When T. E. Lawrence handed by Amman a century in the past on the head of the Arab Revolt, town had fewer than 6,000 inhabitants. The one plane flying in had been Ottoman biplanes hoping to drop a bomb on the British officer’s head.
Now the Jordanian capital has a inhabitants of greater than 4 million and is a serious worldwide hub, served by architect Norman Foster’s breathtaking Bedouintent-inspired Queen Alia Airport.
A desert delight: Petra is rightly thought of to be one of many wonders of the world
Within the Seventies and Eighties, earlier than this growth, Amman was residence to Fahrelnissa Zeid, the painter and sculptor whose fabulously daring abstracts and portraits are being rediscovered and given a serious retrospective at London’s Tate Trendy.
Hoping for a glimpse of the world Fahrelnissa knew, I’ve come to Amman – and to Tannoureen, the luxurious downtown restaurant that was as soon as her residence and studio.
Uniquely, maybe, this permits me to dine on beautiful Arab mezze in what was as soon as the artist’s bed room.
Jordan is a outstanding nation. With no oil riches to talk of, it has nonetheless taken excess of its share of refugees displaced within the area’s wars. Fahrelnissa was a refugee of kinds. When she died in 1991, aged 89, it was the top of a peripatetic life that was as noteworthy as her artwork.
She spent her teenagers in Ottoman Istanbul, then married Iraqi prince Zeid bin Hussein in 1933. She knew Hitler, Kemal Ataturk – the founder of contemporary Turkey – and in Fifties London, counted the Queen Mom as an acquaintance.
However she misplaced almost all her royal in-laws once they had been executed within the 1958 Iraqi army coup.
Ultimately she discovered refuge right here in Amman.
Fahrelnissa wouldn’t recognise the glass-clad towers and luxurious inns that exist now. The massive, cool suites with walk-in moist rooms at The Boulevard Arjaan, the place I’m staying, look down on the lodge’s al fresco Italian restaurant and a plaza linked to swish purchasing malls. Jordanians like to buy.
However most of the issues she loved stay. A lone bagpiper nonetheless performs a lament on the partitions of the traditional citadel that stands guard over the Roman theatre and souk under. The remaining columns of the Temple of Hercules level to the heavens, as they’ve for the reason that 2nd century.
Fahrelnissa’s artwork melded modernism with Islamic and Byzantine types. You will discover an identical combine all through Jordan – within the Byzantine mosaic map of the Holy Land on the Church of St George in Madaba; within the angular strains of the fabulous crusader fort at Kerak; within the patterns of the materials that Bedouin ladies nonetheless put on.
I encounter simply such a lady in a Fahrelnissa portrait at Amman’s Darat al Funun gallery.
This arty bolthole, an officer’s membership throughout the inter-war British Mandate, is stuffed with modern Arab artwork in addition to a small, good assortment of Fahrelnissa’s work.
Shut your eyes and pay attention onerous sufficient, and the corridors nonetheless ring with shouts for Scotch and soda. I choose as a substitute for a number of slices of the candy cheese pastry kanafeh – an addictive Center-Japanese dessert – on the rooftop café, and end as Amman’s mosques broadcast the night name to prayer. The muezzins are pre-recorded nowadays, however the ensuing cacophony, startling pigeons from the rooftops, continues to be haunting.
Jordan delights in such moments, although nothing is as placing as rising from the perilously slender rock cleft that results in the cliff-face facade of the Treasury in Petra.
A 3-hour drive from Amman, town’s temples, stairways and cisterns had been carved out of stone by the Nabateans greater than 2,000 years in the past.
A monumental murals as a lot as structure, Petra had a hypnotic pull on Fahrelnissa, who visited typically.
A capital mixture: The King Abdullan I Mosque, one of many landmarks of Amman
On the drive again to Amman I absorb Mount Nebo – the place God allowed Moses to look out over the Promised Land through which he would by no means set foot. Then I dip all the way down to Al-Maghtas, the Unesco World Heritage web site on the River Jordan the place Christ was baptised.
Lastly, I comply with Fahrelnissa’s instance and take a scorching plunge on the artist’s favorite Roman baths and is derived at Hammamat Ma’in. Excessive above the Useless Sea, it is a true oasis the place the springs attain 60C, and desert valleys flip as vividly inexperienced as a Fahrelnissa canvas. Life, maybe, imitating artwork.
