Caravan of Martyrs

NEARLY two decades before the Middle East completely lost its romantic Lawrence of Arabia aura and became a brutal battlefield, two young cousins sat on neighboring thrones: Feisal II in Iraq, Hussein in Jordan. Handsome, carefree, gallant, the two young Kings were installed on the same day in 1953. Their dual reigns were a spectacular achievement for the ancient Hashemite dynasty.

In the summer of 1958, the spectacle ended. Feisal, then 23, was murdered in his Baghdad palace by a clique of revolutionary army officers whose political passions had been aroused by the antiroyalist call of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Hussein, only 22, narrowly escaped a similar death; his life and throne were saved by the intervention of British paratroopers. In Amman, the boy King took the train of events heavily. "I have received confirmation of the murder of my cousin, King Feisal of Iraq, and all his royal family," he told reporters. "They are only the last in a caravan of martyrs."

That Hashemite caravan has been a long and winding one. The principal reason for the fanatic support that Hussein received from Bedouin warriors in Jordan is that the King can trace his ancestry back to the Prophet Mohammed. Thirty-seven generations of Hashemites were traditionally Grand Sherifs, or rulers of Mecca, Islam's holiest city, until they were forced out in the early 1920s by the Saud family. At the time of the Saudi takeover, the Grand Sherif of Mecca was Hussein, great-grandfather of the boy Kings. The Sherif thought he had found a way to refurbish the Hashemite image. He volunteered the family's services to the British in their World War 1 battles with the Ottoman empire, which was allied with Germany. In return, the Hashemites were to receive large swatches of territory, including Syria.

But the British reneged on part of the deal. The Sherif's son Feisal was made King of Iraq, but a second son, Abdullah, was left with nothing. To make amends, Winston Churchill, then a young British Colonial Secretary, called a conference in Cairo in 1921 which sketched the boundaries of a new kingdom on some unallotted lands near Palestine. The country was called Trans-Jordan.

Abdullah, as the first King of Trans-Jordan, ruled his country uneventfully for 30 years. The most exciting act of his reign came in 1948 when Israel was created and Abdullah annexed a tract of Palestine west of the Jordan. With land on both sides of the river, the King decided to call his country merely Jordan. Control of it remained firmly in the hands of the Trans-Jordanians, however, and Abdullah's Palestinian subjects on the West Bank never really warmed to their King. Many of them suspected that he might agree to a peaceful settlement with Israel; one of the Israeli emissaries who once slipped into Jordan in Arab disguise to plead with the King was Golda Meir. A Palestinian gunman killed Abdullah at Jerusalem's historic Al Aqsa mosque. The assassin also fired at Grandson Hussein, who was standing beside Abdullah, but the bullet ricocheted off a medal on his uniform. Abdullah was succeeded by Hussein's father, Talal. But after one year, schizophrenia overcame Talal, and Hussein, 18, was proclaimed monarch.