Making sense of honor culture - by Tove K - Wood From Eden
I have always struggled to understand the mainly Muslim cultures of the Middle East and Central Asia. And I have always tried to do something about it. At the age of 18 I started to study Arabic. Two years later, at the age of 20, I traveled to Syria and spent three months in Damascus studying Arabic and trying to make sense of what I saw and heard.
I can't say much about my very own anthropological studies without revealing the many mistakes I made. I was far too unprepared. Schooled in the pre-Woke everyone-is-the-same sentiment, I wasn't even prepared for what the phrase different cultures meant.
What shook me the most was the behavior of men. I learned that as soon as a man technically had an opportunity to touch me, chances were that he would. Not in all cases, and there seemed to be zones of exception, like buses (where men instead gave up their seats for women). But essentially, many men behaved as if they themselves believed that they lacked self control.
The behavior of one man especially made an impression on me. Let's call him Ali. Ali worked at the hostel where I lived. He was unusually good at speaking with foreigners, in his unusually good English. Since I had an unusual interest in speaking with Arabs, also compared to other Westerners visiting Syria, Ali and I came to talk a lot with each other. There was only one big problem: Ali couldn't accept that I wasn't interested in any kind of physical relationship with him.
