A Time for Kings?: Hashemites and others in the Arab mix - Brief Article

National Review, Sept 2, 2002 by David Pryce-Jones

Washington is searching for a successor regime to Saddam Hussein. It is an exercise in political science. Can an even passably democratic government be devised to take the place of a dictator who has stripped his people of decency and trust in others? Iraqis of all sorts are putting themselves forward: dissidents and exiles, former army officers who fled from Saddam in fear of their lives, men of substance certainly. But how representative are they? Why should Iraqis have confidence in self-selected and evidently ambitious leaders whose legitimacy is questionable? This is where the Hashemite family comes in. The last ruler in Baghdad to enjoy legitimacy was a Hashemite, King Faisal II, grandson of the man appointed -- imposed, if you will -- by the British after World War I to rule Iraq. The legitimacy was admittedly tenuous, but better than none at all. A return to a constitutional monarchy might provide the framework for law and order and national unity.

Communism and Arab socialism almost put paid during the Cold War to monarchy in the Middle East. King Farouk, the gross but witty last king of Egypt, once quipped that soon there would be only five kings left in the world: the King of England and the kings of diamonds, hearts, spades, and clubs. In 1952, revolutionary Egyptian officers, Gamal Abdul Nasser among them, dispatched him on his yacht into exile. Six years later, revolutionary Iraqi officers mercilessly murdered their young king, Faisal II, along with many members of his Hashemite family. With a combination of luck and courage, his first cousin King Hussein of Jordan survived about a dozen conspiracies to kill him in the course of his long reign. The late King Hassan of Morocco was almost King Hussein's equal in surviving assassination attempts. In 1975 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was shot dead by one of his nephews, and if Osama bin Laden now has his way the entire Saudi royal family is doomed. Another Muslim absolute monarch, Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, was driven off the throne of Iran in 1979 by Islamic fundamentalists.

Whatever ideological credentials they may have boasted, successful revolutionaries in practice kept themselves in power by means of force and the secret police. But even men of that type seem to find it natural to aspire to found a dynasty. In Syria today, Bashar Assad is president only because his father once seized power and eliminated his opponents. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, and Libya's Muammar Qaddafi are all grooming sons as successors. Lack of legitimacy does not inhibit them.

The passing of power from one ruler to the next in this personal way is a constant source of instability. Anyone with the will and ambition for it has only to decide to seize power for himself, and so upset the state, to be dispossessed in turn by a rival. The spiral of violence is self-perpetuating. Islamic history is an unrelieved tale of usurpation by means of murder and palace coups and revolution. So it was once in the West, of course, where many a ruling family began as usurpers, and only the hereditary principle and the passage of time brought legitimacy. The evolution of the constitutional arrangements of parliaments, parties, and elections gradually introduced the transfer of power by consent, that cardinal stabilizing virtue of democracy.

The principle of hereditary monarchy doesn't attract many defenders in a world of equal opportunity and anti-elitism. But it may have a special role to play when a totalitarian or police state collapses, and the successor state has to form in a void where political legitimacy is an unknown quantity. After the death of Franco, for instance, Spain was open to a right-wing coup and possible civil war. The restoration of constitutional monarchy under King Juan Carlos instead laid the basis of a successful democracy. The return of King Simeon to Bulgaria provided a sense of national identity and continuity, whereas King Michael of Romania failed to take his chance to do the same, and his country is suffering as a result. In Afghanistan, reinstated from exile in spite of his advanced age, Zahir Shah has been a symbol of unity. Many Iranians hope that Reza Pahlavi, the former shah's son, will one day play that role in an Iran liberated from the mullahs. Even post- Soviet Russia has spasms of Romanov nostalgia.

The Hashemite family has a legitimacy which derives from Islam. They claim descent from Hashem, a forebear of the prophet Muhammad. With this ancestry, as they traditionally asserted in the days of the Ottoman Empire, came the right to rule the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz. The sharif, or head of the family, carried the title of Guardian of the Two Shrines. Toward the end of the 19th century, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a British Arabist, prophesied that if a man of real ability were to appear in the Hashemite family, he would be sure to find "an almost universal following." The result, Blunt fancifully imagined, would be a "liberal Islam."