What is Jordan.. but Amman by Jamil Shawwa

The other day I was having lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant in the DC area, in Virginia. While ordering the food, I came across a server who ‘happened’ to be from the Middle East and particularly from Jordan. Before knowing where he was from exactly, I asked him to tell me and he said Jordan, I then asked, from Amman? And he responded spontaneously by saying, of course, what is Jordan but Amman. The obvious explanation to his answer is that Amman is the capital, the biggest, the richest city so clearly he must be from there, where else. Beneath this simple direct answer lies a volcano of how the people in the Middle East feel about their countries and how the rulers have ruled in the past fifty years. Since the early fifties, all resources in the Arab world, the Middle East have shifted to the capitals of the Arab countries, the government, the financial power, the capital, etc. People from all over the respective countries started to migrate towards the capitals searching for better life. There cities, towns and villages did not have the resources to maintain them. Investments have shifted to the capitals and the very surrounding areas. The capitals became congested, crowded, randomly designed to accommodate the thousands and millions newly immigrants, case in point is Cairo-Egypt.
Cairo became a monster in random buildings and designs, by the way, the Arab world shares this problem with other countries elsewhere like Mexico, etc. The feeling became since the late fifties that if you want to succeed you must go to Misr, meaning Cairo, this is Egypt’s name in Arabic and also Egyptians refer to their capital as Misr. Nasser, Egypt’s leader then almost ignored all other parts of the country and focused on Cairo. The problem became bigger and bigger by time and now as the Egyptians try to expand outside the city, the solutions are very hard to implement. The concentration of power was one of the reasons that those leaders focused on the capitals. They wanted the capital to have the power to control the rest of the country. Another reason was the socialist model that many Arab countries have copied from the defunct Soviet Union. Again, the solution resorts in few words, democracy is one of them, the private initiative and the powers of the market. These solutions that are easy to talk about but difficult to implement, however the gate has opened and it has to be done in the near future. These solutions will overcome the void the Arab youth feel and will steer the focus into building rather than destroying.