Lost in adolescent limbo

For Muhanned Jaradat, growing up is hard to do. Bound to his father by social and economic chains, he represents a generation of Jordanian men who find the weight of marriage and financial independence too much of a burden to bear. Craig Nelson reports from Amman.

Muhanned Jaradat, right, 32, is unmarried and lives with his father. Jamal Jaradat, left, has difficulty relating to his son.

Most Jordanians consider Muhanned Jaradat an outcast. His brothers and sisters cover their ears in dismay. Most important of all, perhaps, is the frustration of his father, who simply does not understand him. Mr Jaradat is a connoisseur of heavy metal, a genre of rock music featuring an onslaught of distorted guitar chords and sledgehammer rhythms that has been described as the "sensory equivalent of war".

And as if a passion for music whose lyrics dwell on sex, violence and the occult were not enough to attract suspicion and derision in this strait-laced society, Mr Jaradat sports a goatee and a mane of hair that stretches to his shoulder blades. For his 62-year-old father, a devotee of the iconic Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum and her delicate readings on love, longing and loss, his son's passion for power chords and ponytails are all too much.

"This heavy metal music is not good; it's very loud and affects your brain," sighs Jamal Jaradat, dressed elegantly in a blue suit and tie and seated, with paternal precision, in an over-stuffed chair in the living room of the family home. "If any of my three daughters took it up, it would be disaster." The dissonant notes that jangle the air between Jamal Jaradat and his son do not stop with music and hair. Their relationship - like the ties between father and son in Jordan and elsewhere in the Arab world - is under severe strain, buffeted by the unprecedented economic and social currents flowing through the region.

The result in Jordan is a society of fathers who feel increasingly powerless to affect their sons' lives. "Half the nation seems to be looking for a father," says Muin Khoury, a market researcher and the author of a 2004 study on the social impact of work and unemployment that questioned youth on their relationships and the environment around them. The study found that while fathers are less able to influence their sons' lives, their sons continue searching for someone to look up to.

The life of the young Jordanian man typically follows a chain of seemingly inexorable social and economic logic. Until he graduates from secondary school or university, he cannot get a decent job. Until he gets a decent job, he cannot afford to marry. Until he marries, he usually remains under his father's roof and is not - on the assessment of many in society - fully a man. For his part, an Arab father follows a well-trodden path, too. By tradition, he is obliged to feed and house his son, and provide educational and living expenses, until his offspring has married and set up his own household.

Today, each link in these complementary chains of logic has become a far heavier and more difficult burden to bear. High rates of unemployment and underemployment among high-school and university graduates in Jordan mean that a father must financially support his son much longer, and adulthood is receding indefinitely into the future like the fading tail lights of a speeding car. In its place is a prolonged adolescence, with unmarried sons living at home even if they do not want to, and financially dependent upon their fathers well into their late 20s, 30s and even later, says Dr Mazen Abu Alhaija, a psychiatrist at the Al-Rashid Hospital Centre in north Amman.