Lion of Jordan (5 page)

In March 1921 Abdullah arrived in Amman and set up his headquarters, still with the declared intention of raising a larger force to mount an invasion of Syria from the south. Abdullah's arrival in Transjordan threw into disarray a conference being held in Cairo by Winston Churchill, the British colonial secretary, to discuss Middle Eastern affairs. Churchill had already promised the throne of Iraq to Faisal as a consolation prize for the loss of Syria. This offer was part of his favoured ‘sharifian policy' of forming a number of small states in Arabia and the Fertile Crescent, all headed by members of the sharif's family and of course under British influence and guidance. Abdullah's bold march into Transjordan, and his well-advertised plan of fighting to regain Damascus threatened this policy. Although such a move would have been doomed to failure, it could embroil the British in further difficulties with their suspicious French allies – and besides, Transjordan was needed by them as a link between Palestine and Iraq.

The initial impulse of the eminent experts assembled in Cairo was to eject the upstart out of Transjordan, by force if necessary, and to administer the area directly. But on further reflection it was decided to accept the fait accompli and let Abdullah stay in Transjordan as the representative of the British government. Sir Herbert Samuel, the Jewish high commissioner for Palestine, doubted Abdullah's ability to check anti-French and anti-Zionist activities in the area, but Churchill stressed the importance of securing the goodwill of the king of the Hijaz and his sons. T. E. Lawrence, Churchill's adviser on Arab affairs, claimed that Abdullah was better qualified for the task than the other candidates by reason of his position, lineage and very considerable power, for better or for worse, over the tribesmen. Lawrence was convinced that anti-Zionist sentiment would wane, and that Transjordan could be turned into a safety valve by appointing a ruler on whom Britain could bring pressure to bear to check anti-Zionist agitation. The ideal, said Lawrence, would be ‘a person who was not too powerful, and who was not an inhabitant of Transjordan, but who relied on His Majesty's Government for the retention of his office'.
¹⁷
In other words, the British were looking for a pliant client who could be entrusted to govern the vacant lot east of the Jordan River on their behalf.

Britain was simply too busy setting up an administration in Palestine
proper, west of the Jordan River, to bother with the remote and undeveloped areas that lay to the east of the river. Moreover, these areas were meant to serve as a reserve of land for use in the resettlement of Arabs once the national home for the Jews in Palestine had become an accomplished fact. There was no intention at this stage of turning the territory east of the river into an independent Arab state.
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At a hastily arranged meeting in Jerusalem in late March 1921, Churchill himself, with the eager assistance and encouragement of Lawrence, therefore offered Abdullah the Amirate of Transjordan, comprising the territory between the Jordan River and the Arab Desert to the east. The condition was that Abdullah renounce his avowed intention of attempting to conquer Syria and recognize the British mandate over Transjordan as part of the Palestine mandate. Abdullah, relieved to be quit of a military adventure with an extremely doubtful outcome, accepted both conditions without argument. In return for Abdullah's undertaking to forswear and prevent any belligerent acts against the French in Syria, Churchill promised to try to persuade them to restore Arab government there, this time with Abdullah at its head. Abdullah's suggestion that he should be made king of Palestine as well as of Transjordan was declined by Churchill on the grounds that it conflicted with British commitment to a Jewish national home.

Abdullah had to settle for a temporary arrangement, lasting six months, within the framework of the Palestine mandate and under the supervision of the high commissioner, who would appoint a British adviser in Amman to help the amir to set up a central administration. During this period, the amir was to receive from the British government a monthly subsidy of £5,000 to enable him to recruit a local force for the preservation of order in Transjordan. Thus, by the stroke of a pen on a sunny Sunday afternoon, as he was later to boast, Churchill created the Amirate of Transjordan.

In April 1921 a government was formed in Transjordan. The initial six months were full of problems, as Abdullah, who was extravagant and absurdly generous towards his friends, squandered his allowances, while the country was swarming with Syrians bent on taking up arms against the French. Abdullah's inability to run the country efficiently raised doubts about his value to Britain. Nevertheless, towards the end of the year the temporary arrangement was given permanence when the British government formally recognized ‘the existence of an independent
government under the rule of His Excellency the Amir Abdullah Ibn Hussein', subject to the establishment of a constitutional regime and the conclusion of an agreement that would enable Britain to fulfil its international obligations.

This was the first step down a new road in British policy: the separation of Transjordan from Palestine. The second was taken in 1922, when Britain, in the face of strong Zionist opposition, obtained the necessary approval from the League of Nations to exclude the territory of Transjordan from the provisions of the Palestine mandate relating to the Jewish national home. In May 1923 the British government granted Transjordan its independence, with Abdullah as ruler and with St John Philby as chief representative, administering a £150,000 grant-in-aid. It was largely Abdullah's own failure to fulfil the condition of constitutional government that prolonged the dependent status of Transjordan. Another reason for the delay was the progressive deterioration in the relations between the British and Abdullah's illustrious father. At the Cairo conference, in March 1921, some of the post-war problems in the Middle East had been settled to the satisfaction of at least some of the parties concerned: Churchill got his ‘economy with honour'; Faisal got the throne of Iraq; and Abdullah got the Amirate of Transjordan. Iraq and Transjordan became the two main pillars of Britain's informal empire in the Middle East. Churchill candidly explained the advantages to Britain of ruling the Middle East through the Hashemite family:

A strong argument in favour of Sherifian policy was that it enabled His Majesty's Government to bring pressure to bear on one Arab sphere in order to attain their ends in another. If Faisal knew that not only his father's subsidy and the protection of the Holy Places from Wahabi attack, but also the position of his brother in Trans-Jordan was dependent upon his own good behaviour, he would be much easier to deal with. The same argument applied, mutatis mutandis, to King Hussein and Amir Abdallah.
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That summer Colonel Lawrence was sent to Jedda to tie up some loose ends, only to discover that the grand sharif himself had become the greatest obstacle to the consolidation of Britain's sharifian policy. Lawrence offered a formal treaty of alliance that secured the Kingdom of the Hijaz against aggression and guaranteed indefinite continuation of the handsome subsidy paid annually to Hussein since 1917. But the old man, embittered by what he regarded as British bad faith and
betrayal, refused to sign and angrily rejected the conditions stating that he should recognize the mandate system and condone the Balfour Declaration.

The subsequent ending of the British subsidy and the removal of British protection left the king of the Hijaz exposed to the mercies of his great rival, Sultan Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud of the Najd in Eastern Arabia. Only British diplomatic pressure and the payment of a subsidy to Ibn Saud had kept the rivalry between the two Arabian rulers dormant during the First World War. After the war an inevitable trial of strength developed between the king, who assumed that his sponsorship of the Arab Revolt entitled him to political authority over his neighbours, and the chieftain, whose determination revived the Wahhabi movement. The Wahhabiyya, named after Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, was an ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim movement that arose in the Arabian Peninsula in the second half of the eighteenth century. Ibn Saud turned the Wahhabi movement into an effective military force.

The first serious clash occurred on 21 May 1919 in Turaba, on the eastern border of the Hijaz, when Ibn Saud's forces almost totally obliterated a large Hashemite army commanded by Abdullah. The wild Wahhabi warriors, the Ikhwan, crept up at night on Abdullah's unguarded camp and killed many of the men in their beds. Thirty-five of his personal guard died fighting at the door of his tent. Abdullah himself escaped in his night clothes with the taunts of
shurayif
(‘little sharif') ringing in his ears, wounded in body and pride. Moreover, as his biographer has observed:

The battle at Turaba was a turning point in Abdullah's life and in the history of Arabia. From that time on, Husayn and his sons were on the defensive while Ibn Saud grew inexorably more powerful… Abdullah's Arabian ambitions died at Turaba as well. The reverberations of the dreadful rout echoed throughout Arabia, diminishing his stature and his family's prestige. In a single night his dreams of an Arabian empire had turned to nightmares.
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More defeats were to follow. In March 1924, after the Turkish National Assembly abolished the caliphate, Hussein proclaimed himself caliph. Characteristically, this was a unilateral move for which he had not obtained the agreement of any other Islamic leaders. It was also a misjudgement of his own power and position. For Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi followers, it was the last straw. The decisive battle began in
September 1924, when the Ikhwan mounted an offensive that Hussein could not withstand. After they captured Taif, Hussein abdicated in favour of his eldest son, Ali, hoping to save the Kingdom of the Hijaz for his family. But Ali too was overthrown and banished from the Hijaz a year later. In October 1924, Ibn Saud captured Mecca, and Hussein escaped to Aqaba. From Aqaba, Hussein was taken by a British naval vessel to Cyprus, where he lived in exile until his death in 1931.

The Hijaz became part of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud inflicted on Hussein and his eldest son the crowning humiliation of seeing him assume the administration of the holy places in Mecca and Medina. Thus, with the loss of the two most sacred sites of Islam, the Hashemite claim to leadership of the Muslim world disintegrated, as did the dream of a mighty Hashemite empire. And, by a cruel historic irony, it was in its own ancestral home that the Hashemite dynasty sustained the most monumental and shattering of defeats.

Hussein's eclipse gave a dramatic illustration of the immense power wielded by Britain in shaping the fortunes of the Arab nations and their rulers. The political shape of the region did not evolve naturally but was largely the product of British design tailored to fit Britain's own imperial needs. It was not the Syrians who expelled Faisal nor was it the Iraqis who raised him to the throne in their own countries. Abdullah could not have gained power in Transjordan without Britain's approval, and had he tried to do so in defiance of Britain he would not have survived for very long. Ibn Saud was not invited by the Hijazis to their country but rather he was enabled by British-supplied arms to enter and conquer their land. And just as the withdrawal of British support paved the way to the decline and fall of the Hashemite kingdom in the Hijaz, so it was British protection, and only British protection, that could preserve the Hashemite crown in Transjordan.

Ibn Saud was not content with his victory over Hussein. Driven by political ambition to expand his own realm and by the religious zeal of the Wahhabi reform movement, he turned northwards with the intent of completing the destruction of the house of Hashem. Abdullah's incorporation of the provinces of Ma'an and Aqaba, which formerly belonged to the Kingdom of the Hijaz, into the Amirate of Transjordan exacerbated the poor relations between the two rival dynasties. In August 1924 Wahhabi forces crossed the border into Transjordan, and had it not been for an RAF squadron from Jerusalem and a detachment of British
armoured cars that furiously mowed down Ibn Saud's column of camel riders, Abdullah undoubtedly would have met the same fate as his father.

Ibn Saud did not abandon his designs on Transjordan, and the conflict continued to smoulder, with occasional forays across the border and tribal clashes. The 1928 treaty, which recognized Transjordan's independence but left finance and foreign affairs under British control, was signed at the time when Wahhabi raids were increasing. It was just as well for Abdullah that the British also undertook to defend the borders of the amirate, because this time the Wahhabis, fired by the fervour to sweep away all corruption and restore their pristine and puritanical brand of Islam, advanced upon Amman itself. Once again it was only the swift and forceful intervention of the RAF, this time assisted by the Arab Legion, that repelled the invasion and kept the amir on his throne in Amman. The Arab Legion (Al-Jaish al-Arabi) was a military formation created in Transjordan in 1920 by the British to maintain internal law and order. It was financed by Britain and commanded by British officers, underlining the local ruler's dependence on his colonial masters.

The principality that Abdullah had carved out for himself and from which he was in danger of being ejected was a political anomaly and a geographical nonsense. It had no obvious
raison d'être
and was indeed of such little political significance that the European powers, in their generally acquisitive wartime diplomacy, tended to overlook it as an unimportant corner of Syria. The status of this territory had remained indistinct until Abdullah's arrival. The Amirate of Transjordan was then created by the famous stroke of Churchill's pen, in mitigation of the sense of guilt the British felt towards the sharif, and in the hope of securing a modicum of stability and order east of the Jordan River at the lowest possible cost to their exchequer.