Story of a City...

I love early mornings. I love coffee from Cups and Kilos. I love the daylight saving time. And I love the beginning of Amman’s spring before the sands from the South and East start creeping into our clear blue sky.



I recently finished reading Abdul Rahman Munif’s “Story of a City”, which tells the story of Amman in the 1940’s. The book is wonderfully intimate, drawing a picture of Amman in that era through the lens of personal memory. Memory is an intriguing thing, oftentimes filtering, reshaping, and adding a tint of its own.

I am very tempted to go off on a tangent, as “memory” is one of the topics that fascinate me the most about human nature and life. But I won’t. Not here and now at least.

I was thinking about Munif’s book as I was driving to work at 7:30 in the morning, smiling at the thought of a time, barely 60 years ago, when first circle was considered to be at the edge of Amman (with the Husseini Mosque downtown as the center, mind you!) It was amusing to read about how, when the Scientific Islamic College was built past first circle, people wondered why a school was built so far, and students struggled to get there through the rain and mud. The book tells of the people who lived in Amman at the time, the street corners, the stairways, the market downtown, the lifestyle, and some of the events that had an impact on the city. It describes the path of the “river” that ran through the heart of the city, next to which the Circassians settled when they first came to Amman. Munif talks about the time of World War II and how it affected Ammani’s in terms of inflation, scarcity of supplies, and the gatherings in the house of the neighborhood that was lucky enough to have a radio that picks the signal of Radio Berlin.

One of the most interesting parts of the book for me was towards the end, describing the political climate around 1947. The three secondary schools in Amman (The Bishop, the Islamic College, and the Hussein College) were a fertile soil for growing activism and political awareness. Students would collaborate in organizing street demonstrations, and a school paper (Sawt Al Jabal) – published by Irbid highschool – was a vibrant platform for student voices all over Jordan at the time.

Makes one wonder what happened to really effective student publications and to youth being involved in public life?


My dad, who also read the book, tells me that you’d enjoy it more when you can relate to what Munif is talking about. To me however, the book is a chance to reflect on Amman’s character and how it grew and evolved. It makes me want to go on a journey of retracing the places mentioned, seeing what remained, what changed, and what completely disappeared. Can you be nostalgic to something you haven’t actually lived?

I stole this photo off Natasha's blog :) she has some pretty interesting ones of Amman in the past..