Dr. Abdelrahim Foukara
Arab-US Policymakers Conference
Washington, DC
October 26, 2007

Ladies and gentlemen,

I would like to warmly thank the National Council on US-Arab Relations, and Dr. John Duke Anthony in particular, for having kindly extended the invitation to me to share with this wonderful gathering here today, my thoughts and feelings about the state of US-Arab relations. 

Regrettably, I have to agree with those who say that it has become almost impossible to talk about those relations without feeling or expressing a sense of lament. I am sure some Arabs and Muslims resent America no matter what it does or does not do. I am equally sure that many Arabs and Muslims are disappointed or even angered by American foreign policy in the Middle East and think of most Americans as being unable to even place the Arab world on a map. But when all is said is done, I believe that given a choice, a large percentage of Arabs and Muslims would, at the drop of a hat, choose coming to America over going to many other parts of the world, despite everything we hear and read about anti-American sentiment in the region. Why? Because despite what is said about the failings of American foreign policy in the Middle East and despite all the bad press that Arabs and Muslims have sometimes got in this country since 9/11, the United States remains associated with a high-value commodity called: hope. 

So what should Arabs living in America tell their fellow Arabs living elsewhere about their American life? I am sure some Americans simply hate Arabs and think they're a an inherently violent species. But America, like the Arab world, is a place of great diversity of opinion and perspective. I am also confident that given half a chance to visit the Arab world and experience the warmth and generosity of its peoples and cultures, some of those Americans would be less eager to judge or misjudge. And that's because America, like the Arab world, is a generous human and cultural mosaic which is at its best and most natural when it embraces everyone. As you know, when America veers off that track, the whole world cringes, and I mean that literally as well as figuratively. 

If I had to find a simile that best describes relations between Arabs and Americans at the present time, I would say they're rather like the forlorn children of parents who've been through a violent divorce but who continue to find solace and comfort in recalling the magic of the early days, the magic of an age of innocence when Americans populated their fantasies about the Arab world with glorious characters and scenes from the "Thousand and One Nights," and when little Arab children populated their fantasies about America with the Ingells of "Little House on The Prairie," which I watched a lot when I was growing up. 

I was born in Morocco, a country whose culture is based on its unique geographical position between the Arab Middle East, black Africa and Mediterranean Europe. This geographical variety has, over thousands of years, translated into a mosaic of cultural and ethnic expressions which have in turn blended into that most generic and inclusive concept known as Arabness, a concept often ill-understood because it is ill-explained. 

Contrary to widespread perception, being Arab is not necessarily a statement of race or ethnicity. Being Arab is much more complex than that and much more inclusive. Being Arab to millions of people who call themselves that, is a way of life, a way of being in the world in all its manifestations of joy and sorrow, shame and pride, pettiness and grandeur, intolerance and open-mindedness, reason and madness. Being Arab, rather like being American, implicitly and explicitly denotes a wide variety of attributes and contradictions. But when all is said and done, being Arab is nothing more and nothing less than a way mankind has invented to express his humanity with everything that's sublime and fallible about it. 

When contemporary Arabs look around their universe, they see a reality riddled with dilemma, a long night of poverty, tyranny, occupation and a sense of shame, the kind that springs from having lost the compass that once helped their ancestors navigate the seas and skies of human achievement. So acute are their shame and despair sometimes that they find untranslatable comfort in the words of Al-Nabigha Al-Dhubiyani, an ancient Arab poet, overwhelmed by the endless night of waiting for his beloved, Umayma:

[Arabic] 

Kilini li hammin ya umaymata nasibin, wa laylin uqasihi bati'ilkawakibi, tatawala hatta qultu laysa bimunqadhin, wa laysa lladhi yar'annujuma bi'a'ibi

[English translation] 

"O leave me, Omayma, to my exhausting sorrow
Leave me to suffer the long night of slow-moving planets,
It has dragged on for so long it feels without end,
So long, the stars' shepherd, I feel, will never return."

Nothing captures either the sorrow or the magnificence of the human soul better than literature. And should the Arabs, God forbid, leave this planet one day, they would be most remembered for their poetry, though there were also other stars that once lit and hugged the higher heights of Arab achievement in architecture, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and various other sublime expressions of the human spirit. 

That's something which Americans would be better served to understand about Arabs. That is the best and most secure bridge to Arab hearts. 

So what do Arabs need to fathom about America and Americans?

America and its culture may not have the historical depth of the Arab world. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps because of their young and short history, Americans are natural-born precursors who lead the way into the future. That's where, it seems to me, their natural sensibility takes them. In many ways, the future of many nations is already the present in America. Many of those nations, including the Arabs, may take issue with American foreign policy in Iraq or Palestine or elsewhere. But when they look at America's enterprising spirit, how it has put man on the moon and invented cures for diseases once thought incurable, they say, not in shock and awe, but in words of wonder and amazement, "Ah, that's where I'd like to be in fifty or a hundred years, if I'm lucky."

So let us look at the magic roundabout that is the past of the Arabs and the future of the the Americans. It is the kind of magic that can take us back to the future, to the the things that bind us together beyond the seas that separate us. In 1492, the Iberian peninsula's last Muslim kingdom fell to the Catholic Kings of Castille. In 1492 also, America was discovered by Christopher Columbus, a voyage sponsored by the same kings, a voyage that dramatically changed the course of human history, a voyage made possible by the scientific legacy of a desert people who, with time, became seafaring nations: the Arabs. That's how magical man's roundabouts can be. 

"What a piece of work is man!", said Hamlet, "How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!"

"And yet to me," asked Hamlet, "what is this quintessence of dust." 

So let me for a while turn to the quintessential dust of Arab-American relations and what has driven those relations in recent years.

Six years after 9/11, I continue to puzzle over the extent to which Arabs, and perhaps non-Arabs too, living outside the United States have failed to fathom what the 9/11 attacks have done to America's collective psyche. I have heard many Americans say that the attacks not only violated their sovereignty and sense of security but they also shook the very foundation upon which their Americanness was erected. The threat, they say, was existential. Whether Arabs can relate to that or not, it certainly deserves to be food for thought. 

But I also continue to puzzle over the extent to which Americans have failed to grasp what the invasion of Iraq signified to millions of Arabs, particularly those who had never been directly exposed to the authority of the Iraqi state. Iraq in the Arab psyche has a resonance all its own. Its history may be punctuated with discord and blood. Its geography has been patched together or even fabricated by past empires. But Iraq, in the eyes of the Arabs, has always represented the jewel in the crown, the land that has for so long spurred the magnificent horse of Arab imagination, stimulated by such legends as Harun Al-Rasheed who, the fable goes, had golden birds chirping in his garden's golden trees. Dig deep in the archeology of modern Arab psychology and popular memory and you will sooner or later hit that find: Iraq. Americans may or may not be willing or able to relate to that perception, but no attempt to understand the contemporary Arab psyche would be complete without listening to the ring of Iraq in that psyche.

But that was not the only thing that was lost in translation between Arabs and Americans. There were other things too. One of them is that human history is littered with evidence that militaries can't always buy you love or victory, as Iraq has yet again shown us. Another thing lost in translation is that there's no safety in numbers. Just look how hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims completely failed to prevent the invasion of Iraq or to offer the Iraqis a way out of their current quandary. 

A third element that must be restored to the translation of US-Arab dialogue is that pithy and totally wonderful phrase thought to be the foundation of American democracy, that all men are born equal. I am delighted that a poet has yet again beaten me to the punch. This time, America's very own Walt Whitman:

"Neither a servant nor a master am I, I take sooner a large price than a small price.. I will have my own whoever enjoys me, I will be even with you and you shall be even with me." 

If Al-Nabigha Al-Dhibiani and Walt Whitman were here with us today, I would have asked them to compose a poem to Arab-American relations. For while the current state of those relations is far from poetic, I don't see armies of American poets marching to the Arab world to show the bright side of Americanness. Nor do I see armies of Arab poets marching to America to show the bright side of Arabness. But if this magnificent gathering here is a beginning, I'll take it.

Thank you. 

Dr. Abdelrahim Foukara, Washington Bureau Chief, Al-Jazeerah International and former longtime BBC Correspondent