Bryan Dunleavy

Horses matter to the Arabs. Inad’s father in fact was a horse dealer in the early days of Amman. Now of course they are rarely beasts of burden or human transport and, as in England, are a hobby for the well-to-do.
The event we attended this morning was the third day of a three day horse show held at the Royal Stables. I know nothing of horses and horse shows but I assume these events are to show off breeding stock. I spoke with an Iraqi-American horse breeder from Philadelphia who was over for the event. We also met Ali Almimani, a first rate horse artists, formerly of Amman, now living in Dubai. Inad knew him and it turns out that he painted the picture of his father on a horse from a photograph.

Winning Junior Male

There were a number of Saudi sheiks and their entourages, including armed guards. When their horses were introduced into the ring the staff and followers whooped and hollered and cheered the horse. A claque.
Inad’s neice Alia is the event organizer here so we had a reserved table on the west side of the arena.

Middle East Championships

Home for lunch then to pick up the pottery.
In the evening we went to see a dance performance by a troupe of Circassian dancers. The Circassians, originally from the Caucasus, settled in Turkey and Jordan after 1917 when turmoil was going on in their part of the world. The dancing has affinity with the Cossack dancing – the men leap, the women glide.
The show purported to illustrate the story of the Circassians in Jordan. They became a special guard for King Abdullah and their desecndants are obviously royalist judging from the cheers and applause that greeted each one of the three kings when they were shown on the screen. In parts the show was interesting but it became repetitive after a while. The dancers, while very good, were all amateurs, and the show needed professional direction.

We drove down from Amman about 30 kilometers towards Israel and paused to take a photo at sea level. From there we had to plunge a further 400 feet to reach the Dead Sea. It was very hot, about 38 degrees.
Coming up to the Israeli border the whole character of Jordan changes. The road turns sharply left down the Jordanian side of the sea; to the west are a series of checkpoints.
The sea is now a resort. Hotels and holiday apartments line the shore. We went to the Movenpick complex. Security was very tight. We were checked by armed guards at the entrance where the car was screened for explosives and there was a further airport-like check, as in airports, for individuals on foot. Names were checked at every level against a register.
We met Olga again and she was using up her boundless energy playing tennis.
We swam and paddled for a bit in the spa, then went down to the sea. I floated about for a bit but found that keeping my neck out of the water caused too much strain. If I lay back in the water the salt caused irritation on my ears. Angie covered herself in mud and paddled around for a long time. I lay back on a lounger.
We went back to the spa for a while and then a few minutes in the steam room.
On the way back Inad’s engine blew on the Saab. Fortunately there was a tow truck nearby.

Jerash is a modern city north of Amman, but it is built around an ancient city of the same name which flourished during the first three centuries AD. IT is reckoned that this city may have had a population of 20,000. The city was abandoned and over time covered with sand, so that the archareological excavations which began in 1925 were able to uncover a more-or-less complete city.
It is astonishing. At the south end is a triumphal arch built to honour the emporer Hadrian in 129AD and at this point the city doesn’t seem like much, but as you go further in you can see the vast scope of the city, with several temples, colonnaded streets, two complete ampitheatres, a huge open oval piazza.

Morning:
        Jordan River – arts and crafts.
        Wadi Finan Gallery
        Ali Jabri exhibition

Ali Jabri retrospective: a life recorded in sketchbooks Sousan Hammad, The Electronic Intifada, 20 July 2009 One of Ali Jabri’s sketchbooks on display in Amman. Ali Jabri locked his paintings in a trunk. It had been more than 20 years since the artist had opened it, but after he was murdered in his Amman, Jordan apartment in December 2002 his friends decided it was time to tell Jabri’s tale. Six years in the making, Fadi Ghandour, a philanthropist and friend of Jabri’s, set up a foundation to document and preserve the late artist’s work. In a home Jabri had wished to one day own, the Ali Jabri Human Heritage Foundation was launched in Amman. On a Wednesday evening a somber crowd gathered for the first of Jabri’s exhibitions since his death, titled Journey Back, a collection of his sketches, collages and paintings from the time he spent in Cairo, a place he passionately loved. “It’s not about art, it’s about commentary … we are bringing [Jabri] back to life for everybody to see. Jabri did not like to be in the public eye, but now he is in the public eye because he needs to be known. He’s a national treasure and a national treasure needs to be protected, it needs to be available to everybody,” Ghandour, chairperson of the Jabri Foundation, said. Born in Jerusalem in 1943 to a prominent Aleppo family, Jabri spent his formative years at Victoria College in Cairo (where Edward Said had also been a pupil). It wasn’t until he left for California in the 1960s, his friends say, that he truly embraced his artistic personality. Despite his studies in architecture at Stanford University, Jabri opted for a bohemian life: beaches, drugs and frequent romantic encounters. He then moved to the UK and studied English literature at Bristol University, eventually moving back to the Middle East: first to Egypt, where he lived for one year, then, finally, settling in Amman. “[Egypt] is the period of time when he first considered himself as a professional artist. It was his journey back to the East, so it was fitting that we opened the exhibit with that journey,” Hanya Salah, director of the Jabri Foundation, said. One of Jabri’s paintings on display in the exhibit. Jabri had an affirmed interest in Egyptian life. He drew, with meticulous detail, the handsome faces of Egyptian men: one smoking a cigarette with a sly smile, another wearing a white jalabiyya and looking at the ground. “My passion: the people, my ecstasy: the faces,” he wrote in his journal. A lot of attention in Jabri’s work was inspired by Cairo’s atavistic prevalence. He painted mosques and Islamic settings, but the skyline of the minaret was never more than the background of his piece. His focus was more on the people of Egypt, whom he greatly adulated. In one of his sketches, a homeless man is sprawled on the floor, asleep near the entrance of a mosque. In another of his works — a multi-layered mixed medium sketch — the artist superimposes his self-portrait, blending his face into the architectural design of a mosque. He was also fascinated, it seems, with his grandfather (with whom he initially lived in Cairo). Displayed again and again on a wall were profiles in pastel, ink and charcoal of the blue-eyed man who in every photo wears an astrakhan hat with a suit and tie. Jabri poked fun at his jiddo, writing in his journal: “… and poor grandpa round One Hundred Years of Age, the old Lampedusa Aristocrat himself, in eight layers of pre-war English tailoring …” Jabri was known by his peers to be sarcastic. “Jabri’s journals are full of parody and tirades against the colonial and homegrown rulers for whom the ‘little people’ didn’t really matter,” Salah said. Wherever he went in Egypt, Jabri carried a journal with him. He took notes as he journeyed across both the city and countryside, whether he was sitting on the beach or drinking his coffee — Jabri replicated all that caught his eye. At the exhibition was a room dedicated exclusively to his sketchbooks where the artist’s Cairo journals are archived into stacks three-feet-high, most of which are mixed media, juxtaposing narratives and images together. The theme is “Youth, Eros, Time, Art, Life.” One sketch is of a naked woman from the chest up: her head tilted up, a cigarette in her lips, eyes closed in an orgiastic state. Written across the painting is the word asrar (secrets) in an elegant Arabic script. The artist had a particular obsession in drawing what he called “city kitsch,” essentially sketching all that he could of Cairo’s harsh streets, or as Jabri summarized in one of his journals: “… the dichotomy persists between ancient beauty and modern Warholian junk,” referring to the iconic American pop artist Andy Warhol. It wasn’t until his relocation from Cairo to Amman that Jabri incorporated political and social commentaries into his art. Using different newspapers and magazines of the Arab world during the 1980s, he created a satirical 12-piece collage, from “The Prayer Call” — a disjointed piece with lascivious photos of two men — to the “Director of Antiquities,” where a clipping of a suit-clad Westerner is pasted over ancient Egypt. The collage ends with what Jabri considered to be an allegory to the “modern Arab world”: magazine clippings of a marching militia, a cadaver and wine — all images layered into a piece titled “And now.” While it’s still unclear who killed Ali Jabri, officials in Jordan say it was his Egyptian lover, a man Jabri’s friends never met and who “mysteriously disappeared.” Related Links Ali Jabri Human Heritage Foundation Ali Jabri Artist who recorded a disappearing Jordan Tuesday, 17 December 2002 Ali Jabri was one of the leading Arab artists of his generation. For many people, Jabri’s was the eye through which they discovered Jordan: his vision, communicated through his work and his life, was equally revealing to both Jordanians and visitors. Ali Jabri, artist: born Jerusalem 1943; died Amman, Jordan 3 December 2002. Ali Jabri was one of the leading Arab artists of his generation. For many people, Jabri’s was the eye through which they discovered Jordan: his vision, communicated through his work and his life, was equally revealing to both Jordanians and visitors.

He believed that an artist must immerse himself in all that surrounds him and he saw himself as an artist in all that he did, whether in painting, engraving, etching, sculpting, making magical boxes, sketching buildings he hoped to save from the misplaced energies of municipal authorities, drawing up plans for urban conservation, or simply in living. His enthusiasm and love for everything Jordanian – its landscapes, vernacular architecture, ruins, markets and contemporary downtowns, and above all its people – was the driving force behind his endeavour to leave a record of what he feared would one day be lost.

Born in Jerusalem in 1943 into a prominent Middle Eastern family, one of the oldest in Aleppo and famous for its intellectuals and politicians, he was an elder child and only son – his sister Diala was born 12 years later. He was educated first at Victoria College in Cairo (where Edward Said, amongst many other distinguished figures, had also been a pupil) and then sent to Rugby School in England. His art master there described him as the most artistically gifted boy whom he had taught in his years at the school.
But, rather than pursue his artistic studies when he left school, he was persuaded by his father, who had been a civil engineer and Minister of Works in Syria, to concentrate on architecture. Ali Jabri lacked the necessary maths O-level to study architecture in England, so he went to Stanford in California. Art, however, remained his first love and he rapidly fell in with a group of artists, most notable of whom was Ron Kitaj. He adopted a bohemian lifestyle, ending up living on the beach, from which he was seized by his family and brought back to the UK. There he went to Bristol University to read English Literature.
When Jabri arrived in Bristol, it was at the height of the Sixties and he fitted in perfectly. A friend described him as arriving dressed formally – and somewhat incongruously – in a Harris tweed jacket and grey flannels, but he soon reverted to a more characteristically outré mode of dress. While he was not exactly a flower child, he found himself completely in sync with the mood of the time. Jabri was an enormously charismatic figure. Handsome, tall, blue-eyed, olive-skinned, effortlessly charming and sophisticated, he was open to anyone and everyone and completely without prejudice or preconception.
When he graduated in 1970, he went to live in London to work at the Jordanian Embassy, but he “lived” at the British Museum, studying the artefacts and making works of art from antiquities. This was to become the foundation of his life’s work and in the early Eighties, Jabri returned to Jordan.
The background of his family, the Jabris of Aleppo, Syria, made him conscious of his Arab identity and of his responsibility to live up to a great name. Although not a native of Jordan, it was to this state and its society that he felt allegiance – his father’s sister, Sitt Saadiyeh Tal, widow of Wasfi Tel, the murdered Jordanian Prime Minister, was the founder of the Museum of Popular Culture in Amman. Jabri’s obsession with preserving his heritage led him to record, in his sensitive and original neo-realist style, many sites in Jordan that have now disappeared, like the old port-city of Aqaba in the south and late King Abdulla’s guest house in Maan.
On a study tour in France and the United States in 1982, he received a training in museology and, on his return to Jordan, he took over the redesign and instalment of the display at the Museum of Popular Culture. He himself founded the Petra National Trust for the preservation of Petra (where he has been buried) and worked on the conservation and restoration of several old sites. He was the first artist to win the prize “Art in the Service of the Community” given by the Jordanian Royal Society of Fine Arts in 1991.
Jabri was murdered in his apartment in Amman. The timing of his death is particularly cruel: he had recently returned from Berlin where he had participated in a group show of Arab artists and where he had been offered a one-man show for which he was excitedly preparing.
Lucretia Stewart
Afternoon
Zane took us to her aunt (Inad’s sister) and we then went to “Holy Land” an emporium of tacky souvenirs of Jordan, mostly produced in India and China.
Had tea. Met her husband Marwan – ex airline pilot, born also in 1942, and he two daughters. There is a married son apparently.

Today shopping for tablecloths to carry back to England. I stood apart from this but Angie eventually took all of this man’s stock – at a better price I think than she paid in Damascus three years ago.
And it rained. Only for about ten minutes, and not even a heavy downpour by English or Vancouver standards, but within minutes the streets were teeming with water as there was no effective run-off. Inad said that after a long dry spell the drains get blocked and the ground becomes very hard and impervious.
Later we visited Inad’s mother and two of his sisters who lived in an old buiding in Old Amman. It was a very substantial but very appetising meal – too much really.

The night was spent in a tent built on a metal frame, raised above the ground. 16 or so tents were arranged in rows in this little encampment sheltered by mountains and rocks. Tents for eating and socializing, cooking, and ablutions were arranged on the other side.
I am not sure what to make of this. At one level it was a novel experience to spend a night in the desert, but there were similar camps nearby, the desert was criss-crossed with Land Cruiser tracks and Ahmed’s mobile phone was going off constantly. We were not at all isolated with the elements.
Having said that, when we arrived at night there was a great flurry of activity at the village with an ambulance on standby and a police helicopter dropping down on the road. Apparently two English climbers had got lost. Our Bedouin guide was convinced that they would die.
We later learned that they had been found. Food and water was dropped to them by helicopter but they had to spend the night in the desert until they could be rescued the following morning – which they were.
Our Bedouin driver took us in his ramshackle Toyota Land Cruiser to view parts of the desert. The Toyota was absolutely stripped. The radio and lighter was gone, door handles were missing, the upholstery was threadbare. But it worked – just. On our drive there were signs that the starter motor was failing and the driver was taking it to the garage that morning. The desert is obviously hard on vehicles and I imagine a shiny new showroom car would last about a week in the desert. I suppose these guys pick their vehicle up second hand. As long as the basics work, that’s fine.
The desert was impressive in the morning and the heat was rising. The mountains rose high above us but huge tracts of rock had been worn down to coloured sand over millennia. The desert has always been inhabited. We were taken to an oasis where early travellers had left inscriptions and drawings on the rocks. There were even substantial lone trees growing out of a cleft in rocks where moisture and soil had settled. We were shown the parts of the desert where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed.
Drove back to Amman for a shower and rest. This was quite a long trip

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Up at 5:30 for the long drive to Petra. The driver Ahmed took ourselves and Zane and Kinda. He was formerly a soldier and one of King Hussein’s special guards. It seems that he may have lost this position when King Abdullah came to the throne and brought in his own people. He has ten children. On the two day journey he spent a lot of time on his mobile, which seemed to work everywhere, even in the desert and had an Ice Cream Van jingle as a ring tone. After a while this became annoying.
We stopped for breakfast at a roadside restaurant cum tourist bazaar at 8 pm for breakfast. We surprised them because half the staff were still sleeping on mattresses on the floor. The breakfast was pretty dreadful. Unfrozen hamburger buns, slices of processed cheese etc. The food arrived first, the cutlery some ten minutes later.
On the way we drove through a valley where we could see the ancient and abandoned village of Showbak. There was a castle on the hill.
We arrived in Wadi Musa, the comunity close to Petra at about 11:30.
Inad had organized horse and cart transport down to Petra. These were rudimentary affairs taking two passengers with a driver on the side. The horses had a hard time of it I thought. They could pull us at a trot on the smoother track but over the flag stone paving it was hard work and extremely bumpy. The springing of the carts was minimal.
Petra is reached down the valley through a narrow cleft in the rocks, which must have been very useful defensively, although it appeared that the town was open on the other side. The immediate encounter is with the so-called Treasury, a mgnificent tomb with pilasters and porticos carved into the soft sandstone. This was the image used in the Indiana Jones film The Last Crusade.
What survives of Petra is remarkable, not least because of the hidden nature of the city. The upper part is given over mostly to tombs carved in the rock, of greater or lesser magnificnce. Lower down there is a colonnaded street with a market place and evidence of normal life and habitation, temples etc.
Petra flourished under the Nabitean people who governed the old silk road in these parts. The city went into decline in the 2nd century AD after the Romans moved the trading centre to Bosra in Syria, which we visited three years ago.
The same driver took us out of the valley but with a different horse. Apparently the drivers are now required to rest their horses after a few hours. Previously, from what I have been told, they flogged them to death
Later in the afternoon we headed off to Wadi Rum. The journey was longer than expected from looking at the map. The descent from the mountains towards Aqaba seemed to be endless. We reached the desert for sunset.

When Inad was a boy (and he is about 60) Amman had a population of about 40,000. Today the recorded population is 2,000,000 and growing.Each time there is trouble in the Middle East waves of immigrants flood into Amman. The latest influx has come from Iraq, but before that there was a Lebanese immigration, a Kuwaiti immigration and a Palestinian immigration.
The first modern settlement came in 1878 when a colony of Circassians was re-settled in Amman by the Ottoman Turks. Hitherto it was an oasis and the ruins of the old city of Philadelphia. It was the formation of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan by the British after WWII that established Amman and the Circassians became the King’s bodyguard.
First off we explored the ampitheatre. It is second century AD and pre-dates the one I saw in Bosra three years ago. It’s always impressive to discover how remarkably well-preserved these buildings are. This is partly die to being covered with sand for centuries and partly because there was no demand, until the 20th century to re-use the cut stone.
Later we went up to the citadel on Jabal Amman. Here is a museum and the remnants of columns from various public buildings. There was once more, but after an earthquake in 1923, the residents of Amman raided the site for stone to replace their adobe houses that had been destroyed by the quake.

Friday is the Islamic Holy Day and most have a day off work. Inad and Lorraine took us out to “Greenland”, a new development where they are building themselves a new villa. We explored the site. It is certainly going to be a large house and they have incorporated apartments for the children
Otherwise generally a restful day.
Zain took us down into Amman in the evening.