The Participants

I wanted these interviews to reflect a diverse population in terms of nationality, gender, age, socio-economic status, and religious belief. Of the 18 interviews that I conducted, only 7 are available on this website, thus it is necessarily a less diverse group than that with which I started. However, not all participants were willing to have their interviews videotaped and not all those videotaped could be included on the site. For these reasons, the perspectives of several other people including Amer, my cab driver in Amman, Bana, a young Christian woman from Latakia, and Mohammad, a researcher at the University of Jordan are regrettably absent from this site.

Interestingly, however, several important themes reoccurred consistently in all of the interviews regardless of the individual’s religious affiliation, level of education, or socio-economic status. Most important among these common threads are a conscious decision to distinguish between American people and the American government, a concerted effort to reserve resentment for the latter, and an emphasis on the importance of the US relationship with Israel in fomenting this resentment.

In spite the relatively small number of interviews that can be viewed here, significant differences in background still exist among the participants. Ahmed is the only interviewee who lives in Damascus, however according to Syrian law, his nationality is technically Iraqi since his father is from Baghdad. Um Salaam, Khulood, and Sana are all Palestinians who live in Jordan. Um Salaam was born in Hebron, but fled to Jordan after the 1967 War. She identifies as Palestinian with a Jordanian passport, and much of her family still lives in the Occupied Territories. Khulood is Palestinian, but born and raised in Amman. Sana, the youngest of the Palestinian women, has spent her life living in Becca, a Palestinian refugee camp outside of Jordan’s capital. Mohammad and Rawan are Jordanians who live in Amman, but whose families come from Irbid and Ma’an respectively. Mowad, also Jordanian, lives in the village of Dissa in Jordan’s southern desert.

The interviewees range in age from 18-62. They are all Muslim, although some identify more deeply with their religion than others. Mohammad, Rawan, and Sana are all university students who I had never met before approaching them on the University of Jordan campus in search of participants for the interviews. Once I explained the project, students lined up for the opportunity to share their ideas about the US with an American audience. I knew the other participants prior to conducting the interviews from a variety of settings. Khulood was my Arabic teacher in Amman. She also teaches English to Jordanian students and spent one year teaching Arabic at Earlham University in Indiana. I met Mowad while spending a week with his family in the desert of Wadi Rum. He currently works in Dissa as a government employee. Um Salaam, a retired art teacher, was the host-mom of a friend of mine. Finally, Ahmed works at the grocery store that I shopped at while living in the old city of Damascus.

Certainly the interviews of seven people cannot possibly encompass all the diverse perceptions that exist among Arab populations in regards to the United States. However, the commonalities that exist between them provide a good impression of the most widespread opinions. For those outside of the Middle East who do not have the opportunity to travel and meet Syrians or Jordanians firsthand, this site can serve as a means to increase understanding of the region and of the people that live in it who feel the repercussion of American foreign policy in their own lives.