The Arab Street

When you're watching the news it's very common to hear talking heads talk about what is going on in the "Arab street," that is, what folks are thinking about the world, and especially the U.S., in the Arab world. I would never pretend to be an expert on the Arabic world (I mean, come on, I'm essentially a defrocked Tudor historian), but I've been fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and have made trips to Egypt, and even far-flung corners of the "Arab" or at least Islamic world such as Morocco or India (largely Hindu, obviously, but there are over 120 million Muslims in India, and I've spent time in Hyderabad, which is mainly Islamic). Beyond the theft in Cairo, and, realistically, that obviously had nothing to do with the fact that I was an American, I've never had a bad experience. People in the Middle East do a much better job than we do in separating American foreign policy from average everyday Americans. Sadly, we tend to lump all Muslims together into this monolithic, and in our minds, lunatic and virulently anti-American core. Yes, there is a lot of anger towards Bush's idiotic and militaristic foreign policy here in the Middle East, but, geez, there is back home in the U.S. as well. Folks in the Middle East tend to like Americans, and not simply because they view us as walking ATMs - I think they still see a shred of the dream that used to be America - of what we always represented in the word (and, hopefully, will again someday). I'm including a picture of a poster I saw in downtown Cairo.