Horrific news this morning, another woman killed for the sake of a myth called honor:

Criminal Prosecutor Amjad Kurdi on Saturday charged a 23-year-old man with the premeditated murder of his younger married sister for reasons related to family honour, official sources said.

Kurdi also charged the victim’s father, mother and sibling of complicity in premeditated murder in connection with the drowning of the 22-year-old at dawn on Saturday.

The 23-year-old suspect, an electrician who got engaged a week before the murder, then placed his sister’s body in the trunk of the car, drove back to Amman, headed to the Jabal Hussein Police Station and informed officers on duty that he murdered his sister to “cleanse his family’s honour”, the source added.

The victim, who was married almost two weeks before the incident, was returned to her family home on Friday by her husband, who questioned “her fidelity”.

The victim’s family interrogated her and she allegedly told them that “she knew a man but was not involved in an affair with him” so they beat her until she almost fainted, the source told The Jordan Times.

The victim tried to resist and informed her brother that she did nothing wrong, but “he did not listen and killed her,” the source added.

Read the full story here

This is the second woman to be slaughtered in cold blood by a male sibling this week, the 6th since the start of 2008. Nobody knows if the husband’s allegations were accurate, the family never bothered and killed the girl anyway, and now how can we ever be sure what went on?* The woman was married so she must have lost her virginity, and the husband decided to report her “infidelity” after two weeks of marriage. At the sound of the word “honor” the victim’s family was taken by some demonic myth and butchered their own daughter.

Will this killer also walk and be hailed a champion of honor?

*Please note that the woman’s being or not being in an affair of sorts should not have spelled out her death sentence. There is no excuse for murder, and least of all for murder in the name of honor. All justifications for that, real or fabricated, should be made illegal.

A new atrocity in the name of female genitalia honor was committed in Jordan two days ago. Al Ghad reports that a man killed his 20-something, married and pregnant, sister by shooting her repeatedly in the head. The man then handed himself in and claimed his motive was defending the family’s honor.

The story in Al Ghad does not clarify exactly what the situation was that led to the young woman’s, and her baby’s, death. But there is mention that her brother suspected she was having an affair with a relative. That begs the question: how come the man who’s engaged in an improper relationship with a woman is rarely, if ever, treated with the same cruelty that the woman is subjected to, i.e. death?

In another story, a 19-year old girl was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison (originally to hang to death but the verdict was reduced) for poisoning four members of her family. The story goes that the girl poisoned her parents and two brothers because they had accused her of stealing some money, and let her brother beat her up, in the week prior to the murders. The girl felt she needed to avenge herself and stated that she wanted to “harm them” only and not to kill them when she presented them with poisoned juice, but they died.

There is no excuse for murder that a rational person would hide behind. But, given the situation in our societies, women are extremely marginalized and at the same time there are many doors open to them to pursue education and careers. The resentment resulting from prejudice against them when they have achieved just as much, if not more, than their male counterparts is bound to take shape one way or the other. You can only repress someone for so long, and then they’ll explode in your face and you won’t like it.

If that girl’s family had prevented her brother from beating her up upon accusing her of theft, she would not have been so angry and frustrated with her situation. If that other young woman’s family had cared to check the murderous brother’s actions and attitudes, there would not have been a woman and an unborn baby dead today. A large part of the reason many women are angry is because when they speak up they are violently silenced, when they dare to ask a question they are ridiculed, and when they demand their rights they are robbed of what little privileges they already have.

I am saddened by this current state of affairs. It makes my heart bleed to see the brutality of the patriarchal system that sees women not as companions and equals, but as followers and subjects. This won’t last, though, because hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

In today’s news, the Jordan Times reported the following:

Criminal Prosecutor Tareq Shoqerat on Sunday charged a 70-year-old man with the manslaughter of his daughter during a family brawl in Karak at dawn, official sources said.

The 30-year-old victim, who was not identified by officials, was shot twice in the face and head, allegedly by her father, while she was attempting to stop a fight between him and one of her siblings, one official source said. The victim died instantly, the source added.

It’s definitely a good thing that the man’s crime was treated seriously, seeing as the victim is not only female, but also his daughter. These two conditions usually render crimes committed by male relatives against female family members extremely insignificant and very often legally and socially condoned.

The man was angry at his son, and shot his daughter (who stood between the two men) supposedly by accident. The criminal part of the affair is obvious, but how is this situation any different from a man shooting his daughter because he suspects she is damaging the family’s honor? In both cases the man is angry, the daughter is not proven guilty, and oftentimes is not at all guilty (think autopsy that proves she, and her honor/hymen, are intact). So how come legal authorities and society itself look the other way and let murderers out of prison after serving a modest 6 months when the word “honor” is mentioned by virtue of the infamous article 340:

Any man who kills or attacks his wife or any of his female relatives in the act of committing adultery or in an “unlawful bed” benefits from a reduction in penalty.

Is that not giving men a “license to kill” in the name of an imaginary term invented by men themselves? Any man can kill his sister in Jordan for reasons like taking over her finances or her share in inheritance, and he can simply cite honor as his motive, and it would not matter if this woman is not found “guilty” of adultery during her autopsy, and society would hail the murderer as an honorable man.

I am willing to bet that if that 70 year old man cited honor as his motive for killing his daughter, which might be his lawyer’s tactic in the near future — you never know, he would be allowed to walk free and celebrate his 71st birthday at home. The irony.

I just got this as a forward. I thought it as a very expressive caricature on the situation of real estate prices in Jordan. Owning an apartment has turned into a mission impossible — it requires a Bond kind of guy and a Bionic Woman kind of girl to manage to do it.

I realize the issue of road safety is the current craze in Jordan, but I feel the media and officials are taking it way too far, and in the wrong direction too.

Al Ghad published a report on road humps, which are so annoyingly common in Amman that drivers deliberately take alternative routes to avoid them. The report says that “citizens” value the humps and urge the municipality to increase their numbers (what citizens? can I punch them in the face?). It also says that the municipality does not install humps which are over 5cm in height, or which are unpainted or unrecognizable. That’s a glaring lie and everyone knows it — plenty of trick humps in Amman and other cities. The municipality is supposedly working on fixing the problematic humps which technically can ruin people’s cars and cause accidents themselves. I suggest they remove them entirely.

I also suggest authorities fix the streets and patch up the numerous random and invisible holes and mend the water drainage holes which lie about 5-10cm below street levels and make our cars dip in them and almost run into either the pavements or other cars trying to avoid them. I suggest the municipality award street building bids to reliable and professional contractors, instead of the random connected engineer who commands a sea of untrained Egyptian workers and then, surprise surprise, the tunnel or bridge chips after the first drops of rain it receives and the street dough cracks and peels. I suggest we stop the wasta tradition, starting with the municipality staff and engineers, and ending with driving coaches and testers, and then we won’t need road humps anymore.

Another piece of news was about the death of a four year old boy in an accident. The boy was run over by a car and passed away, and his father was pretty badly injured. Other similar stories were covered previously by all Jordanian newspapers in an almost press-release format over the past few months. While the tragedy of losing human life to recklessness is obvious, it’s very interesting to me to note that car accidents in years past never got the same attention they are getting now.

Previously, only when 5+ people died in a massive and horrorish accident did we read about that in the papers. Now, whenever an accident happens, it’s right there in the papers. This trend started with the death of Hikmat Qaddoura and the subsequent noise over the accident, including the march and the road safety campaign launched by his family and friends. At that time, I started noticing how the unprecedented buzz generated in the papers about this particular accident touched a sensitive nerve in many people who noted that since the deceased belonged to a wealthy family, his passing away got the kind of attention no road-killed kid from a less affluent family ever got. They argued that kids die every day in Rusaifa and Wihdat, and nobody bothers to publish anything about them.

I am guessing authorities received these notes and digested them well, and from then on, we read in the papers about some unwealthy, often disabled, commoner dying in a road accident. I remember not too long ago there was a story about a blind man’s son, or the blind man himself, passing away after being hit by a car. Today there was the story of the four year old boy, and the trend is obvious.

It’s absolutely fascinating how class differences affect people’s perception of issues. The common Jordanian was angered by the attention to the Qaddoura case on the basis that common kids never got the same attention. The Qaddoura case started things going with a march and an awareness campaign. Now suddenly the Amman municipality and road authorities care about road safety and the media bombard us with pictures of mothers crying over their deceased kids’ coffins. They also make us feel like we’re roaming killers instead of recognizing their faults and the faults within the system. The whole affair is disturbing for the following reasons:

1- Roads suck.
2- Drivers get their licenses a la wasta. No wonder they can’t drive.
3- Driving coaches make so many mistakes and illegal errors themselves when they don’t have their students with them. I see that every day.
4- Amman Municipality is capitalizing on the Qaddoura case and the subsequent attention to road safety to blame everything on us drivers. Again, patch the roads.
5- Sob rhetoric is lame and ineffectual.
6- Class differences will increasingly underscore people’s attitudes towards significant problems.
7- Road humps do not solve the problem. They create angry drivers and broken cars.

And that ends my rant about road safety in Jordan.

I am currently reading Pillars of Salt, by Jordanian writer Fadia Faqir. The novel was recommended to me during my college years by Maria Laura Iasci, one of the best teachers I ever had and a reader of this blog (ciao professoressa!) during a class in English-to-Italian translation. I remember we were a class of about seven, all female, and we were assigned passages from the first chapter of the book to translate into Italian. I remember the task of turning the rich English of the text into comprehensible Italian was very challenging.

My then-professor, now-friend, Maria, recommended Pillars of Salt with enthusiasm. I had never heard of Faqir previously, and quite frankly I never heard of her afterwards except from Maria herself who, only a few months ago, recommended yet another book by Faqir. She emphasized that this was a Jordanian writer who treated issues such as honor and gender inequality in this society. Her being a woman was an instant plus as well.

Two days ago, I finally found Faqir’s Pillars of Salt at Prime. I started reading the book tonight and I have not yet finished it, but I was so moved by its realism that I felt compelled to write about it here. I do not know how the story will develop, I do not know if I will enjoy it in the coming pages as I have so far, but I do not think that would alter my reception of it so far.

Pillars of Salt is not only a novel about Jordan, the Bedouin Jordan and the developing Amman, it is a historical account of the situation of Jordanian women, a situation that has remained static for the most part. It relates the story of two women, one Bedouin and the other an Ammani, during and after the British Mandate. In doing so, it reveals the injustices, the myths, and the hardships that clouded and decorated the Jordanian scene.

That above was a brief summary of the novel. My own impressions upon reading it are not different from my sentiments when I used to hear my late aunt recount stories of her childhood in Karak. The stories she told of her father, my grandfather, riding a horse with a jinnee, the stories of men hunting at dawn and sleeping in caves, the stories of women giving birth as they participated in harvest (my grandmother included). Pillars of Salt also relates, but in a more limited way, to my mother’s upbringing in Amman as a Circassian. My mother tells me stories of Cinema Philadelphia, of Syrians and Bedouins flooding the old markets in Amman, and of a girl losing her hair while looking through a drop of oil in a coffee cup to uncover the location of an ancient treasure with the help of jinn.

There seems to have been a common historical fabric that united this Jordan together, and women seem to have been a vital part in this union, albeit in a repressed way. Faqir’s novel taps into that but refrains from making judgment. It recounts the events and seems plot-less precisely because it is so smooth and revealing, and it leaves it to the reader to observe and judge. While reading the novel, I feel like Faqir is narrating my own familial history, which to me has always been the history of the women rather than the men.

To put it in a word, this novel is captivating. Perhaps it is because I can relate to it to a large degree that I feel this way about it, but I believe it will be appreciated equally by others. I do think, though, that people from other cultures would be more taken by the religious-mythical-romantic theme the book has rather than the actual events. It might seem to them that the constant religious remarks and mythical references in the book are tools of style used by the author, but the reality is that these occur in reality exactly like they do in the book. I could hear the characters speak in Arabic Jordanian, although the book is in English. That is a sign of a successful, honest portrayal of Jordan.

Read this book is you’re interested in learning more about Jordan and its mentality and culture. I strongly recommend it and thank Maria for bringing it to my attention. You can also check out Fadia Faqir’s website by clicking here. I do hope this post preaches Faqir to you, she is a truly brilliant writer, and it’s a shame that such Jordanian writers do not get the attention they deserve.

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:

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?

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.