In the Amman, Jordan, airport I struck up a conversation with a Muslim woman. After a few minutes of her describing the difficulty she has traveling, "the extra hoops I have to jump through," I asked if she was Palestinian. Yes. She was going to Chicago to visit her son.
As we talked, pretty soon I felt like we were friends, so I asked her to read the sign above the nearby door--two lines in Arabic.
She reminded me that they read from right to left, and it is true I had been looking at those two lines from left to right. (Not that I could have read them anyway.) And I remembered seeing her read her book. What is for us the back of the book is for her--and all who read in Hebrew or Arabic--the beginning.
"Yes," I said, "I had forgotten."
A man from the FFL tour was sitting across from us, listening to our conversation. At this point he said, "Oh yeah, you people read backwards."
She--her name is Majda--said, "No. You people read backwards."
I liked it.
1 comment:
I like it, too.
Sometimes we can be so arrogant that our way is THE way, and everyone else is "backwards," eh?
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