Abd Al-Ilah

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Crown Prince of Iraq, Abd Al-Ilah, ruled the country as a prince regent on behalf of his nephew, from 1939-1953 - although not interrupted. A member of the powerful Hashemite dynasty, Al-Ilah was also an authoritarian antisemite who once took refuge on a British naval ship called the HMS Cockchafer. A dandy, he charmed MP Chips Cannon into writing: "We are very intimate …I never can resist a Regent.” Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays for monthly episodes, our advice segments, and to support our work. Check out our new merch, including hats, shirts, and socks. ----more---- SOURCES: Bloch, Michael. Closet Queens: Some 20th Century British Politicians. London: Little, Brown UK, 2016. Channon, Chips. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 3): 1943-57. Penguin, 2025. Cole, Juan. “Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Twentieth Century” 23 (n.d.). Draper, Morris. Interview by Charles Stuart Kennedy, February 27, 1991. https://adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Draper,%20Morris.toc.pdf. Finnie, David. Shifting Lines in the Sand: Kuwait’s Elusive Frontier with Iraq. London: I.B. Tauris, 1992. Hashimoto, Chikara. The Twilight of the British Empire: British Intelligence and Counter-Subversion in the Middle East, 1948–63. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Mansfield, Peter, and Nicolas Pelham. A History of the Middle East: Fifth Edition. Updated edition. New York/N.Y: Penguin Books, 2013. Schwartz, Adi. “The Adas Affair.” Tablet Magazine, December 9, 2022. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/adas-affair-jews-iraq. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Batgaze, a podcast about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:22.3	I'm Ben Miller, a writer and historian, currently at work on a book about the fashion designer
0:27.0	Rudy Germrick.
0:28.6	And my name's Helemy.
0:29.5	I'm a writer and author.
0:30.8	Great.
0:31.2	Last week, we talked about Reed Erickson, who was a extremely wealthy trans guy who funded the standards of medical care for
0:40.5	trans people and also research into Dolphin ESP. Who are we talking about this week, Hugh?
0:47.3	Well, today's subject is the crown prince of Iraq, Abad al-Illah, who rules the country as a
0:53.2	prince-regent on behalf of his nephew from 1939 to
0:56.3	1953, although not interrupted, as we will discover. So he was a gunkle? He was a gunkle. Born in Taiy,
1:04.2	a city now in Saudi Arabia, but then in the Villayette of Hajaz in 1913, he was the eldest son
1:09.4	of Ali bin Hussein, the king of Hajas, himself the eldest son
1:13.0	of the very influential Hussein bin Ali of the Hashemite dynasty, an important power broker
1:18.4	in the fractured Middle East of the post-Ottoman era, and a key figure in early pan-Arab
1:24.3	politics. Are the Hashemites still the dynasty in control of Jordan? They are. Okay, which we
1:29.0	will get on to. But I do think, yeah, we should start with some backstory into the dynasty,
1:33.9	some context for how this young man who might have expected his own throne ended up becoming
1:38.2	the power behind another throne, that of the King of Iraq. The story is complicated, as you
1:43.7	might expect, but it goes some way
1:45.6	to explain the twists and turns of his life and how and why he made the fatal political alliances that
1:51.6	he did. So let's go back to the state of play when he was born in 1913. The Ottoman Empire at that point
	...

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