Abdullah I of Jordan

Abdullah I bin al-Hussein al-Hashimi (1299–1370 AH / 1882–1951 CE) was the founder of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and its first king, known as the Founder King, and the second of Sharif Hussein bin Ali's four sons (Ali, Abdullah, Faisal and Zeid), by his first wife Abdiyya bint Abdullah, as the Arabic article describes him. ^{1 2} Born at Mecca on 2 February 1882, he sat as deputy for Mecca in the Ottoman parliament, commanded the Eastern Army in the Great Arab Revolt, founded the Emirate of Transjordan on 11 April 1921 and ruled it as Emir until independence made him king on 25 May 1946, annexed the West Bank in 1950, and was assassinated at the entrance of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on 20 July 1951, succeeded by his son Talal. ^{2 1}

Abdullah received his basic education at Mecca and completed it at Istanbul; he had a wide knowledge of Arabic and Turkish literature, was a poet and a man of letters whose court saw literary salons flourish, and was known for his attachment to the religious sciences and heritage and his love of horses, in the Arabic article's account. ¹ In 1910 he persuaded his father to stand, successfully, for Grand Sharif of Mecca with British support, and in the following year he became deputy for Mecca in the parliament established by the Young Turks, acting as intermediary between his father and the Ottoman government, and sitting until 1914. ² In 1914 he paid a clandestine visit to Cairo to meet Lord Kitchener and seek British support for his father's ambitions in Arabia; he kept contact with the British through the First World War and in 1915 encouraged his father to enter into the correspondence with Sir Henry McMahon that led to the Arab Revolt. ²

In the revolt Abdullah commanded the Arab Eastern Army: on 10 June 1916 he attacked the Ottoman garrison at Taif with five thousand tribesmen and besieged the town until it fell on 22 September with British-Egyptian artillery support, then joined the siege of Medina with a force of four thousand. ^{2 3} In early 1917 he ambushed an Ottoman convoy in the desert and captured twenty thousand pounds in gold coins intended to bribe the Bedouin, and in August 1917 he worked with the French captain Muhammad Ould Ali Raho sabotaging the Hejaz Railway; his relations with Captain T. E. Lawrence were not good, and Lawrence spent most of his time in the Hejaz with Abdullah's brother Faisal of the Northern Army. ² On 8 March 1920 Abdullah was proclaimed King of Iraq by the Iraqi Congress but refused the position, which his brother Faisal then accepted after his defeat in Syria; when French forces took Damascus after Maysalun (24 July 1920), Abdullah moved his forces from the Hejaz into Transjordan intending to liberate Damascus, until Winston Churchill, at the famous Cairo "tea party" of 1921, persuaded him to stay put and not attack Britain's French allies, and he established his emirate there on 11 April 1921, welcomed by its inhabitants. ² For thirty years he concentrated on building the state and its institutions: a legislative council in 1928 whose role stayed advisory, Jordan's first constitution in 1928, known as the Basic Law, the first parliamentary elections in 1929, and eighteen governments in the twenty-three years of the emirate. ^{1 2} His reserve force under Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Peake was renamed the Arab Legion in 1923 and was led by John Bagot Glubb from 1930 to 1956; in the Second World War Abdullah was a faithful British ally, keeping order in Transjordan and helping suppress a pro-Axis uprising in Iraq and in the occupation of Iraq and Syria. ² A series of treaties with Britain culminated in that of 22 March 1946, which ended the mandate and gave Transjordan full independence; the state became the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, and Abdullah was crowned king at Amman on 25 May 1946. ^{1 2} His dream of a Greater Syria — Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine under a Hashemite throne at Damascus — made the other Arab states distrust him as a threat to their independence. ² He supported the Peel Commission of 1937, and in 1947 he was the only Arab leader supporting the United Nations partition of Palestine; he held secret meetings with the Jewish Agency, attended by Golda Meir, in November 1947 and again on 11 May 1948, before Arab League and popular pressure brought him into the all-Arab military intervention of 15 May 1948, in which he saw himself as supreme commander of the Arab forces and, on Abdullah el-Tell's account, personally ordered the Arab Legion into Jerusalem's Old City against Glubb's wishes; in 1950 he annexed the West Bank, angering Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. ²

On 20 July 1951 King Abdullah was assassinated at the entrance of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City as he arrived for Friday prayers accompanied by his grandson Prince Hussein: Mustafa Shukri Ashu, a Palestinian tailor's apprentice associated with a Palestinian nationalist group, shot him three times in the head and chest, and Prince Hussein survived when a medal he wore deflected a bullet. ^{2 1} The assassin was shot dead by the guards, and the killing was attributed to a secret group linked to the Muslim Brotherhood with political ties to the former Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini, with Colonel Abdullah at-Tell and members of the Husseini family later implicated. ² He was succeeded by his son Talal (1951–1952) and then by Talal's son Hussein (1952–1999); in Jordanian memory he remains the founder of the kingdom and its first king, and it was he who in 1949 created the Order of Hussein bin Ali, Jordan's highest order, named for his father. ^{2 3}

This section is read as a presentation of positions reported from the sources, not as a verdict of the museum.

His relations with Britain and with the Jews are the most contested file of his reign: the English article lays out the historians' readings — Avi Shlaim's case for a real partition understanding against Efraim Karsh's critique — and concludes, in Graham Jevon's discussion, that the parties openly discussed a Hashemite–Zionist accommodation even if a "firm agreement" is not proven; the museum transmits the disagreement as it stands. ² The article calls him, alone among the Arab leaders of his generation, a moderate in Western eyes, and says he might possibly have signed a separate peace with Israel but for the Arab League's militant opposition — its own hedged phrasing. ² His annexation of the West Bank angered Arab states that saw him as a threat to their independence and suspected him of being in cahoots with the enemy, while he distrusted their leaders in return and saw himself as the Arabs' qualified leader — mutual distrust the article reports on both sides. ² The Urdu stub errs in its single statement, calling him the second of three sons of Hussein, where the English and Arabic articles give four sons. ^{4 2} His faith is recorded as unknown as to school in his data record: no article read names a school for him — the English article, read in full, never calls him Sunni — and the only naming anywhere is inside Wikidata, whose religion property carries two values, Sunni Islam and Islam, a single structured-data family that never counts on its own, on the precedent of Sami Frashëri, whose single infobox stayed unknown; his Hashemite descent is family background and his rule of a Muslim-majority emirate an office, neither of them an attestation, so with no second independent source the value stays unknown under the two-source rule and the doubt rule. ^{2 1 5}

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article need periodic review with clear update dates.