An Alternate Witness

At Least As Far As We Can Tell

I want to dispel a rumor circulating on the Web about Jordan and its Palestinians. Actually, I'm surprised that Nas at the Black Iris hasn't already commented on it.

Word on the Web is that Jordan has begun revoking the Jordanian passports of its Palestinian citizens. According to rumor, the Jordanian government is uneasy in the wake of President Obama's speech in Cairo about where the Middle East Peace Process will go next. There is concern that Jordan will be asked to take all the Palestinians, which Jordan and Palestinians have always made clear is not a viable option, and the rumor goes that Jordan is revoking the passports of Palestinians to pre-empt any talk of Jordan as the new Palestinian homeland.

Several of my friends in the States have heard the rumor and asked me about it, so I've been asking around. First of all, there is this article in the Jordan Times. As I understand it, Palestinians in Jordan hold one of three kinds of ID: green cards, yellow cards or UN IDs. From this article, it is my understanding that Palestinians can, under certain circumstances, exchange one kind of ID for another, and that a small number of Palestinians do this every year. I understand from the article that this number has not changed significantly from recent years.

I've also asked a number of friends who have their fingers on the pulse of Jordanian politics, whether by professional or personal interest, or through family connections. What I have learned boils down to this: no one knows anyone, or has heard of anyone, whose Jordanian passport was revoked. In fact, the Interior Minister was recently on Amin FM, a local radio station, inviting anyone whose passport had been unjustly revoked to call in to the program, and no one did. I know, in Jordan one must take this with a grain of salt, and suspect that anyone who did call in wouldn't be allowed on air anyway, but it shows that the government is aware of the rumor, and trying to dispel it.

This is what I think happened: In the wake of the Gaza War, the Obama speech, and other recent developments in the Israeli/Palestinian issue, reporters have gone into overtime to find information about Palestinian issues. One of them found some data about the yearly turnover of green and yellow cards, and misconstrued it, or sensationalized it, and then it "went viral" as the term now goes.

This is what I tried to teach my students in my Islam course at nerd camp. When you read something in the newspaper, see it on TV, or especially when you find it on the Internet, think carefully about who wrote it, where they got their information, and what their personal biases are. A reporter might, as happened in one of the articles my students read, come to Algiers, interview half a dozen people there, and write an article about the evils of Islam, a religion that encourages so-called "honor killings." Now, my students had studied Islam for almost three weeks of 7-hour days by this time, so they knew right away that she had her facts wrong: honor killings are a cultural phenomenon in many predominantly Muslim countries that directly contradict the edicts of the Qur'aan. But even if you didn't know anything about Islam, would you say that half a dozen interviews with Algerians makes the reporter any sort of authority on Islamic practices?

My sources may be suspect for any number of reasons, but I feel fairly confident in saying that there's sufficient evidence readily available that casts at least a shadow of a doubt on this latest rumor about the revocation of Palestinians' passports.

I was clued into this YouTube video on this article on NPR. As someone said at our house the other night, the women of the Arab world are so eloquent, and don't get nearly enough air time!

Nas is a very brave man, and everyone interested in free speech in the Middle East should be reading his blog!

There's such a Catch-22 in all this conversation here in the Middle East about President Obama's character, intentions and potential actions. People are asking each other if President Obama really wants change in the Middle East, whether he really is the idealistic humanist democrat that his words portray him as, and how much the people who voted for him really care about his Middle East policy. I am also hearing and reading a lot of debate as to whether President Obama will rise above domestic concerns (read: the economy) and American self-interest (read: AIPAC) to engage his administration in the politics of the Middle East, if so, will the Congress support or impede him in such an endeavor, and can the United States even accomplish the peace, freedoms and prosperity that Arabs hope Obama will bring to their region. Many people here are optimistic, like the newest Jordanian blogger I'm following, The Arab Observer. Others are less trusting of rhetoric, including my friend Kinzi and many who responded to the Observer's opinion.

There's certainly plenty of debate as to how much power the American government has over the issue of Israel/Palestine, or of democratic and human rights reform anywhere in the region. Certainly the United States pumps plenty of money into controversial regimes in the region, starting with Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but definitely not ending there! If America cut off the tap, would that weaken oppressive regimes enough to be overthrown by the will of the people? If so, would the United States extend the same humanitarian aid to a regime that had overthrown America's former allies?

There's no doubt that foreign aid is needed in Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and other parts of the Middle East. If the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were to suddenly stop all its programs in part or all of the region, humanitarian crisis would surely follow. Saudi Arabia and Iran may have the oil resources to provide some sort of substitute for USAID, but would they extend that aid? If so, what strings would be attached, and how would people in the Middle East or beyond react? Judging by the reaction to Iran's support of Hamas and Hezbollah, which do provide extensive and vital social services in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon, I think the reaction of the Western powers would be far from desirable.

On the American side, there are plenty who question why we should help people in the Middle East who don't seem to want to help themselves. Of course, Black Iris made an eloquent argument in the post "Somewhere Near the Israeli Embassy In Amman...." for why it is so difficult for people in this region to press for change and reform from within. On the other hand, change and reform will never be successful if they are imposed entirely from without.

The whole debate reminds me of an amazing experience I had as an undergraduate at tiny Goucher College in Baltimore. Professor Emeritus Froehlicher, who had a dramatic life that included working for the resistance to the Nazis, and then coordinating the translators and interpreters at the Nuremberg Trials, convened a group of professors, most from the Modern Languages Dept, and me and my former roommmate. We each read the opinion pages of newspapers in different languages, and convened to share what we had found. One French professor invited the Johns Hopkins University professor who was teaching her Arabic to bring us the Arab perspective, and he showed us magazine after magazine calling for America to bring an end to Egypt's and the region's woes. America, he said, was the only country with the political, economic, military and cultural power to effect real change in the Middle East, and if Americans really believed in their founding principles, how could they not save the Middle East? He had to leave early, but it's the rest of the conversation that has really stuck with me.

Prof. Froehlicher had grown up under the Nazis. Most of the other teachers in the room had grown up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Russia. They started describing how they had felt the same way about America. If America really wanted to cover the world in democracy and freedom, why weren't they doing anything? Why wasn't the United States using its superpowers to tear down that wall, to fix their problems in the Soviet states and satellites?

But what really brought down the Berlin Wall, and ultimately the Iron Curtain? It wasn't American democracy and power. It wasn't American President John F Kennedy saying, "Ich bin ein Berliner," or Pres. Ronald Reagan saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Perhaps America and its presidents served as an inspiration, or as that vital ray of hope, but in the end, it was the people behind the Wall, behind the Curtain who brought it down. It was the grassroots resistance movements of the Polish Spring, the Velvet Revolution, and the Catholic Church. It was the ordinary East German citizens who chose to believe a bureaucratic error and converged peacefully on the wall. It was the lowly East German borderguards who made the humanitarian choice to disobey their standing orders to shoot anyone trying to cross that border. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, America may well have facilitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, but nothing America did directly caused it.

I hope that people in the Middle East take inspiration from Barack Obama, as Americans are doing, and do find the audacity to hope. But it is incumbent upon us all to remember that hope alone will never be enough. It is our responsibility, as Mahatma Ghandi said, to be the change we want to see in the world. It's not enough to believe in change; you have to work for it.

Here are a couple interesting blog entries by friends about blogging in the Arab world: from kinziblogs with some interesting comments by the very Jordanians effected, and about a Saudi blogger whose neighbors can't see what he writes.

I feel somewhat protected by being an American in Jordan, which depends heavily on American funds to run its government and its economy, and is therefore loathe to offend the American public. However, rest assured, it has crossed my mind more than once that blogging in this part of the world is not without risk.

I filter my writing carefully anyway. I know that friends, family and potential employers all have access to my blogs, as well as the friends, family and current or potential employers of those whom I mention in my blog. I definitely don't want to offend those people, who are important to me, nor jeapordize their personal or business relationships. I also have a definite agenda to help Westerners see this region in a more sympathetic, positive light.

All of this, however, is about my own personal concerns. As a US American, as a humanist, and as a writer, I find government control of information appalling.

Is today's education teaching our children to live in their world?

Leaving my job as a second grade teacher at the Modern American School here in Amman, Jordan, has made me rethink a conversation we frequently had in Peace Corps with Jackie and Lynn, who were retired elementary school teachers, and had been students in the American system fifty years ago. They would frequently say that Jordan's education system is about where America's was 50 years ago, and it would take time to catch up. I would say that the Modern American School may be where the American system was 40 years ago, but I keep thinking back to a video I saw on YouTube some time ago:



We can't afford to be stuck in an educational philosophy that is 40 years old. We can't even afford to be stuck in today's educational philosophy.

I don't know what the answer is. That's the whole point. None of us knows what the answer is, what our new teaching model needs to look like. But I know that it shouldn't look like this:

My math class was the hardest to teach, not only because I don't do math the way most people do math, but also because it was a class of extremes. I had one student who needed me to do every problem with her, because she couldn't remember how to do them from one question to the next. I also had about five students who finished their workbook pages in five minutes, finished four or five additional double-sided worksheets, and still had twenty minutes left in the class period, day after day. My mother suggested what seemed to me like a brilliant solution, which I proposed to my supervisor: Elementary school math books are designed to be more or less self-explanatory to students who are competent readers. Couldn't I just put my best students together at one table and allow them to teach themselves at their own pace? It was essentially what those students had been asking to be allowed to do for weeks.

Now, I know that my supervisor was thinking of the third grade teachers when she answered my question. The third grade teachers who would have those students next year, and have to fit them back into the officially sanctioned little boxes. I am sympathetic to my supervisor's answer, but I am shocked nonetheless by it. She said:

"Absolutely not! We can't have students thinking that they can learn by themselves!"

The parents of my students are being told and believe that they are getting the best possible education for their children. What their children are learning, however, is to work within a social system that will be completely irrelevant by the time they finish college. I'm not sure how to teach for that. I think it probably looks something more like the way I taught for nerd camp. What I know is that it's not the way I was being asked to teach the second grade.

There are those really amazing days in teaching when you can see a student finally get it, make that breakthrough that just makes your day....
And then there are days like this....

Bulqiis was one of my brightest first graders. She had learned every word in her vocabulary, she had learned at home to identify all the words and letters in the English alphabet, and she never gave me any trouble in a class that was often quite unruly. Like the Queen of Sheba whose name she shared, Bulqiis was already well on her way to being a very capable, admirable woman.

One day, as I was starting class, Bulqiis raised her hand. "Miss Maryah," she asked, "do you speak Arabic?"

"Of course. We're speaking Arabic right now. You hear me use it a lot in class." Too much, perhaps, though I needed the least amount of Arabic to get the lessons across to my first graders, who had not yet formed the habit of learning English through Arabic. But maybe, I was thinking, I didn't use as much Arabic as I thought, if Bulqiis wasn't sure I spoke the language at all.

Then she asked the question that burst my bubble. "Then why do you always speak to us in English?"

In my second year of Peace Corps, I taught English to the first, second and third grade classes. Perhaps the freshest of my first graders was Sarah, the daughter of an Arabic teacher who lived right next to the school. Sarah's sister Selsabeel was the star of my third grade and the darling of the teachers' room, and Sarah was determined to be different from her sister. I'm sympathetic to this; my sister was in a very similar situation, and eventually she transferred to another school to avoid being compared to me!

Sarah was clearly one of the fastest learners in my class, but determined not to let anyone know it. Sometimes I would walk around the room and ask the girls to point, say, to the number 3 in their books. With a big smirk, Sarah would point to the 4, the fox, the pencil, the 2, the ball.... Sometimes I'd wait for her to point to everything else on the page, and then ask her again to point to the 3, and she would start over, pointing to the fox, to the 1, to the pencil, to the 4.... Anything but the 3, which made it obvious that she knew exactly where the 3 was, but was determined not to let me know it. In addition to trying to act dumb, Sarah did her best to be disruptive. I would turn around to write on the board, and hear some little girl's voice, usually Bulqiis or another of my best students, say, "Miss Maryah, Sarah's sitting under her desk again!"

Every morning, when I entered the first grade classroom, Sarah would ask, "Miss Maryah, do you love God?"

"Of course I love God," was always my automatic response, and I would start class. Though an agnostic with polytheist inclinations at home in my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Maryland, in Jordan I described myself as a Christian, at Peace Corps' suggestion, and because UUism is hard enough to explain in English!

One morning, however, Sarah tried a different tactic of distraction as I entered the classroom. It was midmorning, with early morning flurries and no heat in the school, and it was cold! As usual that winter, I was wearing pants over second-hand Eighties stirrup pants, two wool sweaters, a wool cloak and my mother's gift from my trip home to Maine the summer before: a big fleece hat . "Miss Maryah," said Sarah in her chipper little voice, "you shouldn't be wearing that hat! You should be wearing a headscarf!"

Without really thinking about the fact that these were only first graders, most of whom had seldom left the village and probably never met another real, flesh-and-blood non-Muslim, I said, "I'm a Christian. I don't have to wear a headscarf." With older children, this was often (but not always!) sufficient explanation.

Immediately, though, another little girl asked, "What's a Christian?"

"Christians are of a religion like Islam," I said. "They worship the same God, but they have different customs. For instance, they don't wear headscarves." I thought this ought to do it: a fairly simple, non-judgemental statement that no parent could take offense to as prosthelytism, with carefully chosen pronouns to not dig myself too deeply into my habitual white lie of being a Christian.

Not so. "Miss Maryah?" asked someone else. "Are you a heretic?"

This hit a little closer to home, and perhaps made my response a little more vehement than necessary. "No, no!" I said. "Christians are People of the Book; they worship the same God as the Muslims. Christians aren't heretics."

"Miss Maryah?" asked yet another first grader. "Are you a pagan?"

Cringing inwardly, I said, "No, no!" Things were starting to get out of hand.

"Miss Maryah?" someone else inquired. "Do you love Satan?"

With a quick "no," I started class with our usual full-body review of the four verbs they knew in English. "Alright, ladies. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Jump! Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Turn around."

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Bedouin village in northern Jordan, it bothered me to no end that no one every said "shukran," the word we had been taught in training to mean "Thank you." In fact, my neighbors and students would laugh when I said "shukran," and ask me why I used that word so often. Even more bewildering to my new community was the way I would say, "No, thank you." They would protest, "But I didn't do anything! I just asked a question!" It was a long time before I began to appreciate the nuances of thankfulness in Jordanian culture, and to recognize that I was being thanked, but in ways that were so culturally strange to me that I did not initially recognize my neighbors' gratitude.

Months into my service, I began to complain to my closest colleague and friend, a Muslim American raised mostly in Pakistan, about the lack of gratitude for the work I was doing. It was she who explained to me the Evil Eye and related customs, which were also prevalent in Pakistan. It was, she said, considered very bad form to give compliments or thanks, because this might foster a sin of pride and bring down the Evil Eye upon the recipient. I found the idea of the Evil Eye strange and, I must admit, backward. Nevertheless, I used the mantra I had learned as a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholar, "Not better, not worse, just different!" and tried to accept that I would not be receiving thanks for my work.

In fact, as I eventually recalled, they had told us in training that we would probably not be thanked for our work. They had told us that the things we would do in the community would not fall outside the realm of the community's expectations of us, and thus would not merit thanks. Also, they pointed out, we would be invited for tea and meals, to engagement parties and weddings, and this would be because the community appreciated our efforts there. However, our trainers were primarily Jordanian themselves, few had even traveled outside the Arab world, and few had lived in the villages, where life is very different from the capital city, Amman. Over time, I began to unpack the cultural norms that they could not recognize behind their own descriptions of how Jordanians show appreciation.

Jordanian life, especially among families in the smaller villages that tend to be of nomadic Bedouin origin, operates on a basis of collectivism. In the desert, the individual perishes without the support of the community. Even in the villages of the semi-arid regions, Jordan is one of many cultures where it truly does take a village to support an individual. Under such conditions, everyone always helps everyone else.

Sometimes the girls next door would come over for English help while I was cleaning, doing laundry or cooking, and I would say that I did not have time just then, and they should come back later. Often their mothers would then come knocking, and the mothers would say, "If you are going to live among the Arabs, as an Arab, you may not say no when you are asked for help." They would explain that even when someone called the house, asking for the mother of the house, and she was a mile down the road visiting a friend, whoever answered the phone would say, "She's right here! Just a minute," and run down the road to fetch her. Once it had been pointed out to me, I saw that exactly this was the case.

I started thinking about "Thank you," and what it implies. To say "shukran" in Jordan is to imply that someone did something for me that was not needed or expected. Giving me a cup of tea is not occasion for "shukran;" guests expect to be offered tea. Receiving a plate of whatever my neighbor had made for lunch is not an occasion for "shukran;" she was also sending plates to her inlaws, and she considered me her spinster sister. "Shukran" is for an unexpected gift, or something above and beyond the daily exchange.

In time, I noticed that, while I was not being thanked, thanks was constantly being given. A daughter of the house would serve tea, and the guest would say, "God bless your hands." A child would bring home a high grade on an exam, and the parents would say, "God's will is done!" A neighbor would give us a ride home from school and we would say, "God have mercy upon you." We had been taught all these phrases in training, and been told that they were an important part of village life and courtesy. At first I avoided such phraseology; as a secularist who has not declared faith in any God, it felt fraudulent for me to use such God-speak. Eventually I came to understand what our trainers had known intuitively, that all these phrases meant "thank you," but by thanking God, there is no danger of attracting the Evil Eye. It was not until I had studied Islamic law and tradition more closely in graduate school that I realized an even deeper significance of the practice. If they thanked God for the things I had done, I would remain sufficiently humble, and I would understand that my place was to work for the good of the community, promoting the good and forbidding the evil, which is the essential core of Islam.

Living with the Bedouin in Jordan and learning their language and idiom helped me to see the world in a new way. As I embark on an academic career leading to a career as an Arabic interpreter, I find myself wondering about the interdependence of interpreters and the peace process. If I am the linguistic liaison between Arab and American parties, and at the end of negotiations, the Arab says, "God's will is done!", it may be unwise to translate this literally, because the American party is likely to understand this as a statement of religious conservativism, whereas perhaps the Arab's meaning is closer to "Thank you." Likewise, in English, perhaps it is worth considering how sincere my own "thank you"s are, and what cultural baggage they carry.