Jordan's culture: a Bedouin table set in a country of cities

Who Jordanians are by origin and faith

Britannica describes the population as overwhelmingly Arab, principally Jordanians and Palestinians, and says most Jordanian citizens are of Palestinian origin. Jordanians of Bedouin heritage were the largest indigenous group before the wars of 1948 and 1967 brought the Palestinians east, and are now a minority, though urban residents who trace their roots to the Bedouin make up more than a third of Jordanians and the tent-dwelling nomads less than a tenth of the population. Smaller communities complete the picture: Circassians, known locally as Cherkess or Jarkas, Chechens numbering about 1,000, Armenians and a small Turkmen group.

About 95% of the population is Sunni Muslim, and nearly all the rest are Arab Christians, two-thirds of them Greek Orthodox; Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics, Syrian Orthodox and several Protestant churches make up the remainder. Most non-Arab Christians are Armenian. Britannica counts a few hundred Druze in and around Amman and about 1,000 Baha'is at Al-Adasiyya in the Jordan Valley. The Circassians, mostly Sunni, came as refugees from the Caucasus and were first settled around the abandoned site of Amman in 1867; with the Chechens they form the main non-Arab minority, and both have seats reserved in parliament, as do the Christians (how the House is elected).

What language Jordanians speak and write

Arabic is the official language under Article 2 of the constitution, and nearly everyone speaks it. The spoken dialects are mutually intelligible and close to the Levantine Arabic of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, while schools teach Modern Standard Arabic, the written form descended from Classical Arabic. The gap between the two is the same one found across the Arab world.

Most Circassians use Arabic in daily life, though some still speak Adyghe, and Armenian survives in pockets; Britannica notes that bilingualism or assimilation into Arabic is common among all the minorities. English is understood widely and spoken in some upper-class households in place of Jordanian Arabic. Calligraphy is the old prestige art of the written language, used on manuscripts and mosques, and UNESCO listed Arabic calligraphy in 2021 among the elements Jordan reports.

How Bedouin custom became the national register

UNESCO first proclaimed the cultural space of the Bedu in Petra and Wadi Rum in 2005 and inscribed it on the Representative List in 2008. The listing names the Bdul, the Ammarin and the Sa'idiyyin as tribes that still use the Nabataean cisterns and caves near Petra, and describes the knowledge the Bedu keep: plants and animals, traditional medicine, camel husbandry, tent-making, tracking and climbing, and an oral literature of poems and tales tied to particular places. It also records the pressure on that knowledge. Over fifty years more Bedu groups settled as schools and clinics reached them, and desert tourism created a demand for what the listing calls authentic Bedu culture. A safeguarding action plan for the Bedu of the two regions ran from December 2006 to March 2009, and Irbid was later chosen as a pilot city for recording intangible heritage in urban areas.

Hospitality is the custom most often described. The host pours black coffee and drinks the first cup to check its temperature, the guest takes the rest of it, and a second and third cup follow; the whole display is called karam, a word for generosity with overtones of nobility. A proverb quoted in Wikipedia's account warns that the guest who sits at the meal is company and the guest who leaves is a poet. UNESCO added Arabic coffee as a symbol of generosity to Jordan's listings in 2024.

The register reaches beyond the tent. Britannica notes that men of Bedouin descent still form the core of the army, and television has turned rural life into a genre of its own: Jordan produces Bedouin soap operas, filmed outdoors in a Bedouin accent softened so that viewers across the Levant and the Gulf can follow it.

What is cooked for a feast

Mansaf is built in layers on a large round tray. Thin unleavened bread called sherack goes at the bottom, soaked in yoghurt broth made from jameed, the dried yoghurt; rice covers it; chunks of lamb simmered in the same broth go on top, with the head of the lamb in the centre, and the whole is scattered with pine nuts, almonds and parsley. Rice and nuts are later additions. It is the meal served at the noon of a wedding, at holidays and at family occasions, and it is shared by Jordanians of every background, Bedouin or not.

The second festive dish Britannica names is musakhkhan, chicken cooked with sumac and onions and laid over flatbread from a clay oven. In the south, around Petra and Wadi Rum, zarb or quzi is marinated meat with dough and vegetables cooked in an oven sunk in the ground. Other dishes came with migrants. Maqluba, meat and fried vegetables cooked in a pot that is turned upside down to serve, spread with the Palestinian population; kabsa, chicken over rice with raisins and almonds, came with Uzbeks who arrived after the First World War.

Daily food is the eastern Mediterranean table: olive oil as the main fat, flatbread with dips such as hummus and baba ghanoush, ful medames, tabbouleh, white cheeses, olives and pickles at breakfast, and lunch, eaten between two in the afternoon and eight in the evening, as the main meal. Desserts include baklava, knafeh and halva, and qatayef is made for Ramadan.

How Jordanians dance and sing

The group dance is dabke. Dancers stand shoulder to shoulder in a line, holding hands or with arms over their neighbours' shoulders, and move in a circle with kicks and stamps that mark the rhythm, to a flute called the ney, a drum called the tabl and a reed pipe, the mizmar. It is danced at weddings by Bedouin and townspeople alike, in mixed or separate groups. The sahjah is a Bedouin dance, and the Circassians have a sword dance of their own. UNESCO listed As-Samer in Jordan in 2018 and the zaffa in the traditional wedding in 2025.

Rural zajal is improvised sung poetry accompanied by the mijwiz, the arghul, the oud, the rabab, the tablah and the daf; a file on oud playing was among Jordan's nominations under examination in 2026. Villages keep songs for births, weddings, funerals and the harvest, and a national troupe sponsored by the government performs on state radio and television.

Written literature is younger. The modern short story and novel began in the twentieth century with Khalil Beidas and Mohammad Subhi Abu Ghanimeh, and Britannica places the poet Mustafa Wahbi al-Tal among the major Arab poets of that century. Jordan's own films include Captain Abu Raed of 2007 and Theeb of 2014, and its deserts have stood in for other places in foreign productions from Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989 to The Hurt Locker, The Martian in 2015, Aladdin and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in 2019 and Dune: Part One in 2021.

What UNESCO lists for Jordan as living heritage

Jordan ratified the convention on intangible heritage on 24 March 2006, and the list above counts the 11 elements inscribed by 2025. Oud playing and Al Saafiyat, plant-fibre crafts, were pending in 2026.

What the old towns and sites preserve

As-Salt, on three close hills in the Balqa highlands of west-central Jordan, shows the culture of the late Ottoman town. In the last sixty years of Ottoman rule merchants from Nablus, Syria and Lebanon settled there and made fortunes in trade, banking and farming, and the craftsmen they drew in built a town of large public buildings and family houses in local yellow limestone. UNESCO counts about 650 significant historic buildings in its core, mixing European Art Nouveau and neo-colonial styles with local tradition. It describes a town built without separate quarters, where Muslims and Christians kept guest houses called madafas and a mutual-welfare custom called takaful ijtima'i.

The older layers are religious and decorative. Qusayr Amra, an early eighth-century Umayyad desert castle, has a reception hall and bathhouse covered in figurative murals, and Umm ar-Rasas has 16 churches, among them the Church of Saint Stephen with a mosaic floor that maps the towns of the region. Fourth-century mosaics survive at the church on Mount Nebo and Byzantine ones in the churches of Madaba. Organised archaeology began with the Department of Antiquities in 1923; the Jordan Archaeological Museum opened in Amman in 1951, and the 'Ain Ghazal statuettes were found in 1983.

Modern art has its own institutions. Britannica notes that modernity has loosened the old reluctance to depict people and animals, so painting and sculpture sit beside calligraphy and geometric design, and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman collects contemporary Arab and Muslim painting and sculpture. Weaving survives in striped rugs of wool and goat hair, with embroidery, leatherwork and pottery.

What Jordanians learn and where

Schooling runs in three systems: government schools, which most pupils attend, private schools, and the schools UNRWA set up for Palestinian refugee children. Britannica describes six years of elementary education, three of preparatory and three of secondary, with education compulsory to the age of 14 and free textbooks in government schools, and says the great majority of the population is literate and more than half have completed secondary education or more. The oldest universities are the University of Jordan, founded in 1962, Yarmouk University in Irbid, founded in 1976, and Mutah University, founded in 1981, and many more opened in the 1990s.

Engagements in town follow a pattern of their own. Older women of the two families usually start the match-making, the agreement is sealed over rounds of coffee between the bride's father, the groom and his father, and the groom's family then holds a large engagement party before the week of gatherings that leads to the wedding.

How Jordanians mark the year and spend leisure

The calendar mixes the Islamic and the national. Britannica lists the Prophet's birthday, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha and the other Islamic festivals with Independence Day on 25 May, and Christmas on 25 December is also a public holiday (why 25 May). Weddings are the largest private occasions. Among Bedouin they traditionally run five to seven days, with the men singing and dancing in the groom's tent and the women painting the bride's hands and feet with henna on the last night; in cities the celebration is often shortened and moved to a wedding hall, with a procession of cars.

Football is the most followed sport, followed by basketball; the national football team first qualified for the AFC Asian Cup in 2004. Jordan hosted the Pan-Arab Games in 1999 and first competed at the Summer Olympics in 1984. The press is led by the Arabic dailies Al-Ra'i and Ad-Dustour, in which the government holds major shares, and the English-language Jordan Times; Britannica records a law of 1998 that tightened press restrictions and some easing after 2000.