I returned from Sharjah loaded with a lot of ideas, I cannot reduce it in a quick impression or transient news, because the conference organized by the Sharjah Heritage Institute last week under the title “Folk Heritage in the Children” was an open space to look at the mirror, those that the West has long been refining and drawing our features on it, sometimes with the sincerity of the researcher and documentation tools, and sometimes with the shadows of Orientalism and its methods It is known in the molding of the East inside rigid molds, charming and curious, and at other times underdeveloped and strange, but in any case, that image does not obligate us except as much as we are fluent in reading our features on its pages.
In this conference, in which Sharjah brought us together, it was clear the size of the gap between our view of ourselves and how the other sees us, and it is a gap that is not new, but today it is more sensitive, because the world today no longer needs orientalists who cut the deserts and deny fashion, and they impersonate personalities to write their reports, the age that we live today made any person with a camera of his phone or a passing tweet, to make an image that may be added, I refuse to record our external view, and for this it seems to me that this type of academic meetings, despite the calmness of his halls and his distance from the hustle and bustle of the media, is in fact more important than any conference with resonant slogans that fill the screens and does not leave a trace.
I was honored in this conference by presenting a research paper that dealt with a specific aspect of that image, through four Western books, the Bahrain History and Archeology Association contributed to its translation into Arabic, with the effort of Dr. Issa Amin, and my humble editor Analytical an analytical balance between the accuracy of documentation that cannot be denied in some of them, and the biases of the Orientalist view that sometimes infiltrates its pages.
It was striking in most researchers ’papers, to emphasize that no one could cancel the historical role of the writings of travelers, diplomats and Western doctors who passed through this region and written their observations, and some of what they wrote was accurate to the extent of admiration, and some of it was selective or charged with their cultural backgrounds and their prior view, and here the challenge lies, to read these sources with a critical mind, not with the logic of the absolute acceptance Introduction, with the ability to sort and distinguish, and this is what I tried to express in my paper, and while I am always keen in my research and liberation work.
I am not one of those who mourning the danger of Orientalism, nor who raise the slogan of the conspiracy in every Western sentence, but I see that the real awareness of our history and our identity begins with understanding how the other viewed us, so that we do not rely on the reactions, and we work to improve the drawing of our image ourselves, by correcting the narratives and transferring them to the West as they transfer them to their people, and this is a great responsibility that falls on academics and historians in particular, Teaches, document, or produce content that addresses the world in its language and logic.
The Sharjah Institute for Heritage Conference reminded me of this compass, which is not permissible to be absent from the mind of any interested in heritage and history, the heritage is not a beautiful poem we repeat or colored costumes that we salute the occasions, but rather it is part of the Battle of the Great Awareness, which is managed on the pages of books, on the media screens, and even in the corridors of quiet conferences, and for this when I sat there between colleagues from the Gulf and the Arab world, discussing the search tools What others wrote about us, I realized that this is the most important image, the image of the Arabs when they sit to read themselves in the mirror of the other, neither with fear, nor arrogance, but with consciousness that knows where to start, and where he wants to reach.
Perhaps Sharjah in this conference, and with what it collected from the memory of the place and the audacity of the question, reminds us that the battles of consciousness begin calmly, but it is decided when we have the courage to look at ourselves “with the eyes of the other … and with our eyes first.”
