Saturday I left the house because the cleaning lady was there and returned later in the afternoon to a house cleaned and decorated for Easter. Colored eggs hanging on the wall, bowls of candies, stuffed chicks, ducks and bunnies sitting in various corners of the rooms. I spent some time with my family the only way I know how, sitting and watching TV with them (it really seems to be, unfortunately, the only group activity they partake in, other than eating and church). The past few days, since its been a holiday and my host father didn’t travel to his farm this weekend and I hadn’t started my new class yet, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time watching TV with them. Sometimes it is good because my host father will watch the news, either in English or Arabic, or maybe Farah will be watching an American movie, so I can justify my television-time as 1) ‘quality’ time with the family 2) creating opportunities for conversation/discussion and 3) listening practice! (this is clearly a good excuse for just about anything I wouldn’t otherwise want to do) or in the case of movies in English, translation practice as I switch between listening and reading the subtitles (mostly paying attention to how they translate American slang into formal fus’ha).
If my host mom is watching, however, or if the family is watching together, the channel is usually on one of the 10 or so Christian channels (there must be some kind of satellite TV programming where you buy the package based on your religion, clearly Muslims would have different channel options), either showing a debate, lecture, preach-fest with a televangelist, musical event, religious film or most unfortunate of them all/my host mother’s favorite, kids’ programming (although my hostfamily belongs to a Protestant church, their religious activities suggest a likening to evangelism).
This particular session started out promising. My hostfather was watching a political debate on an Iraqi news channel between four men (two Arabs and 2 Americans) about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It was most interesting because it may have been the first time that I saw a Westerner/American participate in a debate in the media with Arabs and actually speak to them in fus’ha (the other American spoke English and had it translated). It was encouraging for me to watch as a student, because it reminded me that there may be some purpose to my studies after all; though I may not ever be in this exact context, it exemplified the benefit of being able to have a discussion between Western and Arab perspectives on the same level/in the same language. Likely the other participants knew English well enough, but it was an Arab TV channel with a debate in an Arab context with an American guest—plus, one can appreciate the symbolic gesture/rarity of having an American in this field/in this position of knowledge/power/influence know fus’ha well enough to speak it.
But the channel was soon changed to a religious debate between a priest and a Muslim on the vowelling in the Qu’ran [at the time of the revelation of the Qu’ran, the written Arabic langauge didn’t include diacritics such as short vowels, so there is debate (primarily among Christians, that is) over whether different versions of the Qu’ran exist and if Muslims even really know what their Holy Book says]. Although I’m all for a good religious or political debate, and even though I didn’t fully understand what they were saying, I didn’t like the look of this priest and I didn’t need to hear him to not trust the words that were coming out of his mouth that I couldn’t understand. Plus I don’t trust any of these channels because I figure that anything written by Christians for Christian audiences in order to boost their self-esteem about how much more correct their religion is compared to the Other Religion, is more than a little suspect. It’s like when they bring Muslims on the show who have converted to Christianity in order to explain the differences between the religions and why his new religion/Your Religion is the better choice.
Thus I have realized that not everything can be endured for the sake of language practice (and I now have to leave the room everytime the channel is changed to one of the first 10). There does, in fact, have to be SOME substance in what is being communicated in order to even have the desire to figure out the meaning.
Yet here is an example of the same idea from the other end of the spectrum: I went out a few nights ago to meet Frank and a friend of his to go to a poetry reading. Frank has only studied Arabic for a few months and his friend doesn’t even really study Arabic (I forget why he is here) so we all acknowledged the fact that we probably wouldn’t understand anything but it was worth the visit. But first, we hung out for a bit with Frank’s roommates and their friends and sweets that two Syrian girls had brought from Homs. The group spoke English/French/Arabic/German and it was the first time that the only common language was Arabic (finally!) so I had a good conversation in fus’ha with a friend who is French and Muslim and here to study the language in relation to his religion.
After some time, we left for the reading, which was held in a bar located in the basement of a five-star hotel and packed with locals, cigarette smoke and bottles of beer. Admittedly, it was a little pretentious for any foreigner to go to such an event and pretend to appreciate anything that was being said, but at the very least, it was a great cultural experience—for one, because the poets were definitely local but shared origins from Libya to Iraq to Palestine, and for another because poetry is an important part of the Arab literary tradition and though I’ve had to (attempt to) read some in class this was the first time I ever heard it performed. And though the scene itself was not unfamiliar: the darkened room, jazz posters on the wall and people crammed wherever they could fit: the people showed their appreciation not with snaps or polite clapping but with shouts and raucous applause and calling out or jumping to the podium themselves.
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Sunday was the most important day of the year, again. I slept in again, even did a little (/a lot of) studying in order to prepare for my return to the university the following day. We had lunch again with the family in the garden—this time we had frikie (at first I thought it was called Afrikiye aka African food), a green wheat served with cashews, tender lamb chunks on the bone and a yogurt and cucumber sauce.
During the meal, the conversation was appropriately themed for the holiday and the others tried to bring me into the discussion by asking if I knew that Muslims didn’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus (they believe in him as a prophet and therefore have respect for the religion of Christianity but they don’t agree that he is the son of God and divine in nature) and then a little later if I knew that the Muslims don’t believe in Jesus in the way that he is written about in the Bible, only through the words of the Qu’ran. Yes, that is because they are…Muslims. And they can’t believe in the divinity of Jesus because they believe it is not possible for God to live on earth, and if they believed in Jesus according to the Bible, and took the Bible as God’s Word, well, then they would be Christians. You realize that you are two different religions, right?
Then post-lunch: Ihab started by asking me if I believe in Jesus Christ. He already knew that I didn’t believe in the religiousity of the story, so he clarified it by asking if I believed in his existence from a historical perspective. He prefaced the conversation by saying he hoped he wasn’t offending me, but that there is not much opportunity for this kind of religious debate and he was curious to know what I thought about some of religion’s big questions: life and death, creation, human nature, divine nature, the meaning of life. I did most of the talking, but ultimately I tried to explain that usually I find that in talking with people of different beliefs that we share similar hopes/dreams/fears about life and what it all means, where it all comes from—we just happen to use different words or metaphors to represent our ideas. He responded that this isn’t true because I don’t have God in my heart; I said well you can call it God and I can call it something else, but how do you know what is in my heart? and again that we all share the same questions about life but we have different ways of getting to the answer, but it doesn’t mean any one way is better than the other—and then he told me, no that’s not true, I have the right and the best way. Henceforth the conversation went downhill from there, finally ending with a crash and burn when he told me “I believe that if only you thought about it more, you would see that I am right.”
Wafa in her broken English intervened with, “I believe in the end, we get what we plant and we love you anyway.”
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