A Line or Two on America

The one thing I was repeatedly told about going to Egypt was, don’t have any expectations. Thus I, and I think my peers did the same, put myself in a mindset to be ready for surprises. I figured I’d probably learn a thing or two about Egyptian culture and society along the way; what I didn’t anticipate is how much it would tell me about my own. When I’m put into a new situation or something unexpected happens, I am usually not surprised. No big deal, that’s what’s supposed to happen when you interact with a new culture. In an earlier blog post I think I interpreted this as being unfazed by my interactions in Cairo. But the truth is that I am fazed, and the effect lies in the fact that something was unexpected in the first place. Instead of getting a better understanding of Egyptians, I think I’ve ended up learning more, through contrast, about Americans.

One of the main insights I feel like I’ve gained, and the one that’s been most on my mind lately, is that we Americans are obsessed with lines. Yes, lines. All types of them. In the metro, when there are massive mobs trying to get in and out of the same door of a car at the same time, or trying to buy tickets, it’s a bit foreign. I suppose earlier I dismissively thought (quite pompous in hindsight) that this had something to do with civility. But the truth is Egyptians are no less civil than the people I’ve been surrounded by for most of my life. My fellow Americans are just absolutely infatuated with organization, often for no real purpose other than to subdue their unyielding (and perhaps more unnatural than I thought?) fear of chaos. Our reaction to the mobs at the metro is just the surface of some sort of new metaphorical insight I feel like I’ve gained about the American and perhaps Western mindset.

And that’s not the only kind of line. The American is proud of nothing more than he is his open-mindedness and acceptance of others. Yet perhaps exactly that idea can limit his outlook, which sounds paradoxical and probably is. Whatever. Most of my Arabic class here is discussion based, so we often end up talking about important and usually sensitive issues in America and Egypt with our teacher. Our teacher would ask us how Americans viewed something or what the tradition was for something and we very quickly learned the word for “it depends on…” Within the first week it became absolutely necessary to explain to our teacher the concept of “politically correct.” In being so constantly preoccupied with not hurting anyone’s feelings or not generalizing, we were drawing another line- a boundary. A limit. And lots of them at that. I’d realized a while ago that Americans hate to generalize or offend people (yes, I know what I just did there. Clever, right?), but once we had to talk about something in a foreign language, without the ability to say things exactly right, I really saw just how stunting it could be for communication. Every society has boundaries about what can and cannot be done, but ours is an intellectual boundary and seems to be a lot more apologetic. Our group knows each others’ values and backgrounds; why, then, is there still this constant trepidation to say something that may, theoretically, have offended some person from some family in some random area of the country? Why do we get so uncomfortable when an Egyptian in a coffee shop asks us about our religion and feel the need to constantly repeat the fact that this is only one opinion and not everyone believes this way? Of course it’s your opinion- you’re the one who said it; it’s not about clarifying that. It’s about that historically deep-rooted, socially promoted discomfort- not with being wrong, but with being perceived as ignorant or closed-minded.

There is another line still, though it’s very similar to the former. A few days ago I was in a largely Christian area in a church with a few friends on a mountain called Moqattum (an experience that really deserves its own post, though the chances of that happening are pretty slim). We were discussing the relationship between Muslims and Christians in Egypt and one of my friends said something that struck me. He knows the country much better than I do and was telling us how he’d seen Muslim women come to the church we were sitting in and ask the patron saint for protection. He then related that followers of each religion have parades for their respective saints and how sometimes they attend each other’s parades. My friend prefaced this with the observation that the relationship between Muslims and Christians in this area was “pretty odd.” I immediately thought of Islam and Hinduism in pre-colonial India. First of all, I don’t think Hinduism even had a name at that point. People just believed in their gods. If one of those gods had a prophet by the name of Muhammed, then so be it. And if one of the Muslim prophets was a Hindu god named Ram, that’s cool. It was all very… natural. When the British came and went, they left lines. Not just boundaries like the one between Pakistan and India, but categorical lines. People were asked if they were Muslim or Hindu and were then filed in one drawer or another. I’m not arguing that partitions didn’t exist before the evil Western man came in and created them, not at all. But I’ve heard too many stories about people who had no idea if they were Muslim or Hindu, or what the differences were between the two, or even that there were any differences, before British occupation. I think that developed countries in the west, more than any other countries, feel some need to categorize things. It’s no surprise that taxonomy was invented by a Roman. For something to exist, there must be distinctions between it and something else. It goes back to the western preoccupation with organization.

Now don’t get me wrong- my friend isn’t some dumb American who’s completely unaware of the fact that societies have different religious and cultural norms. I, as primarily a westerner, also found the information he shared strange. I think I’m guilty of drawing all of these types of lines. I’m not even so sure if that’s a bad thing. I really don’t think I would have been able to fully appreciate it without the contrast of Cairo though. It’s definitely not the only thing that being here has taught me about Americans and probably won’t be the last; I’m curious to see if I’ll find even more biases once I go home.