MIDDLE EAST: King & Killer

In the Old City of Jerusalem, toward noon one day last week, a white-robed old man with piercing eyes and a soldierly bearing walked across the compound of the Mosque of the Rock, believed by the faithful to enclose the rock from which the Prophet Mohamed rode to heaven on a white steed. King Abdullah of Jordan, who traces his descent from the Prophet himself, was making his weekly visit to the shrine to honor the Prophet and the memory of his own father, Hussein, onetime Sherif of Mecca (Custodian of the Holy Places) and King of the Hejaz, whose bones lie buried there. Abdullah, right hand relaxed on the hilt of his ceremonial dagger, * walked easily, far ahead of his bodyguard. Talking animatedly with his companions, including his grandson, 15-year-old Emir Hussein, the King went up the steps to the entrance of the nearby Aqsa Mosque, slipped off his shoes, prepared to join 4,000 other Moslems at prayer. At that point a young man in Western clothes stepped from behind an iron grille gate. Within a few paces of the unsuspecting monarch he whipped out an American-made automatic, fired five bullets into Abdullah’s face and chest.

Broadcast Death. The first King of Jordan, one of the Arab world’s few statesmen, fell to the ground. Five accomplices of the assassin fired into the roof of the mosque, and the crowd of worshipers stampeded. (The microphones of Radio Jerusalem in the mosque were connected, carrying the sound of the shots to thousands who had tuned in to listen to the prayers.) Abdullah’s body was trampled in the panicky rush. The accomplices, including a young boy who had been standing by with a reserve clip of ammunition, managed to get away. The murderer, according to one report, placed the gun to his right temple and shot himself; according to another version, it was the King’s bodyguard who felled him where he stood.

Then the Hashemite regiment of the Arab Legion assigned to guard Abdullah rushed in. The men fired crazily, clubbed with their guns, stabbed with their bayonets, killed at least 20. Other legionnaires, usually tightly disciplined, rushed through the Old City, looting, and shooting at anything that stirred.

Three days later in Amman, its dusty capital, Jordan buried Abdullah. In his simple palace, men chanted verses from the Koran. As Abdullah’s coffin was carried out to a waiting caisson, crowds of women wailed “Sayedna” (Our Master), tore their clothes and beat their bodies.

The dead King’s boots were tied heels to the front in the stirrups of his pure white Arabian horse and the procession began to move, paced by the dull boom of a single cannon, fired every minute. Glubb Pasha, British chief of the Arab Legion, wept openly, wiped his eyes with his red-and-white checkered legionnaire’s headdress.

Abdullah’s death is a serious loss for the West, for the King was the West’s most reliable friend in the shifting, explosive Middle East.

The Other Mustafas. The story of Abdullah’s murder—and of his murderer—explains what is happening in the Middle East.

The killer’s name was Mustafa Shukri Asho. By trade he was a tailor’s apprentice. Three years ago, in the Israeli-Arab war, Mustafa, then 18, joined an Arab terrorist gang known as the Sacred Holy Fight Commando (headed by a Nazitrained demolition expert) to fight Israel. Mustafa, an American overseas cap cocked on his head, would do anything: once he drove a truckload of explosives into a Jewish section of Jerusalem, nonchalantly jumped out and watched the explosion.

But Mustafa’s side lost the war. He was bitter and disillusioned. Like most Arabs of his age, he lost confidence in the older Arab leaders, and particularly hated Abdullah who, seeing how weak the other Arab states were, arranged a truce with the Jews. Mustafa went back to Jerusalem and the dull job of tailoring, ready to follow almost anyone who offered leadership, a goal, and revenge. He joined a semimilitary gang known as the “Forthcoming Salvation Army” whose aim was to regain Palestine. Its reputed sponsor: the Mufti of Jerusalem, exiled by the British in 1937, a schemer who still commands the loyalty of many Palestinian Arabs and whose ambition, shared by his protector, King Farouk of Egypt, is to crush Israel and destroy Britain’s last remaining influence in the Middle East. Last week, at the Mosque of the Rock, Mustafa struck his blow for “Forthcoming Salvation,” and gladly died for it.

The West calls Mustafa a “nationalist fanatic.” But he is no exceptional case. Men like him are at large by the thousands from Abadan to Cairo, from Alep to Mecca. A man like Mustafa committed last week’s second political murder in the Middle East, in a different cause but in the same spirit (see below). Such men are not united in their aims; they often hate each other’s factions. But they have one thing in common: hatred of the West and of all Arab leaders whom they suspect of friendship for the West. Lacking political leadership in their own countries or from the West, the Mustafas are involuntarily becoming Communism’s formidable allies in the Middle East.

* Securely soldered to its scabbard, to avoid incidents: before this precaution, flash-tempered Abdullah had been known to draw his dagger against subordinates.