Title: Writing off the Beaten Track: Reflections on the Meaning of Travel and Culture in the Middle East

Author: Judith Caesar

Publisher and Date: Syracuse University Press, 2002

A journey to the Middle East is always fraught with problems when one's occidental perception of current events results in a misunderstanding of cultures that differ from one’s own culture at every turn . It is of grave importance to see events, culture, and society as they unfold and as they are, and not as they should be. Or rather, not as a Westerner would like them to be.

This journey is not one that can be described to be seen from West to East but rather one in which the reader is firmly placed in the milieu that constitutes the Eastern context and therefore is able to live and experience it from within, as much as a non-native can.

Judith Caesar’s forays and explications of the Middle East are not without problems. She focuses on a time when she began her tenure as an associate professor of English at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. As a result, her view of the Middle East is through the lens of the Gulf States. Consequently, there are instances of a harsh tone toward countries, such as Saudi Arabia and its treatment of women.

From the beginning of the text, Caesar presents herself as someone who is extremely multicultural and sensitive to seeing the world in that manner rather than the typical view of the average monolingual American. Emirati society is presented as a more open — albeit more Westernized — version of the Middle East. The reader is presented with images of teenagers dressed in jeans and T-shirts, hanging out, shopping, and having a chat at cafes in Western style malls where blonde women dressed in skimpy tops will not be ogled or talked to condescendingly for wearing Western clothing.

At the same time, there are those who adopt a traditional manner of dress, women wear abayas and shillahs and men wear kandooras (a long, loose robe) on one day and Western attire the next, declaring that they are religious yet also influenced by the West. Here, Caesar states that they are "fashionable," i.e. Westernized, and one can understand that she is viewing this in a very American fashion due to the fact that she is equating traditional clothes with being unfashionable, or at least she infers this.

Caesar's American sensibilities get the better of her and she takes a tone of big brother admonishing the backward thinking and unenlightened Middle Easterners, particularly in her description of her student, Shaima. Shaima is an Emirati girl who informs Caesar that she has decided to marry a cousin even though she wants to finish her studies and despite her mother's objections because she is too young to marry. Shaima marries and returns the following semester to Caesar's classroom but "she seemed different." Even though she still participates in classes and her work continues to be good, she constantly arrives late and becomes pregnant.

Caesar claims to understand the cultural and social forces at work in Emirati society as a being microcosm of Arab society, but she seems to pity Shaima and her "plight." Because Shaima's father had died some years, previous to the encounter with Caesar, her aunts thought that her marriage was a good opportunity for her to claim her status as an upper-middle class woman with privileges.

Even though it is against Shari`ah to force a woman to marry against her will, deciding against the marriage would have brought consequences for Shaima who was supported by her paternal aunts and family whose opinions carried more weight than those of her foreign-born mother because they were her primary source of financial support. Further, her family's reputation could have suffered irreparable damage if the women of the family did not adhere to what was expected of their social strata.

Though Caesar purports to understand all of this and attempts to explain it to other Westerners, it is obvious that she has much to learn about in order to accept the society she claims to understand. This calls to mind the Elian Gonzalez case wherein his Cuban-American relatives were attempting to save him from the repressive communist Cuban society that his mother was attempting to escaping from when she died.

Westerners cannot assume that those they purport to save want to be saved. This can be seen in the stories of Caesar's friends like Rana who completes her Western education and then returns to the United Arab Emirates to live and raise her children. We must come to terms with seeing the world away from the Western lenses of democratization and liberation. An attempt should be made to comprehend and accept differences rather than try to educate those, which would seem to be all Middle Easterners whom Westerners view as being backwards.