The Haj - Leon Uris [231]
‘The king is dead!’
I saw young Husain, felled and dazed, but still alive. My impulse was to reach out for him. Ibrahim grabbed me, jerked me to him, and whispered in my ear. ‘Drift back very, very slow,’ he ordered. ‘Do not get involved.
Do not break and run. We will just melt away.’
Abdullah’s death had been at the hands of a Palestinian, a Mufti gunman, and that shot triggered vicious reaction from his Bedouin subjects. He had united them and ruled them for three decades, and they remained fanatically loyal to him. Tribesmen bore in from their desert lairs in a rage of retaliation against the refugees on the Jordanian side of the river. A dozen Palestinians were seized and hanged before the gates of various refugee camps.
The next day the bodies were cut down, carried into Amman, and dragged behind galloping horses. Arms and legs were severed and tossed to a wild crowd. The torsos of the corpses were kicked, spat upon, and stabbed.
When this had been done, the lust was still not satisfied. The Bedouin formed up to storm into the camps. At last the Jordanian prime minister, a Palestinian, convinced the Legion that it had to prevent a monumental massacre. Much against their will, they surrounded the major camps and the cities of Amman, Salt, Suweilih, and Madaba to protect the Palestinians.
When the king was laid to rest on a hillside outside Amman, a Cairo journalist at the funeral noted that in the past six years the Arab world in its fledgling experiences with self-government had eradicated a number of the men who had been charged to rule them. In addition to Abdullah, there was ...
Imam Yahya, the ruler of Yemen, who was murdered, as well as ...
President Husni az Ziam of Syria, and ...
Prime Minister Ahmed Maher Pasha of Egypt, who was followed in office and death by ...
Prime Minister Nokrashy Pasha of Egypt, and also ...
Prime Minister Muhsen el-Barazi of Syria, and ... A prime minister of Lebanon, who had been followed in Jordan where he was visiting and riddled by bullets from a passing car, and also ...
The Commander in chief of the Syrian Army, Sami el Hennawin, and ...
Sheikh Hasan al-Banna, the leader of the Moslem Brotherhood of Egypt, as well as ...
Minister Amin Osman of Egypt, and ...
An assortment of ministers, judges, police chiefs, and military commanders.
To say nothing of the dozens of unsuccessful attempts.
Iraq had four coups.
Jordan changed prime ministers on what seemed a monthly basis.
And a degenerate, corrupt, and disgusting Egyptian king was removed by an officers’ revolt, after which he fled to a life of perversions on the Riviera.
Abdullah’s son the Emir Talal ascended to the Jordanian throne. For two decades he had whiled away his life in boredom and a bitter relationship with his autocratic father. When he was crowned, the other Arab leaders praised him as an enemy of his late father and a patriot who would end British domination in that country.
Alas, King Talal was insane. He had spent half his youth in private European sanatoriums, and was returned to Jordan from a mental hospital in Switzerland to claim the throne. Talal’s tenure was short. The mad king, propped up in place by the British and the Legion, was obviously unfit to rule.
By secret agreement between the military and the Parliament, Talal was deftly removed and spirited from the country. He was to spend the rest of his life in exile, first in Egypt and then in a forlorn villa in Turkey.
Talal’s oldest son, Husain was named king under a regency. Young Husain had escaped death at Al Aksa when one of the assassin’s bullets, meant for him, glanced off the medals on his fifteen-year-old chest.
4
IF THERE WAS A time ripe for rebellion, it was at the moment of Abdullah’s death. As a reaction to Jordanian