Hamburgers and Tolerance

Things have been very busy, in a good way, around here. Yesterday, I went to the July 4th Celebration at the Embassy. We ate hotdogs, hamburgers, had a watermelon-eating contest, and listened to a Navy band that was flown in from Naples for the weekend - the female singer did a great Gwen Stefani. It was a fun meeting of the State Department program Arabic Students, the Learn and Serve participants, the Amideast interns and teachers, along with Embassy staff and some interns from the African Development Bank - which is headquartered here in Tunis.

Today was a whirlwind as well - I got up and went into work this morning, ready to give the kids from my Access Program class their test. Their bus never showed up. Before I knew it, I was chatting with a new study abroad program that was stopping by Amideast. This time, it was 20 students from Loyola Chicago studying international politics - they're spending three weeks around Tunisia. I ended up befriending one of the professors, and I went out with them on a Medina walk (the old city of Tunis with winding, small streets). We stopped by an old Bey's palace (a Bey was an Ottoman ruler) in the heart of the Medina and took in the gorgeous view from the rooftops over the old city, and then Avenue Bourguiba stretching out to the Mediterranean with Cap Bon off to the right. After that, we had lunch in the Medina at a great Couscous place and went to a lecture on women in Tunisia.

The lecturer was a Tunisian professor who spent on a year on a Fulbright scholarship at Brown University, and we had a nice discussion about the role of women here. We talked about the duality of the country - on one hand you have a country on par with Turkey in legislating women's rights in all spheres, and a country with a resurgence in the number of women choosing to wear the headscarf. The Professor attributed this change in part to the War in Iraq - a way of showing political resistance and solidarity with muslims there.

After, I hopped back to Amideast with some new Tunisian friends who went along on the Loyola expediation, and went to a lecture on Islam and Tolerance. On a fun note - I got to translate the lecture for the Learn and Serve students from French to English. He was a very interesting man who brought up a few points in ways I haven't thought of before. For instance, he likened the current internal conflict in Islam to the metamorphosis that happened in Christianity with the reformation and the ensuing political and military conflicts. He rejects comparing 20th Century Islam to the 20th Century Western World. He prefers to look at this type of comparative history through the lense of these formative movements in society, where movements, both political and belief-based flare. He touched on examples such as Nazi Germany, the witch trials, and the Enlightenment.

There was also a lot of talk about the idea of the "Other," and what he believes is its necessity in forming cohesive movements. He contends that it is necessary to have that "Other," to reinforce group identity. Furthermore, he believes that the Other is merely an outward manifestation of our own internal struggles. For example, misogyny as a man struggling against and fighting his own femininity. While I don't wholly agree (and have merely provided a cursory explanation here), he was definitely thought-provoking. Also, I like how he approaches comparative history as based around pivotal events and decisions within different cultures, not in a strictly linear fashion.