A Question of Class
July 8th, 2008Having been brought up by a strictly Nasserist father and very socialist mother, I was always brought up to believe that there is no such thing as class.
“If you work hard enough, you can get anywhere” I was told. To some extent that is true, I doubt that my forefathers would ever have believed it possible that their offspring would one day be living in the UK and studying at Oxford but then circumstances change with time and I have always said that I owe my mere existence to Nasser’s revolution.
However, looking at a friend’s engagement photos I was distinctly reminded that there is still such a thing as class. While I inspected her dress, and the lavish party and many guests, it dawned on me that as a ‘westerner’ one is allowed to transcend some divisions in the Arab social system. Living here means that one mixes freely with anyone who happens to call themselves ‘Arab’ and the massive differences in currency mean that places that would ordinarily be inaccessible to anyone other than the privileged classes, hold their doors open.
Arabs in diaspora seem to almost attain a ‘classless-ness’ because of their distance from the society. Is this why people emigrate?
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I don’t know if my family emigrated to the US due to the ability to attain a “classlessness”, but money and the opportunities I would be able to have in the US as opposed to Egypt as a minority and a female with rather limited monetary resources were the motivating factors in why my parents chose to leave.
I’ve found that “class” seems to be a much bigger deal amongst arabs than it is amongst your average joe american. My grandmother was a servant and my grandfather a fruit/vegetable picker who never went to school and the absolute looks of disgust and comments of dismay I’ve gotten from arabs (even ones that have been raised to a large extent in the US) when this sort of topic comes up in conversation is something I’ve never encountered amongst nonarab americans.
I do think it is much easier to succeed in the west irrespective of what social strata you come from (my family being text book example of this). From what I’ve seen in the ME/NA how far you can go seems to be in large part dictated by your father’s connections and what position your family is in already. (Not that this isn’t so in the west for a lot of people, it just seems like a smaller degree to me). The idea of “if you work really hard you can do anything” doesn’t seem as applicable in my mind to the Arab world as it would in places like the UK in your case.
I’m really not an expert so feel free to lambast my opinion