A Good Husband Sometimes Beats his Wife

Don’t worry, this is not my opinion, but that of a female university student from Egypt. It is also the title of a book by Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk about the year he spent in Egypt as a student in the mid-nineties. The original Dutch title is Een goede man slaat soms zijn vrouw. It has been translated into German, but I don’t think the book has been translated into English.

Een goede man was first published in 1998, so before 9/11 and the changing attitudes towards Islam and Muslim people in the West. However, I think that this is not a dated book, and I think it would actually still be an eye-opener for quite a few people. Een goede man is an interesting and at times absurd book about a Westerner’s experiences trying to integrate into a Muslim-society and about the lives and ideas of Egyptian university-students, written several years before the integration of Muslims became a hot topic in Holland and other Western countries. Luyendijk talked with his Egyptian friends and other young people about Islam, the Western world, love, sex, gays, Jews, women’s rights, fundamentalism etc. There are times when he wonders: “Do I want to be friends with people who think gays should be killed and that it is okay to cut off the hand of a thief or for a husband to beat his wife?” Then he considers that his Egyptian friends probably think something similar about him: “Do we want to be friends with a guy who is okay with his wife working outside the house, who doesn’t believe in any god, and who doesn’t mind if his sister walks around in shorts or has sex before she marries?”

In the book Luyendijk focuses mostly on the differences between him and his Egyptian friends. Eventually he concludes that at that time (before 9/11) people and media in the West portrayed people elsewhere (not just in the Middle-East) as “being on the road to becoming the same as us / the West”. They are just different, and their road of development is just a bit slower than that of people in the West, but eventually they’ll get to “the same level”.

During his year in Egypt, however, he finds out that the people he meets do not want to become like the people in the West, on the contrary, they don’t see the West as superior or as a model society. In the afterword he wrote in 2007 to the edition I have (printed in 2007), Luyendijk makes a very fitting comparison. He was raised to view history as a long train, the first carriage of which was the West and the first coupe in this carriage was Holland. His Egyptian friends on the other hand were raised with a similar, but at the same time very different, view on history. For them human history was also a train, but for them the first carriage was reserved for Islam, the front part of that carriage for the Arab world and on the very first bench up front the Egyptian people were sitting. At the time this discovery was a huge shift in his worldview for Luyendijk, but I think that after 9/11 it has probably become clearer to many people that maybe, just maybe, being like people in the West is not the ideal for many or most Muslims. Though I suppose there are still plenty of people who don’t recognize this and for whom reading Een goede man could still be very ‘beneficial’.

I enjoyed reading Een goede man slaat soms zijn vrouw, though towards the end it became a bit repetitive with the same themes popping up over and over again. It is well-written and fast-paced, at times funny (though unintentionally so) when the two worldviews bump into each other (on purpose I am not using the word ‘clash’ here) and it gives plenty of food for thought about how ‘we Westerners’ (sorry for the huge generalization here as well as in most of this post) perceive Muslim cultures and the other way around, how they see us. The book gives some insight into how people from a non-Western, Muslim culture view Western society and where these ideas originate from.

On a personal level I could relate to this book as well, though my situation of moving to Armenia was definitely less extreme than Luyendijk’s time in Egypt. First of all, Armenia is a Christian country. The problem is, that people in Armenia receive most of their information about “the West” from tv, in other words from Hollywood movies and videoclips. Go figure what a distorted image that is! A lot of people are obviously reasonable and smart enough (or they have been abroad or have friends or relatives there) to understand that at least part of that image is incorrect. But still, enough of the distorted image (especially when it comes to relationships, sex and things like that) remains.

Een goede man was Luyendijk’s first book as a result of which he was asked to work as correspondent in the Middle-East for some major Dutch media-outlets. Another of Luyendijk’s books, Het zijn net mensen (appr. They’re Just Like Humans), became a bestseller in Holland two years ago and a somewhat controversial book at that. Luyendijk wrote in Het zijn net mensen about the limitations journalists have and especially journalists working for Western media in the Middle-East: they have to deal with many limitations on the information they can gather and how they can convey this information to their audience. As a result, people in the West get a very simplified picture of a complicated region. Luyendijk claims that journalists should be much more aware of and much opener about all these limitations, about what they don’t know or cannot know and about what part of the news they are unable to tell because of lack of time, space or lack of background knowledge of their audience. I am obviously giving Luyendijk’s point in a very abbreviated form. This stance caused an uproar among some of Luyendijk’s colleagues. I read this book last summer (I think), just before I started blogging and I found it a very interesting and though-provoking book about journalism.
Het zijn net mensen has been translated in several languages (among others French, German and Italian), but not in English. You can read two articles in English about this book here and here.