Alone at last! (kidding)

My parents left the next morning around 6 am, abandoning me in a strange city in a strange country. Luckily I had made plans to meet up with a friend once my parents left, so I would have a place to stay for an indeterminate amount of time while I decided how much more I wanted to explore Jordan.

I know a few students in Amman: two girls from Georgetown in a program at the University of Jordan, another who I met in Damascus and is friends with Katherine, and Rachel, who graduated from Georgetown two years ago—we have several mutual friends from school who put us in touch. I completely lucked out, being able to stay with Rachel and her two American roommates, and ended up sleeping on their couch (in their extra living room) until Thursday. She only arrived in Amman a week or two before, and along with her roommates, had just begun classes at the Qasid institute, which offers programs in both Classical (language of the Qu’ran) and Modern Standard Arabic (fus’ha).

The programs at Qasid seem pretty interesting—the quality of the classes is much higher than the U of J program which is, from what I’ve heard, disorganized and unsatisfying, and the fact that the institute offers classes in Classical Arabic is unique. For this reason, it attracts a lot of Western Muslim students (predominantly American, South African, Australian) who never had the chance growing up to attend an Islamic school and study the Qu’ran in class. The only downside of this program seems to be that it is in Amman. All the students that I met were envious that I was studying Arabic in Damascus, where one can actually speak the language in everyday life. Amman is somewhere between Beirut and Damascus—the only time Rachel and her roommates get to practice their Arabic is with cab drivers—it has all the conveniences of a modern city with supermarkets, ex-pat cafés and shopping malls (though not to the extent of Beirut), without the charm of old markets and buildings. Just one more reason to appreciate the political and cultural isolation of Syria from the West! (though everywhere we went in Syria my dad was still astounded by the apparent lack of Western brandnames [not even GE!].)

Other facts about Jordan: all local Jordanians are Bedouin/of Bedouin descent (ex. our 22 year-old university-educated Petra tour guide whose grandfather had 7 wives and so he has 500 cousins) though the urbanites live the Western lifestyle and the rest (or at least the vast majority) have settled into small towns. The landscape is overwhelmingly desert, except in the North, and travelling through the relatively small country (you could drive N-S in less than 6 hours) you hardly see any evidence of settlement—it appears to be largely unpopulated. The country is about the size of Virginia, with a population of 5 million: 2 million Jordanians/Bedouins, 3 million Palestinians and as of 2006 100,000 wealthy Iraqi Christian refugees. Jordan has clearly been very gracious offering a form of citizenship to refugees from both the east and the west, and has the only open border with Israel/Palestine of any of its Arab neighbors. However, it also means that it is home to more than a few disgruntled Palestinian resistance groups as well as Iraqi Al-Qaeda groups, who do not support the country’s peaceful relationships with Israel and the US, resulting in a few assassination attempts on the king’s father (King Hussein, credited for creating modern Jordan). The rest you’ll have to look up on Wikipedia.