A wild wind blew on Friday, the first day of the weekend here, but the sky was clear with horse tail clouds whisking across it, so J, the boys and I headed to the King Hussein park for a scamper. J and I agreed the wind was making us feel a bit mad as we rolled around the back of a yellow cab with the boys shrieking and clambering at the open windows.
The park sits below the vast King Hossein mosque where the muezzin was singing his heart out, calling the people of this city to Friday prayers. The mosque is pale brown with darker brown minarets and exquisitely, and simply beautiful. It was built in honour of Hossein the current King's father, after he became king at a young age when his Grandfather, King Abdullah was shot beside him as they stood in the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
As the Lozenge kicked a ball around with some older Jordanian boys I allowed myself some mental escape as I listened to the call. There are about 5 per cent Christians in this country, and the rest Muslim. There is a mixture of covered female heads to uncovered and in West Amman, where we live, you can more or less wear what you like within reason. It's extraordinary that in this country, sandwiched between so many trouble spots, life seems to carry on relatively peacefully. At the beginning of the Arab Spring Jordanian police were handing out Diet Cokes and oranges at demonstrations whilst in other countries young people on the streets were on the receiving end of tear gas and brazen batons. Since then, the government in Jordan has changed almost every six months to keep the electorate quiet. The call to prayer is meditative when sung well, so I was lost for a good few minutes until we were interrupted by a Jordanian boy of about 10, in a yellow tracksuit top with train tracks on his teeth.
'Are you Christian?,' he asked. Although my feelings for organised religion these days vacillate, it would be the nearest guess, and stauncher Muslims don't really understand if you say you have no religion, so we said: 'Yes, we're Christian (Masihi).'
'That's okay,' he replied. 'Not Jew then?' The tone was menacing, but we assured him we weren't Jewish. 'The dirtiest country on earth,' he said, skating off on his board.
You can't spend time in this country without feeling the deep resentment and sadness of the Palestinian people, who for over a century have been pushed and squeezed and crowbar-ed out of their own towns and villages by Israeli Government policy and settlements. The majority of Jordan's population is Palestinian, but although it's a peaceful place where they can live freely and trade, nothing takes away from the fact they've had their homeland stolen. And the 10 year olds know this well, too. They're imbued with the cause, just like the teenage 'killing machine' teenagers who are currently being trained by the Syrian opposition forces to fight the Government and vice versa. Young people, particularly poorer ones, in this region do well if they escape the language of hate.
I'm reading a book called, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a vanishing landscape, by Raja Shehadeh at the moment. He clarifies in thoughtful and beautiful prose, some of the mess that's been made of his country as he walks the central highland hills of Palestine. It's heartbreaking to read, yet you don't feel pity as much as incredulity that it's been allowed to happen. And because he's a lawyer and writer he manages to lay everything out clearly enough for newcomers to the region such as myself to understand.
Before we left the UK, I bought a film poster for the boys' room. It's purple and orange with 'Arabian Adventure' scrawled across it. It's from a fantasy adventure film made at Pinewood in 1979 starring Christopher Lee. I haven't seen it, but it looks like Aladdin meets Star Wars with an evil Caliph and all the rest. I was giggling with a Jordanian girl who works in the film industry here, about quite how recently we were buying into this stereotypical Arab misrepresentation. She told me she went to a British girls' boarding school and apparently when she arrived one girl asked her if she lived in a tent.
The Lozenge has been getting really into J's old Tin Tin books recently, and one of the two editions we have here is The Land of Black Gold, the 1930's version of which is set in the British Mandate to Palestine and focuses on the fighting between the British, Jews and Arabs. With word play including a town called: 'Bir Kegg' and someone called 'Hasch-a-Baibibi' I'm relieved we're actually reading about it in this part of the world so we can show the Lozenge and Rashimi the reality behind the myth, despite the same rancours living on in our time. He took it to his nursery school in the monkey back pack the other day. I wonder what his teachers thought.
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