The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (24 page)

For the younger members of the family such as Jamil, the Young Turks’ reservations about the idea of Arab national identity was sufficient reason to organize as a national group on behalf of all the Arab regions that might be interested. Perhaps impelled by a son’s natural reaction to his father, Jamil was, like other young men in his family, very much a product of Istanbul. While a student in the capital in 1909, he had met an Arab intellectual who, in response to the Ottoman policy, formed a secret organization called Al-Fata (‘The Arab Youth’). The front for this organization was a literary club in Istanbul in which Arab literature was discussed – a permissible activity. In reality it was a hothouse for extensive political activity. Jamil joined the secret group as soon as the club opened, and was one of its first members.
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This was one of the first groups to call for the separation of the Arab regions from the world of the Unity and Progress Party and to fight against the Turkification of the new regime. The Young Turks’ secret police never detected the true nature of this club or its many branches that sprang up in the Arab world. The dual structure – a literary façade concealing underground activity – also characterized the branch that Jamil al-Husayni set up in Jerusalem.

Jamil’s cousin Mustafa II represented the Tahiri branch of the family in the national movement. Mustafa had attended a secondary
school in Istanbul, and in September 1912 he was one of the founding members of the Green Flag Association, an organization of Arab secondary school students in Istanbul. Mustafa was even more dynamic than his Umari cousin, and his group published two papers that discussed Arab nationalism:
Lisan al-Arab
(The Language of the Arabs) and
Al-Muntada al-Adabi
(The Cultural Club).

While the younger Husaynis were engaged in developing a pan-Arab identity, others in Palestine, notably the Greek Orthodox, were beginning to consider a more specific national identity in the country. The first indication appeared in the newspaper
Al-Karmil
in 1913, in editor Najib Nassar’s response to a Beirut article attacking the Jerusalem notables. The Beirut paper
Al-Mufid
had accused them of failing to contribute their share to the promotion of the Ottoman reforms. Najib Nassar responded with an article entitled ‘The Arab-Palestinian League’, in which he distinguished between the interests of the people of Beirut and those of the people of Palestine. ‘What have we, the Arabs of Palestine, to do with the Beirutis? Our economic and social situation does not resemble theirs. We are in a bad predicament.’ He also charged the notables of Jerusalem with political apathy, but called upon them to create a ‘Palestinian league’, which would channel all the efforts of the notables for the Palestinian people and not serve the Ottoman government. They should establish ‘a league to defend the Palestinian homeland’, he wrote, ‘not only from the Young Turks, but also from Zionism.’
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In this way he linked support for the Young Turks with support for Zionism. Young members of the family adopted some of the ideas of the Greek Orthodox writers, but until about 1920 most of them persisted in their efforts to create a pan-Arab – or at any rate pan-Syrian – state and did not call for the creation of an independent Palestine.

Not every notable or every senior person in the family felt called upon to adopt a position. Indeed, there were always some in the family who preferred to wait. Musa Kazim of the Umari branch sat on the fence, with notables like Ismail, Shukri and the mayor on one side and the restless young people, including his own offspring, on the other. Until the outbreak of the war, Musa Kazim tended to agree with Shukri and Ismail that nothing had happened to warrant risky new positions. Such a posture was not necessarily conservative: support for the Young Turks often implied support for their modernization. That is why he supported his sister (who married Muhammad Salih) when she sent her son Jamal to the American University in Beirut. This Jamal would later fill the highest position
in Palestinian politics under the British Mandate, that of chairman of the Arab Higher Committee.

For most of the Husaynis, especially the Tahiri branch (though not for historians of the period), 1910 marked an important turning point. That year Salim’s son, Hussein al-Husayni, succeeded his father as mayor of Jerusalem. It was not an easy win – he received the votes of 648 out of the 1,200 electors.
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Nevertheless, it proved that the family was as powerful as ever, especially its Tahiri branch. Hussein’s triumph also demonstrated that the family was coping well with the dramatic changes in Istanbul.

Hussein’s attitude towards the Istanbul government is not easily assessed. In the early days of the revolution, he supported the cautious attitude of the head of the family, Ismail. Once established in the mayoralty, he became an implacable enemy of the new regime – according to the reports of the British consul in Jerusalem, at any rate. In 1912 he organized a petition signed by sixty of the district notables and telegraphed it to the British consulate, calling on the British government to intervene, if necessary by force, against Turkish nationalism and its manifestations in the district of Jerusalem. Hussein was the moving spirit at all the gatherings that considered various scenarios of a British invasion of Palestine that would put an end to the new face of the Ottoman Empire and lead to the creation of a new state in the Arab provinces.
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Shortly before the outbreak of the war, Hussein al-Husayni ran again for the mayoralty, this time making skillful use of the local press to broadcast his sense of responsibility for the public. He was one of the leading reformers of the family. The newspaper
Al-Quds
published the praises of Hussein Hashim Effendi al-Husayni (his full title), who walked about the city streets and markets and concerned himself with public sanitation, much like a modern-day mayor with public relations in mind. According to that report, he personally supervised the mending of potholes in the roads and the quality of the water supply.
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The post of mayor was periodically filled by Hussein’s brother Abd al-Salih and his relative Said. The latter – mentioned earlier in connection with his parliamentary career – was the better known of the two and served as mayor of Jerusalem between 1902 and 1906, when he was in his mid-twenties. (The term ‘notables’ should not be interpreted as meaning ‘elders’.) Said was the most dynamic of the Husaynis in pioneering activities for Arab nationalism. After Shukri’s decline, it was Said’s work in the parliament along with the mayoralty that also made him the most political of the Husaynis.

During the summer holidays, the students Jamil and Mustafa III (a scion of the Tahiri branch) returned home and met at Said’s house, where they found warm support for their views. A man of the in-between generation, Said encouraged their new national outlook. ‘We Arabs are more than half the population of the empire, so Arabic should be the language of common usage and schooling,’ he maintained. Together they read the speeches of Talat Pasha, one of the leaders of the Young Turks, as reported in
Al-Aqdam
, in which he rejected the idea of Arab nationalism.
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Said supported the idea of Arab nationalism as enthusiastically as the younger men. He too joined the secret organization Al-Fata, which became the vanguard of the national movement. This group gradually attracted educated Muslims and Christians who wanted to break with the Ottoman Empire. Said was introduced to it by the Syrian friends of the Husaynis, the younger members of the famous al-Azm family. Another member was Ali al-Nashashibi, who apparently joined most of the associations, public or secret, that cropped up between 1908 and 1914.
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Shukri al-Husayni was horrified by this mutinous movement and tried to persuade Said to support the attempts in Egypt to create a comprehensive pan-Arab national movement that would campaign for decentralization – that is, the preservation of the loose framework of the empire combined with cultural and administrative autonomy in the Arab regions. Although Shukri supported the Turks, in 1912 he approved of the Egyptian group that called itself the Decentralization Party, which he felt was anti-British rather than committed to pan-Arab independence from Turkey. Shukri’s chief concern was to support any entity that resisted Western penetration into the Arab Middle East. He had read about the Egyptian group in the papers that reached Jerusalem or heard about it from young al-Hajj Amin, who was studying at al-Azhar with Sheikh Rashid Rida, who was also involved with the Decentralization Party.
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Most of Shukri’s contemporaries in the family did not share his hostility to Europe and all it stood for, and they were especially reluctant to adopt a strong anti-British stance. For example, like many of his companions in Al-Fata, Said was sympathetic to the British, whom he regarded as potential allies. He was an Anglophile who spoke excellent English – and no wonder, as he had spent much of his adult life among the residents of the American Colony.

Having noted the various routes by which members of the Husayni family reached the idea of nationalism – whether in reaction to
Istanbul’s forcible Turkification or inspired by the ideas of certain Greek Orthodox individuals or
sheikhs
like Rashid Rida – we should mention George Antonius’ argument that American missionaries had contributed much to the national thinking of Arab notables in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. It stands to reason that all the Husaynis who had come in contact with the people of the American Colony had been exposed to the enticing vision of the American dream of liberty and progress and been inspired by it. Nevertheless, though the group of young men who would form the backbone of the Syrian and Lebanese national movement did learn much from the American missionaries, the most important teachers in the formative years of the Husaynis, who would lead the Palestinian national movement, were local men.

These future leaders had their world shaped at an early age by the teachers of the
kuttab
, the Qur’anic school. The school of Sheikh Lulu stood at Bab al-Amud (the Nablus Gate), and the first lesson was devoted to the history of the gate. The children heard that in ancient times a column had stood in front of the gate that served as the epicenter from which distances to other parts of the world were measured, proving the universal centrality of Jerusalem. Some were taught by Sheikh Rihan, whose school was also nearby. But the best-loved teacher was Hassan Nur al-Din. He was seventy years old and had never raised his voice or hand to his pupils, but rather led them gently through their childhood via the sacred texts.
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From the infant school the children passed to secular schools. There local Christian teachers – rather than American missionaries – ‘nationalized’ their outlook. Three of these teachers stood out: Khalil al-Sakakini, Zurayk Nakhla and Khalil Baydas, who influenced a whole generation of young Muslim and Christian Palestinians. With his thick beard and great nose and severe gaze, Zurayk Bey had a striking appearance. He was a Lebanese who had come to Jerusalem in 1889 at the request of Anglican missionaries to manage their store of religious books. In 1892 he became headmaster of the Gobat boys’ primary school on Mount Zion, which later became the English College and which most of the Husaynis growing up during the Hamidi period attended.

One can still visit the school today. If you ignore a no entry sign on your right when you ascend towards the Jaffa Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem and follow the forbidden turn alongside the old Ottoman wall through the Citadel, on the mountain’s slope looking west lies the old Gobat School. Today it is an American college, and amongst the beautiful buildings left behind by the Anglicans, modern-day
Americans have planted posters supporting the Greater Israel idea and a Zionist Jerusalem, which would not have shamed the most ultra-right Zionist settler movement in Israel.

As mentioned, Samuel Gobat was an Anglican bishop who built a boys’ school there in the mid-nineteenth century. The Gobat School became the main preparatory school for the Palestinian elite. Gobat came to Palestine, as Americans still do today, because he believed that the return of the Jews would precipitate the Second Coming of the Messiah and the unfolding apocalypse of the ‘end times’. Unlike his successors, however, Gobat fell in love with the local population and helped tie them into the global educational system. In a way, he forsook his missionary task for the sake of granting them a more universal education. His efforts helped the embryonic Palestinian national movement to emerge.

When Zurayk was headmaster and the Husaynis were studying there, the language of tuition at the school was Arabic, which prepared the students for higher studies. They also studied arithmetic, algebra, geometry and biology. Zurayk taught Arabic but did not confine himself to grammar and syntax. He told his students about the great Arab heritage, and together they read passages selected from the glorious periods of Arab history. This charismatic man so appealed to them that they were drawn to listen to him even when he was among adults.
Al-mu‘alim
(the teacher) he was called by all and sundry, including graybeards, because of his renown as a scholar. He used to invite some of his students to his house, where they would sit and listen to the gatherings of Jerusalem notables, including Mayor Hussein al-Husayni. In times to come, Zurayk Nakhla would be regarded as one of the pioneers of the revived modern Arabic.

The Husayni family had close relations with the teacher Khalil al-Sakakini, who had been Zurayk’s student at the Anglican Mission in Jerusalem.
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Always meticulous in his dress, a man of noble qualities and courteous manner, he was widely learned and would be the subject of future writings. He had studied in Britain and the United States in his youth, and his command of the English language was impressive. He returned to Palestine directly after the Young Turks’ new constitution was published in 1908, and began to work as a journalist and teacher. That year he opened a private school in Jerusalem, the Ottoman Constitutional School, where he sought to inculcate Arabic language and culture but with reverence for the new constitutional empire that reformers in Istanbul wished to build. He combined his
particularist activity on behalf of his Greek Orthodox community with work for the emergent national movement. One of his favorite students was Raja’i al-Husayni, the son of Said, who used to come to his house during the summer holidays for private tuition in Arabic language and literature. Like others of his generation of Husaynis, Raja’i studied with all three teachers mentioned.
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