With all the festive spirit(s) in the air, this seems a good occasion for a proposal of a similar kind. While everything and everybody, including the most bizarre phenomena deserve their own special day in the calendar (my personal favorite being July 26th “All or Nothing Day”), no date is reserved for the brave bunch, the pioneers of intercultural miscommunication. These were people that went somewhere but ended somewhere completely different, that searched for one continent but found another, that thought they were translating texts while they were actually making them up.

The Day of Intercultural Lapses would be a day to remember this widely criticized but very common situation (an attitude we don’t forgive others for but are very apologetic of when it is us who display it) . It would be an occasion to reflect on the experience of those that entered a dialogue of cultures with high hopes and false presumptions and came out bravely mistaken and misunderstood – and who despite all this continued to get themselves involved in similar situations. A day of Columbuses, Voltaires and Schopenhauers, to name but a few.

The festive day proposed is a likely candidate, July 1st, the date of a great intercultural nonsense that occurred in 1798. Namely, this was the day when Napoleon Bonaparte during his Egyptian campaign issued the Déclaration du général Bonaparte au peuple égyptien and proclaimed himself – with the obvious worldly ambitions – to be the true Muslim:

“Peuple de l’Egypte, on vous a dit que je ne suis venu ici que pour détruire votre religion; cela est mensonge; ne le croyez pas; dites à ces diffamateurs que je ne suis venu chez vous que pour arracher vos droits des mains des tyrans et vous les restituer, et que, plus que les mamelouks, j’adore Dieu et respecte Son Prophète et le Coran.”

So, what do you think?