Doubts of Hope

Today, I was the most discouraged I have ever been concerning politics in the region.  This feeling was born from a discussion in my "Islam in the Modern Context" class where the guest speaker - an expert on Shariah law at the University - spent the whole class period arguing that the political actions of the West in the past century is the reason why the Middle East fails to overcome oppressive governments and to advance as a region socially, economically and politically. This conversation replaced the scheduled discussion of Islamic law.

Anyways, as I sat there, hearing yet again the blame, the bitterness and the bias, I realized that these feelings and opinions have penetrated and rooted itself within this society and it will take nothing short of a miracle to be able to move past it all.  And that's just the start.  For any sort of progress in the relations between Arabs and Israelis and Americans (political relations, that is), there will have to be a global cleansing of all theories that have become fact (each nation is guilty of this) and have thus further diluted the reputation of any side.  Finally, the widespread ignorance needs to be addressed, on all sides and of any background whether you are an American student, a Jordanian doctor, a Palestinian Shariah law expert or a Zionist grandmother.

Can you see where the discouragement is coming from?  If a class of American students who came to learn and study "the other side," can not hold a political discussion with a Palestinian professor of Islam without misunderstandings and wide disagreements about the "facts" of history, how on earth are whole nations of far less open-mindedness and oceans apart, supposed to resolve themselves?

I don't mean to use my class as a measure of the potential of international resolution. Nor do I want to somehow suggest that one nation is worse than another.  I will be the first to admit that we - the United States - have messed up.  But alongside that statement, I have to add that both the pot and the kettle are black and it does no good to point the finger.

Sometimes I wonder if, because of America's rather short, known, history, we tend to live for today and tomorrow and thus alienate ourselves in that aspect culturally, from other nations and regions that have centuries and centuries of developing national identity.  I say this, because it is easy for me to say, "Forget the last sixty years! Yella! Let's do something today." However, I don't know what it's like to live in the shadow of my family's memories or to have the political situation during my parents and grandparents' generation, still affect me today.

I don't know.  I'm ignorant of that life, of the culture of memory. And that will be the first difference between me and that professor.