Ending negative perceptions of Saudis
It is sadly not really surprising these days to learn that Muslims in western countries are regarded with unwarranted suspicion and treated unfairly by the police, officials or the general public as a result. In the past week, several Saudis have experienced this unfortunate phenomenon, perhaps as a result of public nervousness in the aftermath of the Boston bombing. Saudi students were arrested last Saturday in Detroit for traveling with a pressure cooker, a device used for cooking. One wonders, naturally, whether a person of a different background, carrying a pressure cooker, would have been similarly held in suspicion. Another Saudi student had his home searched and was questioned by the FBI for similar reasons. Is it just coincidence the individuals in both cases were of Saudi background?
Whether generalized as ‘Islamophobia’ or specifically experienced skepticism and paranoia about Saudis in the world, it is no secret that such attitudes in the West have gelled and have been accentuated since events such as 9/11, the 7/7 attacks in London, and these most recent events in Boston.
It goes without saying that generalizing the actions of a few radicals to cast aspersions on much of the Muslim world is unfair. It is completely unjust, and most intelligent people around will readily acknowledge this — even those who fall prey to it from time to time. And that is because, much as these attitudes are unfair, they also tend to be an accurate representation of human nature, fear of the unknown or ‘other’, and the desire to lay blame for wrong doing and injury on an identifiable person or group.
We didn’t create those circumstances, nor did we create the deep-seated prejudices that come to the forefront in their aftermath. We have no responsibility for those. However, what we are responsible for, in some sense, is the future of our relationship with the rest of the world. And for many of us life is full of opportunities to better this.
These opportunities arise whenever we travel or study abroad, or when we create art or literature that represents us. Wherever we go in the world, we carry our Saudi identity with us and become its representative, whether that comes from sharing knowledge or from individual, one-on-one contact. Every contact with the West thus becomes an opportunity.
The British recording star Sting wrote these lyrics of one of his songs: “Men go crazy in congregations, they only get better one by one.” By ‘congregations’, I believe he meant any big assembly of people in which the group dynamic overwhelms the individual conscience. That is why we can only ‘get better one by one’, when humanism is able to reassert itself. To allow us to find the humanity in one another, we can act as cultural ambassadors and simply allow others to know us. Over time, our mutual understanding may reach a critical mass, so that hurtful misconceptions will not continue.
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