Hello, Phil. I hear you’ve got to know this new fellow who has moved into your town lately, and I’ve been wondering what you think about him. He’s an immigrant, a missionary from a Muslim country, here to try to convert Americans to Islam. He certainly seems surprising, in some ways. He knows nothing about Christianity, or about what Christians believe. When someone asked him, he had no idea which country was on the other side of the United States’ northern border. And it was complete news to him that America had begun as a collection of British colonies, which rebelled against British rule and achieved independence in the eighteenth century. He doesn’t speak English, and is certainly taking his sweet time about learning it. But then, as he says (through an interpreter), some people just aren’t good at languages.
In fact, self-deprecation seems to be his long suit. He keeps saying what a dummy he is, how naïve etc.. Though I notice that, when you give him information that will be useful to him, he almost makes a point of forgetting it again right away, as though he didn’t want to be contaminated by it — as if naïveté were a treasured part of his self-image.
And then there’s the strange matter of American names. You can’t have failed to notice. As he explains, there is a custom in his country that all foreign names containing a simple ‘i’ sound have to be pronounced with ‘oo’. It’s not that the ‘i’ sound is difficult for him (there are plenty such names in his own country, for goodness’ sake); it’s just that they have a rule among themselves to pronounce all foreign names this way. So he calls Philadelphia ‘Fooladelphia’, and addresses you as ‘Fool’ — and, in the nicest, humblest possible way, he rather expects you to answer to it. And if you tackle him on this, he does his favorite ‘hurt feelings’ look, and says it’s the custom of his country, a part of his identity. And how could you try to take that away from him?
So what I want to know is this: What do you think of this fellow, Phil? (or ‘Fool’?) Please don’t tell me merely that you expect him to be rather unsuccessful in converting Americans to Islam. I think we can take that much for granted. No: I’m playing the shrink here, with the big “So how do you Feel?” How do you feel about him?
My guess is that, at a minimum, you will view him as a pitiable but also unwelcome intrusion into your town. Maybe you go further, and hold him in some degree of contempt for his attitudes. It’s possible you even go so far as to view him with actual anger and hostility.
Since it’s hard to feel threatened by him (although his country is powerful, it’s nowhere near as powerful as the U.S., and people there are an awful lot poorer than they are here), I suspect that you go for the more moderate reactions toward him. If the relationships were reversed, though, and his was the more powerful and wealthier society that was influencing our daily lives in countless ways, I suspect that your reactions would move over toward the more virulent end of the spectrum.
Scratch all that. I just made it up. And anyway, you’re not Phil. So let me tell you instead about a young couple I really have met, who really were surprising, in exactly the ways our imaginary Muslim in Phil’s home town was surprising. And I have to say that it’s OK — not great, but still OK — not to have any idea who Cyril and Methodius were. Or whether Istanbul is at the eastern end of Turkey, or the western. Or which country Belgrade is in. Maybe you know none of those things. It’s not great to be ignorant about them, because they matter. But the world is a big place, and I’m sure you could easily find facts of equivalent importance about, say, western China, concerning which I would be equally ignorant.
And anyhow, we’re in America. Indeed, it would still be OK not to know those things if we were in the U.S. and planning to start a business (or some political move, or do some Christian missions work) in, say, Peru or India. But this couple? They were missionaries in Macedonia. By that I mean, they had already arrived there. Now, Macedonia is a predominantly Orthodox country (Cyril and Methodius are the crucial figures in Slavic Orthodox history), that was under the rule of the Ottoman Turks for more than five centuries until just about within living memory. And it spent most of the twentieth century as part of Yugoslavia — which was ruled from the Serbian capital of Belgrade. And our couple knew nothing about these fundamental features of the country’s culture, religion, history, or geography.
A missionary is a person who, to put it bluntly, goes somewhere to tell the locals what’s what. But our friends didn’t know what’s anything.
We’ll take as read the fact that they didn’t know any of the language until they arrived. Who would expect anything else? And, of course, they pronounce the capital city of Skopje as ‘Skoapje’. You can say that’s the American pronunciation — like calling the Italian city of Firenze ‘Florence’ — if you want. Except that it wouldn’t be true. Because, even if we accept the unlikely assumption that they’d even heard of the city before they arrived, or had heard American pronunciations of it, they pronounced it that way straight away anyway, and ditto for smaller places that would have been completely off their radar. No: everyone around them in Macedonia says one thing — so they say another. It’s the custom, right? And my friend Kosta gets addressed if he were a beer mat: Coaster.
Can we see that anything milder than furious outrage would be altogether too kind a reaction by the unfortunate hosts?
But our friends are not the exceptions: they’re typical. To be sure, I know counterexamples. There’s an American pastor who has lived in a small town of that country for nine years. He looks and dresses like a local, sends his kids to the local school, and speaks so well that many can’t even tell he’s a foreigner.
But he’s the exception. The clueless young couple are the rule. So how should they respond to the points I just made? I’d tell you how they will respond — but you already know. Smile; look bewildered; make self-effacing jokes about what dummies they are; do something groovy that’ll entertain the local kids; look hurt and keep what they fondly imagine to be a ‘holy’ silence. But, whatever they do, make no change.
