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Hussein, like his people, is a figure caught between two worlds, and inside himself plays out many of the conflicts which rend the Middle East. He is the scion of one of Islam's proudest families, the 41st generation representative of the Hashemite clan in direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed. He is also the Westernized product of a British schooling, who likes nothing better than to tinker over a souped-up Cadillac at the Amman auto club, pilot his personal jet across the desert skies, or dance the Arabian nights out to Latin American jazz rhythms. He has the flashing eyes and the bearing of a highly bred Arab prince; his manners and speech are those of a young Englishman.
Churchill's Land. It was Winston Churchill, Britain's Colonial Secretary after World War I, who created the artificial desert kingdom that Hussein rules. Churchill whacked a hatchet-shaped hunk off the defunct Ottoman Empire, called it Transjordan, and handed it to Hussein's grandfather Abdullah "one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem," as he later said. Churchill was repaying Abdullah's fighting services to Britain in Lawrence of Arabia's desert campaign (another hunk—Mesopotamia, now Iraq—was given to Abdullah's brother Feisal). Thenceforth, while Britain's Glubb Pasha built the British-equipped Arab Legion into Islam's sprucest fighting force, Abdullah ruled the sandy wastes as a Bedouin black-tent state.
Hussein, born in 1935 in dusty Amman, became the King's favorite grandson, receiving a royal schooling in horsemanship and saber fighting, and accompanying the old monarch all over his desert realm. "My boy," said Abdullah. "I want you to come always to me and try to learn what you can from what you witness at my palace. Who knows? The time may come when you will replace me on the throne."
In the eyes of Arab extremists, Abdullah was a British stooge, and insufficiently eager to resist the birth of Israel. They accused him of not fighting hard enough in the 1948 war, in which Israel held off and beat back its Arab neighbors and macje itself at home in a hostile land. When Abdullah accepted the 1949 armistice with Israel, he inherited the territory of the old Arab part of Palestine west of the Jordan River. It was a rugged land full of holy places—Bethlehem, Calvary and Gethsemane—but bedeviled by hatreds. Its inhabitants call themselves Palestinians, not Jordanians. They numbered about 400,000 people, were generally urban, better educated, and felt themselves superior to the 400,000 (mainly Bedouins) in Abdullah's old desert wastes. In addition came some 500,000 Arab refugees from Israel, who were huddled into tents and encampments, fed for 9¢ a day by the U.N., and left to nurse their resentments and stir to Cairo's inflammatory Voice of the Arabs.
In July 1951 an embittered Palestinian refugee waylaid old King Abdullah as he went to pray at Jerusalem's sacred Mosque of the Rock. There was a clatter of shots and the stouthearted old King fell dead. One of the assassin's bullets ripped a medal from the chest of 15-year-old Hussein as he walked beside his grandfather. It was a deed that Hussein can never let himself forget.