Peer Pressure!

So, my mother (like your mother, I am sure) never bought the excuse "But everyone else is doing it/has one/is allowed to!" In fact, her response was (exactly what your mother's response was): "And if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?" It's very hard to win an argument with your mother.

Actually, I heard someone, somewhere, defend this. Ah, yes, it was in college. We had a huge argument. Somebody or another was arguing (and believed it, too, I think) that it is okay for your 12-year-old daughter to date somebody just because "everyone else is doing it." And that it is okay because, and I paraphrase here, "You have no idea how much they might suffer in the lunch room if they don't." It was clearly extraordinarily important for this person that his/her child be popular. Without popularity, why live?

As you can probably tell, I buy this argument not at all. I was brought up to cherish my individuality and my freedom of thought, and not to let people push me around. In fact, I was more likely to do the OPPOSITE of what everyone else was doing, just so I could avoid being like everybody else. I was that kid for much of highschool - you know the one, the one who is standing in the back whining "Guys, I don't think this is such a good idea....". Only instead of whining I was generally the one saying "No. No NONONONONONONONONONO." Luckily my friends chose to continue to hang out with me, mostly because they were also brought up to cherish individuality, and they preferred to keep me around to tease me about my enormous conscience (which they named Nevada) and because I was such a scintillating, fascinating person.
Essentially, I am the last person in the world who would follow my friends off a cliff. Unless they needed saving, in which case it's possible, but that's a whole other issue.

Anyway. This post has a point, I swear. And that point is this: even I, maven of individuality and protector of the small and weak, find myself caving to peer pressure now and again. But it's a much more insidious sort of peer pressure, none of that 'dude, you are so not cool unless you own a pink Barbie watch with flashing lights'. It's the peer pressure that comes naturally from living as a minority of any sort. I now, by the way, have incredible amounts of respect for other people who have lived as a minority, and I'm much more conscious of it in my life when I'm in the States and definitely not a minority.

I'm a Christian, I'm a white kid, I'm a blond woman who stands out a mile as a foreigner. I study Islam, I study Arabic, and I am honestly, truly interested in all of this. And, to top it off, I'm the sort of person who is constantly reexamining myself and my beliefs. I can't tell you how many times I have been asked whether I am Muslim, or whether I am intending to convert, because obviously if I study Islam and move to Saudi Arabia I am clearly intending to be Muslim. No, I patiently explain, I am very interested and I find much of Islam beautiful, but I'm very happy with my religion and don't really feel the need for another one, thank you very much.

But why, then, would I be spending my time studying Islam? Clearly I must be vulnerable. So I get invited to all sorts of "Welcome to Islam!" bashes, and I get given huge numbers of informative pamphlets (because once I know enough obviously I will see the Truth). The people who know me have figured out that I am well-informed and very curious, but they've given up on converting me (or, bless their souls, they never tried in the first place).

Doth I protest too much? Yeah, that's the problem. Because although I don't feel in need of a different religion or a change in lifestyle or values (I like myself, and my values, and my religion, just fine thank you very much - even if I'm occasionally uncertain of who exactly I am and what, exactly, my values and religion are), I am still very conscious of the underlying message that my would-be converters are sending: you are not good enough until you are Muslim. You are not "right" until you are Muslim. You are not "saved" until you are Muslim. You are a deluded, hell-bound infidel demon until you are Muslim. Okay, the last might be an exaggeration (but then again, maybe not).

I suspect I'd get the same thing if I were in a conservative religious community anywhere. Unless, of course, I were willing to hide who I was and what I believed, and I've never really been a big fan of doing that. I took a class on the early history of Christianity, and you know in Rome pre-Constantine they used to force people to stomp on a picture of Jesus or else they would be killed? Even though I can't imagine that God would consider stomping on a picture to be really that bad if it saved your life, the idea of publicly renouncing your beliefs in order to fit in still feels incredibly, incredibly wrong. Although I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be brave enough to die for my beliefs, I gotta say the idea of stomping on that picture makes my stomach turn. And yet, when you're surrounded by a group of people who think differently from you (and simultaneously think, with absolute certitude, that YOU are wrong), it's really, really really really really hard not to feel pressure to conform. It weighs on you, the knowledge that everyone else thinks your moral system is corrupt and wrong. It gets to the point where you assume everybody thinks you're going to hell because it's easier than assuming the opposite and then being unpleasantly surprised. That's the worst part, for me. I find myself constantly underestimating the open-mindedness of the people around me just because I can't bear to be disappointed in them. I struggle to keep myself from doing this, but it's hard.

It's not easy to constantly be aware that you're considered freakish. I can only be thankful that there are lots of people out there, Muslim and non-Muslim, who don't consider me freakish.

It would be much easier if I were like my sister, who is pretty darn sure of who she is and what she believes (and she is NOT afraid of letting you know), but then I am not sure I'd really get as much out of the experience. But who knows. The fact of the matter is, I'm not like that. Like I said, I'm a pretty fuzzy outline in my mind, and to be honest I like that about me. I like to think I'm adaptable and willing to honestly reflect on myself in order to improve. Maybe I'm just wishy-washy. But regardless, in a community where you feel constantly judged (negatively), it's tough to keep that from affecting you as you renegotiate yourself. I think in the long run it's probably good for me ("builds character" as my father would say), and I think it makes me take a deeper look at what I really believe and why. I don't even entirely dislike the experience. It's a trial by fire, and even if it weren't a fascinating to look at the society around me, it would be fascinating to try to navigate personal relationships around the inevitable landmines that exist because of different cultural and religious values. And I've found to my delight that a lot of the time there are many fewer landmines than I think there are and, more than that, I've found a huge number of things that I truly admire about the culture and the people and the religion here, so there are things about myself that have changed positively because of the experience.

I'm rambling. All of this thought crystallized a little today because of two things. One, I found this blog (via the Daily Dish) and spent much of the day reading back through all of the archives, and two I talked to my sister about it. We are both fascinated by social experiments like this (for those who are too lazy to click the link, it's a lady who is Living Oprah - meaning, she watches Oprah daily, reads O magazine, and uses Oprah's website and is trying to create a holistic system of life by following all of Oprah's edicts on what to read, eat, how to dress, what to buy, how to think, etc.) where someone immerses themselves in a lifestyle very different from their own in order to test their own boundaries and to experience another point of view (or, in this case, to make a larger point about the unfortunately large role celebrity gurus play in our lives). That's kindof what I'm doing here, and my sister said she would be interested in joining a fundamentalist church to do something similar. But reading the Living Oprah blog, the blogger talks a lot about how she ends up feeling like she is inadequate in some huge way for not having immediately found the enlightenment and self-love that Oprah seems to expect us all to acquire easily. I completely related to that. Okay, I haven't chosen to follow Oprah's word as the Word of God, but I did choose to move to a country with a religious code different from my own. I think, where I feel the weight of the whole society here on me, our Living Oprah blogger feels the huge weight of Oprah's enormous charisma/star power/celebrity as a society of its own, a society in which everyone is well-adjusted, skinny, energetic and clutter-free.

That's all I've got. I realize this wasn't the most coherent post ever, but hey, obviously coherency is not one of my strong points. And I am, as I say, a work in progress, so I reserve the right to completely contradict myself in the future.

Del.icio.us

Hello all! Update on the blog I thought I'd make you aware of. I joined Del.icio.us which is a much better way to collect bookmarks and interesting links than I currently use. My current method involves sending myself long long long gmail conversations (of 80 letters or more) filled with nothing but links. Not the most practical thing ever.

So I'll be switching over to this. The advantage is the linkroll you see down the right -- as I bookmark something in my fantastic internet journey, it appears here on my blog automatically! So, I'll be posting in my blog only the very tippy top of the coolest stuff, or if I have something particular to say about something. But if you want to see a lot of cool stuff, check out the links on the right for what I've been looking at recently.

Surfing the internet is something I have only recently truly understood. Letting yourself open a random link, because it looks interesting, and then finding another random link to open, and then another and then another, and then eventually you're somewhere and you don't know how you got there but man is it nice.

Take, for example, my discovery of the following completely amazing blog: LikeCOOL. It's a collection of nifty stuff, and it's updated all the time. Who here isn't thrilled by a constantly updated collection of nifty stuff? I know I am.

In fact, I'm so thrilled that I'm adding it to my blogroll. Yes, I said it.

Anyway, just thought I'd give you an update.

Downtown Jeddah

It's been a while since I posted. Thanks to the lovely Saudi Telecom Company, our internet connection was down for a week. Actually, 9 days. Believe me, I was counting. Nowhere in the normal world would an ISP be able to keep service down for so long and still have any customers. But as we all know, this is not part of the normal world. Anyway, it was kindof interesting. For some reason our offices use a different internet connection than the residence, so my office still had connectivity. This means that I spent an ungodly amount of time in my office this past weekend.

ANYWAY, what I came here to discuss an interesting trip we went on the other day. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism in downtown Jeddah is run by a wonderful man who leads the fight to preserve and restore the old historical buildings of Jeddah. By far his biggest success is the restoration of Naseef House into a museum. One of the things he does on the side, and for which the Jeddah community is extremely grateful, is to give tours of Nassef House and the historic district. I have been lucky enough to go on this tour a few times, and it always fascinates me. Today, we were there because of some architects who were visiting us from abroad and who were naturally fascinated by the historic part of the city and the traditional architecture to be found there.

It quickly became clear that our guide was really happy to have the opportunity to ask our architect guests their opinion on something that has been vexing him for a while: the everlasting debate between restoring and preserving using traditional materials and methods, and restoring and preserving using modern materials and methods. Listening to them all talk, it sounds like it's been pretty well established that modern materials and methods don't work. They tried to protect the stained glass of the Notre Dame with plastic, and a century later the plastic had to come out as it was causing more problems than otherwise. Similarly, it sounds like they are trying to convince a French firm not to inject the walls of these houses with concrete. The idea would be to shore them up, but our guide was convinced this would be a disaster, and listening to them talk it sounds like they might be right.

Anyway, I wanted to give you an idea of what the old houses of Jeddah looked like, so here are some of my pictures.

The old houses of Jeddah were generally built about 150-100 years ago by the wealthiest families living in the region. This was before the Saudis had permanently claimed this region, but they still had influence and the families here deferred to them. Naseef House, the oldest of them, is roughly 150 years old and is also the biggest. The Naseef family is still one of the wealthiest here, and at the time they were by far the wealthiest. In fact, when the soon-to-be King of Saudi Arabia was visiting Jeddah, the Naseef family gave him the top floor of their house to stay in.

All the houses are built of coral, which I find fascinating, but makes sense given the fact that we're right on the Red Sea. So they make this sort of cement out of coral and sand, and then use wood supports to hold the "cement" in place (it obviously is not as strong as real cement). The walls get thinner as you go up, so that there's less pressure on the lower floors.

The houses have big windows, both to minimize the weight of the materials on the lower floors and to let the air circulate, and the windows are covered with a patterned wooden grate to protect the privacy of the people within. The grates are colored in a variety of ways (natural brown, green, blue) depending on the whims of the city's mayors when they were built, I think.

We saw, in addition, a mosque built 1400 years ago and renovated consistently since then. The oldest bit, the minaret, is 900 years old.

The highlight of the tour, hands down, is the end. Our guide led us up to the very top of Naseef House and, on the roof, there is a little wooden room that is open to the air. We got up there and sat down just as maghrib prayer started. Just at sunset. It was stunning. We sat up there and looked over the old city as the prayer call from a hundred mosques hit us all at the same time in a beautiful cacophony. It is easy to see how one might be inspired to prayer.