Chapter Nine
Ma’an
On Sunday morning, Nebras, Riyad, and I departed Amman for the long drive to the south of the country. For yet another workshop we were to conduct regarding self-reliant community-cohesion with the heads of the Southern municipalities in the city of Ma’an. Located around 3 hours south of the capital, the city, and to a larger extant, the governorate of Ma’an holds a special status in Jordan for its history and culture.
The city of Ma’an is famous for its nickname of being the “Heart of the Great Arab Revolt”, when the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire rebelled against Constantinople for their independence and a unified Arab state promised to them by Britain, during the Middle Eastern theater of World War 1. Lying at the heart of the Hejaz railway that ran from Damascus in Syria to Medina in the Hejaz region of Western Arabia through what was then the Transjordan, and most prominent for carrying pilgrims to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Ma’an was where a strategic part of the rail line of the railroad was destroyed by the Arab rebels, in tandem with T.E. Lawrence, earning the city the aforementioned nickname.
History aside, what made Ma’an so special to me was the sheer difference in ambiance of the city compared to Amman. Inhabited mostly by peoples descended from local Bedouins and the Howaytat (the Howaytat are a large confederation of Bedouin Arab tribes that transcend national boundaries and are found in the deserts of Jordan, Palestine, and the Arabian Peninsula), and partly due to it’s southern geography and proximity to them, an individual dropped in Ma’an could easily be forgiven for mistakenly thinking they were in a town in the Hejaz or Najd regions of modern-day Saudi Arabia. Compared to the Levantine feel and ambiance of the cities to its north, such as-Salt, Amman, Ajloun, and Irbid, which are closer in culture, and behavior to other Levantine areas such as Syria, Lebanon, and adjoining Palestine, Ma’an leans more towards the Arabian peninsula in this regard. From the everyday dress of the townspeople, to the cuisine, and even the dialects of Arabic spoken in Ma’an, all bear remarkable similarities to neighboring Saudi Arabia, across the desert border.
What strikes me as important was despite this clear cultural difference, between Ma’an and the capital of Amman, and to a larger extent the northern part and the southern part of the country, is that both feel equally proud of their identity as Jordanians in spite of their differences and allow those differences to be a source of celebration and unity instead of hostility and division, a rare and wonderful example of the way things should be in the world.
Petra & Wadi Musa
Post-checking into our hotel in Wadi Musa and freshening up, Nebras, Riyad and I went to spend our afternoon at Petra. It was my second time at the site, one of the seven new wonders of the world, and it was as grand as I had remembered it. We made the long walk to the through the Bab as-Siq, or the gateway to main site, the iconic Nabataean treasury, locally called the al-Khazneh (الخزنة in Arabic), guided by a 12-year-old local Bedouin boy who kept telling me I looked like his older brother. I couldn’t help but to feel the same sense of awe I first felt walking through here. Thousand-year-old ruins really never do fail to humble oneself, for there's just something about seeing a site so ancient with your own two eyes, so exquisitely built, so immemorial, protruding from the rose-colored mountains, shimmering in the setting sun that leaves one simply astonished.
For some background, the city of Petra was located on an important trade route, about halfway from the cities of Syria and the Arabian Red Sea coast, making it ideal for commerce, and indeed from this commerce the people who founded the city, the Nabateans, grew wealthy as did their city. The Nabateans, referred to once as "one of the most gifted peoples of the ancient world”, were an ancient Arab people who lived in the deserts of the Southern Levant and northern Arabia, who had perfected the art of constructing buildings into the faces of the dry mountains they inhabited, as well as being exceptional water engineers, founding an extensive system of reservoirs and dams, along with perfecting the art of harvesting rainwater. Petra had become not only their capital, but an extremely cosmopolitan center of trade with a population of around 20,000 at its peak. The Nabataean kingdom remained a powerful and independent entity until it’s eventual undoing at the hands of the Romans, when it was annexed and incorporated into the Empire under the name Arabia Petraea, under Emperor Trajan in 106 A.D.
Today, Petra stands as symbol of modern Jordan, a point of pride for, and testimony of, ancient Arab civilization. Tourism at the site has picked up dramatically in recent years, following an all-time-low after the beginning of Arab Spring in 2011, ironically after reaching its record peak the year prior in 2010. Sitting on a flat mountain top with Riyad and Nebras, overlooking the Treasury, drinking a cup of strong black tea, I sat and wondered if the Ancient Nabateans ever wondered what would become of their capital city. That in the far, far future, tourists from every corner of the world, corners unknown to even exist to them at the time, would come streaming into their city, to stare in amazement at the legacy of their civilization.
Workshop & Reflections
Our workshop went on as smoothly as usual, and the discussion that followed as lively as ever. Many of the issues and factors relating to community cohesion that were brought up differed slightly from the other communities we’ve worked with, which was to be expected, given the aforementioned regional, cultural, and economic differences between a Southern municipality like Ma’an versus the ones in the north.
Although much of the TTCC’s constitute confidential information for the sake of the project, one of the issues that stuck out to me was that of taxation costs, and how they can can severely hinder the establishing of local businesses in more rural areas such as those around Ma’an, as opposed to the capital, because of the dependent level of wealth, and how the problem should be dealt with and solved accordingly.
At any rate, it’s begun to hit me that with something along the lines of two weeks left, my time in Jordan is drawing ever so nearer to a close. I’ve tried not to dwell too much on it, for goodbyes are never easy, especially when one’s gotten as close to the people they work with everyday as I have, and it’ll be hard to leave a place I’ve learned to love so much. But suppose we'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now there’s still time to enjoy my last couple of weeks in the Kingdom, and I plan on doing just that. Enjoying them.