Word: emirs
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Desert Welcome. Britain created Jordan in the '20s to provide a throne for its World War I ally the Hashemite Emir Abdullah. Glubb arrived from Iraq to work for Abdullah's dusty, black-tent Bedouin kingdom. How, asked Abdullah's father, had Glubb traveled? "Riding a camel," said the newcomer, in fluent Arabic. "By Allah!" exclaimed the old warrior. "This one is a Bedouin...
Beside the Kaduna River one day last week, a gaudy explosion of sound and color broke over Britain's largest colony. Spearmen whooped and saddlery creaked. Drums bongity-bongity-bongitied. Reed pipes wailed, wooden kafo horns growled out Louis Armstrong blue notes. The Emir of Kano's jester wore his best blue-dyed sheepskin wig and beard. Some of the warriors wore chain mail, wide-bladed swords or helmets of Crusader descent...
Black-Tent Kingdom. Winston Churchill, Britain's Colonial Secretary after World War I, created Jordan. He whacked an elbow-shaped hunk off the defunct Ottoman Empire and handed it to the Hashemite Emir Abdullah, "one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem," as he later said, for the Emir's fighting services to Britain in the desert campaigns against the Turks. Abdullah ruled his arid waste spaces as a Bedouin black-tent state, with three courtiers alternating as Premier at the royal pleasure, and a British proconsul in the Lawrence-of-Arabia tradition commanding the British-equipped Arab Legion. Lieut. General...
...Arabs believe that to kill one is a great deed. In the old days of horses and spears, the feat was reasonably difficult, but today great motorcades of oil-rich princes of Araby chase the oryx across the desert with barbaric howls and the roar of powerful engines. One emir organized a 300-car hunt. Now the oryx has retreated into the Rub' al Khali (empty quarter) of Southern Arabia, where at most 100 survive. Talbot does not think they will survive for long. The same emir is after them hell-bent with airplanes...
...Tommy gun. But they told him the game was up, the country and the Council of Elders were with them. Suddenly, the old man agreed to abdicate, but demanded that his son Badr succeed him. No, replied Colonel Thalaya, he had another candidate: the King's halfbrother, the Emir Saif el Islam Abdullah, the 48-year-old Foreign Minister, who once represented Yemen at the U.N. While Abdullah set about forming a new government, the old Imam retired within his palace, broke open the treasury coffers and secretly began buying off the besieging soldiers. After five days, the number...