Where do we go from now? A first impression of the Hashemite kingdom

9:45am. The plane from Casablanca, Morocco via Cairo, Egypt landed in Amman, Jordan. On time.

At a first glance, I would have not expected Jordanians to have blonde hair and clear eyes. Stupid thought... King Abdullah II looks like this!

Convenient currency: 1 Jordanian Dinar (JD) equals to 1 Euro. Indeed, the Jordanian economy is doing well. There is an advantage when you sign a peace treaty with Israel: you get economic and military assistance from the United-States to ensure stability and development in your country.

I get into a cab which charges me 19 JD to get around the University of Jordan. What a surprise to see two screens in the back of the taxi with commercials in English and pictures of the royal family. Welcome to the New York of the Middle East?

While I am barely handlingsurviving the extremely-arid weather and feeling my eyes getting drier, the cab driver offers me a Gaulloise cigarette. Where the hell did I end up?!

The taxi keeps going and I cannot help but witness all the large campuses of different universities with American names. After all, Jordanians are exceptionally highly educated. According to Rough Guide, over 2.5% of the population is enrolled at university. This rate is comparable to the United Kingdom¹.

The Rough Guide to Jordan introduced the travel book with the following statement: “Jordan is the safest country in the Middle East by quite a long way, and domestic extremism is virtually non-existent.”² Is that really so? Can education mitigate culture?

Of course, it is quite impossible to assess the level of religious conservatism in a country in twenty-four hours. However, a first impression is rarely entirely wrong.

When my sweet French roommate Charlotte gives me a tour of the amazing campus of the University of Jordan, I feel the look of several veiled girls standing in front of the dorms, tough I hid my shoulders and was wearing loose clothes. The looks are not insisting or aggressive though. I just sense that I could be entertaining, with my Western clothes, in a predominantly-Muslim country in which Islam permeates all aspects of the daily life. What is fascinating on this campus is that you can see all the different levels of religiosity. Some women wear a burqa that only reveals the eyes. Some others have a simple veil. Some girls wear a hijab with tight clothes, which emphasizes the schizophrenia inherent to Islamic societies, with a push for liberalism and pull from the traditions.

Of course, wearing the veil does not mean that you are religiously conservative. It could be the result of social pressures, like in Cairo, where about 95% of women are veiled but behave in a quite liberal way. Some are smoking. Others driving. Some are spending time with their boyfriend in front of the Nile, in the afternoon. Women can hold they male friend's hand in the street.

On the other hand, Charlotte tells me that, on a sunny day, she was laying down on the grass of the university, reading a book by herself when, all of a sudden, a veiled student came to ask her to sit appropriately. Such things happen in conservative Muslim countries.

Can a country whose modern queen is beautiful Rania can be conservative? Take a look at the first page of Queen Rania's website (www.queenrania.jo): Education = Opportunity, is the title. However, the voice of the street seems to disapprove such liberalism. According to Nadia, our Palestinian roommate, the queen and the king of Jordan are too modern. Thus, there are not representative of the population. There are some doubts about this issue also because both did not live in Jordan their entire lives. Queen Rania was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Kuwait and studied at the American University of Cairo. As for King Abdullah II, he studied at Oxford University in England and at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. The point is that their education seemed to have created a gap with the more conservative Jordanians.

Again, this is just a first impression of the Jordanian society. It would be quite pretentious to assert that I saw and understood everything in Jordan.

1Matthew Teller, The Rough Guide to Jordan, Rough Guides, September 2009

2 idem

The Time that Remains

A dark room at the Al Hussein Cultural Center in Amman, Jordan. Two young women late to a screening. Some whispering. We finally find two well-located seats. The movie? The Time that Remains.
The director? Elia Suleiman, a talented Christian Arab-Israeli. One hour forty-five minutes (minus fifteen minutes!) of absurdity begin. In Arabic, of course!

The movie deals with Elia Suleiman's observation of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 through the present day. It is inspired by his father's private diaries and his mother's letters to their family in Jordan.
Suleiman provides a down-to-earth account of the lives of those who decided to stay in the newly-established state and live as a minorty.

In the Arab village of Nazareth, in what is today Israel, Suleiman's family witnesses the absurdity of military occupation. The film is slow and powerful, such as the daily life of these Palestinians. Thanks to the director's sober cinematic style, we undertand that all is about observation. We observe the characters staring at life going on. Suleiman and his friends watch events that they cannot control or influence. A burlesque moment of the movie perfectly captures this absurdity: for about five minutes, an Israeli tank is targeting every movement of a random Palestinian man, who is talking on the phone, in the street, during the day. It obviously underlines Israelis worried about threats that could come from, according to them, any Palestinian in the most common situations. There is not any music. Just the strident sound of the war machine.

Throughout the movie, we observe beauty, when, on a balcony, Suleiman is looking at his mother who is staring at beautiful fireworks. We observe pain in the eyes of a seven-year old boy who cries when he hears on television the death of Nasser in Egypt, the proponent of Arab nationalism, who might have been a hope for the Palestinian people. We observe despair, in the gestures of a silent family. When nothing is left, the time that remains is devoted to the observation of hopelessness.

The Time that Remains also highlights Suleiman's deepest desire. In another sequence of the movie, we see him staring at the Wall, which divides the West Bank from Israel. All of a sudden, he vaults over the Wall with a long pole. Irrealistic? Maybe not. In a five-second sequence, the director puts an end to division, insecurity and hatred. This is an open path to reconciliation.

The music of the film also underlines Palestinians' hardship under occupation. We go from house music in a club, where Palestinians are dancing at night, to the sounds of Israeli soldiers yelling at them with a microphone. In the most normal situations, Arab-Israelis are brought to the reality of the conflict.

This sober movie is very compelling. Suleiman forcelly features Palestinians' meaningless life. He masters the combination of tragedy and comedy in this dark comedy. More dark than funny though.

Suleiman also explains that, in the Israeli-Arab conflict, all is about interpretation, in the same way Samuel Maoz's movie Lebanon proves it. Maoz's film brings the audience into the nightmare of four Israelis in a tank, during the first Lebanon war, in June 1982. It emphasizes young soldiers' doubts and fears in the chaos of war. We becomes more familiar with– perhaps more sensitive to, Israelis' perspectives.

Indeed, all is about the lenses through which we observe conflicts.