How I Fell in Love with an Arab, Part 1

Many people that I know have not yet had the privilege of meeting my fiancé and have not heard the story of how God brought us together. For some, all they know is what they see—that I’m engaged (rather quickly by modern American standards) to a Palestinian Arab man, and that realization brings with it a host of questions and preconceptions about what that means. So in this inaugural post in the new Cross-Cultural category on An Iris Awaits, I seek to begin telling the story. In doing so, I am cognizant of the fact that my audience is no longer strictly American, and it is my deepest desire to share honestly while not being unnecessarily offensive to readers from any background.

For those who are new to the blog and might not be used to my writing style, it will be helpful to know that I often describe mindsets in such a way that seems to indicate I agree with them only to turn around and show why I do not. In some cases thought patterns that I used to hold are described in present tense as if I still hold them, in order to help readers feel what it was like to inhabit such a point of view before leading them to see why I shifted to hold a different one.

So with that groundwork laid, let’s begin. . .      

September 11, 2001, was my introduction to Arabs. As a nine-year-old girl, I saw faces on television— faces of the men who attacked my country and faces of men and women who were celebrating the attack. Before then, I have no recollection of ever seeing people of Arab descent. My introduction to Arabic was of a similar nature. I only ever heard the language spoken in the context of angry chants directed toward my country and its people as loud tirades of unknown words pushed their way through the English translation overlays on the news. While terrorism does its job of effecting fear, the media often does its part as well, and suddenly in my country Arabs were looked upon with suspicion and were lumped together into one category—terrorists. In the general thinking, the entire Middle East became synonymous with Arab and Arab with terrorism (spoiler alert—neither of those is accurate), and that was my understanding of the world as a child.

Now, nearly two decades later, I find myself in love with and engaged to an Arab man, learning to read and speak Arabic, and about to move to the Middle East, a place much more beautiful than the media let on. So what changed? What happened to break the walls of distrust and fearful prejudice that subconsciously had been built inside me as a child? What happened to ease the internal tightening of the chest and stomach that came with hearing the Arabic language? What happened to cause my heart to swell with love for the Arab people?

Well, as with most things, there’s a story. . .

A year after 9/11, my family moved from one southeastern state to another. Although the move was within the same region of the same country, I still experienced pretty significant culture shock. To move twelve hours away, from the mothership of the “South” to the heart of the “Mid-South,” only to be called a “Yankee” was perplexing to say the least. To find that people ate different food, shopped at different grocery store chains, spoke with a different accent, and endured very different climate and weather patterns enrolled me in the school of learning how to adapt, how to be proud of where I had come from but still to embrace where I was then. I was happiest when conversations turned to talking about my new culture and sharing about my home culture with my new friends.

Over the first few years in our new home, my family had occasion to develop friendships with people from all over the world—Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea, Malawi, Russia, Moldova, Brazil. I began to pick up tidbits of information about their countries and cultures, and I loved connecting those tidbits to my growing knowledge of the world’s geography that I was gaining through my schoolwork. I also met several cross-cultural couples who continued to expand the awareness I had of cross-cultural marriages that had begun in my previous home with knowing of my best friend’s grandparents who were an Irishman and a Filipino woman.

In high school I traveled out of the United States for the first time and experienced an international culture. I was learning Spanish in school and, with this trip to Brazil, was exposed to Portuguese as well. I loved being able to learn about new languages, even if it was only to speak a few words. It was like being able to break a code and understand a secret message. My mind was also opened to the variety that exists in the world, to realize that things we take for granted, say, at the grocery store, are not always available in other countries, but at the same time to realize that this reality goes both ways. There are treasures that other countries hold that America is deprived of.

Fast-forward to college, and I had the opportunity to travel outside the country once again, this time to England to learn at L’Abri. Once there, I spent 10 days living, working, relaxing, and studying with people from all over the world including Canada, the Netherlands, Brazil, England, and Australia. One night in particular stands out when a Dutch couple invited me to their flat for Swiss hot chocolate. We spent a couple of hours talking about our countries, asking and answering questions that we had always been curious about regarding each other’s home. It was invigorating, and I loved every minute of it. I learned so much that week in so many areas of my life, but the one thing that is relevant to this post was a conscious awareness of how much I enjoyed learning about other cultures and helping others learn about my own.

All of this contributed to the broadening of my perspective, to the priming of my heart and mind and personality to embrace intercultural connections, but you might have noticed that one people group has been conspicuously absent in the story thus far. That’s right—Arabs.

I went to a Christian college where we corporately attended chapel services three times a week. Sometimes these were like church services with worship music and a sermon, but sometimes we heard from guest speakers on a variety of topics. One chapel in particular is forever burned in my memory. The speaker that day was from Bethlehem. He was a Christian from Bethlehem. And he was a Palestinian (Arab) Christian from Bethlehem. Those are three identifiers that my brain had never put together before. But there he was, in the flesh, talking about his experience as a follower of Christ in the town where Christ was born and where there presently exists politicoreligious and racial tension of a high degree.

You know those movies where the scene is playing out, and then suddenly everything in the periphery blurs out as the camera zooms in quickly to focus on the main character as he has an earth-shattering realization? Yeah, that’s what it felt like. I felt in the core of my being that I had been thinking of the world all wrong, and it shook me.

And with that, I’ll have to leave you hanging to find out why next time on An Iris Awaits.

[Read Part 2 here.]

PC: Pamela Hollis. Used with permission.