Sunday, December 30, 2007
BY JEFF DIAMANT
Star-Ledger Staff

On the streets of the Arab world, Amaney Jamal, a Princeton University politics professor, asks the kinds of questions that can get her put under surveillance, kicked out of the country, thrown in jail, or worse.

At 37, she is among a new crop of street-reporting academics who see their mission as helping the Western world better understand the views of Muslims here and overseas.

Jamal's particular specialty is polling, getting out with everyday Muslims to sample their opinions, to get a taste of ordinary life and the big political and religious issues that matter most to them.

It can be risky work.

She found out just how much one summer day in 2005, when the phone rang in her apartment south of Amman, Jordan. Two of her research assistants, she learned, had just been jailed on suspicion they were with the CIA.

"I'm sitting here in an apartment full of transcripts," recalls Jamal, a mother of four. "My kids are with me also. The logical thing to think is, 'If I can't get these people out, they're going to come pick me up.' "

In the retelling, there's excitement in her voice: "Immediately I hid the computers, scattered them around contacts we had established. I called up my contacts in Amman: 'You guys said I had security clearance! My researchers are in jail!' ... We hear all these stories all the time of people who disappear in these situations. We figure, 'It's not gonna happen because we're American citizens.' But you can't help but worry."

Her assistants were freed six hours later, after playing tapes for their jailers -- tapes in which, lucky for them, their interviewees had praised the police.

After the arrests, she didn't leave Jordan. She had two weeks of work left in the country, on her quest to interview 250 Middle Easterners. She is almost certain she was under surveillance those two weeks. That angers her.

People ask, "'Why don't we have more people studying the Middle East?' It's not an easy region to get into," said Jamal, a Muslim of Palestinian descent who was born in California. "Here I am, a fluent Arabic speaker, I have relatives in the region, I wear hejab, and I observe, and I get accused of working for the CIA."


TOUGH QUESTIONS

When not in the Middle East, Jamal is usually behind her desk at Corwin Hall, in Princeton's politics department, surrounded by shelves of books on Arab politics and unfinished packages of Pepperidge Farm orange Milanos and peanut butter Girl Scout cookies.

Field work on other Muslims is her bread and butter. She has two books out this year, and has begun work on another. Up for tenure soon, she is a frequent contributor to academic journals. She is a well- traveled speaker on American Muslim issues who has tutored the FBI on talking more effectively with Muslims.

She has been an assistant professor at Princeton since 2003. Be fore that she worked a year at Columbia University, and earlier she helped survey Arab-American attitudes in Dearborn, Mich., receiving her Ph.D from the University of Michigan. With children ages 17, 13, 7 and 6 months, she has been balancing the demands of family and work since graduate school.

These days, in her Princeton office, she is perusing transcripts of the interviews she and her research assistants did with the 250 Middle Easterners, interviews she hopes will form her third book and teach Westerners how ordinary Arabs really feel about democracy.

She won't say what they said -- she's saving that for the book -- but she showed a visitor some of the questions posed during 60-to-90-minute interviews in the streets of Jordan, Kuwait and Morocco in 2005, 2006 and 2007:

"Do you think the voices of the people are heard in your country?" "Do you think Islam and democracy are compatible?" "Do you think government officials understand the needs of people?"


DIFFERENT DEMOCRACIES

Jamal and her colleagues believe that with the United States spending billions of dollars trying to reshape Arab governments, it is important that Americans understand that these new Arab democracies may never look like Western ones.

For example, it's a widespread belief in Arab countries, Jamal said, that "church and state" need not be separate as in the United States. Proposing such a wall often gets a person labeled an enemy of Islam, she said.

"Can a Muslim country be a democracy? Absolutely. Will that democracy be based on liberal values we in the West are familiar with? That's a different issue. Can democracy procedurally endure? Can we hold free and fair elections? We know this can happen. Is it problematic that they don't share the same values that we share? That's a judgment call.

"Religion will play more of a role. Is that problematic? Can democracy be the impetus for attitudinal change? Perhaps."

There's a thrill, she admits, just in asking Middle Easterners their views.

"During each and every conversation I had with people, each time I say to myself, 'Wow, that's so interesting,' ... It's not just what they're saying. These are people, who, nobody ever really cared about their voices. They make a point of telling me, 'You really care about our point of view.' Just that in itself is rewarding."


STUDYING MIDEAST PROSPECTS

Back in the early 1990s, as the Cold War ended, political scientists everywhere were abuzz over an essay called "The End of History," written by a former State Department official named Francis Fukuyama.

Fukuyama argued that the Soviet Union's downfall, and an ensuing trend toward democracies, showed that the ideological battles waged through history were mainly over. Democracy had won.

The young Jamal, an undergraduate at UCLA at the time, noticed something. In authoritarian Arab lands, democratic change wasn't mentioned much.

"Democracy seemed to be breaking out around the world," she said, "...but I noticed a lot of the paradigms and models and theories that were being used to discuss democracy didn't necessarily apply to the Arab world or to the Middle East."

She chose political science as a major, she said, so she could study the prospects for Mideast democracy.

After spending the first 10 years of her life in Oakland and Modesto, Cal., her family moved back to Ramallah, where she attended a Quaker school. That's where she met her husband, Helmi Saud, now an emergency room doctor at St. Francis Hospital in Trenton and Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in Hamilton.

"She made me feel she's going to do something big in the future and really going to succeed," Saud said. "She has an amount of energy and outgoing personality where she can be friends with most people, which is something you have to do ... in her world."


OFF THE MARK

Graduate work at the University of Michigan so enthused her that in 1999 she approached the leader of the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, a Palestinian-run polling center in Jerusalem and Ramallah, for help with research.

"He kind of smiled and said, 'Do you know we charge $1,000 a question?' My jaw kind of fell. I said, 'This is very important to my work.' "

They agreed to help if she worked for them for free. So for six months she wrote reports and helped analyze their data.

Her research led to her first book, which came out in April, "Barriers to Democracy." It argues that a common way Western nations try to support Mideast democracies -- that is, with millions of dollars for civic associations, in hopes they will enrich civic life -- is off the mark.

The reason? In these authoritarian societies, she wrote, civic associations are politically tied to national leaders in ways they are not in the West. Where associations like the YMCA in Princeton lack government ties, she said in an interview, similar associations in the West Bank have been aligned with the Palestinian Authority.

"I interviewed people at a civic association that professed loyalty to the Palestinian government, and (former leader Yasser) Arafat. It received grants and favors and funds from the Palestinian government, and it was socializing its members to pay tribute to the Palestinian government ... It was almost as if, if you were not a government-supporting member, you were a liability to the association."


BALANCING LIFE AND WORK

When Jamal is not zipping around the country to speak on panels, or traveling around the world to interview Muslims, she's often driving up or down Route 27 or Route 1, to her office, to her home in Princeton, to her mosque (the Islamic Society of Central Jersey), or to her children's basketball games.

Having had two children by her mid-20s complicated research efforts, especially earlier in her career.

"Not everybody is terribly supportive of grad students having children, which is something we shared," said Ellen M. Lust-Okar, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University who knew Jamal as a graduate student. "It's not easy trying to balance how to be at a basketball game with ... kids and trying to write a paper."

Jamal has been a PTO member at her children's Islamic day school and an occasional trip chaperone, disciplining herself by waking up at 5:30 a.m. each day and being in bed by 11 p.m.

She also tries -- mostly with success -- to keep her professional and private lives separate. A few months ago, when one of her articles was published in Horizons, a popular American Muslim magazine, it was the first time many at her mosque realized what she did for a living.

"People in the mosque come up and say, 'I didn't know you're a professor' ... At the mosque, I just want to be another member of the mosque. I don't want people to treat me any different just because I'm a professor at Princeton."


AMANEY JAMAL

1. Latest vacation: Disney World, December 2007: "My first vacation ever where I didn't bring my laptop."

2: Favorite countries to visit for research: Kuwait and Morocco. Excellent food (especially Kuwaiti shrimp), great hospitality.

3: Least favorite country to visit for research: Jordan. See the article.

4. Work and play mix: Day trips every two months to Paterson. Good for learning the word on the street with Palestinian-Americans there, picking up Arabic-language newspapers, and eating at the Al- Basha Restaurant.

5. Books published in 2007: "Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World" and "Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects."

6. What she hears while researching in the Middle East: "People would say things like, 'Wait, so you wear a headscarf and you pray five times a day, you speak Arabic, your parents are Palestinian, and you work at Princeton? Are you lying?'"

© 2008 The Star Ledger
© 2008 NJ.com All Rights Reserved.

Related: Amaney jamal's website at Princeton

Recent books:
Race and Arab Americans Before and After 9/11: From Invisible Citizens to Visible Subjects (Arab American Writing) (Paperback)

                                    
Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World by Amaney A. Jamal (Hardcover - April 23, 2007)