Stuff Jordanian People Like #1: Photos of King Abdullah II

While I have been busy with research, I’ve neglected my blog, not so much because I’ve been too busy to write, but because I’ve had little I can share with a general audience. So to keep the creative juices flowing, I’ll be doing a parody series of "Stuff White People Like" (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/), inevitably titled "Stuff Jordanian People Like".

#1 Photographs of King Abdullah II.

Nations love immortalizing their heads of state in various media, but none more so since Stalinist Russia than perhaps Jordan - like a cult of personality only less fearful and more blissfully ignorant about what the king actually does, which, besides his presumed political duties, is everything: from scuba diving, to piloting helicopters, to riding motorcyles, to acting as an extra on Star Trek, Abdullah has done it and probably has been photographed doing it; all but the most intimate bodily functions are fair game. The English daily features a different Abdullah shot each day, and if Jordanians munched on cereal in the mornings instead of zait ou zatar (olive oil and thyme with bread), they would no doubt collect portraits of King Abdullah in cereal boxes. Whether or not Jordanians approve of Abdullah is inconsequential, like trying to decide whether or not Jordanians actually prefer the desert; that’s just how things are here. And at least in Jordan, unlike some of its neighbors, you won’t be imprisoned for three years over a satirical poem about your leader. Displayed in the ritziest restaurants to the humblest falafel stands, framed astutely inside homes, and weaving in and out of traffic plastered to taxi windshields, Abdullah’s face is more familiar to Jordanians than their third cousin’s – and that’s saying a lot. Consequently Abdullah infamously dons a bushy black beard when mingling with the common folk, like sneaking into a hospital ward to check up on the state of healthcare or smoking argeelah with some old men on a street corner talking about the state of the economy.

He learned such covert activities not from his military training but from his father, the late King Hussein. And while he’ll never have the classic patriarchal and mustachioed Arab good looks of his father, whose now fading visage still graces shop windows and peeling, sun-bleached car decals, Abdullah makes up for this lack of Arab-ness with an appealing Anglophilia: he founded the King’s Academy in Jordan, modeled after his experiences at the prestigious American boarding school Deerfield Academy and from his time at Oxford; he speaks English like a true Briton (much to the befuddlement of Jordanians who recognize that Abdullah speaks Arabic with a foreigner’s accent); he has unusually blonde-haired children; and like many a clever world leader, he’s married to a supermodel. The only personality Jordanians enjoy fawning over more than King Abdullah is Queen Rania whose slim, attractive figure has defied the law of nature that Jordanian women inflate like baking khobez (bread) by kid number five or by age thirty, whichever comes first.



(King Abdullah as an extra on Star Trek, "Investigations", 1996)