Suspension of disbelief.

It’s what keeps you reading a novel or watching a movie even though ridiculously some kid has just been shipped off to wizarding school for the fourth year in a row.  You put aside the part of your brain that tells you that only crazy people believe in wizarding school so that you can enjoy the deeper contexts and experiences of the events and characters in question.

On the other hand, when traveling to another nation with a culture phenomenally and quite possibly diametrically positioned against your own, you must employ suspension of belief.

You have to forget who you are for a while if your traveling is going to make any significant difference in the way you think and approach the world.

Ugly American.  You’ve heard the term.  It conjures up that image of a slightly overweight woman in a tank top and shorts standing in front of the Louvre screaming about how the McDonald’s in Paris doesn’t put enough ice in their sorry excuse for a large Coke.

What most people don’t acknowledge is that most tourists from everywhere are “ugly” like this.  By virtue of living in the Central Florida area and by understanding several languages well enough, I know that there are multiple iterations of that Coke analogy and that they’re offered by a disparate number of nationalities.

And every complaint boils down to the same thing, “Why can’t these people be more like us?”

When one visits a new culture, they should suspend what they believe about themselves, how they think things ought to be, and who others ought to be.

It’s critical to the definition of “worldly” or “well traveled”.

In fact, if a person can’t do this, it’s a complete waste of money for them to travel.  They should just stay home until they have a true sense of how other cultures can imbue one with new found wisdom instead of assuming that they only exist to reinforce an internal sense of superiority about your own way of life.  I recommend watching Anthony Bourdain.  He seems to have it all figured out.

How was my trip to Saudi Arabia?

It was fantastic.

And mostly because I didn’t stop to think about how they were doing it all wrong and why or how they should be different.  I examined the society there and tried really hard to understand why they did things the way they did.  I truly attempted to get a sense of who they were.

Now, I know what some people are thinking as they read this, “Well, you’re Muslim, and it’s a Muslim country, so how much adjusting did you actually have to do… not much…”  Not true.  I am an American Muslim of Pakistani heritage.  And there is a significant difference between the way that I view the world, God and just about everything else and the way a typical Saudi Arabian might.

There were moments in Saudi where I caught myself donning the cloak of judgment and weighing my cultural practice over theirs, but I would immediately stop myself.

I told myself, I will accept these people and this culture in this moment so that I can truly get a sense of who they are.  I will reserve judgment until I am confident that I know them.  I will not walk away from this with one simplified and discrete opinion.  I will recognize that there is much more to this country than I can begin to understand or experience in three weeks.  I will accept that there is some measure of wisdom in their practices.  This place will make me better than before.

Now, I am not Pollyanna.  I know and you know that there are injustices that are occurring in Saudi Arabia.  Still, my feeling is and has always been that we should worry about our injustices and let them worry about theirs.  For now, anyway.

When we are perfect and great and awesome and everyone here loves and respects each other, then we can go over there and fix them.

We might find at that point, though, we’ve been confusing “saving them” with “changing them.”  And we might find that they don’t want to change and that they’re fine with the way things are.  We also might find that the way they do things over there has less to do with our general safety in the world than we might think.  We might find these things out if we suspend our own beliefs long enough to really find out who they are.

See, you and I, Americans that we are, we love our freedom, and our choices, and our individuality, and our sense of being unique and our God given right to complain and fight when just one of ninety nine of us isn’t getting their due.

Sometimes, we forget, though, that everyone else doesn’t see it that way.

Some cultures value structure over choice, the community over the individual and God over the exceptionality.  It’s hard for us to understand and accept these different approaches, but I think we have it in us to, at the very least, acknowledge that there’s more than one way to build a functioning society.

And who is right?  I cannot and will not presume.  I, having only been there for three weeks, do not have enough information to confidently dismiss another person’s entire way of life.  I would hope that people who have never even been there will realize what my ambiguity means for them and the precarious conviction which with they judge this country and others.

Basically, I’m just hoping that people will stop thinking, “Why aren’t they like us?”

Because we all know that this thought eventually becomes, “You should be like us.”

And then it becomes, “You will be like us.”

And, you know what will be the absolute last thing they will want then?

Is to be anything is like us.

Seek first to understand and then to be understood.  Remember, an American* first said that.

*If memory serves, it was Stephen Covey.