Background:
Tūjān al-Faīṣal, the first female member of the Jordanian parliament, is being interviewed and talks about her background, the effects that the Israeli-Jordan peace treaty has on Jordan politics and democracy, pluralism and the role of intelligence in Jordan, legal and judicial deficits, rural population and fundamentalism as well as other general societal and political issues.
For more information on Tūjān al-Faīṣal, please refer to the tape Jordanian MP Tujan al-Faīṣal / Circassians in Jordan and the Middle East: http://www.arabwestreport.info/en/jordanian-mp-tūjān-al-faīṣal-circassians-jordan-and-middle-east
Side A:
Tūjān al-Faīṣal is introduced by an FPA journalist: being of Circassian origin and very critical of the current peace process handling. She is fighting for women’s liberation and against religious hypocrisy. She used to be a TV presenter and was elected in November 1993.
She then introduces herself as a Jordanian from Circassian origin. Her grand grandfathers emigrated to Jordan during the Ottoman empire and settled down in Amman and other towns, being the first establishers of modern Amman. She herself ran for parliament in 1989, faced by the government-aided fundamentalists’ campaign, and failed. She ran again in 1993 and now occupies a seat for Amman. She holds a degree in English language and literature retrieved from the University of Jordan. After her BA, she took a media career and worked as a TV producer announcer for eleven years, during which she also held administrative positions such as the director of development communication. In total, she spent eighteen years working in TV/radio/newspaper related posts. Since 1990, she is a regular political columnist. She is an independent member of parliament and joined its legal committee as well as its education committee. She neither calls herself a women’s rights advocator nor a feminist, but instead a human rights advocator and spent more work on children rights than on women’s rights.
When al-Faīṣal is asked about internal politics, she states that Jordan internal politics are centred around the Israeli-Jordan peace treaty. Since the Washington Declaration, which prepared the peace treaty, Jordan lost in pluralism with a pro peace treaty opinion being the only accepted one, which is due to regime and security forces pressure. There are so many security bodies in Jordan that sometimes track on them is lost. Even the governors do not serve as civilian servants but rather as security agents, including the governor of Amman. The general feeling since the peace treaty is a loss of sovereignty and a tightened grip of the security forces. The previous house of parliament witnesses an unprecedented incident when in 1991 two MPs were put on trail over accusations of planning a coup, with the evidence allegedly having been invented. One of them, after being released from prison, founded the “Society of the Resistance of Zionism“, and was elected for parliament again, being both head of the engineering syndicate and head of the union of syndicates. The other imprisoned MP disappeared from the political stage. She criticises the procedures of military courts. For the first time since 1967, she saw a number of tanks in the streets of Amman since the peace treaty, now blue instead of green. Further, she elaborates: why she thinks the 1989 “One man, one vote“ law was aimed at dividing the country into tribal loyalties and allowing some tribes to control certain constituencies; why the Jordanian trading of land with Israel is a pre-arranged scenario; and how her campaigning against the peace treaty was disturbed by the government but welcomed by the people.
Side B:
Al-Faīṣal continues to talk about former Prime Minister Aḥmad ʿUbaīdāt’s violent intelligence past and his opposition to the peace treaty. The scope of spying on people is generally high and intelligence plays a prominent role in administration (including in higher education). Furthermore she shares her anticipation that one day people will violently take the streets and describes the 1989 uprisings in the Maʿān and al-Karak governorates (with an originally poor but regime-loyal population). She then elaborates upon the little but promised economic benefit from the peace treaty and the colonial character of the Amman Economic Summit. Arguing that there is little level of religious sentiments in Jordan as Jordan has generally been less religious than other Arab counties, she stresses that there has been a rise of religious fundamentalism in Jordan in times of economic recession. She further discusses the parliamentary successes of the Jordan Muslim Brotherhood with their Islamic Action Front and the the fundamentalists’s influence on clothing. At last she refers to the popularity of Hamas in Jordan, parliamentary opposition and finally the general role of women and polygamy in Jordan.
