Abdullah I of Jordan
Abdullah I was the founder of Jordan, emir of Transjordan from 1921 and king from 1946 to his assassination in 1951, the second son of the Sharif Hussein of Mecca who had raised the Arab revolt of 1916 with Lawrence's gold, the brother of Faisal whom the French threw out of Damascus in 1920. In November 1920 he rode north from the Hejaz with a few hundred Bedouin to Maan and then Amman to retake Syria. He was instead given, by Churchill at the Cairo conference of March 1921, the empty east bank of the Jordan between the French and the Palestine mandate, with a British subsidy, a British resident and, from 1923, the Arab Legion under Peake and then Glubb. Out of it he made a state of three hundred thousand people with no city, no oil and no port, by patience, by the tribes' loyalty, which he bought and earned, and by never quarrelling with London. Transjordan became independent in May 1946 when the mandate ended and he took the crown. He was born in Mecca in 1882, was educated in Constantinople, where his father was kept by the Sultan, sat in the Ottoman parliament for Mecca in 1909-14. He was the go-between of the revolt's negotiations with the British in Cairo before it began. The kingdom's test was 1948. The Arab Legion, the only Arab army that fought well, took the Old City of Jerusalem and held the West Bank, which he annexed in 1950 as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, tripling his population with Palestinians who did not want him. The secret talks with the Zionists, with Golda Meir in November 1947 and with the Israelis afterwards over a peace that would have divided Palestine between them, were known in every Arab capital. On 20 July 1951, entering the al-Aqsa mosque for Friday prayers with his fifteen-year-old grandson Hussein beside him, he was shot in the head by a Palestinian tailor's apprentice. Hussein, whose medal deflected a second bullet, was king within a year. He wrote memoirs and poems, and kept a court of tribal sheikhs and Circassian guards. He believed to the end in the Greater Syria the family had been promised. He made the one Arab state of the mandate era that has kept its dynasty, which was not what anyone had expected of the east bank in 1921.
- Lived: 1882 CE – 1951 CE
- Nationality: Jordanian
- Roles: monarch, king, emir
