Please don't block me ever again...
Compiled by Sohail Moughal
5 October 2006

This morning, I came out of my house to go to work and found a car parked in front of my gate blocking my exit. This happened exactly and quite conveniently on the same day I had decided to quit smoking. After waiting for fifteen minutes, I asked my house boy to go fetch two packs of cigarettes, make some more coffee, and smoked three cigarettes in a row. I didn't know who to blame. I started making plans, how to react when the stupid owner of the blocking car arrives. What if I had an emergency. What if my wife was pregnant and I had to take her to the hospital. What if I have a heart attack now. What if my boss has already put me on a final warning for arriving late at work. What if I loose my job and cant pay my mortgage and support my family. What if I miss an all important meeting and my company looses the best opportunity they had been working on for the last two years. All the whatifs started coming to my mind. Forty five minutes later, a women with her daughter arrived. They saw me standing between their car and my open gate with my hands on my hips. She looked at me, at my gate, at my car in the driveway, at her car, and my hands on my hips, analyzed the situation, said nothing. Her daughter, "the fifteen year old chhamak chhallo with long ear rings, high heels and a school uniform" said a single word in Arabic very silently, most probably to herself, and they both sat in their car. No remorse. I don't know how to speak Arabic, except a few words like "sorry", "thank you" and "go screw yourself", so I had no way of telling them how I felt. Absolutely no remorse, and it bothered me even more. I wanted to throw my favorite insulated coffee mug along with my favorite brewed coffee on their windshield. But I didn't. And I didn't, well I couldn't, I actually couldn't say a word, utter helplessness. So I simply started my car, and found that their car had still not moved. She was still in front of my gate discussing some papers with her daughter. I honked, and only then she moved a little bit, just enough, so that I could get out of my house. Still no remorse. While driving to work, I kept thinking, who the hell are these people, where did they come from, who teaches them the ways of life, and what makes them the way they are. Who lets them live and do such things. So here I go again. Making a mountain out of a molehill...

Before I go on, I want to access my self. Am I xenophobic, judgmental, and stereotyping people. I look up for the symptoms of xenophobia. French and English are so muck alike, that they love to hate each other. Their economies are very closely tied and their policies have a significant effect on each other. Same is the case with Americans and Canadians. Indians are Pakistanis love to hate each other too, even though they belong to a very similar culture. Almost everyone hated blacks and the yellows in the past, still do to a large extent. Southern Italians hate Northern Italians. Arab in the Gulf hate the people from Far East, South Asia and East Asia, but rely on them heavily for developmental work. When there was no oil in the Gulf, people from other countries coming for pilgrimage used to treat Arabs probably the same way. Northerners everywhere don't like southerners. And Eastenders don't like Westenders. Hate is such a strong word, but lets face it, it exists everywhere. It has always existed between different cultures, but never before has hate between cultures been so global as it is now. Is globalization the real curse. We are trying to see the world to be flat rather than round. I thought globalization was going to level out all the inequalities, but its making the differences even wider. We are getting more and more polarized, along the axis of class and economic inequality, axis of religion and culture, axis of gender, axis of geographies, languages and regions. Discrimination is a built-in instinct. But I still blame it all on the individuals. Only individuals can make the change, fight the instinctive xenophobia. If every individual tries to be tiny bit considerate, a little better human than before, we will see the difference. This women could have parked a few meters away, walked a few more steps and would have definitely saved me from writing all this. How could she decide that her issue was more significant than my issues.

All of a sudden, I wanted to find out which people in the world are the rudest or the rudest nation in the world. An internet search will give you stories about British, French, Germans, Arabs, and Americans. Some surveys have been done too but nothing can be established. There are good or bad people everywhere. I want to think that all are good, and its their circumstances that make them bad. The women must have been the best mother for her daughter. The daughter must have the best student for her teacher, or the best daughter for her father. And still they managed to act rudely towards me. While living in a society members owe a little respect to the other members of the society. Is it not common sense.

That day the city traffic was a chaos, every one in the office was complaining about it, the schools had started. I came home for lunch and after a short nap, asked the house boy to open the gate to go bach to work, only to find my way blocked by another car again. Twice in the same day. This time the wait was almost an hour long. And the guy who showed up turned out to be my dentist. He had moved to Canada in 1979, worked in New Brunswick, Canada for 20 years and had decided to move back to his home country just recently to start his own business. I had chosen him to be my dentist, because I was told he would be more responsible than other local dentists. I had always thought Canadians to be very responsible people when it came to community living. But Canada had obviously failed to teach community living to my dentist in 20 years.

So what do you do when you have a little time on your hands. Your mind becomes a devil's workshop and you start finding reasons. You start putting 2 and 2 together. Some times you start comparing apples to oranges and sometimes you manage to prove that adding 2 and 3 might give you 4 if you know how to tweak things. My devil's workshop is thinking, is it the orient, is it the arab, or is it me who needs to be told about to others. I decide to tell about Arabs, for two main reasons. Firstly, because, I have started living in an Arab speaking country and second, I am totally not liking it. I moved to this place after living for ten years in North America and when people warned me while I was moving, I had replied, "Who says, one should live in the best places all the time".

There are approximately 6 billion humans on the Planet. Among every four/ five humans in the world, one is a muslim. Today around 250 million people speak Semitic languages, out of which some 200 million speak Arabic. Out of these 200m Arabs, some 170m are muslims. Arabs constitute less that 15% of the Muslim world. There are more muslims in Indonesia than there are in the Arab World. The three holy books of Arabs say that Arabs are descendants of Shem, the son of Noah. Muslims have increased by over 235 percent in the last fifty years up to nearly 1.6 billion. By comparison, Christians have increased by only 47 percent, Hinduism, 117 percent, and Buddhism by 63 percent. Islam is the second largest religious group in France, Great Britain and USA. Some Arabs claim they can trace their lineage directly back to Noah. Roots of these Arabs "al-Ariba" meaning pure origin are found in the ancient Petra in Jordan. After wandering around the world, visiting about 35 countries, and studying cultures and religions for more than three deacdes, I have found Muslims to be the rudest people in the world and the Arabs being the ones at the very origins of Islam, are no different. I am a Muslim myself and studying Islam makes me wonder, how could believers of such a religion act the way they do. The religion that tells you to love thy neighbour first and then the creator, has its people doing totally the opposite. I am not sure but it was Ibn Battuta who had said that he saw Islam being practised in the west but people living as muslims in the east.

The second type of Arabs are called Arabised Arabs or "al-Mustaribah". The history is vague and has many definitions of the Arabised Arabs.
a. Descendants of Adnan, son of Ismail who was son of Abraham
b. People with afro-asiatic languages, like the Berbers, Chadic, Egyptian, Semitic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages
c. Also sometimes known to be the descendants of Ham, the other son of Noah. Ham is known to be the father of all African races.
d. Bedouins who migrated from Assyria/ Mesopotamia

The third type of Arabs are the Perished Arabs "Al-Ba'eda" and are believed to be the descendants of Ad, the great grandson of Noah and the first to populate the land of Arabs, starting from the Southern most parts like Oman and Yemen. The Prophet Hud, Eber in English, was sent to these people who lived in the center of "Rab uk Khali desert" or The Empty Quarter in a city called Ubar or Iram, the city of a thousand pillars. Ubar's king Shaddad defied the warnings of the prophet Hud and his people dabbled in occult.The whole city with its people was covered by sand dunes as a punishment. The city Ubar is sometimes called the Atlantis of the desert. There is a common notion that the word Hebrew originated from Eber. There were some survivors and the Prophet Hud and his family is considered to have settled in Yemen and also considered as an ancestor of the Prophet Abraham.

The fourth type are the Mixed Arabs, the "al-Muta'aribah". They lived in the land between the Pure Arabs and the Perished Arabs.

More to come

Click for myRamblings on ONE-PPM