Resilience of the Jordanian fabric

The cohesiveness of Jordanian society could not be more manifest than in being spared the inferno of sacrificing 2,000 of its youth at the altar of the Goddess of Death as is currently happening in Iraq. The resilience of the Jordanian fabric is well attested by the harmony of different, diversified strata of all components of our society who belong to nine ethnic groups and seven religious doctrines.

The absence of that resilience in Syrian society led to the tragic destruction of the entire country at a cost of $200 billion, along with 163,000 Syrians killed, nine million displaced and three million refugees in other countries.

The same grim picture applies to other countries, whether in Egypt or Yemen or Libya, each with different shades of variations or colouring. The case in Gaza is even worse where, in a political metaphor, the daughter still rejects the French writer’s maxim: “Never punch your rapist if you do not want to suffer more.”

Sociologists attribute this lack of violence among Jordanians to many reasons. Some scholars claim that many components of the population have not been into the melting pot whose political cauldron will reshape the identity, national affiliation and self image of all people living on this terrain. The political imperatives forced successive waves of Palestinians to find refuge in Amman since the early fifties of the last century. Other political imperatives forced thousands of Iraqis to settle in Jordan since the 1980s. The melting pot of forging a new identity could not digest them or have them integrated into the whole fabric due to some justifiable reasons and other non-justifiable ones. Even the Jordanians who returned home in the 1990s brought with them new identities as the process of cultural assimilation in the Gulf inculcated some ideas of Jihadi Salafism which they had been exposed to since 1948, and naturally been impacted by its tenets.

The key word is compatibility in its social and political connotations. That degree of melting pot integration requires a master plan that will embed the basis of a deep affiliation to the country and its people in school curricula and summer camp courses. Something similar took place in the United States where the second generation of Arabs feel their American identity stronger than their attachment to Syria, Egypt or Iraq. Such a result was the spontaneous outcome of being processed into the “Grand Cauldron” of the social, cultural and behavioural melting pot experience.

Such a stratagem, when applied, will eradicate one of the three bases of university violence, which has tribal feuds in its deep, subliminal motivations.

Efforts to develop that melting pot stratagem in the early sixties were aborted by the 1967 war, which forced a new prioritisation of the national agenda. Now, while the prerequisites are now available, it is high time to reassert the Jordanian identity and forge its sustainable compatible components as suits the new millennium.