In July 1989, interviewing the late King Hussein for a doctoral dissertation on the early years of his reign, I summoned up the courage to ask him to autograph a first edition of his English-language autobiography, Uneasy Lies the Head (1962). He signed it “with all my warm wishes and high esteem, Hussein I.” For a twenty-seven-year old graduate student, life does not get much better than that. I mention this because, as any serious student of Jordan knows, Uneasy Lies the Head is more artifact than source. At the time, numerous Hussein-watchers told me that it had been ghostwritten by Noel Barber, the peripatetic foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail, and was designed explicitly to burnish the king’s image for Western audiences and Western patrons. The fact that the 42nd direct-generation descendant of the Prophet Muhammad boasted about enjoying his wife’s crispy bacon for breakfast was proof enough that the book was never intended to be read by his overwhelmingly Muslim subjects.

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