Week… something.

I’ll try to make this a quick update. Part of my problem with this blog, I feel, is I’m a little over ambitious by trying to make each update an entire page, not double spaced. It seems that might be a little much as a Master’s student, especially at the end of a given semester when papers and exams are happening, or at the beginning of a semester in which one must submit a 15 page thesis proposal (I’m not sure if that’s normal for most Master’s programs, but it seems to me that 15 pages for a research question is… a bit much).

Okay, I have many many things to describe and write about and honestly I’m torn about what to write about. Possibly my brief but fun trip to the US? The end of my first semester and the confusion of testing here? Maybe the process of enrolling in classes for a second term? (Though to be honest, if you want to know about that, you could go back to one of my earlier entries and read about enrolling for the first semester; just condense that process to two weeks and cut out the government bureaucracy aspect, then you’ll get a similar picture). I could also describe my first two weeks of classes which has been interesting in itself… with odd characters I will have to describe at some point in the coming weeks. (Quote from one professor: “Who has fear?... I don't believe you.”).

I guess in all fairness I should probably give my attention, in this update, to what many people back at home are concerned about: the Middle East unrest. First and foremost, despite what many at home might be hearing, Jordan is very stable. When I returned from the US, I got some indication that there was a lot of worry about how I was doing and about what was going on. To be honest, I was absolutely baffled about the level of worry… until I checked the CNN website and started looking at what’s being said and implied, both on their TV programs and in their articles. And to be honest again, I was a little disappointed because the flagrant “sensationalization” of the situation seemed outright deceitful. To be fair, the King did fire the Prime Minister, and as one article pointed out “after a month of protests.” What that particular article failed to point out was that those protests were only once a week, small, very organized, and the police were handing out water and snacks during the entire process. The bottom line is that Jordan is not Egypt, not Tunisia, not Yemen… not Bahrain… nor Algeria... etc. The people here know that Jordan is small and not blessed with many natural resources, that the King is a true Jordanian and he is not given to corruption or enriching his own family. He is known as a pragmatic (military) man who truly does seek to better the economic situation of common Jordanians and who has Palestinian Jordanian interests in mind, but an East Bank Jordanian (Tribal, Bedouin) heart.

Let me take a second to get on a soapbox real quick and say this is exactly why scholars like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis are absolutely wrong, when it comes to “the Muslim World” or the “Arab World.” There is no real "civilizational" divide. Human sciences is a painting composed of complex details, not broad brushs strokes and to attempt to explain it as such is to fundamentally (and dangeroulsy) misunderstand the painting. The Middle East is, in my mind, the best description for the region because it is a geographical term (though orignially based in an American comparative perspective). It does not use a religion to describe the region, which is abundant with various religions, even multiple sects within many of those religions, and those religions have different levels of impact on society as a whole. It does not use an ethnic term to describe the region, which might be more accurate than any religious terminology, but still misses the point. One of the biggest similarities from country to country in this region when looked at closely- and this is becoming most evident now- is that the regimes are generally Authoritarian in type (Thank you Comparative Politics). This is a political distinction, not uniform, and ultimately transitory. Thus the Middle East, the geographic, stable, and most accurate designator for the region, is experiencing unrest. There are a lot of reasons for the unrest… which I don’t even want to get into now because that would be a thesis unto itself.

Please forgive my… aggressive tone… if that was perceived in this update. The subject is something I’m pretty passionate about. I hope to have an opportunity to continue talking about it in later posts and I will certainly bring back my lessons from Jordan and the Middle East personally, to give some presence to the message. Finally... for those who were hoping for a quick update... I apologize. I feel like there must be something about soapboxes that extends messages and makes people get carried away.

As always, thank you for your interest!