Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  Britain was simply too busy setting up an administration in Palestine proper, west of the Jordan River, to bother with the remote and undeveloped areas that lay to the east of the river. Moreover, these areas were meant to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the national home for the Jews in Palestine had become an accomplished fact. There was no intention at this stage of turning the territory east of the river into an independent Arab state.18

  At a hastily arranged meeting in Jerusalem in late March 1921, Churchill himself, with the eager assistance and encouragement of Lawrence, therefore offered Abdullah the Amirate of Transjordan, comprising the territory between the Jordan River and the Arab Desert to the east. The condition was that Abdullah renounce his avowed intention of attempting to conquer Syria and recognize the British mandate over Transjordan as part of the Palestine mandate. Abdullah, relieved to be quit of a military adventure with an extremely doubtful outcome, accepted both conditions without argument. In return for Abdullah’s undertaking to forswear and prevent any belligerent acts against the French in Syria, Churchill promised to try to persuade them to restore Arab government there, this time with Abdullah at its head. Abdullah’s suggestion that he should be made king of Palestine as well as of Transjordan was declined by Churchill on the grounds that it conflicted with British commitment to a Jewish national home.

  Abdullah had to settle for a temporary arrangement, lasting six months, within the framework of the Palestine mandate and under the supervision of the high commissioner, who would appoint a British adviser in Amman to help the amir to set up a central administration. During this period, the amir was to receive from the British government a monthly subsidy of £5,000 to enable him to recruit a local force for the preservation of order in Transjordan. Thus, by the stroke of a pen on a sunny Sunday afternoon, as he was later to boast, Churchill created the Amirate of Transjordan.

  In April 1921 a government was formed in Transjordan. The initial six months were full of problems, as Abdullah, who was extravagant and absurdly generous towards his friends, squandered his allowances, while the country was swarming with Syrians bent on taking up arms against the French. Abdullah’s inability to run the country efficiently raised doubts about his value to Britain. Nevertheless, towards the end of the year the temporary arrangement was given permanence when the British government formally recognized ‘the existence of an independent government under the rule of His Excellency the Amir Abdullah Ibn Hussein’, subject to the establishment of a constitutional regime and the conclusion of an agreement that would enable Britain to fulfil its international obligations.

  This was the first step down a new road in British policy: the separation of Transjordan from Palestine. The second was taken in 1922, when Britain, in the face of strong Zionist opposition, obtained the necessary approval from the League of Nations to exclude the territory of Transjordan from the provisions of the Palestine mandate relating to the Jewish national home. In May 1923 the British government granted Transjordan its independence, with Abdullah as ruler and with St John Philby as chief representative, administering a £150,000 grant-in-aid. It was largely Abdullah’s own failure to fulfil the condition of constitutional government that prolonged the dependent status of Transjordan. Another reason for the delay was the progressive deterioration in the relations between the British and Abdullah’s illustrious father. At the Cairo conference, in March 1921, some of the post-war problems in the Middle East had been settled to the satisfaction of at least some of the parties concerned: Churchill got his ‘economy with honour’; Faisal got the throne of Iraq; and Abdullah got the Amirate of Transjordan. Iraq and Transjordan became the two main pillars of Britain’s informal empire in the Middle East. Churchill candidly explained the advantages to Britain of ruling the Middle East through the Hashemite family:

  A strong argument in favour of Sherifian policy was that it enabled His Majesty’s Government to bring pressure to bear on one Arab sphere in order to attain their ends in another. If Faisal knew that not only his father’s subsidy and the protection of the Holy Places from Wahabi attack, but also the position of his brother in Trans-Jordan was dependent upon his own good behaviour, he would be much easier to deal with. The same argument applied, mutatis mutandis, to King Hussein and Amir Abdallah.19

  That summer Colonel Lawrence was sent to Jedda to tie up some loose ends, only to discover that the grand sharif himself had become the greatest obstacle to the consolidation of Britain’s sharifian policy. Lawrence offered a formal treaty of alliance that secured the Kingdom of the Hijaz against aggression and guaranteed indefinite continuation of the handsome subsidy paid annually to Hussein since 1917. But the old man, embittered by what he regarded as British bad faith and betrayal, refused to sign and angrily rejected the conditions stating that he should recognize the mandate system and condone the Balfour Declaration.

  The subsequent ending of the British subsidy and the removal of British protection left the king of the Hijaz exposed to the mercies of his great rival, Sultan Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud of the Najd in Eastern Arabia. Only British diplomatic pressure and the payment of a subsidy to Ibn Saud had kept the rivalry between the two Arabian rulers dormant during the First World War. After the war an inevitable trial of strength developed between the king, who assumed that his sponsorship of the Arab Revolt entitled him to political authority over his neighbours, and the chieftain, whose determination revived the Wahhabi movement. The Wahhabiyya, named after Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, was an ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim movement that arose in the Arabian Peninsula in the second half of the eighteenth century. Ibn Saud turned the Wahhabi movement into an effective military force.

  The first serious clash occurred on 21 May 1919 in Turaba, on the eastern border of the Hijaz, when Ibn Saud’s forces almost totally obliterated a large Hashemite army commanded by Abdullah. The wild Wahhabi warriors, the Ikhwan, crept up at night on Abdullah’s unguarded camp and killed many of the men in their beds. Thirty-five of his personal guard died fighting at the door of his tent. Abdullah himself escaped in his night clothes with the taunts of shurayif (‘little sharif’) ringing in his ears, wounded in body and pride. Moreover, as his biographer has observed:

  The battle at Turaba was a turning point in Abdullah’s life and in the history of Arabia. From that time on, Husayn and his sons were on the defensive while Ibn Saud grew inexorably more powerful… Abdullah’s Arabian ambitions died at Turaba as well. The reverberations of the dreadful rout echoed throughout Arabia, diminishing his stature and his family’s prestige. In a single night his dreams of an Arabian empire had turned to nightmares.20

  More defeats were to follow. In March 1924, after the Turkish National Assembly abolished the caliphate, Hussein proclaimed himself caliph. Characteristically, this was a unilateral move for which he had not obtained the agreement of any other Islamic leaders. It was also a misjudgement of his own power and position. For Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi followers, it was the last straw. The decisive battle began in September 1924, when the Ikhwan mounted an offensive that Hussein could not withstand. After they captured Taif, Hussein abdicated in favour of his eldest son, Ali, hoping to save the Kingdom of the Hijaz for his family. But Ali too was overthrown and banished from the Hijaz a year later. In October 1924, Ibn Saud captured Mecca, and Hussein escaped to Aqaba. From Aqaba, Hussein was taken by a British naval vessel to Cyprus, where he lived in exile until his death in 1931.

  The Hijaz became part of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud inflicted on Hussein and his eldest son the crowning humiliation of seeing him assume the administration of the holy places in Mecca and Medina. Thus, with the loss of the two most sacred sites of Islam, the Hashemite claim to leadership of the Muslim world disintegrated, as did the dream of a mighty Hashemite empire. And, by a cruel historic irony, it was in its own ancestral home that the Hashemite dynasty sustained the most monumental and shattering of defeats.

  Hussein’s eclipse gave a dramatic illustration of the immense powe
r wielded by Britain in shaping the fortunes of the Arab nations and their rulers. The political shape of the region did not evolve naturally but was largely the product of British design tailored to fit Britain’s own imperial needs. It was not the Syrians who expelled Faisal nor was it the Iraqis who raised him to the throne in their own countries. Abdullah could not have gained power in Transjordan without Britain’s approval, and had he tried to do so in defiance of Britain he would not have survived for very long. Ibn Saud was not invited by the Hijazis to their country but rather he was enabled by British-supplied arms to enter and conquer their land. And just as the withdrawal of British support paved the way to the decline and fall of the Hashemite kingdom in the Hijaz, so it was British protection, and only British protection, that could preserve the Hashemite crown in Transjordan.

  Ibn Saud was not content with his victory over Hussein. Driven by political ambition to expand his own realm and by the religious zeal of the Wahhabi reform movement, he turned northwards with the intent of completing the destruction of the house of Hashem. Abdullah’s incorporation of the provinces of Ma’an and Aqaba, which formerly belonged to the Kingdom of the Hijaz, into the Amirate of Transjordan exacerbated the poor relations between the two rival dynasties. In August 1924 Wahhabi forces crossed the border into Transjordan, and had it not been for an RAF squadron from Jerusalem and a detachment of British armoured cars that furiously mowed down Ibn Saud’s column of camel riders, Abdullah undoubtedly would have met the same fate as his father.

  Ibn Saud did not abandon his designs on Transjordan, and the conflict continued to smoulder, with occasional forays across the border and tribal clashes. The 1928 treaty, which recognized Transjordan’s independence but left finance and foreign affairs under British control, was signed at the time when Wahhabi raids were increasing. It was just as well for Abdullah that the British also undertook to defend the borders of the amirate, because this time the Wahhabis, fired by the fervour to sweep away all corruption and restore their pristine and puritanical brand of Islam, advanced upon Amman itself. Once again it was only the swift and forceful intervention of the RAF, this time assisted by the Arab Legion, that repelled the invasion and kept the amir on his throne in Amman. The Arab Legion (Al-Jaish al-Arabi) was a military formation created in Transjordan in 1920 by the British to maintain internal law and order. It was financed by Britain and commanded by British officers, underlining the local ruler’s dependence on his colonial masters.

  The principality that Abdullah had carved out for himself and from which he was in danger of being ejected was a political anomaly and a geographical nonsense. It had no obvious raison d’être and was indeed of such little political significance that the European powers, in their generally acquisitive wartime diplomacy, tended to overlook it as an unimportant corner of Syria. The status of this territory had remained indistinct until Abdullah’s arrival. The Amirate of Transjordan was then created by the famous stroke of Churchill’s pen, in mitigation of the sense of guilt the British felt towards the sharif, and in the hope of securing a modicum of stability and order east of the Jordan River at the lowest possible cost to their exchequer.

  The borders of the new principality did not correspond to any particular historic, cultural or geographical unit. Bounded by the valley of the Yarmouk on the north, by the Arabian Desert on the east, by the Jordan River, the Dead Sea and Wadi Araba on the west, it had no outlet to the sea until Abdullah grabbed Ma’an and Aqaba from the expiring Kingdom of the Hijaz. Effectively, Transjordan was a strip of cultivable land 270 kilometres long with a width tapering from 80 kilometres in the north to almost nothing in the south, and flanked by a great deal of desert; it possessed some 230,000 inhabitants, one railway line and hardly any roads, no industrial resources and no revenue except for a modest British subsidy. The capital and largest town of this backward amirate was Amman – a drab and dusty place that could not even boast a glorious past. It was perhaps not altogether inappropriate that such a place should serve as the capital of this provincial backwater. And it was in a modest palace on the eastern hill overlooking Amman that Amir Abdullah settled down, ‘loyally and comfortably’, as Churchill had hoped, with two official wives and a beautiful concubine.

  But Transjordan was a very insubstantial principality for so ambitious a prince. The contrast between the barren and insignificant patch of territory assigned to him to administer on behalf of the British mandatory power and Abdullah’s own heart’s desire could hardly have been greater. Proud of his provenance, he was moved by an unshakeable faith that the true destiny of the Arabs lay in unity under Hashemite rule. From his father, Abdullah inherited the belief in Arab greatness, the yearning to revive the glories of the Islamic past and the vision of a mighty Hashemite empire and caliphate. But he did not inherit either the sanctimonious self-righteousness or the quixotic obstinacy that had brought his father’s kingdom crashing down in flames.

  Among Arab politicians Abdullah was never a popular or trusted figure. In his own way he was an ardent Arab nationalist, but the authoritarianism that marked his approach to the affairs of state and the confidence he exuded of being marked out by destiny to lead the Arab world to independence did not endear him to other Arabs, especially when they happened to be fellow kings or rulers in their own right.

  Given his pride in his heritage, the faith that he himself was destined to play a commanding role, his penchant for playing for high stakes and the vaulting ambition he had nursed since his youth, it was inevitable that Abdullah would regard Transjordan as only the beginning, not the end, of his political career. ‘Much too big a cock for so small a dunghill,’ was Lord Curzon’s comment on Abdullah in September 1921. Another contemporary described him as ‘a falcon trapped in a canary’s cage, longing to break out, to realize his dreams and passions of being a great Arab leader; but there he was, pinned up in the cage of Transjordan by the British.’ Abdullah spent the rest of his life in a sustained attempt to project his political presence and influence beyond the borders of Transjordan. Behind this attempt lay not merely a personal sense of destiny and grievance but a statesmanlike appreciation that Transjordan needed a regional role if it was ever to become independent of Britain.

  To this end Abdullah looked in all directions, but his greatest ambition was Greater Syria – Syria in its historical, or ‘natural’, dimensions, encompassing Palestine, Transjordan and Lebanon. Abdullah aspired to realize this vision of Greater Syria with its capital in Damascus, the hereditary seat of the Umayyad caliphate, and with himself as king and overlord. He consistently maintained that Transjordan was only the southern part of Syria, and that his presence there was just a prelude to the attainment of complete Arab liberation, in the pursuit of which his family had sacrificed the Hijaz. The motto he adopted was: ‘All Syria to come under the leadership of a scion of the House of Hashem; Transjordan was the first step.’ The cherished notion of a great Arab empire that eluded the father would thus be realized by the son.

  In the early years of Abdullah’s rule, frustrated Syrian nationalists and enemies of the French mandate descended on Amman in droves. Some found their way into Abdullah’s embryonic administration, while others, more militant and bent on pursuing their struggle against the French, even mounted raids across the border. With Faisal keeping a low profile in Baghdad, and Hussein fighting a rearguard battle until 1924 in his remote corner of Arabia, Abdullah emerged as a leading champion of Arab unity, and Amman became a focal point for Arab nationalist politics. But the initial euphoria evaporated rapidly, and with the passage of time the gulf between his idea of Arab unity – based on Islam, autocracy and the preservation of the old social order – and the younger nationalists’ conception of unity – based on attaining liberation from foreign rule, and freedom and social reform at home – grew wider and resulted in mutual disenchantment.

  Abdullah’s tendency to assume that what was good for the Hashemites was good for the Arabs did not gain him many friends abroad. He began to focus more n
arrowly on his dynastic and personal interests at the expense of the broader political ideals. After the loss of the Hijaz to Ibn Saud and the expansion of his domain down to the Gulf of Aqaba, Abdullah settled down patiently to await opportunities for promoting his Greater Syria scheme. This was modified following the death in 1933 of his brother Faisal. From that point on he was to toy with various ideas for merging Iraq with Greater Syria, possibly in a federation of the Fertile Crescent of which he, as the oldest member of the Hashemite family and the only surviving leader of the Arab Revolt, would be the natural ruler.

  Abdullah worked industriously, if rather fitfully, to propagate the idea of Greater Syria, always harking back to Faisal’s lost kingdom, which should revert to him, just as Faisal’s lineal heirs should succeed to the throne of Iraq. He assiduously cultivated a following in Syria itself and managed to enlist the support of some of the conservative elements there: the Ulama (religious scholars), the small landlords and the tribal shaikhs scattered around the country. Among Abdullah’s most prominent supporters were Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar, the nationalist politician, and Sultan al-Atrash, the Druze leader from Jabal al-Druze in south-eastern Syria. (The Druze are an Arabic-speaking national–religious minority in Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Their sect is a branch of Shia Islam whose origins go back to the eleventh century.)