About Me

Growing up in Europe, my only window to Arab culture was through my parents and the occasional summer trip to Egypt or Lebanon. I was born in the Netherlands, while my grandfather was the ambassador to Egypt there. I learned to speak some Arabic at a young age, however I soon picked up Dutch and spoke to my parents primarily in English. I made friends from around the world as a kid; Canadians, Dutch, Belgian, British friends, yet this multi-culturalism lacked the Arab heritage of my parents. I knew little about Lebanon, in which my father was born and raised. As for Egypt, my only memories as a child were the beaches, and the sun that eluded us in Holland. It was inevitable that at age 9, when my father decided to take a job in Morocco, I’d feel like an outsider moving to the Middle East.

Our stay in Morocco was short; around 9 months, leading us to our next destination that would host my teenage years: Saudi Arabia. Not speaking Arabic, or knowing anything about Arab culture is easy in Saudi. Living on a compound with foreign neighbors, as we did, does not give one a chance to interact much with Saudis in general. The shopkeepers were mostly from Pakistan or the Philippines, so English was always the most effective language to use anyway. However, I still felt like I was in the Middle East. My friends were mostly Arabs who had lived abroad, and during my 8 years there I developed a sincere passion for the different cultures of the Arab world. However, I still had not picked up Arabic, and towards the end of my stay in Saudi I began to feel a sense of importance in doing so. It was also towards the end of my stay that two big terrorist attacks on a compound I had recently moved away from and another one less than a kilometer away from where I lived took place. I won’t go into detail, but while it didn’t affect me directly, my view of the world had changed. I felt it was an important time to be in the Middle East. During my senior year in high school, I decided to apply to the American University in Cairo. I no longer wanted to be an outsider in a place I felt at home.

My next two years were spent in Egypt’s capital, where I developed my Arabic enough to hold an hour long conversation with any taxi driver (albeit with a slight American accent). Cairo, and to an extent the university, introduced me to the politics of the Middle East. I took a class with Saad Eddin Ibrahim on social movements; I attended lectures and speeches by intellectuals. My political views began to become clearer, and I realized I was a liberal. The term can mean many things in this largely conservative region, but I felt strongly that the present political situations were unacceptable. My time in Saudi helped develop a sense of what it meant to be Arab, and moving to had Egypt cemented it. It is out of this change in identity that I feel inspired to write about politics and reform in the region.

I live in the Netherlands now, where I’m earning a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and Political Science. I still feel like a Westernized Arab, or an Arabized Westerner, however I don’t see that as a bad thing. I feel like an outsider who can relate to those inside. Hopefully this will put some context into anything I may write in the future.

Hope you enjoy this blog!