A Plaintive Cry In The Night

“It’s a gift, you know,” Julianne noted, as she heard the call to prayer in the not-so-far distance Sunday evening. The call to prayer is so ingrained in this culture here, so reliable in its five-times-daily exhortation to pray that it certainly reminds one of the Middle Ages when the regular tolling of church bells helped everyone in that society tell time. This call to prayer came at about 8:40 p.m. after dusk had given way to the darkness of evening.

Julianne made that observation about the beauty of the regularity of the call to prayer at an otherwise profoundly sad moment here at KA. The community had gathered a few minutes before to hear the announcement that one of our seniors, Ahmad Tarawneh, had passed away just an hour or so before from injuries sustained in a car accident that afternoon. We gathered in a courtyard that has so often been the scene of joyous events, but now we had gathered to hear the words most feared in a school—the loss of one of our own.

As our headmaster and Julianne relayed the news, that call to prayer pierced the night sky. Julianne explained how she has come to view this call to prayer in her nine months in Jordan—it was a time to beseech, to seek solace, to reflect, to offer thanks, to rejoice, and to seek guidance. As an outsider, she observed how the regularity of that prayer cycle helped her process all the changes of moving thousands away, and now in a time of fresh grief, an opportunity to seek divine wisdom and healing.

That afternoon a tire blew out as the boys from the town of Karak were driven back to campus to resume KA life after a brief Easter break. I had gotten a call from Julianne about 6:30 that there had been an accident, and one young man was in critical condition, and another, Hamzeh, had been injured less critically. She knew how much Hamzeh has meant to me in my time here at KA, and she wanted to prepare me. She calmly explained how critical it remained for the other young man. Within an hour she had called to inform me that Ahmad had indeed not survived his injuries. We needed to gather the community as quickly as possible and reveal the turn-of-events to our students.

I never taught Ahmad, but he was one of those 100 students when KA opened its doors in 2007, and of course, back in those “salad days” it was easy to know everyone. It was also impossible to miss Ahmad. He was everywhere, trying everything, thoroughly enraptured with what this school had to offer, and the doors this school, and its training, and ethos, might open.

You could say Ahmad was a student of the school before it was a school. Ahmad was one of a group recruited from government schools in 2006 to attend a summer institute in the hopes that this group might improve their English skills enough that they might apply and attend this brand-spankin’-new school. By the time the school opened in the fall of 2007, he was already an old hand at the school, having attended two summer enrichment programs here.

Ahmad, in so many ways, was the prototype, even the archetype of the kind of student, and what this school hoped to achieve. Ahmad came from modest means, and his government school probably could not equip him with the skills or the access to world-class educational opportunities. But what His Majesty had in mind was a school that would train leaders, regardless of background, and prepare the next generation to lead Jordan, taking Jordan farther than anyone might imagine. Ahmad was a superb example of a young person ready for this challenge. He was humble, friendly, aware, intelligent, and unerring in his understanding of what school was all about. He loved the school uniform, loved computers, loved Jordan, admired his teachers, and looked for any new way to enhance and enrich himself. While Ahmad was by definition “introverted,” he was not a wallflower. He simply did and acted and performed and led by a straight-line moral example, and people knew of his talents and compassion.

I remember in the first few days of the school watching small groups perform skits based on the Five Guiding Principles of our infant school. I remember him participating in a skit, gently mocking the idealism and heroic qualities of those guiding principles. He was charming, funny, but never precocious or sarcastic. As I would get to know him over these three years, he lived by those guiding principles, not out of fear of reprisal, but he believed that those principles, and order would train him for great things.

Last year Ahmad applied to go on the Model Congress trip I planned to lead to Boston. 54 students “auditioned,” to be delegates and most were excellent. All five of the judges noted Ahmad’s outstanding preparation, public speaking, poise, and intelligence, and he earned a spot on the trip. Ahmad loved the trip to Boston and was a model student on the trip.

Last spring Ahmad won a place for a summer program at Oxford. I remember an email I received from him during that time telling me of his economics class and how exciting it was to spend the summer at Oxford. “Imagine ME at Oxford!” he wrote, and his joy was apparent as he recounted what they were doing.

While at KA Ahmad tried squash, tried the violin, sang in a choir, traveled with His Majesty on a trip to the US where the king spoke in Washington, Princeton, and New York. Ahmad earned a proctorship for freshmen, and then, this year for his own peers, and of course, spent last fall in a sea of college applications. Just a few days ago he was accepted at Brown University.

In Islamic tradition a body is buried within 24 hours of death, so arrangements needed to be made immediately. Yesterday all the males on campus who wanted to attend the funeral, we took seats on buses for the 100 mile trip to Karak for an event we would have thought unthinkable only 18 hours before. As I learned yesterday, there are many traditions and customs to funerals in Jordan, and the funeral and burial is attended by the male mourners just after one of the calls to prayer. We arrived in Karak at noon and the Muslims poured into this beautiful mosque to do the daily prayers and then the prayers for Ahmad. We non-Muslims remained outside in the courtyard as is the tradition. Then we followed the coffin raised by loved ones to the cemetery for a graveside service, and then met with male family members, hoping that our large numbers provided a small comfort for this stricken family.

As we rode back on the bus from Karak I thought of the last long conversation Ahmad and I enjoyed, just a couple of weeks ago. We sat on a bus going somewhere for the Model United Nations conference and we got to talking about the “ideal” school, and Ahmad’s awareness of school and learning and pedagogy and student behaviors impressed me. As always, it was an exquisite conversation with an intelligent and able teen-ager on the cusp.

As I thought about that excited email from last summer of his presence at Oxford, I was reminded of a beautiful play by Emlyn Williams from the 1940s, called The Corn is Green. This play focused on a modest mining village in Wales, and its autobiographical content was about a teacher who discovered a latent genius for writing and thinking in a young student. Eventually that student landed at Oxford. The parallels are obvious—Ahmad hailed from a modest, albeit proud town, where few young people end up at Oxford. In the play the teacher reads from an essay by the student named Morgan in the play, and how his words startled and uplifted her. She read his words: “And when I walk in the dark, I can touch with my hand to where the corn is green.”

That character understood promise and the hope of something far deeper than many around him. The green-ness surprised him, buoyed him, compelled him, inspired him. Ahmad was so similar! He understood what success and leadership entail, the hard work necessary, and on top of that offered us the sweetest of souls to know.

It is his promise that first thrilled us to get to know him; it is that promise cut short that we now mourn in our community.