Yarmouk University, located in the northern city of Irbid, decided to expel students arriving on campus with headgear made from red-striped cloth, arguing it inflamed tribal rivalries. Students have used the shemagh to cover their faces during brawls to hide their identity and have begun wearing variously colored ones to symbolize their tribal affiliations. The university has already reportedly expelled 70 students for the offense.
Following a recent brawl at the University of Jordan in Amman that left 12 students injured and university facilities damaged, 30 students were questioned by university authorities, who promised the perpetrators “harsh punishment.” Earlier, a large-scale brawl involving at least 100 students in the southern city of Ma’an had police cordoning off the road leading to the city’s Al-Hussein University.
But local experts said that banning the headgear wouldn’t solve the problem, which has much deeper roots than student rivalries. King Abdullah is determined to impose the rule of the law on the influential tribes, but tribal chiefs are equally determined to preserve their traditional power and privileges, putting the two on a potential collision course.
“It’s a cosmetic solution,” Muhammad Al-Masri, a researcher at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan, told The Media Line. “The root cause is lack of political activity in Jordanian universities. Universities don’t allow students to associate politically, which would bring them closer together.”
Al-Masri said that over the past 5-7 years tribalism and regionalism have increased in Jordan, and have come to play a greater role in Jordanian politics. By contrast, in the 1980s, students were more aligned along ideological worldviews, represented in the socialist and Islamic political parties.
“The universities are just a reflection of what goes on in Jordanian society,” he said.
Tribes have always played a major role in Jordanian society, but until recently their function was more social and familial than political, Al-Masri said. The turning point, he added, came in 1993 when Jordan’s election law was changed.
Known as “one man one vote,” Jordan’s current election law sought to curb the power of the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition group to the ruling Hashemite family. By limiting the ballot in every election district to one winning candidate, the law both reduced the ability of radicals to win seats in Parliament and strengthened the tribal alliances in the kingdom.
The election law was slightly revised by King Abdallah last May, but the system under which voters are allowed to choose only one candidate remains. Political parties were only allowed to exist in Jordan in 1989.
Expulsion wasn’t the sole solution taken by universities to curb brawls. Some universities announced they would introduce magnetic ID cards, hoping to keep out provocateurs who were not students at the university.
Yasser Abu-Hilalah, a columnist at the Jordanian daily Al-Ghad and head of Al-Jazeera television network’s Jordan bureau, attributed the campus brawls to a deep identity crisis.
“The basic problem is the absence of a common national identity for Jordanians of Palestinian origin and East Bank Jordanians,” he told The Media Line. “The state is attempting to circumvent the identity problem.”
The red and white shemagh represents the East Jordanian tribal identity, while the black and white keffiyeh represents Palestinians, most of whom come from what is now Israel and the West Bank.
Abu-Hilalah said that when Jordan relinquished its claim to the West Bank in 1988, a Palestinian state was meant to emerge. However, it never did — leaving Palestinian Jordanians stateless and with no clear national identity.
Economic cleavages contributed to tensions as well, he added. East Jordanians were mostly employed in the public sector, earning low wages, whereas Palestinians worked in the private sector in Jordan and the Gulf, making more money.
Jordan’s democratic experiment which began in 1989 and witnessed political cooperation between Palestinians and East Bank Jordanians, has gradually reversed, Abu-Hilalah said.
“The state has failed in finding frameworks to mitigate tribalism,” he said. “The only solution is real democracy.”
