Having just begun *Rory Stewart’s book Occupational Hazards, I was struck by a simple quote:
“The best kind of international development seemed to be done by people who directly absorbed themselves in rural culture and politics, focused on traditional structures, and understood that change would always be very slow.” (Stewart, 2007, pp8)
Following on from reading Rory’s account of walking across Afghanistan, it struck me that we cannot form an accurate opinion or world view on Middle Eastern politics here in the West.
Stewart in The Places in Between, for example, recounted a particularly widely-held view in the West regarding the Koran. Namely: that we have not seen from an Eastern or Islamic perspective the importance of the holy book itself to Muslims. Because our view of our own cultural and spiritual texts relies on dialogue, we tend to analyse and debate, to argue and distinguish. Muslims, according to Stewart, are much more likely to see their texts as transcendent, regardless of what is written or studied. They are holy for their own sake, not necessarily because of the lessons or teachings within.
As a personal illustration of a malformed understanding, I remember just such a situation I couldn’t get my Western head around. As a teenager, my family hosted a foreign exchange student from Kosovo. The lad was bewildered in the US, and we were bewildered by our first experiences with someone from such a different background.
*This originally linked to Rory Stewart’s website, which has moved or broken. The link has been updated to Wikipedia.
