Prince of Asturias Awards 1981–2014. Speeches

4 O viedo | C ampoamor T heatre | Why are we afraid of foreigners? Because we fear they might attack and harm us. We are all afraid of Cowboys because if some poor stranger approaches their borders they automatically go for their guns. Yet we are not afraid of Sinbad the Sailor, because in One Thousand and One Nights the public story-tellers, “the Ouccac”, in ninth-century Baghdad used to recount how being fortunate enough to visit distant lands and communicate with foreigners provided him with gratifications and benefits. In the Cowboys’ civilization, the stranger is always the enemy because power and control stemfromcontrollingborders; withSinbad, incontrast, dialoguewith the foreigner was enriching. Sinbad is the opposite of an immigrant. He always returns to his point of departure, Baghdad. He sets off from Baghdad in all seven of his journeys, sailing down the Tigris to the port of Basra, and setting sail when the monsoon blows from west to east, on ships laden with Arab and Persian merchants, sailing the Indian Ocean to the ports of the islands of Malaysia, Indonesia and China. Sinbad and any merchants who had managed to come through the shipwrecks tied up at Asian ports for seven or eight months at a time, waiting for the season when favourable monsoon winds would blow from east to west. Yet Sinbad was not a mere fictional character; he stood for a class of Baghdad merchant who gained wealth and pleasure from their travels and from speaking to foreigners. Fatema Mernissi — Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2003 Excerpt from the speech given on the occasion of receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature on 24/10/2003. 24 th O ctober 2003