The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (19 page)

As Bertha herself recalled, Ismail cared greatly about the education of girls (as had Hassan in the previous century). He had been impressed by the extensive education Bertha had received from her father, and now he asked her to give him her answer the following day, her eighteenth birthday. When Ismail came to call, he heard that although
Bertha wanted the post, her mother adamantly refused. ‘You’re too young and have no experience,’ she said. But the other candidate, a Miss Brooks, who had been headmistress of a Christian girls’ school in the city, was too old to take on the post by herself. In the end Bertha’s mother gave in to Ismail’s urging and allowed her daughter to be Miss Brooks’s senior assistant. The following day Ismail took both Miss Brooks and Bertha to see the school, which stood in its own grounds bordering the Dome of the Rock. According to tradition, it had been built by Saladin and had served as a
madrassah
(Muslim school). Its renovation took some time, but finally the first female pupils arrived. Six years later, Bertha Spafford became sole headmistress, and after she married Frederick Vester in 1903, the two ran the school together.
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The Spaffords and Ismail shared another interest, that of archaeology. When Ismail became head of the Board of Education, he began to collect ancient artifacts found by foreign archaeologists. He picked six finds and arranged them in a handsome permanent display at the Sultaniyya school opposite Herod’s Gate. This was the first Palestinian museum, which Ismail hoped would encourage the study of the history of Palestine from the Canaanite period to his days.

Ismail and his young nephew Said (son of Ahmad Rasim and great-grandson of Hassan) were the first Husaynis to lead their society not only into the traditional religious track but also into the tracks of the Ottoman reformist world and Western education. Said did so as a twenty-year-old school teacher, ostensibly teaching only the art of writing but in fact teaching much more. He was his uncle Ismail’s right hand and principal aide. By 1901 Ismail’s department included Said and Said’s brother Husam al-Din, who served as deputies, as well as fourteen other officials.
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Thus, the educational department became another power base in the growing empire of the Husayni family. And it was mainly due to Ismail that this influence has grown so greatly.

It should be noted, however, that visitors from the region, mainly Egyptians and Istanbulis, were divided on Ismail’s achievements. Some seemed unimpressed by the standard of education compared with that in their own countries, but it is difficult to determine the relative quality of education in the various cities at that time. Georgi Zaydan, who visited Palestine, wrote that education ‘in the principal city Jerusalem’ was even poorer than in other districts, especially in the government schools. Having visited the constitutional secondary school of Khalil al-Sakakini and the Rawdat al-Ma’arif (‘Educational Garden’) run by Muhammad Salah al-Husayni, he concluded that their standard was
equivalent to that of primary schools in Egypt. Muhammad Salah was a wealthy man who owned most of the houses near the Herodes Gate, and devoted some of his capital to the schools. Zaydan noted that the schools run by foreigners were of better quality – for example, the Schneller orphanage school, established in 1860, and Zion, the school of the Anglican bishop Gobat. Yusuf al-Hakim of the Syrian national movement thought so too. Though he was impressed by the number of schools in Jerusalem, he described only the foreign ones as ‘first-rate’.
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On the other hand, Muhammad al-Shanti, the Palestinian editor of the Egyptian paper
Al-Aqdam
, visited the ‘Educational Garden’ in 1914 and was favorably impressed.
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But he was moved by the school’s commitment to the Palestinian national struggle against the Zionists and did not comment on its educational standard.

Ismail’s historical standing as an educator is therefore controversial. Nor is his public and social work clear-cut. Each of the individuals and groups that had dealings with him remembers him in a different way – always as an important figure though not always as a positive one. In the tragic history of the village of Qolonia (present-day Mevasseret Zion), some of whose lands were sold to the Zionist settlement Motza at the turn of the century and most of whose inhabitants became refugees in 1948, Ismail’s behavior in early 1871 was probably not the worst chapter. But his conduct tells us much about the social outlook of the Palestinian aristocracy, or rather the limitations of that outlook. While the early Zionists began to show an interest in the village lands, so did Ismail al-Husayni. Some of the best land was owned by one Khalil Salim, and despite the heavy taxes, he did not want to sell it to Ismail’s agent. Thus Ismail reported to the authorities that Salim was a deserter from the Ottoman army who had joined the forces of the Egyptian rebel Muhammad Ali. Salim fled to the mountains, and his family could not resist the Ottoman soldiers who arrived at Ismail’s behest and forced them to sell the land to him. Needless to say, the price he paid was barely a fifth of its value.
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Be that as it may, by the turn of the century Ismail had become the most important figure in Jerusalem. His standing and that of his entire family were demonstrated when Kaiser Wilhelm II came to Jerusalem in 1898. The kaiser’s reception, conducted by Ismail, was of great importance to Sultan Abd al-Hamid II, whose relations with Britain and France had deteriorated as these powers displayed their territorial appetite in the guise of support for the liberation of nations under Ottoman rule. It began with the British conquest of Cyprus in 1876,
continued with the British occupation of Egypt – one of the empire’s most important regions, which had been practically independent since 1805 but nominally, and crucially, an Ottoman territory – and culminated in France’s firm grip on North Africa. Wilhelm II also dreamed of an empire to call his own, but he did not expect to obtain it at the expense of the Ottomans. The conservative and impulsive kaiser was willing to confront the hegemony of Britain on the high seas and French hegemony on land. After establishing a cordial relationship with Russian Tsar Nikolai II, he set out to consolidate his alliance with the Ottoman Empire. He sent the sultan military experts to help build up a strong army that would resist the constant nibbling at his provinces, dispatched engineers to expand the Ottoman railway system and placed at the sultan’s disposal capitalists to help him save the empire from the financial bankruptcy it had undergone in 1875.

On his journey through the sultan’s empire, the kaiser treated his visit to Jerusalem as a demonstration of their alliance. Moreover, his visit to the holy city symbolized his struggle against the secularization of Europe and his support for the conservative values of Christianity. He hoped that this support would halt the disintegration of the conservative empires, including his own.

Ibrahim al-Aswad, who accompanied the royal procession, described the event.
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The cannons roared in honor of the Christian visitor, he reports, as was common with visits of such august people. The Husaynis and several other Jerusalem notables waited at the Jaffa Gate. Al-Aswad had never seen the city so bedecked with flowers or so full of armed guards. The royal couple’s carriage drove through the city and passed between the former Joachim Fast Hotel near the gate – just outside the city wall on the corner of the Jaffa and Mamilla Roads – and the New Grand Hotel, a handsome three-storey building inside the wall above a fine colonnade of shops owned by the Greek monastery. (Fast’s hotel had become the seat of the municipality in 1896.)

As it approached the gate, the kaiser’s carriage passed under two decorative arches displaying his imperial standard beside the Ottoman crescent. At the gate he was greeted by Mayor Yasin Khalidi, who made a speech in his honor. The kaiser repaid him with a half-hour speech at the Church of St Savior, opening with the words, ‘I have not come with political intentions. This is a purely religious visit.’

The following day the notables, including the Husaynis, gathered for yet another ceremony, this time on Mount Zion, where the sultan’s representatives gave the kaiser the title to a half-acre plot.
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Starting in
the afternoon and ending in the brilliant sunset, the ceremony began with a solemn procession led by Tawfiq Bey, the sultan’s ambassador to Berlin, and concluded with a pompous handing over of the title deed from the original owner, Said al-Daudi, to the kaiser in the presence of the city governor. The kaiser then laid the cornerstone of the prospective church, the Dormizion, which would be built in 1910 to rise above the city as a symbol of the new era. The municipality also gave the royal visitor a collection of drawings of the views along the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem, bound in mother-of-pearl, and a gilded Qur’an, presented to him by Ismail al-Husayni. The kaiser also visited the Dome of the Rock.

The entire city had brightened its face to welcome the sole remaining European ally of Sultan Abd al-Hamid II. The city council tore down a section of the wall between Jaffa Gate and the Citadel and filled in the moat so that the kaiser could enter the city on horseback. But it also took other measures to improve the life of the inhabitants: increasing the number of streetlights, renovating the cotton market and, most important, enlarging the water supply by extending pipes into the city from the Pools of Solomon and the nearby spring, so that water again flowed into the cistern beside the Mahkameh near the Chain Gate at the entrance to the Haram al-Sharif. The water supply to adjacent houses was also improved. But, as said above, only after the British took over the city did the population as a whole begin to enjoy a decent supply of water.
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Having been completed the previous year (1897), the house of Ismail al-Husayni was a focal point during the kaiser’s visit. Smaller than Rabah’s house – Ismail was not as wealthy as he – it stood on an acre and a quarter of land, the garden planted less with fruit trees than with young olives. Ismail’s son Ibrahim supervised the construction. This fine house would become a hotel, which opened in 1914 under the name Orient House. Like the American Colony, it too would lose some of its architectural beauty amid the dense modern construction around it, but it is still possible, looking at the graceful colonnade leading to the entrance, to imagine Kaiser Wilhelm II and Ismail al-Husayni walking up the staircase to the entrance hall. Many eyewitnesses described the occasion as a splendid reception in which all the city’s notables and Ottoman officials took part.
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A newly built house was a cause for celebration – one of the three major events in the life of a family, after marriage and the birth of sons. A series of ceremonies marked the occasion, and the presence of such
an august visitor made for even greater solemnity. Had the occasion not been marred by a horrible tragedy, it would have been remembered by the family as one of its finest days.

Some weeks before the kaiser’s visit, the Ottoman Department of Education ordered the Muslim school for girls in Jerusalem to prepare a gift for Queen Augusta Victoria. The gifts chosen were a diamond brooch and a box of sweets. The headmistress, Bertha Spafford Vester, had to choose a pupil to present the gift. With many parents fearing the evil eye, she turned to her friend Ismail, who agreed to let his eight-year-old daughter, Ruwaida, do the honor. The night before the presentation, the little girl, greatly excited, tried on the fine white muslin dress that had been made for the occasion. She was wearing it as she followed the servant who went up to the roof to light the candle lamps, as was done in the other five houses outside the walls at nightfall. A spark from the servant’s lamp fell on her dress, which immediately went up in flames.
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To round off the picture of the Husayni family’s adaptation to the changing Ottoman world, we need to look at the career of a third family member – after Shukri and Ismail – who served in the empire’s bureaucracy. Musa Kazim al-Husayni, a scion of the Tahiri branch, would be the first mayor of Jerusalem after the British conquest of Palestine. He will figure largely later in this book when the British Mandate is discussed. His path resembled that of his kinsman Shukri. Like him, Musa Kazim attended a religious primary school in Jerusalem, where he had been born in 1853. At an early age he was admitted to the
maktab malkiya
(state school) in Istanbul, the school of administration that trained men for service as provincial governors and officials. Upon graduation, Musa Kazim was third amongst all students from the Arab world – an impressive achievement that gave him an auspicious start. He was put in charge of the local Department of Health and was later appointed
qaymaqam
(governor) of Jaffa – all before he was thirty. Between 1892 and the outbreak of World War I, he served as governor in a number of places, including Safed, Akkar (Lebanon), Irbid (Transjordan), Asir and Najd (Arabia), Thalis (Anatolia), and the Hauran (Syria). The height of his career was the governorship of the al-Muntafaq region in Iraq.

Musa Kazim was one of the first of the urban notables to become integrated into the Ottoman administration, right up to its highest echelons. The historian Yehoshua Porath has noted that the government’s decision to send him to such remote regions showed his high
standing: it was precisely in those remote places that the sultan needed men he could count on.
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If Shukri reached the highest rank at the heart of the Ottoman Empire, Musa Kazim achieved the highest posts in the provincial administration. These two men would advance the family and enable it to cross the Rubicon of the First World War. The historian Philip Mattar noted that during the reign of Abd al-Hamid II the notables chose to follow bureaucratic careers and became an ‘aristocracy of service’.
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Like many of the Husaynis, Musa Kazim not only enhanced the family’s standing but also added to its wealth – for example, in 1872 he acquired at an auction 1,000 acres of fertile land, including two thirds of the land of Jericho in the Jordan Valley.
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