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 Frenc
h 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.
1Matthew Teller, The Rough Guide to Jordan, Rough Guides, September 2009
2 idem
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