willow
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09:13:28 pm on June 18, 2008 | # | |
So I’m reading Lawrence Durrell’s orientalist masterwork The Alexandria Quartet, which, if you haven’t read it, is excellent. Durrell is certainly guilty of a few of Said’s more serious pet peeves–under much discussion, as we’ve seen, now that Orientalism is entering its fourth decade–but overall the picture he paints is complex and thoughtful. (He focuses on Coptic rather than Muslim culture, it should be noted, and has a very astute handle on how the British complicated the relationship between the two.)
When I read, I dog-ear pages that I think contain really amazing phrases/insights. This was one I ran across today:
“To have a grasp of the language was nothing, he now realized; for Leila exposed the hollowness of the knowledge when pitted against understanding.”
My take: so, so true. A concise summary of what fells most western expats/travelers in the Middle East: you arrive thinking you know something, discover you know nothing, and retreat into racism because it’s the only thing you have in your intellectual arsenal that makes sense.
Thoughts?
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thabet 4:32 am on June 19, 2008 | #
How far do you think ‘whiteness’ plays a part?
Most of the western Muslims expats I know (of Indo-Pak origin) place their ‘Arab brothers’ on the pedestal of piety usually reserved for saints and prophets, expressing shock when their brothers are found to be just human beings.
Willow 9:35 am on June 19, 2008 | #
Whiteness as in the whiteness of the expat in question? A huge part. I’m mostly talking about the non-muslim western expat who goes to the ME with a lot of hold-over ideas from the colonial era, whether s/he knows it or not. (Most western expats I met think, though they would never admit it, that the East exists to provide transformative experiences to westerners. They get very cheesed when they fail to have said experiences.)
Though I have met several Arab-Americans who’ve gone to the ME hoping to belong there in a way they feel they don’t belong in the US, only to be treated just like any other foreigner. There really wasn’t an Indo-Pakistani culture in Egypt (Egypt exports not imports guest-workers) aside from the Bohras, so I couldn’t comment on disappointed Muslim pilgrims.