At that time, Jordan was a country with no national archive; no systematic, or even partial, collection of the oral history of Jordanians who fought in the first Arab–Israeli War, which produced the 1949 Armistice lines on the map of the Middle East that had to form the basis of any workable solution between Israel and the Palestinians. The Israeli government’s egregious breaches of mutual agreements with the Palestinians seemed timed for whenever the Palestinians appeared to be on the verge of a historical national consensus. The settlements continued to expand in the occupied West Bank, and in 2007 provocative plans for new Jewish settlements funded by American evangelicals in East Jerusalem had just been published.
In the aftermath of Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, civil war sent a new wave of Palestinian refugees, 240,000 displaced from Gaza and Bethlehem, into Jordan’s six UNRWA ‘emergency’ camps. Amman became the centre of resistance: ‘The road to Jerusalem is through Amman’ became the slogan, and the young King Hussein defended the Palestinians even as the monarchy came under direct threat and ‘the guns turned inward’. Yasser Arafat, his headquarters in central Amman, in 1970 coined the anti-Hashemite slogan ‘Amman, the Hanoi of the Arabs’.
I was being given a Jordanian glimpse of events I still recalled, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijackings in early September 1970 of TWA, Swiss Air and BOAC passenger planes. After being refused landing and refuelling, they were eventually forced to land on Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip left behind by the British, near Zarqa in Jordan. The world’s tabloid press congregated at Amman’s Hotel InterContinental to cover the drama over the next three weeks, as the PFLP demanded release of three Palestinian dissidents held in Swiss jails, in exchange for the 382 passengers held hostage. It was a huge public relations victory for Arafat and the PLO, ending with the release of the passengers and the blowing up of the aircraft.
It was sensationalist, one-sided reporting in the absence of any experienced war correspondents, Sidi Hassan said, still outraged that Time Magazine made Yasser Arafat a cover story. At the time, Australian war correspondents were mainly covering the escalation of the war in Vietnam, following President Nixon’s orders to invade Cambodia. I would only have read versions in Australian newspapers via AAP. But the fierce courage of Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled I still remember.
For those Palestinians who wanted to maintain Jordanian stability and sovereignty, this was Aylul al Abyad, White September. But it was Black September, Aylul al Aswad, for those who wanted the Hashemite monarchy overthrown. When unarmed ceremonial Palace guards were shot, and, night after night, the Palace grounds and the Prince’s house were strafed with machine-gun fire, the cohesion and loyalty of the Jordanian army were remarkable, Prince Hassan said; especially as 40 per cent of the population at this time were Palestinian. By the time I was there, Palestinians were represented in parliament, some having made their fortunes in Jordan, but the majority were still in refugee camps, which had the look of decrepit permanent suburbs.
Soon after my conversation with the Prince about a different, more political, book, the PA and I were at a party in a beautiful bohemian wreck of a house overhanging a cliff above the suq, near the First Circle, the oldest part of 20th-century Amman. I asked a group of young Jordanians if they knew which side their fathers and grandfathers had fought on in September 1970, when Arafat’s headquarters were nearby. When terrified civilians barricaded themselves in their houses and cellars. When people defected, and shots were fired into houses, and street executions were common. None of them knew, or maybe they were not prepared to tell me. One woman remembered, as a child, her aunt rushing her into a cellar, and waiting in the dark for something terrible to happen, but it was never spoken about, she said.
A young photographer working with BBC TV cameramen in Iraq was at the party. He was just in from Baghdad, with horror stories about Sunni professionals being kidnapped for ransom, about the killings, the maimings, the vanishings, the corruption at the checkpoints, at petrol pumps, at the compulsory AIDs testing at the border. For every kind of service, he said, rich Iraqis were paying with US dollars to get out of the country. After a couple of hours of this, the group started talking about their pets, as if to keep a kind of toehold on normality—or so it seemed to me. I invented a story about my dog, Morry, chasing ducks and swimming in a lake somewhere in the Australian countryside, which made me feel better.
Last night planes came over without lights on, I wrote to Carmen. We were told they were landing at the King Hussein Airport outside Mafraq in order to go into Iraq. Whose planes? The rumours were wild like the weather. The Soviets. The Israelis. The Syrians. Impossible to find out anything credible except that the US has been doing deals all over the Middle East.
Prince Hassan often spoke about East–West perspectives, and the distortions caused by poor translations of Arab sources into English. I decided to go to London to consult agents about suitable publishers there and in Beirut, and so I could have a few days in the British Library, this time knowing better what I needed to read to give myself background. Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation had just been published. I also needed to read Avi Shlaim’s War and Peace in the Middle East, and much else.
I met my stepdaughter Ellie for a picnic lunch, and we walked among the daffodils in Holland Park. Strong and beautiful, she was alight with her London life of working in a television company. She asked me if I would ever reconcile with her father. I am reconciled, I told her firmly, but I will never live with him again. I need to live on my own. And so does he. I then bought too many books in Daunt’s. Back in Carmen’s attic, I dreamed of pulling ivy off a tall brick wall, strand by strand, leaving little sucking roots between the bricks.
It was nearly midnight on a Friday when I flew back to Amman. No waiting driver, no one answering their mobiles. My luggage weighed down with a heavy box of peanut butter, cosmetics and toys I had brought in from London for someone in the compound. The men at the airport were kind when they realised I was stranded. The lights were being turned off and the steel shutters closing, but I was invited into the baggage-handling section, which they told me stayed open all night. Welcome, they said and gave me mint tea and bottled water. A man called Khalid came out from behind the luggage counter and told me he studied English literature at the university in Aleppo, and we spoke joyfully of Middlemarch and Shakespeare and The Odyssey while the hours ticked by.
The night operator of the Palace switchboard was new and had not heard of me. Khalid told him to wake his manager. At 4 a.m. a soldier came with a car.
I lay in bed, listening to the azans from the mosque downtown and the planes overhead, wondering what would happen if I died there. Would I be sent away, or be buried in the little Christian cemetery below the compound the PA showed me? Whatever would be easiest for our kids, she and I joked at the time.
The next few weeks went rather well. Morning interviews were scheduled, for first thing, or immediately after a session in the office. I set up the recorder outside if the weather was good, in the little walled courtyard off the pavilion. Ousters sometimes followed Prince Hassan, and poured coffee into small blue and white cups, or I made espresso. I had a list of questions, some of which were redundant or that he swerved away from—often in ways that took surprising turns. Sometimes, the Prince walked off and returned with a pile of books and folders: articles, speeches, Arabic poetry, philosophy, examples of western misreadings or gross assumptions. The West was so one-eyed about the Arab world. I felt on the cusp of a different way of seeing. I listened, he read to me, I eventually interrupted and on we went. We taped for sometimes as long as two hours. The PA transcribed the tapes very late at night.
I discovered I was good at interviewing, which I think of as a form of intense listening. His voice in English was unaccented but reverberant and emphatic. His images, I reminded myself, were those of an Arab potentate, but one who was determined to continue doing meaningful work
on behalf of a fractured region and an ever-growing population of displaced people. A tale of thwarted ambition for an imploding state, perhaps. Anecdotes were needed to set the scene, I reminded him, and to shine some light on what readers in the West could only imagine.
We often discussed titles. Goodwill, he came up with; Hope Against Hope, I preferred. Whatever; it was a working title only, for a proposal I would need to send to the handful of British publishers seriously interested in the Middle East. I would be seeking expressions of interest for the book when in London again in August.
Now I was working to a template of topics, commencing with what being a Hashemite meant, and the crucial injunction ‘to give the message of peace and to help the poor’. This had defined Prince Hassan’s politics, and informed his work as Crown Prince of a small nation determined, for the public good, on both reconstruction and development after the decades of war. His exposure as Crown Prince to the mighty figures on the international policy-making scene made him intensely aware of the difficulties of reconciling provincial, regional and national realities with, often unspoken, international agendas. ‘Here were the cream and the élite of the experienced and clever architects of American and European economies, planning for the future of our region with a gleam in their eye not unrelated to the traditions of the great game. In other words, they told us what we wanted to hear, while planning for us as they wished.’
After the declaration of the ‘War on Terror’, so much of the hard work done to present an accurate image of Islam and of Muslims had run into the sand, Prince Hassan said. This was the starting point for the book. The focus now was on rebuilding the economy in Iraq by outsourcing to private contractors, leaving self-interested market forces welded to the controls. The failure of the US Senate to pass a bill that would have required troops to be out of Iraq by the next April meant the deterioration of regional security. By designating the region part of the axis of evil, a grotesquely lucrative buyers’ market for weapons had been created.
If the goal of the international community invested in the War on Terror was to strengthen and maintain the integrity of the state system, however disparate, the emphasis had to change to consolidating the peace, Prince Hassan believed. ‘At the very least with a cohesion fund to stabilise economies and reduce social disparities, such as the EU had provided for its least prosperous states—instead of leaving market forces at the controls.’ But the EU’s recent go-slow on admitting Turkey, bound to be seen as anti-Muslim, was extremely short-sighted, he said.
Several times, I went to hear him speak in Arabic. Once, to a large hall of young people, from notes he didn’t look at, in a voice that rose and fell and commanded attention. The audience sat up straight and listened intently. Hassan took questions and often made the students laugh. I tried to imagine what the joke might be. Maybe it was the one he told me for The Book about an old man who was dismissed by snobs because they misunderstood the big meaning of what he said. Or the one about waking students up so they would be led to an understanding of the need for a Citizen’s Charter.
What had happened overnight often shaped the interviews. The news from Iraq was ever more terrible. Each day there were more suicide bombings. A car bomb outside the Shahbandar coffee house, in Baghdad’s book district, near the Tigris river, killed twenty-eight, including the owner’s four sons and his grandson. The coffee house had been a meeting place for generations of intellectuals and writers. Al Jazeera showed upturned tables and books burning in the gutters, the wailing women of that dreadfully broken family; the rage that has no end.
I didn’t mention that I had seen the Shahbandar coffee house long ago, and later wondered why I didn’t. My other life felt so safe and far away. But I was drawn to book districts wherever I happened to be; curious about what was being read, what was in translation, hoping to spot a dog-eared Australian title left by a traveller. I sometimes found a Tim Winton, but more often the fantasia Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.
The only questions I was ever asked by anyone were the ones I was told not to answer. What is your work? Why are you here?
Meanwhile, Prince Hassan went to London but had arranged for me to meet the head of the Arab Thought Forum, the impressive Dr Humam Ghassib. He turned out to be a physicist and a man of letters; a lover of the Arabic language, its idioms and aphorisms. He had just completed an enormous dictionary of Arabic phrases in use in public life. His book The Scarlet Notebooks: Reflections of a Passerby, which evoked the richness of the Arabic language, and was first published in 1975 when he was in his early twenties, had just been reissued. A polymath, Dr Ghassib was a believer in editing as an art form, and in book design and typography as intrinsic to conveying meaning. He told me how few books were acquired for translation into Arabic, and how few in Arabic were acquired for translation into European languages. Only ten thousand books had been translated into Arabic in the past thousand years, he told me—the equivalent number of books translated into Spanish in one year.
My notes of our meeting were fulsome and indiscreet. Dr Ghassib shared my bookish enthusiasms—and my admiration for Sidi Hassan. The Prince was the president and founder of this think-tank, which ‘encourages pan-Arab thinking and development in a region where sovereign borders have been melted down by civil war’. But also, crucially, Dr Ghassib said, ‘Prince Hassan is a man of letters’ who ‘reigns supreme in translating the spirit of the language’ and ‘strategic thought’—a man ‘who joins the dots’.
Dr Ghassib also told me that the book world in Jordan was full of frustrations: bad books, overhyped and poorly produced; good books getting little attention in a reviewing and media culture that favoured the crass. Lebanon is better, he said, and Egypt is the best. He said that Naguib Mahfouz was only available in Jordan after he won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, and then only volume one of The Cairo Trilogy, in English, and in small quantities, catering for a wealthy élite. Dr Ghassib and I got on like a house on fire, and I signed for him a copy of my book about my work in Australian publishing and literature, Other People’s Words.
We were determined to arrange for Prince Hassan’s book to be available in an Arabic paperback edition soon after its publication in English. The distinguished scholar M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, who recently had published with Oxford University Press a much admired translation of the Holy Qur’an, was Sidi Hassan’s preferred translator. Dr Ghassib said the family would approach him to translate Prince Hassan’s book and that he would surely agree.
I returned to the prefab feeling much invigorated, but the following week’s sessions with Sidi had to be postponed. The organisers of the next World Council of Churches conference, in Amman on Israel and Palestine, wanted Prince Hassan’s involvement. But he told me that, after more than fifty years, they were still politicising the issues, rather than promoting a holy space for the three monotheistic religions. Christians were fleeing Jerusalem and the West Bank and Lebanon, yet the World Council of Churches was ‘still looking to advise the region, instead of rising above politics and promoting holy spaces’. He spoke scathingly about ‘the endless run of initiatives, conferences, events that lead to nothing’. Meanwhile, the constant dislocation of people and their desperate poverty begot violence.
Prince Hassan needed to be actively involved in what was going on in the present. His wife, who clearly adored him, didn’t hesitate to berate him about some of his beloved initiatives ‘soaking up time and money’. He had sons and daughters who were increasingly being sought for public roles in Jordan’s institutions when he was not. His wife said it was because he was not tactful and ‘says what he thinks’. Others told me it was because his Arabic was very much better than the King’s—who was half English anyway.
So, when an urgent request arrived that the Prince chair an advisory group on Iraq’s electoral procedures for the next round, he was fired up, and the PA started running around with lists headed ‘top level contacts’ and with confidential letters. The interviewing session ended, and I
knew that would also be it for the rest of the week and probably the one after. But there was mention of a young intern from Boston coming for the summer, who might be able to help with the transcribing. I was trying to get hold of some of the Prince’s better speeches as a short cut to this stop-and-start interviewing—but when a CD arrived on my desk with copies of the speeches I’d selected, all were minute PDFs, unable to be unlocked, let alone edited.
I blew my top at my friend, the poor PA, who was copping it from all directions, and something Dr Ghassib had said about the Majlis being inhuman in chewing people up, expecting miracles, made me wish I hadn’t got angry. But, once again, the project felt impossible. Then, when Prince Hassan started arranging for me to speak to other people about his work, I relaxed about the confidentiality clause. I made another note to remind the office that a revised contract needed to be drawn up.
A few days later, an invitation arrived from Mamdouh and Basima Basharek, delightful friends of Sidi Hassan. The PA and I were invited to lunch at the Bashareks’ ‘winter compound’, and advised to bring swimming clothes, so we could dip in a natural pool fed by a thermal spring. The Basharek family owned one of the valleys near the Syrian border, overlooking Lake Tiberias, where they grew bananas and guavas. A car was arranged, and we were driven north-west for several hours to where Mamdouh Basharek, a handsome old man with courtly manners, was waiting by the roadside, high in the mountains.
He wanted first to show us the Golan Heights from No Man’s Land. Sidi Hassan had, no doubt, arranged for us to have a viewing. This involved much ringing ahead by soldiers on mobile phones, and checking for explosives under the car and in the boot, as we were escorted through several checkpoints until we could get out and walk towards the site of Glubb Pasha’s headquarters, and the old railway line the Ottoman Turks built in 1906, which zigzags through the valley and into the mountains. Mamdouh pointed to a bridge that was one of fourteen that T.E. Lawrence blew up; and the railway station where the small steam train used to stop. We were right on the border of Syria, with young Israelis in watchtowers guarding the Golan, which was seized in the Six Day War in 1967; defended during the Yom Kippur War of 1973; and, still, despite various attempts at normalisation, a site of conflict.
Other People's Houses Page 10
