Letter from Amman: discovering resilience around the dinner table

Dining in a different culture lets Belle TIndall contemplate struggle and belonging across the heartlands of the Middle East.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

a Lebanese meal of many dishes displayed on a table.

Did you know that a traditional Lebanese meal is usually served in four or five courses?

First comes the vegetarian feast; a smoky eggplant dip, a mountain of pita, grape leaves that are rolled around vegetables, rice and nuts, bowls of pickled turnips and ribboned cucumber.

Then a hint of meat is introduced; chicken wings and slow-cooked liver, beef meatballs unfused with onion and parsley and smothered in breadcrumbs, all served alongside more dips, more vegetables and more pita.

The third time the servers come around, you are presented with the climax of the meal - a plate of painstakingly cooked lamb and chicken skewers. Only once that has been enjoyed can you expect desert before a final course of fresh mint tea and little almondy-flavoured treats.

Each time the servers re-appear, you find yourself convinced that there cannot be enough room on the table to accommodate yet another round of plates. And each time you realise that you were wrong. Lebanese cuisine, similar to many other Middle Eastern cuisines in this respect, is designed to be enjoyed slowly, continually, and communally.

I did not know this.

When I found myself at a Lebanese restaurant in their neighbouring country of Jordan (affectionately referred to as ‘the oasis of the Middle East’ throughout the evening), I naturally loaded up my plate on the first round, wondering why everyone around me was being so overly polite with their miniature portions. That was, of course, my mistake. By the third (and arguably best) course, I was defeated. My far savvier dining companions that evening were Christians leaders from across Jordan, the Middle East, and beyond. Among those present were Anglican bishops and archbishops, those whose provinces spanned countries and even continents. Leaders from the Oriental Orthodox family – representing Coptic Orthodox, Syriac, Indian, Greek and Armenian. There were Maronite leaders from Lebanon, Lutheran leaders from Jordan, and Anglican leaders from Israel to name but a few. And then there was me. I am twenty-seven years or so into this Christian life of mine, and as well as being exposed to six or seven different expressions of ‘church’ in my lifetime, I also read a lot. So, I had kidded myself into thinking that I understood the immense diversity encapsulated in the term ‘Christianity’. It turns out that I was wrong, again (are you beginning to sense the theme of my trip?).

If there is such a thing as sacred geography, I think I may have experienced it that afternoon. I was able to soak in the past, and it was glorious. Almost as glorious as the glimpse of the present that I was granted that evening.

Utterly honoured to be at that table in Jordan’s capital city of Amman, I was exposed to more diversity in that one meal than I had experienced in my entire life. I am truly not exaggerating when I say that there wasn’t a single minute spent at that restaurant where I wasn’t soaking up something entirely new; whether that be a story, a statistic, a taste or a custom. There were seemingly endless details to learn about differing expressions of a faith that I knew so well, lived out in contexts that I knew not at all. The whole experience was a sledgehammer to any notions, consciously denied yet subconsciously held, that Christianity had come to set up its largest camp in Europe.

On the contrary; we are, at present, but a quarter of the story.

Furthermore, the Middle East, in many respects, is the birthplace of Christianity. These countries are the ‘biblical heartlands’, as Rupert Shortt puts it. The Christian presence there dates back to the lifetime of Jesus Christ himself, who travelled and taught throughout the then Roman-occupied lands. As a Biblical studies scholar, one of my favourite oddities of Christianity is that it is, to a degree, situated. There’s human context involved; tangible, immersible, learnable context. The death and resurrection of the Son of God happened in human history. Of course, Christianity simultaneously bursts the banks of such contexts; in a far truer way it is unplaceable and certainly uncontainable, transcending time, space and matter. It resides beyond all that we can measure. God is, after all, over all things, through all things, and in all things (to borrow a phrase from Paul… who wrote this in a particular letter, to a church rooted in the particular city of Ephesus, during the particular timeframe of 60-62 AD. So you see my point…).

But still, the context is there: the depth of history, the breadth of legacy. As Augustine once said of the Church: it is on a pilgrimage through time. And I would suggest that nowhere is such a pilgrimage more obvious than the ‘biblical heartlands’ of the Middle East. Indeed, one of the variables that fed into me being embarrassingly eager at the dinner table that evening was the appetite that had been worked up that day. An appetite caused by venturing into the Jordanian wilderness, walking along the Jordan River, journeying up Mt. Nebo, looking out over the landscape that one can find detailed in the pages of the Bible.

‘Not a bad place to have a cup of tea, aye?’, remarked the Archbishop of Dublin (who knows these regions well), as we sat next in the grounds of a Franciscan Monastery on the top of Mt. Nebo, looking out over the Dead Sea and all that surrounds it.

I began to ponder at length what faith looks like when it is laced with defiance. By the third course I was beginning to appreciate (albeit in an incredibly limited sense) what hope feels like when it must be stubborn to survive.

Over a long and shared meal, the kind that makes getting to know the stranger opposite you quite inevitable, I was able to hear about what it’s like to be a Christian in the Middle East in the here and now. The hospitality extended to me at the table included me being so generously provided with stories of what it can be like to be a Christian in their contexts.

Of course, many stories shared throughout my time in Jordan were pertaining to the on-going Israel-Palestine conflict. I was able to speak with a Greek Orthodox Bishop about the Greek Orthodox church, filled to bursting with refugees, which was struck and destroyed in a Gaza City blast. I was able to hear about the Anglican-run Cancer Treatment Centre of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which was hit and damaged in a similar way.

I learnt about the Christian communities who are readying themselves to respond to the needs and trauma of those who may, eventually, be able to seek refuge in their countries. I heard compassion flow from people whose eyes hadn’t for one moment turned away from the on-going plight of the Palestinian, nor the Israeli, people.

I also realised that evening, just how much there is much to be learnt about the faith that one has taken for granted, from those for whom the very same faith is a source of discrimination, even danger. The pressure that 360 million Christians across the world are living under is referred to by Rupert Shortt as ‘christianophobia’ and profoundly coined a ‘360-degree threat’ by Janine Di Giovanni.

I heard how it feels to receive word that members of your community have been executed for their Christian faith; how such news incites instant fear and unimaginable grief. I spoke to one man who plans to leave the country he’s currently residing in as soon as a certain political leader is no longer present, because according to him, this sympathetic leader’s presence is the only reason his Christian faith has been tolerated thus far.

And very quickly, I realised that I was no longer learning about these Christian leaders and the communities they represent, I was learning from them. I began to ponder at length what faith looks like when it is laced with defiance. By the third course I was beginning to appreciate (albeit in an incredibly limited sense) what hope feels like when it must be stubborn to survive. I glimpsed first-hand the difference that resilience can make to one’s compassion. Like I say, I was intending to learn about these communities, but I found myself learning from them.

Sitting at a table in a country that I had never been to before, with a group of people who were all strangers to me before this trip, trying to wrap my head around contexts that I have no experience of, the words of the afore-mentioned Janine Di Giovanni sprang to mind,

‘It (Christianity) combines ritual, which soothes in anxious times, with a vast sense of belonging to something much larger and greater than yourself.’

How, in that situation, where I had utterly misunderstood the meal-time etiquette, could it be that I felt a sense of belonging? On one level, it could very well have an awful lot to do with how naturally hospitality seems to come to people in Jordan, and it appears, the Middle East in general. But, I would suggest that it is something else too; something larger, something greater, something unseen.

Perhaps Christian community, in accordance with the Son of God upon which it is built, is both completely situated in one’s individual time and place, and simultaneously utterly un-containable.

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Digital

Freedom

30 October 2024

5 min read

Seen in Beijing: what’s it like in a surveillance society?

Cameras and controls remind a visitor to value freedom.

Alex Ross

A guard stands behind a barrier across an entrance to a station escalator.

A Beijing station gate and guard.

The recent Archers’ storyline wouldn’t have worked in Beijing. Here, great gantries of traffic cameras see into cars and record who is driving, so a court case which hinged on who was behind the wheel would not play out in months of suspense. The British press periodically runs stories on how much tracking and surveilling we are subject to, while the success of the TV series Hunted showed just how hard it is it to evade detection, and how interested we are in the possibility—but how often do we stop to think about the tensions inherent in the freedoms we enjoy?

It is difficult to explain just how free life in Britain is to someone in China, and how precious, and conducive to social good, that freedom is, to people at home. Take my recent experiences. Prior to entry at Beijing airport, I was randomly chosen for a health check and required to give a mouth swap. This may have been a benign Covid testing program, but it was impossible to tell from the questions on screen we had to answer—and a mouth swab certainly hands DNA to the authorities. At the university where I was studying, face scans are required for entry on every gate, and visitors must be registered with state ID in advance. Despite not having been in China since prior to Covid restrictions, my face had been pre-programmed into the system and an old photograph flashed up on screen as the barriers opened.

The first time I used a rental bike to cycle back to campus (the local Boris-bikes come on a monthly scheme, linked to a registered phone number), a message flashed up on my phone telling me that I had gone the wrong way down a one-way bike lane. The banner appeared twice, and the system would not let me lock the bike until I had acknowledged my error. The fact that the GPS system tracks the bikes so closely it knew I had gone against the traffic flow for a couple of hundred metres to avoid cycling across a 4-lane street was a surprise. Since that phone is registered to a Chinese friend, such infractions are also potentially a problem for him. What was less surprising, is the systemic nature of China’s ability to track its people at all times.

Walking through my university campus, where every junction has three or four cameras covering all directions, I occasionally wonder where students find space to have a quick snog.

No one uses cash in cities in China; in many outlets and places cash isn’t even accepted. Everyone uses apps like WeChat or Alipay to pay for goods—even at food trucks and casual stalls the vendor has a machine to scan a phone QR code. WeChat is WhatsApp and Facebook and a bank debit card and a travel service and news outlet rolled into one; Alipay, its only effective rival, offers similar. To obtain either account, a phone number is needed, numbers which have to be registered. And to pay for anything, a bank account in the name of the individual must be linked to the account. In other words, the government can choose to know every purchase I make, and its exact time and place. A friend who works in a bank says he uses cash where possible because he doesn’t want his colleagues in the bank to see what he's been buying.

Transport is also heavily regulated. To enter a train station, a national ID card is needed, which is scanned after bags are x-rayed. To purchase a high-speed train ticket, a national ID card—or passport for foreigners—is required. It might be possible to purchase a ticket anonymously in cash from a ticket window outside the station for an old-fashioned slow train, but one would still need an ID card corresponding to the face being scanned to make it to the platform—and the train station has, of course, cameras at every entrance and exit.

Cameras are pervasive. Walking through my university campus, where every junction has three or four cameras covering all directions, I occasionally wonder where students find space to have a quick snog. The only place I have not yet noticed cameras is the swimming pool changing rooms, which are communal, and in which I am the only person not to shower naked. There are cameras in the church sanctuary, and cameras on street crossings.

Imagine being constantly reminded by human overseers that your activity in person and online is both seen and heard.

Even when not being watched, out in the countryside, the state makes its presence felt. On a recent hike in the hills, our passage triggered a recording every few hundred metres: “Preventing forest fires is everyone’s responsibility.” Once or twice is common sense, ten or twenty times a stroll is social intrusion. One can, of course, learn to ignore the posters, the announcements, the security guards on trains playing their pre-recorded notices as they wander up the aisles and the loud speaker reminders that smoking in the toilets or boarding without a ticket would affect one’s social credit score and imperil future train travel, but white noise shapes perception.

As a (mostly) upright citizen, there are many upsides to constant surveillance. People leave their laptops unattended on trains, since they will not be stolen. Delivery packages are left strewn by the roadside or by a doorway: anyone stealing them will be quickly found. There is almost no graffiti. I can walk around at night safe in the knowledge that I am exceedingly unlikely to be a victim of petty theft, let alone knife or gun crime. Many Chinese have horrified tales of pickpockets in European cities or crime rates in the UK, while young friends are so used to the state having access to phone data and camera logs that they barely notice. Most Chinese I know are very happy with the trade-off of surveillance for safety—and the longer I spend in Beijing, the more appealing that normality seems.

To those who have lived outside, however, the restrictions make for a more Orwellian existence. Any church group wanting to hold an online service must apply for a permit. A friend was recently blocked from his WeChat account for a period after using a politically sensitive term in a family group-chat. Not being able to access certain foreign websites, search engines or media (no Google, no WhatsApp and no Guardian without an illegal virtual private network) might be an irritation for a foreign resident but means a lifetime of knowingly limited information for a citizen. Not being able to access information freely means, ultimately, not being able to think freely, a loss that cannot be quantified. The elite can skip over the firewall, but many cannot.

We have seen the dangers recently in the UK of limited information flow, and of social media interference by hostile players. Imagine never being able to know whether the information you are receiving is trustworthy—or being constantly reminded by human overseers that your activity in person and online is both seen and heard. Christians may believe in the benevolent and watchful gaze of God—but are rightly wary of devolving that omniscience to fellow humans.