The Eye Abroad
football in jordan: a study in similarity
PrintPeople like to make the joke that Jordan is between “Iraq and a hard place”—not all that funny. But Jordan is a pro-American country squished between a lot of U.S. State Department travel warnings: Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and, of course, Iraq. Being in such a central location in the region lends Jordanians a lot of the flavor from these other countries, as well as some of the politics. On Jan. 30, I traveled to Amman, Jordan, to begin my four-month study abroad experience. I’m currently taking classes in Arabic and middle eastern studies at the University of Jordan in Amman. I’m living in and commuting from an apartment I share with another American from South Dakota, in a small district of the city called Jabal Amman.
I recently took a trip to the center of Jordanian athletics, a sprawling sports complex in Amman called “al-Medina al-Riyadhiya” (roughly translated as “Sports City”), to watch Wihdat, a football team—that’s soccer team, if you speak American—with a following from the Palestinian refugee camps outside Amman. Wihdat was going to play a Jordanian team, Faisaly; the two teams have the biggest rivalry in the Jordanian Football Association. Upon our arrival, each of us was patted down and our bags searched by a contingent of police in full riot gear. They soon decided that it would be too disruptive to have a line of Americans in the stands, and directed us to our own special seating section, away from the crowds. On a side note, the reasons Jordan has not been afflicted with some of the security problems of its neighbors are its extremely efficient police, intelligence, and security services. The day after we arrived in Jordan, the other students in the program and I went on a train tour of part of the desert outside Amman. We were told after the fact that the white-haired woman wearing a hijab on the train was an intelligence officer, and that her suitcase contained an automatic weapon and a satellite radio.
After some finagling for seats, we managed to use “wasta,” a term Jordanians like to use for name-dropping or pulling rank, to negotiate our way into the Jordanian section of the stands. There, each girl in our group was promptly surrounded, photographed, and given free merchandise by a fascinated crowd. Once the game began, the attention shifted from the six Americans in the stands to the players. Despite cultural differences, like being in a group with the only two girls in the entire stadium, or having the guy next to you grab your hand and kiss you on the cheek, many aspects of Jordanian and western football traditions are the same. Chants were as obscene as football chants anywhere else in the world, despite the fact that the crowd was completely sober, and they largely carried racial overtones—political correctness be damned—as both the game’s participants and fans were split along racial lines. The crowd demonstrated their team preferences by wearing the “keffiyeh.” The checked scarf, used in the west as a hipster fashion statement, is here a declaration of allegiance: a red checked keffiyeh is a declaration of “East Bank,” or Jordanian allegiance, whereas a black checked one shows support for the West Bank, and more generally the Palestinians.
So, while Jordan may be a peaceful abode between “Iraq and a hard place,” it is faced with a twist on the challenges of your average American city—rivalries based on such factors as tribalism, family affiliation, and Bedouin, peasant, or urban lineage, as well as the constant threat of terrorism or domestic disruption. As a visitor to Jordan, I found that a football game is the perfect arena to witness these challenges.
Rajiv Lalla, a Columbia College junior, has also traveled through Uganda and Kenya as part of his study abroad program.
26 February 2009
vol. 6, issue 5
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