Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (16 page)

Al-Husseini and the Assassination of King Abdullah

The anger of al-Husseini was directed in particular at King Abdullah of Jordan. Abdullah, the mufti believed, had usurped what was to have been a sovereign part of Arab Palestine and in so doing had betrayed the Arab people. His annexation of that land had doomed the mufti’s dream of achieving an independent Palestinian Arab state.

A growing enmity between Abdullah and the mufti had been brewing since their first meeting in Jerusalem in 1921. “My father,” Abdullah continually reminded his followers, “always told me to beware of preachers.”
⁴⁷
Their enmity only deepened after the mufti’s return to the Middle East in 1946, when each came to view the other as a treacherous political enemy and rival. Alone among the Arab leaders of his generation, Abdullah was a moderate with a generally pro-Western outlook, who was ready to accept the existence of the new state of Israel and to consider signing a separate peace agreement with the new Jewish state. “I was astonished at what I saw of the Jewish settlements,” King Abdullah had written in his memoirs, published in 1946. “They have colonized the sand dunes, drawn water from them, and transformed them into a paradise.”
⁴⁸
He had further angered al-Husseini and his followers in stating that “the Jews had their rights to their Holy Places in the Old City” of Jerusalem.
⁴⁹

Such behavior by an Arab ruler was inexcusable, the mufti raged. He, like other moderate leaders, had become tools of the Zionist infidels, traitors to the radical Islamic cause, who were betraying both Allah and their fellow Muslims. Such betrayal, preached al-Husseini, could not and must never be tolerated. They were deserving of violent retribution by the Islamic people they had betrayed. Abdullah’s opposition to the mufti’s dream of an Arab state in Palestine, with his Arab Higher Committee as its government and al-Husseini as its president, was the final straw. It was Abdullah’s final act of betrayal, one that the mufti and his followers could not and would not ever forgive or forget.

On July 15, 1951, the moderate prime minister of Lebanon, Riad Bey al-Solh—who had also earned the condemnation of al-Husseini and his radical Islamic colleagues for his apparent willingness to support a cease-fire in the Arab war against Israel—was assassinated in Amman. Al-Solh had journeyed to Amman to encourage Abdullah to proceed with a peace treaty with Israel. Supporters of al-Husseini immediately denounced both men as traitors. While attending a memorial service for al-Solh at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on July 20, King Abdullah of Jordan was himself assassinated, gunned down by a twenty-three-year-old Palestinian, Mustafa Shukri Ashu.
⁵⁰
As Abdullah fell to the ground, his fifteen-year-old grandson Hussein, who would succeed him on the Jordanian throne, witnessed with horror the murder of his beloved grandfather. More than forty years later, King Hussein would refer to that moment in moving terms, when he returned to Jerusalem to speak at the funeral of assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin.
⁵¹

Al-Husseini always denied having any connection with the assassination, but his denials are far from persuasive. Several of the mufti’s family and supporters were in fact arrested in the investigation following Abdullah’s slaying. Indeed, one of the six assassins convicted and sentenced to death, in the ensuing trial, was Dr. Musa Abdullah al-Husseini,
⁵²
a cousin of the mufti. As scholars agree, there is no doubt that the mufti instigated the assassination of King Abdullah.

These assassinations were part of a wave of mufti-inspired political killings of moderate Arab leaders that swept the Middle East in the aftermath of the establishment of the state of Israel. Much to the anger and outrage of al-Husseini and his allies in the militantly anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s moderate prime minister Mahmoud an-Nukrashi Pasha made it known that he did not want to send Egypt’s army into combat against Israel. For al-Husseini and the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, this was an unforgivable sin. For this crime, Pasha fell to an assassin’s bullet as he left his office in Cairo on December 28, 1948. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood fired the shot. Al-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood had conspired secretly in his assassination, as they would conspire together in the assassination of King Abdullah.

The Violent Ideology of Sayyid Qutb

Haj Amin al-Husseini was not alone in his condemnation and indictment of moderate Arab leaders like Abdullah. Sayyid Qutb, the eminent Muslim Brotherhood writer and theoretician, shared his sentiments. In 1981, not long after signing a peace treaty with Israel, Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat was assassinated by members of the Egyptian terrorist group Islamic Jihad, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, who were all admirers and disciples of Qutb and al-Husseini. A moderate Arab leader, al-Husseini, Qutb, and their disciples fervently believed, was a traitor to radical Islam and could not be permitted to survive and govern within the Islamic world.

The virulently anti-Western ideology of Qutb’s thought had its genesis in his visit to the United States, where, as an official of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, he was sent on a special study mission in November 1948. Qutb later recounted his horror at what he witnessed in America. Everywhere in America, he wrote, even religion is measured in material terms. Churches in America, he said, “operate like businesses, competing for clients and for publicity, and using the same methods as stores and theaters to attract customers and audiences…. To attract clientele, churches advertise shamelessly and offer what Americans most seek—‘a good time’ or ‘fun.’ The result is that church recreation halls, with the blessing of the priesthood, hold dances where people of both sexes meet, mix, and touch.”
⁵³
He noted with evident disgust that “the dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone; the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.”
⁵⁴
He also quoted the Kinsey reports on sexual behavior to document his disgust with American immorality. This perception of the West and its ways, popularized by Qutb in his writings, has shaped two generations of radical Islamic thought and attitudes about America and the West.

Sayyid Qutb’s ideology shares much in common with the worldview of the terrorist Islamic Jihad organization, which was inspired by the radical Islamic revolution that swept Iran in 1979 under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini. For Qutb, as for Khomeini, the evil of Western influence is personified by the United States—or “the Great Satan,” as termed by Khomeini. Consequently, Israel, as the agent of the United States in the Middle East, is termed “the Little Satan.”
⁵⁵
Qutb’s denunciations generated some controversy in his native Egypt, where some moderate leaders in the Farouk and later Nasser governments still hoped to maintain ties with, and receive financial aid from, the United States. Indeed, so vehement were Qutb’s denunciations of America and its way of life that in 1952 he left his post at the Ministry of Education to devote his time and energies exclusively to the Muslim Brotherhood. He soon became the brotherhood’s leading ideologue and theoretician and was appointed editor of its official journal,
Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun.
⁵⁶
Qutb, like his friend al-Husseini, had at first enjoyed close relations with Nasser and his new regime, which had overthrown King Farouk. Unlike al-Husseini, however, Qutb quickly parted company with Nasser and his new government, whose secular policies he actively opposed. As a result, beginning in 1954 Qutb would spend several years in prison in Nasser’s Egypt. He died in 1966—executed upon orders of the Nasser regime for his treasonous activities. But his legacy would be an enduring one. Qutb’s anti-Western Muslim polemic
Signposts,
which the mufti and other radical Islamic leaders often quoted, would become vital reading for all in the jihadist movement.

The impact of the jihadist ideologue Sayyid Qutb on the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon has been well documented. Qutb had a particularly important influence on terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. As a student at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah in the late 1970s, bin Laden first became associated with the Muslim Brotherhood while studying religion with Sayyid Qutb’s brother Mohammad,
⁵⁷
one of the university’s most prominent teachers of Islamic studies and the chief interpreter of Sayyid Qutb’s written works.
⁵⁸

The anti-Jewish invective inspired by Qutb’s widely quoted writings has also been central to the ideological development of two generations of radical Islamic terrorist leaders, from the mullahs of Hamas and Khomeini and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, to the leaders of Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Thus, for example, Ayatollah Khomeini said in his 1970 “Programme for the Establishment of an Islamic Government”:

We must protest and make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world. Since they are a cunning and resourceful people, I fear that—God forbid!—they may one day achieve this goal and that the apathy shown by some of us may allow a Jew to rule over us one day. May God never let us see such a day.
⁵⁹

The Mufti’s Later Years: The 1950s and 1960s in Cairo and Beirut

In hindsight, 1951 was a watershed year for Haj Amin al-Husseini. The assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan had removed a major voice for political moderation from the scene. Although his blatant role in the Jordanian king’s assassination had generated some controversy and criticism, even among several of his friends, it had been applauded by his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, who had conspired with him in the assassination, and had enhanced his stature within the radical Islamic world. In the immediate aftermath of Abdullah’s assassination, al-Husseini presided over a meeting of the World Islamic Congress held in Karachi; and in his role as president of the Arab Higher Committee and its new All-Palestine government, he continued his travels and meetings with world leaders, where he was treated as an official Arab head of state. He maintained bases of operation in Syria and Egypt.

In 1955, he joined Nasser of Egypt, Nehru of India, Tito of Yugoslavia, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Chou En-lai of China at the Afro-Asian non-aligned conference held in Bandung, Indonesia. Haj Amin al-Husseini was determined to maintain a Palestinian Arab presence in all international forums where he knew they would be welcome. The Palestinian Arab delegation to the United Nations was led by his close friend and associate Issa Nakhleh, who also served as the permanent representative of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine at the UN. On a regular basis, memorandums were submitted to the appropriate UN committees, and the words of al-Husseini still rang in the halls of international power. In August 1959, he decided to move the headquarters of the Arab Higher Committee from Cairo to Beirut,
⁶⁰
where he took up permanent residence. Beirut would remain his home and political base for the rest of his life.

On May 11, 1960, in a surprise action, Israeli agents abducted the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from the streets of Buenos Aires. At his trial, Israeli prosecutors tried to persuade Eichmann to elaborate on his relations with the mufti. Eichmann always claimed that he could recall meeting the mufti only once, at a Berlin cocktail party. This claim was, of course, an immense distortion of the truth, for there is irrefutable historical evidence to document the close working relationship between Eichmann and the mufti during the Third Reich. In the aftermath of the Eichmann trial, however, the mufti’s followers, writing in newspapers in Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, and Amman, wrote glowingly of Eichmann. In his memoirs, the mufti later thanked Eichmann for his discretion and praised him as “gallant and noble” for having denied, while in Israeli custody, “that there had been any connection between the two men.”
⁶¹

The later 1960s were a time of decline for al-Husseini. In 1963, Iraq’s prime minister Abd al-Karim Qasim, a supporter of al-Husseini, was overthrown. The new government withdrew its support for the mufti and the All-Palestine government. Following the death on June 29, 1963, of Ahmed Hilmi Abd al-Baqi, prime minister of the All-Palestine government, the Arab League withdrew its support for al-Husseini by declaring the seat of the Palestinian representative at the league to be vacant. In September, over the mufti’s objections, Ahmed Shuqairy was appointed by Nasser to be the Palestinian representative at the Arab League. In 1964, a new organization was created to replace the Arab Higher Committee and the All-Palestine government. In May of that year, 422 delegates gathered in Jerusalem to create the Palestine Liberation Organization, which al-Husseini assumed he would be elected to head. Once again, Ahmed Shuqairy, who had emerged as the mufti’s main rival, was victorious and was formally elected as chairman of the PLO. Al-Husseini was furious. “The opposition to Mr. Shukeiri,” reported
The New York Times,
“centers around Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who claims to be the proper and legal representative of the Palestinian people.”
⁶²
Outraged, al-Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee put out a statement calling the new organization “a colonialist, Zionist conspiracy aiming at the liquidation of the Palestinian cause.”
⁶³
Further marginalized by the Arab League, which recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian Arab people, al-Husseini suffered yet another blow when, in 1966, Syria withdrew its support for his All-Palestine government. Haj Amin al-Husseini seemed to be finished as an important political player.