196 Books: Jordan

 This Arab Life by Amal Ghandour

We're on Jordan:

 Summary:

This Arab Life is an intimate and honest exploration of a rising Arab generation’s descent into silence. Personal and panoramic, granular and sweeping, the book offers a raw account of the unremitting mire that anticipates the region’s present-day chaos.

In an unusual twist, the author, a daughter of the Levant who claims Jordan and Lebanon as her homes, locates her own privileged class in this painful history and holds a mirror to herself and her fellow travelers. In doing so, she threads a generational tale with grit, color, and nuance.

This Arab Life begins in Amman in the Summer of 1973 and concludes in Beirut in December 2021. But the narrative encompass a world by turns distant and faded, near and vital.

 

 

More and more of these books I'm reading are just history repeating itself. Can we freaking learn something at some point? And MUST they always equate it with religion? Lucky for my two readers, I'm freaking tired of bitching about the same shit. Here's the gist: country becomes progressive and the younguns look forward to the future. Religion freaks out and takes over. Bye bye rights. Let's look at the (jaded) highlights.

 

"At a lecture, Cairo university student Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood who passed away in 1949: 'What is acceptable art in Islam?' Hassan al-Banna: 'Acceptable art is acceptable; and forbidden art is forbidden.'" Classic. We decide what's okay, but we're not giving you any parameters and the goalposts mysteriously keep moving. What's forbidden is what they don't like at that particular moment. 

 

"When we click away at emojis, it is not the appalling mutilations that we bemoan, but the ubiquitous ruptures in society, politics, and culture that have made such mauling exceptional." Another school shooting? Sad. Trans healthcare being taken away? Bummer. Women being "incentivized" to have more babies? Ick. Gut the Department of Education? Put reality stars and conspiracy theorists in charge of everything? Ship your citizens off to El Salvador? Break out the party crackers. We can't even process all this shit anymore. 

 

"For Islamists, it was really a straightforward affair. They just massaged lore into doctrine. None of it was truly alien or foreign, much of it was helpfully accompanied by social services for the neglected and forgotten, and all of it was grimly cast as the immutable word and will of God, the better to induce the hush of the graveyard. Slowly (bit by bit, not all of a sudden, not out of the blue, not overnight), veiling, once a gesture of female modesty, turns into a duty, and a handshake between a man and a woman, long an unfussy business, becomes a sin." Here's the one part that differs from today, and I find it very interesting.  This side of religion helped out the poor, built them up until they had everyone under their thumb. Somehow the 'Christians' of today have made helping the poor into a bad thing, and they still managed to get them under their thumb. 

 

Ghandour laid out 4 revelations about a regime change:

1. Be Careful What You Wish For

2. Know Your Regime

3. The Emperor Has No Clothes, and Neither Do We

4. Are These Rebels Revolutionaries or Refolutionaries?

The overall of the whole thing is: we're fucked. We're all fucked.  

 I guess I found more to bitch about. But, I believe there's hope in the next generation...if they can make it through this one. As Ghandour semi-hopefully said, "And theirs, of course is the burden of enticing the future in a direction that may yet redeem this region. And how wonderful the opportunity, because they start with practically everything in pieces."