The people who teach me

I have a teacher here called Sana' and she's the best Arabic teacher I've ever had. She's well spoken, intelligent, and down to business. She doesn't put up with any stupid comments and she's very open about her views. Obviously, this leads to me disagreeing with some of the things she says - normally internally, sometimes orally.



Today for example, we came across the word for 'fortune-teller or psychic' in the text we're reading. She mentioned that this is haram (a sin) in Islam, and that such people are just liars, for no one knows the future except God. She then asked us whether we had ever had our fortunes told by such people. I was the only one admitted that I had, telling her that my Mum is a fortune teller. This provoked some laughter from class. In fact, my mother does not claim to be able to tell the future, and certainly doesn't call herself a fortune teller. But she is able to very accurately read people and understand many things about themselves and about the type of life they lead, and what the likely patterns will be for them in the future. So, I guess I was baiting my teacher in a way, but we were able to have a very nice discussion about this which is something I appreciate from people that have very different view points.



The previous discussion we had had about love had also warmed me to her somewhat. She recently won an international prize in a short story competition, which the theme of love. Sana' is avowed feminist and has very interesting and pertinent views on love and women. When she accepted her prize in Cairo, she was asked on stage, how much it meant to her, obviously with the expectation that she would whoop on about how this was a great affirmation for her career etc.



Instead, she said, I would take back all the books I've published, all the prizes I've won, all the acclaim I've received, in exchange for true love.



Now, I can't say that this is an opinion I share, or that I don't share it. I honestly don't know if I would pass up a succesful career for love. Which would be more fulfilling? It's hard to say. Sana' herself is very sure, but then she, like me, has never been in love. So how to know? Her views on love make her position even more confusing. She believes that in most cases love is one sided and thus unfulfilled, or that one person is much more in love than the other. In her view, the cases where two people love each other deeply and completely a all but nonexistent. Why? Because for Sana' love means giving and giving and giving. And most people do not have this in them. They just want to be loved. I'm exactly sure where I stand on this view, though I think that a need to be loved, and a belief that love involves the sacrifice of giving, are both equally unhealthy ways to approach love. I'm just happy to have a teacher that is thought provoking at the same time as teaching us Arabic in a very accesible way. An engaging language teacher is pretty rare.



I have to contrast this highly satisfying class with the second class I went to today. We had a professor called Awni (that's also the name of my local supermarket). He very proudly told us that he has published 23 books, more than 20 academic articles, and studied in the US, Russia, Sweden and god knows where else. He's a very proud man, and most of his sentences begin with 'Well, I studied/lived/visited in ..... so I know'.



We will have Dr Awni once a week and he will teach us about media. He says we will read all sorts of newspaper articles, but we wont get bogged down in the politics of them, as we are here to learn the language. Oh, and we wont read articles about sex. Fine, I respect that. So then, he started telling us about a recent new item he had read in the British papers, about Chantelle Steadman(15 years) and Alfie Patten (13 years) who have recently had a child. I hadn't read about the case, and was confused about the news, as I know that such teen pregnancies are pretty common (there was a girl in my sixth grade class who gave birth). So I said, that's normal, obviously not in the sense that I think that's normal, but that it happens. I was confused about why it was news, and news enough that he was bringing it up. He assured me that such a case is not normal, in any way.



So, someone asked him, what is the legal age for marriage in Jordan? 14 for girls, 16 for men, he replied. Observing the shock on some peoples faces (I was not shocked; a friend of mine's mother was married at 13) he defended his country, saying well in Saudi Arabia, the legal age of marriage is 9. That certainly registered a shock in me. But he had another defence, and this is the part that got my goat...



He says, girls that live in hot climates such as Saudi Arabia develop younger (he cites heat as a trigger for puberty...) so in Saudi Arabia, 9 year olds are fully formed women (the implication that physical formation is all the constitutes womanhood was not discussed) and thus ready for marriage. I told him that I had grown up in an incredibly hot climate (Narrabri) which certainly is as hot as some parts of Saudi Arabia (no exaggeration) and that I hadn't started puberty until 12. And, though I didn't mention it, was not a fully formed (supposedly) woman until some years later.



No, no. In these hot countries, girls become women younger so its fine. And Awni has lived in Sweden, so he knows, and there the age of marriage is 18. That's because Sweden is such a cold country that they become women later.



I was pretty outraged by this whole discussion, not because of his view that you can be 9 and be a women, which I certainly don't agree with, but at the same time I am certainly not going to get outraged against a commonly held opinion being recycled by my teacher, but more by his general hypocrisy. The cases of these kid-parents in Britain is an outcry, but not in Saudi Arabia. And that's because of the weather.



Anyway, I decided I should check my facts, in case I was horribly wrong. And it is clear that environment does have some effect on the onset of puberty, namely malnutrition and stunted development leads to a later onset, while obesity and diabetes can lead to early onset of puberty.



I can easily accept that people everywhere in the world have views that disgust and anger me, as well as views that make me sad or relieved or happy. It's not just that I'm living in Jordan, I feel these sentiments with any people I mix with in the world, and I try not to buy into their views too emotionally. But this man, well, I guess it was the way he tried to establish his authority as an educated and worldy chap that really made his views all the more offensive. Ignorance when it's being supported by arrogance is much more painful.


(The above was an old post that I didn't post due to internet failure. Now I have one more to add to my 'interesting comments from teachers stream').


This week's class with Dr. Awni was once more insightful. Al-Taib Salah, a very important Sudani writer recently passed away. We study one of his most famous works in our course, so naturally we talked about him following his death. Dr. Awni introduced Salah to us, telling us about his life and publications. Salah lived and studied for many years in Britain, and experienced some racism as a black man living there. No surprises there, because as Awni was very quick to point out, countries like Britain and the US are very racist and were even more so at the time when Salah emigrated to Britain. But often Western countries get a pretty bad rap in the Middle East, not least by academics. So I quickly pointed out that racism is also a problem in Jordan.


'In Jordan!? No, we don't have racism here.' (Undertones of Ahmadinejad's famous speech at Columbia University in 2007).


Well, yes, you do, I experience racism here all the time.


'No! How can we have racism when we don't have blacks and whites here (not that I like using those terms).'


Well racism isn't just about colour, and certainly not just about two colours.


Westerners can never blend in in Jordan. We will always be ripped off more than your average Jordanian, frequently assumed to be morally loose and lacking a strong cultural background. And the racism experienced by immigrant workers from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philipines etc. is of an even nastier kind.


'But in Islam, and in the Arab culture, we don't have racism.'


I don't think many cultures or religions state racism as one of their tenets, but bad stuff happens and people don't always follow their culture, in fact when it doesn't suit them, I think they rarely do. There are bad people in every country, and mentalities and attitudes spread through populations very quickly to the point that they no longer seem remarkable.


The fact that someone grabbed my vagina in a crowd today, following multiple jeers in English (one look at me and you know I'm not Jordanian apparently - that's not racist?) does not instantly make me think, wow, these teenagers are racist. But they are. So why does that not evoke in me the thought that the people doing or saying these things are racist, whereas someone being called a towel-head would? A Palestinian being beaten up by an Israeli would be a racist attack, but my vagina being groped by a Jordanian is not?


This is not meant to be a comment on the injustices done to white people, who clearly responsible for some of the most repulsive racial tirades in history, but merely an observation on how we develop our opinions on what is racism.


Racism is typically seen as a savage vs civilised dichotomy where one people designates itself as more civilised than another. Whereas the racism directed at Westerners in Jordan comes (obviously from many things but) largely from negative media images that portray Westerners as sexually loose and morally vague. The wealth that they bring to this poor country also obviously has a part to play, as well as a sometimes different lifestyle, values and priorities. All these things lead insidiously to Western females being considered sex objects and undeserving of basic respect and decency.


I don't agree with such an image of Western girls. There is nothing about me or my culture, or even the way my culture is sometimes portrayed in the media that can in any way justify or excuse someone violating me.


And if these teenagers' vision of my culture was actually accurate, would that make it any more appropriate for them to abuse me?

Well no, because there are real differences between cultures and cultures are frequently constituted of (or mainly identified with) one main 'race'. So to attack someone on the basis of their culture (identitfying them as such by their racial appearance) even if an aspect of their culture is apparently abhorent, would set a fairly dangerous precedent.

What I'm trying to say is that racism is not simply about skin colour or a sense of biological/physical superiority. It has definite associations with the culture assumed to be related to a particular race. And so racism can become a more complicated problem, when it can backed up with complaints against a culture more than with weak biological or physical complaints.

And that is the way racism is moving now. Arguably, Arabs experience the most racism in Western countries at the moment. And this is a comment on the way their culture is perceived, much more than a complaint about their physical appearance which was once the largest driver behind racism.