Political Succession in the Arab World by Anthony Billingsley

Author:Anthony Billingsley [Billingsley, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Middle East, General, Political Science, Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781135182571
Google: Y7mLAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-12-16T17:03:45+00:00

Jordan: a vulnerable child of colonialism

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan had a difficult birth. Transjordan, as it was originally known, was a consequence of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans, which had been almost exclusively a Hashemite affair. Other major tribal groups on the Arabian Peninsula remained largely aloof or, in the case of the Al-Saud family, were potentially hostile. There was also limited enthusiasm among the people of the Arab world more broadly for the project. For many Arabs, continued membership of a reformed Ottoman Empire offered greater potential for their interests to be met. Moreover, continued allegiance to the Ottomans meant continued membership of a great Islamic power. As Fromkin observes:

… to the extent that it (the Moslem Middle East) was politically conscious, it was not willing to be ruled by non-Moslems. Behind the lines there were Moslems who were dissatisfied with the Young Turk government, but they proposed to replace it with a different Turkish government.11

Jordan was, in effect, a colonial convenience. Britain and France had colluded in the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and of historic Syria. Britain had also wanted access to the Mediterranean for Iraqi oil that did not rely on French benevolence. Britain simply took a piece of the Syrian Desert, which by-passed the French protectorate of Syria.12 Britain’s chosen ruler, Abdallah,13 had been intended as a temporary measure to ensure this strip of territory did not become a problem with Zionist groups in Palestine and the French in Syria. Abdallah turned out to be a more tenacious and clever ruler of his temporary kingdom, if a rather less than scrupulous implementer of British policy.

The Hashemites were, therefore, an imposed, foreign regime14 and they were seen by much of their population and the populations in other Arab countries in the context of Anglo-French colonial ambitions and the destruction of Arab rule in Syria. Abdallah’s commitment to his Transjordanian kingdom was initially viewed with some scepticism by tribesmen who dominated the area. There are suggestions that the tribes of the region were concerned that Abdallah saw his rule in Transjordan as little more than a stepping stone for achieving his ambition of gaining control of Greater Syria.15 His grandson, King Hussein, noted this concern in his forward to Abdallah’s memoirs when he commented:

King Abdallah Ibn Al-Husayn was particularly grieved by the partitioning of natural Syria, in consequence of the Sykes-Picot Agreement…King Abdallah’s adversaries, in their relentless and unabashedly self-seeking efforts to abort his efforts towards restoring the God-created and timeless unity and territorial integrity of Syria, tried to denigrate his endeavours by distortive descriptions such as the ‘Greater Syria Plan’, to connote the idea of aggrandisement.16

In the event, however, suspicions of Abdallah’s ambitions and the fact that the family did not originate in Transjordan have not proven to be insurmountable problems for the survival of the regime. The tribes of the area have always maintained extensive links with the Hejaz, Syria and Iraq. This meant that, while the Hashemites’ Hejazi origins did complicate the

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