Memories: An Oasis in Time

By Kamel Abu Jaber

The story of Kamel Abu Jaber (1932-2020) is in some ways the story of the modern day Kingdom of Jordan. In this short and sweet collection of memories, Kamel recounts his tribal past, being a Christian Bedouin family, his childhood, seeking better opportunities in the United States, returning to his homeland to become head of many educational establishments and later a major political figure. Full of humour wit and wise andecdotes, Kamel takes you on his life' s unexpected journey with all its twists and turns. These stories were barely finished before his passing in 2020, and were published posthumously with a collection of photographs compiled by his wife Loretta Pacifico Abu Jaber.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: May 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781843919902

Kamel Abu Jaber

Professor Kamel S. Abu Jaber is an internationally recognised statesman, diplomat and scholar. He was the Foreign Minister to Jordan in 1991 during the Madrid Peace Conference negotiating a peace treaty between Israel, Palestine and Jordan. He has written many articles and books about the Middle East. Among his most notable books: The Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party (1966) and The Palestinians: People of the Olive Tree (1980) and The Jordanians (1991) currently being republished by Hesperus Press.

Book preview

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Preface

I:THE ABU JABERS

1:Introduction to the Tribe

2:Saleh Ibn Nasser

3:Conversion to Orthodoxy

4:Family Honor

5:Dove of Peace

6:Garayeb

7:Salti Traditions

II:CHILDHOOD

8:Salt

9:Yadudeh

10:Amman

11:Religious Identity

12:The Bishop’s School

13:My Mentors

14:Politics Enters My Life

III:ADULTHOOD

15:New Beginnings

16:Professor at Last

17:Return to Roots

18:Post Cabinet

19:Democracy a la Saddam

20:Road to Madrid

21:From Jericho, Oxford to the Senate

22:Semi-Retirement

Epilogue

Copyright

Acknowledgements

This labor of love would not have been possible without the encouragement and enthusiastic support of my children Linda and Nyla and my grandchildren Kamil and Nour Ammari and Summer and Abigail Mohrmann, as well as the gracious assistance of my dear friends Ica Wahabeh, former managing editor, and editor of the opinion page, of the Jordan Times newspaper, and Jacky Sawalha, author and freelance writer, without whom this project would not have come to fruition. Additionally, I would like to extend special thanks to our good friend, Jordanian artist Riham al-Ghassib, for her painting The Farm, 1999, acrylic on canvas, which depicts Dr. Kamel Abu Jaber’s farmhouse – our favorite place – and graces the front cover of the book.

Preface

I started writing these memoirs around 40 years ago, during which time I kept adding, sometimes amending, and often deleting a line or two here and there. The fact that my life was neither neat nor orderly and it did not progress along defined lines might explain why I found writing these recollections to be most difficult. It is because I was trying to create images that would convey to others, especially my children, grandchildren and the youth of each yesterday, my life in the Amman and Jordan that I love. Or maybe the difficulty was caused by the fact that my life spanned at least two modes of human civilization.

Sometimes, seeing how things were and how they are now, I almost believe I was catapulted in time from the Middle Ages to the present. My life, like Jordan’s, changed in a short space of time from simple, pastoral, to modern; and then, I found myself in academia. Throughout, images of the past and present intertwine; the tribal and the millet systems, with all they entail, continue to force and impose themselves on the life and laws of today.

In trying to correlate my life to the developments of Amman, one anomaly immediately springs to mind. While age continued relentlessly to creep up on me, Amman seemed to only grow younger. No longer are its steep stairways in as much use and no one hears anymore the dallal (the town crier) informing the people of an imminent event or the approach of a holiday. Nor can one see anymore the trash collectors loading their donkeys, going house to house and climbing the steep stairs, or taking their loads to Misdar Aysheh for burning.

Though growing, Amman, unlike me, grows younger, combining the heritage of the ancient past, Rabbat Ammoun - Philadelphia of the Roman era - with that of the Arab and Islamic eras in a unique medley of architecture, sound and color. More, of course, can be written about that, but suffice it to say, planned or not, life for me, like for Amman, turned out to be beautiful and full of hope.

Looking back at my life now, I begin to truly appreciate Aristotle’s idea that the only two constants in life are ‘the passage of time and change’. The moment a person is born, his life begins to change, not only physically, but also mentally. I never thought of change as a threat; rather, I indeed welcomed it, at times, I even looked forward to it. Every human being, indeed every society, has to change and adapt or else be bypassed by history. The father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, wisely told his people: Change, or perish!

Kamel S. Abu Jaber

Amman, Jordan

I

THE ABU JABERS

Chapter 1

Introduction to the Tribe

One account of my family’s origins goes back to the sheikhs of the Muslim Jubarat, (the Abu Jabers) a tribe of Beer al-Sabi’, Beersheba, in south Palestine. In the 1970s, a member of that tribe called Awad Jum’ah al ‘Awad al-Zubaidi gave me a family tree, which he said was prepared in 1867 tracing our origins to the earliest history of the Arabs following the destruction of Sad Ma’rib, (Ma’rib Dam) in Yemen, in almost prehistoric times. Historians claim that following the destruction of that dam, the tribe moved north, with some of its members settling in the Hijaz and others moving to parts of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and south Jordan prior to the advent of Islam, 15 centuries ago. However exaggerated this account, the relations today between the Muslim Abu Jabers, now refugees having been expelled from their ancestral homeland by Israel, following the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, and the East Jordanian Christian Abu Jabers are very amicable. The facial and physical similarities are sometimes striking. I remember the obituary of one of their sheikhs, Saleh Freih Abu Jaber, which appeared in ad-Dustour newspaper in the early 1970s. Not only did this sheikh carry the exact same name as my father, but his physical features, as they showed in the published photo, very closely resembled those of my father.

On a few occasions, I remember my father telling me that we had Muslim relatives in Palestine. He also told me that their sheikh, known as Prince Hassan Abu Jaber, renowned for his generosity and valor, once visited the Yadudeh Abu Jabers early in the twentieth century.

Another story about the origin of the family says that the Christian Abu Jabers are scions of the Jawabreh clan of the town of Tafileh in south Jordan. The story goes that in the sixteenth century, one young Abu Jaber by the name of Jala was forced to flee having committed a crime of honor. His travels ended in Nazareth where he began to work for a Christian family. Reportedly a handsome, hardworking young man, he eventually married the daughter of his employer/benefactor and his great grandson, Nasser, moved to Nablus in the early eighteenth century. My cousin Raouf Abu Jaber tells this story in one of his writings, … I used to hear that we have relations in Nazareth and other places, but that we also are close relatives of the Tafileh Abu Jabers whose sheikh, Saleh Pasha al-‘Ouran was my uncle Said’s colleague in the Second Legislative Council between June 10, 1931 and June 10, 1934. Incidentally, this gentleman was my father’s friend and a frequent guest in our home whenever he travelled to Amman.

Raouf later adds another version when he writes: … it appears that the origin of the family according to oral history traces to the Arab tribes that remained Christian after the spread of Islam in the south of Jordan and most likely in Tafileh. Following the Ottoman rule of the area which commenced in 1516, and as a result of tax collection and instability due to the clash between the Ottomans and the Bedouin tribes, many inhabitants both Muslim and Christian left these troubled regions and migrated north. First, some settled in the Golan region in today’s south Syria, some in Nazareth, while a branch moved to the town of Marj’eoun in Lebanon where they remained and where they called themselves after the name of their grandmother Naifeh. I heard this version on a few occasions from my own father, who was very interested in genealogy, not only of human families, but of horses too.

Descendants of this Naifeh Abu Jaber, known in Lebanon as Awlad Naifeh (Naifeh’s children), eventually migrated to the United States. One descendant, George Naifeh, later became the American cultural attaché in Jordan where we became friends. Upon his return to the United States, he established the Arab-American Center, which issued a scholarly periodical, The Arab-American Journal. His successor to the presidency of the center was Senator George McGovern, once a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

I got to know some of our relatives in Nazareth when, in the late 1940s, two brothers, Subhi and Jaber, visited us in Amman. Another branch remains in Bethlehem to this day. One of their members owns a large bazaar of memorabilia and artifacts, in the square in front of the Church of the Nativity. My cousin Haider, who once served as an architect in the Engineer’s Corps of the Jordanian Army, got to know a soldier from this Bethlehem branch who was also serving in the Jordanian Army.

* * *

In a diary that my father kept faithfully throughout his life, the following entry was recorded on 23 February 1932: This morning Um Freih gave birth to a baby boy. May God give him long life. However, in the family Bible where my father and mother recorded all the important occasions of life, my date of birth was recorded as 8 March, 1932, and I was given the name Kamel, meaning ‘perfect’ – or ‘complete’. Um Freih, of course, is my mother, whose given name is Aneeseh, meaning ‘good companion’.¹ Freih was the name of the eldest of my five brothers.

I was born in our village, Yadudeh, also known as Khirbet Abu Jaber, about 20 kilometers south of Amman, the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Yadudeh is the site of an ancient tal (hill), with layers of succeeding civilizations dating to prehistoric times. The Aramaic name Yadudeh means my love, a name that I particularly cherish.

The word khirbeh (ruins) refers to the fact that when it was settled by my great-grandfather Saleh, in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was really just that: an uninhabited, ancient settlement in ruins. By the advent of the nineteenth century, and under four hundred years of Ottoman rule, slowly but surely, much of Jordan returned to pastoral and nomadic life. Considered as the periphery of their empire, on the dividing line between the desert and the sown, the Ottomans paid very little attention to this land and its inhabitants, except when it came to collecting taxes and for it being the tariq al haj (pilgrimage road) between Damascus, Syria, and Medina, in the Hijaz. Slowly, the farmers abandoned their villages and joined their nomadic tribes where personal safety was better assured. Some historians tell that when Ottoman rule commenced, there were nearly 1,000 villages in Jordan and only around 200 remained when their rule ended in 1917. Indicative of the neglect of the land was the loss of its very name, referred to only as East Jordan, meaning the land east of the River Jordan.

1. In Arab culture and out of respect, custom dictates that a person not be called by his first name, but rather be referred to by the name of his or her eldest son, preceded by abu ‘father of’, or um ‘mother of’. This holds true between husband and wife where they refer to each other as um or abu and even between brothers and sisters; such customs do not apply in Egypt or in most other Arab countries of North Africa. It is not considered polite to drop all decorum and to become so intimate as to call a person by his or her first name, especially if that person is older or married with children.

Chapter 2

Saleh Ibn Nasser

Several dates are given for the time when Saleh, my great-grandfather, befriended one of the most prominent sheikhs of the Bani Sakhr tribe, Rumaih Abu Junayb, and eventually purchased the rich agricultural land of Yadudeh from him, but it is certain to have occurred during the 1850s. Saleh was a wealthy merchant through his trade in al-qilu, the alkaloid ash of the desert plant known as al-hamd, which is abundant in the Jordanian desert. This shrub, favored as a staple food by the camel, was also the main ingredient in Arabic soap production. The Bedouins would collect the hamd, burn it, collect the ash and ship it to the soap factories of Nablus in Palestine. Saleh became the middleman, leading his caravans of qilu from the land east of the River Jordan to Nablus. By 1878, he was reported to have sold 3,000 camel loads of qilu to the soap factories, with considerable financial profit. Later, he added to his wealth by becoming the supplier of rations to the Ottoman army in the town of Karak, in south Jordan. It was then that Saleh established the family homestead in Yadudeh. A man of great intelligence and resourcefulness, he purchased, in addition to the lands around Yadudeh, lands in Salt, then the principal town of central Jordan, where he built himself a small palace which stands today as one of the architectural landmarks of the nation. Appropriated by the government, it has been refurbished and is now known as the Abu Jaber Museum.

The house in Salt tells of a man of complex taste and nature, with an appetite for life that encompassed the spiritual and the material. Thus it was that both his mind and body were capable of many contradictions, perhaps due to the fact that he almost always lived on the edge of danger. More often than not, he had to define his own role, his own limits, as well as the moral parameters of his life. From Yadudeh, with its semi-primitive style of life to the more sophisticated Salt, the distance is more than that of space and encompasses different dimensions of his personality. His love for Christina, his legitimate wife and daughter of the prominent Kharoubah family of Nablus, perhaps explains the house he built for her.

The Salt house was designed by an Italian architect along the nineteenth century European style. The white Italian marble used for the floors was imported by ship from Italy to