Abdullah I of Jordan

Biography

Abdullah bin Hussein was born in Mecca in 1882, the second son of Hussein bin Ali, later Sharif of Mecca, and was educated in Istanbul and the Hejaz. He helped his father win the post of Grand Sharif in 1910 and then sat in the Ottoman parliament as deputy for Mecca, acting as his father's go-between with the government. In 1914 he secretly approached Lord Kitchener in Cairo, and in 1915 he urged his father into the correspondence with Sir Henry McMahon that led to the Arab Revolt.

During the revolt of 1916-18 he commanded the Arab Eastern Army, besieging the Ottoman garrison at Ta'if and then joining the siege of Medina. Offered the crown of Iraq by an Iraqi congress in 1920, he declined it in favour of his brother Faisal. After the French expelled Faisal from Damascus he moved north with his forces, but Winston Churchill persuaded him not to attack the French, and on 11 April 1921 he set up the Emirate of Transjordan under British protection.

He ruled largely as an autocrat, building the Arab Legion with British officers, and stayed a loyal British ally in the Second World War, when his forces helped put down the pro-Axis uprising in Iraq. Transjordan became independent on 25 May 1946 and he was crowned king. Unusually among Arab leaders he backed partition of Palestine and met secretly with Golda Meir, hoping to annex the Arab areas; in the 1948 war his Arab Legion held East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Jordan formally annexed in 1950, angering other Arab states.

Suspected of seeking a separate peace with Israel, he was shot dead at the entrance to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on 20 July 1951 by a Palestinian gunman, in front of his grandson Hussein, who later became king. His son Talal succeeded him.