Other People's Houses by Hilary McPhee

Author:Hilary McPhee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522875652
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

At a concert and dinner at the Swedish embassy, I met a senior lecturer from Yarmouk University, who taught ‘clever rural girls’, who made up 90 per cent of his students in Maths, English and Engineering sciences. ‘The boys are useless,’ he said. ‘Preening sex objects looking for clever wives.’ He invited me to visit and speak to his students. Then I went to a lecture at the Australian embassy by Sydney University Professor Stephen Baker, who had been heading up the Pella excavation for the past twenty years, which had recently uncovered a huge temple structure dating from 1800+BC. I was seated next to the director of the Department of Antiquities in Amman, who told me about the Museum With No Frontiers, a virtual museum of Islamic art, that was just being completed with EU funds, where much of this work would be featured. Later, he sent me the link to the website and invited me to visit the department.

Before I left for Italy, Sidi Hassan arranged for me to meet Senator Ina’am Al-Mufti, the first Jordanian woman to hold a governmental position. She had established the Ministry of Social Development, and much else, and was a member, with him, of the Arab Thought Forum.

The senator was impressive and gracious. She asked me, of course, about Norma Khouri’s fraudulent book, Forbidden Love, and I found myself trying to explain how Australian agents and publishers apparently failed to verify Khouri’s fabricated story of a Jordanian woman whose father murdered her in an honour killing after she had a chaste love affair with a young Christian man.

How could this have happened? the senator asked. Did they not check that she was telling the truth? I didn’t know for sure what had gone wrong, but I suspected it was due to the desire to discover a topical bestseller about wicked Islam as practised in a far-off little-known country. The book had sold 250,000 copies in Australia before the Sydney Morning Herald’s Malcolm Knox exposed the hoax. The author, an American citizen resident in Australia, had left Jordan as a three year old. The Jordanian women’s groups I met during my next visit were nothing remotely like the oppressed Arab women Khouri invented, and were outraged by her fabrications and puzzled that Australian publishers could be so naive—or slipshod.

One Friday, an invitation arrived for me to visit Mamdouh Bisharat at the Duke’s Diwan in King Faisal Street in Downtown, next to the old Arab Bank. This Duke’s Diwan is a rare 1920s stone building, which the new Transjordan government leased in the 1940s as the Central Post Office, after which it became the Haifa Hotel, and was saved from demolition by Mamdouh Bisharat and preserved in its original condition. The steep stairs of yellow ceramic went up from the street to five reception rooms with high ceilings and splendid arched windows, and doors opening off a central salon. There were chequered black-and-green tiled floors, blue peeling paint, and walls covered in photographs of Old Amman before the freeways and circles started cutting it up into districts.

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