King Hussein of Jordan

Hussein bin Talal was born in Amman on 14 November 1935, the eldest son of Crown Prince Talal and Princess Zein al-Sharaf. The family belonged to the Hashemite dynasty, which traces its lineage to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and had ruled the Hejaz before the British installed Hussein's great-grandfather's sons on the thrones of Iraq and Transjordan after the First World War ^[1]. Amman in the 1930s was a modest town, and the young prince's childhood was comfortable but not lavish; his grandfather, King Abdullah I, took a close interest in his education and grooming.

Hussein attended Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, before moving to Harrow School in England and then to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, an education that left him fluent in English and at ease with British military culture ^[2]. The defining trauma of his youth came on 20 July 1951, when he accompanied Abdullah I to Friday prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. A Palestinian gunman shot the king dead at close range. Hussein, then fifteen, was standing beside his grandfather; by his own later account, a bullet aimed at him was deflected by a medal on his chest ^[1].

His father Talal succeeded to the throne but suffered from schizophrenia, and in August 1952 the Jordanian parliament declared him unfit to rule. Hussein was proclaimed king at sixteen, with a regency council governing until he formally assumed constitutional powers on 2 May 1953, aged seventeen ^[3].

Anyone asking who was King Hussein of Jordan in the mid 1950s would have found a teenager presiding over a fragile state. Jordan had annexed the West Bank after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and Palestinians, many of them refugees, made up a majority of its population. Arab nationalism, energized by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, treated the pro-Western Hashemite monarchy as an anachronism ^[4].

Hussein moved early to shore up his nationalist credentials. In March 1956 he abruptly dismissed Sir John Bagot Glubb, the British officer who had commanded the Arab Legion, Jordan's army, for decades. The decision, taken without warning London, angered Britain but won the young king applause across the Arab world ^[2]. A year later he faced the gravest internal challenge of his early reign: in April 1957, amid tension with his elected nationalist government and reports of plotting among army officers at the Zarqa garrison, Hussein personally drove to the camp, confronted the troops, and rallied loyalist Bedouin units. He then dismissed the government, banned political parties, and imposed martial law, consolidating royal control that would last for three decades ^[4].

Survival became his trademark. He escaped repeated assassination attempts, including a 1958 plot in which Syrian fighter jets tried to force down his plane, and a reported scheme to poison him through a palace cook ^[1]. After the 1958 revolution in Baghdad wiped out the Iraqi branch of his family, Hussein stood as the last reigning Hashemite monarch, dependent on Western aid but determined to present himself as an authentic Arab leader.

The 1967 war was the catastrophe of Hussein's reign. In May of that year, as tension between Egypt and Israel escalated, he flew to Cairo and signed a defense pact with Nasser, placing Jordanian forces under Egyptian command. When war broke out on 5 June, Jordan joined the fighting; within days Israel had captured the entire West Bank, including East Jerusalem, home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque that the Hashemites regarded as a sacred trust ^[5]. Jordan lost roughly half its most productive territory and absorbed a new flood of refugees. Hussein later described the loss of Jerusalem as the deepest wound of his life, and he devoted much of his subsequent diplomacy to the search for its recovery through negotiation. He played a part in shaping United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which set out the land-for-peace framework that governed Arab-Israeli diplomacy for decades ^[5].

The war's aftermath brought a different threat. Palestinian guerrilla organizations, led by Yasser Arafat's Fatah, built an armed state within a state on Jordanian soil, mounting raids into Israel and increasingly defying royal authority. Matters broke in September 1970, after the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked four airliners and blew up three of them at Dawson's Field, a desert airstrip in Jordan. Hussein ordered the army to crush the fedayeen. The fighting of Black September, which included a brief Syrian armored incursion that was turned back, killed thousands and ended with the expulsion of the Palestinian armed factions to Lebanon by mid 1971 ^[4].

The episode secured the throne at a heavy price in Arab opinion. In 1972 Hussein proposed a federated United Arab Kingdom linking the East Bank and a self-governing West Bank, but the plan found no takers. Jordan stayed out of the October 1973 war except for a token force sent to the Syrian front, and in 1974 the Arab League summit at Rabat recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization, not Jordan, as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians, a decision Hussein accepted with public grace and private frustration ^[5].

Any honest account of King Hussein of Jordan achievements must begin with endurance: he kept a poor, externally buffeted kingdom intact while monarchies and republics around him fell. But his record went beyond survival. Under his rule Jordan built one of the Arab world's better education systems, expanded the University of Jordan, and exported skilled labor across the Gulf, whose remittances became an economic mainstay ^[3]. He cultivated ties with every American president from Eisenhower to Clinton while maintaining channels to Arab nationalist rivals, a balancing act that made Amman a hub of quiet diplomacy.

For years he conducted secret talks with Israeli leaders, meetings later documented by historians using declassified records, even while formally at war ^[2]. In July 1988 he took a step that redrew the map of the conflict: Jordan cut its legal and administrative ties to the West Bank, renouncing the claim his grandfather had established and clearing the way for the PLO to declare Palestinian statehood ^[5].

The Gulf crisis of 1990-1991 nearly undid him. Hussein refused to join the coalition against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, urging an Arab solution instead. The stance was popular at home, where sympathy for Iraq ran deep, but it cost Jordan its Gulf aid, its Saudi oil supplies, and much of its American goodwill, while some 300,000 Palestinians expelled from Kuwait arrived needing homes and jobs ^[4]. Rehabilitation came through peacemaking. Jordan joined the Madrid conference of 1991, and after the Oslo accords opened the way, Hussein signed the Wadi Araba peace treaty with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on 26 October 1994, making Jordan the second Arab state, after Egypt, to make formal peace with Israel ^[6]. The treaty 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 him a brother; and in 1997, after a Jordanian soldier shot dead seven Israeli schoolgirls at Naharayim, the king traveled to Israel and knelt before the grieving families to ask forgiveness ^[6].

Hussein married four times. His first marriage, in 1955, to his cousin Sharifa Dina bint Abdul-Hamid, an Oxford-educated academic, produced a daughter, Alia, and ended in divorce in 1957. In 1961 he married Antoinette Gardiner, the daughter of a British army officer, who took the name Princess Muna; their sons included Abdullah, born in 1962, the future king. After that marriage ended in 1972, Hussein wed Alia Touqan, for whom Amman's international airport is named; Queen Alia died in a helicopter crash in 1977 ^[3]. In 1978 he married Lisa Halaby, an American of Syrian descent and a Princeton-trained urban planner, who became Queen Noor and remained his wife until his death. He fathered eleven children and adopted one more ^[1].

Away from politics the king was an enthusiast of machines and speed. He was a qualified pilot who often flew his own aircraft, including the royal jet, and he collected motorcycles and fast cars. He held an amateur radio license, operating under the call sign JY1, and radio hobbyists around the world prized contact with him ^[3]. Compact in stature and famously courteous, he spoke to Jordanians in direct, colloquial Arabic and cultivated a father-of-the-nation persona that opinion at home, whatever its complaints about government, largely accepted.

His autobiography of his early reign, Uneasy Lies the Head, appeared in 1962 and gave his own account of the assassinations, plots, and gambles of his first decade on the throne ^[7].

Economic crisis forced political change in Hussein's last decade. Riots over price increases in 1989 led him to revive parliamentary elections that year, the first full ones since the 1960s, and to ease press restrictions; martial law was lifted in 1991 and political parties were legalized in 1992 ^[4]. The liberalization had limits, and critics noted that election rules were later tightened, but it distinguished Jordan from most of its neighbors.

In 1992 Hussein was treated for cancer, and in July 1998 he returned to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for six months of treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Even then he intervened in diplomacy, leaving his hospital bed in October 1998 to help push the Israeli and Palestinian delegations at the Wye River talks toward agreement, a gaunt figure whose appearance moved the negotiators ^[6]. In January 1999, days after returning home to a rapturous welcome, he stunned the country by removing his brother Hassan, crown prince for 34 years, and naming his eldest son Abdullah heir instead. He flew back to the Mayo Clinic for a final, failed treatment and died in Amman on 7 February 1999, aged 63 ^[1].

His funeral drew an extraordinary gathering: presidents Clinton, Bush, Carter, and Ford, Arab monarchs and presidents, Israeli leaders, and delegates from states with no relations to one another, a measure of how many quarrels he had bridged ^[6]. Assessments of his reign vary. Critics point to decades of martial law, the suppression of dissent, and the human cost of Black September. Admirers answer that he preserved a haven of relative stability and moderation in a violent region and proved that an Arab leader could make peace with Israel and survive politically. Among the basic King Hussein of Jordan facts that endure: 46 years and 9 months on the throne, four wars weathered, at least a dozen serious plots survived, and a succession that passed smoothly to King Abdullah II, whose kingdom still rests on the foundations his father laid ^[3].