Book fair!
Sunday is the first day of the working week over here, which means that they’re just like Mondays in the states. Once you’re through with work/school, you really don’t have much motivation to get out and do anything. It’s back to the grindstone, and you’re having withdrawals from whatever you were doing on the weekend.
I was ready to go back home and do nothing for the rest of the day. However, there was one little problem. We have these language learning journals that we’re supposed to fill out daily, and one of the requirements for these journals is that you get in two hours of speaking time. Crap.
So I came out of the language center, and I saw this mixed group of Arabs, Europeans, and Americans out on the steps, just hanging out and talking. I noticed a few of my Arab friends that I haven’t hung out with in a while, and so I thought “hey, here’s an opportunity to at least get in half an hour before I head back.”
These Arab friends are pretty cool. They like to hang out in the language center because they’re all learning different languages, and most of them speak English fairly well–but not so well that they don’t need help. It’s a perfect tradeoff: we help them with their English, and they help us with our Arabic. They’re generally always around, which means that it’s really easy to just walk up and say hi.
So there I was, hanging out with these Arab kids, speaking a mix of English and Arabic, when one of them says “Hey, there’s a book fair going on down by the jusr iz-zara’! Let’s go check it out!”
If you know anything about me, you know that I LOVE books. Pound by pound, I think I own as many books as I own anything else. Bookstores are like black holes that suck me in and never let me out. since I didn’t have anywhere else that I needed to be, I was all for checking it out.
To put this all in context, you’ve got to understand that different kinds of specialties attract different kinds of people. Once you’ve chosen a major and become embedded in it, you start to notice that you have a LOT in common with all the other people who’ve made the same choice as you. For that reason, you tend to understand these people more than people who are doing other things in their lives. I’m not an Arab, and there are all kinds of things about Arab culture that I don’t understand, but I do understand the kind of personality type that tends to be attracted to language studies. For that reason, it was REALLY easy for me to hang out with these Arab kids from the language center. There was this connection that we had that made it easy to understand each other, even though we come from completely different cultures and backgrounds. Honestly, I felt just like I was hanging out with my friends back home, the connection was that good.
On the way down, we got onto the subject of terrorism, and I found out that this one girl is from Zarqa and knows the family of Al-Zarqawi fairly well (remember Al-Zarqawi? He was the second in command of Al-Qaeda–before a US missile killed him in Iraq. I’m not going to lie: that was a happy day.)
She started talking about how she doesn’t think that Al-Qaeda is all that we make it out to be, that the Zarqawi’s are good people and she thinks that the US government is just making up a bunch of stuff up to make people look like terrorists who really aren’t. All the people in the media are just liars and the Jews have got their fingers in everyone’s pie.
The thing that made this so funny was that this was NOT some backwards girl who was totally alien to me. In fact, of all the people in this group, I felt that I could read her better than any of the others. She’s way friendly, too, and loves to talk about all kinds of stuff. She’s a lot like my sister Kate, in fact.
I could tell that we had some serious differences and weren’t going to agree on anything, so I diffused things by talking in vague generalities and changing the subject in subtle ways. It worked, but not before we had an interesting talk about how you should never make an argument without having the logic to back it up.
From there, I got to talking with Uthman, this European student from Turkey who’s out here studying Arabic. He’s actually attending a university in Virginia, and we got on a very interesting discussion about Israel (the modern state of Israel) and the Bible. This got on to an even more interesting discussion about freedom of speech in American universities, and how ideologically restrictive the academic atmosphere is back in the states. We were exactly on the same page. Use the word “Palestine” instead of “Israel” and you’re slammed as an anti-semite, even if you’re describing the occupied territories that legally belong to the future Palestinian state. Disagree ideologically with your professors and speak what you really believe, and these east coast institutions will find all sorts of creative ways to punish and silence you. This, of course, gave me the perfect opportunity to talk about how that’s TOTALLY not the case at BYU–that you can speak your mind, criticize Israel, disagree with your professors, and your opinions will be heard and valued, even when people disagree with them. It’s true, too–BYU is probably one of the most moderate universities in the United States, even though (ironically) it’s located in the middle of the reddest state on the map. That tells you something about how “open minded” the self-proclaimed liberals are, doesn’t it? But I’m getting sidetracked. Needless to say, it was a VERY enjoyable little discussion.
We climbed up the hill to this book fair, and the first girl I was talking with started acting all melodramatic about how far away this place was, how difficult it was to walk there, etc. This, of course, opened up the perfect opportunity to tease her about how “baykha” she was, but I think she was asking for it. So we had this speedwalking race and had a fun time just joking around all the way up to the top of the hill.
The book fair was AWESOME. I’m DEFINITELY going back tomorrow. There were representatives from all sorts of Arab publishers, including some Saudi foundation that was giving out copies of the Qur’an with the English and Arabic text side by side. High quality stuff, too–I’ve seen copies this good going for eleven and twelve JD in town. They were giving them out for FREE. Besides that, I got a copy of Khalil Jibran’s The Prophet, with the English and Arabic texts side by side (ahhhh! I’m in heaven!). There was TONS of other stuff, too. It was REALLY cool just to wander around and check it all out!
I was browsing around with this girl from Zarqa, and I learned that she’s really well read. We passed a stack of Danielle Steele novels, and she asked me all about the romance genre back in the states. I told her that it’s really popular, even though some of the stuff can be really trashy, and started pointing out some Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte as the higher quality stuff. Turns out, she’s already read almost everything that those two authors wrote! We stumbled upon a bunch of literary books in English, and she was all over them (”ooh, it’s Chekhov! I love Chekhov!”), and as we passed the tables full of literary books by Arab writers, she would pull out different ones and say “this is SUCH a good writer!” or “I read this one, but I HATED it!”
One of the books that she pulled out that she really liked was actually a translation from Spanish into Arabic. The title is “the motorcycle diaries” or something like that, and it’s basically the autobiography of Che Guevara. I asked about it a little further, and found out that Che Guevara is one of her heroes. Che Guevara–that communist Cuban who’s picture is so fashionable among rebellious American teenagers who have no clue who he is or what he did.
I don’t know why, but Che Guevara is AMAZINGLY popular out here in the Middle East. His picture is everywhere. Even when I was walking around in Kerak, we passed a bookstore with his picture up on the window. Practically every hat shop in the open air markets of Egypt has a cap with his picture on the front of it. Imagine as popular as he is in the states and multiply that by five, and that’s the Middle East. It’s actually kind of funny.
A little while later, we saw a book with a swastika on it, and she pointed to it and said, “ooh, that’s bad.” Naturally, I agreed, but I wanted to draw her out so I asked about it. She said “yeah, the nazis were really evil–but I don’t think Hitler himself was all that bad. His autobiography, Mein Kempf, was REALLY good. He was a man who really struggled to make his way and be his own man.”
Mein Kempf? The book that launched Hitler and the Nazi party to power??? Holy cow!
This reminded me that I recently saw a copy of Mein Kempf translated in Arabic. Guess where I found it? Safeway. That’s right–safeway, the American grocery store. It was so surprising that I actually took a picture and put it up on my photoblog.
I told her how Hitler is considered as evil as Satan himself back in the states, which she found really surprising. This attracted the attention of on of the other language center girls, who jumped into the conversation and said that she had read Mein Kempf as well–and that she really liked it too. They both felt that Hitler was grossly misunderstood, and that he wasn’t nearly as bad as we make him out to be.
CRAZY.
It was quite an interesting hanging out with these Arab kids, discussing politics and literature and getting a feel for the way they see the world. We all had a really good time hanging out together and ended on a really good note, so don’t worry–there were no fights, no arguments. It was really fun, and I always felt completely comfortable around them, despite our differences. However, it was incredibly fascinating to see how WILDLY different their ideas about the world were from my own. What kind of a person has Che Guevara as a hero? What kind of a person feels that Hitler was misunderstood? I think I can count on the fingers of one hand how many friends I have back in the states who see things that way!
The thing that made it really fascinating, however, was how well we got along even though we had these tremendous political differences. Honestly, I felt like I was hanging out with some of my longtime friends. I felt like we all understood and connected with each other really well the whole time. Surprisingly well, in fact. I wasn’t expecting someone I understood so well to hold to a point of view that I hardly understand at all. It was just wild.
At the same time, it’s kind of comforting to know that we could get along so well. It shows that politics and political ideology, while it’s important, isn’t everything. You can still be friends with people who have wildly different opinions from yourself. In the end, that’s really good to know.