I woke up Saturday with no plans for the day. After eating an early lunch, I decided to call Jamal, a man who I had met at the King Abdullah Mosque earlier in the trip. The first time I had met Jamal, he had mentioned that he was friends with an American writer who he referred to as "Eriga" (I think that he was trying to say Erica) and he had said that if I ever wanted to get in touch with her all I had to do was give him a call. I thought that an American writer living in Amman would be a very interesting person to talk to, so I decided to take Jamal up on his offer and gave him a call. Jamal told me to come down to a library in the first circle around 4 p.m. and that we would meet "Eriga" there. When I got to the library, I found out from Jamal that Erica was busy for the day and that I would not be able to meet with her. Jamal and I talked for a few minutes and he told me that when he first met and talked to Erica he was surprised by her intellect and that she was actually quite brilliant. Hearing this caught me off guard. I guess when Jamal looked at her initially he assumed that she would be inherently dumber and less educated. It was surprising to him that she wasn't.
After five or ten minutes we heard the call to prayer ring out and Jamal informed me that he would be leaving for about 40 minutes to find a nearby mosque and pray. He said that I could come with him to the Mosque but I decided that I would wait outside the library. I sat for a short while before I decided to go over to a girl who was sitting alone and reading and ask her some questions. I started off by asking her how she felt about the current ministers and government. The girl paused for a moment before telling me that while she could understand English, she couldn't really speak it. (Ideally, I would have liked to have talked to her in Arabic for the entire time but early on in my trip I realized that my Arabic is not quite good enough to understand what people were saying about domestic and foreign policy.) At the time there was nobody nearby to translate, and I didn't really want to ask a stranger to stand there while she was talking because I didn't want to make her feel uncomfortable and feel as though she couldn't speak out against the government or the king. We settled on an interesting system: I would ask her questions in Arabic/English and she was willing to write down her responses in Arabic in a notebook that I had with me and which I would later translate. I asked her some more questions and found out that her opinion of the current political situation in Jordan was very similar to that of most people that I had talked to on my trip. She felt as though the government was corrupt and ineffective and that their main goal was to take as much money from the people as possible. She was frustrated that the money that the government was collecting in taxes was showing no apparent improvements, and she proposed that there be a change of ministers as soon as possible. However, when it came to the king, her opinion was very different. Her support for the king was unwavering. While she seemed to have nothing good to say about the government, she saw the king as an entirely separate entity with separate intentions. The king, she said, had the people's best interests in mind and if not for the governmental failures, things would be much better. I was fairly confused by her response. Seeing as the king has final say over policy and appointing ministers, I thought that ultimately the king would bear the responsibility for poor policy and poor ministers. When I brought up this point the girl just smiled and shook her head. Maybe it's not something that Jordanians admit, or maybe it's not something that Jordanians admit to a foreigner, but throughout my trip not a single person had a bad thing to say about the king.
At this point, we were joined by two of the girl's friends who had stepped outside of the library to smoke a cigarette and shortly after they arrived Jamal returned from the mosque. Luckily, one of the boys spoke English pretty well and he was able to translate for the three of them as we talked about politics. One of the boys had pretty much the same view of the government as the girl I had been talking to, but he had some interesting things to add. He said the unlikely event of an overthrow of the Hashemite Monarchy would bring only chaos. Selecting a president or prime minister would exploit the regional tensions in Jordan as any candidate from the North would be rejected by the South and any Southern candidate would be rejected by the North. I asked the other boy who was translating what his view of Jordan was. He mentioned multiple times that what he loved most about Jordan was how safe it is and, unlike the two other kids there and every other college student I had talked to on my trip, he had no complaints about the government. I found this response unusual and so I asked him what he meant. We continued to talk and I learned that he is Iraqi and that he moved to Jordan when he was much younger. His brother, father, and uncle were all killed by the government in Iraq and what he loves most about living in Jordan is that he never has to worry about anything like that happening or bullets whizzing by at night. It really made me realize that everything is relative, and that though these students study together and live in the same setting, their view of the world is ultimately defined by their past experiences and their level of expectations.
For a while we stayed and talked about less serious topics such as what video games we each played or what soccer teams they liked. Twice, a group of 7 or 8 students gathered around Jamal as they listened to "words of wisdom" about the proper way to study and to focus. Some of the students started to leave, but Jamal, the two boys, and I stayed and kept on talking. I don't know how it was brought up, but one of the boys started talking about how the Jews were to blame for the partition of India into India and Pakistan and the ensuing violence in the Kashmir region. I asked him what he meant, and he proceeded to say that it was Great Britain's fault, and seeing as the Jews clearly controlled Great Britain, they were to blame. I told him that as I had learned it, the Partition was the result of a Muslim Nationalist Movement who wanted to break away from India. It was not the fault of Great Britain, rather it was an issue pushed by the Muslims. Additionally, the Jews didn't control Britain then, and it would be hard to argue that they do now. His response was that I had no idea what I was talking about and I only knew what they wanted me to know. I stopped arguing as I realized that there was no way to rationalize with anyone who believed something so ridiculous and was insinuating that I was the victim of a grand, secret, Western coverup of Jewish trickery.
After five or ten minutes we heard the call to prayer ring out and Jamal informed me that he would be leaving for about 40 minutes to find a nearby mosque and pray. He said that I could come with him to the Mosque but I decided that I would wait outside the library. I sat for a short while before I decided to go over to a girl who was sitting alone and reading and ask her some questions. I started off by asking her how she felt about the current ministers and government. The girl paused for a moment before telling me that while she could understand English, she couldn't really speak it. (Ideally, I would have liked to have talked to her in Arabic for the entire time but early on in my trip I realized that my Arabic is not quite good enough to understand what people were saying about domestic and foreign policy.) At the time there was nobody nearby to translate, and I didn't really want to ask a stranger to stand there while she was talking because I didn't want to make her feel uncomfortable and feel as though she couldn't speak out against the government or the king. We settled on an interesting system: I would ask her questions in Arabic/English and she was willing to write down her responses in Arabic in a notebook that I had with me and which I would later translate. I asked her some more questions and found out that her opinion of the current political situation in Jordan was very similar to that of most people that I had talked to on my trip. She felt as though the government was corrupt and ineffective and that their main goal was to take as much money from the people as possible. She was frustrated that the money that the government was collecting in taxes was showing no apparent improvements, and she proposed that there be a change of ministers as soon as possible. However, when it came to the king, her opinion was very different. Her support for the king was unwavering. While she seemed to have nothing good to say about the government, she saw the king as an entirely separate entity with separate intentions. The king, she said, had the people's best interests in mind and if not for the governmental failures, things would be much better. I was fairly confused by her response. Seeing as the king has final say over policy and appointing ministers, I thought that ultimately the king would bear the responsibility for poor policy and poor ministers. When I brought up this point the girl just smiled and shook her head. Maybe it's not something that Jordanians admit, or maybe it's not something that Jordanians admit to a foreigner, but throughout my trip not a single person had a bad thing to say about the king.
At this point, we were joined by two of the girl's friends who had stepped outside of the library to smoke a cigarette and shortly after they arrived Jamal returned from the mosque. Luckily, one of the boys spoke English pretty well and he was able to translate for the three of them as we talked about politics. One of the boys had pretty much the same view of the government as the girl I had been talking to, but he had some interesting things to add. He said the unlikely event of an overthrow of the Hashemite Monarchy would bring only chaos. Selecting a president or prime minister would exploit the regional tensions in Jordan as any candidate from the North would be rejected by the South and any Southern candidate would be rejected by the North. I asked the other boy who was translating what his view of Jordan was. He mentioned multiple times that what he loved most about Jordan was how safe it is and, unlike the two other kids there and every other college student I had talked to on my trip, he had no complaints about the government. I found this response unusual and so I asked him what he meant. We continued to talk and I learned that he is Iraqi and that he moved to Jordan when he was much younger. His brother, father, and uncle were all killed by the government in Iraq and what he loves most about living in Jordan is that he never has to worry about anything like that happening or bullets whizzing by at night. It really made me realize that everything is relative, and that though these students study together and live in the same setting, their view of the world is ultimately defined by their past experiences and their level of expectations.
For a while we stayed and talked about less serious topics such as what video games we each played or what soccer teams they liked. Twice, a group of 7 or 8 students gathered around Jamal as they listened to "words of wisdom" about the proper way to study and to focus. Some of the students started to leave, but Jamal, the two boys, and I stayed and kept on talking. I don't know how it was brought up, but one of the boys started talking about how the Jews were to blame for the partition of India into India and Pakistan and the ensuing violence in the Kashmir region. I asked him what he meant, and he proceeded to say that it was Great Britain's fault, and seeing as the Jews clearly controlled Great Britain, they were to blame. I told him that as I had learned it, the Partition was the result of a Muslim Nationalist Movement who wanted to break away from India. It was not the fault of Great Britain, rather it was an issue pushed by the Muslims. Additionally, the Jews didn't control Britain then, and it would be hard to argue that they do now. His response was that I had no idea what I was talking about and I only knew what they wanted me to know. I stopped arguing as I realized that there was no way to rationalize with anyone who believed something so ridiculous and was insinuating that I was the victim of a grand, secret, Western coverup of Jewish trickery.
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