User:Perrycallas

Those who refuse to learn from the past.... somehow continue to prosper.
When the United States, in pursuit of its strategic interests, sponsored a military coup to install Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran, it set in motion events, which continue to affect the Middle East and the United States.

During the Shah's rule, Persian society was exposed for the first time to the positive and negative aspects of American culture. Pahlavi liberalized the country enough to loosen the religious shackles that had maintained a tribal, theocratic stranglehold on Persian society for many years. He also used his secret police, Savak, to maintain his place on the Peacock Throne, alienating large segments of Iranian society, who were, until the Islamic Revolution, victims of his dictatorial tactics.

As oil money flowed into Iran, its growing upper class allowed its children to experience the wider world and its possibilities. The same thing happened in Saudi Arabia. Many wealthy families sent their kids to the U.S. for their college educations, and in the 1960s and 1970s there were thousands of Persians and Saudis on campus at many American universities.

As a young English Literature major at Portland State University in the late 1970s I had the opportunity to tutor two Middle Eastern students; one was a Saudi Arabian woman named Hussah and the other a Persian woman named Fatemeh. Each would sit with me for an hour or two every day, and it was my work/study job to help them understand their English textbook assignments. For hours on end, they would show me highlighted passages in their texts and ask me their meaning. Most of their questions revolved around idioms such as "keep the ball rolling" or "on the other hand." However, the more time we spent together, the more their questions turned to the nature of American society and how Americans managed to survive without the apparent religious strictures that existed in their home countries.

I acquired a broad understanding of the differences between our cultures and attempted to explain why, for example, Americans are open, exuberant, and apparently less concerned with spiritual propriety than others; why we allow the questioning of authority, why we speak openly about political matters without fear of reprisal, why we celebrate our independence, our sexuality, our innovation.

Hussah was Sunni, vivacious, independent, and wanted a college degree so that, when she returned to Saudi Arabia, she could pursue a teaching career. Fatemeh, the daughter of a Tehran tea merchant, was Shiite, but she had been raised in a westernized Iran and had been exposed to enough education to see the shortcomings of the Shah's tyranny and of Islam's lack of freedom. Neither completely trusted the U.S., but it was apparent that they found American freedom to be an intoxicating and fascinating thing.

Fatemeh, somewhat shy and conservative, often expressed anger at the Shah, a man who, she said, was responsible for the brutal suppression of his political enemies and who had made it impossible for Persian culture to flourish. She wanted more than anything to return to Tehran and teach basic literacy to the many young women who, she said, were treated like chattels. She also related to me how Americans living in Iran flouted Islamic convention by drinking, dancing, and kissing in public. She said that the Russians in Iran were more reserved and more respectful of Persian customs, and she found it difficult to believe we cared about Iran.

Hussah, who was less concerned with social change, spent less time criticizing the U.S., and she seemed to be more concerned with simply finding a way to take her new skills home and use them in the service of her personal life.

One afternoon, they happened to meet each other in my little tutoring classroom. I introduced them, and after a brief interval of awkwardness, they started a conversation. It took them little time to begin comparing notes on their cultures and ours. I soon became a bystander, and over the next few weeks, by listening to what they said to each other, I was able to see how we were all affected by what we had been taught.

I learned for the first time that Persians and Arabs are as culturally different from each other as Americans are from either and that we had all been raised in provincial environments. My Lutheran background was quite different from theirs, and my preconceptions about the world were tested against their views of Islamic history and culture. In the intellectually safe atmosphere of the college, away from our parents and our parents' tribes, we found that we shared the same desires: freedom, safety, intellectual challenge, and hope.

My wife, raised by a Chinese mother and a Russian father, invited both women to our rented home, and all three women cooked their traditional dishes in the most memorable potluck of my young life. They discussed their families, their homes, and their dreams. No one spouted any hatred; no one insisted that they had the one true belief.

When the Islamic Revolution in Iran caught fire in 1978, Fatemeh had already returned to Tehran, and Hussah was back in Saudi Arabia. I never heard from either one again, and I wondered what had happened to them. Did Hussah continue her learning? Was Fatemeh now wearing a burkha and putting her dreams of female literacy on hold?

Now, almost 30 years later, the Bush Administration is attempting to continue an American practice of meddling in the conflicts between religious sects in the Middle East. Instead of dialogue, there are more arms sales. Instead of conversation, there are more attempts to back the "winning" side. Instead of respect for and recognition of the deeply held religious beliefs in the region, there is manipulation, machination, and deceit.

The most troubling and ironic aspect of this is that of all the American groups Sunnis and Shiites most closely resemble, in terms of fundamental religious convictions, Christian Fundamentalists come the closest. All three of these groups shun teaching which engenders the questioning of religious authority; all three groups seek to preserve their ancestors' traditions and thereby assure their relationship with God; all three place family, piety, and correct moral behavior on a cultural pedestal. Yet, all now seek to triumph in order to assuage their baseless fears about the other two.

In the U.S. we continue to feed this fire by relying upon and exploiting the Middle East's natural resources. The Sunnis continue to view Shiites as an inferior class. The Shiites, seeking to end centuries of being second-class citizens, wish to show the world that their God loves them, too. And while this continues, young people (like we were in the 1970s) die in bombings.

The Bush family's alliance with the Sunnis goes back many years, and America's meddling in this family feud has all the prospects of success of a cop bursting into a house where a domestic dispute is in progress. None of the parties involved has a hope of changing the others' minds, and the likelihood of violence increases when any party feels threatened.

Many of the American people are as innocent, as kind, and as religious as the Sunnis and Shiites. They understand what it is to love one's God enough to honor him through their actions. Therefore, it seems to follow that we stop treating the Sunnis and Shiites as pawns in our game to protect our oil addiction. Instead, we must take real action to broker peace in the Middle East, to reduce our need for their resources, and to live up to our expressed desire to foster "freedom." We cannot take away the religious beliefs of fanatical killers who bomb in the name of Allah, but we can stop buying them the weapons they use. We cannot erase many years of foreign policy blundering, but we can stand fast in our insistence upon conversation, even if it takes resources, time, and commitment. We have to recognize that centuries of belief are created by discrete events, and our actions now will reverberate for many years.