A brief example of East-West perception

Update 1: see a follow-on post here.

Update 2: in Andrew Zolnai Private Blog, two mid-2026 posts on Middle-Eastern religious regimes compared here, and Climate Change and the Old Testament here.

To continue the tenor of this blog, let me relate a last example of contrasting cultures. This follows my second-from-previous post here. 

1975

My dad worked for a national oil co. that offered as a birthday present to employees' 18-year-olds a 10 day cruise. My year went from Genoa via Naples/Pompeii & Palermo Sicily past the Greek Islands to Istanbul, and then straight back. 

At the famous Istanbul Market, by best friend went with his girlfriend to that market. She looked at Afghan-print long dresses popular in that hippie era. She went to a dressing room, but something felt wrong for me. So while her beau was oblivious, I stepped in just in time to see three burly Turks exit quickly! She was pale & shaking: she realized she had almost been carted off to white slavery... She even overheard that she was worth two camels! So yes white slavery is alive and kicking. 

See Cambridge Core, Jan. 2025 here as well as UN brief, Dec. 2024 here for current updates.

2005

I described my brief visit to Bahrain, coincidentally at the start of the Intifada, in this blog here. Picking out a small segment:

... The riots the anti-Israeli sentiment engendered was something else, with muezzin clearly whipping up the crowd judging by the tone!  That's when I first saw the Black Standard with inscriptions on it [...] It was only two decades later, however, that I was to learn the significance of those black flags: was it the seminal  roots of Daesh / ISIS...

 2010

The object of this blog is to describe my Kuwaiti experience, and to draw lessons from comparing two cultures. To be complete, I should complete Christian & Muslim perspectives with Jewish ones. But first I have Jewish co-counsellors here, but that's not socializing. Second I had the following experience in Kuwait, that Israel didn't exist in their day-to-day discourse: it was like the Mediterranean experienced a sudden sea level rise and reached the banks of the River Jordan! 

That underscores the hurt prevalent among two peoples, such that one (Kuwait) excises the other (Israel) in their mind, while the other (Israel) tries to excise yet another (Palestine) on the ground. Isn't it ironic that they're all ethnic Semites? And while in the West,⁶ Israeli politicians are overdubbed on TV, in Kuwait they were subtitled instead: did you know that listeninng to Hebrew on Kuwaiti TV, it was indistinguishable from Arabic to my untrained ears?

(I speak neither tongue, see this paragraph from my 1st post here:

The second thing I learned was about language. I asked expats and locals alike if I should learn Arabic? They were split down the middle, half saying it's the local language, half warning me that I would then take local mores upon myself. One diplomat even said she learned Arabic but only used it with her domestics and never at work! And domestics is something I never had, not only because I went there single, but also because I opted against the expat life...)

2025

Book

I'm now in SW FR at my mom's. I took her to a book signing last year, where a local writer gave a talk about his book, novelizing the adventure of a young woman lured to be an ISIS bride in Syria. 

At the talk attended mostly by middle-aged women and a few older men, I asked the writer during and after the debate three questions: how was it to get under a woman's skin to write this novel? He said that was an interesting journey of self-discovery (I don't know him & can't comment). How did he feel about describing war-torn Syria & had he visited? He said he hadn't, but did as much research as he could, admittedly from afar. And how did he find describing a place where church is the state from a country the two been separated as a tenet of democracy? He said he carefully avoided religion & focused solely on the human & social aspects.

In Germany they'd say „Er schreibt mit einer silbernen Feder, doch seine Zunge ist aus purem Gold.“ (“He writes with a silver quill, but his tongue is pure gold.”)

Film

This year my mom was invited to movie opening about a Madam in Raqqa, Syria processing Caucasian females lured to be wives of ISIS militants. That same author, who wrote a novel mentioned above on that same theme, to lead an après-film discussion.

He spent his youth in Lebanon during its Riviera heyday. He wrote his last three novels over the last five years with lots of journalistic research, that gave a documentary flavor to his novels. They compared favorably to the movie:

The ensuing discussion ranged far and wide,  deftly avoiding religion as mentioned in the book section above. Also discovered that the event organiser shared some commonality w.r.t. my ancestry... small world!

2026