Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (14 page)

 

Al-Husseini poses with Nazi officials at a reception in Berlin, circa 1941–1943.
©
USHMM, COURTESY OF GEORGE BIRMAN

 

Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini (left) with Indian freedom fighter Chandra Bose (center) and Iraqi former prime minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani (right) during an official visit to Berlin to discuss the political situation with Nazi leaders, January 23, 1943.
©
USHMM, COURTESY OF YIVO INSTITUTE

 

Al-Husseini meets with Heinrich Himmler on an official visit to Germany, July 4, 1943. The photograph is signed by Himmler and translates, “His Eminence, the Grand Mufti. In remembrance.”
©
USHMM, COURTESY OF YAD VASHEM PHOTO ARCHIVES

 

Al-Husseini with Himmler.
©
USHMM, COURTESY OF YAD VASHEM PHOTO ARCHIVES

 

Al-Husseini inspects the rifle of a Bosnian Muslim recruit to the Waffen-SS, Bosnia-Hercegovina, July 1943.
©
BUNDESARCHIV

 

The mufti reviewing Bosnian troops of the Waffen-SS. This is a reproduction of the front page of the
Wiener Illustrierte (Vienna Illustrated)
of January 12, 1944
.

 

Al-Husseini poses with a unit of Bosnian Muslim recruits to the Waffen-SS, Bosnia-Hercegovina, July 1943.
©
BUNDESARCHIV

 

Al-Husseini in the company of German SS and Bosnian members of the Waffen-SS during an official visit to Bosnia, 1943.
©
USHMM, COURTESY OF ROBERT KEMPNER

 

Al-Husseini inspects Bosnian Muslim recruits to the Waffen-SS, Bosnia-Hercegovina, July 1943.
©
BUNDESARCHIV

 

Al-Husseini greets a Bosnian member of the Waffen-SS during his visit to Bosnia, 1943.
©
USHMM, COURTESY OF ROBERT KEMPNER

 

Al-Husseini reviews Bosnian Muslim recruits to the Waffen-SS, Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1943.
©
USHMM, COURTESY OF ROBERT KEMPNER

Al-Husseini’s reappointment to the presidency of the Arab Higher Committee was public confirmation, both symbolic and real, that the mufti had returned to political leadership and power in his native Palestine. His presidency of the Arab Higher Committee provided Yasser Arafat with an avenue for political advancement and influence as well. Over the next few years, many of the Arab Higher Committee’s meetings, over which the mufti presided and which Arafat regularly attended, were held for the mufti’s convenience in Cairo. In the years to come, Arafat would play an increasingly important role within the Arab Higher Committee as al-Husseini’s trusted confidant and lieutenant.

Another protégé of the mufti, and for many years one of his most trusted allies and loyal political supporters, was future Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat. Sadat, like his close friend and associate Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he succeeded as president of Egypt, had begun his political career in the mid-1930s as a teenage activist with the Muslim Brotherhood. It was through his early political activity with the brotherhood that Sadat (like Nasser) had first met al-Husseini. Both Sadat and Nasser boasted a long history of pro-Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitic speeches.
¹⁶
In his autobiography,
In Search of Identity,
Sadat candidly admitted that he was inspired by Hitler’s Germany.
¹⁷
Like his friend Nasser, Sadat was recruited by the mufti to engage in espionage activity on behalf of the Third Reich. During World War II, Sadat had worked for the mufti as a spy for Nazi Germany in British-occupied Egypt.
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He later served a term in prison for his role in these pro-German activities. Sadat’s attitude did not change after World War II. In 1953, while serving as a close associate and political confidant of al-Husseini, Sadat published a letter in the Egyptian weekly
Al-Mussawar,
addressed posthumously to Hitler, in which he expressed sorrow over the defeat of the Third Reich and hailed Hitler as the “immortal leader of Germany.”
¹⁹
In a speech celebrating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad on April 25, 1972, Sadat declared: “Nobody can ever decide the fate of Jerusalem. We shall re-take it with the help of God out of the hands of those of whom the Koran said ‘It was written of them that they [the Jews] shall be demeaned and made wretched…condemned to humiliation and misery…. They [the Jews] are a nation of liars and traitors, contrivers of plots, a people born for deeds of treachery.’”
²⁰
In the years before he concluded a peace treaty with Israel, Sadat often quoted anti-Semitic verses from the Koran to illustrate what kind of treatment Muslims would impose on Jews when Egypt defeated Israel. In an address before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in 1975, in the course of an official state visit during the Gerald Ford administration, Sadat justified the November 10, 1975, UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism, stating that the Egyptian economy had once been controlled by the Jews.
²¹