Facebook/Matt Wiggins
Closer Than We Think
“What is keeping you from contacting someone who’s 22 in an Arab country?” I remember hearing Anne Siddiquie, the 24-year old curator at the Museum of Islamic and Muslim Culture in Jackson, Mississppi, say last fall. “I think it’s partially not understanding the need or importance of communicating with people from another country-and just not caring.”
It sounded like a rhetorical challenge, but one worth exploring – if for nothing more than a chance to test and play with exciting innovations on the Internet. So after 36 seconds of Googling, I discovered SaudiJeans, a blog written by a 22-year-old King Saud University student named Ahmed Al-Omran. His pragmatic observations of global political order and social commentary on McDonalds adaptation to Saudi culture in a blog post titled “Do Not Supersize Me” were both impressive.
The author photo revealed a slender, brown-skinned face with Starbucks barista-like glasses that gave the impression of a ruddy intern at a D.C. think tank. Not the image I would have drawn from the mainstream media. A turban-wearing fundamentalist holding an AK-47 would have felt more appropriate.
I was reading his blog, clicking through pictures of Riyadh, and getting a sense of his opinions and thoughts on Muslim young adult life in Saudi Arabia – all while sitting in my dorm at Boston College. That night I sent him an email.
By the next morning Al-Omran had responded with answers to most of my questions. “I don’t think America can win the World Cup, not in the near future anyway.” He wrote. “The interest in football, or as you might call it soccer, is much less in America than almost any other part of the world, which is, from my point of view, a weird thing actually.”
It became hard to imagine the more than 7,500 miles separating us, or the Clash of Civilizations ideology that was supposed to be separating us. They didn’t seem to exist. His idealistic life visions (he’s the founder of an Arab blogging community hoping to offer the world a better view on what’s really happening in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East) and a general uneasiness about the future implications of a cultural misunderstanding between Americans and Muslims (more terrorism) – gave the impression of a liberal American university student.
He didn’t feel like the “enemy.” But maybe that’s because I recognized, as he said, that communicating online could “help us to understand each other in order to build relations that are stronger and healthier based on common interests and not on the difference of (ideological) forces.”
Al-Omran speaks and writes perfect English. If he didn’t, our cross-continental communication would have been impossible. But even three years ago our conversation may not have happened at all. Talk to most Americans today and they might still think it’s impossible to communicate with people one-on-one in the Arab world – and that’s wrong.
“I read some blogs by Americans,” Al-Omran says. “Reading such blogs alters my view on Americans as a whole and gives me a better understanding of American politics.”
I paused to acknowledge Al-Omran’s global perspective. The revelation was inspiring: If he could explore a new culture over the Internet, what’s holding us back?