Understanding

 I love to read. I also enjoy learning about things I don’t know about or don’t understand.  But, I like to be entertained while I’m reading.  As a result I read lots of historical fiction and non fictional stories and memoirs. I just finished The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson. I chose this book because it was about an American who moves to Egypt and converts to Islam. I’ve always been fascinated by Egyptian culture and I thought an American immersed in it would be the perfect person to help me learn more about the country and culture.  

Although, I did learn a lot about what I was hoping to learn about I took away something rather unexpected from The Butterfly Mosque.  Something that I could apply to so many things going on in my life and going on around me.  Almost all conflicts and misunderstandings come down to fear.  As human beings, we tend to fear what we don’t understand.  This fear can sometimes cause us to react in ways that we wouldn’t under normal circumstances.  

As a woman, I feared many middle eastern countries because of my perception of discriminatory practices toward women in these countries and cultures.  Ms. Wilson helped me to see that I was misinformed.  Woman are treated the way they are in some cultures because they are honored and revered not because they are considered to be lesser people than men.  Women are encouraged to cover their heads and bodies because they are considered beautiful.  There are no images of God or Allah for the same reason.  He is too beautiful for humans to see. In The Butterfly Mosque, Ms. Wilson shares a story that was published in the west. It was a story about women only cars on the Cairo transit system. There are cars where men and women can ride together and there are also cars that are for women only. It is not done for discrimination purposes, it is done to protect women from bad behavior by men.  In women only cars women are not stared at or propositioned by men which is not unusual behavior in Cairo. I had feared this culture because I didn’t understand it. 

I have read many books and watched many documentaries about World War II.  No matter how hard I tried, I could not understand how something like the Holocaust could ever happen.  How could a person like Adolph Hitler ever come to power and why did the German people just go along with it and not fight against the atrocities happening around them?  Some brave people did and many of those people lost their lives.  Now I see that fear was a valuable tool utilized by the Nazi party to help keep the people complacent.

Looking at my own life, especially in this era of COVID, I can see that fear of what is not understood drove much of the behavior around me. Throughout this pandemic I have been calling for calm and reactions driven by facts not hearsay and a cry wolf mentality. This caused many people that I had considered friends to lash out at me. I now see that those people were scared of the virus that they didn’t understand and their fear caused them to act in ways that they wouldn’t under normal circumstances. 

There is so much in this world that I don’t understand.  There are many things I’m fearful of as a result of that lack of understanding but I vow to keep learning.  I’ll keep striving for that understanding because we all inhabit this planet, we all love our families and friends and we all deserve more understanding and less fear.