Hussein I of Jordan

Hussein bin Talal was born in Amman on November 14, 1935, the eldest son of Crown Prince Talal and Princess Zein al-Sharaf. His family, the Hashemites, traced its descent from the Prophet Muhammad and had ruled the Hejaz before the British installed his great grandfather's sons on the thrones of Iraq and Transjordan after the First World War ^[1]. The Amman of his childhood was a modest hill town, capital of the Emirate of Transjordan, a British mandate territory that became the independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1946.

His education mixed Arab and British influences. He attended Islamic schools in Amman, then Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, before moving to Harrow School in England. Later he took a short course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, an experience that shaped his lifelong attachment to the army and to flying ^[2].

The defining shock of his youth came on July 20, 1951, at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. A Palestinian gunman shot and killed his grandfather, King Abdullah I, as the 15 year old Hussein stood beside him. Hussein later recounted that a bullet aimed at him deflected off a medal on his chest, an event he described as fixing his sense of destiny ^[1]. The assassination pushed the family into crisis and pushed Hussein toward the throne far sooner than anyone had planned.

Abdullah's death made Hussein's father, Talal, king, but Talal suffered from serious mental illness, later described as schizophrenia, and the Jordanian parliament declared him unfit to rule in August 1952 ^[3]. The crown passed to Hussein, then 16 and still studying in England. Because he had not reached the constitutional age of majority, a regency council governed until he was formally enthroned on May 2, 1953 ^[1].

Few observers expected the boy king to last. Jordan in the early 1950s was poor, dependent on British subsidies, and swollen by hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war. The kingdom had annexed the West Bank in 1950, which more than doubled its population and tied its fate to the Palestinian question for decades ^[3].

Hussein moved early to assert himself. In March 1956, riding a wave of Arab nationalist feeling, he dismissed Sir John Bagot Glubb, the British general known as Glubb Pasha who had commanded the Arab Legion for decades. The decision, taken abruptly and against London's wishes, signaled that the young monarch intended to Arabize his army and rule in his own right ^[2]. A year later he faced down an attempted coup linked to nationalist officers, dissolved political parties, and consolidated royal control, decisions that defined the authoritarian but personal style of his early reign ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Hussein I of Jordan usually begins with his talent for survival. Through the 1950s and 1960s he outlasted assassination plots, army conspiracies, and relentless pressure from Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose pan-Arab broadcasts branded the Hashemite king a Western puppet ^[1]. Hussein balanced between the radical Arab republics and his Western patrons, first Britain and then, after 1957, the United States, which became Jordan's principal financial backer ^[4].

The gravest miscalculation of his reign came in June 1967. Days before the Six Day War, Hussein flew to Cairo and signed a defense pact with Nasser, placing Jordanian forces under Egyptian command. When war broke out, Jordan joined the fighting and lost the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem to Israel in less than a week ^[4]. The defeat cost the kingdom its most productive territory, its holiest sites, and produced a new wave of roughly 300,000 refugees and displaced persons crossing to the East Bank ^[3]. Hussein spent much of the rest of his life trying to undo the consequences of that decision, and in November 1967 he helped shape UN Security Council Resolution 242, which set out the land for peace formula ^[4].

The next crisis came from within. Palestinian guerrilla organizations, using Jordan as a base for raids against Israel, grew into a state within a state. After the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked airliners to a desert strip in Jordan in September 1970, Hussein ordered his army against the fedayeen. The civil war that followed, remembered as Black September, killed thousands and ended in July 1971 with the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization to Lebanon ^[5]. During the fighting Hussein also repelled a Syrian armored incursion in the north. The confrontation secured the monarchy but left a lasting wound in Jordanian-Palestinian relations ^[5].

Any honest list of Hussein I of Jordan achievements centers on diplomacy. He kept Jordan out of the October 1973 war in all but token form, and at the 1974 Arab summit in Rabat he reluctantly accepted the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, a decision that loosened his claim to the West Bank ^[3]. In July 1988 he made that separation formal, severing Jordan's legal and administrative ties to the territory and clearing the way for an eventual Palestinian state ^[4].

For decades Hussein also held quiet meetings with Israeli leaders, contacts that were an open secret in diplomatic circles long before any treaty existed ^[1]. His hardest balancing act came in 1990 and 1991, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Refusing to join the American led coalition against Saddam Hussein, with whom Jordan had deep economic ties, he was punished by Gulf states and Western donors, and Jordan absorbed a flood of returning expatriate workers ^[4]. He spent the following years rebuilding those relationships.

The Madrid conference of 1991 and the Oslo accords of 1993 opened the door he had waited for. On October 26, 1994, Hussein and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Israel-Jordan peace treaty at Wadi Araba, making Jordan the second Arab state, after Egypt, to make formal peace with Israel ^[6]. The treaty settled borders and water shares and recognized Jordan's special role at the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. When Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Hussein delivered a eulogy in Jerusalem, calling the slain leader a brother. In March 1997, after a Jordanian soldier shot seven Israeli schoolgirls at Baqura, the king traveled to Israel and knelt in condolence before the bereaved families, a gesture that drew wide attention ^[6].

At home Hussein governed through a mix of tribal loyalty, a strong security establishment, and periodic openings. After riots over price increases in 1989 he restored parliamentary elections, suspended since the 1967 war, and in 1991 endorsed a National Charter permitting political parties again ^[3]. Jordan under his rule remained a monarchy where real power sat in the palace, yet it also built schools, universities, and one of the region's better health systems despite scarce water and no oil ^[4].

Hussein married four times. His first marriage, to his cousin Sharifa Dina bint Abdul-Hamid in 1955, ended in divorce and produced a daughter, Alia. In 1961 he married Antoinette Gardiner, a British officer's daughter who took the name Princess Muna and became the mother of Abdullah, the future king. His third wife, Alia Touqan, after whom Amman's international airport is named, died in a helicopter crash in 1977. In 1978 he married the American born Lisa Halaby, who became Queen Noor; they had four children together, bringing his total to eleven children, in addition to an adopted daughter ^[1].

Away from politics the king was an enthusiastic pilot who flew his own jets and helicopters, a ham radio operator known by his call sign JY1, and a lover of motorcycles and fast cars ^[2]. Compact in stature and famously courteous, he cultivated a direct, informal style with soldiers and ordinary Jordanians that became part of the monarchy's appeal.

Cancer shadowed his last decade. Doctors removed a kidney tumor in 1992, and in mid 1998 he began six months of chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin lymphoma at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota ^[6]. Even in treatment he kept working: in October 1998, gaunt and bald from therapy, he left the hospital to help President Bill Clinton salvage the Israeli-Palestinian talks at Wye River, an intervention widely credited with pushing the negotiations to agreement ^[6].

In January 1999 he flew home to an emotional welcome in Amman, then stunned the country by changing the succession. He removed his brother Hassan, crown prince for 34 years, and named his eldest son Abdullah heir instead ^[4]. Days later his cancer returned. A bone marrow transplant at the Mayo Clinic failed, and he was flown back to Jordan on life support.

King Hussein died in Amman on February 7, 1999, at the age of 63, after a reign of nearly 47 years ^[1]. His funeral drew an extraordinary gathering: dozens of kings, presidents, and prime ministers, including leaders of states still formally at war with one another, walked behind his coffin, a measure of the respect he commanded across hostile divides ^[6].

Hussein's central achievement was the survival and consolidation of Jordan itself. He inherited a fragile buffer state that many expected to disappear and left a functioning kingdom with settled borders, a peace treaty with its most powerful neighbor, and an orderly succession ^[4]. His son Abdullah II continued the Hashemite line, and the institutions Hussein built, above all the army and the intelligence services, remain pillars of the state.

Historians weigh that record against its costs. His reign included long stretches of martial law, restricted party politics, and the trauma of Black September, and his 1967 decision to enter the war against Israel remains the most criticized choice of his life ^[3]. Biographers such as Avi Shlaim have portrayed him as a ruler who learned from disaster, shifting from confrontation to a patient search for peace ^[1].

Among basic Hussein I of Jordan facts, the numbers alone tell part of the story: he dealt with nine American presidents, survived repeated attempts on his life, and ruled longer than almost any contemporary head of state. In the wider Middle East he is remembered as a moderating voice who talked to nearly everyone, and in Jordan as the builder of the modern country, a legacy visible in everything from the airport bearing his third wife's name to the mosque in Amman that bears his own ^[6].