That winter day in February 2007, it was a peaceful scene. There was a smell of sulfur from the hot springs, fields dotted with red poppies, and, across the Yarmouk River, hundreds of wild cows were grazing happily in the sunshine. Mamdouh Basharek told us how a bunch of Arab cows escaped across the river in 1967, when the shooting started, and occupied a hillside below the Israeli electrified fence. The Israelis eventually gave permission for the Jordanian farmers to try to get them back and the fence was temporarily deactivated. But no one could catch the wild cows. And there they’d been ever since, breeding up and grazing happily, watched over in the Galilee by young Israeli soldiers in their watchtowers, and young members of the Syrian Arab Army manning the barricades on the other side of the Golan Heights. What their fate has been since, I don’t know. But Prince Hassan told me stories of farmers who lived on either side of the Jordan River talking to each other and sometimes working things out, despite politics and history. It might be the same in the rich Galilee.
We returned through the checkpoints, and were driven up to a large house in a rainforest of tree ferns and eucalypts surrounding a natural pool fed by one of the many hot springs. Twenty guests were assembled and we were introduced ‘as Sidi Hassan’s people’ to the Georgian ambassador—a young woman who last year, we were told, obtained 100 million dollars’ worth of Arab investment in Georgian industry—and to her husband, who headed up George Soros’s social investment network. There was also a group of attractive Italians, a documentary filmmaker from Dubai, the Bashareks’ Russian farm manager, a couple of artists and a ceramicist, all seated around a splendid long outdoor table. A much more cosmopolitan version of Montsalvat at Eltham, outside Melbourne, I thought, disloyally. Australia felt provincial and a very long way off.
Again, there were the questions about why I was in Jordan and what I was working on, skilfully fielded by the Bashareks, who loved Sidi Hassan and seemed to sense what I was up against. The Prince’s friends always spoke highly of him, and often murmured to me that, of course, he should have been made king, and what a fine king he would have been. The PA knew how to handle this kind of thing, having been there for many years. I managed to change the subject to that of Georgian capitalism, which was surely on the move.
The Bashareks invited me next to visit them in East Amman, where they had a treasured reproduction of an image of Mamdouh’s warrior grandfather, Shibli Ibrahim Bisharat, from Salt in what was then Palestine, which George Lambert drew on the battlefield near here in 1918. They had presented the original to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra but no one had been in touch or told them if it was on display. I promised to try to find out.
They gave me a copy of Jordan: The Land and the Table by Cecil Hourani, and I started to make more sense of the countryside, and the utterly arbitrary Sykes–Picot borders, drawn with a ruler on a map of the Middle East for the League of Nations at the end of World War I. The borders, which suited the British, the French and the Zionists, were then secured with the local Bedouin tribes, plus Circassian and Christian troops led by Sharif Hussein of Mecca, Prince Hassan’s redoubtable grandfather.
There was no such thing as ‘Jordanian food’, wrote Cecil Hourani, since Jordan was a new land on ancient foundations, with a cultural mix of Bedouin, Palestinian, Armenian, Lebanese, Assyrian, Chechan and Circassian, each with their own culinary specialities based on locally grown and wild ingredients. The massive influxes of Palestinian refugees since 1948 and Iraqis since 2003 have, according to Hourani, ‘disturbed the previous relationship of man and the soil: the growth of the cities took place at the expense of the village, water resources became scarcer, and the land was no longer able to sustain the population. In the space of fifty years Jordan went from self-sufficiency to almost total dependency on the outside world.’†
Jordan and Australia have much more in common than might at first appear. Both are rather new sovereign nations in ancient lands. Both have cruelly displaced their indigenous populations from their traditional lands. Both pride themselves on their pluralism and struggle to live up to its demands. Both have deeply problematic relations with neighbouring countries. Both have breathtakingly beautiful desert landscapes. Both have massive environmental problems: desperate water shortages, and arable land inadequate to support large rural populations or to develop agribusinesses for export. Both are spasmodically attempting to replace old paternalism and colonialism with new institutions. Both have colonial pasts that have left a deep residue of British symbolism and snobbery.
My husband, instead of telephoning, emailed me little writing tasks. Tell me about Petra was one, I recall. Also, about the Galilee. And I did. I thought he’d like to hear about the wild black-andwhite Jordanian cows crossing the border, but maybe he didn’t get the email. The message Hope your excursion was good was waiting in my inbox.
Emails did go astray; also files I was working on. Some days, whole chapters of the draft of the book disappeared, only to be found in another file when the office sent over a clever young female tech head and equilibrium was restored.
One Friday in late spring, the PA suggested we drive out along the old road to Jerusalem, which winds through the Jordan Valley, to see the small regional town of Al-Salt. First built in the crook of three hills by the Macedonian army for Alexander the Great, Al-Salt had been a bishopric during Byzantine times, and the administrative centre of the province for the Ottoman Empire. The town eventually became the capital of Transjordan, under the auspices of the British Mandate for Palestine, and Sheik Abdullah bin Hussein’s headquarters from 1921, until he moved the capital and his extensive family to Amman in 1946.
The suq was crowded when we arrived, stalls overflowing with the glorious produce of the deep red soil of the Jordan Valley. We bought baby aubergines, bunches of small white onions, cucumbers, tomatoes and fresh coriander, and stowed them in the shade near the car. We visited a small Byzantine church that was unlocked for us by a grumpy verger—both the PA and I were wearing jeans, which almost certainly was offensive. Most of the women and girls were covered, and I was conscious of flouting the modest-dress rules that prevailed in all small towns. Still, we had long scarves, which we wound over our heads and arms.
The yellow sandstone and timber houses of 19th-century merchants were arrayed along the heights of the town, many with balconies and arched windows under domed roofs, and luxuriant gardens tumbling over high walls and steep stone steps. By early afternoon, the town was putting up heavy shutters for siesta, but the PA knew where to buy the best picnic food, and we sat on the steps in the shade, eating shish kebab and tomatoes, and crunching small cucumbers. Later, we bought bags of pastries from a special bakery she knew, for the compound’s housekeeper and head gardener. The baker himself followed us out to the car to say farewell.
The PA, having long worked for Sidi Hassan, was hailed everywhere, her easy manner honed in the Victorian country town where she had worked with a local politician for some years. I often felt tongue-tied and wooden in comparison. The Bedouin guards at the Palace knew her well and respected her, some of the older men confiding in her about their families and their hopes for their sons. This was a country where preferment, tafdil, and the petitioning of the powerful were deeply embedded in the culture. It predated Islam, Sidi Hassan had explained, telling me stories of how, when he was a little boy at a local school, he’d find his bag stuffed with requests for his parents. The PA walked the line adroitly, it seemed to me, but there was no doubt that her Arab friends hoped she would find a way to assist them or their families.
When she was invited to a large Bedouin family wedding, she managed to get me invited too. The bridegroom, who the PA introduced me to, was a handsome, elegantly dressed man. She told me the family was mentioned in the book of the Hashemite armies, as ferocious tribesmen who acquitted themselves with honour during the Arab Wars. We will probably be the only outsiders, she said, and treated well because of the Palace connection.
Traditional Bedouin weddin
gs take place over three days. The groom’s family hosts the first celebration; on the second day, the motorcade collects the bride and brings her to the groom’s house; and the family of the bride hosts the third day, to express their sadness at losing her.
The first event was held at Shuna, near where the Dead Sea joins the Jordan River, close to the sacred site of the first baptism. The Alawis were a huge tribe, wealthy, and important in the area. In our best clothes, we drove through blasts of rain in the dark, missing the turn and ending up, after going through a Jordanian checkpoint, on an empty, unlit road heading towards the Jordan River and the lights of Israel. We found a place to turn around, and eventually the right road appeared, lined with cars and vans. We parked, changed into our party shoes, and followed the loud music inside.
‘Honoured guests from the Palace’, we were ushered into the women’s tent attached to the house, where we were welcomed—kissing left, right, left—by the sisters and mother of the groom, and led to where at least a hundred women of all ages, shapes and sizes were seated on plastic chairs arranged around a dance floor. The PA and I were shown to seats that had a good vantage point, and introduced to more sisters, cousins and aunts on each side of us. They spoke little English, and the PA had about twenty words of Arabic, and I not even that, but we all laughed, clapped and enthused as the dancing began.
The younger women were dressed raunchily, in black leotards with belts, long white boots, lots of cleavage, many exposed midriffs—unselfconsciously erotic in the presence of the smiling, clapping older women, some with indigo tattoos on their faces and hands. Many of them had elaborate hairdos and makeup; others wore head scarfs but also trousers and diaphanous sequined blouses. Very young boys were allowed in the women’s tent, sitting on seats watching, or helping pass the Pepsi and cakes. Little girls in lace party dresses and bows were led forward by older girls and clapped into the dance, and babies were kissed and held high, and passed around the dancers. Soon, the women reached out for us and we joined the scented, undulating throng of women and children. I thought of the frowns and tuts of disapproval such attire would have produced at rural weddings back home. Here, it felt like a celebration of female sexuality and of children yet unborn. Next door, from the men’s tent, there was the sound of fireworks, and then of guns being fired up into the sky. Of course, always with live ammunition, the women told us, laughing. The older boys were in the tent next door, collecting the empty cartridges and dancing with the men.
On the third night, we went to one of the large hotels in Amman, where the family and friends of the bride had gathered to pay their respects formally to the newly married couple in white. We saw the bride for the first time: a small, dark-haired beauty sitting beside the handsome groom in a decorated alcove. They both looked radiant, and were snapped constantly by a professional photographer, and by everyone else on their phones.
At a concert and dinner at the Swedish embassy, I met a senior lecturer from Yarmouk University, who taught ‘clever rural girls’, who made up 90 per cent of his students in Maths, English and Engineering sciences. ‘The boys are useless,’ he said. ‘Preening sex objects looking for clever wives.’ He invited me to visit and speak to his students. Then I went to a lecture at the Australian embassy by Sydney University Professor Stephen Baker, who had been heading up the Pella excavation for the past twenty years, which had recently uncovered a huge temple structure dating from 1800+BC. I was seated next to the director of the Department of Antiquities in Amman, who told me about the Museum With No Frontiers, a virtual museum of Islamic art, that was just being completed with EU funds, where much of this work would be featured. Later, he sent me the link to the website and invited me to visit the department.
Before I left for Italy, Sidi Hassan arranged for me to meet Senator Ina’am Al-Mufti, the first Jordanian woman to hold a governmental position. She had established the Ministry of Social Development, and much else, and was a member, with him, of the Arab Thought Forum.
The senator was impressive and gracious. She asked me, of course, about Norma Khouri’s fraudulent book, Forbidden Love, and I found myself trying to explain how Australian agents and publishers apparently failed to verify Khouri’s fabricated story of a Jordanian woman whose father murdered her in an honour killing after she had a chaste love affair with a young Christian man.
How could this have happened? the senator asked. Did they not check that she was telling the truth? I didn’t know for sure what had gone wrong, but I suspected it was due to the desire to discover a topical bestseller about wicked Islam as practised in a far-off little-known country. The book had sold 250,000 copies in Australia before the Sydney Morning Herald’s Malcolm Knox exposed the hoax. The author, an American citizen resident in Australia, had left Jordan as a three year old. The Jordanian women’s groups I met during my next visit were nothing remotely like the oppressed Arab women Khouri invented, and were outraged by her fabrications and puzzled that Australian publishers could be so naive—or slipshod.
One Friday, an invitation arrived for me to visit Mamdouh Bisharat at the Duke’s Diwan in King Faisal Street in Downtown, next to the old Arab Bank. This Duke’s Diwan is a rare 1920s stone building, which the new Transjordan government leased in the 1940s as the Central Post Office, after which it became the Haifa Hotel, and was saved from demolition by Mamdouh Bisharat and preserved in its original condition. The steep stairs of yellow ceramic went up from the street to five reception rooms with high ceilings and splendid arched windows, and doors opening off a central salon. There were chequered black-and-green tiled floors, blue peeling paint, and walls covered in photographs of Old Amman before the freeways and circles started cutting it up into districts. The Duke’s Diwan was now a writers’ centre, a performance space; a place where anyone could come and sit on the balcony above the street, borrow books from the library and watch the world go by.
Mamdouh Bisharat had assembled a small discussion group, perhaps for me, before lunch at his house. Coffee and pastries were brought up in a basket on a pulley from the café below. Mamdouh was a visionary about what Amman could become but despairing, like Sidi Hassan, about what the developers were hell-bent on doing. I met Dr Fawzi Ziadine, a scholar who spent many years in charge of archaeological sites in Jordan, including the Citadel, and the Byzantine excavations at Madaba, the Jerash site, which, he told me, had to be saved from severance by the highway in the 1970s. He spoke of Johann Burckhardt and the discovery of Petra in the early nineteenth century, and of Washington Irving and his Tales of the Alhambra, as if he were there with them. One of those conversations that makes you glad to be alive, I wrote in my diary later.
We were then driven in Mamdouh’s truck to East Amman, and his marvellous, airy old house high on a hill looking down to the Roman Amphitheatre, surrounded by what looked to me like Roman rubble in a quarter made derelict after the arrival of the PLF militia and the refugees in the late 1960s. Basima welcomed us to a house full of books and paintings, lithographs and Moroccan watercolours. The copy of George Lambert’s 1918 portrait, painted in Salt, of Mamdouh’s grandfather, Shibli Ibrahim Bisharat, was hanging in the dining room. I promised again to see the original in Canberra when I returned to Australia.
We sat at a huge table, and were served a splendid lunch of green soup, ftoul (a chicken dish with chickpeas, lentils and wild greens), a shredded cucumber and onion salad, fruit and coffee. Mamdouh held court, delighting in ideas, in art, in sharing his books and telling stories. He gave me the phone numbers of several of his friends in Rome, insisting I ring them in the next few weeks when I again would be based in Italy, drawing the threads of the book together for a proposal to take to London publishers.
The second book I had suggested to Prince Hassan sounds so obvious now: a short, tightly focused account, in his words, of the plight of the Middle East since 9/11 and the grotesque retaliation of the Iraq War, informed by his work as the Crown Prince, and assembled from some existing materials, new taped interviews and m
y own, now extensive, notes. There was nothing else like it on publishers’ lists that I could see.
I had assumed he would take control of the rough draft, and shape the final text himself, which the original contract seemed to assume. But, of course, he will not, I wrote in my diary. He was a great communicator from notes, a terrible pontificator when depressed, a man who deserved his reputation as the thinker, visionary, voice of reason in the region—and one of the few Muslim leaders free enough to throw some light on this seemingly intractable set of horrors and conflicts the Middle East was again suffering. As the region’s thinker about these issues, he was second to none. Or so it seemed to me, and certainly to everyone I was starting to meet in Jordan. I returned to Cortona full of hope about the project.
† Cecil Hourani, Jordan: The Land and the Table, Elliott & Thompson, London, 2006, p. 12.
6
Learning to see the weather coming
THERE WAS NOTHING romantic about living in Cortona. A hard-eyed commercial town with a history of invasions and miracles, in a glorious setting under huge skies. Its inhabitants kept up appearances, dodged taxes, berated grown-up sons and daughters unlucky enough to be still living at home—or so the stories went. At the end of each day, the passeggiata down the Via Nationale and into the public gardens was full of well-dressed, well-coiffed, gossiping groups. No black or brown people. No hijabs. No odd stranieri like me. Or, at least, not that I could see.
Other People's Houses Page 11
