Unrest Growing Among Jordan's Worshippers

Beneath the slender minaret of an elegant mosque, Sheikh Subhi Mughribi addressed hundreds of worshippers in the volatile Jordanian city of Maan yesterday and passionately attacked the foundation of the country's foreign policy.

"North Korea said no to America but here in Jordan we have not the will to say no to America and no to war on Iraq," he bellowed through a rasping loudspeaker. "We must learn from North Korea."(Hee,hee)

King Abdullah has never hidden his long-standing belief that an American-led war on Iraq is all but inevitable. As the crunch approaches, his government is struggling to balance its crucial alliance with America with the increasingly popular views represented by Mr Mughribi.

Beneath the surface, other factors make the task of preserving stability and heading off unrest still more difficult.

The fourth anniversary of King Abdullah's accession to the throne passed yesterday. He has yet to emerge from the shadow of his late father, King Hussein.

Jordanians offer heartfelt praise for their dead king. Left unspoken is the belief that his 41-year-old son does not pass muster. This is especially so in Maan, where Mr Mughribi is a prominent religious leader and chief of the Fanatsa clan.

With prayers over, he returned to his home and sat cross-legged beneath a vast picture of the faithful in Mecca.

A few hundred yards away, an armoured car with a machine-gun mounted guarded a junction. Others rumbled through the streets, accompanied by police armed with sub-machine guns. This desert city, 140 miles south of the capital, Amman, has a history of unrest. Its 70,000 people are largely jobless and impoverished after the closure of a local quarry and two factories.

Last November, King Abdullah sent thousands of troops and armed police, supported by tanks and helicopter gunships, to suppress a band of fundamentalists in the city.

Six people were killed and a curfew closed down the town for seven days. The city was isolated from the rest of Jordan by the severing of its telephone links.

The prowling armoured cars are, Mr Mughribi believes, designed to send a message that no dissent will be tolerated once war with Iraq begins.

"This is to keep people quiet," he said. "But the people here aren't afraid. They have their beliefs, their feelings inside them and the government can't change it," he said.

Intense preparations for war make heading-off unrest still more important. This week, Jordan took delivery of six F-16 fighter jets and Patriot anti-missile batteries from America. Boeing Awacs airborne surveillance aircraft are expected to follow.

Mr Mughribi makes no direct criticism of King Abdullah and is anxious to stress that he harbours no blanket resentment against westerners.

But implicit in all that Mr Mughribi says is the belief that the king has not acquired the popular touch needed to master the near-impossible balancing acts required of a Jordanian monarch.

January 31, 2003 - (compassdirect.org) - Christian widow Siham Qandah was informed this morning that apart from direct intervention by Jordanian King Abdullah II, she will be jailed next week for refusing to hand over her two minor children to be raised as Muslims.

In a written order sent from their Amman headquarters, Jordanian security officials declared that they could not do anything to help Qandah in her nearly five-year legal battle to retain custody of her children.

“It’s a sensitive, Muslim-Christian issue,” a JID representative explained to Qandah today. At this point, he admitted, the only person who could do something for her was the King of Jordan. Although palace sources claimed that King Abdullah had been briefed on Qandah’s case in mid November, local Christians now wonder if he really knows about her plight.

The Irbid Court of First Instance issued a warrant for Qandah’s arrest in mid January, although she was not informed until January 20. The court order sentenced her to 30 days’ imprisonment if she failed to surrender her children to their Muslim guardian.

“I was very surprised to receive such a decision,” Qandah said last week, after learning the court had ordered her arrest. “I did not do anything or harm anybody. I am not a criminal. I feel so sad and so scared of losing my children.”

Siham Qandah will be jailed on February 5 for refusing to hand over her children to be raised as Muslims.

According to Michel Hamarneh, an aide to Prince Hasan assigned to monitor Qandah’s case, the Irbid arrest order has been “deferred” for two weeks, until February 5. “So we are trying our best to postpone the decision of the court to jail her for one month,” Hamarneh said. “I hope that we will be able to succeed.”

The aide told Compass that he had been meeting this week with various lawyers who were studying the case, although he admitted, “You know that through the courts, we cannot do anything whatsoever.”

Qandah’s Christian husband died in 1994 while serving as a Jordanian soldier in the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Kosovo. A few months later, an Islamic court informed her he had allegedly converted to Islam several years earlier, producing a so-called “conversion” certificate signed by two Muslim witnesses. There was only a scrawled “X” for her husband’s signature.

Incredulous, Qandah protested that her husband was given a Christian funeral and was buried in the church graveyard, strictly forbidden by law if he was actually a Muslim. But a conversion paper certified by the Islamic courts cannot be contested, so under Jordanian law her children were automatically considered Muslims.

In order to collect the children’s army benefits, Qandah had the court appoint her brother, who had converted to Islam in his youth, as their legal Muslim guardian. But the maternal uncle, who by then had become a mosque leader, eventually objected to the children’s Christian upbringing and opened a civil case in May 1998 so he could raise them as Muslims.

Jordan’s ecclesiastical courts for its Christian citizens refused to tackle the controversial case, leaving jurisdiction in the hands of the Islamic and civil courts. Based on the alleged conversion of her Christian husband to Islam, two lower courts and the Court of Cassation all ruled against Qandah.

In February of last year, Jordan’s Supreme Court denied Qandah’s final appeal and ordered her to surrender her daughter Rawan and son Fadi, now 14 and 13, to the custody of their Muslim uncle.

But Jordanian authorities have not yet enforced the ruling, which has attracted media coverage abroad and prompted a wave of diplomatic appeals to government officials and the royal family.

With the winter school break just concluding, Rawan and Fadi should start classes again next week at the Catholic school in Husn. “She will not send them to school now,” a friend said. “She doesn’t know what to do.”

“I just want to be free from the pressure of my brother, the court, the unfulfilled promises,” Qandah told Compass this week. “I want to live in peace with my children.”

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