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After moving to Kuwait, I emotionally embraced the Arab world. The Islam I knew from the media no longer resembled the Islam I witnessed first hand in the Middle East. While living in Kuwait, I traveled to many other countries such as Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. I discovered that conservative and liberal Muslims differed very little from conservative and liberal Christians. Not until I began reading literature by Arab authors did I begin to realize how significantly the misunderstanding of a culture creates a false impression of the people and religion.
One of the first books I read was Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. Her memoir reinforced feelings of a fearful regime I remembered from Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution; however, visiting the cities of Shiraz, Esfahan, and Tehran in April 2004, I found a general appreciation of American people shared by the average Iranian. While visiting numerous acquaintances on my ten-day journey, I was overwhelmed by the Iranians’ generosity and willingness to please. The only conflict I felt was in having to wear the required head scarf forced on all women in Iran.
Sometime during the past six years I read Hanna Mina’s Fragments of Memory, a story about a Syrian family. Mina’s work, according to critic Khaldoun Shamaa, is “firmly grounded in the realist tendencies prevalent in Syrian literature at the time.” A small collection of stories by the Egyptian peasant, Alifa Rifaat, titled Distant View of a Minaret, opened my heart to the reality of a culture that had condoned female genital mutilation. Translator Denys Johnson-Davies in 1983 remarked about Rifaat: she “lifts the veil on what it means to be a woman living within a traditional Muslim society.” A small novella titled Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani left me numb. The story of the harsh reality of the Palestinian struggle and the grave poverty of the people horrifies the reader. With the four main characters, the reader climbs inside a stifling hot water tank, desperately hoping to escape into Kuwait. Kanafani created enough heat through his vivid imagery that I felt myself gasping for air and cold water. Over the past nine years, I found numerous other works by male and female Arab authors from all over the Middle East. A universal thread of tradition and culture weaves all these stories together. Islam is certainly incorporated into their narratives, and I eventually developed a sense of how well these authors relate their own realities.