Having discussed the revolutionary experiences of the republics, what is especially surprising in the Middle East of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s is the stability of the Arab monarchies. It was the monarchies that were expected to be bowled over one after another. But it is for the most part the monarchies that have been the most stable states in the region. Some observers have argued that the strength of the monarchies lies in their wealth. While that is probably true for most of them, countries like Saudi Arabia or the gulf states. It is obviously not true in a case like Jordan. Jordan is a poor country, relatively speaking, but a very stable one at that. Others have noted that the authority of royal families, like in Jordan, Saudi Arabia or Morocco, stems from their integral role in the nation building and state formation processes in their respective countries. One of the most salient explanations for the stability of the monarchies, especially in countries that have very strong tribal traditions, like Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the gulf states, is the deep-rootedness of the dynastic principle itself. Hereditary succession has been an accepted long-established practice for centuries, in many parts of the Middle East. From the nomadic tribes to the Muslim Caliphates, and the Ottoman Sultanate. As for the Hashemites, those who are in power in Jordan, their dynastic legitimacy is reinforced by their being descendants of the prophet Muhammad himself. These, needless to say, are assets with regard to legitimacy. But they do not guarantee these regimes political immunity. After all, monarchies were indeed overthrown in rapid succession as we have seen in the Middle East of the 1950s and the 1960s. But the military regimes that replaced the monarchies have generally been dismal failures. The ruling officers, lacking the ancestral authority of the monarchs, base their legitimacy on the promised attainment of power, prestige, and prosperity. They never delivered, and were subsequently faced in the Arab Spring with rebellions on the part of their disillusioned peoples. The monarchs never promise their peoples messainic deliverance on a Nasserist or a parity model. Rather from Hussein in Jordan in his early years to Abdullah the present king of Jordan now, the Hashemites have offered nothing more ambitious than securing a better life for all Jordanians. But by comparison with other regimes in the neighborhood, they have actually delivered, as attested to most recently by the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have been flocking to Jordan to take refuge in the Jordanian haven from the mess of Syrian civil war in recent years.