The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  Profits from the guardianship of Muslim holy properties, notably the sale of their agricultural lands, enabled the Husaynis to bequeath a handsome estate to the next generation. It is worth noting that this was an extensive range of religious properties, many of them of all-Islamic importance. Even after selling some of these, the family still owned considerable real estate in and around Jerusalem, and like others of their class they were buying property in the lowlands. Musa, Ismail and Rabah al-Husayni all owned lands in what is today called the inner plain. Many villagers registered their lands in the Husaynis’ names, or the names of other notables, because they could not afford the cost of registration and ownership. The first to do so were the villagers of Bait Nequba. In the 1870s, as a temporary measure, they registered village plots in the name of Ismail al-Husayni, who paid the land taxes. But they discovered that the temporariness was questionable, and the dispute between the villagers and Ismail over those lands continued throughout the Ottoman period and was not resolved even during the British Mandate.16 Proprietors of medium-sized lands preferred to deposit their properties in the waqf, which also yielded the Husaynis a handsome income.

  THE 1880S – SETTLING OUTSIDE THE CITY WALLS

  The first to realize these profits was Rabah al-Husayni. In 1870 he broke out of the city confines and built himself a house near the mosque of Sheikh Jarrah. In its time, Rabah’s palace had a novel style – spacious halls and rooms embellished with marble arches and carved wooden doors, built around a hexagonal patio full of climbing plants, variegated shrubs and fruit trees surrounding a hexagonal stone cistern. It was roofed with lightweight terracotta pipes to insulate it from extreme temperatures and faced with nari stone. The architect must have been partial to the six-sided form, which also dominates the main hall with its magnificent chandelier. A two-storey house with a basement, it covered two acres including the garden, and each of Rabah’s four wives had a separate wing. The first floor was the grandest, containing Rabah’s apartment and those of his wives, but it was the reception room, with the coffered wooden ceiling topped by a brightly painted dome, that most impressed visitors.17

  The family remained here until the house was closed down at the end of the twentieth century by the Israelis. However, the palace still stands: it is now the American Colony Hotel. It was a striking architectural gem, especially in those days, when the surrounding area was still largely unbuilt. But even today, amid the dense Israeli construction sites all around the city, it remains unusually attractive – as visitors to the hotel can testify.

  In 1882 Mayor Salim joined Rabah and built a house next door. There, on the slope leading to the village of Sheikh Jarrah, the Husaynis began to establish a stronghold, a springboard for family members who wished to play major roles in the new world created by the Ottoman reformists, the European powers and the national movements of Jews and Palestinians. By 1894 the family already had six houses outside the walls, and in the early twentieth century it would be known as the Husayni neighborhood.

  Salim’s house was also a grand structure for its time. Two-storied like Rabah’s house, it was more traditional. (Today it is the House of the Arab Child, an orphanage supervised by the family.) They had chosen the site well: the steep hillside near the mosque of Sheikh Jarrah faced Mount Scopus and overlooked a landscape of vineyards, strips of cultivated land, olive groves and fruit orchards and the road leading to Abu Tur. A handsome central edifice predated the arrival of the Husaynis, including Qasr al-Mufti and a few other palaces known as qusur. These were buildings originally designated for religious purposes, and some of them dated back to the time of Salah al-Din al-Ayubi (known in English as ‘Saladin’). Sheikh Jarrah and Abu Tur had sprung up around these structures, which had served Saladin’s warriors.18 Some of this land fell within the Husaynis’ religious properties and was used to build summer houses. Although a common practice, this was disapproved of by the public, who had a saying: ‘He who builds his house on the waqf risks having his roof fall down on the heads of his family.’

  Completed in 1711, Qasr al-Mufti was originally the residence of Sheikh Muhammad al-Khalili (the Shafi’i mufti of Jerusalem in the early eighteenth century). Built north of the city wall, it may be seen today in the courtyard of the Rockefeller Museum. In the 1860s, it was used by the Husaynis as a summer house. There the family, accompanied by their servants, would enjoy the fresh air and open spaces through much of the summer, until the end of the British Mandate.

  Today it is called the Mufti’s Palace, and the surrounding gardens the Mufti’s Vineyard. Tahir II made it into a permanent residence in 1864 and lived there until the 1890s, when he moved into a new house nearby. His new home was a grand two-storey villa built of Jerusalem stone, which like Salim’s and Rabah’s villas had its own water supply and a fountain in the central courtyard. Tahir’s house was one of Jerusalem’s cultural centers: poets came to read their poems and talk about literature, and debates were held about politics, both local and imperial. Here Tahir’s son, the future al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, would grow up. In 1966 the house became the Arab Academics’ Club, and it currently serves as a club and meeting place for Palestinian academics in Jerusalem.19

  Muslims began to build permanent structures outside the walls after the Christians and the Jews. They had always had temporary buildings outside, but permanent structures required large amounts of ready cash, which they did not have. In the 1870s, wealthy Muslims began to construct permanent dwellings in various places outside the city walls. The Husaynis’ neighborhood prompted other wealthy Muslims to follow in their footsteps. By 1918 there were thirty buildings, including the homes of other prominent families like the Nuseibahs, al-Afifis and others. Eventually the Nashashibi and Jarallah houses would outnumber those of the pioneering Husaynis – another indication of the family’s decline. The houses were usually preplanned by European architects, and all of them were built of stone and designed to allow for an independent water supply. Few of them exhibited classical Muslim architectural features, except for Ismail’s house – the future Orient House – which included the classical Muslim perforated screen, the qamriya (though this is more orientalist than oriental). The furniture was heavy and European, notably in Rabah’s house, which would become the property of the American Colony (first leased, then purchased). The furniture in the reception rooms and bedrooms in Ismail’s house was also of the heavy European kind, reflecting the vogue for conspicuous wealth and the process sweeping over the entire empire.

  In Istanbul, too, the sultans moved from the Topkapi Palace, their residence until the reign of Abd al-Aziz II, into the rococo Dolmabahce Palace, built by that sultan in 1867.20 The penchant for ostentation did not affect the notables’ apparel; until the end of the Hamidi period, they continued to wear modest long robes with fine white linen cloth, called yans, wrapped around the tarbush. A period photograph shows many of the public figures of the day standing before the Khalidiyya library in Jerusalem, all dressed in this traditional style.

  The villas in the Husayni neighborhood were not the family’s only real estate. Between the start of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the First World War, Imam Yunes al-Husayni, a son of Musa and brother of Ismail – who was, as noted, the guardian of the Nabi Musa religious properties – built a number of houses on Salah al-Din Street, increasing the family’s wealth. The Alamis settled at the eastern end of the street while the Husaynis occupied the western end.21

  By the end of the war, a new neighborhood known as al-Sahra had sprung up there at the intersection of Salah al-Din and Ihwan al-Safa Streets, where the family constructed some more houses. By 1918 this neighborhood consisted of about fifty houses.

  The buildings outside the city walls demonstrated the family’s high status. Only some 200 families lived in these new neighborhoods, and they formed the nucleus of the class from which the municipal council was chosen. They enjoyed the best higher education and were the first to benefit from Western training and the Ottoman reformist i
nstitutions. Thus they continued to dominate the traditional education system in Jerusalem. Their training made them highly useful to the Hamidi government, and indeed in the 1890s members of the family filled various posts, not only in Jerusalem but all over the empire. Ahmad Rasim was educated in the traditional manner, proceeding from the religious primary school to the Islamic college, where he studied Muslim religious law, but his son Said received a Western education at the Jewish school, Alliance Israelite. Yet it should be noted that the traditional education received by Ahmad Rasim was not the same as that which his father, Said I, had received, much less his grandfather, Hassan al-Husayni. Perhaps that was why he did not join the ulama, despite his profound religious learning, but went into business and even became the head of the city’s chamber of commerce.22 Thus both the traditional and the Western kinds of schooling helped pupils to advance in the changing world of the Ottoman Empire, as shown by the career of two other Husaynis – Ismail and Shukri.

  SERVING THE EMPIRE: BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

  By the 1890s it was clear to see that the reign of Abd al-Hamid II, for all its rigidity, pan-Islamic pretensions and whims, suited the Husaynis immeasurably better than the reformists, who viewed the notables as inveterate obstacles to progress and change.

  The family was again at the peak of its power. Salim was mayor of Jerusalem, Mustafa and after him Tahir II were muftis, Rabah was the naqib and Musa was the head of the chamber of commerce – each a major power base in that decade. Their position was even stronger than it had been in Hassan’s lifetime. This was confirmed by the Egyptian visitor Abd al-Jawad al-Qayati, who stayed in the tent of Mufti Mustafa al-Husayni during the Nabi Musa celebrations in the early 1890s.23 This was a great honor, sought by many who clustered around the tent in the unusually wet spring. The road to Jericho was unpaved since it was used only for the celebrations, and mud, fierce winds and pouring rain caused great hardship. The single building at the holy site offered no shelter to the thousands of celebrants, and the small tents they erected were either swept away by rushing water or blown away by the wind. Some of the participants did not return to Jerusalem, and though for a while it was feared they had been swept away by the flash flood, they were eventually found safe and sound. But no one gave up, reports the Egyptian visitor. They all obeyed Mustafa’s directions and trusted his judgment. The admiration for the mufti’s persuasive powers in the face of natural hardships was undoubtedly helped by his generous hospitality to the many guests from Arab countries, but it also reflected his reputation in the Muslim community in Jerusalem, which enhanced the family’s power.

  The family were powerful not because they were ‘reactionary’ but because they were flexible. Moreover, the ruler they supported, Abd al-Hamid II, was not a thoroughgoing reactionary. He continued to construct the modern state with new power bases like the municipalities and the new Ottoman administration. He also continued the construction of a diverse educational system, which gave the Husaynis the means to make the most of their excellent relations with the Hamidi regime.

  Especially in the provinces, the Ottoman educational system offered a variety of tracks, both traditional and modern, to individuals who wished to make their way in the Ottoman world. However, in the Hamidi period education was not the decisive factor that made a man a ‘traditionalist’ or a ‘modern’, and the empire provided a choice of religious or administrative trajectories without a formal educational career. In 1869 the government passed a law of compulsory primary education in the empire, to be implemented by local boards of education. However, there was no stringent enforcement, and the vague supervision made it possible to negotiate a compromise between local reality and the provisions of the law. In the Jerusalem sanjaq there were 234 primary schools, the traditional kuttabs where boys were taught the Qur’an, the Sunna, arithmetic, Arabic and Turkish. Before their migration to the Husayniyya, the boys of the family attended the kuttab adjacent to the Haram al-Sharif, and later various schools near the Lions’ Gate.24 From the kuttab it was possible to proceed to one of the new secondary schools, such as the one that opened in 1891. Only in 1906 did a reformist secondary school open, the Rashidiyya (probably named after Ahmad Rashid, the governor of Jerusalem), which was modeled on the French lycée. Every sub-district had two such schools, one for boys and one for girls, in which they learned Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and French.25

  The Husayni sons were among the first to attend European schools, notably the nearby school of the American Colony, run by the Spafford family. The Americans had arrived shortly before the start of the Hamidi reign, after an odyssey that began with the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. Horatio Spafford, a successful attorney and church leader, and his Norwegian-born wife devoted themselves to helping the survivors and reconstructing the devastated city. After three years of exhausting toil, they set out on a pleasure trip to Europe, but the ship on which they sailed sank on 21 November 1874, and the only survivors were the Spaffords’ daughter Anna and her husband. Seven years later, moved by these tragedies and their deep religious faith, Anna, her husband and their daughters went to the Holy Land, along with sixteen likeminded friends, including three children. That was the start of the American Colony, and then the hand of fate – whether Muslim or Christian – intervened. Rabah al-Husayni went bankrupt and sold them his beautiful residence.

  The range of possibilities open to the Husaynis may be illustrated by the lives of Musa’s two sons, Ismail and Shukri, who were educated differently yet followed similar careers. This is another individual example that confounds the widespread theories of Westernization – for example, that of the important scholar John Szyliowicz – which assume that a Western education assured one a great career in the Ottoman Empire. In fact, the Husaynis repeatedly fail to bear out the theories of scholars of the period who maintained that a Western education led to secularism and nationalism. Ismail received a Western, possibly American, education, whereas Shukri received a traditional one. Yet Ismail was very conservative and avoided nationalism, while Shukri was in the vanguard that sought to secularize his society.

  Nor does another theory propounded by the scholar of Arab nationalism George Antonius fit the case. According to Antonius, American education in the Middle East catalyzed the rise of nationalist thinking among the local elite. Therefore Ismail, who had come into contact with American missionaries, should have been infected with nationalism, but he was not, while Shukri promptly picked it up. It is true that at the age of sixteen he, too, was exposed to a little French education, so perhaps the West did have some influence on him.

  Shukri’s brilliant administrative career began in 1881, when he was eighteen, with his appointment to the district of Jerusalem’s Board of Education. A young product of a traditional religious education, Shukri was devoted to the practice of zakkat, the Muslim duty of charity. In 1885 he launched a charitable organization called the Association of Muslim Welfare Society (Maqasid). In it he combined a traditional institution with a Western concept of social welfare, a fact that illustrates how nuanced the individual personality is compared with the sharp distinctions proposed by the many theories about transitions in human society in the modern age.

  In 1885 Shukri’s religious devotion earned him an invitation to Istanbul. At this time Sultan Abd al-Hamid II began to backtrack and to maintain that pan-Islamism would save the empire from total collapse. Shukri was given a senior post in the Ottoman treasury, that of chief paymaster of the Ministry of Education in the capital, one of the most important economic posts in the Hamidi bureaucracy. Money, and the people in charge of it, turned the creaking wheels of the empire, and Shukri was able to help his family out of trouble when necessary. He also served as its bridge to the rich and diverse Arab cultural world of the late nineteenth century. He became acquainted with many of the contemporary figures of Arab literature and philosophy. This, no less than his position in the administration, stood the family in good stead in 1908, when secular forces came to power in the Ottoman Empire. />
  As already noted, Ismail received a more Western education. In addition, he had the eldest son’s advantage of inheriting the family lands in the villages around Jerusalem. Due to his connection with the fellahin, his first appointment was as a tax collector. This was followed by a career in the Ottoman administration. The highest post he held was that of chief of education in Idna, then part of Jerusalem. During the Hamidi reign, he was the most influential person on the Board of Education assigned to implement reforms in the district of Jerusalem.

  Though he was a scion of the Tahiri branch, during the Hamidi period Ismail was regarded as the head of the two Husayni branches. However, by this time the family had already lost its clear hierarchical structure. What makes Ismail the central figure of this chapter is not only his status as head of the family but his interesting relations with the sultan and the Europeans and with the newcomers on the scene, the Jewish settlers. He was the last major figure to be untouched by nationalism, and he judged townspeople and visitors not according to their religious or national affiliation but according to familial or possibly class interests.

  Ismail liked to relax on the flat roof of Rabah’s house when it was still his cousin’s, and even after it had been leased and then sold to the Americans. It had a broad view of the lovely surrounding landscape and a small bayt sayfi (summerhouse), in which it was possible to rest and enjoy the fresh air. Beginning in the 1880s, the young people of the American Colony would come up to Rabah’s roof every day, from spring to fall, to take part in a summer feast.26

  It was on that same roof, at the end of March 1897, that Ismail made a major contribution to Palestinian society. He had just been appointed head of the Ottoman Department of Public Instruction. On this occasion he did not pass the time aimlessly with members of the household and other colonists but spoke privately with Anna Spafford’s young daughter, Bertha. He talked to her about the education of girls in Jerusalem and said he was looking for a teacher from the American Colony to supervise the only Muslim girls’ school in the city. It is doubtful he was aware of the precedent he was setting by asking a Christian to supervise the education of Muslims. He lived in a world that the Turkish sociologist and scholar Sherif Mardin described as bureaucratic Islam – that is, Islam in the service of Ottoman bureaucracy rather than bureaucracy in the service of Islam. In that doomed world, religious ideology was not a prescription for life, it was an abstract discussion and only inspired action when it was politically or socially expedient in advancing someone’s personal interests.27 Ismail, with his Western education, Ottoman training and brilliant administrative career, did not need that ideology when interpreting the reality around him. When he needed to choose suitable individuals in the cause of education, he picked them on the basis of their qualifications and his connections with them or their families. Bertha Spafford was a natural choice – Ismail had been her father’s pupil and had known her since she was a child.