The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  Times were good for the Husaynis. Umar’s house, adjoining the wall of the Haram, attracted important visitors, just as Abd al-Latif’s house had done a hundred years earlier. Sheikh Hassan al-Attar, who would later become the sheikh al-azhar, came calling, and he noted the warm cultural atmosphere at the Husaynis’. Like many visitors before and after him, he accompanied them at the head of the procession when they led celebrants to the tomb of the Prophet Moses in Jericho.

  It was also during this time that the first European visited the Husaynis: Scottish physician Richard Richardson repaid Umar’s hospitality by curing him of an eye infection that had troubled him for years.5 Richardson was also the first European to be admitted to the Haram al-Sharif more or less formally – that is, with the permission of the Sheikh al-Haram, who happened to be Umar al-Husayni. Wearing a black turban lent him by Umar, the Scot sneaked into the Haram in the dead of night. Later he complained that he had been unable to appreciate the beauty of the place in the dark, and Umar relented and smuggled his guest into the place in broad daylight in 1818. But Richardson did not keep the secret, and Umar came to regret the gesture, because then more Europeans asked to be allowed in. His consent suggests either that he was aware of the changing circumstances or that he did not consider the matter vitally important. Be that as it may, historians of the Middle East would later discover how flexible Islam was in Ottoman times, unlike some of its more rigid radical forms that sprang up in the latter half of the twentieth century.

  It was not so easy for Mrs Belzoni when she wished to visit the Haram. Her husband, Giovanni Belzoni, was a prominent explorer of Egyptian antiquities, but his English wife was not content to follow his expeditions to the Pharaonic past and wished instead to observe the contemporary Middle East. In her memoirs she recounts proudly that by emulating Richardson’s bold act she proved that she was not afraid to risk death. Ottoman law permitted the execution of any Jew or Christian who presumed to enter the Haram, though in practice the penalty was much less severe. Mrs Belzoni befriended a group of Christian builders and craftsmen whom the governor had brought in to restore the Haram shrines, and persuaded them to allow her to join them as though she were the wife of one of their team. But they dithered, and by the time they agreed the work had been finished. Then she tried to bribe Umar al-Husayni to let her go in, but he was under no obligation to her as he had been to Richardson, and he threw her out of his house. In the end, she put on traditional local dress and went in on her own. Richardson and Mrs Belzoni blazed a trail that would be followed by many, and their incursions into the sacred enclosure marked the decline in the status of the Husaynis and the disappearance of the world they had known for 400 years.6 Later Sarah Berkeley Johnson, the daughter of an American missionary, would imitate Mrs Belzoni. Dressed as a local Muslim woman, she entered not only the Haram but also the Tomb of David, which was also sacrosanct.

  Easy times came to an end under the son of Suleiman, al-Jazzar’s grandson, known as Abdullah Pasha (in power from 1818 to 1831). The rulers of Acre were determined to dominate all the potentates of southern Syria, obliging the Husaynis to act very circumspectly. Taking advantage of Istanbul’s inability to cope with each successive crisis in its far-flung empire, Abdullah Pasha proceeded to change the divisions in the region. Before long he reduced Damascus to his rule and transferred the governance of Jerusalem to his own districts of Acre and Sidon. Now Jerusalem’s notables were squeezed by both Damascus and Acre. The main pressure was financial, as both capitals periodically raised the taxes they demanded from their subjects, and every dura (the annual tax collection) was likely to stimulate a revolt somewhere. The Husayni family apparently helped these insurrections only when its own interests were affected.

  While the Husaynis’ relations with Suleiman caused them to become involved in regional politics, they were also drawn willy-nilly into the greater political sphere – namely, the conflict with the Janissaries, the elite Ottoman military corps that had outgrown its usefulness and was threatened with being disbanded by the reformists. When Sultan Mahmud II proposed creating a new army, the Janissaries all over the empire went on the offensive. In 1819 it was Jerusalem’s turn.

  The Janissaries succeeded in provoking a crisis between the government and society. The pretext was their demand to stop the restoration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which had burned down in 1808.7 Some of the townspeople fell for their incitement, since any excuse would do to resist higher taxation, and together with some outsiders they converged on the governor’s office in the city’s fortress. They demanded that he appoint Janissaries as exclusive guards around the fortress, since only they could be trusted to protect the honor of Islam against the Christian encroachment represented by the restoration work at the church. If their demand was not met, they threatened, they would kill everyone inside the fortress. When the governor hesitated, the rebels closed the gates of the city and overran the fortress. If nowadays the seizure of a broadcasting station or presidential palace symbolizes an assault on or overturning of the ruling power, in those days in Jerusalem or other provincial capitals seizure of the fortress meant a putsch. On their way the rebels demolished the restorations at the church and killed some of the monks. Then they elected one of their own, an unknown individual of no special rank, as governor of Jerusalem.

  The Husaynis reacted very cautiously, as they had done during the revolt of Abu Nabut. The uprising was aimed at a friend of the family, the governor of Damascus, Yusuf Kanj, whom they did not wish to alienate. Moreover, they wanted the work at the church to continue, since they received a constant stream of gifts and grants that would cease with the suspension of the restoration. Why, then, did they hesitate to oppose the revolt? Presumably because they were being made to pay a special and onerous tax to fund the new imperial army.

  Since 1813 the Husaynis, whose exalted status had generally kept them exempt from taxation, had paid a special impost of a considerable sum to the new army fund. Mahmud II was casting around for every possible source of income, up to and including the notables of Jerusalem. It seemed to be a question of simple arithmetic – the tax burden was likely always to be greater than the donations of the Christians, but the family appreciated the stability of the new government after a long period of upheavals and thus avoided clashing with it.8

  The sultan’s response to the uprising was predictably harsh. On the initiative of the governor of Damascus and with the support of the governor of Acre, a regional commander, Abu Zari’a al-Maghrabi, was dispatched to put it down. He stormed the fortress in the middle of the night and slaughtered the rebels. It was said that the governor of Jerusalem accompanied him and with his own hands strangled to death twenty-eight of the rebels. The following day the ringleaders were decapitated and the rest strangled, and their bodies were lined up outside the Bab al-Khalil (Jaffa Gate).

  Amid this violent political turmoil the notables of Jerusalem were at a loss about whom to support – Abdullah, the governor of Acre, or the governors of Damascus, who were closer to Sultan Mahmud II. Some opponents of the Husaynis spread a rumor – probably not unfounded – that Umar al-Husayni was inclined to support Abdullah. Early in 1820 this led to an open accusation, as a result of which Umar was briefly exiled, but his status remained unaffected.9

  For Jerusalem this was a small sample of the political drama unfolding at the heart of the empire. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, life in the holy city was periodically jarred by the concussion of political explosions in the centers of Ottoman or European power. The local manifestations of these detonations were sometimes quite strange, but the family’s standing meant that it was more readily embroiled than other Jerusalemites. Such was the case with the chain of events associated with the Greek revolution.

  The Greeks were the first to assert their national identity in rebelling against Ottoman power, which had ruled over their lands for nearly 400 years. The revolution broke out in March 1821, and when the news reached Jerusalem, every actor
on the local stage used it to promote interests that had nothing whatsoever to do with the uprising.

  Every Christian in Jerusalem who felt solidarity with the Greeks and failed to disguise his joy was viewed by the authorities as an active supporter of the rebels. The principal adversary of the Greek Orthodox subjects was the governor of Damascus, Darwish Pasha, whose representative in Jerusalem called on the townspeople to take up arms against the Greek threat. The tension grew with the arrival of a company of soldiers dispatched by Darwish to occupy the fortress ‘in preparation’. The Christian inhabitants were ordered to surrender their weapons, to wear black and to drag heavy guns from place to place for no apparent reason. Their humiliation was aggravated by looting and attacks against the Greek Patriarchate. A rumor spread that the towns-people had been commanded to kill every Christian who was caught bearing a weapon.10

  The governor of Jerusalem might have massacred all the Greek Orthodox inhabitants if the Muslim notables had not intervened. They published a statement condemning the action and reassuring the Christians. The statement quoted the Qur’an on the legal status of ahl al-kitab (the Christian ‘People of the Book’) in the Muslim nation. The governor of Damascus also recovered his wits and intervened to stop the harassment. The government’s attitude towards the Roman Catholics was quite different: because of its links with France, it permitted the Catholics to restore and reconstruct the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and they were exempt from wearing the qawqa (the distinctive turban imposed upon the rest of the Christians and the Jews).11

  At the time, the events of 1819–21 did not seem extraordinary. Then rebellion came to Palestine, and since the land had been quiet for a century this was decidedly unusual. Moreover, these rebellions covered almost all of Palestine and included all the social groups living on the land, which was also unusual. The first occurred in 1824, and the second a decade later in 1834. Some historians consider these the awakening of a Palestinian national, or proto-national, identity (we shall have more to say about this later). In the present context, these political tremors had a greater impact on the life of the Husayni family than those that shook the center of the empire, such as the Greek revolution and the other national uprisings that followed it.

  We have chosen to denote the 1824 uprising as the first Palestinian revolt rather than the better-known peasant uprising of 1834, which has lately been described in a book of history as ‘the first Palestinian revolt’.12 The events of 1824 are usually described as a fitnah (sedition). It all began in 1823, when Abdullah, the governor of Acre, sent a representative to Jerusalem to demand, in addition to the usual taxes collected by Damascus, a substantial chunk of the family’s property. This was a time of decision for the family. Tahir took the lead in formulating the family’s response. Ever the scholar, Tahir was thoroughly familiar with the city’s history and had also learned from his forefathers to pay close attention to proceedings in Istanbul. This combination of historical and political knowledge gave him his answer. Faced with the new threat, he thought of repeating past victories. He recalled the events with which this account opens – the revolt of the naqib al-ashraf al-Husayni al-Wafa’i that began in 1703. In the long run it had failed, but at its climax it had spilled out of the city walls to the surrounding villages. Tahir realized that the revolt had failed because it had challenged the sultan. The current situation was different: Tahir was rebelling against someone who was himself a rebel against the empire, and Tahir could expect the empire to support him. He decided to mount the rebellion with the help of the local peasants, brave and stubborn men oppressively taxed by the governor of Acre. This was a wise decision, and the Husaynis weathered yet another crisis.

  During those same years even more meaningful developments took place. We know this only in hindsight; Tahir could not have realized it at the time. Foreign visitors who arrived during the days of the revolt would alter the country’s character beyond recognition.13 Protestant missionaries, both British and American, came to spread Christianity among the Arabs and to convert the Jews. Two American missionaries were especially active. They concentrated their activity around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and tried not only to Christianize Muslims and Jews but also to attract lapsed Protestants and win over Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christians. This was an unprecedented presence in Jerusalem that would have far-reaching effects on the evolution of national awareness and on political developments in Jerusalem.14 Christian messianism would lay the groundwork for the rise of the new Jewish messianism, namely, Zionism. But this, too, is obvious only in hindsight, and the Husaynis had no inkling of it.

  The full extent of the missionary activity in the city was not generally known, or else tensions between Muslims and Christians would have grown worse. The Greek revolution, as we have seen, contributed directly to the restless atmosphere, and constant rumors made it harder to maintain the delicate status quo. The city governor, Suleiman Pasha, was unable to calm things down, and while the uprising of 1824 was quite unrelated to events in Greece, all these developments created unease and uncertainty and a feeling that there was no firm hand on the government helm.

  The personal biography of this Suleiman is not documented, but it was evidently well-known in the city. He was rumored to be a Jewish convert and was suspected of sympathizing with the Christians in Jerusalem during the conflict between the Greeks and the Ottomans. Indeed, his very presence in the city exacerbated the tendency to rise up against the government. His common epithet was ‘the nineteenth century’s Pontius Pilate’. In addition to these rumors, there were also reports that a European navy had reached the coast of Palestine, bringing an advance force for the conquest of Jerusalem. Whenever this story came up, the Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem were confined to their churches.15

  The Husaynis were still occupied with the struggle to survive the greed of local rulers in Acre and Damascus. In 1824 this pressure doubled: Damascus demanded its pound of flesh from Jerusalem, which was officially under its rule, and Acre did not let up either. The family’s friend in Damascus was replaced by a new governor, Mustafa, nicknamed ‘the Criminal’ because of his penchant for imposing unprecedented taxes. The Husaynis, along with the rest of the notables, felt that if they gave in to all these demands they would soon be left penniless. In the spring of 1824 things went too far, and a full-blown revolt broke out.

  Mustafa ‘the Criminal’ arrived in April for the annual tax collection and camped outside the Jaffa Gate. The mood in the city was already very grim, but the visit might have passed without overt trouble if the governor had not been seized with a fit of ‘Jerusalem madness’ and launched a wild assault on the city and its inhabitants, the likes of which had not been seen since 1700. This time the governor of Damascus went too far, stayed longer than was customary and behaved in an unheard-of manner. He had the leaders of the Christians, Jews and Muslims brought to his camp and held them ransom until their communities paid the amounts he demanded.

  Early on 5 April the governor’s troops came to the gate of the Husaynis’ residence, and before the family could gather its wits, Umar al-Husayni was seized and taken to the governor’s camp. There he found Abd al-Rahman, the brother of Mustafa Abu Ghosh, who had also been taken hostage in order to force the Abu Ghosh family to share with the government the income from the impost paid to them by Christian pilgrims on the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem. As representatives of the Jews, ‘the Criminal’ seized Rabbi Mendel and his son, both French nationals hitherto protected by the special agreements signed by the government with the European powers (the Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire). Evidently the Damascus governor meant to demolish personally the special status granted to Christians and Jews of European nationality. The last hostage taken was the abbot of the Greek Orthodox monastery of Mar Elias.

  To demonstrate his determination to humiliate these men until their communities paid the vast sums he had demanded, Mustafa submitted the Greek abbot to torture. The monk was dragged to a pole stuck in the gro
und, and his legs were thrust through a ring attached to it that was tightened until he bled. Then the pole was pulled out of the ground and hung on two hooks in front of the governor’s tent, so that the abbot’s head rested on the ground. Next, ten soldiers began to flog his feet. The soldiers were replaced again and again. Umar counted four shifts and trembled. He feared that Mustafa would dare to flog the naqib al-ashraf of Jerusalem, as the governor was clearly out of his mind and there was no telling how far he would go. The abbot remained lying on the ground with his head uncovered was given nothing but water for three days. The other hostages were confined to the governor’s camp pending payment by their communities.

  On the third day, the governor tied a rope around the abbot’s neck and threatened to hang him if he did not confess that the treasures of the inhabitants of Bethlehem were hidden under his monastery. Now the reason for these mad proceedings became clear to Umar: many of Bethlehem’s inhabitants had fled to the mountains just before the tax collection. The governor threatened to wipe the monastery from the face of the earth. While the abbot was being tortured, the governor’s soldiers invaded Jerusalem, broke into houses, beat up the residents and arrested some of them for tax evasion. They made no distinction between Muslims, Christians and Jews. Tahir al-Husayni and the other notables found a way to halt the devastation, if only temporarily: they pawned the valuables of the Orthodox Church in Jerusalem to an English Jew for 50,000 piastres as a down payment on the debt to the Pasha.16