The House of Hashim, or the Hashemite dynasty, is the royal family that had ruled Jordan since its inception in 1921. The Hashemites claim descent from the prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima, and as such carry some heavy credentials. What follows is a little history lesson.
In 1908, the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire appointed the Hashemite notable Hussein bin ‘Ali Sharif of Mecca and Emir of the Hejaz. During the first World War, Hussein initially supported his Ottoman overlords and their ally Germany, but once he discovered that the Ottomans were planning to depose him after the war, he turned on his superiors and is now rightly hailed as the leader of the great Arab Revolt of 1916.
This is Sharif Hussein as he appears on the one Jordanian dinar note:
Sharif Hussein was promised, in his wartime correspondence with Britain’s High Commissioner Henry McMahon, a post-war Arab kingdom encompassing everything that lies between Egypt and Persia, excepting a few already-extant Middle Eastern possessions of the British Empire. He and his family were instrumental in dismantling the Ottoman Empire’s possessions in the Arab world; his son Faisal (later king of Syria and Iraq) aided the allies in the conquest of Medina and Damascus, and led the Arab delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where he and his friends T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell expected to see, as promised, an ennobling reward for the Arabs who had helped so crucially in winning the war. The promise was, obviously, not kept. Although the Ottoman Empire was dismantled, the Arab world was divided almost entirely into British and French mandates, which is, as you may imagine, not the kind of “independence” Sharif Hussein and his progeny were looking for.
In 1917, Sharif Hussein had declared himself the king of Hejaz, a declaration that was internationally recognized. At the same time, he declared himself the King of all Arabs, which ticked off his rivals to the East, the Wahhabi royal house of Abdul aziz ibn Saud. In 1924, when Sharif Hussein declared himself Caliph, this was the last straw for the Saudis, and later that year the Saudis attacked the Hejaz. Despite his having fought half a world war on behalf of Great Britain, and despite the support they had shown him in the past, the British decided not to intervene in this conflict, and ibn Saud took the Hejaz, forcing Sharif Hussein to abdicate to Cyprus, and later here, to Amman, where he died in 1931.
Meanwhile, in March, 1920, the Syrian National Congress proclaimed Prince Faisal as the king of an independent kingdom of Greater Syria. However, after the San Remo conference a month later, Syria became the property of France, which led to conflict between the French and Faisal’s nationalist army (The Battle of Maysalun). Faisal was expelled from Syria by the victorious French, and fled to the United Kingdom. At the news of his younger brother’s dishonorable discharge from his throne, Prince Abdullah mobilized his own forces in the Hejaz, preparing to launch an attack on Syria to remove the French. Winston Churchill got wind of Abdullah’s plans, and invited him to tea, where he convinced the prince to abandon his likely doomed campaign. Abdullah agreed, and as a reward, a protectorate was set up in Transjordan under his control.
Meanwhile, the British were failing badly in their attempt to directly administer the government of Iraq, and, in the face of unrest there and waning domestic support for the occupation (sound familiar?), they decided in 1921 to abandon direct administration and hand the territory to an Arab monarch; after a plebiscite indicating overwhelming support for this option in Iraq, this job was given to Faisal.
Back in Transjordan, Abdullah ruled over a semi-autonomous entity known as the Emirate of Transjordan, although the British still had a hand in its administration. The British mandate did not actually end until 1946, at which point Abdullah was crowned king of the now-independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
King Abdullah I on the fiver.
King Abdullah I was something of a maverick among Arab monarchs, a tradition continued by his progeny. In the 1930s and 1940s, Abdullah was to his contemporaries what John McCain was to the Republican party in the 1990s (and would like us to think he still is today, despite all evidence to the contrary, but I digress). He held faster to the dream of a united Arab state than his power-preoccupied colleagues, and was unique in his willingness to accept the partition of Palestine and to make peace with the nascent state of Israel. In 1948, Jordan participated in the war against the new Zionist entity, but reluctantly, and only after significant pressure from other Arab states.
Most likely as a result of his pro-Western and insufficiently anti-Zionist attitudes, Abdullah was assassinated by a young Palestinian in 1951 while attending Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in the company of his grandson, Prince Hussein. The assassin fired upon the young Hussein as well, but as the story goes, a medal pinned to his chest by his grandfather deflected the bullet and saved his life. Abdullah was succeeded by his schizophrenic son Talal, who was instrumental in the drafting of Jordan’s constitution and in the mellowing of relations with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but was forced to abdicate in 1952 on account of his poor mental health in favor of his 17-year-old son, the selfsame Prince Hussein. Because Hussein was not yet an adult, he was officially enthroned a year later in 1953.
King Talal on the tenner.
In 1958, following the union of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic, King Hussein and his cousin Faisal II in Iraq formed a similar alliance, the Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan. This federation ended only a few months later, however, when the 23-year-old Faisal was executed along with his family during a coup d’etat. Following this, Iraq became a republic and Hussein was left as the last Hashemite royal still in power.
King Hussein on the twenty.
King Hussein, in the model of his grandfather, was a uniquely progressive Arab leader, and was known to his people as Al-Malik al-Insan (“the humane king”). Favoring peace over conflict whenever possible–and it was by no means always possible–he guided his country through decades of extreme adversity, Jordan to emerge the most stable (if not exactly the wealthiest) country in the region. Not once during his reign, which spanned the duration of the Cold War, did Jordan succumb to Soviet influence. (Granted, Hussein’s staunchly pro-Western posture was well paid for in cash and expensive automobiles by the United States during the 1950s.) He was also an avid sportsman and an amateur radio operator who loved to race cars, drive motorcycles, and fly airplanes and helicopters.
King Hussein’s 1974 Ferrari 365 GT.
During King Hussein’s reign, Jordan saw conflict with both Israel (the 1967 war, in which Jordan lost control of the West Bank) and the PLO (The 1970 conflict known as Black September, in which the organization was expelled from Jordan). During the turmoil of 1970, King Hussein at one point requested Israeli assistance to prevent a Syrian incursion into the north of his country. In September, 1973, King Hussein met secretly with Golda Meir to warn Israel of an impending Egyptian-Syrian attack; after the devastating losses of 1967, King Hussein did not wish his country to become involved in the conflict, but was ultimately pressured by Syria and Egypt into providing a small quantity of support to the invasion. Jordan began peace negotiations with Israel in the 1970s, culminating in the peace treaty of 1994 between King Hussein and Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin. Jordan was the second Arab country (after Egypt) to make peace with the Jewish state.
King Hussein ruled for a total of 46 years, up until his death from lymphoma in 1999. Shortly before his death, he made a change to his will, disinheriting his brother Hassan for his eldest son Abdullah, who ascended to the throne in 1999 as King Abdullah II.
