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The literature on Jordan is awash in studies of the history, politics, and possible futures of the
Hashemite family. In a polity so closely identified with its ruling dynasty, one would be surprised
if this fixation did not prevail. More curious to the anthropologist is the extent to which the
scholarly attention lavished on the Hashemites has centered on the rather obvious fact that they
rule, but has given less concern to the fact that they rule as a family—that they express their
dominance in a patriarchal rhetoric brimming with kinship metaphors, and that they preside over a
body politic in which households and their influential heads are of far greater significance than
electoral constituencies, public opinion, or (least of all) individual citizens and their rights. When
King Hussein described his realm as "the big Jordanian family" (al-usra
al-urduniyya al-kubra¯), he invoked an image of community (and authorized a style of
political exchange) that made immediate sense to his subjects. In his final years of rule, Hussein
artfully consolidated his role as national father figure. His heir, King Abdullah II, who was 37
years old when he inherited the throne in 1999, affects the "older brother" persona
appropriate to his age. In announcing Hussein's death, Abdullah II relied heavily on the
vocabulary of political kinship his father had standardized: "Hussein was a father, a
brother, to each of you, the same as he was my father. . . . Today you are my brothers and sisters,
and with you I find sympathy and condolences under God"1

Half-Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedicition -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- The Terror Decade in Arab Detroit: An Introduction -- Part 1 THE SHAPE OF ARAB DETROIT -- Arab Detroit after 9/11: A Changing Demographic Portrait -- Part 2 AFTERMATH CHRONICLES -- Cracking Down on Diaspora: Arab Detroit and America's War on Terror -- Backlash, Part 2: The Federal Law Enforcement Agenda -- Part 3 LOCAL REFRACTIONS -- Orthodox, Arab, American: The Flexibility of Christian Arabness in Detroit -- Fighting Our Own Battles: Iraqi Chaldeans and the War on Terror -- Muslims as Moving Targets: External Scrutiny and Internal Critique in Detroit's Mosques -- Detroit Transnational: The Interchange Experience in Lebanon and the United States -- Part 4 CIVILIAN STORIES -- My Life as a Brown Person -- Subject to Change -- Going Places -- And Then You Add the Arab Thing -- Part 5 PROTECTIVE SHIELD AND GLASS CEILING -- Domestic Foreign Policy: Arab Detroit as a Special Place in the War on Terror -- The Arab American National Museum: Sanctioning Arabness for a Post- 9/11 America -- Toward Electability: Public Offi ce and the Arab Vote -- Arabs Behaving Badly: The Limits of Containment in a Post- 9/11 World -- Part 6 HARD LESSONS -- The New Order and Its Forgotten Histories -- Contributors -- Index.