Throughout the first week of Donald Trump’s presidency, a lot has changed in the United States. After the executive order banned citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., chaos broke out — not just in the country, but around the world.

As an international student in both the United States and the United Kingdom, all I could do was observe the wreckage from my tiny bedroom, thousands of miles away.

Muslims may just be one of the most vulnerable and discriminated against demographic groups in the world. The attitude towards Muslims in the U.S. got me thinking about the Muslim population here in London. Islam is the city’s largest minority religion, forming about 12.4 percent of London’s population, as reported by the Muslim Council of Britain. Sadiq Khan became the city’s first Muslim mayor less than a year ago.

This semester, I am taking a course titled “Islam and the West.” Rather than attempting to pinpoint who is right or wrong, the course aims to provide us with an understanding about how the West influenced Islam and vice versa, as well as to breakdown common assumptions about the religion and the West as a whole.

In my first class, my professor asked us all an interesting question: “Why is the Middle East called the ‘Middle’ East? Through whose perspective is the Middle East middle?”

It doesn’t take a genius to decipher how much Europe and the Americas have shaped the way the world operates today. In the case of the Middle East, the region was given the name because it was between the defined West and the Asian region, which comprised the East. Despite these boundaries, Australia remained a Western region, even though it was closer to Asia than to any other area.

For the remainder of the class, my professor presented various rather difficult topics for class discussion, such as what the religion meant to us, what our perceptions about Islam were and what we hoped to learn throughout the semester. Several of my other classmates confessed to knowing very little about Islam as a religion. Others said they were taking the class because they wanted to understand why Trump is doing what he is doing.

The political science courses at SU London are a whole new experience because we study the United States and other countries from a different perspective. Because we aren’t in the country, it is easier to have a more open and critical mind towards the place we live in. Besides this, most of my professors are not American. In this particular course, my professor is Italian and has lived in the Middle East for a while, thus bringing a more diverse perspective to what I already know.

It’s easy to get caught up in American patriotism, nationalistic pride, and the confusing blend of politics with religion when living in the U.S. If there is one thing I have learned after two weeks in the European continent, it is that conflict looks much simpler if it’s observed from the outside.

But the view isn’t all that great from here.

Published on January 30, 2017 at 9:31 pm