June 2011
Asher Susser, “Jordan 2011: Uneasy Lies the Head,” Middle East Brief, Brandeis University, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, June 2011.
Jordan in early 2011 is in the throes of a serious domestic crisis. Only twice before in the country’s entire history has the monarchy been challenged to a similar degree. In the mid-1950s, King Hussein barely survived the unrelenting onslaught of the Nasserist revolutionary tide, and in the early 1970s, Jordan just pulled through, at the very last moment, from the frontal assault of the Palestinian fedayeen, backed by a Syrian invasion, in the civil war that became known as “Black September.” In between, in the early 1960s — when Hussein was still embattled by Nasser’s regime in Egypt, which had yet to exhaust its exportation of subversive revolutionary fervor — the young king, taking his cue from Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part II (“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”), published an autobiography titled Uneasy Lies the Head.
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