‘Maintaining the fabric of our cohesiveness’

The brutal murder of a 26-year-old Ajlouni girl last week exemplifies the total failure of our educational system during the last 90 years since the end of the Turkish rule.

Our school curricula did not inculcate the ethos of tolerance, but imbibed young generations during their formative years with bigotry, religious fanaticism and racial dogmatism.

Though Jordan is projected as a modern progressive state, the murder of an Ajlouni girl who told her family that she had converted shows that modernity is only a thin veneer behind which lies the most brutal instincts.

Religious conversion nowadays is a multibillion dollar industry, practised by Catholics, Orthodox, American Evangelicals and Muslims, among Asians, Africans, Indians and Chinese.

Its annual yield is thousands of new converts who renounced their old faith to espouse a new one which, to them, brings happiness rather than death, as in Ajloun.

In Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia, decades ago, many girls converted to other religions without being murdered.

The ranks of Jordan’s communist party, in the 1950s, had many women members who renounced religion and became atheists or agnostics, without facing the danger of having their heads crushed like the Ajlouni girl’s. Many university professors and intellectuals here admit being non-believers, without being scared of imprisonment or death.

Jordan used to pride itself on being a multicultural, multi-creed, multiracial society where Sunnis, Christians, Bahais, Druze, Ismailies, Alawites and Shiites live in harmony and tolerance.

Many prominent Ammani families have a Jewish mother or grandmother. 

Mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians permeated all strata of our society at all levels for decades.

In the 1960s, one prime minister boasted that half of his Cabinet were married to Christian women, or born to Christian mothers. But a new wave of narrow religious fundamentalism had recently overtaken our country due to the impact of American evangelical missionaries, and the oil rich Arab Gulf manipulation of Jihadi Salafist doctrines.

During the last two decades, Jordan spent millions of dollars on building an image of a progressive, modern, open-minded society. Public relations professionals did an excellent job at making Amman a model for Arabs to emulate. 

But now, the seeds of hatred are implanted in the minds of the new generations at grassroots level, both in private and in public schools, through lack of educators and professionals who should teach books that cultivate the ethos of tolerance, acceptance and proper citizenship models.

The fabric of this society cannot tolerate the scourge of religious venomousness and doctrinal acrimony.

During the last 14 centuries, Arab Christians lived in harmony with their Muslim neighbours, to such an extent that they fought against the European Crusaders in the Middle Ages.

What is needed now is a multi-staged basis for a new culture in Jordan where citizenry, toleration, acceptance and universality of outlook are dominant ethical values.

What is needed is a new strategy that can formulate a blueprint for Jordan as a multiracial, multi-creed, multilingual society where priority is given to maintaining the fabric of our cohesiveness.