While staying at a hotel in a small village high above Petra, Jordan, I decided to hike up the mountainside that the community hugged.
The village was smaller than Wadi Musa, which is down in the valley and where many tourists stay. My hotel was the only one there, and it was designed like an ancient village (with one-story stone buildings with flat wooden roofs), so it blended into the neighborhood. As I walked down the main street, a middle-aged man approached and asked if I needed anything. I told him that I had to exercise my dinner off, and he said, “Go anywhere you want! It’s perfectly safe here.” I trusted him because many Jordanians are proud of their hospitality. Before leaving home, I had read that crimes against tourists were very rare, so I turned onto the steepest road and headed towards the mountain top, and into an experience that I felt took me back to some of the most ancient roots of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
I reached the village’s edge after four blocks and kept walking uphill. The community’s lights twinkled far below and stood out under the sapphire night sky. With no streetlights, the only other things I could see were the stars and the barely perceptible peaks around me, which were as jagged as lions’ teeth. I couldn’t even see the edge of the road and thus had to take care to avoid falling off a cliff.
I stopped where the road leveled off. The sky was pure; no streetlights or smog hazed my view of the stars. The black vault of Heaven was studded with jewels. Powerful updrafts from the desert below buffeted me. The contrasts between domains were awe-inspiring rather than proportioned and human-scale, as they typically are in Greece.
The first lines from Genesis came to me: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” I then thought of the beginning of the Koran’s first chapter: “In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful.” Ancients who saw these stark contrasts between community and wilds, lowlands and uplands, land and sky, and life and death while wondering how the world was created were encouraged to focus on the power and glory of the creator of all rather than fundamental proportions, as most ancient Greek philosophers emphasized. I found it easy to have a heightened sense of sacredness in the Middle East.