“EVER A GUEST IN OUR HOUSE”: THE EMIR ABDULLAH, SHAYKH MAJID AL-[ayn]ADWAN, AND THE PRACTICE OF JORDANIAN HOUSE POLITICS, AS REMEMBERED BY UMM SULTAN, THE WIDOW OF MAJID

Abstract

The literature on Jordan is awash in studies of the history, politics, and possible futures of the Hashemite family. In a polity so closely identified with its ruling dynasty, one would be surprised if this fixation did not prevail. More curious to the anthropologist is the extent to which the scholarly attention lavished on the Hashemites has centered on the rather obvious fact that they rule, but has given less concern to the fact that they rule as a family—that they express their dominance in a patriarchal rhetoric brimming with kinship metaphors, and that they preside over a body politic in which households and their influential heads are of far greater significance than electoral constituencies, public opinion, or (least of all) individual citizens and their rights. When King Hussein described his realm as “the big Jordanian family” (al-usra al-urduniyya al-kubra¯), he invoked an image of community (and authorized a style of political exchange) that made immediate sense to his subjects. In his final years of rule, Hussein artfully consolidated his role as national father figure. His heir, King Abdullah II, who was 37 years old when he inherited the throne in 1999, affects the “older brother” persona appropriate to his age. In announcing Hussein's death, Abdullah II relied heavily on the vocabulary of political kinship his father had standardized: “Hussein was a father, a brother, to each of you, the same as he was my father. . . . Today you are my brothers and sisters, and with you I find sympathy and condolences under God”1