i have a half-hour before my arabic class, and nothing to do...

i was going to write a week ago about this, but I had forgotten until now. 

While I love the hospitality of Moroccans here and have really come to imagine just how much i'll miss it after i leave, there are many misconceptions among us which inevitably lead to misjudgments. one of these is how smart/stupid the other is.

ever since i've been in morocco, people want to tell me about muhammad. who he was, what he did, and what islam is; he students (and even some teachers) here dont really expect me to know these things beforehand. In geography class the other day, we were talking about universalizing religions, and the presenter looked right at me and asked, you do know who muhammad is? i said yes, and she looked at the professor, who said, well maybe you should explain a little bit in case some people dont really understand...

i have been asked if i know where morocco is (where am i?), where france is, and where london is; if i know who george bush is, and (the only thing that actually made me want to cry, when i was cooking paella in the kitchen and somebody came up to me) if i knew what oil was. before coming here, i expected that people might imagine me as isolated and less cultured than themselves. what i didnt expect, however, was that they would openly let me know, just how often i'd have to respond to this.

but i have to say, i bet after some of the stuff i've asked them, they feel just as frustrated (and astounded) as i sometimes do. for instance, i asked my friend ismail what jihad meant:

oh my god, he must have thought, not only does he not know what it means, he thinks it means holy war. 

as i did, i thought jihad literally meant holy war. i didnt think all muslims believed in it or supported those who did, but that was my understanding of the term. im far off on this. it simply means struggle, or effort, and those who have interpreted it as war, explains ismail, are not even thought of as muslims by the rest (because the qu'ran never extolls war as a useful way of struggling). we were talking about the taliban directly here.

we talked about similar stuff for a good couple hours, and we realized that while we might both show a very narrow (and often taken as degrading or unknowledgeable) view of each other, we were also very acute, aware, and accepting that there were indeed some things we simply had to ask that flabbergasted each other.