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In addition to the article „Understanding the World“ by May Fawaz. Lotte Krisper-Ullyett strongly recommends a geopolitical “micro approach”.
Even though it is slightly embarrassing to uncover my ignorance, I will list a few things which surprised me during my 4 months stay in Damascus earlier this year:
* I didn’t have to wear any special kind of clothes or behave in any different way.
* I felt 100% safe to walk through any part of Damascus at any time of the day alone.
* The word Allah is shared by Christian and Muslims and actually means the same God. I hadn´t really thought about that before.
* Many times I found Muslims in Christian churches worshipping Maria, St. George and many other saints. I hadn´t expected that.
* Sometimes it is very hard to say whether someone is Muslim, Christian, Druse or Jewish. I always assumed this would be quite obvious.
* Both of my language teachers were Palestinian. I had never met Palestinians before, but these two certainly looked different from the people I had seen on television before. I wish they would show people like this, just for balancing purposes.
* Syria is a Mediterranean country. In my mental map, it had somehow fallen off the Mediterranean sea shore.
* Bring your skis if you go in winter – there is snow in the mountains around Damascus until April.
None of this is academic, or spectacular for that matter. My point is, that it is time to check the "Selbstbild / Fremdbild" in both directions, and that face-to-face conversations produce a much more differentiated range of words, texts and therefore ways to think and interact. Our narratives and the narratives of oriental people are very different. The macro-approach doesn´t seem to do much for coming up with a narrative that both sides would accept. But without this common basic understanding – how shall we move on? Many Syrians, both Christians and Muslims, tell me they suffer from equations like Arab = Muslim = terrorist. Here in Alpbach I sometimes got the impression the Iraq war was something between France and the USA not something which happens to real people.
I would like to make a suggestion for a – hopefully – continuing discussion next year: Let’s invite Samir, the Iraqi filmmaker with his “Shia Shia Shia” background who lives in Switzerland and lets see his film “Forget Baghdad”. The film tells the stories of four Arab Jews, his father’s friends, communists who fought side by side for a liberal Iraq and who had to leave Baghdad. I strongly believe it’s in films like this where a way out it shown. On a micro level.
Comments are welcome on the Alpbach weblog or by email to lotte@krisper.com
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