From Abdullah to Hussein: Jordan in Transition (Studies in Middle Eastern History)

268 Pages·1994·16.97 MB·English

by  Robert B. Satloff

From Abdullah to Hussein
Studies in Middle Eastern History
Bernard Lewis, Itamar Rabinovich, and Roger Savory
GENERAL EDITORS
THE TURBAN FOR THE CROWN
The Islamic Revolution in Iran
Said Amir Arjomand
LANGUAGE AND CHANGE IN THE ARAB MIDDLE EAST
The Evolution of Modern Arabic Political Discourse
Ami Ayalon
IRAN'S FIRST REVOLUTION:
Shi'ism ana the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909
Mangol Bayat
ISLAMIC REFORM
Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria,
David Dean Commins
KING HUSSEIN AND THE CHALLENGE OF ARAB RADICALISM
Jordan, 1955-1967
Uriel Dann
EGYPT, ISLAM, AND THE ARABS
The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900-1930
Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski
EAST ENCOUNTERS WEST
France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century
Fatma Muge Gocek
NASSER'S "BLESSED MOVEMENT"
Egypt's Free Officers and the July Revolution
Joel Gordon
THE FERTILE CRESCENT, 1800-1914
A Documentary Economic History
Edited by Charles Issawi
THE MAKING OF SAUDI ARABIA, 1916-1936
From Chieftaincy to Monarchical State
Joseph Kostiner
THE IMPERIAL HAREM
Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire
Leslie Peirce
ESTRANGED BEDFELLOWS
Britain and France in the Middle East during the Second World War
Aviel Roshwald
FROM ABDULLAH TO HUSSEIN
Jordan in Transition
Robert B. Satloff
OTHER VOLUMES ARE IN PREPARATION
From Abdullah
to Hussein
Jordan in Transition
ROBERT B. SATLOFF
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1994
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne Auckland Madrid
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Satloff, Robert B. (Robert Barry)
From Abdullah to Hussein : Jordan in transition / Robert B. SatlofF.
p. cm. — (Studies in Middle Eastern history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-508027-0
1. Jordan—Politics and government.
2. Hussein, King of Jordan, 1935-
I. Tide. II. Series Studies in Middle Eastern history
(New York, N.Y.)
DS154.55.S267 1994
956.9504—dc20 92-46562
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Jennie
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
Few modern monarchies have been as bound up with the person of their
monarch as has the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Indeed, in Jordan
itself, biographies of the two kings that have reigned for all but one year
of the country's existence often pass for studies of the kingdom's politi-
cal history. But there was a period in Jordan's history when commoners,
not kings, mattered most and when without the lead of a strong mon-
arch, the persistence of a handful of "king's men" were enough to keep
the Hashemite monarchy alive.
The purpose of this book is to describe and analyze that period of
Jordan's history, the years following the 1951 assassination of Abdullah,
the kingdom's founder. By that time, a process was already under way in
which there was a considerable widening of the field of power, author-
ity, and influence inside Jordan, and during the subsequent six years, king,
palace, government, parliament, army, political parties, and popular opin-
ion all emerged as important players on the political stage. Those years
witnessed the country's lone period of weak monarchy, when the king—
the sad Talal or the novice Hussein—was not the preeminent political
actor in the land and when the fate of the regime was left in the hands
of royalists who had never before wielded executive authority inside the
kingdom.
Although these royalists often competed among themselves for power
and differed with one another on issues of tactics, they were, as a group,
intensely loyal to the regime they served and provided the bridge that
permitted Hussein to inherit his grandfather's kingdom. Those years also
viii Preface
witnessed a series of challenges to the existence of an independent
Hashemite regime in Jordan—from both within and without and some-
times self-inflicted. It was when Hussein distanced himself from the "king's
men" in the wake of his dismissal of General Glubb in March 1956 that
his hold on power was set adrift, and it was only when he turned back
to them in April 1957 that the foundation of the Hashemite regime was
again secured. That decision set the basis for the restoration of a regime
modeled on Abdullah's traditional pattern of rule before the upheaval of
the Palestine war.
Jordan's story is, in many ways, just a subplot in the larger saga of
Great Power rivalry and ideological fervor that gripped the Middle East
in the 1950s. But it is a subplot with significance, for Jordan is the his-
torical exception. Of the principal Arab participants in the Palestine fight-
ing of 1948/49, Jordan's was the only regime that remained intact (albeit
shaky) a decade later. Whereas royalist or liberal governments succumbed
to military coups d'etat in neighboring Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, in Jordan
the regime outmaneuvered both its political and military adversaries and
endured. How the kingdom resuscitated itself and survived—and espe-
cially the changing relationship between king and "king's men" that went
far to determine Jordan's fate—is the central theme we explore here.
It is important to note that this is principally a study of Jordanian do-
mestic politics and specifically of the men (and one woman) who ruled
the kingdom during its period of uncertainty. Although we touch on
Jordan's relations with foreign countries—including Arab states, Israel,
Britain, and the United States—those discussions are normally limited to
illustrations of policies adopted by particular Jordanian leaders. Similarly,
West Bank politics (or, for that matter, peculiarly East Bank politics, too)
are addressed only to the extent that they shed light on the central gov-
ernment in Amman, not on their own merits. Such limitations reflect both
the major themes of this study and the diplomatic correspondence that
comprises its main source of research and documentation.
By way of introduction, three general historiographical observations
may be useful. The good news is that a wide range of government archives
central to understanding domestic Jordanian politics in this period is open
for research. British and American diplomatic traffic is especially valuable,
and those charged with declassifying material under the U.S. Freedom
of Information Act seem to be reasonably generous when in regard to
Jordan. Israeli documents are useful first and foremost for an insight into
how Israeli analysts and policymakers perceived events next door, less so
for their detail. Jordanian government records have been open for sev-
eral years, and despite the rudimentary classification system in place, a lode
of valuable information can be mined from them, though more so in the
social and economic spheres than on political and defense issues. (Many
of the sensitive files from the 1950s were destroyed in the bomb blast
that killed Prime Minister Hazza' al-Majali in 1960.) Before the open-
Preface ix
ing of these archives in recent years, virtually all studies of Jordanian his-
tory in the 1950s relied heavily on parliamentary records and newspaper
reportage; such studies are now, for the most part, obsolete.1
The bad news is that the full picture will never be known with com-
plete certainty until other archives are also open for research. Most promi-
nent among these are the archives of the Royal Hashemite Court, but
they.also include French Foreign Ministry archives and that hefty cache
of Jordanian government files captured by Israel in the 1967 war that
was open to researchers for two decades but has been since closed for
"security reasons." Also, Soviet archives should be useful in shedding light
on several key episodes. Given what is available, however, collectively these
files should fill in gaps only on the margin, not at the heart of the story
described here.
Last, a scan of the notes and bibliography reveals that Jordanians do
not, on the whole, write post-1948 Jordanian history; rather, Western-
ers do. Other than biographical and autobiographical works and official,
commissioned histories, there are very few works of consequence by Jor-
danians that touch on the political history of the kingdom during King
Hussein's early years.2 By the same token, it was a Pakistani, not a Jorda-
nian, who was given access to general staff records to compile a massive,
royally sanctioned history of the Jordanian army.3 To be sure, the reti-
cence—government inspired or not—of Jordanians to write on their recent
past is not very difficult to understand: Too much of that sensitive past
is bound up in the no-less-sensitive present, and the kingdom has not
yet developed a strong-enough institutional "thick skin" to stand up under
the close inspection of an inquisitive citizenry. As a result, Jordanians are
by and large uninformed of their own history, leaving Western histori-
ans with the task of answering not only their own questions but the
Jordanians', too.4
Washington, D.C. R.B.S.
March 1993