Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  In the last week of his life Abdullah seemed to have a premonition of his imminent death. On 15 July 1951 Riad al-Sulh, the former prime minister of Lebanon, was assassinated while on a visit to Jordan. In the aftermath of the assassination, the atmosphere in Jordan reeked of resentment, inflamed passions and fears of further violence. Reports of plots against the life of the monarch added to the anxieties of the Jordanian authorities and led them to step up security precautions. Abdullah’s aides pleaded with him not to go to Jerusalem for Friday prayers, but he was adamant. Abdullah’s fifteen-year-old grandson, Hussein, was to accompany him on what turned out to be his last journey. Hussein remembered that as they discussed the visit to Jerusalem the sense of foreboding was so strong that even his grandfather – a man not given to unnecessary alarm – seemed to have a premonition of disaster.

  On Friday, 20 July 1951, Abdullah went to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, accompanied by his grandson Hussein and an Arab Legion bodyguard. They entered the vast courtyard surrounding the Muslim Holy Places just before noon. First Abdullah visited the tomb of his father and then proceeded to the entrance of the Great Mosque, where the Koran was being recited to about 2,000 worshippers. As he stepped across the threshold, the old shaikh of the mosque, a venerable ecclesiastic with a long white beard, came forward to kiss his hand. The king’s guard fell back, and, as they did so, a young Palestinian nationalist stepped out from behind the massive door of the mosque, pressed a pistol to the king’s ear and fired a solitary shot, which killed him instantly. The king fell forward and his turban rolled away across the marble pavement.

  On hearing the news of Abdullah’s assassination, Ben-Gurion’s first thought was to seize the opportunity to capture Jordanian territory. He asked his military advisers to prepare a plan for the capture of the West Bank.35 This was abandoned, but Abdullah’s assassination did cause something of a change in Ben-Gurion’s thinking. Until 1951 he had accepted the territorial status quo and done nothing to disturb it. Once Abdullah was removed, his own commitment to the status quo began to waver, and he indulged in dreams of territorial expansion. The murder also made him more pessimistic about the prospects of peace with the rest of the Arab world. He concluded that peace with the Arabs could not be attained by negotiation; instead they would have to be deterred coerced and intimidated. Abdullah’s murder was thus a critical episode in the history of Israeli–Arab relations.

  From the Jordanian perspective, the founder of the kingdom failed to crown his contacts with the State of Israel with a peace treaty or to normalize relations between the two states. A formal and comprehensive peace settlement with Israel was beyond his power. The legacy that he left behind was complex and contradictory. He was a full-blooded Hashemite, but the Hashemites operated at two distinct levels: ideology and pragmatism. Ideologically, they were deeply committed to Arab nationalism. Indeed, they claimed to be the trail-blazers of the Arab awakening. The Arab Revolt was the great foundation myth of the Arab national movement, and they were the driving force behind that revolt. Pragmatically, however, the Hashemites relied heavily on outside powers to counter their isolation and to bolster their weak position within the region.

  The founder of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan had been dealt a particularly poor hand. He was given a desert kingdom with very meagre resources, no prestigious past and a very uncertain future. He consequently felt compelled to resort to politics, diplomacy and alliances. During the First World War he and his family forged an alliance with Great Britain and after it he developed a special relationship with the rising economic and political force in the region, the Zionist movement. Engagement with the Zionists served his dynastic interests, but for that very reason it also undermined his credentials as an Arab nationalist. Although alliances with foreign powers strengthened the position of the Hashemites regionally and internationally they also laid them open to the charge of serving other people’s interests, of being clients and, even worse, collaborators. Abdullah was much more strongly identified in the public eye with pragmatism than with ideology. He saw himself as an Arab patriot, but he was, in the final analysis, the king of realism. This mixed legacy is crucial for understanding Jordanian foreign policy during the brief interregnum of his son Talal and the long reign of his grandson Hussein.

  2

  Murder of a Mentor

  The murder of his beloved grandfather at the entrance to the Al-Aqsa Mosque was one of the most traumatic events in Hussein’s life and a decisive influence in moulding his character and outlook. The memory of it seared itself on the mind of the young prince, and gave him his first taste of the perils and pitfalls of monarchical politics. In his autobiography Hussein underscores its centrality: ‘I have decided to start these memoirs with the murder of my grandfather, since he, of all men, had the most profound influence on my life. So, too, had the manner of his death.’1

  Nothing in Hussein’s earlier life had prepared him for this terrible tragedy. He was born in Amman on 14 November 1935, and during his early years his family lived simply but happily. His father, Prince Talal, was Abdullah’s eldest son and heir apparent. Born in 1909 in the Hijaz, Talal was educated in Britain at the renowned public school Harrow and then at the military academy at Sandhurst. On his return from England, Talal became an officer in the British-commanded Jordanian Army, or the Arab Legion as it was called. But two periods of attachment to British infantry regiments stationed in Palestine bred in Talal resentment and rebelliousness against the British masters of his country, an attitude that brought his military career to an inglorious end.

  Talal’s marriage to his cousin Sharifa Zain bint Jamil (1916–94), who was herself of Hashemite ancestry, and the birth of their first son gave him the benefit of a settled family life. They lived on Jebel Amman, one of the capital’s seven hills, in a modest five-roomed villa set in a small plot of land. Although Talal was crown prince, his salary from the state was modest, leading them to live fairly frugally. Zain was a remarkable person: well educated, fluent in four languages, highly intelligent and

  with a modern outlook on life in what was a traditional, male-dominated society. She displayed towards her son constant affection and gave him a great deal of encouragement and guidance while avoiding the pomp and protocol that usually go with royalty. Talal too was a devoted husband and a loving father, but he showed increasing signs of the mental illness that was eventually diagnosed by Arab and European experts as schizophrenia.

  Whether Talal was born with the seeds of mental illness is difficult to say, but there can be no doubt that his troubled and acrimonious relationship with his father seriously aggravated his condition. In his memoirs Hussein candidly admitted that his grandfather and father never got on well together:

  The two men were separated by different lives and different ages, and their differences were exacerbated by opportunists. Worst of all, my grandfather never really realized until the end of his life how deeply afflicted my father was. He could not conceive that a man at times gentle and sensible, but at other times very ill, was not being just awkward or difficult. My grandfather was so healthy and tough he could not appreciate what illness was. We in the family knew. We watched our father with loving care, but my grandfather, who lived partly in the heroic past, saw him from outside. He had wanted a brave, intrepid, Bedouin son to carry on the great tradition of the Arab Revolt, and was incapable of accepting an invalid in place of his dream. It was the bitterest disappointment of his life.2

  Apart from temperamental incompatibility and the generational gap, father and son were completely at odds with one another in their attitude towards Britain and its representatives in Jordan. Abdullah was one of Britain’s closest friends and allies in the Middle East. In the Arab world he was widely regarded as a stooge and lackey of British imperialism. In fact, Abdullah felt that he and his family had been badly betrayed by the British and he privately nursed grievances against them. But he also recognized his dependence on them and was consequently d
etermined to preserve their friendship at any cost. Talal, on the other hand, bitterly resented British interference in the affairs of his country and saw no reason to conceal his resentment. He had many public clashes with British representatives, and these enhanced his popular reputation as a Jordanian patriot and an Arab nationalist.

  Britain’s two most senior representatives in Jordan were General John Bagot Glubb, who was generally referred to by his honorific title of Glubb Pasha, and Alec Kirkbride. Glubb was a British Army officer who joined the Arab Legion in 1930 and rose to the position of commander-in-chief. Although he served the Hashemites under contract, rather than on secondment from the British Army, in the eyes of the nationalists he was the symbol of Britain’s imperial domination in Jordan. Alec Kirk-bride lived in Jordan with only short breaks from 1918 onwards for a total of thirty-three years. From 1927 to 1938 he was assistant British resident; from 1939 to 1946 British resident; and from 1946 to 1951 minister plenipotentiary. Kirkbride was a shrewd and experienced politician, a robust character and the real eminence grise of Jordanian politics. A colonial pro-consul would have been a more fitting description of Kirkbride’s role than any of his official titles. He called his memoirs From the Wings: Amman Memoirs 1947–1951, whereas in fact he was at the centre of the political scene, very close to the monarch. Glubb and Kirkbride treated Abdullah with the utmost courtesy and genuine affection, but they were the effective power behind the throne, and their influence over him was all the more effective for being exercised in a subtle and indirect way.

  Both men, in their memoirs, pooh-poohed the idea that Talal was anti-British. Glubb claims that never in his life did he meet with more kindness and consideration than he did from Talal. Glubb notes that in Syria, Egypt and Palestine Talal was depicted as a noble patriot who had quarrelled with his father because Abdullah was a British tool. But he dismisses this view as pure fiction. The lack of sympathy between the two men, according to Glubb, was domestic.3 In a similar vein, Kirkbride writes that Talal did not differ from his father with regard to the policy that should be pursued in relation to Britain.4 Yet Kirkbride himself had described Prince Talal in a 1939 cable to London as ‘intemperate in his habits, untrustworthy and, at heart, deeply anti-British’.5 The most plausible explanation for this discrepancy is that the memoirs are self-serving, designed to protect Britain’s reputation.

  Strong evidence of Talal’s anti-British sentiments comes from his cousin, Prince Raad bin Zaid, the lord chamberlain of Jordan. Raad made a clear distinction between the younger generation of Hashemites – Talal and his cousin Ghazi, who was the king of Iraq from 1933 to 1939 – and their fathers:

  Prince Talal’s and Prince Ghazi’s sentiments were very anti-British. They saw eye-to-eye regarding the British. They were angry with the British for the following reasons. First, for the way that the British treated their grandfather when Sharif Hussein declined to sign the Versailles Peace Treaty and refused to accept the Balfour Declaration. Second, because the British did not fulfil the McMahon promise that Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine will be free. Third, for the way the British treated, humiliated, and banished Sharif Hussein into exile in Cyprus. There was humiliation to his person… He died a disappointed man. He felt that he was let down. At the beginning he had high regard and trust in the British and in the French but this was not to be. These are the underlying reasons for Talal’s and Ghazi’s anti-British sentiment. Abdullah and Faisal, being in a position of leadership, had to go along with the consequences of Versailles, which was not of their doing. They had to plan for the time when changes could be made and mandates removed, as happened in Iraq in 1932 and much later, in 1946, when Jordan gained independence.6

  The endless disagreements between Talal and Abdullah were not confined to high policy but extended to domestic matters as well, including the education of Hussein. Hussein went to no fewer than six different schools in Amman. He loved being in the company of other boys and wanted to be treated as one of them, without any special privileges. But, although he made many friends, none was really close. In his memoirs he suggests that ‘Perhaps this was because I changed schools so often. Opposing forces always seemed to be tugging at my education. I would be comfortably installed in one school, then my grandfather – who, to say the least of it, had a domineering character – would decide that I needed special tuition in religion, so back to the house I would go for extra private lessons. Then my father would decide that I needed more tuition in Arabic and I would have to change again.’7

  To round off his secondary education, Hussein was sent to Victoria College in Alexandria, a prestigious but spartan English public school with an excellent combination of English and Arabic. Despite its public school ethos, the college had a highly cosmopolitan atmosphere on account of its mixed student body, which included Armenians, Jews and the sons of well-to-do Arabs as well as the sons of British officials serving in the Middle East. Hussein’s grandfather paid his fees, as his parents could not afford them. The polyglot group of students welcomed Hussein to the school, and he adjusted to the new environment without any difficulty. A whole new world opened up for him – football, cricket, books and companionship. In his memoirs here called the long dormitory that he shared with about thirty other boys, the cold showers every morning, the uniform of grey flannels and blue blazers. His two years at Victoria were among the happiest of his life. It was also a formative experience in as much as he was able not only to survive academically but to do well, gain self-respect and grow in terms of self-reliance. In addition to the normal curriculum, Hussein took courses in Arabic and religion, always the subjects that his grandfather looked at first when scrutinizing his reports. During his last term at Victoria, Hussein got a good report and won a medal in fencing. His grandfather was so pleased with this achievement that he gave him the honorary rank of captain in the Arab Legion and an officer’s uniform to go with it.8

  During his two years at Victoria College, Hussein’s closest friend was his cousin Zaid bin Shaker, who was fifteen months older. Scion of a prominent sharifian family, Zaid went on to serve as ADC to the king, chief of staff, chief of the royal court and prime minister. Shaker felt that he and his cousin had ‘as perfect a relationship as two men can have’.9 Hussein used to say to Zaid, ‘We are one soul in two bodies.’10 Zaid Rifa’i, another future Jordanian prime minister, was also a contemporary at the college. Other lifelong friends from this period included the Saudi brothers of Hashemite stock, Ghassan and Ghazi Shaker. During his time at Alexandria, Hussein first set eyes on the girl who was to become his third wife many years later, in 1972. Alia Toukan came from a prominent Palestinian family from Nablus. She was born in Egypt in 1948. Her father, Baha Uddin Toukan, was the Jordanian ambassador to Egypt, and Hussein was a frequent visitor at the ambassador’s residence in Cairo. Alia was one year old when Hussein first met her, and he used to play with her. In 1951, when her father was appointed ambassador to Turkey, her family moved to Ankara.

  It was during the long vacations that Hussein grew closer to his grandfather, who considered school holidays as an opportunity to study harder. Abdullah saw in Hussein a more promising keeper of the Hashemite flame than his two sons, so he took him in hand and started to groom him. The daily routine is described by Hussein in his memoirs. He would get to the palace by 6.30 a.m. A room was reserved as a school room and a tutor appointed to give Hussein Arabic lessons. But Abdullah would invariably start the day’s work himself and leave detailed instructions for the teacher. In the course of the morning Abdullah would sometimes barge in like a school inspector to check on the pupil and to cross-examine the teacher.

  Some days grandfather and grandson shared a modest breakfast around 8.30 a.m. – Bedouin coffee flavoured with cardamom and some flat cakes of bread without butter or jam. Abdullah believed that one worked better on a half-empty stomach. When lessons were over, Hussein would go to his grandfather’s office and quietly watch him at work. Occasionally, Hussein would be invited to act as an i
nterpreter, for though Abdullah understood English, he could not speak it. Most days Hussein would return to the palace before evening prayers and dine with his grandfather, who talked at length about the problems and pitfalls of kingship and about the intricate politics of the Arab world. A recurrent theme in these soliloquies was Abdullah’s disappointment with the British and the French. He felt that he had been a leading figure in the struggle for Arab independence but that he was also the victim of duplicity. Nor did Abdullah conceal from Hussein his disappointment with his two sons, Talal and Naif. Only in retrospect did it dawn on Hussein why his grandfather lavished so much affection on him towards the end of his life: he had become the son that Abdullah had always wanted.11

  Abdullah, a Bedouin at heart, loved the desert so much that he staked a tent in the palace grounds in Amman for passing the time in a more relaxed manner. In the cool of the evening he would often recline there on silken cushions and hold court to his friends and other notables. It was in this tent that Hussein spent many evenings listening to the advice and wisdom of the grandfather he revered so much. One moment, however, three days before the visit to Jerusalem remained firmly inscribed in Hussein’s memory and had a powerful impact on him for the rest of his life. They were sitting and talking when Abdullah turned to him for no reason that he could fathom and said to him in a gentle voice,