Essay On Prejudice In America

Women covering their faces, shops closing five times a day for prayer, polygamy being legal for up to four wives. These are all the characteristics of the country I was born in. It is the very country where Islam came into existence, run by a monarch who rule by Islamic law. This is important, because this is the country that shaped how I thought, who I was, and who I’ve become. With its strict religion, and strong tradition and culture, in blunt words, it brainwashed me. Up until the seventh grade I had to take a number of religious classes, including memorizing and interpreting the Quran, or what to do and how to behave religiously, etc. My teachers even had me believe that it was a sin to associate with anyone who was not muslim and that all Americans are going
Young minds are easily influenced, so when someone you look up to says something, you believe it whole-heartedly as a child. An example of someone I looked up to when I was younger was my Arabic teacher. She was extremely tough on us, but that made me want to impress her that much more. One day, we were reading a story that involved people from different places in the Middle East, which included places like Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Consequently, she gave the class a presentation on the background of those countries. Everything went all well and dandy until she got to the slide about Israel. Its flag has a huge X on it and she stated “We do not like people from there, they are bad.”, of course, this had nothing to do with the story, but I thought nothing of it besides agreement. It made sense. Although I had limited knowledge of what was going on between Israel and Saudi Arabia, I did know that it was not good, so therefore, everyone from there is bad and I should not even associate myself with them. No one I knew thought otherwise either, over there, it was okay to feel that way about Israelis at the