People Like Us (5 page)

 

 

M
ost disturbing was the way I’d misrepresented women in my articles. Back home, there was plenty of interest in “the status of women,” and you could get great quotes on the subject; for example, there was an Alexandrian judge who justified sanctioning a man’s divorce from his voluminous wife with the words, “You can’t get much pleasure from a fat woman.” Or the MP who, denying that women should have the right to bigamous marriages, said, “A cock sometimes has up to forty hens, but a hen never has two cocks.”

These articles went down well, but they were all giving the
impression that Egyptian women were miserable, repressed souls—which ran completely counter to my daily experiences of them. It was news when the Egyptian parliament ruled that women could no longer travel abroad without their husbands’ consent, but the way in which Egyptian women behaved towards me when I was shopping in Cairo was not news. My everyday experiences only made it to my diary:

I
had always thought that the “news” was a compilation of the most important things in the world. But after six months as a correspondent, reality set in. News is only what is different from the everyday—the exception to the rule. With an unknown world like the Arab one, this has a distorting effect. When someone is shot on Dam Square in Amsterdam, it’s news, but Dutch people know that people aren’t normally shot there. They’ve been there themselves, or they know someone who went there and returned safely. But how much do Dutch people know about daily life in the Middle East? Before I went to Syria, I’d seen “angry demonstrations in Syria” on the news; no wonder I’d concluded that they hated us and that Syria was unsafe. If you are told only about the exceptions, you’ll think they are the rule.

The question was, could anything be done about it? If you look at photographs or film footage of the Arab world—for example, the crowded streets of Cairo, Damascus, or
Alexandria—what you notice are the dancing Arabic letters everywhere. It looks exotic, until you’re told that those strange letters spell out things like “Egyptian museum next exit,” “Lipton’s—the most delicious tea in the world,” or “Two for the price of one, on special offer.” And wouldn’t it make a difference if we stopped talking about newspapers
Al-Hayat, Sharq Al-Awsat,
and
Al-Ahram,
and used
Life
,
The Middle East
, and
The Pyramids
instead? If we didn’t talk about the Arab TV channels Al-Jazeera, Al-Manana, and Al-Mustaqbal, but The Island, The Lighthouse, and The Future? Would it make a difference if we talked about Devotion, God’s Party, and The Basis, rather than about Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaida?

For a while, I tried to translate the names of Arab media companies in my articles, but the editors took them out—they found it confusing. They were probably right, just like when they rejected my suggestion of having a joke section on the foreign pages, as a reminder that in other parts of the world people were having a laugh, too: “The dictator’s time has come, and God sends the Avenging Angel to the capital to collect him. But, as always, the Avenging Angel is immediately arrested and tortured. “Where’s the dictator?” God asks angrily when the shattered Angel returns to heaven. The Avenging Angel tells him what happened, whereupon God turns as white as chalk and asks in a trembling voice, “You didn’t give away my name, did you?”

Of course they couldn’t do that; they couldn’t just shove ha-ha hee-hee amongst photos of dying people and charismatic experienced world leaders. But they could include other things, at least in the supplements and human interest columns in the paper. From then on, I tried to write articles that indirectly punctured the image of Arabs as exotic
baddies. I threw in an interview with the female presenters of the Arabic versions of
Top of the Pops, Big Brother
, and
The Weakest Link
—as a reminder that such programs are aired there. I wrote a piece on Chef Ramzi, the Lebanese Christian who was the biggest TV chef in the Arab world for a time. That was the point—you have celebrity chefs in the Arab world, and soaps, and shows with hidden cameras, and studios full of serious, grown-up men in suits arguing about football.

 

 

T
hose kinds of articles were readily taken up by the editors, but only for the background pages, which, according to surveys, are hardly given a second glance; or they were put on page four in the human interest column, which in
de Volkskrant
is tellingly called “It’s a Small World.”

I’d have to get into the news cycle, and I learned just how difficult that was when I tried to break down the cliché that Arabs are all the same and can be considered a single entity. I was contributing to that idea myself when I wrote about “the Arab world”—the only available term to describe those areas with inhabitants called Arabs. And then you had the Arab League, with its droning communiques about brotherhood and unity, and the Israeli government’s statements about “the sea of Arabs.”

All of this added to the impression that the area between Rabat and Baghdad housed 260 million identical beings. But take the wars that Arab countries have been fighting for the last fifty years, not against Israel but each other: Morocco against Algeria, Egypt against Syria, Sudan against Saudi Arabia, Iraq against Kuwait, Syria against Jordan, Jordan against Palestine, and everyone against everyone else in
Lebanon. Or take the local stereotypes, another indication of underlying differences: Iraqis are said to be merciless but brave; Gulf Arabs, generous but hypocritical; Lebanese, cosmopolitan but unreliable; Jordanians, friendly but weak; Palestinians, persistent but untrustworthy; and Egyptians, intelligent but arrogant.

Even within Arab countries, there are enormous differences between people. You see it in the jokes they tell about each other: Syrians make jokes at the expense of the inhabitants of Horns city; in Baghdad, it’s always the Dulaymi people from the Anbar province; and the people of Cairo never have enough of jokes about the inhabitants of Upper Egypt, rumored to be over-proud and backwards. Palestinians laugh about the inhabitants of Hebron, who are supposed to be stupid and old-fashioned. As in the story of a man from Hebron who goes into an electrical shop in Jerusalem. “Could you repair this television?” he asks. The shopkeeper looks at the man and says, “You must be from Hebron,” at which point the man runs away.
How does he know where I come from?,
he wonders in panic.
They must think they can diddle me
. He goes to another shop, but the same thing happens; another, and it’s the same story. Now there’s only one shop left; otherwise, he’ll have to go to Ramallah. You won’t believe it, but he’s hardly asked whether they can repair his television when the repairman mutters, “Are you from Hebron or something?” The man can’t take it any more and tearfully asks, “How does everyone know I’m from Hebron when all I ask is if they can mend my television?” To which the repairman replies, “This is a radio, sir.”

 

 

T
he “Arab world” is as diverse as this, but colleagues and friends back home would have no idea. How could they? They would faithfully follow the news and would often know all the political maneuvers at a recent Arab summit. But the fact that the word “Arab” refers to a language, Arabic, and not to a belief, and that there are millions of Christian Arabs, too, including the host of that summit, is something they would not know. Let alone that there were hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews who used to live all over the Middle East until the creation of Israel.

After a major earthquake in Turkey, a distinguished foreign commentator called me to ask if I wanted to go to the disaster site. “Why?” I asked in amazement. “Well, with your knowledge of Arabic ...” Upon which I had to explain that Dutch is closer to Turkish than Arabic is. I came across the same misunderstanding later in Iran, where they speak Persian and where you make as good an impression speaking Arabic as you do speaking German in the Netherlands.

The ignorance of even loyal readers was sometimes so great that it seemed beyond remedy. But there were occasional opportunities—for example, when the next Arab League summit turned into a fight. When, as usual, the news presenter asked about the “hopeless division,” there was the chance to skip the diplomatic disputes of the day, and talk about the differences between the twenty Arab countries, who weren’t so much divided as holding opposing interests. It makes quite a difference if you have oil and gas or not, enough water or not, if you’ve been occupied by colonial powers, or you have to share rivers. Or if you have a border with Israel, Turkey, Iran, or the Straits of Gibraltar.

Planting tidbits of information like this was something, but not much. News has to be fast and concise, which is why
the following article on language had to wait years in the “background” file on my computer before finding a place in the newspaper:

I’
ve probably profited from the ignorance about the Arab world. They’ve never said so, but I get the impression that the
Volkskrant
might have had its doubts about sending such an inexperienced guy to the Arab world. I imagine the head honcho pointing out my knowledge of Arabic, and this being what swung it. It was probably just as well that they didn’t know that, outside of the Cairo city limits, I could hardly understand a word of the various dialects.