Foreign News: Arab Gentleman

When King Abdullah of Jordan visited Britain in 1946, Prime Minister Attlee showed him a portrait of Cromwell and remarked that in his opinion the great Puritan was a remarkable man. Sincerely shocked, Abdullah exclaimed: “But he was the man who cut off the King’s head!”

Abdullah Ibn Hussein, scion of the proud Hashemite family, lived in his youth in “honorable captivity” i.e., as a hostage for the good behavior of his powerful relatives, at the court of Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid, who cut off heads with considerably less thought than Cromwell ever gave the matter. But Abdullah preferred to satisfy his great ambition—and check his many enemies—through subtler means. He seemed to have a natural knack for the subtle games of power. At Abdul Hamid’s court the youngster, who was born and raised (until 10) in a harem, came to realize that the Ottoman Empire was on its way out. He sided with another of history’s favorites—then still in her prime—the British Empire. The British in World War I were organizing Arab resistance against Turkish rule in the Middle East; and Abdullah and his brothers fought bravely against the Turks.

Lawrence of Arabia described a meeting with the young prince: “Abdullah, on a white mare, came to us softly with a bevy of richly armed slaves on foot…Before long I began to suspect him of constant cheerfulness. His eyes had a confirmed twinkle…”

From Tent io Palace. In 1921, as a reward for the Hashemites’ services, Britain’s Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, made Abdullah Emir of Trans-Jordan and made his brother Feisal King of Iraq. The boys had their troubles. Their father, Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, was attacked by his old rival, Ibn Saud. In the end, Ibn Saud drove the Sherif out of his domain, annexed Mecca and the surrounding district to his holdings in Arabia.

Emir Abdullah, meanwhile, worked hard to transform Jordan, an ungainly, rocky patch of land, into a kingdom. For two years he lived in a tent. On the tent site at Amman Abdullah later built his palace. He ruled as an absolute monarch, but the poorest Bedouin could come to plead with him at any time. He once spent a whole day personally tracking down a rascal who had made a poor woman pregnant.

His throne was an ordinary armchair in claret-colored upholstery, his garb a spotless white shirt and beige ankle-length robe, elastic-sided boots, and a white turban wound around his head, one end hanging rakishly loose in Hejaz style. Once Abdullah installed a set of distorting mirrors in the entrance to his audience chamber so that he could chuckle at the changing shapes of approaching people, particularly dignified British diplomats.

Abdullah had three wives, two sons, three daughters. No. 1 Queen was a cousin, Umm Talal, mother of Prince Talal; No. 2 Queen was a Turk, Umm Naif, mother of Prince Naif the new regent; No. 3 was a comely Ethiopian, black as the tents of Kedar, onetime maidservant to Umm Naif. The black queen attended to Abdullah’s clothes, prepared his favorite meals of tender lamb, rice and raisins. A trim figure with a passion for green clothes and nylon stockings, she is, despite her heavy veil, often recognized in Amman’s streets. An Amman urchin once jeered “Nylon” at her, after which it became a crime punishable by jail sentence to shout the word nylon publicly in Amman.

Dream of a Half Moon. Abdullah stayed consistently loyal to the British, even during World War II, when many other Arab leaders were flirting with the Axis. His great political dream was a new state to combine Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, “that great half moon,” as he called it, “which opens’ on two seas.”

But that moon never rose. Ibn Saud, his family’s old enemy, did not like the scheme, and neither did Egypt’s Farouk, who dreamed, with his politicians, of uniting the Arab world under Egypt’s leadership. Abdullah came to be almost universally disliked by other Arab leaders, denounced for his pro-Western stand.

New winds of violence and hate were sweeping the Middle East, different from the passionate, but more governable nationalism of Abdullah’s own youth. Abdullah scoffed at threats, walked, unconcerned and freely, among his people. Last week, as he visited the Mosque of the Rock in Jerusalem, he was talking about the murder of Syria’s Riad el Solh, who was assassinated a few days before (see below). Said Abdullah scornfully: “If Riad had come to Jerusalem, as I asked him, he would not be dead.”

They were Abdullah’s last words before his own murderer’s bullets found him.