Finding the Values in Middle East News—aka Why I Write

When I tell people I write on human values, al-qiyam al-insania (القيم الانسانية) in the Middle East, I am immediately asked two questions.

The first question is: “what does that even mean?”

For the longest time, I had no idea.

When I first started out as a fresh college graduate roaming Jordan and Egypt with a notebook and pen in 2007, I couldn’t describe what I wanted to write about. All I knew was that it was something missing from the news.

At the time, the Middle East was shown almost exclusively through the lens of US national security, with the then-raging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Al Qaeda terror dominating the way America, and the media, saw the region.

In an Arab world spanning two continents, there were few stories other than Washington policy, jihadis, and oil. The region’s people were missing from their own headlines.

So, I focused on people. I spent years travelling the Arab world, from community to community, writing about average peoples’ views, challenges, hopes and fears, the way they saw the world and their place in it.

Whether it was young Tunisians marching in the thousands for women’s rights or truckers carting potato chips across Iraq demanding hazard pay and health insurance for their family, I was drawn to stories showing how people’s lives in the Middle East were no different from ours.   

Even when I wrote about Al Qaeda and later ISIS, I bristled at the broad brushstrokes other journalists used to paint Islam as a faith in need of reform and reduced entire communities and nations into caricatures of violent extremists and victims. Those portraits were missing the most vibrant hues.

It has only been through developing The Christian Science Monitor’s Values Journalism over the past year that I have recognized common motivations in the people I chronicle: striving for Dignity, searching for Safety, acting out of Respect.

Underneath the surface, values were driving the people and events I was witnessing. I have been writing about human values all these years, all along.

Which brings me to my second-most common question: “How can you write about values in the Middle East?”

How can someone write about Peace, Freedom and Hope in a region full of cynicism, conflict, and realpolitik power plays?

My answer: by simply looking and listening.

Once you tackle the tragedies of the day, you are left with the day after—and the fact that for the vast majority of the people of the Middle East and North Africa, life continues in all its quirks and complexities.  

If you stand still in one spot long enough, as the crisis calms, Values don’t just stand out, they sing.

In a repressive police state, people yearn for liberty and practice what Freedoms they have. Refugees safeguard Dignity and Respect even when they lack basic shelter. Compassion, Courage, even Forgiveness are on display daily in gestures big and small.   

Even amid a war or drought values—or the lack of them—drive the story.

So what does reporting from the Middle East through a values-lens look like?

A report on rising poverty and soaring food prices in Cairo becomes a story about the Resilience and Innovation of Egyptians learning how to make a bag of flour stretch farther and a smaller bag of groceries last longer.

It turns a colorful feature about Jordan’s national dish mansaf into an exploration of the time-honored Cooperation between nomadic Bedouins and villagers who have shared that land for generations.

A story about the eruption of war in Sudan elevates the voices of civil society groups and civilians who had warned Western diplomats not to involve the military junta in their country’s transition and poignantly asks whether the international community abdicated its Responsibility. 

Even stories on great- and medium-power competition in North Africa or Arab normalization with Iran strike at the Values that underpin governments’ motives: Safety, Prosperity and Cooperation.

But this Values-lens is not rose-tinted. We are not averting our eyes from war-crimes and or regimes’ stifling of human rights. We are looking at the world clear-eyed.

Talking about values does not make the Middle East and North Africa a kinder place—it makes it a knowable place.

By highlighting our universal values, a far-away region becomes familiar to a reader with little background and zero context. The most far-flung village and camp comes to life as a relatable place with people facing everyday decisions driven by the same hopes and fears we all identify with.

A person may not understand suluh tribal reconciliation ceremonies, but they know the importance of Forgiveness and Community. A reader may have never been to a Kairouan Waqf, but they can recognize Generosity.

Someone in small-town America may have no idea what it is like to live in a desert refugee camp, but they know that feeling when your income is cut and you have to frantically find ways to make do with less.  

If empathy is a bridge between peoples, Values are the concrete, steel and stone that make up and fortify that bridge, allowing us to cross and connect.

But something even greater than empathy occurs on the page.

By focusing on universal values, a story’s subjects become individuals we know and even root for. We are invited to join their journey and they become familiar companions, not sterile statistics or colourful leads. 

Simply put: values-reporting gives the people of the Middle East agency.

For a region whose peoples have given me so much over the last 16 years, it is the very least I can do with my words.