Lion of Jordan Read Online Free PDF Page B

leading champion of Arab unity, and Amman became a focal point for Arab nationalist politics. But the initial euphoria evaporated rapidly, and with the passage of time the gulf between his idea of Arab unity – based on Islam, autocracy and the preservation of the old social order – and the younger nationalists’ conception of unity – based on attaining liberation from foreign rule, and freedom and social reform at home – grew wider and resulted in mutual disenchantment.
    Abdullah’s tendency to assume that what was good for the Hashemites was good for the Arabs did not gain him many friends abroad. He began to focus more narrowly on his dynastic and personal interests at the expense of the broader political ideals. After the loss of the Hijaz to Ibn Saud and the expansion of his domain down to the Gulf of Aqaba, Abdullah settled down patiently to await opportunities for promoting his Greater Syria scheme. This was modified following the death in 1933 of his brother Faisal. From that point on he was to toy with various ideas for merging Iraq with Greater Syria, possibly in a federation of the Fertile Crescent of which he, as the oldest member of the Hashemite family and the only surviving leader of the Arab Revolt, would be the natural ruler.
    Abdullah worked industriously, if rather fitfully, to propagate the idea of Greater Syria, always harking back to Faisal’s lost kingdom, which should revert to him, just as Faisal’s lineal heirs should succeed to the throne of Iraq. He assiduously cultivated a following in Syria itself and managed to enlist the support of some of the conservative elements there: the Ulama (religious scholars), the small landlords and the tribal shaikhs scattered around the country. Among Abdullah’s most prominent supporters were Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar, the nationalist politician, and Sultan al-Atrash, the Druze leader from Jabal al-Druze in south-eastern Syria. (The Druze are an Arabic-speaking national–religious minority in Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Their sect is a branch of Shia Islam whose origins go back to the eleventh century.)
    A not insignificant number of Syrians retained their monarchist sentiments, and after Faisal’s death in 1933 pinned their hopes on his aspiring older brother. But as long as the French remained in Syria and Lebanon, Abdullah had little chance of success, for the French regarded the Greater Syria movement as an unwitting stalking horse, and Abdullah as a direct instrument of sinister British plots to undermine their own position in the area. In actual fact the British had never encouraged Abdullah to pursue his claims to Greater Syria; after the departure of the French in 1946, when Abdullah’s expansionist plans were directed perforce against his Arab neighbours, they actively tried to discourage him. In March 1946, under the terms of a new treaty, Britain granted Transjordan formal independence; Abdullah assumed the title of ‘king’, and the name of the country was changed from the Amirate of Transjordan to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Formal independence, however, was not matched by real independence.
    Caught up in Great Power rivalries and in the cut and thrust of inter-Arab politics, the Greater Syria scheme ran for decades as a leitmotif in the affairs of the Middle East, provoking suspicion, antagonism and outright hostility towards Abdullah. Attack on it came from every corner of the Arab world. The Lebanese emphatically refused to become absorbed in a unitary Muslim state. The republicans in Syria, who had struggled for so long to achieve independence from the Ottomans and the French, were not about to surrender their hard-won gains by turning their country over to Hashemite rule. They also felt that if there were to be a Greater Syria, they were better equipped to lead it than the upstart from the Hijaz, and that its core and political centre of gravity shouldbe Syria itself rather than