Asking academics who have lived in a Muslim-majority country: I would like to discuss strategies to help our countries foster a closer understanding

Does anyone know anyone on here who lives or has lived in a Muslim majority country in the Middle East or North Africa - such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco or Egypt?

If they’d feel comfortable chatting, I would like to ask them some questions from their experience about how open university professors or academics in these countries might be to discussing strategies to help our countries foster more understanding for each other - and to what extent those countries censorship laws would prevent them from discussing ideas like this with American academics.

I think it could have a potential to bring our countries closer if we go through our universities as opposed to politicians. Academics study facts and possibilities, while politicians at the end of the day will always just be working toward ways to keep their own country wealthier and more powerful to outcompete the others. (It’s their job, you can’t blame them for that.)

1.6 billion, one quarter of the world’s people, are Muslim. And just like the case with our own liberals and conservatives here in America – most of the assumptions that many of our people on both sides make about each other are simply, not true. The vast majority of Muslims hate and fear terrorism as much as we in the West do.

Remember that until about the 17th century, Islamic countries were among the most advanced, gender equal, and religious tolerant on earth. Medieval women had far more rights in Muslim Al-Andalus than in Christian Europe. Jewish and Christian groups both helped the Rashidun Islamic Empire take over the Persian and parts of the Byzantine Empires simply because they treated them better; their emperor, Umar, let the Jewish people come home to Jerusalem alongside Muslims and Christians, when the Christian Byzantines had thrown them all out of their homes. The Abbasid Islamics in Medieval Iraq invented the scientific method, and employed people of all races and faiths to work together on their scholarship and even in government, with equal treatment. And it was Akbar the Great, the Muslim Sultan of Mughal India, who ended slavery two centuries before countries in the West like England and America did.

Muhammed himself only engaged in war when he was forced to to protect the people he had been made the leader of in Medina against the persistent threats from the Quayrash in Mecca, as part of his responsibility to them – and even then, remarkably for a 7th century ruler, he strictly forbade the harming of civilians under any circumstances. He also explicitly stated, in quote, that men and women are equal, gave them legal rights unheard of for the time - and was laughed at for saying so. He also fought for animal rights, also unusual for the time. But none of these facts are widely known the West, an example of the misconceptions that have worsened our division.

Remember also that it was America and England that worked together to replace the leadership of Iran in the 1950s that was working toward democracy and women’s rights for their people; we put an oppressive dictatorship in its place because that government was willing to share more oil profits with us. North Africa was among the wealthiest places on earth in the Middle Ages, until European powers took them over to exploit their resources and massacre other people, before leaving them in poverty with unstable governments. And of course, the fight between Israelis and Palestinians over their territory in the Levant is the result of England taking this land over - then promising it to both peoples when it left in the 1940s.

So it would do us well to understand that Western powers are largely to blame for the economic and political instability of these regions - and understand the suspicion that many people in governments in these regions have been left with as a result. We cannot change the past - but we also cannot create a better future if we don’t understand the mistakes of the past that are the reason for the suspicion and ill feelings that have been created today.