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Everyone seemed to have had a cousin who had died in the fighting. Always an innocent, always
so beautiful or handsome. Always so clever and with so much to live for. That’s why revenge was
vital, this is why the war was necessary, to rid the family or the group of the shame of one of their
own being killed by the others.
Alongside these stories of individual bravery and sacrifice, we became more acquainted with the
group mentality supported at the school mosque, as well as the rhetoric of unity and dignity that we
were all inculcated with. In and of themselves, these elements of our history and culture and religion
are valuable. But I observe, at a distance of over thirty years, the negative and limiting nature of the
mix of elements that was propagated in our education and the media at the time.
Many nations inculcate specific values through the teaching of their history in schools. I have
thought regularly about the specific values we were being educated in—and whether this was a
conscious or inertial decision. And as we all know, the question of what we are being taught in the
Arab world has been an issue of international and regional concern from 9/11 onward, as well as
since the publication of the UN Human Development Reports.
The reality is that these historical presentations are choices that have been made. They are choices
made by writers of our schoolbooks, and choices of our ministries of education, and choices of our
governments. They are also the choices of our religious authorities who have decided to focus on the
more militant aspects of Arab and Islamic history. As though all life in the seventh, eighth, and ninth
centuries was filled with warriors and military campaigns. We are deprived of the mass of
information that could have been included in our history, ranging from social and economic questions,
to geographic and philosophical aspects of historical investigation. Often, we are presented with very
fixed ideas of what it means to be a good Muslim.