Maan Abu Nowar, a member of a well-known family from Salt, joined the Arab Legion in 1943. In 1948, as a young lieutenant, he participated in the Palestine war. In 1957, as a colonel and commander of a brigade group, he was tried for involvement in a conspiracy against King Hussein (instigated by his cousin, Ali, the chief of the General Staff) but was acquitted. He retired from the army in 1972 as a major-general and commenced a second career as a diplomat and politician. Simultaneously, he pursued a third career—that of a prolific historian. In 1988, he gained a D.Phil. at Oxford for the study that constituted the basis of his book History of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: The Creation and Development of Transjordan 1920–1929 (1989). His two recent books are a chronological and conceptual continuation of his first work.