JORDAN: He is the US's best friend in the Middle East, and a fan of Ireland. King Abdullah of Jordan, who comes here on an official visit on Monday, talks to Paul Cullen in Amman.
As a 43rd-generation direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed, King Abdullah bin Al Hussein of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan commands a certain respect in the Arab world. But as the son and successor of King Hussein, who was the world's longest-ruling monarch when he died in 1999 after 46 years on the throne, he has some way to go to match his father's legacy.
To western leaders he is a rare sympathetic voice in the Middle East, someone who lauds the values of tolerance and pluralism in a region beset by the rise of fundamentalist beliefs. To his critics the king is hopelessly dependent on injections of American aid and has failed to connect sufficiently with his people.
A compact, youthful 42-year-old, King Abdullah is, like his father, the product of a British military education. He speaks English in the clipped tones of Sandhurst and even bears the title of commander-in-chief of a British army regiment.
Speaking to The Irish Times in Amman this week, in advance of his first official visit to Ireland, the king reminisces freely about trips to Cork in his younger days and his desire to taste "a glass of Murphy's" once again.
But he also talks about bringing a political message - and a warning - to Ireland. The west must support, economically and politically, the reformists within Islam in their struggle against fundamentalism. If it does not, their failure could spread even farther than it has up to now.
"The Middle East in the past couple of decades was like in the Cold War, and many countries are still coming out of that or are still in that mentality - and that is why they can't get their societies to move forward," he says. "The crossroads now is the fight within Islam against the Osama bin Ladens of this world."
More than 50 per cent of the Middle East population is aged under 18, yet the region's combined GDP is less than that of Italy. So if there is to be any hope for the area, the king believes, it will come from social and economic improvement, with the opening up of trade playing a crucial role.
"We're at a crossroads now - do you give up on the Middle East or is there going to be any hope?" he says.
Middle Eastern states will have to reform, but at the same time they need access to markets as "carrots" to stimulate their development.
If the west wants the region to turn away from fundamentalism, then the reformist model being followed by Jordan needs to succeed, he says. "You have little countries, such as Jordan, which are trying to move forward. If we fail, then that failure will be contagious and it will be an excuse for the old guard and the traditionalists in the Middle East not to move forward."
The old joke about Jordan sees the country as caught "between Iraq and a hard place" (i.e. the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). Indeed, Winston Churchill used to boast that he made Jordan with the stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon.
As the colonial powers divided their spoils in the early 20th century, Britain simply created the country from a patch of desert between Palestine and Iraq. King Abdullah's great-grandfather, an Arabian prince, was chosen to lead the Bedouin tribesmen living there.
Today the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians remains at the root of the struggle within Islam, according to the king.
"Until you solve this problem we will never have true freedom in the Middle East and the ability to move our societies forward," he says. "Jordan has a very ambitious programme, but we'll never get 100 per cent of what we want so long as we're always looking over our shoulder at the instability between Israelis and Palestinians.
"This instability affects everyone around the world. A byproduct is Islamic extremism - this is the No 1 recruiting ground for extremism. Solve this problem and 80 per cent of your difficulties are behind you."
However, the king is pessimistic about the prospects for peace.
"Unfortunately, in the next six months or a year, unless something dramatic happens, I don't see any dramatic movement in the peace process in the future," he says.
Connecting with his people after his years abroad and in the Jordanian army hasn't been easy. Although the king has forsworn the more luxurious royal palaces for a modest suburban home outside Amman, the jet-set image of the former skydiver and rally driver has been hard to shed. At times, he has donned disguises, posing as a reporter and as a white-bearded sheikh, to see conditions in the country for himself.
Today a majority of Jordan's 5.5 million population is made up of descendants of Palestinian refugees. One of these is the king's wife, Queen Rania, whose father fled the West Bank in 1967. One of the most high-profile first ladies in the Arab world, the queen has lobbied hard for social and political reforms as well as providing a role model for Jordanian women.
When she isn't sitting on the board of the World Economic Forum, she is to be found delivering relief supplies to the earthquake victims in Iran or promoting the use of the Internet in schools.
Conservative critics have accused her of meddling, and the male-dominated parliament has stymied some of her initiatives to increase protection for women. The queen, who is also coming to Ireland, has continued her campaigning work undaunted. In the west, meanwhile, she has won rave reviews; only last week she appeared on the cover of Time magazine.
Although King Hussein backed Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War, his son supported last year's US-led invasion of Iraq. Not surprisingly then, King Abdullah is loath to criticise the Americans, beyond mild rebukes of the way they have handled the country in the past months.
"I think there was not enough done when hostilities ended to tackle the different issues of society," he says. "It's the soldiers still calling the shots, as opposed to the civilians."
The agenda for change has been too fast-paced, he says, and the date for elections and a handover of power should be pushed back to give moderate elements time to get better organised.
The intention behind the king's reform agenda appears to be to make Jordan a fully fledged democracy. Opening parliament last November, he called on his government to make radical changes to turn Jordan into a modern, democratic country.
Since then, he points out, the ministry of information has been abolished, a press council and a centre for human rights have been set up and a minister for political development appointed. Instead of the present 30 or so factional groupings, the king would like to see a handful of parties representing the left, centre and right of the political spectrum.
Earlier plans to liberalise the media and improve the rights of women were either dumped or reversed, but the king says previous parliaments are to blame.
"As the monarch, instead of me holding them back, I've thrown down the gauntlet and said: 'Guys, meet me halfway, tell me how democracy and freedom is going to go in this country.' So the ball is in their court and, if anything, I'm trying to nudge them in that direction," he says.
Ultimately, as part of this process, his own job could be on the line. The role of the monarchy is going to have to change, he accepts.