The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty
Page 12
The Young Turks supported Abd al-Hamid II, the younger brother of Sultan Abd al-Aziz II, and when the latter died as a result of falling from his bed, they were widely suspected of having conspired to bring this about. Abd al-Aziz had been a very large man, and it was not surprising that his bed collapsed under him; though by the same token his bulk should have protected him from a fatal injury. Be that as it may, in 1876 the throne was inherited by Abd al-Hamid II – destined to be the last real sultan of the great house of Uthman.
It soon became obvious that he was not a trustworthy ally of the constitutional reformists. Though he permitted the first parliamentary elections in the history of the empire, he soon suspended both the parliament and its constitution. Presumably he felt that the time had not yet come for the sultan to share power with others or to be accountable to a sovereign people instead of to God – a shocking reversal for one who has ruled by divine will. But, as Benedict Anderson notes, even autocratic rulers like Abd al-Hamid II could not ignore the age of nationality in which they found themselves, or turn the clock back. Indeed, the one Western cultural product that the sultan warmly embraced was nationalism – an Ottoman variety thereof. Applying his supreme religious status to the national feelings animating many of his diverse subjects, he offered pan-Islamism to the Muslims, while to the non-Muslims he offered that invention of the Young Turks: ‘Ottoman patriotism’. It would soon become clear that neither tactic worked during the volatile turn of the century.1
The Husaynis who occupied various positions in the Jerusalem city council were among the first to hear about the reversal in Istanbul. Initially they did not appreciate its full significance, but later it would become obvious that this historical development enabled the family to consolidate its position and complete its recovery, which had begun after the Crimean War.
The family needed time to adjust to the Ottoman constitutional system, as illustrated by its failure to obtain the post of representative of the Jerusalem district in the new parliament. Eventually they would obtain this important new post too, but in 1876 Umar Fahmi lost the contest to Yusuf Daya’ al-Khalidi, who had also won the mayoralty. The district governor placated Umar Fahmi by appointing him briefly as mayor and then as governor of the district of Gaza. Unfortunately he died suddenly, and according to the historian Adel Manna, the demise of this gifted man was a grievous loss to the family and the whole of Jerusalem.2
The contest for parliamentary representation took place while the Husaynis were adapting to the profound changes that had taken place on the local political scene and in its social makeup. In the months following the accession of the new sultan, the entire family, as a political entity, was occupied with a renewed struggle against the foreign consuls. The principal arena of this conflict was the city council.
THE 1870S – THE MUNICIPALITY AND SALIM AL-HUSAYNI
From 1870 on, the European consuls increasingly intervened in the work of the city council, in which they represented almost all the non-Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem. Utilizing to the utmost the changed legal status of non-Ottoman residents in the empire, they pressured the municipality to adopt resolutions that improved the situation of the Christians and Jews in Jerusalem, especially those who had obtained European nationality and protection.
The council met twice in 1876 and dealt primarily with the demands of the consuls to improve the conditions of the Christian pilgrims in the city. The number of pilgrims kept growing, especially when Jerusalem was connected by newly laid roads to Jaffa in 1867 and to Nablus in 1870. Under pressure from the consuls, a new gate was opened in the city wall on the northwest side to enable the pilgrims to enter directly into the Christian Quarter. Thus in the Hamidi period – the reign of Abd al-Hamid II – Jerusalem was newly connected to much of the country, and Europeans and Ottomans helped to turn it into a geopolitical center whose influence spread far beyond the administrative boundaries of the Jerusalem sanjaq.
The consuls did not always attend the council’s sessions. When an issue important to them was on the agenda, they would wait outside the conference room and their interpreters, who were inside, would keep them informed about the proceedings. There was only one small room for guests at the municipality, used not only by the consuls but by anyone who was concerned with the council’s agenda. When the room became overcrowded, the connecting door to the council chamber sometimes burst open and the visitors pushed their way in, even causing the meeting to be suspended. The consuls regarded themselves as allies of the district governor, who was present at the council sessions, and together they opposed the notables on issues concerning their governments’ positions or their own personal status in the city.
In the first years of the new reign, the Husaynis developed a fairly intricate set of relationships. Their relations with the British consulate improved greatly, especially after Finn’s departure. His successor, Moore, became a friend of the family, and perhaps the seeds of the future alliance between the Husaynis and the British government, which lasted till the late 1920s, were sown at that time. Towards the end of Abd al-Hamid’s reign, the family relied on Moore in the face of the hostility of the Ottoman governor, Rauf Pasha.3
During the first decade of the new reign, the European impact on the city was so profound that the family had no choice but to cooperate to some extent and certainly to avoid the confrontations that had marked Finn’s tenure. The consuls became much more powerful thanks to their construction projects on the lands they had acquired in the 1850s. New buildings kept cropping up, demonstrating that the political balance of power in Jerusalem had changed beyond recognition. As well as new monasteries, there were new hostelries, such as the New Grand Hotel and Joachim Fast’s hotel, which appears in almost every contemporary photograph. These hotels accommodated the consuls’ foreign guests, who were given Ottoman citizenship for the duration of their stay.
One contemporary described the Husaynis as better adjusted to the new reality than were the Khalidis. Yitzhak Rokah, who had business dealings with the Husaynis, noted that they ‘strive to respond gracefully to learning various languages’, and that unlike the Khalidis, they ‘have grown accustomed to learning, and appreciate that there is a world outside the boundaries of Islam’. It was this pragmatism, said Rokah, that enabled the Husaynis to rise at the expense of the Khalidis. But Rokah was aware that it was not only ideological pragmatism that enhanced the Husaynis’ position. Their connection with the Hamidi monarchy was unmatched by any other Jerusalem family due to the marriage of Musa al-Husayni’s daughter to the Grand Vizier in Istanbul. The historian A. Droyanov also quotes a letter written by a Jew from Jaffa referring to Musa al-Husayni as the Grand Vizier’s father-in-law. Such a connection, if true, undoubtedly strengthened the Husaynis early in the reign of Abd al-Hamid II.4
The members of the family who served on the city council appreciated the importance of taking the consuls’ views into account. They also considered what might be called public opinion, which reflected the general attitude towards the consuls and could sometimes be used against them. At that time the Husaynis learned to use the Nabi Musa festivities as a way of demonstrating to the consuls their own and the public’s protests. The German journalist Klaus Volken, who witnessed the celebrations in the late 1870s, reported to his paper that some 10,000 had taken part in the Nabi Musa procession.5 He noted that the heads of the Husayni family used the occasion to express for the first time their objections to the excessive intervention of European consuls in Palestine, particularly in Jerusalem, but that even without their public declarations, the great throng that took part in the festivities protested against the consuls’ meddling in matters large and small. The sight of the processions and groups of European pilgrims – chiefly from Russia, France and Austria – that filled the city streets during the Nabi Musa celebration made it a natural occasion for expressing displeasure. The new governor of the city, who came into office in 1876 and remained until 1888, tried to prevent the holiday from turning into a politica
l occasion but only succeeded in averting violent clashes. Year after year, until the end of Ottoman rule, while a semblance of order was maintained, the event retained and even intensified its political character. And from the eighteenth century on, the Husayni family was at its center.6
Public opinion affected more than the issue of consuls; demands from below were beginning to have an impact on municipal issues as well. For example, in 1875 the municipality responded to the clamor of the residents in the Bab al-Huta neighborhood and opened the Flowers Gate, which had been bricked up for many years.7 The combined effect of the consuls’ demands and pressure from the local populace altered the sense of responsibility – or rather the scope of responsibility – of the Husaynis who engaged in politics. In the past, obeying the traditional concept of charity and welfare, they responded to the personal petitions and group demands of those who depended on their material or political benevolence, whereas now their official functions obliged them to accept responsibility for the entire community. They continued to exact payment for their generosity and responses, and only rarely did they initiate action to benefit this or that group or the community as a whole. But in the 1880s, they began to act on behalf of groups that were not their particular clients. Starting with the mayoralty of Salim al-Husayni, the family tackled issues that concerned the city’s general population. Voluntarily or not, some members of the family began to regard it as a ‘national’ responsibility (the word is in quotation marks because only in the twentieth century would it become a true national responsibility). Indeed, it seems that the Husaynis fulfilled this ‘national’ role very well before the formal birth of the national movement – that is, before World War I. They did less well in the role after the war than they had done before it, thus calling into question the notion of progress over time.
The history of the family in the first decade of the Hamidi reign is the history of the municipality of Jerusalem, and in particular that of its mayor Salim. He was the grandson of Abd al-Salam and Musa Tuqan’s daughter, and the brother of Mufti Mustafa. His father, Hussein, was a prosperous merchant whose wealth enabled Salim to build up his political power. Salim was very much the head of the Tahiri branch of the family, though strictly speaking he descended from both branches, which may account for his special strength. He was more powerful than his nephew Tahir II, who had been mufti since 1865. Salim was regarded by the people of Jerusalem as the head of the citizenry – a novel title to replace the obsolete one of naqib al-ashraf. One of his sons was governor of the district of Jaffa, while the governor of the district of Jerusalem was a close friend of his immediate family.8 These two power bases, that of mayor and mufti, both held by the Tahiri branch, would be consolidated by the ‘politics of notables’. During the British Mandate, Mufti al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni was always at odds with Mayor Musa Kazim. When they cooperated they achieved advances for their families and their people, and when they fought – as they did much of the time – they sowed dissension and reaped failures.
We have noted that the Tahiri branch of the family acquired great power while the Umari branch lost a great deal, especially when the post of naqib also passed to the Tahiri branch. At the end of the century, the post of naqib passed from Rabah to his brother Abd al-Latif al-Husayni, a man of many facets, remembered by Jerusalemites as the man who paved the road from the Jaffa Gate around the city wall to the Mount of Olives. Paved in honor of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who came into power in 1898, the new road extended to Augusta Victoria, a huge edifice named after the Kaiser’s wife.9 Abd al-Latif was a member of the district’s administrative council, hence his considerable influence over the management and development of the city. But he was the last Umari to hold the post of Naqib – the city council transferred it to the Tahiri branch, namely, to Ahmad Rasim, the son of Said, the grandson of Hassan and the father of Said II (about whom we will learn much more below). At the turn of the century the post was still in the hands of Ahmad Rasim, who kept it until his death, when it passed to his son, Said II. However, as we have seen, the post had already lost much of its significance in the reign of Abd al-Hamid II, and the secular revolution of the Young Turks in 1908 rendered it quite meaningless.
The Umaris did not vanish entirely from the political landscape, but they did grow weaker and apparently poorer. They recovered thanks to a move that had proved useful in the past. This time it was Umar Fahmi’s daughter Aisha – fittingly named after a woman famous in Muslim tradition for her financial shrewdness and political audacity – who saved the Umari branch. Her marriage to al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni reunited the two branches of the family. Such matches had not been customary in previous generations, when they were usually made within the branch. Modern Husayni women say that the family had previously preferred to form matrimonial alliances with other clans rather than marry between the branches. Aisha inherited a substantial estate from her father, which would be very useful to al-Hajj Amin. As previously noted, Umar Fahmi himself (in those days known as ‘Little Umar’, to distinguish him from his namesake in the time of the Egyptian Muhammad Ali) had married a daughter of Musa Tuqan. (A sister of hers had married Abd al-Salam, the son of the first Umar, whose wedding was described at the opening of Chapter Three.) The matrimonial ties with the Tuqans linked the elite of Nablus with that of Jerusalem, enhancing the alliance between these two important cities and forming an urban connection that would become a stronghold of Palestinian nationality.
Though fifty years separated the weddings of grandfather and grandson, the ceremonies were the same. Marriages were agreed upon in advance and took place when the bride reached puberty.10 The mother of the groom would come to the girl’s house accompanied by her relatives, but only if the girl accepted the groom did the men begin to negotiate. (The role of the women was not as passive as often depicted.) In the evening, the male contingent would arrive and ask the girl’s father for his approval, after which the betrothal could proceed. In the following days the families negotiated the written contract, the bride price and so on. The wedding preparations consumed two hectic months. After the betrothal, the bride and then the groom took a traditional bath of purification, followed by the henna party, and only then came the wedding night. The evening began at the hammam, followed by an elaborate dressing ceremony, and concluded with the groom walking to the bride’s house. A month or two after the wedding, the bride’s father would hold a feast, but the guest list was made up by the groom’s family. In years to come, the women of the family would describe tensions that arose between the branches of the family because certain individuals of this or that branch were not invited to the post-wedding party.11 These events, like the new family homes built outside the city walls, were the highlights of the lives of those members of the family who did not take part in the high politics associated with the Husaynis’ aristocratic status.
However, Salim al-Husayni needed no matrimonial ties to preserve his standing, either in the family or in the city. His physical appearance in a photograph from the period gives no indication of his forceful personality. A short man, unusually dark-complexioned, he wears a grizzled beard and looks older than he actually was when the picture was taken. His reputation stemmed mainly from his being a qadi asha’ir – one who adjudicated Bedouin tribal conflicts – but he was above all the family’s foremost entrepreneur, a talent he had inherited from his father, Hussein. Thanks to his abilities, the family could sail through the upheavals in the Jerusalem sanjaq as the local economy became linked to the rest of the world. The whole city benefited from his expertise: it was he who developed the concept of municipal services, and with the government’s help, he built a hospital in the Sheikh Badr neighborhood (the building still stands in the Mahaneh Yehudah market), paved roads, sank wells and laid sewage pipes. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to solve the problem of the water supply to the poor, but this would only be achieved under British rule.12
For eighteen years, between 1879 and 1897, Salim was on-and-off mayor of Jerusalem, and he is
still credited with many improvements. It was his initiative to plant trees along Jaffa Road, install the first street-lights and employ the first garbage collectors. This last service was not strictly enforced.13 The numerous draft animals in the city made street cleaning difficult – even the square in front of the municipality, where the animals were habitually tethered, was full of dung. The British mandatory government could take credit for carrying out some of the cleaning operations and relieving the city of the excessive livestock and dung. Already in 1894 the British representatives complained that the new railway from Jaffa was causing the city to become overcrowded, and deliveries of goods were a problem. In response, Salim ordered barriers to be placed at the entrance of many streets, preventing camels and horseback riders from entering. Though photographs from 1900 show that there were still quite a few animals, during Salim’s mayoralty serious efforts were made to improve the cleanliness and sanitation in Jerusalem, and to cleanse its choked drainage channels.14 As well as caring for the city during the Hamidi period, the Husaynis also built themselves a family neighborhood.
It was during this reign that they began to feel the economic transformation that was affecting the entire Near East. For example, the aforementioned Musa al-Husayni, brother of Mufti Mustafa, personally benefited from the railway project since he was responsible for the supply of timber for the rail sleepers. The project brought him fame and one of the highest imperial decorations, which he was invited to Istanbul to receive ceremoniously. He died before the project was complete and left his sons – the fairly well-known Ismail and Shukri and the less-known Arif – great wealth and a priceless network of contacts in the Istanbul administration.15 At the start of the twentieth century, Arif would gain some renown by being appointed chief treasurer of the Ottoman Ministry of Education in Istanbul, a senior post that he filled successfully.