Amman

The capital of Jordan sits on ground that has carried a city under three names. The Hebrew Bible calls it Rabbah, the royal seat of the Ammonites, and puts it at the centre of one of the darkest passages in the David narrative: Joab besieges the city, and Uriah the Hittite is placed where the fighting is heaviest so that he will not come home. The prophets return to Rabbah repeatedly when they turn to the nations around Israel, which is a measure of how substantial a neighbour it was rather than an incidental detail.

Under the Ptolemies the city was refounded as Philadelphia, after Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and it entered the Greek and then the Roman world as one of the cities of the Decapolis, the loose league of Hellenised towns east and south east of the Sea of Galilee, of which Philadelphia was the southernmost. The Roman theatre cut into the hillside still seats several thousand and is the largest structure surviving from that period in the city. On the citadel above it, the columns of a temple usually identified with Hercules stand a short walk from a domed Umayyad audience hall, so that two imperial religions of the site are visible from the same platform.

The Arabic name preserves the oldest of the three through the Greek and Roman centuries that displaced it, which is why the city can be found in a concordance under a name that appears on no modern map.

In November 2004 the Jordanian court issued a statement on what Islam is and on who may speak for it, and in July 2005 an international conference in Amman gathered scholars from across the Muslim world to endorse it. The document is known as the Amman Message, and its substance is three points.

The first recognises eight schools of Islamic law as valid: the four Sunni schools, the Ja'fari and Zaydi schools associated with Shia Islam, the Ibadi school of Oman and East Africa, and the Zahiri school, together with Ash'ari theology, the practice of Sufism and Salafi thought. The second forbids declaring any adherent of those schools an unbeliever, which is the technical act of takfir and the licence under which a great deal of violence between Muslims has been justified. The third sets conditions on who may issue a fatwa and bars anyone outside them from doing so.

None of this is enforceable. There is no body that can bind the schools it names, and the message says as much by resting on endorsement rather than on jurisdiction. What it did instead was put a very large number of senior signatures, from institutions that ordinarily do not sign the same page, against a single proposition: that mutual excommunication is out of bounds. Amman is where that signature list was assembled, and the name of the city has travelled with the document ever since.