Day 39

Listening to this song called "Beautiful" by Eminem on the bus yesterday as I drove through Amman and around the mosques. I know, it's Eminem, but it made me breathe a bit more deeply. I think it speaks for itself; it struck a bit of a chord while I was listening...


Cause where you see it from where your sittin its probably 110% different
I guess we would have to walk a mile in eachothers shoes at least
What size you wear?
I wear tens
Lets see if you can fit your feet
In my shoes, just to see
What its like, to be me
Ill be you, lets trade shoes
Just to see what itd be like
To feel your pain, you feel mine
Go inside eachothers minds
Just to see what we'd find
Look at life through eachothers eyes


If I didn't love psychology so much, particularly clinical, particularly exactly what I know I want to do, I would pursue something related to understanding cultural differences sociologically, perhaps gender differences. The past couple days have been intellectually satisfying for me. Educationally, I feel I have made strides past where I began on this journey. Hopefully by the end I will have exceeded four-fold.

My past couple of days have cumulated into a great amalgamation of renewed interests. Primarily, there was another conversation regarding social issues with the peer tutor (the student with whom we discussed sexuality not long ago). We had a couple more questions which she graciously answered. After that, I will tell you the story of our field trip.

There were a couple questions which plagued us still, the first was on their knowledge of anatomy and the male perspective on virginity in Jordan (as if there were one).

She was asked if she did not use tampons for fear of breaking her hymen and she had no idea, even when looking at a picture or using the dictionary what that was. Subsequently, when asked "but what about sports or athletics? You know it can break that way?" "She said " Sport, like karate?" With a nod in response, she continued...


If you take a sport (like karate) as a woman, you must go to the manager of the course and recieve a note. This is a note you will carry around with you for life and show it to your husband, or fiance to explain why you do not bleed. If you ride a camel, you go to the manager and ask the same thing.


If a woman has no such note and still doesn't bleed, she goes with her husband to the doctor for an exam "together" and the doctor "can explain" if her hymen broke from sex or sports or other... Everything I learned in Middle School was very clear on the fact that a doctor could not tell the difference between these forms of breaks. Apparently here they can... (My theory is that bribery or relationships play a role, but that is just my theory).

Otherwise, the "picture" phenomenon is becoming larger than we had originally anticipated. The peer tutor explained that sometimes men will marry you if they have sex with you because they "love you"...but it is never clear if they love you so therein lies the problem when the day comes. Other times, if he quite clearly DOESN'T love you, he will take a nude or semi-nude picture of the girl in question and use it as leverage. If she doesn't continue to have sex with him, then he will forward it to the whole community (school, neighborhood, etc). This will ruin a girl and she will resort to suicide, social hibernation or will flee.

It is known here that a woman is most likely not be a 'virgin' because she somehow broke her hymen in life (a good thing to understand, but virgin in terms of intact hymen) but a note is crucial for proof.


I don't want to overload with you information on this issue, but these points remained quite salient with me over the course of the past few days and I thought I would share them with you.

Otherwise, yesterday was our field trip for my Contemporary Islamic Thought class. The course I am taking essentially traces Islamic theorists throughout the past century and we explore how they have influenced what has become of Islam in different regions (anything from social relations to those who influenced Al Qaeda)

We were told that we were going to visit a mosque or two but were not given much more information than that. We were also told that it would take the class period (approx. 2 hours) for the trip.

We left around three and drove to the downtown. The downtown is where the souks are located and it is incessantly a madhouse. I love the downtown, but a tour group of twenty American kids at a mosque in the downtown is a suicide mission. We were told to cover our heads with our scarves and started to walk towards the mosque right at the end of the call to prayer (the same one at which I found myself not long ago on a Friday). This mosque was "exclusively" for men, other than a small closed room to the left for a dozen or so women. My friends and I were feeling extraordinarily insensitive and tried to distance ourselves from the target that was a mass of white students in the entryway of a male dominated mosque at the call to prayer. Needless to say, we were offensive and asked to leave (at least the women). We were not feeling good about this decision to go on our fieldtrip and being a half dinar cab ride away from home, were considering calling it quits.


We stayed on, and hopped back in the bus in order to visit our second mosque. A couple of my friends and I had been to this one before in our attempt to visit the citadel back in the first couple days of being here. It is an enormous blue mosque quite near our home and we were excited to see the inside. It is not exactly the easiest thing to access the inside of a mosque, particularly when you are not Muslim or a non-Muslim woman. Since our professor is Muslim and she had organized this with an educational caveat, we were permitted to enter (during a time that was NOT the call to prayer....jeez). We felt slightly more comfortable not being accosted by men trying to have a moment of peace. I also noticed at this point the six Mercedes outside. The only cars. Hm.


We were told that in order to enter we would have to be fully covered. I had a white scarf with me, but none of us carry around jilbabs on a regular basis. We were given full black robes to wear and with my white scarf underneath was taunted regarding my resemblance to Julie Andrews re: Sound of Music. Sweet... The men wore, clearly, nothing but their regular clothes and being in full garb quite clearly puts some things into perspective. Nothing is a picnic in the states regarding subjugation, and being any sort of minority implies that you are not equal to the norm (even if the norm is actually not a numerical majority). I believe in the theory of the importance of women here. Women are the absolute cornerstone of life and progress. They are protected to sustain the family, the most important part of life. How it is implemented, however, is of great concern to me. On the other hand, both the fundemental capitalistic nature AND how it is exercised in the U.S. is of great concern to me, so I don't know where to find a medium. What country has this medium? Can you put the family first and sustain an economically successful country?



We entered the mosque, more specifically the area of prayer for men and were taken aback by the vast open space before us. It was a lovely mosque and we crossed the corridor to visit the space dedicated to women's prayer. Men were not really supposed to enter so the man who was giving us our tour had not seen the stickers and decorations the women had put up and around the alter facing the Kabaa (the black stone in Mecca). He was not happy and started pulling them down. I saw women peering in from behind a corner. I couldn't help but think that they must have felt such resentment towards us at that moment. What were we doing there anyways?


We returned our coverings and hopped on the bus around sunset to visit our third and last mosque. We were late, but the humble men let us in regardless. The Hussein bin-Talal mosque was astounding in magnitude and reverence. I had never felt so at peace. I felt as though the way the wind blew through the corridors and the birds sang on the olive trees inside that perhaps I too would believe in God. There were four minarets posted at each corner that were square in the shape of Ummayyad ornamentation. This was a gift from the King in 2006 to the people of Jordan. This is also where he prays (usually he comes on Fridays). We were shown the area relagated for women's prayer. They were in a box looking down through a screen at the men's prayer area. Even here.

We were shown the entrance the King uses and the washrooms, and were astounded by the 2,000s.meters of serenity. I have posted pictures below.

On our way home, I listened to our professor explain that she wanted to show us three different levels of education and reactions to our presence. The first in the market was the least educated and most resentful while the second was increasingly educated and open to our being there under certain conditions and the third welcomed us with open arms.

What a difference education makes. It was a phenomenal experience to stand under the minaret of the King's mosque at the call to prayer at sunset and soak in the realities of life here.

It was also humbling. Sometimes in the U.S., you forget you are a small part of a big community. It is not that the community is in place to accomodate you, although sometimes it might appear that way. I have found no intelligent answer to reconcile all our relative differences in the U.S. to make life elsewhere appear less marginalizing. But when you are living in a community of minarets, it is almost impossible to imagine ego-centricity. You forget that there are arguments claiming a universal human psychology, that we all are fundementally the same. I have no idea what to say to make sense of either the worlds to which I am privy. I think what I have decided is that education is paramount. Cultural and scholastic education in tandem will make for a much more tolerant global system. Step 1: Be informed.