Lion of Jordan (18 page)

Dina was very beautiful, with a dusky complexion, and very slight, no taller than Hussein. The main bond between them was their pride in their common Hashemite heritage. They had few shared interests apart from their love of dancing. They first met in London when Hussein was still a school boy at Harrow. As a cadet at Sandhurst, Hussein used to take Dina out to nightclubs and to parties. In Jordan and in Europe, Hussein was often photographed in the company of glamorous society girls. The rumour mill kept working and the flavour of the month kept changing. But during his visits to London after ascending the throne, he and Dina continued to meet. Queen Zain initially disapproved of the idea of marriage between them, but he was insistent. Prince Hassan, who was eight years old at the time, remembers his older brother stamping his feet in fury with their mother. Zain's main argument against the marriage was that Hussein was too young, but she also resented the woman in question. Hassan, looking back, felt that they were an odd couple: Dina was intelligent and cultivated, while Hussein was barely out of short trousers, with no social confidence. The tension in the family was palpable from the beginning: ‘My mother could see the dangers of both the timing of Hussein's marriage due to his youth and the age of the person he was to marry and the pitfalls that may have lain ahead. There is no doubt that she also felt threatened by an equally well-born, equally beautiful, equally intelligent woman within the family. So perhaps she did not help matters.'
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Zain had to concede that Dina had impeccable Hashemite credentials as well as a good education and high social standing. Once she realized that her son could not be deflected, Zain bowed to the inevitable and took charge of the practical arrangements. Hussein's letter proposing marriage to Dina asked her for her help in preserving the Hashemite dynasty and in providing a focus for his people's loyalty. Dina accepted Hussein's proposal out of a sense of duty. ‘She was not in love with
him,' one of his biographers has written, ‘but believed he needed what she could give him.'
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On 20 February 1955 Hussein went on an official visit to Egypt, at the end of which his engagement to Dina Abdul Hamid was announced. The royal wedding took place in the queen mother's palace in Amman on 19 April. Hussein signed the marriage contract in the presence of two witnesses: his cousin, King Faisal II of Iraq, and the cadi, or Islamic judge, of Amman. The guests sipped a celebratory glass of strawberry juice before stepping out to the balcony. Dina, who was wearing a grey and mauve dress and a chiffon scarf, waved regally to the cheering crowd. Farid al-Atrash, the Frank Sinatra of the Arab world, sang songs especially written for the occasion. ‘It felt as though a gust of fresh young air was sweeping through the palace, blowing away the feudal cobwebs.'
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The newly-weds set up house in Hussein's villa at Al-Hummar, called Darat al-Khair (‘House of Goodness'). It looked like a perfect marriage.

The honeymoon of the royal couple took the form of a state visit to Spain. This was followed by a visit to the United Kingdom from 16 to 23 June as the guests of Her Majesty's Government, during which it was already apparent that the king and the queen were not on the happiest of terms – for which the king was generally blamed. At the end of the month they returned to Jordan, where a great deal of criticism was being voiced of the royal family, especially of the queen mother and her brother Sharif Nasser bin Jamil. Pamphlets attacking the royal family and the monarch were circulated for the first time. Hussein's known support for Jordan's entry into the Baghdad Pact also damaged his popularity and prestige.
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When Dina told Hussein that she was pregnant he was delighted. A baby girl was born on 13 February 1956, and they called her Alia. The arrival of their daughter led to a marked but temporary improvement in the relations between the parents. Dina performed the ceremonial duties of a queen: entertaining visiting dignitaries, hosting receptions and tea parties, visiting schools and hospitals, and doing charitable work. But she thought that she had been chosen to play a more substantive role in helping her husband to develop his country, and she behaved accordingly. It soon became clear that she was much more liberal in internal politics and much more interested in social issues than her husband. She was also thought to prefer the Palestinians of the West
Bank to the Jordanians of the East Bank. Zain was jealous of the prominent role in the affairs of state that her daughter-in-law was beginning to play and tried to confine her to routine palace duties. The birth of Alia made things worse because Dina resented her omnipresent and intrusive mother-in-law. Zain had strong views on the bringing up of children and took to complaining to her son about both the public and the private conduct of his wife. Zain was a woman of an indomitable will who jealously guarded her powers and prerogatives in the royal household. She represented tradition, whereas Dina represented modernity, and the relationship between them deteriorated very rapidly. Zain felt vindicated. She became a prime mover in bringing about the dissolution of the marriage. Hussein, the apprentice husband, was torn between the two assertive women in his life. He longed for simple companionship, and, when problems arose, he began to distance himself from his wife. Within eighteen months of the wedding, the marriage collapsed.

Not surprisingly, Hussein wanted to put his failed marriage behind him and move on. In his memoirs, he dwelt very briefly on this chapter in his life. His account consists of two terse and exceedingly uninformative paragraphs:

On 19 April 1955, I was married to Sharifa Dina Abdul Hamed, a distant cousin and a member of the Hashemite dynasty, who lived in Cairo. She was a highly intelligent woman with an MA degree at Cambridge, and a few years my senior. At first I was very hopeful that I could build a happy family life around this marriage, and when our baby daughter Alia was born I was overjoyed.

I have always wanted to share the fundamental happiness of the life of an ordinary man, but it was not to be – not then. The marriage was a failure. It was just one of those things that did not work out, despite all efforts; it was far better, and only fair to both of us, to end it. It was a sad and difficult period. There have been many criticisms about the divorce, but the basic principle of life is to live in the best way one can, honestly, regardless of people's opinions. It is better to meet such a crisis with courage and frankness. Eighteen months after our marriage we separated, and my ex-wife left for Cairo.
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In reality, Hussein's handling of the crisis in his first marriage displayed neither courage nor frankness, while his account of the divorce is highly economical with the truth. The official version, repeated by several of Hussein's British biographers, is that Dina went on holiday
to Egypt in the autumn of 1956, leaving her baby daughter behind her, and that she did not return. In fact, she went to visit her father, who had been injured in a car accident, and she was not allowed to return. What the official version does not say is that Dina was not permitted to see her daughter, with one brief exception, for six years after the failure of the marriage.

Dina did not tell her side of the story until many years later and to the most improbable of chroniclers: two Israeli journalists, a husband and a wife. In 1986 Aharon and Amalia Barnea published in Hebrew a book that came out three years later in English under the title
Mine Enemy: The Moving, Hopeful Friendship of Two Couples – Israeli and Arab
.
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The authors were the Israeli couple while the Arab couple were Dina and her second husband, Salah Ta'amari, a high-ranking member of the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a lieutenant-colonel in the PLO's armed forces. Dina had always felt deep sympathy for the long-suffering Palestinian people, and as the short-lived queen of Jordan she developed a special affinity with the refugees among them. The Arab defeat in the June War of 1967 and Israel's occupation of the West Bank set in motion a second wave of refugees. The PLO guerrilla forces relocated to the East Bank of the Jordan to resume the armed struggle against Israel. Dina, who was then living in London, was outspoken in her support for the Palestinian cause. She opened a boutique to sell Palestinian handicrafts, the proceeds of which went to Fatah. At a reception for a visiting Fatah delegation in the summer of 1968 Dina met Salah Ta'amari, and two years later they got married.

Salah Ta'amari was twelve years younger than Dina. He was born in 1942 in Bethlehem, on what became the West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In 1955, when he was thirteen, Ta'amari took part in a demonstration in Bethlehem against Jordan's entry into the Baghdad Pact. He remembered well the spectacle of Jordanian soldiers opening fire on the demonstrators and killing four. Afterwards, the schools were closed for almost a year, increasing local resentment against the regime. Ta'amari studied at Ein Shams University in Cairo for a degree in English literature, and he did an MA thesis on T. S. Eliot. He also read widely about Jewish history, the Holocaust, Zionism and the State of Israel. His aim was to go back to Bethlehem to become a schoolteacher. But when the PLO was formed in 1964 he joined Fatah and after the June War he could not go back. From 1967 he rose fast in the Fatah chain of
command, to become coordinator of raids from the East Bank into the Israeli-occupied West Bank. During the confrontation between the Jordanian regime and the Palestinian guerrillas in September 1970, Dina's first and second husbands therefore fought on opposite sides. Having been defeated in Jordan, the guerrilla organizations regrouped in southern Lebanon to resume the armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine. In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon, and Ta'amari was captured and taken prisoner. He was the highest-ranking Fatah commander to fall into Israel's hands. Aharon Barnea went to interview him for a radio programme.

This was the first of a series of meetings that grew into a friendship between the two men. As a special concession, the prisoner was allowed to pay a visit to Aharon Barnea at his home. Barnea was also instrumental in arranging a clandestine, conjugal visit for Dina with her husband in a beachfront hotel. Thus was born the unusual friendship between the two couples that cut across all the regional battle lines. The book that the Barneas wrote has only one chapter about Dina's first marriage, but it is a highly revealing one. Because the account of the marriage and its disintegration comes to us second-hand, its accuracy cannot be guaranteed, but it certainly has the ring of authenticity.

The most interesting part of Dina's account relates to the break-up of her marriage to Hussein. For a brief period following the birth of Alia, they succeeded in overcoming their troubles. But the rumours against her and the court intrigues persisted, until the king succumbed to the pressures on him. In the autumn of 1956, when Dina went to her father's bedside, she left six-month-old Alia in the care of Mrs Craig, the British nanny, because Hussein refused to let her take the baby with her. When she called Hussein to make the arrangements for her return, she was in for a shock. He said, ‘I think you had better stay where you are, until the situation becomes more propitious.' Dina's increasingly desperate pleas to Hussein to allow her to be reunited with her daughter all fell on deaf ears. When Alia was about nine months old, Hussein allegedly said to Dina, ‘If you think you and my enemies can use my daughter as a weapon against me, you are mistaken.' He issued orders banning all communication between the queen and the court. In August 1957 Hussein sent word to Dina through the Jordanian ambassador to Cairo: as a twenty-eighth birthday present she would be allowed to see Alia but only on neutral territory and under strict supervision. The meeting
took place in a hotel in Istanbul. The party from Amman included Alia, Mrs Craig, several servants, three Circasssian bodyguards and Queen Zain. Dina spent twenty-four hours with her daughter, and then a messenger from Queen Zain came to tell her that her time was up. Hussein subsequently charged his ambassador to Cairo with the mission of serving Dina the divorce papers.

Dina had to wait nearly five years to see her daughter again. It was not until Hussein got married for a second time, to the English girl who became Princess Muna, that the unbelievably cruel royal ban was lifted. It was Muna who persuaded Hussein to change his mind. Dina was invited to stay at the palace to see her daughter and to begin a series of regular meetings with her. Dina had had hardly any contact with Hussein after her visit to Amman, but his conscience must have troubled him. One day, many years after the reunion, he got word that Dina was seriously ill in a London hospital. He asked to see her but she refused. The next morning, as she was being wheeled to the operating theatre, her carers diverted her bed to a small room. Her former husband was standing there. He uttered one sentence: ‘I am sorry.' She felt that she had no choice but to forgive him.
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Hussein's belated apology to his first wife indicates, above all, how much he had learned in the intervening period. One should therefore not be too harsh in judging his handling of either the political crisis or his private life in 1955. At that time he was barely twenty years old. He made serious mistakes, but they were the result of youth and inexperience in the face of unprecedented political upheavals. Political immaturity was more than matched by emotional immaturity: a callow youth with a passion for dancing, he married a woman who was not just older but considerably more mature, sophisticated and politically progressive than himself. He simply could not handle the relationship, and he behaved abominably. But he was not inherently cruel or callous. He was simply at the bottom of a steep learning curve.

The most spectacular event in Anglo-Jordanian relations in 1956 was the dismissal by royal edict of John Bagot Glubb from his position as commander-in-chief of the Arab Legion. Britain's pressure on Jordan to join the Baghdad Pact unleashed a powerful popular current of anti-British feelings that culminated in removal of the renowned British general. Glubb was an employee of the Jordanian government, and to this extent his dismissal was an internal Jordanian affair. But most Jordanians saw him as a British proconsul in Amman; most foreigners saw him as the real power behind the throne; and the Arab world saw him as the symbol of foreign control over the political and economic life of Jordan. Egypt and Syria, in particular, used Glubb's exalted position to taunt Jordan with being a British colony while they were free. By sacking Glubb, Hussein made a dramatic assertion, at the practical as well as the symbolic level, of his country's independence.