Word: amman
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What should rouse less comment than a friendly visit by a nephew to an uncle? But last week, when Hashimite nephew Prince Abdul Illah, Regent of Iraq, went to call on Hashimite uncle King Abdullah in the dingy Trans-Jordan capital of Amman, many an Arab politician fidgeted. That the Regent's fellow traveler was Nuri Es-Said Pasha, perennial Prime Minister of Iraq (temporarily out of office), did not add to their comfort. Arabs suspected that a familiar bee was buzzing in the Iraqis' sedarah.* With British prompting, they thought, the Hashimite family was talking of uniting...
...British Way. A Britain which was retreating in the rest of the world still held fast to oil, pipelines and bases in the Hashimite kingdoms. The three who had their heads together in Amman were thoroughly used to working the British way. There was little about the dapper, languid Abdul Illah (who likes Bond Street clothes, flowers in his buttonhole and cocker spaniels) to show that he was the son of a desert king, Ali of the Hejaz, who had been pushed from his throne,in 1925 by Arabia's flowerless, buttonless Ibn Saud...
...From Amman's rooftops, watching women sang out with joy, their shrill voices sounding like the collective cooing of a thousand pigeons. In the crowded streets, the people yelled: "Yaish el Malek-Long live the King!" Abdullah Ibn Hussein, direct descendant of the Prophet, also known to his good British friends as "The Ab," had just been proclaimed monarch over the 30,000 square miles of lava and desert reaches and over the 300,000 souls of Trans-Jordan...
...sixties, Abdullah has finally become a king like his younger brother, the late great Feisal of Iraq. In Amman last week rumors circulated that Trans-Jordanian independence was only the beginning. Abdullah wanted a full-time job; he hoped to unite Trans-Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and part of Palestine into a "Greater Syria...
With a British subsidy to help, Abdullah had found life in Trans-Jordan tolerable enough. He rises at crack of dawn each day and at 7 o'clock drives in his lemon-colored limousine to an office in the center of Amman. There for two hours he works. Then he returns to his gaudy palace on one of Amman's five hilltops and reads Arabic poetry. After a hearty lunch (favorite dish: chicken pilaf) he attends to more official business. More often he withdraws to a black Bedouin tent in the backyard of his palace, to receive...