The upheaval in my head was about the human tendency which we all share when in dire times of trouble: to plead for salvation to what is supposed to be an omnipotent force that holds our fate in its hands – without ever questioning the meaning and purpose of this instinctive exercise. Why, the question kept haunting me, do believers need to implore God for an intervention to save an innocent little girl like Madeleine, if they believe that He has the power to do it anyway.

Does a most merciful father need us immortals to beg him to do the right thing? Does He need the Pope to intermediate to end a grief-stricken family’s plight?

This dilemma has no comfortable answer for someone like me who has reached his belief in a Creator through an arduous process of rational thinking and reasoning rather than by indoctrinated fear of torture in hell fire.

That’s why all the other believers with whom I tried to share this philosophical issue were unwilling to come near the question of how far God is involved in our daily lives, and whether He is responsible for the inexplicable incidents of pain and suffering that plague humanity. They were too afraid to confront the eternal taboo of whether our misery and unnecessary anguish are man made or God made.

Personally, I want to convince myself that only an evil criminal intentionally causes misery, such as causing the disappearance a young girl, and then expect her parents to beseech him for mercy, while keeping them hanging for a verdict of life or death. No, in my book, the party responsible for abducting Madeleine McCann is the sick individual who took her away. God has nothing to do with it. If He did, Madeleine would have long been in her parents’ arms. This is the only God that my mind can fathom, and is the only one worth worshipping for that matter.

Nor can God have anything to do with causing – or preventing – the crushing under tons of concrete of the thousands of families in the latest earthquake in China. Only a sick joker, let alone a compassionate supreme being, would look at our planet one morning, and then decide to give the earth a little shake underneath the province of Schezuan so that 70,000 souls would expire in the most excruciating and slow manner.

I can sense that this topic is already too much to handle for the unsuspecting reader, so I will shift to another, hopefully lighter, aspect of this tragedy (as if anything can be light in dealing with a disaster of this magnitude – but here it is anyway). I noticed something else while following the earthquake story, something we are all guilty of, but we do it subconsciously without too much thought.

Average Jordanians tended not to focus too much on the vast human toll of the Chinese earthquake because deep down in the unexplorable alleys of our minds, we think China is a massively overpopulated country whereby a few thousand less inhabitants are not a cause for spectacular mourning this side of the Asian continent. Don’t get me wrong; the key word here is ‘subconsciously’.

I am not saying that when we switched on the news of the Chinese earthquake, as we all did, and flicked away so swiftly to another channel, as we also did, we acted this way because we are heartless and indifferent monsters. Apart from the deceptive numbers game (there are over a billion Chinese people, the logic goes, so they can afford it), it is also this overwhelming media conditioning we are all subjected to that sets our priorities of what is newsworthy for precious airtime and what is mundane and lame stuff.

We are under the spell of organizations who direct us towards what should amount to a grieving moment, such as the loss of a beautiful Princess in a car accident in a Paris tunnel, as opposed to the routine loss of a few hundred lesser people in a train crash outside Bangalore, where we yawn and switch off. Of course we don’t do it because we have a grudge against the Indian people, but it is still worth pondering why and how we manage to behave like that; how we turn away as if nothing has happened when thousands die in a flood in Mexico, and how we get glued to the TV when, say, Madeleine McCann goes missing.

And let us admit, in the rat race that is life today, we are all equally guilty in this inclination to be too apathetic and oblivious to the news that really matters. We developed a lazy conscience and just cannot be bothered to determine for ourselves what warrants our attention and sympathy, so we have subcontracted that task to amoral news merchants who are too happy to pick and select on our behalf.

In the case of China, I may personally be adversely influenced by them being the nation who invented fireworks, something that has always been very close to the heart of the child in me, until, of course, Amman became the world capital for the gratuitous daily use of these explosives, smack in the heart of sleepy, residential neighborhoods. Sarcasm aside, there is something seriously twisted in the law enforcement agencies that permit the uninhibited detonation of these bombs right in the middle of our peaceful backstreets, every single night of the week, while having the audacity to pull me over for not wearing a helmet while riding my motorcycle.

Do I have to wait until one of these missiles lands in my balcony before any Jordanian official visualizes the criminal aspects of allowing Amman to resemble, on a nightly basis, West Beirut in the summer of 1982? I just find it insane to live in a society that does not waste a breath without complaining about sky-rocketing prices, but co-exists happily under the constant barrage of another ludicrously money-wasting form of sky rockets.

But I will not go down (or blow up) without a fight. I shall create my own loud bang and will be heard in my own way: by immediately writing to the Guinness World Records institute and get Jordan a new footprint in history books for being the nation that sets off the biggest number of individual fireworks annually in the world (and while I’m at it, for having more mobile phone shops than any other nation).

And the people of Jordan dare to complain about how expensive life has become? And to top that, the government dares to single out motorcycles and ban them in Jordan?

Speaking of the global inflation phenomenon, it is most ironic that only after just more than a decade since the collapse of communism, the whole capitalist system has not yet had the time to take a triumphant breath and yet is itself on the brink of total collapse. And it is happening all because of the incurable human sin of pure and utter greed.

I’m not talking only about the price of gasoline and diesel here. Analysts studying the financial crisis in the US and Britain have warned that the Great Depression of the 1930’s could be a walk in the park compared to the inferno brewing under the ashes of the world’s financial systems today, and that the recent US housing loans crisis is only the tip of a giant iceberg looming behind the façade of cooked books and sugarcoated profit and loss statements.

But why is capitalism doomed to these endless cycles of booms and recessions? Let’s see what’s taking place with the oil markets as an example of my point.

As OPEC and other oil experts would confirm, there is absolutely no shortage of oil in the world today, despite the surge in demand by our friends the Chinese (a fact that every learned economist and taxi driver would tell you these days to explain away why the whole world is sobbing at the gas pumps). So why are prices continuing to climb as I write, and as the head of Russian Gazprom predicted, would reach US$250 a barrel by the end of the year?

The way this humble observer sees things, the unprecedented surge in oil prices is purely caused by greed and speculation by a bunch of unscrupulous global players who can’t get enough profits to feed their insatiable and extravagant lifestyles. Supply and demand as a price-setting formula has just become a tired magical potion used to justify the unjustifiable when suppliers want to con the demanders. There is absolutely no reason why the supply taps cannot be re-opened to relieve the crisis, except for, again, pure, unadulterated, and crude greed, to borrow an oily adjective.

Back in small and oil-less Jordan, what are we to do? I can assure you that no amount of prayers to the Lord can save us from the unspeakable scenarios of steeper rises in oil prices anymore than it has helped to save poor Madeleine McCann or succeeded in undemolishing a single school in China.

All I can advise is that if we all get on our bikes, as the saying goes, no one will feel the weight of the soaring price tags as these machines are very economical, and all of Jordan would then be, just like me, writing their own happy and totally incoherent motorcycle diaries, under the illuminated skies of our nightly 4th of July celebrations.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

This article was originally published in Jordan’s Living Well magazine.

She is a persistent reader despite the fact that our kind of society may even look down upon people who read, because reading is not yet an integral part of our social, cultural, and psychological make up.

While in other societies it is common to see people holding books and newspapers in public places, such a sight is rare in Jordan, or, for that matter, in the different parts of the Arab world where I have also lived in. This is why I look with curiosity upon my “reading wife” simply because the reading culture or the book culture is not there to support her. In spite of that, she would munch through myriads of words, as if their meanings and extrapolations were Turkish delight.

She was socialized in a “readersless” society and had the tenacity to pick up books, opening her mind and indulge in a literature that took her far from her roots, though she continues to value our Arabic and Islamic traditions.

In between getting the house chores done, taking the kids to and from school, cooking, cleaning, and taking them (and, occasionally, me) to doctors, the flow of her reading today remains at a constant pace, a steady momentum that only she can control.

I don’t really know how she manages to find the time, but she closes herself in, finding “reading time” whenever she can. When she reads about something that really matters to her she might discuss it with me, but most modern novels, some that may be wrongly described as pulp, she leaves to herself.

I don’t mind me telling you she is putting all of us to shame, since we rarely read and looking at words on a page is not really in our blood, despite the fact our Holy Koran has instructed us it to read, and fathom knowledge; even if we have to go to China to acquire it, as the saying goes!

She sometimes teases me that most of us don’t have not the guts to read, nor the energy to understand, we prefer verbal communication, and are guided by cinema and television. When I shoot back that she too watches television, she replies that she is in favour of balance.

She makes sure she sticks to a balanced reading ‘diet’ while I sit by and envy her, sometimes inspired to follow suit. Hers is an acquired habit of discipline, as if she were saying to herself “I’ll put in two or three hours a day to nourish my mind.”

She makes it a habit to read on the couch even while the kids are watching television, and I don’t know how she can actually become so consumed despite the noise. She reads in the bathroom at long and frequent bouts, and reads in bed despite the fact that she hardly needs to be rocked to sleep late at night.

She started first reading in the 1980s when she came to England, with one of her first books being Spy Catcher by Peter Wright, after the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried to ban it. She decided to read the book because of the controversy surrounding it, due to the fact that certain officials said it compromised intelligence.

For her this was to be the beginning of a reading journey that blossomed over the years, despite the fact that reading and writing is a solitary, lonely, confining experience.

Because of the nature of our society, that which stresses kinship, my wife carries on with her reading without compromising any of her social commitments. She reads away from prying eyes of my mother, father, sister, and so on. Her reading is confined to our house.

Following Spy Catcher, she moved on to the works of the late Edward Said, which are today standard textbooks on post-colonial societies and their development.

I had bought the books to read one day, as I suppose many people do, but they ended up as decorations in what has become an interesting English and Arabic book library. I complained that I had no time to read, because of my supposed other engagements. She would leave me to my complaints and keep reading quietly.

As a housewife she is a multi-tasking reader, reading for knowledge, intellect, and sheer curiosity, to improve the agility of her brain and exercise her mind, as well to simply enjoy herself, to relax, and to lose herself in the narrative when other matters threaten to overwhelm her.

She was the one who taught me that one can read books purely for enjoyment. It occurred to me then that veteran readers start to accumulate what can be recognized as “reading experiences,” whereby you become fluent in language and sentence construction, which becomes useful when you are editing other people’s work.

My wife has accumulated a rich reading experience, while her thought process has become more methodical. Similarly, I have felt that my ideas, and the way I expressed them, were becoming more organized and systematic, as I read to improve the quality of my writing.

Marwan Asmar is the Responsible Editor of Jo Magazine, a monthly publication produced in Amman that mainly deals in local affairs and writes frequently on Palestinian-Israeli and Arab issues. From 1993 until 2003 he was the Managing Editor of the Star, an English-language political, cultural and economic weekly, also in Amman.

In the cold, Amman is a quieter place. Sound carries. Sunlight is milky and diluted. The nights are more energetic, now that new bars and restaurants are welcoming residents and travelers into their cavernous, smoky insides. For myself, I have now discovered Loki, the place that everyone started talking about a long time ago. As an infrequent traveler, I hope I can be forgiven for my lateness and general un-hipness.

The joke goes that Jordan is stuck “between Iraq and a hard place.” And yet for a nation literally bordered by conflicts, Jordan has done fairly well for itself, all things considered. It remains a favourite with tourists who are particularly keen on history and nature (although international brand-name luxury certainly has its presence in Amman, the Dead Sea, and beyond). The economy has been growing, and the currency is pretty strong.

The Islamic Action Front, a conservative political party, has suffered losses in Jordan’s most recent parliamentary elections. This may have something to do that the economy appears to be a top priority to the electorate, but personally, I’m not sure either way. Jordanian society as a whole is still pretty conservative, but Amman in particular has mellowed out some. I used to feel my foreignness keenly in Amman. Perhaps I’ve mellowed out as well.

In many public places, hotels especially, metal detectors are a reminder of the bombings of November 2005.

The metal detectors have a dual effect: they both inspire a feeling of safety, and remind one that there is no such thing as safety. Although, where in the world is really safe to begin with? I suppose I could bundle up and stick it out in my old ancestral lands in the Ukrainian countryside, or else in the North Carolina mountains, but then there would be people-smugglers and fundamentalists to fear, respectively.

Today, the threat of terrorism in Amman is a whispered threat. Upon a casual observation, it doesn’t quite seem real. You want to relegate it to the ghost-world, to the realm of the Chupacabra and the Abominable Snowman. Desire doesn’t always correspond with reality, however, and in the Levant this is especially so.

But you don’t want to think about these things in the waning days of winter, when women in niqab look badass in leather trenchcoats and shawerma places stand with their doors propped open, exhaling hunger and heat. It’s perilous to try to guess the future, but hope reverberates here, like adhan in those hours when a lazy bum like me has to stop for a second and marvel at how people manage to get up while all I am capable of doing is burrowing further under the blanket and away from the lingering cold.

The olive trees creak on the wind and sleepy cab-drivers honk irritably as a new day presses upon Amman. It’s gorgeous and unfussy, like the women stomping their cold feet at the bus-stops, like the gentle curves of the hills. After I finally come awake and face the music, a Ukrainian woman who dyes my hair tells me, while laughing, a story of her husband beating up her old boss when the latter tried to solicit sex from her. Throughout the day, different people relate the same grim suspicions about the famous Abdoun suspension bridge, a marvel of modernity, that’s “probably built with crap-materials.” Why? Who knows? And anyway, the bridge is so, so pretty that the doomsday talk surrounding it reminds me of a Morrissey lyric: “to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.”

I wish I could stay for weeks, eat mansaf until I’m fat and happy, listen to tales of terror surrounding gas prices, talk about the apparent plans for the prettification of Queen Alia International Airport (hey! I like it just the way it is! Oh wait, no one’s asked me…). I wish I came here more often. That’s the thing about Amman. It may not be obvious, it may not be in-your-face, but it is subtly, dangerously charming, even as it changes and morphs and breaks apart and comes together, like a craggy kaleidoscope before your eyes.