How Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy established hereditary custodianship of Al Aqsa Mosque
On a summer weekend in 1951, Jordan’s King Abdullah I made a routine trip from Amman to Jerusalem to pray at Al Aqsa Mosque and was shot dead at the entrance.
Most of Old Jerusalem was under Jordan’s control at the time, and the trainee tailor assassin, 21, was tried and executed.
The king was the first ruler of modern Jordan and great-grandfather to King Abdullah II, who inherited power in 1999 from his father, King Hussein. The Hashemite family can be traced back to the Prophet Mohammed.
A motive for the assassination was never fully established.
Many in the Middle East may have wanted to kill the man who had ambitions for a larger kingdom over Greater Syria.
The vision could be traced back to his father, Sharif Hussein of Makkah, who sought territorial unity in the Middle East.
King Abdullah’s assassination at one of Islam’s holiest sites reinforced a link between the Hashemites and the mosque.
The ties date to 1924, when Palestinian religious leaders gave Sharif Hussein custodianship of Al Aqsa.
“Al Aqsa was placed in the trust of the Hashemites because they were regarded as having means of support in face of an imminent danger,” said Azzam Khatib, director of the Jerusalem Waqf, or religious endowments.
That danger was the Zionist expansion into Palestine.
“The Hashemites had the power to preserve this trust: politically and physically. They raised money to renovate Al Aqsa,” Mr Azzam said. He termed the custodianship hereditary.
Safeguarding Al Aqsa has been challenged by Israel’s lurch to the right in recent years.
Muslims call the compound Haram Al Sharif.
A visit in 2000 by Ariel Sharon, Israel’s opposition leader at the time and later prime minister, was partly responsible for the second Palestinian intifada.
Violence has occurred in subsequent years because of what Palestinians and many Arabs regard as Israeli intransigence linked to Al Aqsa.
The most recent was a visit by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister.
It was one of Mr Ben-Gvir’s first public moves as a member of the far-right government that took office on December 29.
Jordan condemned the visit as a “scandalous” breach of international law.
The kingdom called on Israel to preserve the status quo at the compound and respect Jordan’s custodianship of the site.
Israel does not explicitly acknowledge Jordan’s custodianship, nor is it directly mentioned in the 1994 Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty.
The treaty says Israel “respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem”.
The Jordanian position is supported internationally, receiving a boost at a UN Security Council meeting last week.
UN Assistant Secretary General Khaled Khiari said that all parties should “uphold the status quo, in line with the special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan”.
Beyond protecting Al Aqsa, some in Palestine wanted Sharif Hussein to become the Muslim caliph as the Ottoman Empire was being dismantled.
The British and other Arab leaders thwarted Sharif Hussein’s drive for a wider Arab federation. Baathists and other Arab leftists also became hostile to the Hashemites, particularly in Syria.
When Sharif Hussein raised money to renovate Al Aqsa, contributions came from across the Arab Middle East and as far as India, but not from Syria.
He died in Amman in 1930 and was buried next to Al Aqsa.