The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (6 page)

Muslim notables such as the Ghudayyas also accrued economic power from the debts owed to them by the Jewish and Christian communities. All members of the family lent money, and the debts increased from one generation to the next, enriching the family’s capital. Abd al-Latif himself passed on this kind of financial asset – not unlike modern bonds or shares – to his son Hassan and his daughter Budriya. The creditors were also the benefactors and patrons of the non-Muslim communities in the city. For example, the creditors of the Jews had the right to veto the community’s chosen leaders.

But there was no satisfying the governor of Damascus: the accruement of debts meant that the accruement of debts meant that the Ghudayyas were richer than before, and the governor thus expected them to pay more taxes. Despite Zayn al-Abidin’s assurances, Abdullah returned to Jerusalem with a heavy heart and a premonition that his family could expect a difficult time. His worries were confirmed as soon as he returned. Before he had rested from the journey, his family informed him that the situation had worsened. The governor of Damascus had openly allied himself with the rival families to depose Abd al-Latif from his post.

The campaign against Abd al-Latif had begun before Abdullah’s journey to Istanbul. It was led by the Dajani family, who headed the Shafi’i school in the city. (Each of the four canonical Islamic schools of law had its own judiciary.) The rumor that was spread in the city would not seem defamatory to us today, but at the time it could seriously damage Abd al-Latif’s standing. It began with an undeniable act that was typical of the man. Not far from his house lived the Jewish rabbi Aharon, who used to beat his son Hayim mercilessly. Abd al-Latif could not bear to see this and demanded that the rabbi stop the beatings, and indeed they stopped. The grateful lad must have decided that only Islam could save him from his abusive father, and asked to be converted. But Abd al-Latif refused to convert him. It was here that the slander began. Some claimed that Abd al-Latif was not interested in protecting the boy but was motivated by greed, and that he had been paid handsomely by the leaders of the Jewish community. Abd al-Latif had no choice but to petition the court, which decided that he was ‘a religious man and a true believer’ and that the slander was groundless.
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But the campaign went on, and it was only thanks to the
mufti
of Damascus, Khalil al-Muradi, Abd al-Latif’s devoted old friend, that the rival families were unable to carry out their scheme. The family enterprises were now being run by Abdullah, since his father was still confined to his house for the crime of corresponding with the Galilean rebel Dahir al-Umar. In effect, Abdullah had become the city’s
naqib al-ashraf
. Counseled by his friends in Damascus and Istanbul, he hoped to be successful in the post, which he had wanted but had not expected to take on so soon.
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In fact, Dahir al-Umar unwittingly saved the family from the hostile governor of Damascus. In September 1771, he routed the governor’s army in the Huleh Valley. To replace the defeated governor, Istanbul appointed Muhammad al-Azm, a scion of the chief notable family in Damascus, with whom the Ghudayyas had cordial relations. Al-Azm was no more successful than his predecessor in the fight against Dahir al-Umar, who continued to expand his kingdom. In 1773 al-Umar seized the entire area west of the Jordan (from the Litani River in the north to Bir Saba in the south); only Jerusalem and its environs remained under effective Ottoman rule.

Fortunately for Jerusalem, al-Umar had no interest in the city, but he did take a brief interest in the Ghudayyas. He believed that their status as a leading family – possibly already known as the Husaynis – could be useful to him in the regional power play. He therefore
sent the heads of the family a letter asking them to mediate between him and Damascus.
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The family only rarely supported rebels against Ottoman rule; mostly they remained loyal to the central government, and they did so in this case too. In any event, Dahir al-Umar’s rise did not force them to become involved in regional political machinations, and since their local rivals showed no interest in the matter, they felt no need to deal with such a mighty force as Dahir al-Umar.

In November 1773, a new local figure successfully challenged both al-Umar and Istanbul. This was Ahmad al-Jazzar, or ‘Cezzar Ahmet’ as he was known in Turkish. (Since he knew no Arabic, it would be appropriate to call him by his Turkish name, but we will use his more common Arabic name.) Al-Jazzar would become a major figure in the region. He quickly rose from being a mercenary soldier to the position of provincial governor, betraying others who helped him along the way, such as Dahir al-Umar. During his ascent to power he visited Jerusalem, but we have no evidence of any contact with the Ghudayyas.

Dahir al-Umar and al-Jazzar were part of a general challenge from within to the empire’s authority in the Middle East. In the 1770s Istanbul was hard-pressed by its prolonged, bloody war with expansionist Russia, and this encouraged potentates in the provinces to try to unseat their Ottoman overlords. In Palestine, this new reality was manifested in a constant struggle for the land amongst Egyptian rulers, who gradually seceded from the empire, and ambitious governors in Damascus, Saida and Beirut.

Al-Jazzar added a new regional center, the city of Acre, which was responsible for most of Syria’s southern regions. After consolidating his role, al-Jazzar, in the service of the empire, succeeded in containing the Egyptian drive into Palestine.

During those years of regional strife, Jerusalem was not sought after by any of the warring parties. Nevertheless, its inhabitants were prey to more zealous tax collection every time one of the rivals gained the upper hand. However, because of all the confusion and ambiguity, this meant escaping the need to pay customary annual taxes. The city was also immune to the destruction wreaked by invading armies on towns in the adjoining districts of Jaffa, Gaza and Ramla. This urban space was quite often a battlefield for the belligerents.

These troubled times were relatively short and came to an end in the mid-1770s. During those years of unrest, the Husaynis, like other urban notables, were more concerned with financial matters than local politics. They were affected by the Ottoman monetary reform declared
in the late seventeenth century, but only many years later. Until 1690 most of the Ottoman economy had been based on foreign rather than local currency, which limited the government’s ability to control its economy in the capitalist era, and the frequent wars in the late seventeenth century had further depleted the treasury. They decided to base the economy on a new imperial currency, the
akce
, a silver coin later replaced by the
piastre
. People began to buy the new currency from the government, paying in old specie, but the government preferred jewelry, diamonds and the like. The notables were ordered to hand over silver objects, as the metal was needed to mint the new imperial coins. The inhabitants of all the cities were obliged to pay for the Ottoman currency with gems and gold.
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The regional and local agitation subsided once Istanbul ended its long, bloody war with Russia with a peace treaty in 1774. With the capital at peace, it was possible to concentrate on pacifying the provinces. Al-Jazzar’s position was solidified alongside a loyal governor in Damascus.

In that year of relative calm, Abd al-Latif’s health began to decline. Perhaps he was worn out by the struggle against the governor of Damascus in addition to the rivalry with the other great families. But his failing health had to be kept secret. While Abdullah conducted most of his father’s business, by all appearances Abd al-Latif was still the city’s
naqib al-ashraf
.

He finally died in 1775, aged eighty-one (though some sources say he was ninety years old). The funeral was low-key. His body was placed in a casket and followed by the family and close friends. Dervishes and sheikhs bearing palm fronds murmured prayers, and everyone called out repeatedly: ‘There is no God but Allah!’ The casket was taken to the Haram al-Sharif, where it was placed on a stone plinth for people to walk past it before it was taken to the cemetery facing the Mount of Olives.
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While walking down to the cemetery, Abd al-Latif’s four sons discussed the future and shared out their father’s posts without dispute. Two of them will appear later in our narrative as they were the ones who were given a role in public life: Abdullah and Hassan. The other two were not given any posts or particular honors (their part of the family played no role in the public life of Jerusalem or Palestine but instead followed private careers in business or the sciences). Abdullah inherited the
niqaba
, which would remain in the family for a long time. In 1776 he was also appointed Sheikh al-Haram, a position that
had always been in the family (that is, in the ‘appropriated’ Wafa’i family). However, Hassan had to wait five years for his post, and only in 1780, at the age of thirty-eight, was he appointed
mufti
of Jerusalem. Now the family had almost complete control of Jerusalem’s religious and social systems.

Before the eighteenth century came to an end, the family would once again have to defend its prominence in the city. It was thanks to Hassan and his brothers that the family made it through this challenge.

HASSAN AL-HUSAYNI: THE MAKING OF A FAMILY NARRATIVE

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Hassan al-Husayni finished writing
The Biographies of the Jerusalemite Families in the 12th Hijra Century
, the histories of forty-three Jerusalem notables of his time. He had labored for over a year on this composition about ‘the Jerusalemites’, including his own family. A few years later, the
mufti
of Damascus, Khalil al-Muradi, wrote a directory of the notables in his district, modeling it on that of Hassan. A hundred and fifty years later the two books would end up at the British Museum Library and enable modern historians to trace the history of the Arab-Ottoman elite of the Greater Syria area.
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With these two books the family’s takeover of the al-Husayni al-Wafa’i lineage became a fait accompli, and its members could proudly hang a drawing of their family tree in the entrance halls of their homes, as was customary among notable families in Palestine.
¹⁶
But Hassan did more than that. He studied a variety of other subjects. The post of
mufti
required considerable learning – his rulings allowed him to interpret and expound on Islamic law (the Shari‘a). His interpretations were rulings (
fatwa
) sent to those who asked questions about Islam, and they relied on precedents or Muslim religious texts or occasionally on the
mufti’
s own inclinations. Hassan’s familiarity with the intricacies of Muslim religious rules was famous throughout the region, and many students from al-Azhar University visited him and consulted his library. Hassan owed his great learning to his father, who had not only hired local religious scholars for his studious son but had also sent him, at the tender age of thirteen, to study with the leading al-Azhar scholars of his time. He spent 1755 and 1756 in Egypt and was so impressed by one of his tutors that before returning to his country he composed a short poem in his praise. His education at home
and abroad introduced him not only to Islamic learning but also to Ottoman culture. In time, Hassan would write his memoirs and name all his teachers and mentors.
¹⁷

During the 1770s and 1780s Hassan was able to devote himself to religious scholarship because his brother Abdullah was still managing the affairs of the family. Abdullah’s successful trip to Istanbul had ensured good relations with the sultan’s court in the Ottoman capital. Nevertheless, it would have been impossible to sustain the family’s political standing without recourse to Hassan’s religious status. Whenever it seemed that the rulers of Damascus, the al-Azm family, were plotting against the Husaynis, it fell to Hassan to tackle the problem. And indeed he not only managed to sort out difficulties with Damascus but also established such good relations with the al-Azms that he became an informal adviser to the Syrian governor.

The most notable political event in the lives of Hassan and Abdullah was the failed attempt, in about 1790, by other notable families to dispossess them of their official posts. It was only a matter of time before such an attempt would be made. Throughout the eighteenth century no single family held such a position in the city. It was no secret that this was due to alliances with Damascus and Istanbul. To maintain their position it was necessary to win the trust of the local
qadi
, then the approval of the governor of Damascus and finally that of Istanbul’s
naqib al-ashraf
. The latter would not confirm an appointment without a magnificent gift, and the list of people expecting largesse kept growing longer. It reached a point where the family had to employ a regular agent in Istanbul to deliver boxes of soaps and vials of perfume to any person with potential influence on the family’s position. Needless to say, the rival families envied the Husaynis’ wealth, because it was impossible to satisfy the greed of all the senior functionaries in the Ottoman capital without considerable means. The Husaynis’ ability to obtain the post of
naqib
was especially impressive because, although it passed from father to son and was in theory an appointment for life, it had to be confirmed annually. It especially rankled that the appointment was supposedly approved by all the notables of Jerusalem, whether they agreed or not. They would all be summoned to the courtyard of the Hanbaliya mosque in the city to hear the town crier announce the appointment of a Husayni to the post.