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Jordan....
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The Nabataeans were the first known inhabitants of the area that is now
Jordan. The Romans absorbed it into their empire, as part of the province
of Arabia, in AD 106. Shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in
AD 632, Arab armies entered the region and established the Umayyad
dynasty. However, this became something of a provincial backwater after
the conquest of Baghdad. During the 11th and 12th centuries,
Jordan was
the scene of some of the major conflicts between the Christian
Crusaders
and Islamic forces. Salah ad Din (known in the West as Saladin) and his
successors ruled Jordan from his main seat of power in Egypt from the late
12th century until they were displaced by the Mamluks, a race of mostly
Kurdish and Circassian origin.
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The Mamluks repelled the Mongol invasion of the 14th
century but were eventually overthrown by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.
Jordan
was governed along with modern-day Palestine and Syria as a single
administrative entity (called a vilayet). Turkish rule lasted, in an
increasingly anaemic form, until the beginning of the 20th century. After
World War I, when the major Western powers began to dismember the old
Ottoman Empire and distribute its territories among themselves, the area
east of the Jordan River, known as Transjordania, fell to the
British. Like
neighboring Palestine, Transjordania came under a League of Nations mandate
under which the British maintained control. The mandate ceased in 1946, at
which point Transjordania attained full independence under the present
constitution. |
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When King Abdullah was assassinated in 1951, the
crown passed to his son Hussein ibn Talal. King Hussein assumed the throne
in 1952 and ruled the country until early 1999. Jordanian history and
politics since independence have been dominated by the Palestinian issue and
relations with Israel. When war broke out in 1948 between the newly-declared
state of Israel and the Palestinians, backed by the forces from neighboring
Arab countries, the Jordanian army took a 6000sq km area of Palestine
bounded by the west bank of the
River Jordan. |
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Until a major change in Jordanian policy in 1988, the
West Bank comprised three of Jordan’s eight provinces, while over half of
the Jordanian population claimed Palestinian origin. Relations between
King Hussein and the Palestinians were difficult from the very start: his
father was murdered by a Palestinian extremist. Jordan
lost the West Bank after the Six-Day War of 1967,
and gained thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled across to Jordan. |
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