Jordanian ‘duke’ honours nation’s heritage and its great tradition of hospitality
The doors of one of Amman’s oldest and most beautiful homes are never closed to visitors. Mamdouh Bisharat, 83, is keeping alive the tradition of openness that sustained the kingdom of Jordan through its first 100 years.
His home is a short walk from central Amman, and looks over the city’s Roman amphitheatre. The villa was built in the mid-1920s, when only a few thousand people lived in the capital, compared to about four million today.
Over glasses of home-made lemonade, Mr Bisharat regales visitors with tales that span the history of modern Jordan, before sending them off with bags of aubergines, tomatoes and cabbages from his estates.
Through his recollections, his guests, many of them young Jordanians, are given an idea of how the bare, nomadic region east of the River Jordan came to be regarded as a bastion of stability in the Middle East.
“The idea that this country survived is an achievement,” he says.
The Bisharat family played an important role in the development of Jordan.
Its estates hosted meetings between King Abdullah, the first ruler of the British protectorate of Transjordan that was created in 1921 and then king of Jordan when the territory gained independence in 1946, and his constituents.
Such talks would include tribal leaders, landowners and members of the emerging farming and merchant classes.
Mr Bisharat remembers once playing in the lap of the king as the country’s path was charted.
This happened in the mid1940s, as the king hosted a luncheon at a Bisharat villa in Jabal Al Weibdeh, Amman.
Mr Bisharat, then about 7 or 8, was playing in the room.
The king beckoned him and gently asked him to play quietly.
“I sat on his lap,” he recalls. “He knew how to interact with anyone.”
Although he has spent his life among Jordan’s elite, Mr Bisharat is captivated by “the soul, the holiness” of old buildings.
“It was in the back of my mind that any old house should be kept and preserved,” he says.
The main hall of the villa is lined with Roman busts from the city of Gadara, now named Umm Qais. It is one of Jordan’s archaeological treasures, situated near the Golan Heights and the Sea of Galilee.
Mr Bisharat acquired the statues before trading in antiquities was banned in the 1970s.
His father, Chibli Bisharat, bought farmland in Mukheibeh, near Umm Qais, in the 1950s.
Nicknamed “the Duke of Mukheibeh” by King Hussein, Jordan’s third ruler, Mr Bisharat has a deep attachment to his country’s history. He has worked with archaeologists and architects to protect buildings and antiquities.
He also helped to build Jordan’s National Gallery of Fine Arts.
Two decades ago, Mr Bisharat stepped in to rescue a twostorey villa in central Amman, also built in the 1920s, that was to be demolished.
The villa became Jordan’s first post office and then the Haifa Hotel in the late 1940s.
Like many buildings, it fell into disrepair as businesses gravitated to western Amman in the 1980s.
Mr Bisharat filled the black-and-white tiled rooms with antiques, paintings and books and turned the second floor into The Duke’s Diwan
– a meeting place or salon for anyone to visit. It has become as well known for the hospitality of its patron as for its setting.
The Bisharat family holds land from Ottoman times in the 19th century, when it bartered crops across the empire.
Farming and herding, mainstays of Jordan’s economy in the 1930s and 1940s, now account for only about 5 per cent of gross domestic product, and less than one fifth of exports.
A significant proportion of Bisharat farmland is in Umm Al Kundum near Amman, where property values soared as the capital expanded.
Mr Bisharat refused offers for the land. “I won’t accept money so a shopping centre can be built on land we have eaten from or survived on for thousands of years,” he says. The crown jewel of the family’s property is the villa in Jabal Al Jofah where Mr Bisharat lives.
Designed by Lebanese architect Sabee Samaha, it is a mixture of Ottoman and French styles, built by Palestinian masons using rock from nearby hills and decorated with Turkish motif tiles laid by Syrian craftsmen.
Inside, paintings by artists from Jordan and abroad cover the walls. A table in the study rests on four heads of Roman columns.
In the dining room, a portrait painted in the 1980s by Turkish modern art pioneer Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid shows Mr Bisharat in an orange shirt with a green scarf. Since then, his hairline has receded, but his distinctive eyebrows and large eyes remain the same.