Same Same but Different
Cairo Airport, June 2010, around nine pm. With the usual sense of traveller’s
excitement I walk into the airports’ arrivals hall. A brown-haired, blue-eyed girl
speeds up to me, a smiling face I recognize from a Facebook picture. No time for
extensive welcomes and chit-chats. My plane was an hour late and we have to rush
to Khan el Khalili, the large and very touristic souk that hosts some very nice shisha
(water pipe) places. Let’s go, yalla yalla! In the car my new AIESEC friends try a nice
joke on me involving one AIESEC’er pretending to be mute, and the other pretending
to be an Indian cab driver. The first intercultural exchanges of laughs. Twenty minutes
later I am walking through little back-alleys in the old Islamic centre of Cairo,
absorbing all the new sights, smells and sounds.
I was in Cairo for my internship with AIESEC. For two months I would take
on the position of fundraiser for the small NGO El Nafeza. My main reason for being
in Egypt, however, was to have the “AIESEC-experience”, to meet people from all
over the world, to get emerged in a culture that was not mine and to get challenged
in my ideas about normality. Additionally, I had been given the unspoken task to
discover that Muslims aren’t that different from us, that more than anything we are all
humans and that we should all be friends.
Quite an obvious message I thought. As anthropologist-in-the-making,
having spent about a third of my post high school life travelling through third world
countries, I was a model cultural relativist. Polygamy or female circumcision, nothing
could get me shocked anymore. Who are we to judge their cultural practices? We
have our things, they have theirs.
My AIESEC experience, however, was very different from all my other travel
experiences. The friends I made in Cairo didn’t wear red and blue checked cloths;
they didn’t have holes in their ears the size of oranges, or live in cow-dung huts. They
were just like me: they went to college, wore the same kind of clothes and listened
to the same kind of music. Because the friendships were based on a strong feeling of
sameness, my ‘us versus them’ cultural relativism didn’t work anymore. They had
become part of the ‘us’. So, when, under an initial layer of sameness, I did discover
quite some cultural differences in the end, for the first time in my life they bothered
me.
One of the most obvious differences was the gender issue. The many
differently shaded hijabs on the streets I could culturally put in perspective, and
the male stares and occasional ‘I love you’s started to grow on me. I did feel weird
however, when, just before we left the house to hand out Ramadan meals to the poor,
my male friend ordered my to put my cardigan on; when during a weekend at the
beach I was subtly pulled out of sight when the neighbours knocked on the apartment
door; or when at a Tiesto concert two other friends acted as my personal bodyguards
with every step I took, afraid that something would happen to me.
All of this was clarified during the last week of my stay by yet another friend
during our weekly shisha. He shared with me the well known facts that “Men are
worth twice as much as women” and “Men are just better in everything than women,
that’s why they always have to take care of them and protect them.” Adrenaline going
from my head to the tip of my toes: how could a friend of mine say something like
this!
The interesting thing here was not to which extent this guy’s opinion reflected
popular opinion in Egypt or for that matter the whole Islamic world. What is
interesting is the situation itself, and how to handle it. What is the limit to cultural
relativism? How much difference of ideas can you handle, and can you accept? Do we
have to get rid of foreign ideas to be able to live in harmony with their owners? I there
really such a thing as respecting without accepting: the well known Dutch ‘tolerance’.
And how do we deal with our own convictions in the face of difference?
Exactly this is, in retrospect, the main lesson that I brought home from Egypt. I’ve
learned that, faced with a difference of conviction, it is no crime to embrace your own
point of view. We should however, when doing this, accept the tension this leads to,
and instead of denying it or running away for it, embrace it, learn to live with it, and
maybe even enjoy the constant debate, change, and reflection this tension leads to.
Because in the end, we’re all human and we should all be friends.
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