Week 1 in Jordan – Learning the Ropes of an Ancient City
- I am including all the photos for this post on this Google folder because this site doesn’t have the bandwidth to accommodate both my yapping and lots of pictures! Click the link for Jordan flicks!
As I bit into the flaky, crisp layers of golden phyllo punctuated with bright green pistachios, I was immediately soothed by the sensation of a sweet, nutty, buttery flavor melting in my mouth. My friends and I had sat down in the corner of a small, crowded bakery in downtown Amman, but in that moment we could have been anywhere in the world… all that mattered was the decadent pastry that clung to my fingertips and lips–I was SO. HUNGRY. As my peers and I discovered, the meal-time schedule is a little different in Jordan compared to what we had grown used to in the States and Nepal. On the Friday evening that closed out the first full day my peers and I spent with our homestays, our student group-chat was filled with messages debriefing about who had eaten when–the breakfast range fell anywhere between 9 am and 12:45 pm, and the lunch range, similarly, fell anywhere between 1:00 and 5:30 pm. Alas, my lack of a noon-sharp lunch absolutely necessitated that Emily, Peace, and I made the bakery pit-stop. It was partly in the name of quelling my dizziness, and partly for the public safety of anyone in a close proximity–my hanger is REAL.
Earlier that afternoon, the three of us ordered a Careem (Jordanian Uber) and headed out on a mission to see the ruins of the ancient Roman citadel that stands proudly in the heart of Amman. The heat was intense–the sun blazed down upon us as we toed the dusty path up to the ruins, trying to get a sense of the history of the place from whatever snippets of English we could find posted on the signs around us. Almost immediately, Peace made friends with a young family who asked her for a picture, and before we knew it, Peace had negotiated her own photoshoot overlooking the city. Emily and I looked at each other and shook our heads, laughing. In that moment, the world belonged to Peace, and we were happy just to be living in it!
After roaming around the ruins and taking some more funny pictures, Emily, Peace and I stepped inside the Citadel Archeological Museum to try to gather some more history about where our feet stood. We were able to gather that the site has a fascinatingly layered history–We had just walked among the ruins of a Roman temple, a Byzantine church, and an Umayyad palace. Walking through the museum, the waves of Roman, Greek, Ottoman, Egyptian, and indigenous tribal influence made themselves known to us through the materials, subjects, and art-styles of the sculptures, tools, cookware, and jewelry that gazed up at us placidly from behind the museum glass. I found myself thinking about how strikingly connected the world has always been, consciously and subconsciously for all of those who inhabit it. None of us lives in isolation–many hundred years ago, the artwork of an ancient Egyptian sculptor inspired another artisan who then carried the first sculptor’s influence across a huge body of water and set it in stone in the walls of a Roman temple. Walking through the museum made me think about how my actions and thoughts impact the world in ways I may never even realize.
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Over the past week, my peers and I have also had the incredible privilege of learning from and listening to a diverse group of individuals involved with the administration and dissemination of human rights principles within and alongside the pluralistic Jordanian legal system, as well as from the front-liners of many Civil Society and Community-Based organizations that target issues such as women’s rights, children’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, worker’s rights, free speech and assembly, and refugee rights in Jordan.
Throughout our group’s inquiry during each site visit and lecture so far in Jordan, a persisting challenge has emerged for our cohort in trying to navigate 1) the universal right and obligation of all people to identify and interrogate human rights violations around the world, and 2) the cruciality that we, as Western students and guests in a foreign cultural context, remain sensitive to cultural relativity and do not assume that we have a greater knowledge of what constitutes human rights than non-Westerners. This issue has led to some high-tension, high-emotion conversations within our group cohort, and as difficult as some of these conversations have been, I’m grateful that I am being exposed to this tricky issue as an undergrad student rather than as a grad student or as a working professional. As a result of our group conversations, I have been made aware that learning to balance the push and pull of the universality of justice/injustice and relativity of each cultural context is a skill that will serve me well for as long as I continue to engage with social justice issues, professionally and personally.
I don’t have any concrete answers, but I think my two biggest takeaways from these conversations to date are 1) Tone and delivery are everything when questioning and making statements about real or perceived human rights issues and solutions, especially in knowledge-seeking contexts such as site visits, and 2) Everyone is entitled to their own opinion about what constitutes a violation of human rights, and while nobody’s opinion can ever be totally objective, they are all based in different life experiences that are real for the individual and valid to their respective positionality.
Having said all of that, the site visits that have stood out the most to me were our trips to the National Centre for Human Rights and to the Justice Center for Legal Aid in Amman. The order in which we visited these places was also important, because I think that our site visit to the National Centre–a “legal personality” that monitors Jordan’s compliance with international human rights law and receives support and funding from the Jordanian government–informed the context in which we arrived at the Justice Center–a fully independent CSO that aims to serve citizens and non-citizens who would otherwise be excluded from the judicial process in Jordan. In my opinion, our visit to the National Centre for Human Rights felt strange and stilted in a way that I was not expecting. One of our speakers was the General Commissioner of Human Rights, who opened his presentation with a warning to us all that the media can be misleading and that it “won’t always give you the right principles to achieve the truth.” He then gave us a speech about the general importance of human rights and about our duty to resist against governments who violate them. He gave the example of totalitarian governments and explained how totalitarian governments oppress their citizens and how freedom of expression and peaceful assembly are cornerstones of true democracy (I thought this was a particularly interesting thing for him to bring up, given that Jordan is a monarchy where freedom of speech is not granted in full). He also repeatedly emphasized the importance of comparison–he stated that “comparison is crucial for reaching the depth of any discipline,” and he mentioned that compared to its immediate neighbors, Jordan upholds human rights to a high degree and prioritizes doing so.
The General Commissioner was a sweet, older man with crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and a kind gaze, and I appreciated his words of affirmation about the importance of human rights and his perspective on how Jordan set itself apart from the socio-political contexts of its neighbors. At the same time, I was struck by how much his opening message conveyed his immediate concern that the room full of American students sitting in front of him might’ve thought that his country was “backwards” or violent and extremist, as the American media so often portrays the Middle-East to be. As he went on and on about the virtues of human rights (at least 30 minutes of the presentation was devoted to this), I found his assertions subconsciously having the opposite effect on me–we came here to discuss the condition of human rights in Jordan, not to re-hash the same frequently broadcasted slogans about why these rights matter… so what was he not telling us?
Eventually, one of his colleagues entered the room and introduced herself to us. She was also an older woman, and she explained that she was a professor of law at one of Jordan’s graduate universities and a member of the Board of Trustees for the Centre. She and the General Commissioner engaged in a back-and-forth banter that involved showering each other with accolades for a few minutes, and then the professor began to give us more detailed information about the history and purpose of the Centre. The Centre runs some very valuable programs focused on spreading awareness about, and conducting government trainings based on international human rights legislation, as well as conducting myriad inspections into how human rights are being protected by various Jordanian institutions.
As the session went on, though, the professor said some things that were very unsettling to me. At one point, she told our student group that female survivors of sexual abuse commonly face shame and pushback from their family and immediate communities when they come forward. She explained that in conservative Muslim communities, a woman’s “honor” is based on her virginity/abstinence, and each woman’s duty to uphold that honor is extremely important for the social reputation of her family. Thus, being raped is seen as a detriment to her family’s “honor”.
In light of this, I asked her about how the Centre is working to protect female rape victims in Jordan, and in response to my query, she said that “rape isn’t really an issue here” thanks to the conservative Muslim culture that prevails in Jordan. What’s more, she claimed that based on her legal experience, 95% of rape cases in Jordan are likely falsified by the women who bring them forward. She said that in Jordan, women frequently use legal clauses related to rape for their own social or economic benefit. I was shocked. My first thought upon hearing this was, “There’s no f****ing way she just said that in the same breath as her previous statement about the lack of support that outspoken female survivors receive.” The professor then went on to tell a story about a female student of hers who sought her help 2 months after a widely-loved male professor at the graduate school sexually assaulted her. The professor told us about how she was suspicious as to why the student had waited so long to confront anyone, since the student “had a strong personality” and was therefore capable, in the professors eyes, of seeking immediate support. The professor then said that she discovered that the female student had recently received a bad grade from the male professor, and so she refused to take the student’s claims any further because she felt as though the student was simply trying to seek revenge for being given such a grade. When it finally came time to leave, I stepped out of the room feeling hollow and confused–I felt like I had less of a clear picture about the principles and values that the Centre stands and works for and about the overall condition of human rights in Jordan than before I had walked in.
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This narrative lies in stark contrast to the message and experience that my peers and I had at the Justice Center for Legal Aid, where our speaker was also a Jordanian woman who had received a law degree and frequently works on the front lines of women’s rights issues in civil court. When a few of us informed our Justice Center speaker about what the professor had told us at the Human Rights Centre, she said that the professor must have only worked a very small and isolated number of cases in order to come up with such an idea. Our Justice Center speaker told us that while abuse of rape legislation does sometimes occur, she put the frequency closer to 15% of the time rather than 95%. She expressed frustration that we had been given this false information, and encouraged us to think critically about why the professor might have believed that 95% was an accurate figure.
Visiting the Justice Center was also refreshing in other ways… It was amazing to be in a building staffed primarily by women (women with law degrees, no less!) who devote so much time and energy to making real, tangible change in the lives of marginalized people in Amman. The Justice Center focuses on offering legal aid and protection to women who are survivors of domestic abuse, small business owners, refugees and undocumented people living in Amman, senior citizens, and many more. We were given a tour of the main office, the legal clinic where beneficiaries have appointments with the Center’s pro-bono lawyers, the 24-hour hotline call center, and other office spaces involved with the reception, processing, and distribution of aid to the callers and inquirers who come to the Center seeking legal aid.
Our speaker informed us that the Justice Center is the only NGO/CSO in Jordan that provides pro-bono legal aid to everyone facing a 10+ year sentence within Jordan’s borders, regardless of documentation status. She explained to us that the Center focuses its legal aid efforts on the population of people in Jordan who would otherwise be barred from the legal process–the right to attorney does not exist in Jordan, and many people cannot afford to pay for this legal resource. A few of the legal issues that the Center frequently deals with involve the fact that women are not legally entitled to pass their citizenship onto their children, issues pertaining to providing divorces and financial and/or custodial justice for women who are survivors of domestic abuse, youth drug charges and other narcotics cases (youth as young as 12 can be tried as/detained alongside adults when it comes to drug cases), cases involving the neglect of the elderly, the cases of beneficiaries who have been convicted of “Cyber-Violence” for slandering other citizens or the King on social media, etc.
She also told us about the two 24-hour hotlines run by the Justice Center (one is for people who are currently under arrest or detention, and the other is for clients who need immediate physical and/or legal protection), and about the hotline staff who are responsible for providing immediate services and resources to individuals who may presently be in crisis. This job in particular sounded extremely emotionally and mentally demanding, and our speaker informed us that recently the Justice Center partnered with an external mental health provider to help ensure that the employees are able to process what they hear while working and better compartmentalize the secondhand trauma they may experience.
Overall, I felt as though the smaller, more focused Justice Center NGO was making a greater impact on the lives of individuals in the immediate community than the larger, government-funded National Centre for Human Rights. This is a pattern that I’ve been observing and grappling with since the start of our program in New York City, and while it’s really easy for me to jump to conclusions and make assumptions about the integrity of the organizations, I have to remember that they fundamentally serve different purposes because they operate at different levels of society–the gap between the federal and grassroots levels is yawning and full of various implications for the power of each to influence policy and act in the favor of marginalized people. What’s more, I also have to acknowledge that the folks at the Centre have what is essentially an impossible task–to hold the government and monarchy of Jordan accountable for protecting the human rights of its citizens while simultaneously existing under the harsh limitations of the government and monarchy in terms of free speech and what causes will/won’t be supported by the King. Not to mention, he’s where they get a huge chunk of their funding! After this week, I feel as though my brain is overflowing with new knowledge and new perspectives on the Jordanian legal system, and I am looking forward to discussing what I have learned with my academic allies back home to better understand where the American legal system stands and operates on the wide spectrum of legal systems around the world.
October 19, 2024