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Hai Al Tafaileh: In city’s historic heart, a neighbourhood feels left behind

By Tom James - Dec 22,2014 - Last updated at Dec 22,2014

AMMAN — Before Amman was the biggest city in Jordan, before glittering outposts like Abdoun and Gardens Street grew up around it, the neighbourhood that is today called Hai Al Tafaileh was just another steeply rising hill, riddled with caves and covered in the same trees, brush and barren rock as the rest of the land stretching away from the outskirts of the city.

Sandwiched between Jabal Al Jofeh and Jabal Al Taj neighbourhoods, Hai Al Tafaileh was built on a hill where “predators lived once upon a time. People dared each other to climb it”, residents told The Jordan Times.

Dry and windswept, far from the little water found on the valley floor below, it was a place no one wanted. At the beginning of the 20th century, the centre of the young city was in Ras Al Ain, not far from the mountain, but a world away. 

Today the neighbourhood constitutes a big chunk of the heart of Amman. Overflowing into narrow, winding alleys, yet within view of the city’s most hypermodern developments; fiercely Jordanian, yet the source of some of the most intense confrontations of the Kingdom’s 2011 brush with the Arab Spring, the neighbourhood embodies many of the most vexing challenges of modern Jordan. 

The area’s residents almost universally describe their relation to the rest of the city — and to the government — as one of intimate exile, kept close enough to touch a world they will never be a part of.

“This is a story,” claimed Abdul Raouf, a community leader in the Hai, “about how the state is not supporting this community”.

Along with his work in west Amman as a computer specialist, Raouf runs a technology programme at the mosque that sits at the heart of Hai Al Tafaileh, Masjid Al Tayaar. There he works with mostly unemployed men who are hoping to gain an edge in the job market by building their computer skills.

The daily commute, the activist said through a translator, is one of contrasts. From the Hai, with its winding, packed streets, to his work in west Amman, every day he travels between what feel like two different cities, he says. 

The closest football field to the Hai is four kilometres away, so instead the children play in the streets. “Why are the services there,” he asks, referring to the wealthier parts of the city, “and not here?”

People in the neighbourhood feel the neglect extends beyond the passive, says Abdul Raouf. The recent reputation for political unrest, riots and violent confrontation with security forces seem to have its toll on the neighbourhood men’s employment chances, according to the activist. 

“We are marked by the government,” said Wesam, a 27-year-old Hai resident, who asked to be identified only by his first name, who as he speaks sits in a basement room in the neighbourhood with a group of other young men, all unemployed. 

Around the room, heads nod.

However, they mostly define a job as a government job, a hard-to-find opportunity for all job seekers nowadays as appointment in civil service and other public agencies is almost sealed. 

Standing on a street corner, an older resident named Mohammad Raoud echoes the sentiment, complaining that the families of the area have ended up stuck on a tiny patch of land far from opportunity.

 

Roots 

 

With about 40,000 residents, Hai Al Tafaileh is one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods, named after Tafileh Governorate, 180km south of Amman, as residents come from that area. Beginning in the 1920s, waves of Jordanian’s fleeing successive droughts in that part of the country came to Amman, especially from Eimeh, a town in the heart of that district.

With its residents not only living in such close quarters, but also hailing from the same town, the neighbourhood maintained an identity all its own. Nearly a hundred years after the first Tafaileh residents arrived, community leaders and local historians estimate that of the families belonging to Eimeh, six major tribes still make up well over three-fourth of the quarter’s population. 

The debate 

 

The claims made by residents like Raoud are debatable, yet experts agree the gap between the neighbourhood and the rest of the city is very real, and rooted as much in history as the oldest families there.

The main source of that gap, according to Tariq Tell, an assistant professor at the American University in Beirut, was a shift in land prices driven by the influx of refugees to Jordan around the mid-20th century. 

At that time, as the first wave of Palestinian immigrants arrived, they settled around the cities in Jordan’s northwest, says Tell, including Amman and Irbid, which made land in those areas more valuable. In parts of the Kingdom, especially in Amman, property values jumped 100 per cent over a relatively short period. Many people who happened to own land in those areas, Tell says, quickly became rich.

But the benefits of the real estate boom mostly skipped Hai Al Tafaileh, Tell said, because the first residents had arrived barely two generations before, and many hadn’t had time to save money for land in the city.

The cruel but predictable knock-on effect struck not only Hai Al Tafaileh, Tell said, but most of the Kingdom’s rural south and east, beginning a cycle of impoverishment that steadily widened the gap between the new urban middle class and everyone else. City residents who benefited from the boom used the money to buy more land, start businesses and send their children to college. But Jordanians who did not own land, or who had the misfortune of owning land in places like Maan and Tafileh, found themselves at best left behind, and at worst thrust into an economic underclass.

Economic conditions in the country at large worsened the problem. As a result of a major financial crisis in 1989, the dinar crashed and the town of Maan, 220km south of Amman, not far from Tafileh, witnessed an uprising that sent a wave of riots in other towns. In Amman, Hai Al Tafaileh led the protests.

Today the area is known as much for being fiercely politically active as it is for any economic challenge its residents face.

During the height of the Arab Spring, of more than 40 regional hirak (grass-roots protest) groups, the Hai Al Tafaileh hirak was widely acknowledged as being the most passionate and extreme in the Kingdom, another scholar said. 

The reason for the neighbourhood’s activism, according to Yazan Dogan, a University of Chicago anthropologist who lived in the Hai during the Arab Spring and studied its politics and history for his doctoral work, was a combination of the real economic conditions in the country as a whole, and a feeling in the neighbourhood of having been singled out for what the residents describe as “harsh treatment.”

An almost complete halt to employment in the public sector and a series of crackdowns on street markets and other parts of the informal economy hit the area hard, Dogan said. 

Tell spoke of a sense of entitlement, as the perception among the Hai residents is that they have historically supported the establishment against internal and external threats. 

“They feel they have a stake in the government, they feel the government owes them,” says Tell. During the Arab Spring, he says, it created “a sense of... deserving to be heard”. 

 

Paradox? 

 

The result is a paradox of identity and loyalty, the expert said, explaining that the combination of the unity of the Hai and the feeling of having powerful justification turned the neighbourhood into the source of some of the fiercest dissent in the Kingdom. At the same time, Tell says, in a sentiment echoed by most of the experts spoken to for this article, the Hai is also deeply patriotic — with a loyalty to the nation coupled with a “we deserve better” sense. 

Sitting in one of the Hai’s mosques, Yehya Al Awamreh, a prominent community figure and head of the Abdali Merchants Association, which led a fierce battle when the municipality relocated Abdali flea market, puts it another way.

The neighbourhood’s youth, he said, see the privilege and wealth in other parts of the city, “and grow up believing the state doesn’t like them”.

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