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Introduction
Before moving to Kuwait in 1998 to teach English at an American high school, I was relatively naïve about the differences between Christianity and Islam. In 2005 I moved on to teach English and Comparative Literature at an American university there, first as Instructor and in 2006 as Assistant Professor. With that first move, I began to collect perspectives and attitudes about the general relationship between religion and culture, more specifically how Western and Middle Eastern culture and religion each contribute to misunderstandings of the Other. The Orientalist often imagines the Other as a person of Arab descent who lives in a tent and rides a camel in the desert. Today, that Other is also mistrusted and suspected of having ties to terrorist agendas. Nothing could be further from the truth. Likewise, the Middle Easterner often suspects the West of having imperialistic, clandestine motives of conquering the Middle East and turning it into a regional democracy. Less than ten years ago, I would not have made this distinction, nor would I have been so willing to demythologize these untruths. As a resident of Johnsonburg, Pennsylvania, a remote village in northwestern Pennsylvania and thousands of miles from the Middle East, I had not read the works of 1988 Egyptian Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz, the subject of this book.