told me to see Zayd Rifai, former prime minister, former ambassador and now chief of the Senate. ‘He’s a great raconteur,’ the Syrian-born artist Ali Jabari said. A young woman at the Foreign Ministry told me, ‘He’s brilliant. He’s well read. When I met him, I just listened.’ (The young woman, Raya Qadi, was so beautiful that when we met I just listened.) Prince Talal bin Mohammed, a first cousin of King Abdallah, said that Rifai was a champion story-teller whose stories were sometimes true. True or not, they were good.
The first thing I noticed about Rifai was not the dark suit, possibly from a tailor in Savile Row, or the cigar, from Havana, but the blue eyes. Everything else in his Senate office spoke of Arabia. We were served Bedouin coffee – boiled cardamom – from a brass pot by a man in immaculate robes and keffiyeh. There were Persian carpets and tribal décor, a ceremonial sword and photographs of Jordan’s four kings. Rifai had the tanned skin of the desert and looked like a shrewd Arab politician. But the eyes spoke of the Ottoman Empire, whose Turks, Circassians, Bosnians, Kurds and Chechens mingled with the tribes of Arabia and Syria. Rifai, it seemed, numbered Circassians and Turks among his ancestors.
‘The family is originally from the Hejaz,’ he said. ‘One of our grandfathers went to Iraq, where he created the Rifai school of thought in Iraq in the eleventh century.’ The Rifai school was a sect of Sufis, Muslim mystics. ‘A lot of followers of the sect took on the name. There are now about twenty million Rifais in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. The family were civil servants in the Ottoman administration. They moved from one city to another. My grandfather was born in a village of southern Syria, in the Hauran. He met my grandmother in Marjayoun and married her. My father was born there.’ Marjayoun, a large town in south Lebanon, was mostly Greek Orthodox. The Israelis had made it their military headquarters and base for their mercenary South Lebanon army from 1978 to 2000.
‘My uncles were born in Tyre and Sidon,’ Rifai said. ‘My grandfather retired to Safad.’ Safad, a mixed Arab – Jewish city in the Galilee, was just south of Lebanon’s Marjayoun. ‘My father grew up in Safad, and he worked for the British Mandate administration in Palestine. He was seconded in 1921 to Transjordan to establish the new administration. I was born here in 1936.’
Rifai said his father, who had served as prime minister to Jordan’s first three kings, advised him to avoid politics. ‘He said I should choose engineering or medicine. He really wanted me to be a doctor.’ He became a diplomat instead. His education at the Bishop’s School in Amman and Victoria College in Egypt, where Edward Said would also study, was pure British colonial. Then he made the transition, as the Arab world would, from the British to the American system. He went to Harvard. Did he study medicine? ‘Political science,’ he said. ‘I graduated in 1956. Then I did international law and relations at Columbia. I still go back and give lectures.’
In 1956, King Hussein had dismissed the British general John Bagot Glubb – Glubb Pasha – as commander of the Arab Legion. Reacting to anti-colonial criticism from Nasser’s Egyptian press, the young king had to prove his Arab nationalist credentials by putting his armed forces under an Arab. I wondered whether Rifai had known Glubb Pasha.
‘He was a wonderful man,’ Rifai recalled. ‘He became more Jordanian Arab than British. A lot of injustice was done to him. My father had to tell Glubb to leave.’ His father found the duty distasteful. Glubb had given his professional life to Jordan within the context of his loyalty to the British Empire. I had known Glubb’s son, Fares, in Beirut in the early 1970s. Short and thin like his father, he looked like photographs of Glubb Pasha as a young man. Fares spoke flawless Bedouin Arabic, had converted to Islam and was close to the Marxists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who in 1970 had attempted to destroy the Hashemite crown that his father had sworn to defend for thirty-five years.
‘I went as ambassador to London for a few months,’ Rifai remembered. ‘Glubb Pasha used to call on me. He always referred to King Hussein as His Majesty, or our lord – sayedna. He had contributed enormously to the establishment of the army, to administration and order in this society.’ The discipline, the starched uniforms and the army band’s bagpipes owed something to Glubb Pasha.
Back in Amman with his Harvard and Columbia degrees, Rifai went on to represent Jordan in Cairo, Beirut and London, as well as at the United Nations. In 1971, he started work in the royal palace. ‘I thought I’d have a change after all we had been through.’ What Jordan had been through included the June 1967 war, when Israel captured Arab Jerusalem and the West Bank from what had been Glubb Pasha’s army; the Arab – Israeli War of Attrition that followed; and the 1970 Black September war between Palestinian commandos and Jordan’s army.
‘The most dangerous time was the period after the ’67 war,’ Rifai said. ‘For Jordan, it wasn’t a six-day war. It was a four-year war. There was the battle of Karameh in 1968. There were daily bombardments and air raids by the Israelis. There was anarchy with the presence of Palestinian commandos. We had fifty-two commando organizations, including the Red Brigades, Baader – Meinhof and Carlos the Jackal. We had no idea they were all here until September 1970.’ He described a time of chaos, when Palestinian commandos briefly held the Western press corps hostage in the InterContinental Hotel.
‘The borders were open. We had Iraqi troops in the country. We had no idea the Palestinians were so well dug in. They planted land mines and had rocket-propelled grenades. They took control of this city. Our army was on the front lines with Israel. The Palestinian commandos put up checkpoints. They stole cars. They took donations to the cause by force. They kidnapped. They had their own newspapers. Remember their slogan, that they would liberate Jerusalem by liberating Amman. The army almost revolted. When soldiers came to spend weekends with their families in Amman, the commandos would kidnap, kill and mutilate them. Battalions in the Jordan Valley would hear what happened to fellow soldiers. The units would come up here on their own. I would go with His Majesty and Zayd Bin Shaker’ – Bin Shaker, King Hussein’s uncle, was the army commander – ‘to stop them. There was a decision by His Majesty. We waited and waited.’
On 15 September 1970, King Hussein appointed a military government to force the commandos out of Amman. The Jordanian parliament sent a delegation to ask Yasser Arafat to evacuate without a fight. Rifai’s version of Arafat’s reaction was, ‘He told them, “The situation has run out of my hands. The best I can do for you is to give King Hussein twenty-four hours to leave the country.” ’
Hussein stayed. After two weeks of intensive fighting, during which Jordan’s Bedouin troops massacred Palestinians and bombarded their camps, it was Arafat who left. Negotiations between King Hussein and Yasser Arafat in Cairo may have caused the heart attack that killed Gamal Abdel Nasser the night after the two Arab chiefs left. With Nasser’s death, Arab nationalism retreated and left the field to the steady advance of political Islam.
Did Arafat, who made several attempts on Hussein’s life, reconcile with the king? ‘Oh, yes,’ Rifai said. ‘They made up. Arafat often came here. He was received as a head of state. With politics in the Middle East, you can’t afford to have a long memory. You won’t be able to talk to anyone.’
After the war, Arafat’s commandos assassinated Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tel outside the Hilton Hotel in Cairo. Someone also tried to kill Rifai, when he was ambassador in London. ‘We were in a narrow road coming from Regent’s Park,’ he said. ‘The driver was making a right turn. They were standing on a little traffic island and started shooting point-blank. I was reading the paper. The car was a big Daimler. It was The Times, I remember. I was crouching like this.’ Rifai bent forward. ‘The first bullets hit my hand and ear. I reacted quickly. I threw myself to the floor. They found forty bullets, and the fire was concentrated on the back seat. A Scotland Yard inspector said he didn’t believe a canary would survive.’ Rifai blamed the clandestine arm of Yasser Arafat’s Al Fateh, Black September, for the attack.
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