King Abdullah

Jordan has a King, Abdullah II.

He's 45 years old. Been king since 1999, when his father died. His picture is everywhere -- not just government offices, but shops and private businesses.

The Jordanian monarchy is interesting in a couple of respects.

1) It's still there! Unlike the monarchies of, say, Egypt, or Syria, or Iraq. This is largely thanks to Abdullah's father King Hussein, one of the 20th century's great political survivors.

2) It's a real constitutional monarchy. That is, the monarch has significant power, but is not an autocrat and is not involved in the day to day running of the country.

3) It's popular. It's hard for me to judge this based on four days in the country, but people seem to think that the monarchy is the reason Jordan is a (relative) oasis of peace and stability in a very difficult neighborhood.

Note that "the monarchy is popular" is not exactly the same as "the monarch is popular". I can't speak to the latter point.

There's a large royal family -- Hussein had ten children over thirty years. The royals seem to be prominent, but it's nothing like the swarm of Princes in Saudi Arabia.

King Abdullah is the fourth Hashemite King of Jordan. The first was his great-grandfather, Abdullah I, who founded the kingdom in 1923 and was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1951. The second was Abdullah's son Talal, who reigned for only one year and then abdicated. The third was Talal's son, the redoubtable Hussein, who ruled from 1953 to his death in 1999.

It's been descent in the direct male line, though this is not inevitable; Hashemite tradition allows brothers to succeed as well as sons, and this is enshrined in the Jordanian Constitution. Indeed, for much of his reign King Hussein's heir was his brother, Prince Hassan. But a few weeks before his death, he abruptly changed from Hassan to Abdullah. The reasons for this remain obscure, but the best guess is that he simply wanted his son to succeed instead of his brother.

King Abdullah went to school in the US and Britain -- Deerfield Academy, Oxford, Sandhurst and Georgetown -- and speaks perfect mid-Atlantic English.

More importantly, he's a huge Star Trek fan; he appeared as an extra on an episode of Voyager in 1995.

Comments

[Noel Maurer]

Dude. Two questions. Why are you in Jordan? And why no pictures?

[Andrew Lambdin-Abraham]

I'm more curious which episode and which character...

[DaveMB]

Here's the Wikipedia article on the Voyager episode -- he had no lines because he is not a member of the Screen Actors Guild (cf. the Cheers appearance of Mike Dukakis, who was a paid-up SAG member because of his prior career as a talk-show host).

Deerfield Academy is the archrival of Northfield Mount Hermon, my wife's and daughter's school, so we hear about Abdullah occasionally. The last thing of local interest was that the retiring headmaster of Deerfield went to Jordan to found a similar school there.