Since everything is getting more and more expensive in Jordan, everything has been downsized. Including the infamous Jabri bar which has gotten so thin and short that to buy it for 10 piasters is an utter waste of money:
I am completely sickened this morning after reading a number of things in the papers and other places online. Here is a tour of my revulsion:
1- Human Rights Watch published a report on the situation of Saudi Arabian women. The report argued, and correctly, that these women are systematically kept in childhood as by requiring guardianship and their guardians’ approval of every step they take in their adult lives (education, work, child caring, travel, etc.) while at the same time the socio-religious system held them legally accountable for their actions as true and actual adults. Most importantly, the report mentioned that women are portrayed and treated as fitna, sources of strife and moral decay, if they are allowed any share of public life or exposure.
This same treatment of women as the sources of malice lays the foundation for the belief that men, their supposed polar opposites, are gullible and easily swayed into vice. Indeed, it argues that for men to stay virtuous, women must be covered up and must not come in direct contact with any men outside their close familial circles lest all social and moral stability come crumbling down. The mere idea that men cannot control their sexual urges, which are oh so easily aroused at the sight of a woman’s ankle or at the scent of her perfume, is absolutely offensive to me and I am not even a man. It pictures men as horny animals and women as their helpless prey, and, ironically, it puts the burden of sustaining society at the shoulders of these prey.
What I have observed is that these arrangements, though meaning well in an incredibly skewed way, actually encourage vice rather than suppress it. Is it not vice that Saudi men seek when they visit Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon in the summer? Is it not vice that Saudi women must be in the company of foreign drivers in order for them to go places? Is it not vice that even women clad in black from head to toe do not escape sexual harassment in the form of pickup lines or phone numbers on small pieces of paper, or bluetooth messages sent to their mobiles, and this does happen in Saudi Arabia because the basic human desire to interact with others, male and female, is not satisfied? Is it not vice that women are placed entirely under the mercy of their male guardians in each and every aspect of their lives? Is it not vice that a human being can die and not be missed by authorities or relatives because she has no ID and only a select few can see her anyway? Is it not vice that the kingdom of hypocrisy imposes strict and sick faith on a number of people, I would argue mostly the women, while it lets others enjoy alcohol, sex, and drugs behind closed doors inside or openly in other countries?
A friend of mine brought it to my attention that the HRW report was funded by a number of Jewish organizations. I think that is significant but it does not change the reality of the situation conveyed in the report. I suppose HRW, like my friend said, should be more selective of its sources of funding especially in these types of reports. Simply put, these fishy sources of money only contribute to discrediting the reports by the Arab public, which is quite the contrary of what they hope to achieve.
2- Allah is everywhere. I read a couple of articles in Al Ghad newspaper today, one was about secularism in an Islamic context, and the other about islamophobia. What struck me as absolutely one-dimensional was the content of the two comments posted on these pages. The commenters contended the ideas present in the articles by invoking the holier-than-thou authority of Quranic and Hadith citations.
In the first article, a commenter argued that a Muslim cannot possibly live under any law except that of Islam, and yet he provided that he lives in Jordan. I don’t know about you, but I see an amazing paradox because Jordanian laws are not,for the most part, Islamic, but secular (and let’s thank whoever it is that runs the show for not letting the Muslim Brothers rule us, amen). Then in the other comment on the second article, the commenter called for a return to the Arabic language in deriving terms instead of arabizing foreign terms, and he cited the Quran as a linguistic miracle. Fine, that is a worthy cause, but please CUT THE CRAP and stop preaching from a pedestal just because you were born into a Muslim family. Did the Arabs have no culture, no language, no identity, before the Quran was born? They did, and they better stop crying over spilled milk and get their act together already.
3- A number of distinguished college students at Al Balqa Aplied University discovered that they had been awarded scholarships by the Ministry of Higher Education, of which their university did not inform them. They made the discovery only lately, while the scholarships were awarded a year or two ago.
In a string of corruption and embezzlement scandals, Al Balqa Applied University seems to have outdone itself this time. The students will be awarded the monetary equivalent of the scholarships, officials said. But nobody commented on WHERE the money was exactly, or WHERE it would have gone had not a random student discovered this theft-corruption affair by accident while applying to another scholarship which he was denied because, hey, didn’t he know he had been awarded one two years ago? I want to see people put on trial for this. I want to see the big heads at Al Balqa University pay a price for their negligence and downright corruption. Will anyone do anything though or will they pacify the public with tales about compensating the students? We must never forget that there will be other students in the future who will be robbed of their scholarships to fatten the pockets of a person or two at Al Balqa Applied University.
4- Oy! Caramba! Nasser Judeh says relax, we didn’t sell the port you idiots, we sold the LAND. Wtf does that mean? Can someone translate it to me? Also, what does he mean when he talks about the Dead Sea Casino deal that “there was no sign of corruption, and the government and the investor agreed to exclude establishing a casino from the deal”? If it’s a “deal,” then there has to be SOMETHING in it for the investor, no? Otherwise what is he and the government agreeing upon? Let’s play a guessing game: it’s not a casino, what oh what could it be? Oh I know! Expanses of land in the Dead Sea area and in Shafa Badran in Amman. That way the government avails itself of the sin of agreeing to build a casino, a vice-house, on the holy lands of Jordan, and it also PAYS land-money to the investor at the expense of homeless and hungry, but entirely pious, Jordanians. I wonder why Judeh did not mention the one billion$$ worth of land that we are forking over to said investor at NO GAIN, and how he cites “complete transparency” at the same time. Does anyone else smell shit?
5- The Jordan Times will not be published on Monday April 28th due to Easter Holiday. As far as I can tell, newspapers run as usual on holidays. News still HAPPEN on holidays. The world does not simply stop because Jesus decides to rise.
6- Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves: “Under the measures, which came in response to Royal directives, around 40 essential commodities were exempted from customs duties and sales tax, while taxes on nonessential items like alcohol, tobacco, video games and satellite receivers were raised.” What 40 “essential” commodities have been exempted, I beg to know. How come they are never enumerated and explicitly indicated in such accounts? And how are alcohol and cigarettes and video games and satellite receivers not essential to us who are beaten down every day and find no console in a greedy system? At least neshrab meshan nensa, kill ourselves slowly with smoke, and indulge in HotBird fantasies. Give us that at least!
There’s still more where that came from. But I don’t feel like devoting any more of my time to this upsetting state of affairs. I do hope though, that the person who argued not so long ago that “Jordan isn’t so bad a country, and I want to live there,” would read this and be forewarned: be a rich foreigner in Jordan or an expatriated Jordanian abroad, and you will SWEAR by Jordan. Otherwise, run for your life.
Shush! Silence
I’m breaking the silence
As I finish this sentence
Silence I demand
Give back to me my independence- Sylvia Chidi
It seems I have tilted lately towards personal-reflective type posts, and that can get annoying and make me lose my focus and join the ranks of “them bloggers who are female, maintain personal blogs, and think everything is right with the world when they go shopping.” I have always resented that stereotype because female bloggers add as much, if not more, value as their male counterparts and especially so in the Arab blogosphere (we’ll argue over the validity of calling a group of blogs a “blogosphere” later).
This isn’t a post about bloggers and their stereotypes and all that jazz. Nor is it about women and their undeniable contributions. This is a post about my own demons and how they relate to and affect this space I call my blog.
Last night, I had a reading marathon of sorts. I had stopped reading extracurricular books almost since the start of this semester under the excuse that I barely had time to finish class readings and work. That was a lie I told myself to make myself feel better about spending hours chatting online or thinking of my future, which are all good activities, but ones that have consumed me with an appetite lately.
So as I was saying, yesterday I started and completed Amin Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, which prompted, or re-fueled, a number of questions I had and also answered many I was challenging myself and others with. Maalouf articulated my thoughts for me, clearly and precisely, and that lifted a load off my brain. But, like any good argument, it also left me with other questions.
In the Name of Identity is a book about identity and how it plays a role in our behavior, reception, and perception of other people and of changes in the world. The book looks at things historically and logically (as Maalouf has an affinity with history) and attempts to dissect the current situation of the world, yes –the world, what a big arena!, from that perspective but also with an inevitable touch of evolutionary rhetoric. It does so using a personal tone and it explains the obvious which most of us cannot quite put our fingers on.
I enjoyed reading Maalouf immensely, and I wondered how come I never read my father’s copy of hisThe Crusades Through Arab Eyes. I suppose it was because when I was younger, history was synonymous with things long gone that I should not bother with, events which are both dull and draining to remember, and names of dead people. But not anymore do I think that way.
According to Maalouf, with whom I agree, our current plague as a global village is the holding-on to tribal identities. At the sight of the word “tribal” people will imagine tents and camels and an atmosphere strictly Arab, but that’s not an accurate picture. What he means by tribal is the idea that we must be belong, that we do belong, to one tribe almost exclusively and above all others: religion, nationality, gender, you name it. It is when this “tribe” is most threatened that we resort to classifying ourselves under its flag with vehemence. This classification changes according to the various threats, actual or fictional, that we observe, and it leads us to stress points that were once negligible, and it leads us to close ourselves up. It’s reflex supreme.
Lest this post turn into an analysis of Maalouf’s work, I will stop talking about it here. It has influenced what I am about to say, though: this blog was started as an attempt to fight stereotypes (mainly of veiled women, Arab women, and Arab people and culture). Now I know why it was so. Because when I started this blog, I felt threatened as a veiled, Arab woman and I felt greatly marginalized both in the Arab world or what I received of it, and in other places where I had been where people would either look down at me with disgust and mistrust or with sheer pity. Nobody, not here or there, could pierce through my appearance to know that I liked piercings, fine arts, and modern languages, or that I had severe doubts about what set of beliefs I had which kept secretly yet dramatically changing over time. Nobody bothered, and nobody knew who I was.
That was the thesis of this blog: to show “them” that I can think and even excel at it, use English extremely well, and have discussions with whomever I want about whatever subject. Thus, I thought, I would achieve balance between upper and middle class Jordanians, and between the West and the Arab East, and by that I would have acted as a bridge and resolved conflict within my capacity.
So since that was the driving force behind my entering the blogging scene, and I continue to adhere to the same principles, what new do I bring? Why does the not-so-occasional personal rant sneak in here if this is a strictly serious and mission-oriented space? My ideas have changed, why do I let myself be confused with someone I was and no longer am? How come I can’t express my opinions as bluntly as I shoot them when asked about them in real-life? I mean, my real-life opinions have earned me quite a reputation and a load of problems starting with family and ending with school, so why can’t I risk having that reputation and those problems through this blog? Why not transmit the same issues I worry about and fight over on a daily basis through here? What do I fear?
I don’t know yet. It could be a distant relative suddenly realizing I am someone they know and then telling my parents I am sharing family issues online. It could be an ex-acquaintance realizing I didn’t portray them as perfect and leaving me angry comments. It could be a stalker, old or new, out on the hunt for anything that can be turned into abuse. It could be futile dialog that takes an unpredicted turn in the comments section. It could be anything. I really, and honestly, can’t point it out.
Still, this uneasiness makes me want to stop blogging. If I bring nothing of value and nothing new, unlike others who obviously do since they enjoy a lot more popularity (and I keep my opinions of their contributions to myself), then why bother? If the people like chirpy entertainment junk-food-for-the-brain type things or hardcore extremism, would it matter if a moderate rational tried to sell her stuff? If I can’t affect change like I set out to do, then why sit idly by and watch my blog become filled with little quirky tales about my eccentricities and other trivia? If I do not have a distinct voice amidst the masses, what’s the point except satisfying my own ego? And isn’t that petty?
A couple of weekends ago my dad taught me how to play Blackjack (21 in his words) and Poker, and we played for a couple of hours with my Victoria’s Secret The World’s Sexiest Playing Cards, mainly because I could not find the regular cards anywhere in the house. We played with imaginary money, while my dad kept lecturing me about how dangerous it is to get addicted to gambling, and about how the house always wins. I nodded all the way through, of course. It was cute because he was ultra excited about teaching me, and might I add, also about how quickly I was learning, and at the same time he was worried this play would get serious.
This weekend: (click on pics to see them larger in my Picasa album)
Briefly in Amman:
Lucky worm meets The Model Hand:
And we made Haleva, thin Circassian pastry stuffed with salted mashed potatoes and then fried to perfection:
C’est tout.
I chat a lot. I practically grew up online; socializing with as many people in cyberspace as in real-life, actually perhaps even more. The former were/are always, always, always more interesting than real-life people, and they usually stay that way until you meet them or hear them talk. Unless they’re absolutely attractive yet impossible to attain, they cease to be interesting. The mind sure works in mysterious ways.
So to me, the idea of having a good conversation is very much related to a messenger of some sort. It started with IRC, then evolved into MSN and briefly Yahoo! Messenger, and later GTalk. That’s not to mention my enduring SMSophilia and the fortunes I spent over the years on witty, neat, short text messages.
As such, I seek good conversation all the time. This brings us to the point of this thus-far pointless post: the idea of having two robots chat together is so very intriguing. I just found out about it by chance while googling for something completely different.
Can a smooth-talking robot initiate good conversation, generate witty responses, and reveal profound thoughts? See what happens when two chatbots speak to each other.
Most chatbots rely on fairly simple tricks to appear lifelike. Richard Wallace, creator of the top-ranked chatbot ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), has handwritten a database of thousands of possible conversational gambits. Type a comment to ALICE, and it checks the phrase and its key words for a response coded to those words. In contrast, Jabberwacky, another top-rated Internet bot produced by Rollo Carpenter, keeps track of everything people have said to it, and tries to reuse those statements by matching them to the writer’s input. Neither chatbot has long-term memory, so they respond only to the last sentence written.
Here’s the exciting part, read this log of a chat session between ALICE and Jabberwacky:
A: Do you experience love?
J: No. I’m 53 years old.
A: Can you explain how it feels to be 53 years old?
J: How old are you?
A: I am 9 years old.
J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).
A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.
J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.
Haha. Now that’s slightly sexist, but it’s so funny! Judging by this log and others posted in the article linked above, ALICE and Jabberwacky sure chat better than 90% of all the people I have met online in my adult life, and they were many. Nay, make that 95%; good conversation is a rare commodity my friends.
We don’t do torture. We don’t receive secret prisoners from the CIA. We’re nobody’s bitches. Do you think they will believe us if we told the same lie over and over again?
Jordan is not the only country to which the CIA has sent prisoners for proxy detention. Egypt has held several such prisoners, and Morocco is believed to have held some. Yet the Jordanian intelligence service has long had an exceptionally close and cooperative relationship with the CIA, so the CIA relied heavily on Jordan for holding prisoners outside of the protection of the laws.
In an article on Salon, Joanne Mariner recounts her interviews with men who were held by Jordanian authorities and interrogated, and tortured, for the CIA, all secretly. Read the chilling account here, and if you don’t want to believe it, don’t. Rely on Jordanian newspapers to report the truth, as told by Naser Judeh.
We’re nobody’s bitches, you hear?
I just returned from a Q&A session with Mariam Said, Edward Said’s widow. The meeting was so casual and focused on Said’s involvement in initiating dialog with the other through music, namely through the Barenboim-Said Foundation. Yesterday, we watched a movie about the foundation and so today Mrs.Said was there to answer our questions and to talk about her and Edward’s experience. It was magnificent really. She was so down to earth, and so cultured and eloquent, and so very much in the know of Said’s and Barenboim’s work. It’s refreshing to see a lady who was married to one of the most influential thinkers of our time, and who has not lost her own uniqueness or become marginalized in the process. I just loved that. Everyone wished she had more time to afford us because we had many questions, and not just about the movie, but alas, she was just passing by and understandably she could not give us more time. C’est la vie, but that hour was so inspirational for me nonetheless.
When the session ended, I went to Jabal Lweibdeh and parked my car somewhere and just walked and asked mini-market owners on where the Società Dante Alighieri is. Eventually, I managed to find it. It is hidden in an alley of sorts and it is not directly overlooking the Kulleyat Al Shari’a street, so that is why I was never able to find it. It also does not have a sign on the street to indicate where it is. That’s pretty retarded I think, and I will indicate it to the Italians. To document my feat, I took this picture with my cellphone camera:
The center was closed when I got to it, but, if you plan to go: it’s in a small alley on the same side of the street as Afghani Souvenirs, right after a tiny mini-market. The entrance of the alley is very deceiving, but it gets big when you enter it and there’s even a parking lot there. After the alley there is a shop that sells work outfits, called Allam. In bocca al lupo! Good luck!
The Italian cultural center, Società Dante Alighieri, now has a website where you can register for Italian culture, language, and literature classes. There are also courses for kids, and all the instructors are native speakers of Italian. I just discovered the site right now because I want to register in some course. This is huge progress, because previously the Italians were not particularly active in Jordan, and as such, their cultural and linguistic influence was almost invisible. I am hoping the società can change that, and this site is definitely a step in the right direction. Hurrah!
La Società Dante Alighieri ha un sito, finalmente! Si può iscrivirsi ai vari corsi di cultura, lingua, e letteratura italiana offerti dalla società– tutto usando il sito. Ci sono anche corsi di lingua per i bambini. E la cosa più importante per me, è che c’è un indirizzo specifico per la società incluso nel sito, perhcé ho provato tantissime volte a trovare la società a Jabal Lweibdeh, ed è stato tutto inutile. Adess, però, credo che le cose cambiano.
