AMMAN, Jordan - Oliver Stone’s World Trade Centre is playing this week in Jordanian movie theatres. Looking at the movie posters of the still-standing twin towers was a trip back in time for me.
My first reporting trip to the Middle East came the day after planes piloted by al-Qaeda fanatics crashed into the World Trade Centre. I landed in Amman on Sept. 12, 2001, and like many, I spent most of the next 48 hours watching again and again the unbelievable scenes of the day before.
I was almost as stunned by the country I had landed in. Like many North Americans, I had a poor understanding of the Middle East and Islam until that fateful September day. My crash course came over the next five weeks, as I travelled in Jordan and Israel, watching a region reel because of events halfway around the globe.
Jordan was nothing like what I’d expected. People were welcoming and friendly (why I’d expected anything different is something that all of us in the mainstream media have to answer for) and many spoke English. Young people dressed in hip Western clothes and watched the same movies and listened to the same music I did. Some women wore the hijab that has become such a famous symbol of conservative Islam in the past few years, but they mixed comfortably with those who let their styled and streaked hair fall unfettered to their shoulders.
On my editor’s advice, I wandered into the historic centre of Amman and had lunch one day at a McDonalds that stood across Hashemite Square from a splendidly restored Roman theatre. The food was, well, McDonalds, but the Jordan on display was one where history and modernity seemed at ease with each other, neither seeking the other’s elimination. Later in the week, I spent a moving evening on the city’s Mount al-Qalaa with several hundred Jordanians who held a candlelit ceremony for those who had died in the attacks on America.
Five years later, the differences in Jordan are many and saddening. The war in Iraq, Jordan’s neighbour to the east, combined with the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, on Jordan’s western front, set in motion a sharp swing in Jordan’s popular mood, from hopefully pro-Western to angrily anti-American.
The most obvious sign that things have changed is the airport-style security I now go through to stay in the same hotels that I checked into without hassle back in 2001. It’s a result of the fear that has overtaken Jordanian society since its own encounter with terrorism last November, when suicide bombers following the orders of the Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi attacked three Western-style hotels in the capital, killing 60 people.
Though thousands of Jordanians took to the streets to protest those attacks, many fear another attack. Despite al-Zarqawi’s death, Islamic extremists have grown stronger in the past five years, as the kingdom – already home to 1.8 million Palestinian refugees – has been inundated with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fleeing the violence in their country. That’s a lot of anger looking for an outlet.
There are subtler signs as well. Many more women wear the hijab now, and fewer restaurants serve alcohol. A prominent Jordanian politician told me that while he enjoys a fine bottle of red wine, he won’t drink in restaurants anymore for fear of angering his increasingly conservative constituents. The McDonalds is gone, replaced by a traditional Arabic sweets store.
Most tellingly, the country sometimes hailed as the most progressive in the Middle East is considering postponing next year’s parliamentary elections. The victory of Hamas in January’s Palestinian elections, coupled with a breakthrough showing by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in parliamentary elections a year ago, has Jordan’s ruling elite worried that the stridently anti-Western Islamic Action Front could win more than half the seats if a vote was held any time soon. A recent Los Angeles Times article even suggested that King Abdullah’s support for American policy could make him the next Shah of Iran, toppled by an Islamic revolution.
I miss the Jordan I used to know.
