TRANS-JORDAN: Birth of a Nation

TRANSJORDAN

Bursts of gunfire sent herds of scrawny goats scampering along the rocky hillsides. Amman, dusty mountain capital of mountainous Trans-Jordan, last week woke out of its normal torpor to its most exciting holiday in a quarter of a century. Stocky (5 ft. 5 in.) Emir Abdullah was home from London with a British treaty recognizing Trans-Jordan (area 30,000 sq. mi.; pop. about 300,000) as a sovereign and independent state.

Rarely had a treaty been so quickly proposed, prepared and signed. At UNO’s London meeting, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had announced Britain’s intention to give up its League of Nations mandate for Trans-Jordan. The following week King George invited Emir Abdullah to London. Within a month the negotiations had been completed. They left Trans-Jordan still tied to Britain by a fairly strong military and economic rope. Trans-Jordan was to provide facilities for the training and movement of British troops, and her communications were to be developed with British money and in consultation with British technicians. Trans-Jordan’s Arab Legion (whose Desert Patrol is known locally as “Glubb’s Girls”) would still be trained and commanded by Britain’s 48-year-old Arabophile John Bagot Glubb. He is known to his men as

Abu Huneik (“Father of the Jaw”) because of the World War I scar on his chin.

Part-Time Job. In spite of the strings attached, Emir Abdullah might feel that a lifetime of loyalty to Britain had at last been rewarded. As a young delegate to the Ottoman Parliament, he had urged his father Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, to team with the British in an Arab revolt against Ottoman overlordship. In World War I (in return for a promise of Arab independence) Abdullah fought against the Turks, side by side with Colonel Lawrence.

With a British subsidy to help, Abdullah had found life in Trans-Jordan tolerable enough. He rises at crack of dawn each day and at 7 o’clock drives in his lemon-colored limousine to an office in the center of Amman. There for two hours he works. Then he returns to his gaudy palace on one of Amman’s five hilltops and reads Arabic poetry. After a hearty lunch (favorite dish: chicken pilaf) he attends to more official business. More often he withdraws to a black Bedouin tent in the backyard of his palace, to receive his chieftains. When he is gay (which happens often), he will take a sheikh into the palace and send him careering through the salons on a bicycle. He loves practical jokes, and keeps a set of distorting mirrors in his palace “so that I can see what my guests are really like.”

Every evening before he goes to sleep (on the floor; he never sleeps in a bed), Abdullah plays chess, to which he is passionately addicted. He is a strict Moslem, who criticizes Egypt’s King Farouk for having allowed his Queen to go out unveiled. But he himself keeps a “black harem,” a frequent source of dispute between him and his three wives.

Now in his sixties, Abdullah has finally become a king like his younger brother, the late great Feisal of Iraq. In Amman last week rumors circulated that Trans-Jordanian independence was only the beginning. Abdullah wanted a full-time job; he hoped to unite Trans-Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and part of Palestine into a “Greater Syria.”