Volume 38, Number 5 · March 7, 1991
In the Wake of 'Desert Storm'
By Scott MacLeod
Never had I felt so gloomy about the Middle East as I did recently after I spent an evening with King Hussein. The King probably knows the region, and certainly the Arabs, as well as anyone else, and he carries the burden of being conceivably the last of the Hashemite rulers. Until the Saudis took over the Hijaz, the region that includes Mecca and Medina, the King's clan was custodian of the Islamic holy places there for hundreds of years. His great-grandfather was the sharif of Mecca. Abdullah, his grandfather, helped lead the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire and was rewarded by Britain with a new kingdom east of the Jordan River. Hussein, as a teen-ager, was at Abdullah's side when he was assassinated in 1951 at the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by a disaffected Palestinian. In 1958, a cousin, King Faisal of Iraq, was overthrown and murdered.
Feature, 4448 words
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