Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,
(Flemish 🙂 Goedenavond, ladies in heren.
(Arabic 🙂 Assalam alikom wa rahmatu Allah.
“Salam alikom” which means: “Peace be upon you”.
I’m wondering :
where are we on the road to peace in this world?
Personally, I come from a country where there is no peace …
I am talking about Syria.
I was born in Damascus,
the city of Saint Paul, the apostle, and Saladin.
But also, it’s the seat of a terrible diet …
Syria has lost peace after long years of ultra-security
where the word “freedom” has become a taboo.
So at the age of 19, it was the presidential elections,
or rather re-elections.
With a basic political conscience,
I wanted to make a small symbolic gesture,
a heroic act vis-à-vis the police threat:
I wanted to vote white!
So, I’m coming, I’m getting my ballot,
where one had to choose between “Yes” and “No”.
So, big disappointment:
the “Yes” box was checked in advance.
This moment marked my life forever, and engraved in me the desire for freedom.
Freedom of expression: zero;
corruption and lack of perspective for youth.
It should be known that in Syria, as everywhere in the Arab world,
70% of the population is under 30 years old.
The wood was already dry: it was missing the spark.
And these are the breezes of the Arab Spring, in 2011,
which will make the volcano cough too long.
Peaceful youth goes down the street
shouting “freedom” and “dignity”.
She receives in return the sound of guns, then cannons.
Blood flows,
men lose their wisdom,
the war begins.
Well, me, in all this? Studies were my compass.
I managed to have an inscription at the Catholic University of Louvain.
The day I arrive in Belgium, if you want,
I note on my Facebook:
“Passage of chickpeas in the country of chicons! “
My new life opens me to freedom.
I can think freely,
I can say what I think in public,
I can even do what I want,
I can explore different political thoughts,
the associative world,
trade unions.
I discover all at once:
voluntary simplicity,
ecological thinking,
student baptism
and the concept of the sabbatical year.
At that moment, I could measure to what extent totalitarianism
has watered through history
social relations in Arab society
and vice versa.
In my home society, at any time,
[collective] pressure requires compliance,
stifles creativity,
and undress your private life down to the smallest detail.
Thereupon
the balance of power on the social ladder
and corruption
arrange to make you believe that happiness equals material goods.
That’s why I lived uprooting
as a certain success.
Here I am ! I eat organic,
I sort my waste,
I engage in the associative …
At the same time, I treasure … [belgicism: to celebrate]
I kote … [student habitat] I soup … [dinner]
Yet after 3 years of belgitude,
I will still live cultural shocks.
The difference does exist
and will not fade.
It is, in fact, necessary and natural
This anecdote can illustrate my point of view.
We had dinner with friends,
and someone brought a dish of pork pie.
So, I wanted to do a little anthropological experiment:
I wanted to pretend to be able to eat it.
And at that moment, it was my friend Simon who told me:
“No, Hazem, you are a Muslim, you can not eat it! “
I did not maintain my difference!
If I try to summarize the source of these cultural shocks,
and on a philosophical level, I can tell you this:
In Occident,
in the West, productivity and efficiency
are the only rules of the game,
objectives and results are the only measures.
All of this leads to burnout and burnout unknown to us.
In the West, here,
the mental,
the rational,
infiltrate into faith, into love relationships.
On the other hand, at home, his absence bogs us into fatalism.
Here, science is too often taken for God.
The concept of “Inch Allah”, on the other hand, leaves room for human imperfection
and let me reconciled with myself, with existence,
and keep me jovial and good living.
I have been working for some time in intercultural and interfaith.
It allows me to say that
the path of peace seems to me to be the one that reconciles the two worlds.
East and West,
Europe and the Arab world,
each have a way to go
in me, first,
and in you, if you will.
So, it’s in the East
to get out of his victim position
self-fabricated, paralyzing,
who systematically feeds on the conspiracy theory:
would all our misfortune be the fault of others?
Let’s stop disempowering ourselves.
Could things be arranged by one stroke of fate?
Let’s stop self-stigmatizing.
Would not the Arabs be made for democracy?
Then,
it is up to migrants to open up to another relationship with their host country
a second homeland is something other than a mere material relation:
work and business.
Then,
– If I may –
it’s up to the West to understand that to know each other,
it’s not enough to confide in politics
or peel the newspaper sheets.
Political glasses are not enough to understand human history,
especially of the Orient.
This is not just about conspiracy,
nor to Islamism.
So, practically,
five things.
[One,] dare more meetings,
real, concrete,
empathic, faithful in time.
Two: dare to explore the human,
to meet our differences
and inhabit our vulnerabilities
for a less violent world.
Let’s give space to art,
poetry, music,
places where differences become appeasement and beauty.
Let’s not forget to engage each other,
for each other
for a more just world,
let us be responsible actors.
Let’s leave our ambitions too material.
I believe in relevance
of voluntary and ecological simplicity.
I would like to close by saying thank you.
First to my host family,
with whom the sharing of our difference in depth
allowed me to expand my faith even.
Thanks to Belgium for expanding my vision of the world
which allowed me to rub shoulders with Africa like Morocco, Turkey and Italy.
It is Belgium which, beyond Belgium,
disturbed my certainties
and boosted and inspired my engaged life.
Danku wel, thank you very much,
Salam alikom.
(Applause)
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