Global Citizenship

I am called American, German, Egyptian, and Costa Rican. You will hear from my lips English, Arabic, Spanish and German. I am Muslim, Christian, Unificationist and yet none at all. What I define myself as, I don’t know. Which country I come from and to which I belong I cannot say.   I do not profoundly claim to understand all cultures and religions; in fact in the past I have lamented my undefined sense of identity. I have not learned to integrate each affliation into one identity and consider each situation with each of those taken into account.

The concept of a global citizen is a very romantic one. The idea that one can encompass many different affiliations and have an identity that represents and incorporates all of those is very much easier said than done.  Honestly it would be wonderful if we could all understand others not by confining each other to cultural or religious stereotypes, but by understanding their affiliations and how those very affiliations develop each human being. Amin Maalouf himself comes from very diverse cultural and religious background; as such I think he is unable to write a text with orientalist themes without running the risk of picking one of his affiliations and condemning the others.
In order, then, to write a text  representing the orientalist discourse he created a character fully detached from identity and able to tell a story without that judgement; a true global citizen. One that may even seem harsh and detached from emotional connections with those affiliations, one that I think cannot exist other than in Literature. Hasan serves as the global citizen, not perfect, but simply human as all definitions of culture and religion are removed.

Despite whether or not it is possible,however,  presenting Hasan in this fashion allows identity, and thus injustice that a reader might feel because their identity is being attacked, to be removed from thought and instead we can look at how humans have interacted with other humans. Maalouf is expressing the need to look at others not defined by what we perceive as their identity but instead their life and everything that has gone into them. I think through Leo Africanus Maalouf emphasizes the importance of shedding the orientalist view that people have of each other and instead view each other as human beings. 

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