Reflection #4

I was going to post a little bit about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but I felt like I could write about something that is just a tiny more personal. I grew up in a Jewish family with Israeli family members and used to look a bit down on the Muslim world, not because of family influence, but because of my own assumptions about Arabs and Arabic culture and from Westernized movies like Aladdin. Much like Edward Said stated, I had a very biased Westernized perspective of much of the Middle East and didn't really have a full understand  However, for the past several years now I have been studying Arab culture a on my own and for the past few months I have been a student of Arabic language, and I have come to the realization that Jewish (Israeli) culture and Arabic Muslim culture, Hebrew and Arabic are alarmingly similar. I have come to deeply love the Arab and other Middle Eastern cultures and know that I want to forever be a part of the MENA region.

From day one in my Arabic course when I first heard the Arabic alphabet, I was suddenly shocked to hear the first three Arabic letters, "Alif, Baa, Taa". It sounded oddly familiar as I thought about where I had heard these before. "It sounds just like Hebrew!" I thought to myself as I went over the first three letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph, Bet, Vet. Going over many different Arabic words as well, I found that they either completely paralleled the Hebrew vocabulary or sounded excruciatingly similar. While the two religious languages matched, I recalled research I did several years ago when I found that Jewish garb and Islamic religious garb and found they look very similar, one of the similarities being that Jewish women have to cover their head with similar looking clothing after marriage while Muslim women have to cover their head with a hijab as well. The Kuffiyeh, the symbol of Arab nationalism and a common clothing trend in MENA, I found was actually worn by both Arab Muslims and Jews at one point, but that the Jews dropped the piece of clothing in the past few centuries.
There are a vast other number of similarities dealing with food, culture, phrases used, daily life, etc. However I could go on forever listing them.

To me, it is a shame that Jews and Muslims have had a feud lasting hundreds of years even predating the Israeli Palestinian conflict. We mirror each other; we are a broken family. I just hope that some day the many Jews and Muslims that have come to dislike each other can one day become enlightened to what I have found the past several years looking at the sibling religions of Judaism and Islam. We can only get so little accomplished in MENA with war between Israelis and Arabic countries.