Hussein

Hussein (born November 14, 1935, Amman, Transjordan [now Jordan]—died February 7, 1999, Amman, Jordan) was the king of Jordan from 1953 to 1999 and a member of the Hashemite dynasty, considered by many Muslims to be among the Ahl al-Bayt (“People of the House,” the direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad) and the traditional guardians of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. His reign marked the shaping of the modern kingdom of Jordan, and his policies greatly increased the Jordanian standard of living.

Following the July 1951 assassination of Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah in Jerusalem, his father, Talal, ascended to the throne but was in 1952 declared unfit to rule by parliament owing to mental illness. King Talal abdicated in favour of Hussein, who, after spending some months at Sandhurst Royal Military College in England, assumed full constitutional powers on May 2, 1953.

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Hussein’s policies fostered slow but steady economic progress, though he was forced to depend on significant financial aid from the West. Hussein’s base of support was his country’s indigenous Bedouin tribesmen, with whom he fostered close personal ties. The king’s socially conservative policies and his alignment with the Western powers were often criticized by other Arab leaders as well as by his domestic opposition. Thus, popular demonstrations—especially among Palestinians who had fled to the West Bank after the 1948–49 war with Israel—and political unrest precluded his joining the pro-Western mutual defense treaty between the United Kingdom, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq, known as the Central Treaty Organization, or Baghdad Pact (1955), which he had helped initiate. In an effort to build domestic support, in 1956 he dismissed Gen. John Bagot Glubb, the British officer who commanded the Arab Legion (later part of a unified Jordanian army). Many Palestinians—who by that time represented a majority in Jordan—felt little attachment to his dynasty; Hussein responded by strengthening the military establishment to assert the authority of the crown over that of parliament.

With U.S. aid he steadily expanded and modernized his military forces, which he used to prevent attempts to overthrow his regime. Hussein reluctantly entered the Six-Day War of June 1967 (see Arab-Israeli wars), but Israel’s military victory was a severe setback, resulting as it did in the loss to Israel of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Jordan had annexed in 1950, and the influx of some 250,000 additional Palestinian refugees into the country. After the war Hussein’s rule was threatened by the military forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), who based themselves in Jordan to carry out guerrilla raids against Israel. By September 1970 the PLO virtually controlled a state within a state. With his future in doubt, Hussein launched a full-scale attack to expel the organization in a civil war later remembered as Black September (see also Jordan: From 1967 to civil war). Despite Iraqi and Syrian military support for the PLO, by August 1971 Hussein’s army had succeeded in driving the PLO’s forces from Jordan.

In the following years Hussein steered a difficult course: he refrained from confronting Israel militarily, mended relations with the PLO, and sought both closer ties with and financial aid from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. He also maintained good relations with the United States and Great Britain. In 1988 Hussein surrendered Jordan’s claim to the disputed West Bank, as well as its role in representing the Palestinians living there, to the PLO. Hussein walked a fine line during and after the events leading to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War of 1991. While remaining sympathetic to Iraq brought popular domestic support for the king, the war cost Jordan dearly economically, as more than 300,000 Palestinians expelled from states in the Gulf region moved into Jordan. In the wake of the Israel-PLO Oslo Accords of 1993, Hussein on October 26, 1994, signed a bilateral peace treaty ending more than 40 years of hostility and normalizing relations between Jordan and Israel.

Until his death in early 1999, Hussein helped further peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians and even intervened in October 1998 to prevent the collapse of the Wye River talks (see Israel: The Wye River Memorandum) after having spent most of that year in the United States undergoing medical treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Hussein’s funeral was attended by numerous heads of state and important political figures, an indication of his international reputation. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Abdullah, who became King Abdullah II.

Hussein’s autobiography, Uneasy Lies the Head, was published in 1962.