Jordan

A Hashemite Legacy

Beverley Milton-Edwards, Peter Hinchcliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134105458
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Created as a mechanism for maintaining British influence through a local patron, Jordan's future never looked certain. Nevertheless, under the leadership of the Hashemite monarchy led by Abdullah and then his grandson Hussein, the Kingdom of Jordan became a permanent feature on the map of the modern Middle East.

Under the rule of King Abdullah II, Jordan has remained an influential regional player in the Middle East Peace Process, its strategic position on the borders of Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq ensuring that it cannot be overlooked in the regional and international politics.

Updated and expanded to include recent developments in Jordan and the Middle East, the new edition includes coverage and discussion of:

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• the reign of King Abdullah II
• the involvement of the US in the Iraq war and the effect on this on Jordan's alignment with the West
• the country's recent economic growth, with an emphasis on economic liberalisation, privatisation, promotion of tourism and encouragement of foreign investment
• the position of Jordan as a point of continuity in an increasingly unstable Middle East.

This volume, intended for both academic and general readers, offers an overview of the history, politics and economics of this fascinating country and its role in a region disfigured by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

1
The formation of the Hashemite Kingdom

Tradition and antiquity

Jordan as a nation-state has existed for less than 90 years. It occupies part of an ancient land inhabited since earliest human times; the Jordan valley was once the home of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. A Neolithic people introduced agriculture and a settled way of life into the region seven to eight thousand years Before Christ. Beidha (1) on the East Bank of the Jordan and Jericho (2) on the West are on the sites of settlements which date back to some of this region’s earliest cities (bracketed numbers against old kingdom names refer to the map).

Over the subsequent millenniums fresh invasions followed. Most significantly in 2000 BC the Amorites, Semitic nomads from central Arabia, destroyed the urban culture and having adopted the settled life gradually assimilated the people they conquered into what became known as Canaan. During the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries BC tribal kingdoms familiar to readers of the Old Testament emerged in the region as a result of the conflict between two great powers: the Hittite, from what is now Turkey, and the Egyptians. Of these the towns and settlements of Edom (3), Moab (4), Bashan (5), Gilead (6) and Ammon (7) made up much of what is now contemporary Jordan. Ammon – or at least its capital Rabbath Ammon (8) – has lent its name to the modern capital city of Hashemite Jordan, Amman.

Other incursions and conquests followed. The Israelite exodus, led by Moses, passed east of the Jordan before crossing the river further north. Moses was reputedly buried on Mount Nebo (9) (20 miles south of Amman) after his tantalising glimpse of the Promised Land. Ironically, given the events of the twentieth century, the Israelites subsequently met stiff resistance from the Philistines, an Eastern Mediterranean people who gave their name to Palestine (ancient Philistia) or falistin in Arabic. Subsequently part of the lands east of the Jordan came under the control of Israelite Kings; Solomon (961–922 BC) exploited the mineral wealth of Edom (3) and built a port (Elat (10)) to import spice from the East on a site possibly coinciding with modern Aqaba.

After Solomon the Jewish Kingdom split into two: Israel and Judah (Judea) with its capital at Jerusalem. Centuries of invasion and conflict followed. First the Assyrians under whom much of what is now Jordan was divided into provinces – serving as buffer areas to contain the desert tribes, a practice followed by a succession of foreign rulers. These included the neo-Babylonian Empire in Mesopotamia. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC and transported the Jewish population to Babylon. They were returned under the Persian Cyrus II and the region became part of the Achaemenid Empire until the advent of Alexander the Great in 334 BC. Following his death his Macedonian generals split his empire between them (founding the Ptolemite pharaohs in Egypt and the Seleucid rulers in Syria) with the Jordan region coming under the control of the Ptolemies; Amman – the city of seven hills – was renamed Philadelphia in honour of the Pharaoh Ptolemy Philadelphus. Greek settlers with their Hellenistic culture left their stamp on urban centres and traces can still be seen in such places as Jerash (11) (Garasa) and Amman.

The Syria-based Seleucids who displaced their rivals the Ptolemies in 198 BC were themselves the victims of Nabataean (Arabs who had settled in Edom in the seventh century BC) expansion. The spectacular remains of Petra (12) – once thought to be biblical Sela, but probably some distance away – commemorate their achievements, which included the control of a desert empire stretching from Syria to the Red Sea. They retreated in the face of growing Roman power and in AD 106 Trajan incorporated Petra into the Roman Empire but allowed the Nabataeans to continue to flourish under Roman rule. Following the partition of the Roman Empire in AD 395 the Jordan region formed part of the Byzantine Empire ruled from Constantinople.

Christianity was widely practised in the towns and continued to be under the Christian Arabs. For example, the warrior nomad Ghassanids, loyal to Constantinople, controlled the region from the sixth century and acted as a buffer against waves of other Arabs moving up from the south – a dam that failed to hold back the advancing tide of Islamic expansion from AD 636 onwards.

Islam and Arab rule to the Ottomans

By the time the Prophet Mohammed died in AD 632, he, his immediate successors – The Four Rightly Guided Caliphs – and followers had stamped their authority on most of the tribes of the Arabian peninsula. The new monotheistic religion of Islam envisaged uniting the individual believer, the state and society under the omnipotent will of God. Thus Islamic rulers were permitted to exercise both temporal and spiritual authority. Followers of Islam, called Muslims, collectively formed Dar al-Islam (the house of Islam). Four years after Mohammed’s death, as the result of the decisive battle on the banks of the Yarmuk River – today part of the Jordanian/Syrian border – all Syria fell to the Muslim Arabs. What is now Jordan was administered in two units known as Junds – the north and west from Tiberias (Jund al-Urdun) and the rest from Damascus (Jund Dimashq).

Despite the original zeal for conversion, the Islamic conquests did not result in the eradication of Christianity among the Arabs of the Syrian region, which included present-day Jordan. Indeed, according to some historians, they might not have been a numerical minority until the end of the Crusades (Salibi, 1993, p. 18). But over the years their numbers steadily declined as the result of the growth of the Muslim population swollen by fresh Arab and non-Arab Muslim immigration. There was also increasing Christian emigration, but by the beginning of the twentieth century Christians in the Transjordanian highlands still formed about 15 per cent of the population. Today the figure is under 5 per cent with continuing emigration mostly to North America and Australia.

Two successive Muslim dynasties followed, ruled by ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’ claiming linear descent from the Prophet (recognised as such by the Sunnis but not by the Shi’a, following a schism over an earlier disputed succession to the caliphate which has persisted to today). They controlled the region from Damascus. The Ummayyads (whose magnificent mosque in Damascus is their most striking memorial) were followed in AD 750 by the Abbasids who moved the capital of the caliphate to Baghdad. They subsequently lost the Jordan area to Shi’ite Fatimid caliphs in Egypt, who were in their turn displaced by Seljuk Turks in 1071 having also ousted the Abbasids from Baghdad. It was their perceived threat to the Christian Byzantine Empire as well as a desire to seize the holy places in Palestine from the Muslims which sparked off Pope Urban II’s call for the launch of the crusades.

According to some historians, throughout much of this time the Jordan area remained a backwater (Rinehart, 1980, p. 11). Traditional camel routes lost out to seaborne trade with the exception of the main Muslim pilgrim route to Mecca from Damascus. The modern desert highway from Amman to Aqaba follows in the steps of those early pilgrims. Much of the bedouinisation of Jordan dates from this period, as towns became depopulated and sedentary agricultural communities decayed. The crusades left their mark on what the crusaders called Outre Jourdain (beyond Jordan – possibly the origin of the description Transjordan), as did the Arab armies opposing them. The castles of Karak (13) and Shobak (14) in southern Jordan are Crusader foundations, whilst that of Ajloun (15) in the north is an Arab creation attributed to Saladin. His decisive victory over the crusaders (or Franks as they were known locally) in 1187 at Hattin (near Lake Tiberias) meant the beginning of the end of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, despite the temporary reoccupation of the coastal strip between Jaffa and Beirut during the Third Crusade.

Following Saladin’s death his successors quarrelled amongst themselves and the Ayyubid dynasty was split up into a number of petty principalities until the dynasty was overthrown by the Mamluks (a caste of slave-soldiers, many of Kurdish and Circassian origin). Under the expansionist rule of warrior sultans, by the late fourteenth century they held sway between the Nile to the Euphrates. But in their turn, weakened by internal divisions, they succumbed to the dynamic and aggressive Ottoman Empire when in 1517 Mamluk Egypt and its possessions, including the Jordan region, were annexed by the Ottoman Sultan Selim I.

Ottoman rule to the British mandate

The Jordan region continued to stagnate under Ottoman rule (Rinehart, 1980, p. 14). Pilgrim caravans to Mecca brought in some revenue to those who lived near its route, but otherwise the East Bank was largely ignored by the outside world until nineteenth-century European travellers ‘rediscovered’ such places as Petra. The Ottoman Turks administered their territories through governors in charge of vilayets (provinces) but control in the East Bank, regarded as marginal to imperial interests, was lax and military garrisons small. The one significant development was the construction of the Hijaz railway by the Turks, with German assistance. Started in 1900, by 1908 it linked Damascus with the holy city of Medina, traversing the territory between the two in what would become modern-day Jordan. This facilitated the pilgrim traffic and Turkish military control of the Arabian peninsula. Turkish military garrisons protected the railway and tribal sheikhs were paid stipends for the same purpose.

Throughout the latter Ottoman period the Bedouin tribes including, for example, the Bani Hassan, the Adwan, the Huwaytat and the Bani Sakhr (whose successors still live in modern Jordan) frequently revolted against the authorities – most notably in 1905 and 1910 – and were only suppressed with great difficulty. In the late nineteenth century the Ottomans had encouraged the settlement of Circassian farmers around Amman in an attempt to pacify the region. Circassian immigration continued into the area until 1909 as Russian persecution of these Sunni Muslims continued in the Caucasus. Their descendants continue to fill senior appointments in modern Jordan – especially in the armed forces.

The last two decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of two political movements destined to be on a collision course: Arab nationalism – as part of a movement known as the Arab revival – and Zionism. Both movements aimed at uniting their people in a national homeland. They were to converge and confront each other in Palestine and despite the hopes of those (relatively few idealists) that believed that both traditions could grow up together in an atmosphere of mutual accommodation, they were to prove incompatible. The Arab revival started primarily as an intellectual cultural movement, initially based in Beirut, encouraging the study of Arab history, culture and language in pursuit of an ‘Arab identity’. This quickly developed into a nationalist movement opposing Ottoman non-Arab authority, looking for autonomy or even independence for an ‘Arab nation’ rather than for an identifiable nation-state in the modern sense.

More or less simultaneously a Jewish revival was gathering force in Europe, calling for the return of the Jews in the Diaspora to their historic homeland. The prime mover was Theodor Herzl whose book The Jewish State argued the case for a Jewish homeland in the absence of which he believed the Jews would always remain a people apart – rootless and unwelcome everywhere. Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, leading to the foundation of the Zionist Organisation with the aim of creating a home in Palestine for the Jewish people ‘secured by public law’. The organisation facilitated Jewish immigration from Europe into Palestine where by 1914 the number of Jews had risen significantly to 85,000 – about 12 per cent of the total population. The community had evolved a distinctive system of communal living, primarily agricultural, but including the building of the new city of Tel Aviv founded in 1909.

Meanwhile, as Europe moved towards war, the old Ottoman system was swept away by reforming nationalist officers known as the Young Turks. Their programme of increased and more effective centralised rule of Ottoman territory and aggressive ‘Turkification’ intensified Arab opposition, particularly amongst the educated and politically ambitious city dwellers who felt they were being turned from Ottoman citizens into Turkish subjects. Less politically articulate perhaps but more traditional resentment grew amongst the desert tribes of the Arabian peninsula – including the Jordan region – fearing that stronger government would interfere with their cherished way of life.

The link between the urban nationalists and the desert tribesmen was Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the Amir of Mecca, hereditary custodian of the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina. As head of the Hashemite branch of the Quraysh tribe, Hussein claimed descent from the Prophet. Hussein’s sons, however, were eager to embrace the message of nationalism promoted in the elite circles they frequented. Sharif Hussein’s son Abdullah probably made his first contacts with Arab nationalist underground groups operating in Beirut and Damascus during the 15-year period he spent studying and growing up in Istanbul. His younger brother Feisal – a fellow nationalist – had delivered the ‘Damascus Protocol’ to his father, appealing to Hussein as ‘Father of the Arabs’ to secure them independence from the Turks and setting out the nationalists’ demands, subsequently used by Feisal in his negotiations with the British. In exchange the nationalists accepted the Hashemites as spokesmen for the Arab cause. Nationalism would open a path by which the Hashemites could underpin their Islamic credentials in a modern era of rising national secularism and the movement for Arab independence.

According to Mary Wilson, Sharif Hussein’s ambitions from 1908 until the outbreak of war were ‘quite simple and constant’. ‘An autonomous, hereditary emirate in the Hijaz, one that would be safe against Ottoman administrative encroachments on the one hand but that would enjoy Ottoman favour over neighbouring principalities on the other’ (Wilson, 1987, p. 25). His son Abdullah had been the main go-between with the Ottomans between 1908 and 1914 and it was Abdullah who made the first contacts with the British just before and immediately after the start of hostilities in Europe in August 1914. With the Ottoman Empire siding with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria), the British were anxious to preempt any attempt by the Turks to persuade the Arabs to proclaim a Jihad (Islamic holy war) in support of the Ottoman Empire and its allies. Sharif Hussein, as Amir of Mecca, was the key figure in this. The British, via Abdullah, knew of Hussein’s ambitions both for himself and as the champion of Arab nationalism. A mutuality of interest was not difficult to establish. And although Hussein maintained contact with Istanbul he decided that the British had more to offer than the Turks to further his ambitions, which had by now gone beyond mere autonomy within an Ottoman imperial framework.

Three sets of documentation drafted between July 1915 and November 1917 were to determine the political geography and history of the Middle East in the immediate post-war years. The first, known as the Hussein– McMahon correspondence, was an exchange of eight letters between Sharif Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, from July 1915 and January 1916. This exchange was intended to establish spheres of territorial interest between Hussein and Britain and its allies. The British undertakings were in many cases vague, especially regarding those areas not to be under Arab control. These included places ‘not purely Arab’, such as Baghdad and Basra where the British had a particular claim or territory where France might have special interests. Areas of disagreement were left for settlement later, but Hussein was satisfied that he had British support for post-war Arab independence and proclaimed the Arab Revolt (and himself as King of the Arabs) in June 1916. But sadly for Arab ambitions, a month before the French and British governments had concluded the secret Sykes–Picot agreement which, although allowing for a post-war Arab state in Arabia, divided most of the rest of the Ottoman possessions in the Levant/Fertile Crescent between them. (Imperial Russia, which subsequently ratified the agreement, also benefited in gaining territory in the northeast of the empire. However, their successors the Bolshevik revolutionaries disowned and denounced the arrangements.) Jerusalem was to be under ill-defined international control and parts of Palestine were excluded.

The third document was the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. This was a letter written on 2 November 1917 by Lord Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, to Lord Rothschild, the leader of British Jewry. Balfour made it known that ‘His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people as long as it did not prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities [there]’. Recognising the growing influence of the Zionist movement within the Jewish communities in Europe and North America, British strategists thought that the promise of a ‘national home’ would prove to turn the Jews into a trump card. Particularly so in the United States where they could bring their weight to bear in favour of entering the war against Germany and its central European allies. To Zionists such as Chaim Weizmann, the organisation’s principal leader, the declaration, despite its reference to safeguarding the rights of the ‘non-Jewish communities’ (i.e. the vast majority), was a firm promise of British support for a future Jewish state, not a mere home. These same carefully worded reassurances notwithstanding, to generations of Arabs the Balfour Declaration has equally been seen as a betrayal of promises given to Sharif Hussein and the other leaders of the Arab Revolt. Thus the gibe ‘the twice promised land’ has some validity in reference to the creation of post-war Palestine. Whatever Britain’s real long-term intentions in drafting the declaration (if indeed any were thought through), its basic contradictions conspired to make its future administration of the mandate for Palestine – of which more below – something of a mission impossible.

In November 1917, seventeen months after the Arab Revolt got underway, the new Bolshevik government in Russia revealed the contents of the Sykes– Picot agreement. Britain hastened to reassure the Arabs that commitments made to them would be honoured. The revolt, sponsored, substantially armed and bankrolled by the British, was going well for the Allies at that time which may have helped the Arab leadership to shrug off any suspicions that they were to be short-changed. Feisal had captured the port town of Aqaba in July 1917; General Allenby and his British forces took Jerusalem in December and then controlled the rest of Palestine and what would become known as Transjordan in preparation for an advance on Damascus. The decisive British victory in September 1918 over the Turks at Megiddo (now in Israel) facilitated this move. More or less simultaneously Arab forces commanded by Colonel T.E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’ who fought throughout the revolt with the Arabs) captured Daraa on the modern Jordan/ Syria border. Feisal then entered Damascus on 2 October. The armistice of 31 October ended the campaign in the Near East. A campaign which Sharif Hussein and his sons had seen as a major war of liberation with British support would not bring all the spoils of victory which they believed had been promised them. From the British perspective the Arab army was an adjunct to the main offensive in Palestine, diverting Turkish attention and resources on the fringe of the serious fighting. Even Lawrence, who was not a man to denigrate his role and that of his Arab allies, once referred to the Arab Revolt as a ‘side-show to a side-show’. But he may have been selling the Arabs short. Most military historians would agree that the activities of Feisal and his ‘Northern Arab Army’, protecting the British right flank and creating upheaval in the Turkish rear echelon by tying up 30,000 troops, made a major contribution to winning the war against the Turks (Abu Nowar, 1989, p. 10).

The creation of Transjordan

Apart from the capture of Aqaba in July 1917 and the virtually unopposed occupation of Amman by the Arab armies led by Feisal in September 1918, what is now modern Jordan was not heavily involved in the campaign against the Ottoman armies, although there were minor engagements in the Wadi Rum, Azraq, Kharameh and Um Jimal. The area was included in the sphere of influence allocated to Britain in the Sykes–Picot treaty. Zionists were also to argue that the East Bank of the Jordan was envisaged as part of the Jewish National Home in the Balfour Declaration. At any event, at the end of the war this remote, thinly populated and mostly barren territory was not looked on as a separate unit (Lawless, 1998, p. 629). Post-war action centred initially on Damascus, where Feisal with the assistance of Iraqi nationalists and British officers had set up an autonomous government. In so doing they had been encouraged by the Anglo-French declaration of 7 November 1918 favouring the establishment of indigenous administrations in Iraq and Syria.

Sadly for Arab ambition, autonomy was one thing, independence quite another as far as the victorious European allies were concerned. In July 1919 the Syrian General Congress meeting in Damascus called for an allied recognition of an independent Syria (including Palestine) with Feisal as its king. (The congress subsequently proclaimed Abdullah as King of Iraq.) These pronouncements being ignored by the Allies, Feisal himself pressed his case at the Paris Peace Conference, claiming Syria on ‘the strength of the Hussein–McMahon correspondence, Arab services to the Allies during the war and his existing administration’ (Wilson, 1987, p. 40).

Fearing their inability to control an ‘independent’ Feisal (thought to be dangerously Anglophile) the French persuaded their British allies to adhere to the Sykes–Picot agreement which had placed Syria (excluding Palestine) in the French sphere of influence. At the same conference the mandate system was approved (a compromise between the direct rule of imperialist powers disliked by the Americans and the prospect of emerging indigenous self-government). This formula allowed Britain and France to divide much of the Middle East between them at the 1920 San Reno conference in furtherance of their strategic interests in the region, Britain getting mandatory control of Palestine and Iraq, the French Syria and Lebanon. The British subsequently withdrew their troops from Syria in favour of French soldiers who enforced Feisal’s withdrawal from Damascus. His consolation prize was to be installed by the British as King of Iraq less than a year later.

Having settled Feisal in Baghdad the problem facing the British was the future of his brother Abdullah. He had set off from the Hijaz where he had recently suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Bin Saud’s ikhwan (literally ‘brothers’) warriors at Turaba – a battle which was to foreshadow the eventual complete takeover of Hashemite possessions in the Hijaz by the Saudis. More immediately they had shattered his dreams of an Arabian empire (Wilson, 1987, p. 36). His new objective was to organise resistance aga...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Chronology
• Preface
• Map of Jordan
• Introduction
• 1 The formation of the Hashemite Kingdom
• 2 Contemporary politics in Jordan
• 3 The economy
• 4 International relations
• 5 Whither Jordan?
• Bibliography