Sir John Bagot Glubb

The British soldier John Bagot Glubb (1897-1986) effectively created and commanded the Arab Legionmilitary force in Transjordan and Jordan from 1939to 1956; subsequently he wrote books and lectured widely.

John Glubb was born on April 16, 1897, at Preston, Lancashire, and educated at Cheltenham College and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He then entered the army as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. In World War I he served on the Western front and was wounded three times.

When Glubb arrived in the Middle East in 1920, the area was emerging from centuries of control by the Ottoman Turks and possessed an uncertain and turbulent atmosphere. Glubb quickly earned a reputation as a friend of the Arabs. He lived among the Bedouins, studying their customs and learning their language. The native police force that he organized played a large part in bringing order to the troubled frontiers of Iraq.

In 1926 Glubb resigned his British commission and became an administrative inspector for the government of the new state of Iraq. After serving brilliantly for 5 years in this capacity, he was transferred to the British mandate of Transjordan and attached to the Arab Legion, the small army of that state. As the commander of the Desert Patrol of the Legion, he ended the Bedouin raids and restored order to the area. In 1939 Glubb was appointed commander of the Arab Legion. He remained a devoted friend to the Arab people and tried to introduce European skills and methods to them. He never, however, ceased to respect Arab traditions; indeed, he became captivated by the customs of these people, whose dress and speech he had adopted and whose confidence he had won.

In World War II Glubb's Arab Legion gained a reputation for outstanding and spirited performance. Shortly after the British mandate ended and Transjordan became independent (it was renamed Jordan in 1949), riots broke out between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine, and the Arab Legion was called on to help maintain order. Later, in 1948, when the Arab League (of which Transjordan was a member) declared war on Israel, the Arab Legion spearheaded the attack.

Glubb's position with the Jordanian government became uneasy, however, and in 1956 Jordan's young king, Hussein, shocked the Western world by dismissing him. Glubb then returned to England and was knighted. His publications include Story of the Arab Legion (1948), A Soldier with the Arabs (1957), Britain and the Arabs (1959), War in the Desert (1960), The Great Arab Conquests (1963), The Empire of the Arabs (1963), The Course of Empire (1965), The Lost Centuries (1967), Syria, Lebanon and Jordan (1967), and Short History of the Arab Peoples (1968).

Further Reading

The most useful book on Glubb is his own A Soldier with the Arabs (1957), which is in part autobiographical. The volume underscores Glubb's own work with the Arabs and explains why he was dismissed in 1956. Also recommended are George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (1939); Sir Reader W. Bullard, Britain and the Middle East, from the Earliest Times to 1950 (1951); and Neijla M. Izzeddin, The Arab World: Past, Present, and Future (1953).

1897 - 1986

British officer who served the Arabs in Iraq and Trans-jordan during the British mandate, and later in Jordan.

Known as Glubb Pasha, chief of staff of the Arab Legion (1939 - 1956), John Bagot Glubb belonged to a West Country British family with a long tradition of service to the crown. He followed his father, Major General Sir Frederick Glubb, into the military. Educated at Cheltenham and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Glubb served in France during World War I. He was sent to Iraq in 1920 and served there during Faisal's monarchy for ten years, first in the army and, after resigning his commission in 1926, as a member of the administration of the British mandated territory.

As administrative inspector in Iraq's southern desert, Glubb's main task was to organize the defenses of the bedouin tribes against raids by the Wahabi troops of King Ibn Saʿud of Saudi Arabia. During this assignment, Glubb acquired his excellent
command of Arabic, an intimate knowledge of the bedouin tribes, and a profound understanding of Arab history, culture, and traditions.

In 1930, as Captain Glubb, he was sent to Trans-jordan to pacify the bedouin tribes, who were also being attacked by the Wahhabi raiders from Saudi Arabia and here, too, he achieved remarkable success. When Glubb joined the Arab Legion - Transjordan's army - it was a tiny force with almost no bedouin in its ranks and was under the command of another Englishman, Frederick Peake, called Peake Pasha by the legion. As Peake's second-in-command and from 1939 as commander, Glubb developed the Arab Legion from little more than a gendarmerie into the best-trained, most disciplined, and most efficient of all the Arab armies. His most distinctive contribution, however, was the recruitment of bedouins and their transformation from unruly nomads into disciplined soldiers and loyal citizens. Although recruits from the settled areas of Transjordan continued to predominate, the bedouin became the hard core of the Arab Legion and infused it with the fighting spirit for which it became renowned.

A good soldier and organizer, Glubb was also a very subtle politician. As chief of staff of the Arab Legion he needed to be a good politician, because the legion was the mainstay of the Hashimite regime in Amman. Unlike the officers who were posted to the Arab Legion by the British army, Glubb served under contract to the Transjordan government and therefore owed his allegiance to Amir Abdullah. The British government, however, continued to finance the Arab Legion even after Transjordan became independent in 1946; so Glubb had to serve two very different masters; because of his skill as a politician, he managed to sustain this dual loyalty.

In 1948, Glubb commanded the Arab Legion against the new State of Israel, alongside the other regular and irregular Arab armies. Although the Arab Legion was the only Arab army to distinguish itself on the battlefield, Glubb was blamed for the fall of the cities of Lydda and Ramla and for the failure to capture West Jerusalem. Arab nationalists accused him of deliberately curtailing the operations of the Arab Legion in line with a British plan to partition Palestine between Transjordan and the Jews.

After the Arab - Israel War of 1948 and the incorporation of the West Bank into the Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, Glubb prepared the plans for the defense of the enlarged kingdom. He also played a key role in curbing Palestinian infiltration into Israel, because it generated perpetual tension along the border and provoked military reprisals from Israel. Glubb's aim was to keep the border quiet and avoid clashes with Israel's powerful army.

Arab nationalists, inside and outside Jordan, continued to view Glubb as both the symbol and instrument of British imperial domination over the Middle East. Therefore, having a British chief of staff became an increasing liability for the Hashimite rulers of Jordan as the tides of nationalism swept through the Middle East. In March 1956, Jordan's King Hussein abruptly dismissed Glubb and replaced him with a Jordanian chief of staff. Glubb's dismissal temporarily strained the relations between Britain and Jordan, but it also constituted a turning point on Jordan's path to real independence.

Upon his dismissal, Glubb returned to Britain and became a political writer. Of his many books, the most important is his 1957 autobiography, A Soldier with the Arabs. A British officer who had served under Glubb in the Arab Legion, James Lunt, wrote a biography of Glubb.

Bibliography

Glubb, John Bagot. Arabian Adventures: Ten Years of Joyful Service. London: Cassell, 1978.

Glubb, John Bagot. Britain and the Arabs: A Study of Fifty Years,1908 - 1958. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1959.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Changing Scenes of Life: An Autobiography. London: Quartet, 1983.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Course of Empire: The Arabs and TheirSuccessors. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Empire of the Arabs. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Great Arab Conquests. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

Glubb, John Bagot. Haroon al-Rasheed and the Great Abbasids. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1976.

Glubb, John Bagot. Into Battle: A Soldier's Diary of the GreatWar. London: Cassell, 1978.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Life and Times of Muhammad. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1970.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Lost Centuries: From the Muslim Empires to the Renaissance of Europe, 1145 - 1453. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1967.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Middle East Crisis: A Personal Interpretation. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1969.

Glubb, John Bagot. Peace in the Holy Land: An Historical Analysis of the Palestine Problem. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1971.

Glubb, John Bagot. A Purpose for Living. London: S.C.P.K., 1979.

Glubb, John Bagot. A Short History of the Arab Peoples. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1969.

Glubb, John Bagot. A Soldier with the Arabs. New York: Hodder and Staughton, 1957.

Glubb, John Bagot. Soldiers of Fortune: The Story of the Mamlukes. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1973.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Story of the Arab Legion. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1948.

Glubb, John Bagot. Syria, Lebanon, Jordan. New York: Walker, 1967.

Glubb, John Bagot. War in the Desert: An RAF Frontier Campaign. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1960.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Way of Love: Lessons from a Long Life. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1974.

Lunt, James. Glubb Pasha: A Biography. London: Harvill, 1984.

Massad, Joseph Andoni. Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

— AVI SHLAIM