Unlearning to Learn

I thought it was simple: I disagreed with about one third of the world's population. The clash of my western mentality with that of the Muslim world, nevertheless still unnerves me. I can't grasp the notion that such a large body of people lives by ideas that at plain view I consider beyond ridiculous. Then I find out I will be spending at least three years of my life in the United Arab Emirates, and the resolution is simple: I need to understand Islam. 

A friend presented me with Eduard W. Said's book Orientalism and I thought that would be the perfect gate to my infiltration to eastern cultures and ideas. 

It didn't take long to find out that before I could understand Islam and Arab cultures I needed to understand why I thought about them the way I did.

The notion of prejudice when evaluating foreign concepts is always present. The first thing I learned in the book was about an embellished predisposition in the western mind rooted in an academic trajectory of European representations of the East that creates an initial image of the region. Said writes on the first page of his introduction "The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences." 

Said's main criticism is to the general grounds upon which such a vast land covered by the term "Orient" with its eternal cultural and geographical intricacies, heterogeneous nature, and detailed history has been crudely generalized and homogenized by the Western scholars of the 18th and 19th century. This unified image is one the modern western citizen keeps, and with time this collective portrait continues to grow and become more consistent. Two pages later Said writes, "...so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of their limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism." 

This indicates that the first step in understanding Islam is acknowledging one's own limitation of thought and extricating one's self from the imposed predispositions of stereotypical thinking. 

ascendancy

əˈsɛnd(ə)nsi/

noun

1.

occupation of a position of dominant power or influence.

inert

ɪˈnəːt/

adjective

1.

lacking the ability or strength to move.

"she lay inert in her bed"