identity of fear, inferiority, and despair. This generosity endangers Bigger’s defense reflexes without in anyway ensuring him against the vengeance of that society. He half unintentionally murders the girl and embarks upon a grim process of self-discovery. Confidence could only come again through action so violent that it would make him forget.
You see, Mr. President, this caging is not foreign to Arabs and Muslims. For many people living in the West, Islam has remained for too long outside their immediate reality. Far too frequently Islam has been “essentialized” to the extent that many have failed either to notice or to acknowledge the variations and intense debates that exist within Islam.
Myths and partial images taken at face value have for long affected and often distorted understanding about Islam when viewed from the West. Commentators have frequently regarded modernity and Islamic tradition to be diametrically opposed to each others in Muslim societies.
In their view, to be a modern, just, dynamic and economically well-off society is to become Westernized. And to become Westernized is to submerge one’s own identity into that all-powerful culture of a Western world whose skin is white, economy is capitalist and politics is liberal.
This prescription for progress was, however, almost impossible to cash. The Western powers of our modern age did not come to the developing world as holders of democratic ideals, but rather as colonial powers whose basic aims were, and still are, to exploit, make use of and integrate countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into a dominating structure of an advanced West. A policy of subjugation that has been reinforced by a conviction that these other cultures were incapable of progress. Edward Said in his “Orientalism” quotes from Cromer’s “Modern Egypt”: “The mind of Oriental, like his picturesque street, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of most slipshod description. Although the ancient Arabs acquired a somewhat higher degree of the science of dialects, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty...”
Perhaps the most painful example of the trauma experienced by those who wanted to follow the modernization road that leads to the West is told by the encounter of the colored man with the “Modern West”. Fanon was at some point still dedicated to integration on the bases of equality but soon discovered that the colored man discards his dreams of integration when he learns two things: first, that by integration the white man means be like me; second that the white man is convinced that the black man can never be like him, can never be as good as he is.
Thus, the same frustrations, emotional wrestling match and rage rose within the Islamic and Arab world to either build walls of isolation, rejection and refusal or to be angry and try to hit back, and then get trapped even more in a series of categorizations that pour out of think-tanks, the media, and in popular culture.
Mr. President you are no stranger to the dynamics of Muslim societies. You know first-hand how Kenya’s post-colonial politics nearly destroyed your father, the Harvard-trained economist, just for telling people “that tribalism was going to ruin the country and that unqualified men were taking the best jobs.” And how the Indonesian engineer, who became your stepfather Mr. President and taught you how to defend yourself and how to change a tire, had changed from the idealist who went to the University of Hawaii to an incommunicative man intent on surviving in the new regime that overthrew President Sukarno, and massacred communists and ethnic Chinese. But there is a deep hope.
Throughout your career, Mr. President, as a community organizer in Chicago, editor of the Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator and US senator, political analysts affirm that you internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions that they might have produced. That you learned Mr. President to slip back and forth between the black and white worlds understanding that each possessed its own language, customs, and structures of meaning; convinced that with a bit of translation the two worlds would eventually cohere. That is why you are now the president and that is why when people look now, they don’t see, to borrow your rhetoric, a black America or a white America but only the United States of America. You have bridged that gap Mr. President. This is why the expectations, the aspirations, and convictions that you Mr. President can understand, relate, share, internalize and cohere; that you can cross the bigger gap, cool the rage and face up to the frustrations in the Arab and Muslim world.
That you can see and hear them the same way you saw and heard your father when you wrote while in Kenya: “I see him in the school boys who run past us, their lean, black legs moving like piston rods between blue shorts and oversized shoes. I hear him in the laughter of the pair of university students who sip sweet green tea and eat samosas in a dimly lit teahouse. I smell him in the cigarette smoke of the businessman who covers one ear and shouts into a pay phone; in the sweat of a day laborer who loads gravel into a wheelbarrow, his face and bare chest covered with dust. The old man is here, asking me to understand.”
And to understand Mr. President their religious feelings the way you understood the black church: “The desire to let go, the desire to escape, the desire to give oneself up to a God that could somehow put a floor on despair.”
There is no better place to do this than in Saudi Arabia. This country, Mr. President symbolizes Islam, its leader prides himself on being in service of Islam’s Holiest Shrines. It is also, the birthplace of everything Arab. It is in a shared effort between your presidency, and all that it symbolizes and represents, and King Abdullah’s bold vision of peace, of dialogue both within Islam and with other cultures and belief, and his relentless pursuit to make this country a Kingdom of Humanity that the gap can be bridged. In King Abdullah and you, Mr. President, we have two leaders who are making history; and what is a better history to make than bringing better understanding, mutual acceptance, shared values, and common endeavors between the world of Islam and the West so that all can see the common thread of never-ending fusion and human contacts that render all world history as one process of human interaction and progress; and that there is no final form of human society.
— Iyad Madani is a Saudi writer based in Jeddah.
