Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (2 page)

Al-Husseini never completed his academic studies at Al-Azhar University, a fact that would remain a source of controversy for his Muslim critics over the years. Since he’d dropped out of Al-Azhar without completing a degree, or the course of study necessary for ordination as a Muslim cleric and legal scholar, his Muslim opponents were able to belittle his academic credentials and maintain that he did not have sufficient accreditation to hold the position of mufti and spiritual leader in the Muslim religious community. Throughout his public career, al-Husseini tended to reinvent his own autobiography, claiming credentials and professional experience that he did not in fact possess. Thus, for example, from the outset of his career he would imply that he had been ordained as a Muslim cleric and that while at Al-Azhar he had completed the requisite studies in Sharia (Muslim religious law) to qualify for ordination. Had he done so, he would have been known as Sheikh Amin al-Husseini, a title that properly ordained members of the Muslim clergy were qualified to hold.
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With the outbreak of World War I, al-Husseini enlisted in the Turkish army and became an officer. The Ottoman Turkish Empire, in whose army he fought, had allied itself with Germany, joining the Central Powers in its losing war against Great Britain, France, and the United States. History would prove that this was a tragically fateful—and foolish—decision for the once formidable Ottoman Turkish Empire: As British prime minister Herbert Asquith remarked at the time, the Ottoman Empire “in making this decision [to join the Central Powers] was in effect committing suicide and sealing its own doom.”
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In 1918, after Germany and Turkey’s defeat, al-Husseini returned to his native Jerusalem, where he worked first as a clerk in the office of the Arab adviser to the British military governor and then as a teacher. As he began to assume a leadership role in Palestinian Arab public life in the aftermath of World War I, he exhibited political skill beyond his years. He quickly attracted the attention of Jerusalem’s young Palestinian Arab nationalists, who began to look to him for advice and leadership. This was advice and leadership that the young al-Husseini, hoping to embark on a political career, was most happy to provide. In Jerusalem, he began to develop a grassroots political organization in the city, mobilizing a coterie of followers and political supporters who shared his virulent hatred of the British and the Jews. A charismatic and spellbinding orator, he mesmerized crowds on the street corners and outside the mosques of his native city and soon attracted a significant political following, expanding and cementing what became a passionately loyal political base that would support him in the years to come. Beginning in 1918, he became a frequent contributor to Arab nationalist journals, writing articles that were violently anti-Jewish.
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In these essays, he did not hide his all-consuming hatred of the British and the Jews or his fanatical opposition to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Some more moderate Arab nationalists were ready to consider working together with the Jews of Palestine and to accept the idea of a Jewish state. Haj Amin al-Husseini was adamant in rejecting such a moderate, conciliatory approach. To him, any cooperation with the Jews was out of the question.

The roots of al-Husseini’s hatred of the Jews were clear and unambiguous. The Jews were the enemy. From his earliest point of awareness, young Amin knew that the Jews were not Muslims. He knew that the Jews were determined to take his homeland. He believed that the Jews were part of a grand conspiracy that would ultimately destroy Islamic civilization. For the mufti, reading
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
for the first time was a revelation. This was the book that explained his world, that accurately described precisely the events taking place in his beloved homeland, British-occupied Palestine. The British were clearly part of the very conspiracy described in the
Protocols.
British army officers in Jerusalem, fresh from Europe, were reading and widely distributing copies of the
Protocols
among themselves and to the Arabs of Palestine. If the Jews were to be prevented from succeeding in the nefarious conspiracy outlined in the
Protocols,
someone would have to raise the banner of Islam in jihad against this mortal enemy.

Al-Husseini saw himself as destined to fulfill that heroic role. He was born into one of the most patrician families of Arab Palestine, a family that could trace its lineage directly back to the Prophet Muhammad. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Husseinis were part of the political elite of Palestine. Members of the family served in the Turkish Parliament and as regional governors, mayors, and religious leaders. Growing up in turn-of-the-century Jerusalem, then still under Turkish Ottoman rule, the young al-Husseini was heir to a political dynasty that had been ruling Arab Jerusalem since the early 1880s. His father, Sheikh Tahr al-Husseini, had served as mufti of Jerusalem, as had his father, Mustapha al-Husseini, before him. When Amin’s father died in 1908, his older brother, Kamal al-Husseini, assumed his position,
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carrying on a family tradition that al-Husseini himself would later continue. In 1918, immediately after World War I, his cousin Musa Kasim Pasha al-Husseini became mayor of Jerusalem. A shrewd and successful politician who governed the Holy City as if it were his family’s personal fiefdom, Musa Kasim Pasha at first ruled with the complete support of the British mandatory government, which after World War I had replaced Ottoman Turkish rule in Palestine. As head of one of the leading Muslim families in the city, he emerged as the preeminent radical Islamic opponent of the British Mandate for Palestine, and of Great Britain’s pledge, in its Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, to create a Jewish national home in Palestine.

The idea for a British mandatory government in Palestine had initially been established by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret deal that the Allies (chiefly Great Britain and France) had negotiated in 1916 to divide the Ottoman Empire—which included present-day Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates—among themselves. The Ottoman Turks had ruled most of these territories for centuries. Carving up the spoils under Sykes-Picot, England tightened its grip on Egypt (already under British rule) and also took control of Palestine, Iraq, several Gulf states, and Transjordan (today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). At the Paris Peace Conference at the conclusion of World War I, the victorious Allies ratified the provisions of Sykes-Picot, stipulating that Palestine would be ruled by the British under a mandatory system. Under the mandate, Great Britain was responsible for all governmental, administrative, and security functions in Palestine. These moves reneged on promises of postwar independence that had been made to various Arab leaders by the flamboyant British representative in the region, T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia. In carving up the Ottoman Turkish Empire and establishing its British colonial administration in Palestine and throughout the Arab Middle East, the Allies had shaken the foundations of what had been the established political order in the Arab world.

The Balfour Declaration, which was published as a letter by British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, head of the London branch of the great Jewish banking family, was issued shortly before al-Husseini’s return to Jerusalem. It was a cataclysmic event for Palestinian Arabs and further shook the foundations of their political order. For the young radical Islamist al-Husseini, it was an act of political betrayal that he would never accept or forgive. It was also the catalyst that led to his emergence as leader of the radical Muslim opposition to the British mandatory government in Palestine, and to his increasingly virulent hatred of both the British and the Jews. The Balfour Declaration had stated, unequivocally, that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this objective, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” To Palestinian Arabs, it was a bombshell. After all, they asked, by what right do the British, who have no legal standing in Palestine, have to give what is not theirs to a people who represent a minority of the population in Palestine? Just a little more than five weeks later, the unthinkable happened. British military forces under the command of General Sir Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem on December 11, 1917, achieving a quick victory over the Ottoman Turkish forces defending the city. The surrender of Jerusalem to the British put the Holy City under the control of non-Muslim authorities for the first time since the Crusades. General Allenby’s capture of Jerusalem fired the psyche of the Allies. For Catholics, the holy places that had been lost when Saladin conquered Jerusalem more than eight hundred years earlier were once again under Western, and Christian, rule. General Allenby was elated by his victory, as were the city’s Jews. Within two years of Allenby’s British conquest of Jerusalem, the emerging British mandatory policy in Palestine would radicalize the Palestinian Arab world that al-Husseini aspired to lead.

On January 8, 1918, the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, addressed a joint session of Congress. It was during this speech that Wilson presented what came to be known as “the Fourteen Points,” his vision of the principles upon which the postwar world should be constructed. Two of these points were of special significance to the Arabs of Palestine. Article 5 called for “a free, open minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title has been determined.” Article 12 stated, in part, “The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity to autonomous development….”
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These two points were viewed by young radical Arab leaders and activists, such as al-Husseini, as calls for an end to British colonialism in the Middle East, as a repudiation of the provisions of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and as a call for self-determination for Arab populations previously governed by the Ottoman Empire. Haj Amin al-Husseini and other young leaders of the Arab world were more determined than ever to actively fight the British. And so they did.

On April 4 and 5, 1920, during the annual celebration of the Muslim festival of Nebi Musa, celebrating the birth of Moses, the first intifada, or uprising, against British colonialism erupted in Jerusalem. At the Nebi Musa festival, coinciding in that year with the Passover and Easter seasons, al-Husseini provoked the Arabs of Jerusalem to incite anti-Jewish violence in the city. In the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, wall posters appeared with the words: “Kill the Jews: There is no punishment for killing Jews.”
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In the Jewish Quarter, rioting Arabs ransacked the Torat Hayim religious seminary and attacked Jewish men, women, and children, killing some and wounding many others. In the two days of rioting, 5 Jews and 4 Arabs were killed, 211 Jews and 21 Arabs were wounded. Two Jewish women were raped. “I regret to say,” the British secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill, told the House of Commons at the end of the month, “that about 250 casualties occurred [in Jerusalem], of which nine-tenths were Jewish.”
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The Jews called the April 1920 riots a pogrom. The Arabs viewed it as a legitimate action against enemies whose political interests were different from their own. The British viewed it as minor disturbance that needed to be avoided in the future.

The riots were the first of many violent radical Islamic uprisings against the Jews of Palestine that would take place over the next eight and more decades, throughout the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. In personally inciting the violent intifada of 1920, al-Husseini established a precedent, for the use of violence and terror, that future generations of radical Islamists would emulate in their ongoing wars against the Jews and the West.

The British held al-Husseini personally responsible for the April 1920 riots and sought him out for arrest. According to one account of what followed, two British officers came to the door of the Husseini residence in May 1920 in search of Haj Amin. They were greeted by a young man who informed them that Haj Amin was his brother and that he was not home. When the British officers told him that they had a warrant for Haj Amin’s arrest, the young man suggested that if they returned later, they would find him at home. Of course, the young man was Haj Amin al-Husseini, and he promptly fled Jerusalem and escaped across the Jordan River to safety.
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Not long after that, he was tried in absentia and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Al-Husseini’s Appointment as Grand Mufti

On April 24, 1920, at the San Remo Conference of the League of Nations, British prime minister David Lloyd George officially accepted the establishment of a British Mandate for Palestine. Less than three months later, on July 1, 1920, a British civil administration was set up in Palestine, with its headquarters in Jerusalem. Sir Herbert Samuel was appointed by Prime Minister Lloyd George as British Palestine’s first high commissioner.