Entries from Islam's Advance tagged with 'Jordan'
Jordan Paves Over Radicalism
I’ve written before about the role of development in tackling Islamic extremism. In Zarqa, the gritty, industrial city infamous for producing al-Qa'eda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the latest, grandest real estate project is under way.
The King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz city on the outskirts of old Zarqa will ultimately house 500,000 residents throughout an area the size of lower Manhattan.
Preventing Honor Killings Begins At Home
In light of this week’s honor killing in Atlanta, Georgia, a Jordanian women’s rights activist argues for a global fight against the practice.
Shocking though the so-called "honor killing" of Sandeela Kanwal in Atlanta, Georgia last Sunday has been for Americans, it's an all-too-common occurrence in the Middle East. Activists like Lina Nabil, featured earlier on Islam's Advance, have dedicated their careers to combating honor crimes like these. Yesterday I asked her about her successful strategies for protecting women like Ms. Kanwal - and why combating honor crimes must be a global fight.
Mideast Ambivalent About Next U.S. President
If the world could vote in the U.S. presidential elections, you might imagine that most would choose Barack Obama. After all, world opinion of America is at a 30-year low, and Obama is the candidate who embodies the deepest change in U.S. politics.
But according to a recent survey, the answer in the Middle East is closer to “None of the above.”
In Jordan, God's Work on Modernity's Doorstep
Over the past five years Amman, the capital city of Jordan, has seen a rate of development unrivaled in the Middle East except in the Gulf. It's not just the office blocks and fancy new housing developments that mark this change, but the arrival of a certain bling culture, which can been seen in the posters of semi-clad models inside shopping malls, and the traffic jams of new SUVs and sports cars trying to park outside.
A Jihadist's Home
For several years, a trip to Zarqa was an obligatory part of the circuit for reporters covering the Iraq beat. The attraction was to understand the motivations of the town's most infamous export, Musab al-Zarqawi - the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed in 2006 - as well as gain a window into the world of Islamic extremism in Jordan, a country known for its urbane face and pro-Western stance.
I first went to Zarqa in 2004, half expecting to find the grinding poverty and failed government of Afghanistan. The truth was somewhat blander. Zarqa is a town of 250,000 people, 18 miles to the northeast of Amman, Jordan's capital, but couldn't be more different. Instead of the ritzy five star hotels and restaurants of Amman, Zarqa had crumbling concrete apartment blocks and military barracks. Additionally, the city boasted a 30 percent unemployment rate and a burgeoning young population that survives on state handouts and the same sort of Islamic charity I showed you last week. Zarqa, in short, is quite typical of a host of towns and cities across the Middle East - neither too desperate, nor offering much hope - and seeming to trap its residents in the limbo world of unrealized aspirations.
Hunger Helps Muslim Brotherhood
Faraz al-Mazrawi runs a Muslim Brotherhood social services organization in the Jabal al-Nasr district of Amman, Jordan. The long food queue outside the center’s kitchen every morning attests to the poverty of the neighborhood, which is made up primarily of Palestinian refugees.
Jordan, like other developing countries, has been badly hit by the global rise in food prices. The price of meat has risen by 25%; tomatoes, a staple of low-income households here, cost five times what they did a short while ago.
To counter the crisis, the government has cut import tariffs on some foodstuffs, and increased public sector salaries by 20 percent. But that has meant little for the plight of Jabal a-Nasr’s 150,000 residents, among whom unemployment stands at over 20%; life there has become, in some cases, a struggle to get enough food to survive.
Fawaz says he’s seen increased criminality in his neighborhood and families foraging in the trash for food.
A Step Back for Jordan's Women
To follow up on last week’s blog on honor killings in Jordan, this week saw a sad reminder that although pioneering journalists like Lina Nabil can break taboos and talk about these issues, the country’s judiciary continues to condone violence and a regressive view of Islamic and tribal culture.
This Wednesday, a Jordanian father received a six-month prison sentence for murdering his daughter by electrocuting her, after she had abandoned an abusive marriage. The prosecution had sought the father’s conviction for manslaughter; he had tied his daughter’s hands together with wire and then connected her to the house current. Instead, he was given a lesser sentence under Article 98 of Jordanian law, by which crimes of passion are punished only with small custodial sentences. In this case, the father had already served six months in prison before his trial and was allowed to walk free.
(Dis)honor Killings
Lina Nabil was writing glossy features for a Middle Eastern women’s magazine when she found the story that changed her life. In the 1980s, while she was working on an investigative report on the situations of Jordan’s imprisoned women, she was shown a cell in the Central Jail in the capital of Amman. It was packed with women in their early to late teens.
“I asked, what had these girls done?” recalled Lina. “I was told they were being held for their own protection because their families had tried to kill them. Some of them had been there for years. Others were released and later murdered. I knew this was a story I had to tell, whatever the consequences.”
Dying to Escape Iraq
The last time I wrote about Haider, he had just arrived in Amman, Jordan after fleeing for his life from southern Iraq. The story of his narrow escape from the Mahdi Army’s death squads is worth repeating, not least because Haider’s struggle represents the continuing plight of thousands of Iraqis who are desperately trying to leave.
Haider worked as a translator for British forces in Basra, but the list of those targeted includes doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers. Their aggressors are, more often than not, poor, uneducated Shi’a from the slums of southern Iraq. Many were themselves victimized by Saddam Hussein’s regime; they found in the Mahdi Army’s leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, an angry voice that echoed their own. The fact that Sadr clothes his message in Islamic rhetoric gives them an additional sense of legitimacy, and a brutal, reductive vision of Islam to enforce.
