tl;dr: Places contain multitudes. Migration is cool. Jordan exists (but also it doesn’t). Context is good. In my last post, I talked about the "what" of my upcoming year: daily disemboweling of my ego to make offerings to an unfriendly God (the Arabic language). In this entry, I'll dwell on the “where" of my time abroad. Jordan is not the most exciting place in the Arab world. A variety of Arabic teachers and college friends, many with family ties to the Arabic-speaking world, or else who are much more travelled than I am, have kindly bestowed this information upon me when I share what I'm doing with my post-grad life. Lebanon is far more cosmopolitan, I’m told. Oman has phenomenal beaches. Egypt is the Arab Bollywood. Jordan, so I hear, is more like the Middle East’s Midwest, or Arizona -- not quite Nebraska, but definitely not California or New York. (Perhaps it’s the Arab Oregon? They do have lots of parks.) That all said, I’m excited about calling Jordan home for the next year. Generally speaking, these days Americans go to one of two places to learn Arabic: Morocco or Jordan. There are several reasons for this. Before the Syrian civil war, my college study abroad program was based in Damascus. Likewise, political and safety concerns largely keep Americans from setting up shop in Lebanon, Egypt, and North Africa (e.g. Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Sudan). As I talked about in my last post, the “where” of Arabic studies is super important, as it will shape the dialect you get to practice. Since Moroccans speak lots of French and have an Arabic all their own (very Berber-influenced), when faced with the choice, I decided to book a ticket to Amman. Jordan is a nation formed in the crucible of a lot of movements — political, migrational, everything in between. Like many of its neighbors in the “Fertile Crescent,” Jordan has basically been inhabited since the dawn of human time. Still, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, population was sparse. Jordan’s lands were controlled by the Ottoman Empire (i.e. Turkey) from the 1500s until the breakup of the Empire in World War I. After the “Great War,” when various European powers decided they were uniquely endowed to run everybody’s business, control of Jordan fell into the hands of the British. The Jordanian monarchy (which still exists today) was more or less installed by the Brits as a thank you to the influential Hashemite family of the Gulf, who fought as allies of the Allies throughout the war. The Hashemite brothers ended up multi-generationally enthroned in Jordan and Iraq; both their roots really stretch back to present-day Saudi Arabia. This is one of the cool components of Jordanian national identity: it isn’t just determined by whose roots are “deepest” in Jordanian sand and soil. On the contrary, Jordan is a country that has welcomed wave after wave of immigrants and refugees. A huge portion of the population is Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi (Jordan is the only Arab country to have given citizenship to Palestinian refugees living within its borders, I'm pretty sure?). There are also Christian minorities, and Circassians, Sudanese, Yemenis…This isn’t to say Jordan is an all-accepting paradise -- every country in the world has its own strain of border-loving bigotry -- but I have noticed that my life as an expat benefits from this general trend of the border-crossing personal history of many Jordanian residents. If we’re being honest, it’s fair to say that Jordan maybe shouldn’t have existed as a country in the first place. Post-WWI, European leaders drew borders where they suited European global domination, not where they necessarily made sense for ethnic, cultural, religious, and other identity groups in the region. “Greater Syria” was something many Arab leaders fought for once it was clear the Ottomans were no longer in charge. The British "Mandate" for Palestine lumped together lands on both sides of the Jordan River (i.e. both Palestine and “Transjordan”), which is interesting to think about today, given the massive flows of Palestinian refugees into Jordan over the last 50 years. “Transjordan” would have been a good name for the country, actually, because of the way Jordan acts as a crossroads/melting pot/salad bowl/maqluba of the world. (The other interesting thing about the British Mandate is that lots of Jordanians learn English in school, so I’ll probably have a fall-back on days when my Arabic is debilitatingly incoherent.) There’s a lot about Jordan that I didn’t get to talk about in this post, but that’s, of course, what the next year is for. In the future, I’ll cover the Bedouin roots of Jordanian national culture, the ecological and geographical features that shape the state, the idiosyncrasies of the capital Amman…lots more to open up, so I hope I’ve whet your appetite for more about this cultural-geographic underdog of the Middle East. Next time: Reconciling privilege, American cultural hegemony, and other uncontroversial and easy-to-explicate topics. (I may also break down how to land a rocket on Mars, TBA.)
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