An open letter to The Guardian

Dear Guardian,

For years you have taken it upon yourself to single-handedly defame my country the United Arab Emirates. For reasons unknown the UAE has had to endure your endless bombardments of smear campaigns and ugliness in the name of free journalism.

In articles dating as far back as 2000 you have attacked the Emirates in all your sections from politics to travel. You have sent reporters with a mission to excavate only the negative no matter how minute it may be and inflated it into certain truths. You have only to enter the name of any Emirate in your website’s search box and watch as the archives of ugliness start to unfold. Pages worth of headlines that will make anyone who knows the UAE shudder. Your commentators and news reports have called our buildings “the nastiest you’ve ever seen” our lifestyle “a place where the worst of western capitalism and the worst of Gulf Arab racism meet in a horrible vortex” labeled our rulers “dictators” and even advised Dr. Who not to film on our land!

All this unsubstantiated drivel we have heard from you throughout the years and have remained silent simply because we have taken it as just that.

Eventually when your army of pen-pushers failed to paint the bleak image of the UAE that they have set out to do you stepped up to this one-sided battle and wrote an editorial denouncing my country, but why?

For anyone who has ever been to the UAE or chose to make it their home, for the people of UAE this is mind-boggling to say the least. The UAE is a peaceful country; its rulers are as much of the people as the people are a part of this country. Emiratis are a welcoming, tolerant people who have in only 41 years opened up their doors and overcome the culture shock that comes with such a transformation with class and grace. 

The country’s foreign affairs are solid and its worldwide humanitarian efforts are ones all nations must strive to emulate. One has only to visit the UAE, talk to its people and the people who have chosen to raise their children in it to know what it truly is.

We understand your bewilderment at the success of this great nation’s experiment in unity and peace. We do not blame you for feeling a tad bit confused about its resilience in the face of economic adversity and the continuous drive of its people. But does that really warrant all this resentment from you?

Granted, there are many aspects to our country that need to be developed and revised and we are well on our way to doing so. 41 years old this December the UAE’s achievements, cultural sophistication and tolerance transcends its young age as a united nation. In our 41 years we have not waged wars, we have sought peace, we have not divided our land based on race, we have embraced more than 200 nationalities as our own. We have tolerated judgment and criticism from nations who have fought and aided wars on either side of the globe and listened to them preach their version of democracy while they take actions of which hypocrisy is ashamed.

We are an educated nation with a 97% literacy race and we have heard you loud and clear. Now it is time for you to hear us. Twelve years of this one-sided reporting is putting a damper on your impartiality and frankly hurting your credibility as a respected paper. Any person in their right mind, whether they have been to the UAE or not, cannot believe that a country as popular and loved as this one would not have one good aspect to report or comment on. How could people from all walks of the earth flock to a nation that is as ugly as you say? That is a true anomaly, a real wonder of the world, a mystery that has yet to be explained and based on your reporting I think it never will be.

This article was published in The Gulf Today newspaper on 18th November, 2012.
Arabic version of this article was published in Al Khaleej newspaper on the same day: http://bit.ly/TQXwPY

                                                 
                                 

Writing a Wrong

Historically the Western mind has been mesmerised by the Middle East often painting pictures of it as a land of mysteries browned by the desert sun. In the United Arab Emirates, our parents recall during the British occupation that Englishmen stood the children in line and took photos of them. These very Englishmen would later put the photos in their books as they penned the history of our country. This was also the case for the rest of the Middle Eastern region, an Arab history conveyed to the rest of the world through foreign eyes.

Edward Said, the late Palestinian literary theorist and powerful political voice coined this phenomenon ‘Orientalism’, describing the Western study of Eastern cultures. In recent years, the Arab world’s fluency of the English language has allowed the West to hear our own description of our past and our concerns for our future. We no longer needed the Englishman to tell our stories and no longer did the philosophy of the Arab mind need to be translated by the West.

Nowadays, Arab writers and commentators writing in the English-language are a plenty. The language barrier has ceased to exist. The true crisis lies in failing to identify the thin line between writing in a foreign language and writing with a foreign tongue. It is sad to see that many intelligent Arab writers are adhering to the Western perspective and echoing its same rhetoric in return for international recognition. 

In the past we have seen such antics working especially in the literary world. Salman Rushdie, the Indian novelist, had written four novels prior to his Satanic Verses but it was this book, that portrays a skewed perspective of Islam which catapulted him into the farthest heights of fame, winning him awards and even having him knighted by the Queen of England for his “services to literature”. Selling out on one’s ideology and beliefs in return for the West’s approval is shameful.

Many Arab writers have been blinded by the glaring lights of Western fame and have found that Arab opinions dressed in a Western man’s suit can get them far, but at what cost? We possess the language that now bridges the gap in perspectives but instead of using it to tell our story we are telling theirs. While we are grateful for their work, it is painful to see writers like Noam Chomsky and Norman G. Finkelstein, both Jewish Americans, fight for Palestinian rights and the Arab perspective more passionately than many Arabs do.

For years, anytime an Arab writer or publication expressed their opinions the Western commentators played the ‘Arab victimisation’ card and dismissed them as just that. On the other hand, if writers such as Chomsky or Finkelstein discuss the same issues they are labeled ‘truth-tellers’. Still, it is one thing for the Arab voice to be suppressed by the West but it is a whole other issue for it to be choked by our own hands. When Arab commentators repeat Western rhetoric then our voice becomes redundant thereby rendered useless.

This month, Al Jazeera English will receive Columbia University’s top journalism award for “singular journalism in public interest”. One of the substantial reasons that Al Jazeera news channel gained momentum and weight for its news coverage is because, regardless of its own agendas, it never followed a Western one. Its notoriety came not from adhering to a certain Western standard, but for standing up against it and revealing to the world the other side of the political coin.

Writers, especially of politics, should never take information at face value and steer facts towards a logic that goes against their beliefs. In journalism and intellectual commentary one should not take certain issues to the merest truisms.

In politics, the pen is at its heaviest because it is weighed down by the collective responsibility it holds towards its people and their future in the eyes of the world.

It is best to retire one’s pen than succumb it to a life of self-betrayal.

This article was published in The Gulf Today newspaper on May 15th, 2011.