The quotes above come from history textbooks published by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1959 and 1975, respectively. The theme of these quotes and of the textbooks as a whole is: The Hashemites are Jordan; Jordan is the Hashemite family. A sample sentence says, “The Arabs in Jordan welcomed Emir ʿAbdullah bin Husayn with a great fervor, and they gave to him the title of savior of Syria. In April 1921, the Emir established a government for his Emirate.”³ Subsequently, the subject of sentence after sentence is the reigning Hashemite king and the state he controls. The citizens of...

The history of Jordan and Palestine illustrates that ideology does matter; that debates about national identity can alter day-to-day events and relationships. In Partha Chatterjee’s terms, the “domains” of national identity give structure and meaning to new state institutions and feelings of shared experiences.⁴ In Jordan and Palestine, the debates about the “inner” and “outer” domains played out on the ground in the twentieth century because political activity came hand in hand with nationalist discourse. Nationalism became a passion for political activists of all stripes, whether for those in Palestine fighting against the British, or for others in Jordan fighting...

As ʿAbdullah took over the governance of the new Emirate of Transjordan in 1921, the most immediate problems involved subduing the tribes and extending the reach of governmental power to all corners of the state. Yet underlying these more practical concerns was a key question about the long-term survivability of the Hashemite leadership over this fragile new state. As Richard Taylor has asked, “By virtue of Jordan’s status as a country, the rise of nationalism was inevitable. But what form was such nationalism to take?”³ The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the Hashemite attempt to answer this question. To succeed at...

As the concept of Transjordanian statehood and nationality came to be accepted in people’s minds, any who opposed the process needed to rally around an alternative national identity. Arab nationalism came to serve that purpose because its broad goals and definitions allowed its proponents to work on the domestic political stage in Transjordan and on the regional stage in the Fertile Crescent simultaneously. By World War II, Arab nationalism meant revolutionary change regardless of its arena. It also brought to the forefront of political discourse new social strata, primarily of the urban areas, led by the burgeoning professional intelligentsia. Early...

The Hashemite state had used the interwar period to establish its top-down approach to nation-building, “working” to establish for itself a legitimate place in the population’s eyes. When the initial indigenous opposition movement disintegrated, governmental and nongovernmental agencies served to acclimatize the population to the existence of the new state that emerged. However, national identity became an arena for conflict in the new agencies of socialization because the Hashemite leadership and its national identity did not hold resonance for the new social stratum emerging in them. In Palestine, in contrast, legitimacy and national identity were not so much in question;...

The Mandate period in Transjordan and Palestine had seen key groups in both populations turn into political activists. Agencies for change, meant to bring people into the respective national projects, succeeded to a certain extent in Transjordan, as more people came to support the Hashemite state. Some, for example, would channel this support through the agency of the Muslim Brotherhood, patronized by King ʿAbdullah from its first days in 1945, and by taking government jobs. Still other Jordanians emerged from this politicization process opposed to the state—for both its governmental policies and its unique status as a nation-state—and...

The 1950s witnessed a confluence of events that catapulted the Jordanian National Movement (JNM) to prominence in national affairs. With the assassination of King ʿAbdullah and the ascension to the throne of Talal and then Husayn, the political system became less controlled from the top, less engineered by the Hashemites. This opening allowed the Movement’s leaders to find more avenues for political expression. In the early 1950s, the liberalization of the political system under the new kings seemed to presage a peaceful transition from the established political leaders to a “new” generation. The regime granted political parties the right to...

The period between October 1956 and April 1957 saw the political climax and then the fall of the Jordanian National Movement (JNM) as a unified political actor on the Jordanian scene.⁴ Because of its enormous popularity, King Husayn appointed one of its leaders, Sulayman al-Nabulsi, to serve as prime minister of Jordan’s first nationalist government. Sheer momentum had brought the parties to power, riding on the waves of emotions and songs and demonstrations. The “new” had finally arrived to displace the “old.” As the JNM’s leaders had promised for years, the opportunity now existed to institute the policies of the...

How could Jamal al-Shaʿir, a member of the Baʿth Party, say by 1998 that “If the Hashemite throne goes, Jordan goes”? Are the Hashemites Jordan and Jordan the Hashemite family? Had the Hashemites “won,” as King ʿAbdullah declared in his memoirs? Is this a pragmatic recognition of political reality? To achieve this status after 1957, the Hashemites had to work harder to improve the economic and social conditions in the country. In 1957, the Jordanian National Movement (JNM) had been physically destroyed, but its demands still remained; its supporters still clamored for better conditions. Arab nationalist goals were just as...