The Problem with Homer Simpson: Sayyid Qutb and the Danger of Cultural Exchange.

By Adrian Cole

I.

In a suburban house in Connecticut, two fourteen-year-old boys sit on a couch watching TV. One of them, Nathan (not his real name), is white, fifteen pounds overweight, wears a baseball cap, and chews a lollipop. The other one, skinny, with a goofy look around the mouth, is wearing a sweat shirt with “Cape Cod” emblazoned across it. This one’s name is Aziz (also not his real name). On the TV Homer Simpson tells Bart and Lisa that they can watch TV really loud because it’s St. Valentine’s Day. Bart asks what his parents are going to do, and Homer tells him that they’ll be upstairs “making love…ly music.” Later, when Homer fails to seduce his wife with candles and a sexy mix tape, he walks the streets of Springfield and happens across an adult education open house at the high school. He walks in and signs up for the class entitled “How to strip for your wife,” taught by the local doctor, who, as “Malcolm Sex,” put himself through medical school by stripping.

Nathan’s school is hosting a group of Pakistani kids for a few weeks as part of a government-sponsored effort to make nice with the Islamic world. Aziz is one of the Pakistanis. After September 11 the extent of the hatred of America among certain sectors of the Islamic world became alarmingly clear, and while most now recognize that violent extremism represents a tiny percentage of the world’s billion-plus Muslims, there are plenty who could be candidates for zealotry. The exchange program strives to educate the Americans and Pakistanis alike, to make of them better global citizens and overcome racist stereotypes by having kids meet each other and recognize their common humanity. Those underwriting the exchange hope that the American kids will impress upon the Pakistanis that America is a good place, a place where a boy can be free to express himself, eat whatever he likes, dance, sing and study a wide variety of subjects. Furthermore, they hope to convey to the foreign guests that the impression, shared by a large portion of the globe, that American foreign policy is self-serving and unjust is a misperception; that when we say we want democracy and freedom, we mean it.

It is not quite so clear, however, what the Pakistanis are to teach the American kids. They could instruct them in the ancient wisdom of their culture; or open their eyes to diverse global perspectives on issues ranging from foreign policy to economic development and religious diversity. Then there is the possibility that they are not really intended to teach them anything, that the exchange, therefore, is to be purely one-way (certainly no Americans from public schools will be going to Pakistan, and it is unlikely from private schools either). The reason for this is that while there are plenty in this country who would like Pakistan one day to become more like America, few in the developed world want America to become more like Pakistan. This hope for change in one’s own image is, of course, an imperialist dream, one which the proverbial White Man has never really abandoned, whether British, American, French or Italian; the tenacious idea that however much we develop our sensitivities towards the non-white, non-developed world, we want to impose change on it, mold it in our likeness. And after 9/11 that vague, yet guiding, predisposition has become an urgent mission.

As so often happens in exchange programs of this nature, however, the Americans perceive (though sometimes dimly) a few uncomfortable truths. For example, there is the nagging doubt experienced by Nathan and his colleagues that the American kids are not, after all, the highly civilized ones. The Pakistanis seems to know a lot about the wider world, and also appear to be mature in ways the Americans are not. And this is confusing to Nathan because he assumed that the kids in Pakistan sat around on dirt floors reading the Koran and muttering prayers. Nathan had shown Aziz his Simpson’s cartoon book. Aziz’s response: “That’s idiotic. Why waste your time with comic books?” After a few minutes of the TV show, Aziz gets off the couch and heads to his room, shutting the door behind him, while announcing his intention “to read.”

Aziz and Nathan have not been getting along very well. Nathan’s mother, a nurse, signed up for this home stay because she thought it would do Nathan some good to have another boy around the house. Nathan, an only child, is a computer geek who spends as much time as he is allowed watching TV, playing Nintendo and surfing the web to check out new comic book offerings (and looking for free pornography sites). Nathan’s mother is worried that they are both too headstrong and opinionated to hit it off. Last week Aziz’s aunt and uncle came to visit from New Jersey, where they live. They spent a lot of time talking earnestly in Urdu. At dinner after his relatives had left, Aziz asked a lot of questions: Do Americans go to church? Who will be the next president? What’s wrong with the economy? Are Nathan’s parents Democrats or Republicans? What’s the difference? Nathan’s mother is uncomfortable at the political tilt the conversation is taking and tells Aziz to look up these things on the Internet. Aziz cannot understand why Nathan’s Mom seemed to resent his questions and thinks they are weird. For her part, Nathan’s Mom cannot quite understand her feelings either, but thinks Aziz’s questioning was bizarre and a little sinister. From his room, Aziz can hear Nathan laugh as the Sub continental Simpson character, Apu, utters something incomprehensible. Yet while laughing, the uncomfortable truths are slowly sinking in, effecting Nathan whether or not anyone intended this to happen, and he wonders: Am I immature? Am I surrounded by cultural junk? Am I obsessed with, addicted to, immediate gratification and entertainment? Then he turns his full attention back to Apu.

In the exchange experience it is possible to view the wider relationship between America and Pakistan, and by extension the wider Islamic world, a relationship strained to breaking point by the current political violence, rhetoric and cultural assumptions. If this relationship was a marriage there would be a restraining order out by now; several, in fact. And as for the kids—God help them. But it is also possible to overstate the influence of the wider culture on the boys. Certainly they are both products of their environments, but it is also possible that Aziz is not really as disgusted as he appears, that he is striking a pose for the sake of his identity, throwing up a smoke screen against an urge within him that says: “I like this, I want some more of it.” Now if this is so, it could go either way: perhaps he will confront his feelings, work through his ambivalence and end up incorporating the different elements of personality which allow him simultaneously to enjoy ironic satire, partake in America’s popular culture, and yet (miraculously) remain a virtuous, serious human being.

There is also the possibility, however, that he will not do this. And this is the danger with cultural exchange. There is an equal chance that, having dimly perceived something within himself which responds to a self-deprecating culture, to a culture of entertainment, to a world in many ways far less restrictive than his own and therefore highly threatening, he will retreat and suppress: retreat from interaction and suppress those feelings of empathy. And this distinct possibility runs counter to the build-it-and-they-will-come mentality of cultural exchange: Meet, and we will all get along.

II.

The modern, western world is obsessed by the idea of “cultural exchange.” Thousands of people jet hither and thither to meet with their peers from different countries in a frenetic attempt to “bridge” the cultural divide, and reach new levels of “inter-cultural understanding,” to exchange ideas, cross-pollinate intellectual plants, humanize “the other.” So much so, in fact that most of these terms have become vapid clichés, overused in college entrance essays and job applications in the non-profit sector. But the volume of exchange makes some sense: surely knowledge of other countries and cultures engenders benign feelings, and prevents the crystallization of racist stereotypes? In meeting one’s potential enemy, one understands that she, like all of us, lives according to age-old human dictates, powered by common human emotions, that her concerns are our concerns: the routine, the commonplace, the universal. And in realizing this it is surely more difficult to return to one’s mountain and continue to see two-headed child-eaters in the neighboring range.

On the other hand, one could argue that it is this knowledge of the other which drives us to hate it. For with no inkling of the fact that the people in those mountains over there have webbed feet and drink human blood, what would be to hate? We would, in our blissful ignorance, assume that they use knives and forks to pick at meat and potatoes as a good human should, and generally have brown, black or red hair, five fingers and five toes (only their Labradors have webbed feet), and all the other attributes necessary to be like us. Or even if we did assume (as some nations and tribes have in the past) that strangers were evil, what would it matter, if we never saw them?

But clearly eternal separation from other tribes is not possible; no mountains are high enough to keep the other from stumbling into our camp and having its horrific differences discovered. Therefore, the thinking goes, instead of having partial knowledge of each other, gleaned from chance encounters, ill-informed and prejudiced media reporting and the like, we should engineer meetings in which a deeper knowledge is cultivated, cutting through the patina of acquaintanceship and destroying myths of unbridgeable gaps. In many cases one only has to scratch the surface of a culture to discover that, beyond the wearing of Kilts and the eating of Haggis, the people of Scotland love their children, respect the elderly, adhere to the rules of community life and experience the emotions which all human beings share: love, fear, jealousy, hate, joy. And probably a few others.

These days, however, we find ourselves in a age in which the existence of cultural differences are potentially devastating, and the specific core of the problem seems to be the widening gap between the West (mostly but not completely, the United States) and the Islamic world. After September 11 it is increasingly clear that there are profound differences of paradigm which threaten to provide us with a long-standing struggle. And in some senses this struggle is a civilizational one, in that the thinking of those who oppose the United States does not single out the United States alone, as a discreet national entity. They see America as simply the fountain-head of a set of forces which are shared with many nations in the modern world, forces which are in conflict with an equally reified “Islam,” and have been since before the Crusades. This conflict can be described as civilizational, therefore, because it is not restricted to policy or politics, but arises out of cultural and religious characteristics and traits which, in turn, create hostile policies.

But it is not just the Islamists who choose to hate many aspects of our cherished “freedom.” Indeed, westerners and non-westerners alike wonder how we can tolerate such a society? Broken marriages, drugs, violence, disrespect of the elderly, the breakdown of the family unit, the increasing irrelevancy (or corruption) of the church. The list is endless, and is full of points which could be debated, no doubt, but the irony is that even the best of us—civic-minded, open-minded, tolerant, democratically inclined—have problems with our own society as well. And sure, we prefer the way things are to the way things might be under the Taliban, but when one hears our own politicians pushing for the development of more, ghastlier nuclear weapons, when one reads of scientists mixing monkey and human DNA to god-knows-what effects, when one witnesses day after day after day house wife after house wife trundling around in $70,000 vehicles designed for the military on shopping sprees for endless unnecessary accessories, and when one watches night after night as we are fed a steady stream of increasingly mind-numbing nonsense about sex and style on the TV, one can be forgiven for casting a wistful glance towards the mountains of Afghanistan, for muttering a few holy verses, for seeking purification in a holy fire. And if, for people like us, these elements of our society are distasteful and upsetting, what must they be to outsiders, let alone to zealots like Bin Laden? One thinks of a parent whose child has developed anti-social, even dangerous behavior. The authorities want to lock him up, to punish him, to execute. But to the parent he is flesh of my flesh; he may be wayward, may be a monster, but he is my monster. Like the tortured parent, we look at our society and understand it, and in understanding we harbor forgiveness and empathy, because the same DNA runs in our blood. We are all Homers, or Barts or Lisas or Marges, and as such, while we recognize that Simpson is a cynical, greedy, stupid coward, we can still muster a chuckle at his absurdly anti-heroic performance. But can someone from Lahore? Can the average fifteen-year-old from a provincial school in Pakistan understand the irony of Homer? Can he empathize with him and accept that we laugh at Homer because he expresses what we never can—although we all feel it? Can he understand that the beauty of Homer rests in our society’s remarkable ability to look at our starkest failings, to flirt with and brandish, if necessary, utter catastrophe, and in so doing hope to avoid being consumed by it?

These are challenges indeed for the run-of-the-mill exchange program trying to sell America to the traditional world, challenges which beg the question of whether such attempts at rapprochement risk hardening some of that hateful resolve. Clearly, one cannot deal with the Bin Ladens of the world with a six-month Fulbright Scholar Exchange program. Anyone who is ready to roll up a will, board a plane full of civilians and fly it into a skyscraper is both too far gone for gentle persuasion, is probably suffering from both religious fervor and profound and complex psycho-sexual abnormalities, and is not in a position to fill out the application. Yet the billions of other Muslims who might feel some stirring of recognition when they hear the ranting against America, the West, and Israel, might well be redeemable—not perhaps candidates for the new season of Survivor or Joe Millionaire, but perhaps candidates for a live-and-let-live truce between cultures. And it is these billions with which the United States and the rest of the world must work towards at least the perception of common interests. For Bin Laden is not an aberration who jumped out of the Saudi Desert full-grown; he is a product of decades of development of the case against the West by Muslims from India, Pakistan and Egypt, principally.

One of these Muslims is a poster child for the argument against cultural exchange, and more importantly a direct influence on Bin Laden and his generation. Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian government official who came to the United States in 1948. He is widely read in the Islamic world and many consider him the intellectual father of Islamic radicalism. His mission, in 1948, was to examine the educational system in America. Bear in mind that at the time, Egypt was still in the throes of an intense nationalist struggle against the British, and in many respects, against itself. The coup of 1956 would oust the unpopular King Farouk, the final vestige of colonial meddling and Ottoman suzerainty. But independence and revolution was the beginning of the real struggle for the soul of Egypt; choices remained to be made about the country’s identity: Capitalist or Socialist? Eastern or Western? Secular or Religious? In this context, Qutb, an accomplished literary figure from the intellectual elite (although born in a provincial village in Upper Egypt), was obsessed by the path of development, and the need to take only the lean meat of modern organization and utility, and avoid the complex carbohydrate of a secular, capitalist, materially-obsessed west, best represented by America.

Qutb, like most Arabs before the creation of Israel, had seen the United States as a force for global justice. American support of Israel after its independence, however, persuaded many that the great capitalist society was controlled by Zionists, and therefore was not a friend of the Arabs. But the Arab-Israeli conflict was simply one pillar of Qutb’s anti-American edifice. America, as the most powerful and populous representative of Western civilization was the promoter of ideological and economic systems that were increasingly anathema to a whole generation of Arabs and Muslims. Qutb had read the work of an influential Pakistani Islamic scholar, Maulana Maududi who had developed a theory equating modernity with Jahiliyya (the era of “ignorance” which preceded the advent of Islam). Jahiliyya was a powerful concept, which not only posited the godlessness of modern (western) society, but then necessitated Jihad to push back its boundaries and protect the Islamic community (‘Ummah). And Jahiliyya was not seen by Maududi, nor by Qutb, as a geographical phenomena; it was a spiritual and societal condition, in which much of the Islamic world found itself following independence, especially in countries where local westernized elites were experimenting with nationalist and secular forms of government.

Qutb was already predisposed against much of western culture in 1948, when in his professional role as an inspector of schools, he was sent by the Egyptian government to the United States for a two-year study tour. On the boat from Egypt he had his first distasteful encounter with America: a half-naked, drunken woman attempted to gain access to his cabin and seduce him. While for some passengers this might have been a taste of many freedoms to come in a new country, to the sensitive eastern gentleman this was confirmation of all his worst fears about the country. Qutb seems to have believed that the woman was a plant, sent by western powers to undermine his moral foundation (imagining himself the protagonist in a fin de siecle style drama of international proportions). It is possible that no such woman in fact existed, which would suggest that much of Qutb’s distaste for western life came from a deep-seated fear of the opposite sex (he settled early in life for eternal bachelorhood due to his inability to find a “pure” enough woman to marry). The episode also suggests that Qutb was completely solid in his dislike of America and determined to find what he expected upon arrival, or even before.

In the ensuing two years of study and travel Qutb found little to challenge his assumptions about his hosts, and he lived amongst them, always dressing the gentlemen, observing the mores, quietly judging and hardening his resolve to root out what of this culture he found on returning to his homeland. Even in a lengthy stay in Greely, Colorado, where he enrolled in an English language program, he found the socially conservative, tea-totaling locals to be decadent, careening hell-ward, entirely lacking in any spiritual virtues. Even the pastors were blameworthy, for the church dances were explicitly designed as meeting places for members of the opposite sex. God’s work? Not according to Qutb. Writing about the experience later, he mused on the excessive freedom American men “allowed” their women, a phenomenon that was symptomatic of the culture’s wider permissiveness and license. America was Jahiliyya, a place where the law of God was subjugated to the law of man, and in obeying men, men condemned themselves to damnation, brutality and darkness.

Whereas before his US-experience Qutb was relatively moderate, on his return to Egypt he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, determined to dedicate his life to rooting out the elements of Jahiliyya in his own society. These elements, in the early 1950’s, were best represented by the King and the government, and Qutb found himself (with the Brotherhood) supporting the coup of the Free Officers, which later put Gamal Abd al Nasser in total control of the state. After a few years, however, the Brotherhood ran afoul of Nasser when they realized that the Officers were leading the country towards a socialist and rigidly secular future that drew its inspiration from Western sources and models. Qutb spent several years in prison, was severely tortured, wrote several books which would become hugely popular in the Islamic world, and was eventually hanged by Nasser and his regime which, by the late 1950’s, had realized that the Muslim Brotherhood and their ilk were the implacable foes of the secular Arab Republic (a fact that was fully borne out in the 1982 assassination of Anwar Sadat by the Gama’a Islamiyya—an offshoot of the Brotherhood).

Qutb’s stay in the US was not what we understand today as “cultural exchange,” in that it was not mediated by a US host, and was not, therefore, bilateral. He was sent by the Egyptian government essentially on a research mission. It was possibly because of this lack of mediation and hosting that Qutb’s pre-existing antipathy towards American life was allowed free reign, and in the end colored his entire visit to a disastrous extent.

III.

All this does not suggest that anyone coming over here on an exchange program will return hateful and zealously anti-American: most do not. But there is a danger in assuming that familiarity breeds adoration, or that our way of life is always and to everyone the embodiment of freedom and happiness (as it is so often advertised). What does this mean for those professionals toiling in the field of cultural exchange? It means they must be aware of the Qutb Principle: All exchange is not necessarily good exchange. Awareness of this principle obliges professionals in the field to recognize that risk is inherent in the act of cultural exchange, and in the post 9/11 world the risk of failed or aborted exchange is quite real, the consequences quite undesirable. No exchange, in this context, is actually preferable to bad exchange. For programs aimed at healing the rift between the US and the Islamic World the risk is ever more real, and yet the task is ever more urgent. There is no point in wasting time singing to the choir and bringing over elite kids, diplomatic brats or others who are already acculturated to the US, or to western cultural norms. The US government, in particular the State Department’s Office of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which manages the Fulbright and other exchange programs, should be reaching deep into the heart of the Islamic world, and while they clearly should not be inviting people who are dead-set against us, should (if they truly believe we’ve got nothing to hide) be searching for those silent admirers of cultural Bin Ladenism, people who half believe the conspiracy theories which are promoted by the state-supported Arab media in several Middle Eastern countries, who believe that the US, while a fun place to do one’s schooling, suffers from a decadent and corrupt society and promotes criminal and self-serving foreign policy. These people, often players at home, will not promote goodwill towards the US among their peers, colleagues and constituents unless or until they engage more fully with the US in the way that well -managed exchange programs can allow.

This demographic includes the relatively mainstream Middle Eastern, Central and South Asian Muslims who are regular citizens involved in regular jobs. They are the small and often embattled middle classes who are educated, yet often face a jobless future which makes it easier to believe that modernity, with its promises of plenty, is a mirage. More importantly, it would be of great benefit if the individuals chosen for exchange experiences acted as “human portals” into their own society, so that through their roles as communicative professionals (teachers, journalists, religious and community leaders, etc) they effect change on their constituents. These people are often unconvinced of the American way, and less so that American foreign policy is a force for good for anyone other than Americans. There is, therefore, plenty of room for improvement with these candidates, yet minimal risk: as professionals they are concerned with the development of their society, interested in seeing the conditions of peace and security prevail in their countries—and elsewhere—and are educated enough to espouse the ideology of civil society.

What follows from the acceptance of the Qutb principle, therefore, is the need to implement processes and practices within exchange programs which guard against bad experiences and, if failing to eliminate them altogether, minimize the damage. Clearly the damage-control process must start at the very beginning of an exchange program—with the criteria for selecting participants. Participants must be vetted thoroughly before selection. What they should be vetted for is key to the whole endeavor of exchange: the ability to navigate cultural difference, and tolerance for otherness (I’ve tried to avoid using this word so far because of its associations with rhetorically ornamental, post-modern literary theory, but in this context it is simply the most plain and useful term). This can be done by methods which, while never completely fool-proof, can nevertheless go a considerable distance to minimizing risk. Surveys and questionnaires, for example, along with traditional interviews and essays, can be used to filter out individuals who exhibit serious insecurity about their identity. And identity is at the core of this issue: when in unfamiliar cultural environments, individuals tend to consolidate their cultural characteristics: Brits working abroad might spend more time drinking that they would at home; Muslims might spend more time at the mosque to showcase their piety in the face of an impious society. With questions designed to measure respondents’ attitudes, one can identify individuals who will be unlikely to react positively to new cultural stimulii, who are more likely to perceive difference as a threat to their identity, and therefore resist it. One can, conversely, select those individuals who exhibit a willingness to explore new cultures and societies without being threatened and without feeling they will “loose” something of themselves. These individuals are generally able to integrate elements of their personalities which might, on the surface, seem incompatible (remember Aziz: his possible attraction to American popular culture and his simultaneous need to be a serious human being). The obvious analogy here is with sexual identity: often the most homophobic are those who experience homosexual urges which they strive to suppress; the result can often be violent, as they attempt to eradicate external expressions of their own inner desires: they beat up gays and in so doing symbolically destroy their inner gay.

Having selected candidates, one needs to prepare them. Orientations must be thorough and all-encompassing so as to minimize the damage caused by unrealistic expectations. I was recently in Egypt where I spoke to a fifteen-year-old boy about his impending trip to Spokane, WA. He was asking an American teacher whether there was a mosque in the neighborhood. As it happens there is one, but it is a room which is only open on Sundays (to cater to the American context, Spokane Muslims worship on Sundays, not Fridays). He became agitated when he learned this, and the fact that the family he was going to stay with lived twenty minutes from the “mosque.” He claimed that this would not be a problem, because his American hosts would undoubtedly have an extra car they could lend him, and with this he could make the journey, because he would need to pray five times a day. The teacher gently, yet firmly, pointed out that the family he was to stay with was not wealthy (a common misconception about Americans) and that it would be an enormous burden on the family if he used the family car to travel back and forth to the mosque five times a day.

When in Rome, you should avoid acting completely like a Vandal (unless you are there on a mission of conquest). The Egyptian kid was already ostentatiously demonstrating his cultural identity, and in his adolescent struggle to show the world who he was, and what was important to him, he was on target for conflict. He needed to back up a little and exhibit flexibility—the hallmark characteristic of the inter-cultural traveler. He also needed to be disabused of the perception that all Americans have multiple cars, are willing to let foreign sixteen-year-olds use them, and live in dense urban environments where there is a mosque on every block.

Finally, the exchange program needs to have processes and contingencies for managing conflict, the inevitable conflict which arises in most programs at some point: I recently visited a student exchange from Algeria with a school in Nebraska and was informed that the Algerian teacher who had accompanied the five students had been unhappy with his home stay arrangements and had tried to engineer a mutiny among his students and return home. The students, however, stood their ground against the teacher and they all remained. In this case the host teachers figured out the problem and acted swiftly to rectify them; while they did not manage to completely expunge the sense of rancor, the students’ experience was salvaged and the organizers learnt that they needed to orient the visiting teachers as much as the students.

Back home, the exchangees need to de-brief, as a means to make sense of the experience, and re-integrate into their own society. Teachers, parents and colleagues will all play a part in this, to help to unravel the thread of consciousness which has been wound tight by experience and otherness. What happens after the exchange depends on the participant, of course. Aziz kept in touch with Nathan for a week or two, and in the de-briefing Nathan claimed that they had patched up their differences, but was not very forthcoming on the details. Before leaving the country, Aziz had taken the $200 he had been given at the beginning of the trip as a per diem and, in a supremely Simpsonian gesture, bought a suitcase full of candy and flatware from the 99c store. Perhaps he was beginning to see value in the American way, even if he hadn’t fully accepted his inner Simpson. Back in Karachi he rejoined his colleagues in the sweltering heat and the absence of air-conditioning. Occasionally he wrote to Nathan, but now that they didn’t have to live together he soon stopped the email exchanges; he never felt much in common with Nathan anyway. In the end Aziz realized that he was who he was, and that was enough. He admitted to a certain cultural chauvinism--a feeling that he was thus, and not so, and that this was ok, this was human. So what if he also enjoyed the odd Nintendo game, and that sports were a vital part of his life (albeit cricket, not basketball)? This did not mean that he and Nathan really understood each other. There is, he realized, more to life than these superficial commonalities; beyond Tomb Raider and sports there is a world of culture—assumptions, priorities, attitudes and sensibilities, and he did not find his reflected in suburban Connecticut, and he was no superman that he could overcome his upbringing, his location, his history, to pretend otherwise for the sake of seeming “cosmopolitan.”

It remains to be seen what will become of Aziz and Nathan: Whether one will end up in Kashmir, fighting the Jihad, or in the UN, struggling for peace (or, as is more likely, in a middle-class desk jobs in Karachi or New Haven); time itself will tell. And the ultimate outcome will depend upon more that the sum of a few weeks of exchange, but upon billions of experiences, interactions and influences that inflect a human life. And in the face of all of this the ultimate influence of an exchange program begins to appear microscopic and diluted.

Ultimately, of course, the project of sending and receiving people across borders is a highly idealistic endeavor, and one which is largely based on the opposite of the Qutb principle: Exchange in itself is good. If there is any truth in this, it lies in the essentially democratic nature of exchange, its people-to-people nature, and in the optimistic assumption that people will get along. In this it represents the ultimate “soft power” of individuals who may, or may not, be able to influence their peers and their government. The principle suggests that in meeting each other we cut through the layers of culture and politics to make connections on a human level. In many cases this may indeed be true. But we still, as a global community, have not answered the riddle of which comes first, the individual or the society: nature-vs-nurture? In looking at the individual, is one not still staring at an individualized creation of the culture?

Benjamin Barber, in his book Jihad- vs- McWorld talks about the process of globalization as one in which “tea” cultures become “Coke” cultures. In Egypt these days there’s certainly more Coke than, say, twenty years ago, but more interestingly they are all drinking Lipton’s “Brisk” tea, in tea bags, as opposed to the erstwhile loose tea they traditionally brew together with the water and sugar. If we want true bi-partisan exchange we’ll need to look into our own cultural café more carefully and think about finding our way back to an occasional “cuppa” and in so doing retrieve something of value, which we have perhaps mislaid in our rush to progress.