A year on and I remember the Egyptian revolution. I remember the anticipation on January 25 2011 and feel happy that I witnessed the revolution in Egypt. A year on and they are still seeking system reform and rejecting the military rule. I do remember when at the height of the slogans in Egypt of "the people and army are one hand" and I was extremely worried and wondered "how are you ok with military rule now". Wisely my friend answered "the time has not come for that fight". A year on and Egyptians had to go through the Supreme Council of Armed Forces committing crimes of killing protesters, sexually assaulting women, and imprisoning people. All this and many Egyptians have sadly asked the revolutionaries to patiently wait for a "peaceful" power transfer. We saw that the Muslim Brotherhood have played dirty political games, stopped supporting the revolutionaries, and sought for their political gain of getting the Parliament. The true revolutionaries are still fighting and advocate that the revolution is not over. A year on and I am not in Egypt but experiencing something new and different. I am in Amman, Jordan this year and experiencing a completely different situation. Jordan is deemed as the most stable country in the Middle East with minimum problems. I am surrounded by 4 foreign students from Germany, Italy, USA, Spain who came to Jordan to study Arabic and do research (instead of going to typical destinations for Arabic in Syria and Egypt). Yet, how stable and great is Jordan? You sense that there is something boiling underneath this stability. I walked into the Jordanian University today (where am doing an internship) and I saw a huge crowd of people holding up signs. I thought maybe they are supporting the revolution in Egypt?!? They had their own demands of raising their salaries. There are small scale demonstrations happening all over Jordan that we get a glimpse of in the Jordanian media like the teachers protests to raise their wages, government reform protests, or Muslim Brotherhood protests. Yet, all these protests lack any anarchist revolutionary sentiments; they are playing it safe towards demands of reform. A year on and the revolutions in the Arab world have not touched Jordan. Instead they are promoting and priding in the notions of safety and stability here. When I talk to people here, they recognize that there is something very wrong about Jordan. Reform is necessary and we secretly talk about a very apparent situation in Jordan that frankly I would be scared to write about it in a public blog- given that there is a strong secret police here. At the same time, how can Jordan have a revolution? I was having a conversation with my friend yesterday on why Jordan does not have a womans movement and it made me think of also why Jordan cannot have a revolution. Since the questions that come to mind are what is Jordan anyways, what does it mean to be Jordanian, and what is the Jordanian identity? It is a confused place with a majority of Palestinians who deny their nationality as Jordanians, a Saudi King, and a minority of Jordanians. What is bringing the Jordanians together? In light of these questions and confusion it seems like a revolution is not possible. How can they revolt and towards the betterment of what when there is nothing bringing them together? This brings me back to Egypt where nationalism is so high and the identity is pretty clear- "We are all Egyptians and love our land, we pride in our differences as Muslims or Christians, liberal or conservative, we are all Egypt". You can see this in an advertisement by the leading Egyptian telecom company showing beautiful scenery of all around Egypt and signing together "Egypt is my mother". Instead in Jordan we find the national anthem of "Long live the King" and not Jordan?
