Last Friday, a crowd of men set off from the local mosque in the small southwestern city of Tafilah to deliver a gift to the chief of the secret police at his office on the other side of town.

“It's a woman's dress,” explained Majdi al-Qabalin with a twinkle in his eye, “because he's a coward.” Along the way, they called out chants addressing King Abdullah II: “You saw what happened to Mubarak, Qaddafi and Ben Ali,” they cried. “No to Abdullah, no to Hussein!”

At the time, the streets of Amman still quiet, such calls seemed an impossibility for the rest of Jordan. That all changed on Tuesday, when protesters took to the streets in cities across the country repeating the rallying cry of Arab revolutions, “the people want the fall of the regime,” even, significantly, in central Amman. The immediate trigger for the unrest was an announcement of cuts to fuel subsidies, part of a package of austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund in exchange for a sorely needed two-billion-dollar loan. But red lines fell away as protesters began naming the king as responsible for mismanaging them into this predicament, even from the steps of the royal court.

Tafilah, a small city tucked into dramatic, austere mountains some 180 km south of Jordan's capital of Amman, could never have been predicted to be at the vanguard of such a movement. It is a tiny province, representing little more than one percent of the total population of Jordan, which is based almost entirely in and around the capital city. As stereotypes would have it, as an East Bank and tribal community, it was once widely believed to be a bulwark of support for the monarchy.