The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty

by Ilan Pappe

  His public utterances were also fueled by the fact that the Haram al-Sharif, particularly the Western Wall, was still threatened by a Jewish takeover. High Commissioner Chancellor suggested to the mufti that the mandatory government, together with the Palestinian leadership, come up with a compromise. Otherwise the government would put the issue of the ownership of the Wall to an international forum, which would probably rule in favor of the Jews. The mufti replied that he would prefer an imposition by an international forum to voluntary surrender. Chancellor replied, ‘But this way you’ll show yourself a statesman.’ ‘But I’m not a statesman,’ replied the mufti. ‘I am a cleric.’13 Disregarding the mufti, the British authorities appointed a special committee headed by a Swede named Lufgren to examine the question of the Western Wall. The committee tended to favor the Muslim side but nevertheless called for considerable changes in the status quo.

  In the meantime, al-Hajj Amin went on rallying the Muslim world to help save Jerusalem. In October 1930, he spent a few days in Cairo to meet with a delegation of Muslims from India led by Shawqat Ali, one of the leaders of the Muslim minority in the subcontinent and the brother of its greatest religious scholar, Sayyid Muhammad Ali. In December of that year, al-Hajj Amin sent Jamal to follow the delegation to London and strengthen their association with this important ally.14 When Muhammad Ali died early in 1931, he was buried in Jerusalem in accordance with his will. His funeral became a great Muslim demonstration.

  It was a very cold day in January when Muhammad Ali’s coffin, draped in a green flag embroidered with verses from the Qur’an, was carried to his grave. Long consultations before and after the funeral prepared the groundwork for the Pan Islamic Congress that took place in Jerusalem later that year. It was not the only important funeral that year. Sharif Hussein, a sincere friend of the Palestinian movement, though he lacked power or political influence, died that summer. A vast throng surrounded the Dome of the Rock to pay homage to the man who at the end of his life sought in vain to claim Palestine for the Arabs. Towards the end of the mandate and immediately after, his son King Abdullah of Jordan would use the tomb as a pretext for claiming Jerusalem.

  Muhammad Ali and the sharif were buried in the same mausoleum in Dar al-Khatib, behind the eastern wall of the Haram.15 This mausoleum had originally been a religious school – an Anatolian noble-woman had donated it to the religious authorities in the fourteenth century. Later both Musa Kazim and his son Abd al-Qadir would also be buried in its chambers. But the amicable coexistence of the deceased contrasted with the conflicting political aspirations of the Hashemites and Husaynis in Jerusalem. During the Jordanian rule, a visitor might have guessed that only Sharif Hussein was buried there, as the entrance bore his emblem flanked by Jordanian flags. Today it is once more the burial place of the Palestinian aristocracy.

  As soon as the mourning period was over, al-Hajj Amin was eager to hold the first Pan Islamic Congress in Palestine. Such congresses had already taken place, but never in Jerusalem. Al-Hajj Amin had tried to organize one in 1922 and failed, but in June 1931 he succeeded. First he had to secure the High Commissioner’s support, which he obtained by promising that the congress would not discuss any issues that might embarrass the British authorities.16 Chancellor was about to be succeeded in October by Sir Arthur Wauchope and was therefore fairly sympathetic. The mufti did not, however, try to conciliate the opposition. Nor did he cooperate with the later attempts of the visitors from India and Egypt to unify the Palestinian camp.

  Al-Hajj Amin wished to give the event an air of spontaneity. During Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque on 4 September 1931, Shawqat Ali announced, probably by agreement, that a Pan Islamic Congress would open in Jerusalem on 31 December that year. A letter of invitation that still survives today indicates that the mufti was indeed careful not to make any reference to the political struggle in Palestine. The honored addressee is invited to take part in a congress whose purpose is to prevent divisions in the Arab world. There could not have been a more appropriate place for such a gathering than the mosque of al-Aqsa.17

  Twenty-two Muslim countries, both Shi‘i and Sunni – all the Muslim states at that time with the exception of secular Turkey – were represented at the congress.18 Most delegates were not official representatives, since the governments of the states concerned were being very circumspect about Jerusalem and Palestine. The Turks did not come because Shawqat Ali, who considered himself a potential caliph, had sent an invitation to a member of the Ottoman family known as Abdul Majid III.

  At the time, there were rumors all over the Middle East that the caliphate might be revived, an idea that Ataturk’s Turkey resisted with all its might. The gathering was pulled in two different directions: the Indian representatives wanted to use it to promote the idea of the caliphate, while al-Hajj Amin wanted it to strengthen Muslim support for the Palestinians. He received the blessing of his old mentor, Sheikh Rashid al-Rida, which carried much weight. Rida was one of the promoters of the caliphate, and his willingness to place the issue of Palestine at the top of the agenda testified to the strong link between him and his former disciple.

  During the congress, al-Hajj Amin also had to struggle against hostility towards Christians, expressed in particular by al-Tabatabai, the former prime minister of Iran. Aware of the standing of Christian Palestinians in local politics, and perhaps loyal to the tradition of his branch of the family, which had coexisted peacefully with Jerusalem’s Christian elite, al-Hajj Amin fought against this sentiment.19 When he had gone to Egypt in person to seek official support, he had run into an advance campaign by the Jewish Agency to dissuade the Egyptian government from sending representatives to the congress. The government was worried by the idea of the caliphate and sent no delegates, but the Wafd, the largest political party in Egypt, did.20 Another proposal on the congress’s agenda that worried the Egyptians was the establishment of a Muslim university in Jerusalem, which the scholars of al-Azhar feared would eclipse their own institution. Rashid al-Rida succeeded in dispelling their anxiety, as perhaps did al-Hajj Amin’s letter to King Fuad I and to Egypt’s prime minister, Sidqi Pasha, explaining the modest aspirations of the projected university. It was mainly intended to provide a Palestinian counterbalance to the Hebrew University.21

  Al-Hajj Amin did not fare much better in Damascus, where the leaders of the national camp declined his invitation. They were in the midst of delicate negotiations with the French and did not wish to be identified with an Arab anti-colonialist front. Some of the Syrian leaders also suspected that the congress was intended to attack the Palestinian opposition, and so when al-Hajj Amin arrived in Damascus in June 1931 he found them unresponsive.22 Those who turned al-Hajj Amin down had been helped by him during the Syrian revolt in 1925, but they would help him in the 1930s when he found refuge there as a political exile.

  Despite these setbacks the list of participants was quite impressive, and al-Hajj Amin managed to steer the congress through conflicting agendas and interests. One of the foremost thinkers of Shi‘i Islam, Sheikh al-Ghaita, making his first appearance in such a gathering, was persuaded to become a spokesman for the Palestinian cause. He delivered the important message that Palestine was greater than the factions of Islam and united its two main currents.23

  The congress opened on 7 December, the morning after an evening ceremony at al-Aqsa mosque described by the British as al-Hajj Amin’s ‘one man show’ and recorded on film by an Egyptian production company. (This was the movement’s first political film, to be followed by many more. It is a vivid document of the congress opening.) Photographs were taken outdoors, then the delegates went into the mosque, sat down on its rush mats and listened to al-Hajj Amin exhorting them to help save Jerusalem.24

  Al-Hajj Amin’s friends had not seen him so active and dynamic for a long time. He pushed resolutions in the plenary sessions and fought to neutralize opponents in the subcommittees. The success of the congress was clearly due to him, and he was chosen to head a pan-Islami
c body, giving him one more title to add to Grand Mufti and President of the Supreme Muslim Council.

  The opposition ran interference through its newspaper Mirat al-Sharq and with a parallel gathering at the King David Hotel titled ‘The Conference of the Islamic Nation’, which drew representatives from all over Palestine.25 But as the High Commissioner reported, ‘The congress strengthened the standing of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni.’26 Al-Hajj Amin was convinced that Fakhri al-Nashashibi, who led the opposition to the congress, was in the service of Zionism. This was not so far-fetched, given Fakhri’s strong ties to the Jewish Agency. At least one Israeli scholar has found a hint to that effect in a letter from Chaim Arlosoroff to the Jewish Agency in London.27

  Yet al-Hajj Amin’s inability to compromise with the opposition did harm the congress and its goals. His close associate Shawqat Ali wrote to a friend, ‘The mufti and his party are unwilling to let others take part in preparing and directing the conference. The opposition behaved chivalrously, announcing that it supported the idea of a Muslim university and the congress, but could not accept a situation wherein the mufti alone makes all the decisions … Had the mufti taken my advice, the results would have been much better,’ he concluded sadly. (He had advised al-Hajj Amin to advance the idea of a new Islamic caliphate.) Indeed, he was so disappointed that the issue of the caliphate was left out of the agenda that he resigned. His resignation did not hurt al-Hajj Amin – on the contrary, it reassured the Arab delegates, who were unenthusiastic, to say the least, about the idea of the caliphate. Though al-Hajj Amin’s inability to unify the ranks was ominous and militated against his success, on the whole the congress left him stronger than before.28

  In 1932 the festival of Nabi Musa also became a battlefield between the rival camps, each of which tried to organize a bigger delegation to the festivities.29 Though for hundreds of years the Husayni, or Prophet’s, banner had led the procession, the Nashashibis announced that their procession would raise a different banner. Al-Hajj Amin did not scruple to get the British authorities to make sure that the Husayni procession, rather than the Nashashibi one, would take place – and so it did.

  In the final analysis, the achievement of the Pan Islamic Congress was personal rather than national. The pro-Palestinian tendency which the Hope Simpson Report seemed to indicate was eroding. The new High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, was friendly to al-Hajj Amin but not necessarily to the Palestinian cause. Wauchope maintained strong personal ties with al-Hajj Amin and helped him to thwart attempts at reforming the Supreme Muslim Council that might have damaged his standing.30 But Wauchope represented the British government, whose policies in 1932 provoked increasing anti-British feelings among the local population.

  In April 1932, a British official by name of Lewis French was appointed to study what could be done to develop the country and help those who had been hurt by the sale of land to Jews. He did not find many such cases and was not persuaded that there was strong resistance among Palestinian landowners to these sales. But he deplored the lack of development plans for rural Palestine and demanded that the economic discrimination in favor of the Jews be stopped. French’s report stunned the Palestinian leadership, historian Yehoshua Porath asserts in hindsight. If that was so, then the leadership overlooked the most significant passages in the report. French was supportive of the Palestinian cause and tried to awaken the leadership to the realities it ignored. But instead of rousing and stopping the sale of land, the leadership was paralyzed, and the executive was not convened until October 1933. When it did, it was dominated by unprecedented hostility towards Britain.31

  The public at large may not have been aware that the Husaynis, too, sold land, though it was an open secret to the family. Even Musa Kazim sold the land of Dalab (on which the kibbutz Kfar Anavim would later be built). Jamal’s brother Tawfiq sold the Jews whole orange groves in Nes Ziona.32 But this practice ended in 1929 and was not revived.

  It took the mufti three years to acknowledge that the 1929 revolt had not made a noticeable difference in the plight of the Palestinians: the Zionist presence in Palestine kept expanding and the British policies remained unchanged. In the 1930s, al-Hajj Amin was not only a social and religious leader but also the head of an important political movement. He became a nationalist politician motivated by considerations of political survival as much as by his commitment to the national cause. It is possible that at this time a kind of Husayni nationalism was developing that guided not only al-Hajj Amin but Jamal and other members of the family as well.

  The hardening attitude of many members of the family was mainly a reflection of the dramatic changes in the character of the country and that of its Arab population rather than any private initiative. In the early 1930s, Jewish immigration became an oppressive reality, and the lack of appropriate action by the British government heightened the feeling of the Palestinian leadership that Palestine could be saved only by extreme measures. But the growing extremism was also indicative of the internal conflicts in the Palestinian camp, which intensified due to the financial straits of the political structure.

  None of the political players could raise sufficient funds to act independently. And even the Husaynis were struggling to raise the necessary budget for the new all-Palestinian conference they wished to convene in the early 1930s. The attempt to revive the annual conferences that had taken place before 1920 was largely a failure.

  LEADING THE RESISTANCE: MUSA KAZIM AND HIS SON ABD AL-QADIR

  For the first time since the family had become a social and political force in the age of nationalism, or perhaps even since the eighteenth century, its members were challenged by popular leadership. The encounter between the high and the low did not go well, and the historians of the Palestinian Left would later denounce the family for its alleged haughty and heartless treatment of the lower strata of Palestinian society.

  The first signs of political organization from below could be discerned in 1932, when Palestinian merchants refused to take part in a government-organized regional trade fair, the Levant Fair, held in Tel Aviv. Employees in the Departments of Education and Transportation resigned their posts. These were sporadic and spontaneous actions, and to some extent the revived activity at the popular level reflected changes in Palestinian political life.

  The Husaynis, Nashashibis and other leading families launched political parties. Some of these took on an independent dynamic that did not always harmonize with family interests, though their agendas were usually factional rather than national. But this was not true for all of the parties. For example, Istiqlal, which came into being in 1932, rose above the clans, calling for unity in the Arab world and protesting its breakup into small states that it regarded as colonialist creations. Perhaps this is why Istiqlal soon fell apart.

  The Husaynis supported the National Youth Party inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, both of which came into being in 1932. In 1934 the opposition, led by the Nashashibis, launched the National Defense Party, while the Husaynis launched a party of their own in March 1935 that will be discussed later. Palestinian society was beginning to develop forms and organizations that might have led it, like other Arab peoples in the region, to political independence but for the presence of a settler movement that coveted their homeland. Such a reality required unity, not pluralism – a solid national movement, not a national society in its infancy.

  The opposition built itself power bases among the rural population and launched an affiliated village party. Many village headmen wrote al-Hajj Amin begging him to honor them with a visit and to involve them in his activities, but the replies sent back in his name offered various excuses (including a broken leg and a sudden illness). He and his family thus failed to acquire a popular power base.33

  In addition to the formation of political parties, there were numerous unofficial conferences, beginning in Nablus. Jamal and his cousin Munif observed the developments and concluded that such spontaneity might eventually restrict al-Hajj Amin’s control ov
er Palestinian politics.

  Jamal set out to channel the radical dynamism of the young men of Nablus. Early in January 1933, he held the first conference of young Palestinians in Jaffa. This meeting was marked by anti-Christian fervor that cooled only after strenuous efforts by Musa Kazim’s young son Abd al-Qadir, at his father’s urging. After all, the Husaynis had traditionally cooperated with the Christians and his father’s nationalism was based on secular Muslim-Christian cooperation.34

  This was an uncharacteristic action for Abd al-Qadir, who represented radicalism in the family – though he never acted against them. Only in 1933 did he appear on the scene as a distinct political figure, and he very quickly made his mark on the Palestinian struggle. In that year, he returned from Cairo, where he had won his spurs in a national struggle alongside the young Egyptians.

  His first political activity had been in 1932, when he helped to organize a boycott against Fuad University in Cairo, which was believed to have been collaborating with the British. Abd al-Qadir himself had been sent to the American University in Cairo, and though the Americans were not viewed as colonialists, it was a Western institution and thus in his eyes a foreign presence on Arab soil. Abd al-Qadir’s protest became progressively radical. At first he was content to design an individual course of studies with the emphasis on Islamic subjects. His favorite subject – ‘Sport and Religion in Arab History’ – foreshadowed his destiny, but he also read extensively about armed struggle in history and religion. Most of his tutors were Western ‘Orientalists’ who believed they had cracked the Islamic code and were now teaching Islam to the Egyptians. When the university diplomas were given out, young Abd al-Qadir’s piercing eyes did not betray his animosity or his intention to embarrass the alien establishment at its most ceremonial.

  The official graduation ceremonies in the summer of 1932 on the university’s splendid campus were expected to run their usual course. The heads of the university, with leading figures in the expatriate community and the Egyptian administration, were all in attendance as the graduates were called one by one to come to the stage and receive their diplomas. Leading the ceremonies was the president of the university, Charles Watson, flanked by heads of departments, including the head of the Department of Oriental Languages, unwittingly destined to become the hero of the day. When Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was called to the dais, he asked to say a few words to the audience.