Hussein (ibn Talal) 1935-99
King of Jordan

He was born in Amman, the great-grandson of Hussein ibn Ali and cousin of King Faisal II of Iraq. He was educated at Victoria College, Alexandria, and in Great Britain at Harrow and Sandhurst. In 1952 he succeeded his father, King Talal, who was deposed because of mental illness. His marriage (1955) to Princess Dina was later dissolved, and in 1961 he married an English girl, Antoinette Gardiner, given the title Princess Muna, who in 1962 gave birth to an heir, Abdullah. In 1972 he divorced Princess Muna and married Alia Baha Eddin Toukan, who was killed in an air accident in 1977. The following year he married Lisa Halaby. The young king maintained a vigorous and highly personal rule in the face of the political upheavals inside and outside his exposed country, steering a middle course, on the one side favouring the western powers, particularly Great Britain, on the other pacifying Arab nationalism, as by his curt dismissal of the British general, Sir John Bagot Glubb (1956). His federation of Jordan with Iraq (1958) came to an unexpected end with the Iraqi military coup d'�tat in July of the same year. He lost the West Bank to Israel (1967) and had problems coping with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas based in Jordan, who had no attachment to him and wanted a firmer anti-Israeli policy. From 1979 he was reconciled with Yasser Arafat, renounced Jordan's claim to the West Bank (1988) and attempted to prevent the outbreak of the Gulf War (1990). After the war he distanced himself from Saddam Hussein, and signed a peace treaty with Israel in Washington in 1994. In 1999, after undergoing months of chemotherapy in the US for cancer of the lymphatic tissue, he returned to Jordan, where he died. He was succeeded by his son Abdullah

Bibliography: James Gant, Hussein of Jordan (1989)