A City Divided Posted by Shadi Hamid

I’ve been MIA on this blog for a while. Hopefully that will change...now. I guess part of the problem is that blogging from Amman is actually more difficult than you would expect. The military controls our bandwidth here (or so I’ve been told). Jordan is a fascinating place, and perhaps emblematic of a region that is going somewhere and going nowhere at the same time. It either feels like Dubai in 1994 or, maybe, Iran in 1977. How you perceive it probably depends on which side of the city you’re standing in (literally). 

Amman has a reputation for being boring (the Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom, as quite a few American expats call it). On its merits, this statement is, in fact, true. This isn’t Cairo. But if you look closer and dig beneath the surface, this place is pretty much an anthropologist’s dream. There’s something disorienting about living here, and it's this disorientation which, frankly, really concerns me. I was at one of Amman’s “hippest” clubs on Thursday night (Thursday here is like our Friday night). Everyone was dancing to, um, European house music and otherwise having a great time. The club, which is actually really big, was packed to the point where it was difficult to move. The alcohol was flowing. Not to politicize everything, but it was a reminder of why democratization in Jordan, or anywhere else in the region, will continue to be a difficult, tortured process. The secular elite here is not particularly excited about the prospect of political change, particularly if Islamists will be the ones leading it. Will they be allowed to do the things they do if Islamists come to power?

People here live in parallel societies running close together – in some cases, right next to each other. They do not, for the most part, intersect. Democratization is difficult enough when economic concerns predominate (as in Latin America where the primary cleavage was between socialists and conservatives). But it is more difficult when it is about existential matters like religion and identity. “On matters of economic policy and social expenditures you can always split the difference,” the political scientist Dankwart Rustow once said. How do you split the difference on religion? In the end, as much as Islamists moderate, they will still in some sense be “Islamists,” and this, by itself, independent of other considerations, is the problem for authoritarian regimes and allied secular elites.

So, anyway, the “hip” club represented one side of Amman, the posh neighborhoods of Abdoun, Sweifieh and Jebel Amman that look, feel like, and are strongholds of the city’s privileged Westernized elite – a cosmopolitan mix of well-heeled Jordanians wearing the latest fashions (don’t worry, there’s a Zara down the street from the Starbucks I’m writing from), mixed in with American expats who work in Amman’s burgeoning refugee aid community, and Europeans who find themselves in Jordan because the prospect of learning Arabic has become increasingly lucrative. This is a world unto itself, which is why I have mixed feelings about being a part of it.

Something feels wrong, because, while I live, hang out, and otherwise associate with one side, I’m here in Jordan conducting field research on the other side, the side that Americans rarely see, and the one that policymakers don’t seem too concerned to know about. This is what I would call the “real” Amman. For better and worse, it is representative of the large majority of Jordanians, many of them of Palestinian origin, who have been left behind by Amman’s quixotic bid to become a kind of poor man’s Dubai. At the center of this society is the Islamic movement - dominated primarily by the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest, most influential political group in the country. The Brotherhood’s political arm – the Islamic Action Front – is the only opposition party with representation in parliament (and, even then, they only have 6 out of 110 seats, due in large part to massive rigging, vote buying, vote “transfer,” the Arab phenomenon of dead people suddenly deciding to become alive, and a Byzantine electoral law that has few competitors in the world).

I digress. It’s hard to imagine how divided Amman is, ethnically (Jordanian vs. Palestinian), ideologically (Islamist vs. secularist) and geographically (East vs. West), and and harder still to explain (unless, I suppose, if you’ve lived in DC). To put it simple terms, you can live in Amman and almost never venture into the Eastern half, by far the larger, more populous part. I can’t say a whole lot about East Amman, because I myself haven’t spent much time there. But it’s there, and it’s not looking too promising. In fact, the more time I spend here, the more I get very, very worried. This is supposedly one of the most "stable" countries in the region. Stay tuned.