THE FIVE DRAFT chapters I had left behind were 100 pages printed with wide margins for comments, and a tactfully worded request, insisted on by Sitti Sarvath, that Prince Hassan work on the text before I return, and not ‘just keep talking’. I knew what she meant. The taped interviews, when he could fit them in, had been getting better, and some were rather wonderful—full of rich ramblings, philosophical, poetical, theoretical, literary, hilarious—or simply ways of avoiding the task. It was obvious by now that this was a book Prince Hassan was reluctant to do, had probably never wanted to do. But his wife and, presumably other members of his family, persuaded him to ‘write’ it, perhaps in the hope it might cheer him up. Or something. Eight years of mourning, enough already—whatever its Arabic equivalent might be.
Leaving those 100 pages behind was also a way for me to test the waters. Before I flew out, I had remembered to ask Adiba, the research assistant who’d met me when I first came to Jordan, about Lyndall’s mention of a friend who was writing a biography of King Hussein. Adiba’s face lit up. ‘That’s Avi Shlaim,’ she told me, the esteemed supervisor of her Oxford Ph.D. She had been one of his research assistants on the biography, and proofs of the book were expected in the new year.
Suddenly, belatedly, the origins of the idea of a Prince Hassan book done by interview became clearer. Avi Shlaim was the author of major works on the Middle East, the most recent being Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Born in Baghdad, Shlaim grew up in Israel and was Professor of International Relations at Oxford. A hugely respected scholar, Shlaim was able to persuade the United States Institute of Peace to fund three research assistants over five years to work on his biography. Instead, for Prince Hassan’s ‘autobiography’, the PA, and whoever else was party to the idea, found me.
Why? Because I was Australian and therefore an outsider?
Would I have fallen for the project’s exoticism had I known that a major biography of Prince Hassan’s older brother, King Hussein, had been underway for five or more years, and, indeed, was almost finished and soon would be published to, no doubt, great acclaim? Surely I would not.
Why didn’t I think to check? Why wasn’t I told about it? I, too, had lost face, but presumably nobody there but me knew that.
Would I have stayed home, and faced the music? The question only then occurred to me.
I was sleeping badly again, according to my diary. Life was pretty threadbare, if I was honest. Incredibly lonely. Lots of new experiences, new people, new ways of thinking. Brain fully stretched. But not a friend in sight. It dawned on me that I was in a kind of oasis on the edge of a war zone, in a state of transition, if I was lucky. I emailed this rather flimsy thought to the friend who was interested in psychoanalysis and psalms. How about this? I emailed hopefully. And as for me thou upholdest me in mine integrity, and settest me before thy face forever. Psalm 41:12.
Integrity was the point. I had no hope of an afterlife, and not the faintest hope that anyone but me would help get me through this time. But the language of the Psalms sometimes reached out across the abyss and held me.
I never mentioned what had happened to me. Putting it into words for strangers would only turn it into a shabby cliché, as the same friend who went through the wringer with her soulmate writer husband had put it. Instead I had fallen for an intriguing project I probably should have avoided. So, I read a lot, walked a lot, and, at night, projected myself into the corrupt manic-depressive world of The Sopranos, laughing and groaning.
When I next returned to Amman, at the end of January 2007, it was midwinter, dark and raining. On arrival, I was hoping to sleep but the office telephoned to say that a car was on its way, as Prince Hassan wished to see me at 6.30 p.m.
Fitted in between harried staff planning meetings for a conference in Islamabad and two Indian diplomats on a trade mission, I was ushered into Prince Hassan’s office, where the five chapters were waiting. He had read only two of them closely, hadn’t had time for the rest, but there was a yellow writing pad covered in minute notes in Arabic and English, which he then started taking me through. Clearly he doesn’t want to do a memoir. I don’t blame him. Perhaps later, in my dotage, if then, he might pen one for family and a few close friends.
Obviously, he hates the first-person pronoun, and any hint of emotional, let alone psychological, underpinnings, I wrote furiously in my diary later that night, which makes writing a memoir or an autobiography by interview rather a tall order. His use of the words fluff and visceral in response to my wanting more about his formidable mother’s determination to protect his ailing father, King Talal, made me cross. He didn’t want to speak at all of his parents; or of his extraordinary Christian humanist nanny, who gave him a copy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and taught him to know the natural world. Or of his schooldays at Harrow, where he, the only Muslim in his class, and another boy, a Sephardic Jew, were let off chapel provided they studied together, one the Qur’an, the other the Old Testament. This was the material that, for me, had comprised much of the appeal of the transcripts of the original taped interviews. And, as expected, he wanted no details of the succession change. Nor of his Beloved brother, King Hussein, nor of his Beloved nephew, King Abdullah. The mandatory ‘Beloved’ always with a capital B.
But when I calmed down, I was rather relieved. I knew what he meant. The international book world was full of lightweight ghosted memoirs ‘penned’ by prominent men promoting themselves. Prince Hassan was far more interested in policy and good governance. His 30-year role as Crown Prince of Jordan, and in the years since, had been one of nation-building, establishing institutions and promoting alliances, and, with his brother, attempting to broker peace deals with Israel. ‘A record of dynasty in service of the people’, as he described it. Certainly, it meant that Jordan punched above its weight. He warranted a better book than a ghosted autobiography.
Later, Prince Hassan rang me, presumably from the house, to reassure me that it was ‘my call’. And he especially wanted to read me two amusing quotes, about ‘moral clarity’ and ‘core values’, from a gift I’d given him: my distant husband’s most recent book, Dictionary of Weasel Words. The quotes were perfectly apposite and made him laugh loudly. I made myself laugh back.
The next fortnight, Sidi and Sitti were away, and I quelled my urge to walk away from it all as impossible unless it were properly resourced, with more staff, which seemed unlikely. Instead, I started to come up with a plan for a rather different book, based mainly on new interviews, about the plight of the region and its political struggles. The plan I noted in my journal was to insist on having Adiba help source documents that weren’t as dry as dust, and for me to do further interviews, transcribed by the PA, so that I could present the idea in the best form I could to London publishers. The London literary scene is no pushover—not even for the voice of reason from the Middle East.
One evening, I was just putting the finishing touches to a new synopsis and a progress report, including a firm I may not be the right person for this. We may well be too far apart in our views of what is needed and what is possible—and I have a professional distaste for books no one reads, when the door to the pavilion slid open and in he came. ‘I saw the light on and came straight over, and wanted to see how you are getting on.’ Charm—and perhaps an awareness that he’d left me in an impossible position, with only two chapters read, and the absurd proposition that all the personal stuff he’d given me should go, and be replaced by a book of record, or something equally dreary.
He read what was on the computer screen, groaned and said, ‘You are playing into my wife’s hands.’ I described what I thought might work—in his words, from his material, written by me. But I told him this was the hardest kind of book to make work, because I would have to get inside his head, in language that sounded like him and could be readily translated into Arabic. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. ‘Don’t go. You’re in charge.’ And he’d done it again—left me wanting to make a difficult book happen.
But this was to be a first-person account by a Hashemite Prince at the centre of public life during a long period of regional and civil wars, when institution building and modernisation were all that would save Jordan from threats from all sides.
How do you get inside a culture to which you have privileged but very partial access; and restricted, surely stage-managed, access to its inner workings? Until I arrived in Jordan, most of what I knew of present-day Islam was shaped by post 9/11 panic, and by Australian media coverage closely aligned with that from the UK and the US. The passing of the US Patriot Act after 9/11 and its renewal in 2006, which suspended and curtailed so many civil liberties, had been mirrored by Canada, India, Mexico, Britain and Australia. Islamophobia was rising rapidly, with hotspots in Gaza and Iran feeding the panic.
For the next eighteen months, I steeped myself in Jordanian history and culture as best I could. I ordered books online, and borrowed from Prince Hassan’s library the prolific and wonderful Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History and A History of God. Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, I found in anthologies. I ordered recent Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese novels, Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun and Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. Novels in translation about Jordan I could not find—but everyone I met took me to task for Forbidden Love by Norma Khouri, recently published in Australia, and now exposed as fraudulent. I read Edward Said again, plus Christopher Hitchens, Paul McGeough, Robert Fisk, biographies and political histories, travelogues of journeys through Syria and Turkey. I ordered DVDs and one day found at the market the 1996 Chronicle of a Disappearance, made by Elia Suleiman.
Carmen suggested Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian writer born forty years after Naguib Mahfouz, whose superb historical and political novels In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love move between London and Cairo. Both Soueif and Mahfouz took me inside Muslim households, across several generations, as only fiction can. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran had just been published and was in large piles in bookshops everywhere. I read, of course, William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain, envious of his scholarly surefootedness, but irritated by his confident, striding male Britishness. One evening in a book exchange at one of the hotels, and abandoned by a traveller, no doubt, I came across a battered copy of Albanian Ismail Kadare’s The Successor, a brilliant political and psychological thriller set in a small country where steadfast loyalty goes unrewarded and powerful clans come to bitter ends.
Iran, Russia, Albania, Kurdistan, Turkistan, Afghanistan were not far away. Syria, Israel and Saudi Arabia were just over the border. Not only did my mental map of the world start to shift in a way I could not yet nail, but my antennae did also—whatever that might mean. The PA and I went to some performances of what could only be described as rough political satire—Jordan was sometimes the butt of all jokes but so, too, were political figures, the prime minister, the chief of police. The Royal Family, certainly not. In a country where death and life sentences were common, where families were expected to petition for justice or arrange recompense, where surveillance was increasing due to rapid internet access, the monarchy seemed beloved, with its profile polished by numerous glossy magazines, and its protection ensured by endless heavily armed motorcades that brought the traffic to a standstill.
In my apartment, where I started to work more often, central heating blasting, I sometimes watched subtitled soapies from Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, with wicked husbands, pleading wives, scheming sons and runaway daughters. The Sopranos were mild in comparison. I was dependent for nightly news on Al Jazeera, CNN and BBC World News, and on what I could read online about the immediate and deteriorating situation in Iraq. Journalists from the BBC and CNN called on Prince Hassan often. He issued regular statements on Middle East policy and the ramifications of the war, and about the region’s need for a peace plan to come from Arab leaders, not from those who had brought it to its knees.
The US surge in Iraq ‘to win hearts and minds’ had the opposite effect. The Battle of Najaf killed 300 Sunnis at the end of January 2007. A truck bomb in the Baghdad market killed 135 and injured many hundreds more. Reprisals escalated, with car bombs planted where people congregated. There were images of desperate fathers carrying bloodied children through the streets. Planes went overhead very often and everyone would fall silent.
Prince Hassan was a visionary who believed democracy should be driven from within. This put him at odds with those who maintained that US foreign policy in the region should be guided by a mission to export freedom, and somehow bring about democratic change in the Arab world without understanding the social dynamic of the silenced majorities there or taking account of the shallowness of civil society. The weight of the last two centuries of Ottoman rule on Arab political life, followed by that of imperial Britain and France, when political parties were artificially established and manipulated, had left a residue of hopelessness. Well before 9/11, security services in the Arab world were often entirely funded by foreign powers. How, then, to progress freedom of speech and analysis after 9/11, when security became the primary consideration?
At that time, Jordan was a country with no national archive; no systematic, or even partial, collection of the oral history of Jordanians who fought in the first Arab–Israeli War, which produced the 1949 Armistice lines on the map of the Middle East that had to form the basis of any workable solution between Israel and the Palestinians. The Israeli government’s egregious breaches of mutual agreements with the Palestinians seemed timed for whenever the Palestinians appeared to be on the verge of a historical national consensus. The settlements continued to expand in the occupied West Bank, and in 2007 provocative plans for new Jewish settlements funded by American evangelicals in East Jerusalem had just been published.
In the aftermath of Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, civil war sent a new wave of Palestinian refugees, 240,000 displaced from Gaza and Bethlehem, into Jordan’s six UNRWA ‘emergency’ camps. Amman became the centre of resistance: ‘The road to Jerusalem is through Amman’ became the slogan, and the young King Hussein defended the Palestinians even as the monarchy came under direct threat and ‘the guns turned inward’. Yasser Arafat, his headquarters in central Amman, in 1970 coined the anti-Hashemite slogan ‘Amman, the Hanoi of the Arabs’.
I was being given a Jordanian glimpse of events I still recalled, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijackings in early September 1970 of TWA, Swiss Air and BOAC passenger planes. After being refused landing and refuelling, they were eventually forced to land on Dawson’s Field, a remote desert airstrip left behind by the British, near Zarqa in Jordan. The world’s tabloid press congregated at Amman’s Hotel InterContinental to cover the drama over the next three weeks, as the PFLP demanded release of three Palestinian dissidents held in Swiss jails, in exchange for the 382 passengers held hostage. It was a huge public relations victory for Arafat and the PLO, ending with the release of the passengers and the blowing up of the aircraft.
It was sensationalist, one-sided reporting in the absence of any experienced war correspondents, Sidi Hassan said, still outraged that Time Magazine made Yasser Arafat a cover story. At the time, Australian war correspondents were mainly covering the escalation of the war in Vietnam, following President Nixon’s orders to invade Cambodia. I would only have read versions in Australian newspapers via AAP. But the fierce courage of Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled I still remember.
For those Palestinians who wanted to maintain Jordanian stability and sovereignty, this was Aylul al Abyad, White September. But it was Black September, Aylul al Aswad, for those who wanted the Hashemite monarchy overthrown. When unarmed ceremonial Palace guards were shot, and, night after night, the Palace grounds and the Prince’s house were strafed with machine-gun fire, the cohesion and loyalty of the Jordanian army were remarkable, Prince Hassan said; especially as 40 per cent of the population at this time were Palestinian. By the time I was there, Palestinians were represented in parliament, some having made their fortunes in Jordan, but the majority were still in refugee camps, which had the look of decrepit permanent suburbs.
Soon after my conversation with the Prince about a different, more political, book, the PA and I were at a party in a beautiful bohemian wreck of a house overhanging a cliff above the suq, near the First Circle, the oldest part of 20th-century Amman. I asked a group of young Jordanians if they knew which side their fathers and grandfathers had fought on in September 1970, when Arafat’s headquarters were nearby. When terrified civilians barricaded themselves in their houses and cellars. When people defected, and shots were fired into houses, and street executions were common. None of them knew, or maybe they were not prepared to tell me. One woman remembered, as a child, her aunt rushing her into a cellar, and waiting in the dark for something terrible to happen, but it was never spoken about, she said.
A young photographer working with BBC TV cameramen in Iraq was at the party. He was just in from Baghdad, with horror stories about Sunni professionals being kidnapped for ransom, about the killings, the maimings, the vanishings, the corruption at the checkpoints, at petrol pumps, at the compulsory AIDs testing at the border. For every kind of service, he said, rich Iraqis were paying with US dollars to get out of the country. After a couple of hours of this, the group started talking about their pets, as if to keep a kind of toehold on normality—or so it seemed to me. I invented a story about my dog, Morry, chasing ducks and swimming in a lake somewhere in the Australian countryside, which made me feel better.
Last night planes came over without lights on, I wrote to Carmen. We were told they were landing at the King Hussein Airport outside Mafraq in order to go into Iraq. Whose planes? The rumours were wild like the weather. The Soviets. The Israelis. The Syrians. Impossible to find out anything credible except that the US has been doing deals all over the Middle East.
Prince Hassan often spoke about East–West perspectives, and the distortions caused by poor translations of Arab sources into English. I decided to go to London to consult agents about suitable publishers there and in Beirut, and so I could have a few days in the British Library, this time knowing better what I needed to read to give myself background. Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation had just been published. I also needed to read Avi Shlaim’s War and Peace in the Middle East, and much else.
I met my stepdaughter Ellie for a picnic lunch, and we walked among the daffodils in Holland Park. Strong and beautiful, she was alight with her London life of working in a television company. She asked me if I would ever reconcile with her father. I am reconciled, I told her firmly, but I will never live with him again. I need to live on my own. And so does he. I then bought too many books in Daunt’s. Back in Carmen’s attic, I dreamed of pulling ivy off a tall brick wall, strand by strand, leaving little sucking roots between the bricks.
It was nearly midnight on a Friday when I flew back to Amman. No waiting driver, no one answering their mobiles. My luggage weighed down with a heavy box of peanut butter, cosmetics and toys I had brought in from London for someone in the compound. The men at the airport were kind when they realised I was stranded. The lights were being turned off and the steel shutters closing, but I was invited into the baggage-handling section, which they told me stayed open all night. Welcome, they said and gave me mint tea and bottled water. A man called Khalid came out from behind the luggage counter and told me he studied English literature at the university in Aleppo, and we spoke joyfully of Middlemarch and Shakespeare and The Odyssey while the hours ticked by.
The night operator of the Palace switchboard was new and had not heard of me. Khalid told him to wake his manager. At 4 a.m. a soldier came with a car.
I lay in bed, listening to the azans from the mosque downtown and the planes overhead, wondering what would happen if I died there. Would I be sent away, or be buried in the little Christian cemetery below the compound the PA showed me? Whatever would be easiest for our kids, she and I joked at the time.
The next few weeks went rather well. Morning interviews were scheduled, for first thing, or immediately after a session in the office. I set up the recorder outside if the weather was good, in the little walled courtyard off the pavilion. Ousters sometimes followed Prince Hassan, and poured coffee into small blue and white cups, or I made espresso. I had a list of questions, some of which were redundant or that he swerved away from—often in ways that took surprising turns. Sometimes, the Prince walked off and returned with a pile of books and folders: articles, speeches, Arabic poetry, philosophy, examples of western misreadings or gross assumptions. The West was so one-eyed about the Arab world. I felt on the cusp of a different way of seeing. I listened, he read to me, I eventually interrupted and on we went. We taped for sometimes as long as two hours. The PA transcribed the tapes very late at night.
I discovered I was good at interviewing, which I think of as a form of intense listening. His voice in English was unaccented but reverberant and emphatic. His images, I reminded myself, were those of an Arab potentate, but one who was determined to continue doing meaningful work on behalf of a fractured region and an ever-growing population of displaced people. A tale of thwarted ambition for an imploding state, perhaps. Anecdotes were needed to set the scene, I reminded him, and to shine some light on what readers in the West could only imagine.
We often discussed titles. Goodwill, he came up with; Hope Against Hope, I preferred. Whatever; it was a working title only, for a proposal I would need to send to the handful of British publishers seriously interested in the Middle East. I would be seeking expressions of interest for the book when in London again in August.
Now I was working to a template of topics, commencing with what being a Hashemite meant, and the crucial injunction ‘to give the message of peace and to help the poor’. This had defined Prince Hassan’s politics, and informed his work as Crown Prince of a small nation determined, for the public good, on both reconstruction and development after the decades of war. His exposure as Crown Prince to the mighty figures on the international policy-making scene made him intensely aware of the difficulties of reconciling provincial, regional and national realities with, often unspoken, international agendas. ‘Here were the cream and the élite of the experienced and clever architects of American and European economies, planning for the future of our region with a gleam in their eye not unrelated to the traditions of the great game. In other words, they told us what we wanted to hear, while planning for us as they wished.’
After the declaration of the ‘War on Terror’, so much of the hard work done to present an accurate image of Islam and of Muslims had run into the sand, Prince Hassan said. This was the starting point for the book. The focus now was on rebuilding the economy in Iraq by outsourcing to private contractors, leaving self-interested market forces welded to the controls. The failure of the US Senate to pass a bill that would have required troops to be out of Iraq by the next April meant the deterioration of regional security. By designating the region part of the axis of evil, a grotesquely lucrative buyers’ market for weapons had been created.
If the goal of the international community invested in the War on Terror was to strengthen and maintain the integrity of the state system, however disparate, the emphasis had to change to consolidating the peace, Prince Hassan believed. ‘At the very least with a cohesion fund to stabilise economies and reduce social disparities, such as the EU had provided for its least prosperous states—instead of leaving market forces at the controls.’ But the EU’s recent go-slow on admitting Turkey, bound to be seen as anti-Muslim, was extremely short-sighted, he said.
Several times, I went to hear him speak in Arabic. Once, to a large hall of young people, from notes he didn’t look at, in a voice that rose and fell and commanded attention. The audience sat up straight and listened intently. Hassan took questions and often made the students laugh. I tried to imagine what the joke might be. Maybe it was the one he told me for The Book about an old man who was dismissed by snobs because they misunderstood the big meaning of what he said. Or the one about waking students up so they would be led to an understanding of the need for a Citizen’s Charter.
What had happened overnight often shaped the interviews. The news from Iraq was ever more terrible. Each day there were more suicide bombings. A car bomb outside the Shahbandar coffee house, in Baghdad’s book district, near the Tigris river, killed twenty-eight, including the owner’s four sons and his grandson. The coffee house had been a meeting place for generations of intellectuals and writers. Al Jazeera showed upturned tables and books burning in the gutters, the wailing women of that dreadfully broken family; the rage that has no end.
I didn’t mention that I had seen the Shahbandar coffee house long ago, and later wondered why I didn’t. My other life felt so safe and far away. But I was drawn to book districts wherever I happened to be; curious about what was being read, what was in translation, hoping to spot a dog-eared Australian title left by a traveller. I sometimes found a Tim Winton, but more often the fantasia Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.
The only questions I was ever asked by anyone were the ones I was told not to answer. What is your work? Why are you here?
Meanwhile, Prince Hassan went to London but had arranged for me to meet the head of the Arab Thought Forum, the impressive Dr Humam Ghassib. He turned out to be a physicist and a man of letters; a lover of the Arabic language, its idioms and aphorisms. He had just completed an enormous dictionary of Arabic phrases in use in public life. His book The Scarlet Notebooks: Reflections of a Passerby, which evoked the richness of the Arabic language, and was first published in 1975 when he was in his early twenties, had just been reissued. A polymath, Dr Ghassib was a believer in editing as an art form, and in book design and typography as intrinsic to conveying meaning. He told me how few books were acquired for translation into Arabic, and how few in Arabic were acquired for translation into European languages. Only ten thousand books had been translated into Arabic in the past thousand years, he told me—the equivalent number of books translated into Spanish in one year.
My notes of our meeting were fulsome and indiscreet. Dr Ghassib shared my bookish enthusiasms—and my admiration for Sidi Hassan. The Prince was the president and founder of this think-tank, which ‘encourages pan-Arab thinking and development in a region where sovereign borders have been melted down by civil war’. But also, crucially, Dr Ghassib said, ‘Prince Hassan is a man of letters’ who ‘reigns supreme in translating the spirit of the language’ and ‘strategic thought’—a man ‘who joins the dots’.
Dr Ghassib also told me that the book world in Jordan was full of frustrations: bad books, overhyped and poorly produced; good books getting little attention in a reviewing and media culture that favoured the crass. Lebanon is better, he said, and Egypt is the best. He said that Naguib Mahfouz was only available in Jordan after he won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, and then only volume one of The Cairo Trilogy, in English, and in small quantities, catering for a wealthy élite. Dr Ghassib and I got on like a house on fire, and I signed for him a copy of my book about my work in Australian publishing and literature, Other People’s Words.
We were determined to arrange for Prince Hassan’s book to be available in an Arabic paperback edition soon after its publication in English. The distinguished scholar M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, who recently had published with Oxford University Press a much admired translation of the Holy Qur’an, was Sidi Hassan’s preferred translator. Dr Ghassib said the family would approach him to translate Prince Hassan’s book and that he would surely agree.
I returned to the prefab feeling much invigorated, but the following week’s sessions with Sidi had to be postponed. The organisers of the next World Council of Churches conference, in Amman on Israel and Palestine, wanted Prince Hassan’s involvement. But he told me that, after more than fifty years, they were still politicising the issues, rather than promoting a holy space for the three monotheistic religions. Christians were fleeing Jerusalem and the West Bank and Lebanon, yet the World Council of Churches was ‘still looking to advise the region, instead of rising above politics and promoting holy spaces’. He spoke scathingly about ‘the endless run of initiatives, conferences, events that lead to nothing’. Meanwhile, the constant dislocation of people and their desperate poverty begot violence.
Prince Hassan needed to be actively involved in what was going on in the present. His wife, who clearly adored him, didn’t hesitate to berate him about some of his beloved initiatives ‘soaking up time and money’. He had sons and daughters who were increasingly being sought for public roles in Jordan’s institutions when he was not. His wife said it was because he was not tactful and ‘says what he thinks’. Others told me it was because his Arabic was very much better than the King’s—who was half English anyway.
So, when an urgent request arrived that the Prince chair an advisory group on Iraq’s electoral procedures for the next round, he was fired up, and the PA started running around with lists headed ‘top level contacts’ and with confidential letters. The interviewing session ended, and I knew that would also be it for the rest of the week and probably the one after. But there was mention of a young intern from Boston coming for the summer, who might be able to help with the transcribing. I was trying to get hold of some of the Prince’s better speeches as a short cut to this stop-and-start interviewing—but when a CD arrived on my desk with copies of the speeches I’d selected, all were minute PDFs, unable to be unlocked, let alone edited.
I blew my top at my friend, the poor PA, who was copping it from all directions, and something Dr Ghassib had said about the Majlis being inhuman in chewing people up, expecting miracles, made me wish I hadn’t got angry. But, once again, the project felt impossible. Then, when Prince Hassan started arranging for me to speak to other people about his work, I relaxed about the confidentiality clause. I made another note to remind the office that a revised contract needed to be drawn up.
A few days later, an invitation arrived from Mamdouh and Basima Basharek, delightful friends of Sidi Hassan. The PA and I were invited to lunch at the Bashareks’ ‘winter compound’, and advised to bring swimming clothes, so we could dip in a natural pool fed by a thermal spring. The Basharek family owned one of the valleys near the Syrian border, overlooking Lake Tiberias, where they grew bananas and guavas. A car was arranged, and we were driven north-west for several hours to where Mamdouh Basharek, a handsome old man with courtly manners, was waiting by the roadside, high in the mountains.
He wanted first to show us the Golan Heights from No Man’s Land. Sidi Hassan had, no doubt, arranged for us to have a viewing. This involved much ringing ahead by soldiers on mobile phones, and checking for explosives under the car and in the boot, as we were escorted through several checkpoints until we could get out and walk towards the site of Glubb Pasha’s headquarters, and the old railway line the Ottoman Turks built in 1906, which zigzags through the valley and into the mountains. Mamdouh pointed to a bridge that was one of fourteen that T.E. Lawrence blew up; and the railway station where the small steam train used to stop. We were right on the border of Syria, with young Israelis in watchtowers guarding the Golan, which was seized in the Six Day War in 1967; defended during the Yom Kippur War of 1973; and, still, despite various attempts at normalisation, a site of conflict.
That winter day in February 2007, it was a peaceful scene. There was a smell of sulfur from the hot springs, fields dotted with red poppies, and, across the Yarmouk River, hundreds of wild cows were grazing happily in the sunshine. Mamdouh Basharek told us how a bunch of Arab cows escaped across the river in 1967, when the shooting started, and occupied a hillside below the Israeli electrified fence. The Israelis eventually gave permission for the Jordanian farmers to try to get them back and the fence was temporarily deactivated. But no one could catch the wild cows. And there they’d been ever since, breeding up and grazing happily, watched over in the Galilee by young Israeli soldiers in their watchtowers, and young members of the Syrian Arab Army manning the barricades on the other side of the Golan Heights. What their fate has been since, I don’t know. But Prince Hassan told me stories of farmers who lived on either side of the Jordan River talking to each other and sometimes working things out, despite politics and history. It might be the same in the rich Galilee.
We returned through the checkpoints, and were driven up to a large house in a rainforest of tree ferns and eucalypts surrounding a natural pool fed by one of the many hot springs. Twenty guests were assembled and we were introduced ‘as Sidi Hassan’s people’ to the Georgian ambassador—a young woman who last year, we were told, obtained 100 million dollars’ worth of Arab investment in Georgian industry—and to her husband, who headed up George Soros’s social investment network. There was also a group of attractive Italians, a documentary filmmaker from Dubai, the Bashareks’ Russian farm manager, a couple of artists and a ceramicist, all seated around a splendid long outdoor table. A much more cosmopolitan version of Montsalvat at Eltham, outside Melbourne, I thought, disloyally. Australia felt provincial and a very long way off.
Again, there were the questions about why I was in Jordan and what I was working on, skilfully fielded by the Bashareks, who loved Sidi Hassan and seemed to sense what I was up against. The Prince’s friends always spoke highly of him, and often murmured to me that, of course, he should have been made king, and what a fine king he would have been. The PA knew how to handle this kind of thing, having been there for many years. I managed to change the subject to that of Georgian capitalism, which was surely on the move.
The Bashareks invited me next to visit them in East Amman, where they had a treasured reproduction of an image of Mamdouh’s warrior grandfather, Shibli Ibrahim Bisharat, from Salt in what was then Palestine, which George Lambert drew on the battlefield near here in 1918. They had presented the original to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra but no one had been in touch or told them if it was on display. I promised to try to find out.
They gave me a copy of Jordan: The Land and the Table by Cecil Hourani, and I started to make more sense of the countryside, and the utterly arbitrary Sykes–Picot borders, drawn with a ruler on a map of the Middle East for the League of Nations at the end of World War I. The borders, which suited the British, the French and the Zionists, were then secured with the local Bedouin tribes, plus Circassian and Christian troops led by Sharif Hussein of Mecca, Prince Hassan’s redoubtable grandfather.
There was no such thing as ‘Jordanian food’, wrote Cecil Hourani, since Jordan was a new land on ancient foundations, with a cultural mix of Bedouin, Palestinian, Armenian, Lebanese, Assyrian, Chechan and Circassian, each with their own culinary specialities based on locally grown and wild ingredients. The massive influxes of Palestinian refugees since 1948 and Iraqis since 2003 have, according to Hourani, ‘disturbed the previous relationship of man and the soil: the growth of the cities took place at the expense of the village, water resources became scarcer, and the land was no longer able to sustain the population. In the space of fifty years Jordan went from self-sufficiency to almost total dependency on the outside world.’†
Jordan and Australia have much more in common than might at first appear. Both are rather new sovereign nations in ancient lands. Both have cruelly displaced their indigenous populations from their traditional lands. Both pride themselves on their pluralism and struggle to live up to its demands. Both have deeply problematic relations with neighbouring countries. Both have breathtakingly beautiful desert landscapes. Both have massive environmental problems: desperate water shortages, and arable land inadequate to support large rural populations or to develop agribusinesses for export. Both are spasmodically attempting to replace old paternalism and colonialism with new institutions. Both have colonial pasts that have left a deep residue of British symbolism and snobbery.
My husband, instead of telephoning, emailed me little writing tasks. Tell me about Petra was one, I recall. Also, about the Galilee. And I did. I thought he’d like to hear about the wild black-andwhite Jordanian cows crossing the border, but maybe he didn’t get the email. The message Hope your excursion was good was waiting in my inbox.
Emails did go astray; also files I was working on. Some days, whole chapters of the draft of the book disappeared, only to be found in another file when the office sent over a clever young female tech head and equilibrium was restored.
One Friday in late spring, the PA suggested we drive out along the old road to Jerusalem, which winds through the Jordan Valley, to see the small regional town of Al-Salt. First built in the crook of three hills by the Macedonian army for Alexander the Great, Al-Salt had been a bishopric during Byzantine times, and the administrative centre of the province for the Ottoman Empire. The town eventually became the capital of Transjordan, under the auspices of the British Mandate for Palestine, and Sheik Abdullah bin Hussein’s headquarters from 1921, until he moved the capital and his extensive family to Amman in 1946.
The suq was crowded when we arrived, stalls overflowing with the glorious produce of the deep red soil of the Jordan Valley. We bought baby aubergines, bunches of small white onions, cucumbers, tomatoes and fresh coriander, and stowed them in the shade near the car. We visited a small Byzantine church that was unlocked for us by a grumpy verger—both the PA and I were wearing jeans, which almost certainly was offensive. Most of the women and girls were covered, and I was conscious of flouting the modest-dress rules that prevailed in all small towns. Still, we had long scarves, which we wound over our heads and arms.
The yellow sandstone and timber houses of 19th-century merchants were arrayed along the heights of the town, many with balconies and arched windows under domed roofs, and luxuriant gardens tumbling over high walls and steep stone steps. By early afternoon, the town was putting up heavy shutters for siesta, but the PA knew where to buy the best picnic food, and we sat on the steps in the shade, eating shish kebab and tomatoes, and crunching small cucumbers. Later, we bought bags of pastries from a special bakery she knew, for the compound’s housekeeper and head gardener. The baker himself followed us out to the car to say farewell.
The PA, having long worked for Sidi Hassan, was hailed everywhere, her easy manner honed in the Victorian country town where she had worked with a local politician for some years. I often felt tongue-tied and wooden in comparison. The Bedouin guards at the Palace knew her well and respected her, some of the older men confiding in her about their families and their hopes for their sons. This was a country where preferment, tafdil, and the petitioning of the powerful were deeply embedded in the culture. It predated Islam, Sidi Hassan had explained, telling me stories of how, when he was a little boy at a local school, he’d find his bag stuffed with requests for his parents. The PA walked the line adroitly, it seemed to me, but there was no doubt that her Arab friends hoped she would find a way to assist them or their families.
When she was invited to a large Bedouin family wedding, she managed to get me invited too. The bridegroom, who the PA introduced me to, was a handsome, elegantly dressed man. She told me the family was mentioned in the book of the Hashemite armies, as ferocious tribesmen who acquitted themselves with honour during the Arab Wars. We will probably be the only outsiders, she said, and treated well because of the Palace connection.
Traditional Bedouin weddings take place over three days. The groom’s family hosts the first celebration; on the second day, the motorcade collects the bride and brings her to the groom’s house; and the family of the bride hosts the third day, to express their sadness at losing her.
The first event was held at Shuna, near where the Dead Sea joins the Jordan River, close to the sacred site of the first baptism. The Alawis were a huge tribe, wealthy, and important in the area. In our best clothes, we drove through blasts of rain in the dark, missing the turn and ending up, after going through a Jordanian checkpoint, on an empty, unlit road heading towards the Jordan River and the lights of Israel. We found a place to turn around, and eventually the right road appeared, lined with cars and vans. We parked, changed into our party shoes, and followed the loud music inside.
‘Honoured guests from the Palace’, we were ushered into the women’s tent attached to the house, where we were welcomed—kissing left, right, left—by the sisters and mother of the groom, and led to where at least a hundred women of all ages, shapes and sizes were seated on plastic chairs arranged around a dance floor. The PA and I were shown to seats that had a good vantage point, and introduced to more sisters, cousins and aunts on each side of us. They spoke little English, and the PA had about twenty words of Arabic, and I not even that, but we all laughed, clapped and enthused as the dancing began.
The younger women were dressed raunchily, in black leotards with belts, long white boots, lots of cleavage, many exposed midriffs—unselfconsciously erotic in the presence of the smiling, clapping older women, some with indigo tattoos on their faces and hands. Many of them had elaborate hairdos and makeup; others wore head scarfs but also trousers and diaphanous sequined blouses. Very young boys were allowed in the women’s tent, sitting on seats watching, or helping pass the Pepsi and cakes. Little girls in lace party dresses and bows were led forward by older girls and clapped into the dance, and babies were kissed and held high, and passed around the dancers. Soon, the women reached out for us and we joined the scented, undulating throng of women and children. I thought of the frowns and tuts of disapproval such attire would have produced at rural weddings back home. Here, it felt like a celebration of female sexuality and of children yet unborn. Next door, from the men’s tent, there was the sound of fireworks, and then of guns being fired up into the sky. Of course, always with live ammunition, the women told us, laughing. The older boys were in the tent next door, collecting the empty cartridges and dancing with the men.
On the third night, we went to one of the large hotels in Amman, where the family and friends of the bride had gathered to pay their respects formally to the newly married couple in white. We saw the bride for the first time: a small, dark-haired beauty sitting beside the handsome groom in a decorated alcove. They both looked radiant, and were snapped constantly by a professional photographer, and by everyone else on their phones.
At a concert and dinner at the Swedish embassy, I met a senior lecturer from Yarmouk University, who taught ‘clever rural girls’, who made up 90 per cent of his students in Maths, English and Engineering sciences. ‘The boys are useless,’ he said. ‘Preening sex objects looking for clever wives.’ He invited me to visit and speak to his students. Then I went to a lecture at the Australian embassy by Sydney University Professor Stephen Baker, who had been heading up the Pella excavation for the past twenty years, which had recently uncovered a huge temple structure dating from 1800+BC. I was seated next to the director of the Department of Antiquities in Amman, who told me about the Museum With No Frontiers, a virtual museum of Islamic art, that was just being completed with EU funds, where much of this work would be featured. Later, he sent me the link to the website and invited me to visit the department.
Before I left for Italy, Sidi Hassan arranged for me to meet Senator Ina’am Al-Mufti, the first Jordanian woman to hold a governmental position. She had established the Ministry of Social Development, and much else, and was a member, with him, of the Arab Thought Forum.
The senator was impressive and gracious. She asked me, of course, about Norma Khouri’s fraudulent book, Forbidden Love, and I found myself trying to explain how Australian agents and publishers apparently failed to verify Khouri’s fabricated story of a Jordanian woman whose father murdered her in an honour killing after she had a chaste love affair with a young Christian man.
How could this have happened? the senator asked. Did they not check that she was telling the truth? I didn’t know for sure what had gone wrong, but I suspected it was due to the desire to discover a topical bestseller about wicked Islam as practised in a far-off little-known country. The book had sold 250,000 copies in Australia before the Sydney Morning Herald’s Malcolm Knox exposed the hoax. The author, an American citizen resident in Australia, had left Jordan as a three year old. The Jordanian women’s groups I met during my next visit were nothing remotely like the oppressed Arab women Khouri invented, and were outraged by her fabrications and puzzled that Australian publishers could be so naive—or slipshod.
One Friday, an invitation arrived for me to visit Mamdouh Bisharat at the Duke’s Diwan in King Faisal Street in Downtown, next to the old Arab Bank. This Duke’s Diwan is a rare 1920s stone building, which the new Transjordan government leased in the 1940s as the Central Post Office, after which it became the Haifa Hotel, and was saved from demolition by Mamdouh Bisharat and preserved in its original condition. The steep stairs of yellow ceramic went up from the street to five reception rooms with high ceilings and splendid arched windows, and doors opening off a central salon. There were chequered black-and-green tiled floors, blue peeling paint, and walls covered in photographs of Old Amman before the freeways and circles started cutting it up into districts. The Duke’s Diwan was now a writers’ centre, a performance space; a place where anyone could come and sit on the balcony above the street, borrow books from the library and watch the world go by.
Mamdouh Bisharat had assembled a small discussion group, perhaps for me, before lunch at his house. Coffee and pastries were brought up in a basket on a pulley from the café below. Mamdouh was a visionary about what Amman could become but despairing, like Sidi Hassan, about what the developers were hell-bent on doing. I met Dr Fawzi Ziadine, a scholar who spent many years in charge of archaeological sites in Jordan, including the Citadel, and the Byzantine excavations at Madaba, the Jerash site, which, he told me, had to be saved from severance by the highway in the 1970s. He spoke of Johann Burckhardt and the discovery of Petra in the early nineteenth century, and of Washington Irving and his Tales of the Alhambra, as if he were there with them. One of those conversations that makes you glad to be alive, I wrote in my diary later.
We were then driven in Mamdouh’s truck to East Amman, and his marvellous, airy old house high on a hill looking down to the Roman Amphitheatre, surrounded by what looked to me like Roman rubble in a quarter made derelict after the arrival of the PLF militia and the refugees in the late 1960s. Basima welcomed us to a house full of books and paintings, lithographs and Moroccan watercolours. The copy of George Lambert’s 1918 portrait, painted in Salt, of Mamdouh’s grandfather, Shibli Ibrahim Bisharat, was hanging in the dining room. I promised again to see the original in Canberra when I returned to Australia.
We sat at a huge table, and were served a splendid lunch of green soup, ftoul (a chicken dish with chickpeas, lentils and wild greens), a shredded cucumber and onion salad, fruit and coffee. Mamdouh held court, delighting in ideas, in art, in sharing his books and telling stories. He gave me the phone numbers of several of his friends in Rome, insisting I ring them in the next few weeks when I again would be based in Italy, drawing the threads of the book together for a proposal to take to London publishers.
The second book I had suggested to Prince Hassan sounds so obvious now: a short, tightly focused account, in his words, of the plight of the Middle East since 9/11 and the grotesque retaliation of the Iraq War, informed by his work as the Crown Prince, and assembled from some existing materials, new taped interviews and my own, now extensive, notes. There was nothing else like it on publishers’ lists that I could see.
I had assumed he would take control of the rough draft, and shape the final text himself, which the original contract seemed to assume. But, of course, he will not, I wrote in my diary. He was a great communicator from notes, a terrible pontificator when depressed, a man who deserved his reputation as the thinker, visionary, voice of reason in the region—and one of the few Muslim leaders free enough to throw some light on this seemingly intractable set of horrors and conflicts the Middle East was again suffering. As the region’s thinker about these issues, he was second to none. Or so it seemed to me, and certainly to everyone I was starting to meet in Jordan. I returned to Cortona full of hope about the project.
† Cecil Hourani, Jordan: The Land and the Table, Elliott & Thompson, London, 2006, p. 12.