An Omani Dress Pointed the Way to A Trove of Arab Cultural Treasures

By Christine Harland

When asked by my international studies professor, Melissa Prevatt, to participate in the 1991 Brevard (FL) Community College Ethnic Fashion Show, I accepted, thinking it would be a great way for me to meet new people. She suggested I model for an Arab country since my eyes and hair are dark, and Switzerland was the only other option.

On the day of the show, she gave me a black and gold dress, and white trousers with lovely red and gold embroidery at the cuffs. I emerged from the changing room dressed in an outfit from southern Oman. * Melissa had spent several months there visiting former students and researching the culture. She had received the dress as a gift. She was the first American I had met who had visited an Arab country, and I was fascinated to hear about her adventures. To be frank, before she told us about it, I had never heard of Oman.

As I walked down the runway during the show, the audience on all sides stared at me intensely. I realized that, like me, they were seeing something so new to them that they were unable to digest the experience. I was suddenly aware that everything about the culture and the people that I was representing had been somehow ignored, suppressed, distorted or exaggerated into a great myth which I grew up believing.

After the show, as I walked to the changing room, several students approached to ask where I was from. When I explained I was American, they relaxed. "Where did you get your costume?" one asked.

"This isn't a costume. It's the Omani equivalent of a Western gown," I replied to the student, who seemed confused at this possibility. It seems no one had bothered to tell her about the myth either.

As my semester with Melissa continued, each class chipped away at the enormous myth I had been conditioned to believe. We listened to Arabic music one day while chewing on small pieces of frankincense which Melissa had brought back from Oman.

She explained, "Those notes that are making some of you wince are called quarter-tones. Western music doesn't use them." Like a child I listened to these new sounds, wondering why no one had played such music for me before.

Melissa burned frankincense on another day and explained that it has antiseptic properties and was burned in a house after a child was born to keep the air clean. I thought of the three Magi, the only positive image of Middle Easterners during my childhood. They had traveled from afar with gold, frankincense and myrrh to bring to Bethlehem where the baby Jesus was born in a manger.

As a Catholic, I know the story so well, but had never been told much about these wise men. I had never thought about what frankincense smelled like, or the importance of the gifts, or even associated these wise kings of the past with the Iranians or Arabs of today. Rather, the myths perpetuated by the media led me unconsciously to reject the association. Such people somehow were not worthy of my attention, and couldn't possibly be wise.

Melissa spoke about Islam, and I learned that this was not the totally alien religion I had imagined it to be from the images of waves of bowing figures that flashed on the nightly news so often when I was a child. Upon hearing that Abraham, Moses, and Jesus were regarded as prophets by Muslims, I realized the myth again had misled me. I shared beliefs with these people.

The more I discovered, the more I realized how my mind had been manipulated by this myth. My education offered no relief. The myth was supported by history classes, in which the Egyptians stopped existing with the last Pharaoh, and the wondrous birth of civilization in the Fertile Crescent was somehow dropped out of our ancient history lessons after the sixth grade.

In high school, we never talked of the 1967 war. I recall watching American Marines pulling away the rubble of their bombed barracks in Beirut in 1983. All I understood from the news was that "Arabs did it." This was supposed to suffice. Nowhere, until my class with Melissa and the fashion show, had I encountered any opposition to the myth.

Only now can I look back on my beliefs as a child and see them as layers of a self-renewing blindfold I had worn throughout my formative years. Why wasn't I taught the truth?

Peeling Away the Blindfold

Now my notebooks in college are filled with small phrases and my name, written in Arabic. As a child I wasn't even aware that those squiggles on the signs in the scenes of Middle Eastern violence were a language. I thought they were designs. No one thought to teach me otherwise. The time I've spent learning the Arabic alphabet is an effort to peel away the blindfold that warded off interest or understanding.

When scheduling the 1992 International Food Festival for my college in Florida, I called a mosque to ask when Ramadan began. I had only learned of this month of fasting a year earlier, just after the fashion show. How could someone be unaware of an event that shapes and defines the year for a fifth of humanity? Apparently no one in any of the schools I attended thought I needed to know. Yet learning of it enabled me to schedule our feast so that all, including a sizeable number of Muslim students, could participate.

The words in my notebook, the music I now listen to, the debka dancing I have tried, the beliefs I have learned to understand, the culture I have uncovered, the black hole in history which I am slowly beginning to fill, are all gems in a cultural collage of which I was ignorant for too long. Melissa gave me the first glimpse of this treasure the day of the fashion show. She took the time to tell me about things others dismissed as insignificant and irrelevant to my existence. Otherwise I would not have been given the choice. Our media-driven society would have chosen for me.

My participation in that fashion show did enable me to meet new people. It also opened my eyes to the richness and diversity of the entire Arab world. More importantly, by beginning to understand another culture, I came to understand more about my own culture and myself as a product of it. Of all the gifts I could wish for my fellow students this season, I could wish them nothing greater that the excitement of discovering such treasures for themselves. Perhaps my experience will help point the way.

Christine Harland majors in international studies, with an emphasis on the Middle East and North Africa, at American University in Washington, DC.