My (earnest, irate) thoughts

A minor fiasco erupted at my house when our neighbor’s boarder decided to tinker with his Harley-Davidson on Sunday afternoon, while Yusuf and I were watching a movie, Blood and Oil: The Middle East During World War I. (Spoiler alert: the British and French succeed in colonizing the Middle East.) Just as we were learning that Sir Winston Churchill was in fact the devil, vroom vroom went the bike next door. My heart started to beat a bit faster, because my husband, Yusuf, believes fervently that his right not to be bothered by someone else supercedes the right of someone else to bother him, and he is not known for his mild manners.

Aside: Westerners tend to regard the rights of the individual as most important. The right of a person to seek his happiness, in whatever way he sees fit, is paramount. No other individual, group or government has a right to stop him, unless he’s trying to harm himself or someone else. Easterners, however, tend to regard the rights of the group as more important than that of its individual members. The right of a group not to be burdened by ill-behaved individuals is paramount. The group has the duty to correct the individual’s behavior or remove him from the group, in order for its members’ happiness to continue uninterrupted. Maybe this is why Western governments have had to create laws for countless situations, and why Western laws in general are incredibly ineffectual for deterring crime or “deviant” behaviors. Maybe this is why Eastern societies often have a strong “shame” culture, and the unspoken punishment for acting out (the disapproval of others) is the real deterrent. In Islam, there is a strong bent toward the Eastern view.

For example, the harshness of some of the punishments in Sharia (the comprehensive code of Islamic law that evolved from the Qur’an over the centuries). One of the most famous is that theft is punished by the amputation of the thief’s hands. Never mind the fact that this punishment was actually carried out only twice during the 700-year reign of the Ottomans. (And never was anyone punished for stealing food, like Disney movies would have you believe. Rather, the existence of poverty was a source of shame for the wealthy, who are obligated by Islam to give alms to the indigent.) For most people, the mere thought of losing one’s hands was so frightening that stealing ceased to be an option. Thus, the punishment acted as a deterrant, and stealing was rare.

Aside for an aside: Islam and democracy are completely compatible. Islamic states like Iran interest me as a curiosity, something I would like to see and judge for myself without the veil of criticism from narrow-minded journalists. Still, political Islam is a concern — not because of Islam, but because of the shortcomings of the people who would be responsible for interpreting Islamic law. Of course they should forcibly strip away hundreds of years of misogyny, patriarchy and cultural appendages, and go to the very heart of the Qur’an and the spirit of any law derived from it, before they ever hear a case… but what if they don’t? And though I don’t idealize European penal codes or modern Western society’s many social ills, modern “Islamic” states where men abuse their wives, women bear all the punishment of adultery or aren’t granted divorces, are also abhorrent. And all in “the name of” Islam — the religion that actually grants more rights and protections to women than any other society, culture or religion. Muslim women are often ignorant about the rights granted to them by God 1,400 years ago. So it’s particularly annoying that the subjugation of women is something that even some Muslim men strive for.

Over the course of an hour, I watched Yusuf become incensed. I admit, I couldn’t really feel his frustration. Though I certainly don’t like the sound of loud mufflers — especially since I happen to know that the noise Harleys make is a) for show; b) usually increased purposely by the rider; and c) totally unnecessary for bike operation — I accept the eccentricities of my neighbors completely and without reservation. Since it was daytime, I said all we could was ask the guy to stop, and not hold out much hope for that. The conversation started out something like this:

Yusuf: My friend, what is this noise?
Harley: I’m workin’ on my bike, man.
Yusuf: I am trying to watch a movie, but I can’t hear over your noise.

Now see, in Turkey, that statement would really mean something. The person making the noise would feel embarrassed for having bothered someone else, apologize for it, and stop. Actually, Yusuf informed me, no one in Turkey would ever have such a stupid, noisy hobby.

Harley: Look, man. I’m workin’ on my bike. And if you have a problem with that, I really don’t care.
Yusuf: So everyone here has to listen to your noise?
Harley: I work six days a week. This is my only day to work on my bike. So that’s what I’m gonna do.
Yusuf: So how long I have to listen to your noise?
Harley: How long? However long it takes, man.

And so on. The two of them were completely unable to understand where the other was coming from. For Harley, it was a matter of personal enjoyment and rights. For Yusuf, it was a matter of neighborhood etiquette and community rights.

What ultimately happened was actually hilarious, if I only could have stopped the heart palpitations I got from the shouting match in my front yard (I’m a sensitive, easily flustered person). First Yusuf threatened to call the cops. Harley told him to go ahead, shouting that Yusuf needed to learn the rules of America. Yusuf then grabbed his new Nikon camera to snap photos of him working on his bike. Harley offered to pose for more shots. Yusuf shouted that the pictures would be part of his evidence in court. Harley paused, suddenly uncertain. Then Yusuf did a very American thing… he opened the windows of his Honda and cranked a CD of Turkish pop to top volume. Harley demanded that he turn that garbage off. Yusuf said, “You like your noise. I like mine.” Then Lucille, the owner of the house, came barreling out and screamed at Yusuf to turn off the music. He screamed back that he was going to invite five hundred Turkish guys for a barbecue in the street. Lucille shrieked that he wasn’t American and should go back to Turkey. So Yusuf yelled, “What are you talking about? Your husband is Chinese.”

(Background: There is a sad, strange history between Yusuf and Lucille. We were here two weeks when Yusuf hurriedly parked in the street one day, with a few inches of his bumper protruding into the neighbor’s driveway. He hadn’t been inside five minutes when Lucille was shouting and banging on the door with her fists and feet. He opened the door, stunned. Red-faced, she yelled at him for parking there and demanded that he move it immediately. When he started to protest that it would only be a few more minutes — he’d stopped at home to pray before going back out — she shrieked that he couldn’t speak English and should go back to his country. Since he’d been in a praying mindset, he got his keys, moved the car, and went back inside to pray. Ten minutes later, a timid knock at the door. A meek Lucille offering her humblest apologies… her husband had commanded her to apologize, she’s normally not like this, she’d just gotten bad news from the doctor. When Yusuf told me this story, I pronounced her a lunatic and wrote her off. He was more forgiving.

A few months later, her dogs were regularly barking for hours every night in their backyard. This was driving us both slowly mad. Finally, he went over there at 10 o’clock one night, apologized for the late-hour disruption, but asked if they could please do something about their dogs, because it was keeping us awake. She apologized profusely. After that, a few yaps and the dogs were attended to. And in the year we’ve lived here, Lucille has sought Yusuf out on several occasions… when the three-doors-down neighbors were racing their souped-up trucks up and down our cul-de-sac, and when our two-doors-down neighbor was letting his dogs roam unattended in the wee hours of the morning, she ran over to tell Yusuf she agreed with him. On several occasions, she has cornered him to share chapters in her decidedly strange life story… 30 years of marriage to a weak Chinese man who hardly speaks, a transsexual son who doesn’t visit.)

So then Lucille actually called the cops, because Yusuf’s music was bothering her. O, the irony. When two sheriff’s deputies showed up, she ran toward them with the gratitude of a war-torn refugee. They said, “Hey, ma’am, slow down there. Hey, stop. Stop. What are you doing? Stop.” Then she said, “Thank God you’re here. I’ve been scared to death.” Yusuf smirked. The deputies looked her up and down, and looked at Yusuf up and down, and said to Yusuf, “So why did you call us?” O, the hilarity of snap judgments honed from years of dealing with miscreants.

The deputies listened to both of them tell their stories. Yusuf said, “She told me I’m not American. I am citizen, I pay taxes. How I am not American?” From my post at the window, I heard Lucille tell bald-faced lies in her defense: “What are you talking about? I never said that! I don’t know what you’re talking about right now!” One of the deputies remembered Yusuf from the last time he came to our street for a noise ordinance violation — where we live, amidst the redneck pastimes of engine-meddling and drag-racing, this is a weekly occurrence — and pulled him aside to say, “Next time, don’t crank them up. Just call us. You can’t reason with people like this.” He gave Yusuf a card with his name and number, and we went inside. As we did, I heard Lucille say, “I want to make a formal complaint about what he said about my husband.” I heard the deputy say, “Well, ma’am, he didn’t really say anything…”

After all was said and done and the deputies were gone… what struck me was the contrast between Yusuf and me. He felt relaxed, peaceful, calm. I felt tense. He said he wishes we could have a good relationship with our neighbors, as Islam requires, but he wonders how it is possible with people who don’t have “human” qualities like shame, with people who only see as far as their own personal freedom to do as they please.

He said, “What I can do? Let them bother me and not say anything? That’s what’s wrong with Americans. Americans pretend nothing bothers them. And it kills them slowly inside.” (When Yusuf says “Americans” what he actually means are Americans with good manners who pretend not to notice other people’s bad manners. I don’t know if possessing these dual qualities is rare or common. I just know that me, my family and most of my friends are like this.)

He said, “I want to be a good example, and be nice to them. But I have been a good example for a year, not bothering anyone on this street, only saying something if they bother me first. But they don’t understand. They think I am bothering them. They think, because no one says anything, that no one is bothered by their noise. They think they are alone in the world. But I think the other people are happy I say something.” I’m sure the 90 percent of our neighbors who never make excessive noise are relieved. I know I am. But all this has made me curious… how do other Easterners living in the West deal with the bizarre ways that some people behave in a culture “with no shame”?