The Jew is Not My Enemy (9 page)

The meeting between Hitler and the mufti produced immediate results. Soon after, Hajj al-Husayni was allowed to hire a staff of sixty Arabs in Germany to run an Arabic-language radio service for the Nazi shortwave Oriental Service that targeted the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and India. Broadcasting out of Zeesen, south of Berlin, the programming skilfully intermingled anti-Semitic propaganda with verses from the Quran and the Hadith depicting Jews as the enemies of Muslims until the end of time. The Hadith narrating of how, at the end of times, stones and trees would supposedly speak to Muslims and say “There is a Jew hiding behind me” would most certainly have figured prominently in his radio chats.

But Hitler had bet on the wrong horse. There may have been isolated sympathy for the Nazis in some parts of the Muslim world, Egypt in particular, but there was no sign of this in Iran, Turkey, or India, not even in the mufti’s native Palestine. It was only in Bosnia, where the mufti raised the now infamous Muslim SS division, that he had some success and managed to hold sway over the mosque establishment, as well as with Muslim pows of the Red Army. While addressing the imams of the 13th Waffen SS Mountain Division in October 1944, Hajj al-Husayni dwelled on the convergence between national socialism and Islam. He summarized this as follows:

• Monotheism – unity of leadership, the leadership principle;
  
• A sense of obedience and discipline;
  
• The battle and the honour of dying in battle;
  
• Community, following the principle: the collective before the individual;
  
• High esteem for motherland and prohibition of abortion;
  
• Glorification of work and creativity: “Islam protects and values productive work, of whatever kind it may be”;
  
• Attitude towards Jews – “in the struggle against Jewry, Islam and National Socialism are very close.”
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Despite his calls to Arabs to support the Nazis, Hajj al-Husayni’s pleas fell on deaf ears. When American troops landed in North Africa to engage Rommel’s Afrika Korps, the Mufti moaned on the radio: “The Americans are the willing slaves of the Jews … as such the enemies of Islam and the Arabs.”
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The path that took a Muslim cleric from the Middle East into the bosom of the Third Reich is the story of a man who served three colonial masters – the Ottomans as a military officer, the British as one of their appointed muftis, and Hitler as an ally.

Born into a well-known landowning family in 1897, Mohammed Amin al-Husayni’s father was the mufti of Jerusalem and a prominent early opponent of Zionism. The al-Husayni clan were formidable power brokers in Palestine during the Ottoman period; thirteen of its members sat as the mayor of Jerusalem between 1864 and 1920.

Young Amin al-Husayni first attended an Islamic school, but later went to one of the Ottoman government institutions, where he learned to speak fluent Turkish. As the son of a cleric whose elder half-brother
was already a mufti, in 1912 young Amin was sent to study Islam at the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He never graduated.

After dropping out of Al-Azhar, he returned to Jerusalem in 1913 before going to Istanbul to join the Military Academy. Here, too, he could not complete his education because of the outbreak of World War i, in which Turkey joined Germany against Britain, France, and Russia. After being commissioned as an artillery officer, al-Husayni was assigned to the Forty-Seventh Brigade stationed in and around the city of Smyrna. It was during the Ottoman caliphate’s darkest hours that the future Grand Mufti of Palestine would commit treason and betray his oath. A sworn pan-Islamist who would later invoke Islam in every action he took, he had no problem whatsoever selling out the very caliphate of Islam he had sworn to defend in exchange for British favours.

In November 1916, while his own Ottoman army was fighting the British, al-Husayni took a three-month disability leave and moved to Jerusalem. While pretending to convalesce, and still in the pay of the Ottoman army, Hajj al-Husayni secretly severed his allegiance after being bought off by the British, who made him an officer in the army of their ally, Sharif Hussein bin Ali, who later became king of Hejaz.

By 1917 the British army under General Allenby had defeated the Ottoman Turkish forces, and, with the aid of the Arab irregulars, occupied Palestine and Syria. For the first time since the Crusades in 1099, Jerusalem had fallen to a largely Christian army; this time with the aid of the native Muslim population. Seven hundred years after the Kurdish general Saladin had liberated Jerusalem, the city was back under the flag of a European power. Ironically, it was Muslims who helped defeat the caliphate.

After the war ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, it dawned on the Arabs of Palestine that liberation at the hands of colonial
powers would not entail freedom. As Arab political scientist Samir Amin famously declared decades later, “The Armies of the North can never bring freedom to the peoples of the South.” The Palestinians who had been part of the Ottoman caliphate for more than four hundred years and had elected members to the Ottoman Parliament in 1877, 1908, 1912, and 1914 now found themselves locked inside a cage of their own making.

When World War I ended, the Arabs began to riot, demanding the rescinding of the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine. True to their tradition, the British set up a royal commission to look into the riots. Hidden in the details of this commission’s report can be found the role of Hajj al-Husayni and his collaboration with the British.

The commission’s report, filed on July 1, 1920, argued that the disturbances were caused by the Arabs’ disappointment over unfulfilled promises of independence that the British had made during the war to Sharif Husein ibn Ali of Mecca, as well as their belief that the Balfour Declaration implied the denial of their own right to self-determination. It said the Arabs feared that establishing a Jewish national home would lead to such substantial Jewish immigration that the Arabs would become subjects of the Jewish community. The report concluded that the British must rule with a firm hand, meaning the policy of the Balfour Declaration would not be reversed, but also confirming that the Arabs would be treated fairly.

Buried in the report was the name of the English officer who had recruited Hajj al-Husayni. Capt. C.D. Brunton told the commission that he found al-Husayni very pro-English and that he had facilitated the dropping of British War Office pamphlets from the air promising the Palestinian Arabs peace and prosperity under English rule – “the recruits [were] being given to understand that they were fighting in a national cause and to liberate their country from the Turks.”
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Hajj al-Husayni wasn’t the first or the last Arab leader to demonstrate political short-sightedness. After first collaborating with the British, he now led the anti-Balfour Declaration riots. As a result, in April 1920, the British authorities sentenced him to ten years in prison. The future mufti escaped to Syria, but when the Damascus regime collapsed, the fugitive al-Husayni fled to Transjordan.

In the 1918 British elections, former Home Secretary Herbert Samuel, who was one of the country’s prominent Zionists, lost his seat in parliament. Samuel’s ideas had helped shape the Balfour Declaration. In addition, it was Samuel’s idea to offer thousands of Russian Jewish refugees during the war years a choice of being conscripted into the British army or returning to Russia for military service. Many of these new British soldiers of Russian Jewish background became part of the British army that defeated the Ottomans and occupied Palestine and Jerusalem.

After losing his seat in Parliament, Samuel was appointed Britain’s first high commissioner to Palestine. In a twist of fate, by helping defeat the Ottomans, Hajj al-Husayni and his anti-Zionist jihadis had helped make one of the leading Zionists the de facto ruler of British Palestine.

Herbert Samuel went to Palestine with the full weight of the British Empire behind him and the collective expertise of the empire’s fine-tuned statecraft for ruling colonies. As few as fifty thousand British civil servants governed five hundred million souls in India for more than a century. Palestine, by comparison, was no big deal. One of the first acts of the new high commissioner was to pardon Hajj al-Husayni and bring him back from Transjordan into the British fold in Jerusalem. Samuel knew how valuable al-Husayni, the head of a prominent family, was to the British administration.

In March 1921, the mufti of Palestine, Kamil al-Husayni – Amin al-Husayni’s half-brother – died, leaving the position vacant. To fill the vacancy, the British administration arranged an election, in which they would select from the top three vote-getters.

When the elections were held in April, al-Husayni received the least number of votes among the four candidates. The top three vote-getters all belonged to a rival clan of the Husaynis, the Nashashibis. For the first time, no al-Husayni was in the running for the position of mufti.

The shocking defeat of the heir apparent caused widespread distress among the Husayni clan, who began a territory-wide campaign of petitioning the British, demanding that the high commissioner set aside the election results and appoint Hajj al-Husayni as mufti.

Jerusalem mayor Raghib al-Nashashibi bitterly opposed any accommodation for al-Husayni. The two leading families of Palestine were sworn enemies of each other. (Later, this feuding proved extremely costly to the Palestinian people, just as today Fatah and Hamas are perennially at each other’s throats. It is remarkable how feudalism and clan-based tribalism has played such an important role in the tragedy of Palestine.)

As the feuding reached fever pitch, the British stepped in to resolve the problem with a stroke of good old colonial arm-twisting. High Commissioner Samuel summoned the Nashashibi front-runner and persuaded him to withdraw. This automatically promoted Amin al-Husayni to third position, thus allowing the British diplomat to appoint his man as a symbolic chief of the Palestinian Arabs.

Thus was born the mufti of Palestine, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, delivered by Caesarean section under the direction of a British Zionist architect of the Balfour Declaration. Because he lacked Islamic credentials, Hajj al-Husayni received the title not of Grand Mufti, but merely Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine. Nevertheless, his followers openly addressed him as the Grand Mufti, a title that has stayed with us ever since.

Subsequently, in 1922, the British high commissioner created the Supreme Muslim Council and had the Grand Mufti elected as its president. This was a significant development, for the council was given control of funds, amounting to tens of thousands of pounds annually. In
addition, the Grand Mufti controlled all the Islamic courts in Palestine and exercised his authority to appoint teachers and preachers. Effectively, the mufti began to control the lives of the people in British Palestine with unmatched authority. In return, the mufti offered near-total cooperation to the British colonial powers while keeping Palestinian demands in check from 1921 to 1936.

The Grand Mufti’s rise to power in Palestine must be seen in contrast to events in the rest of the Muslim world, where – from Egypt to Turkey and Indonesia to Iran – the population was emerging from under the weight of religious leadership and embracing a more secular approach to Islam and the community. In the words of Bernard Lewis, rather than the nation being a sub-unit of Islam, Islam became a sub-unit of the nation in which citizenship was not based on religion.
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In the 1920s, most of the Muslim world did not live under sharia law. In Turkey, Kemal Atatürk had separated religion and state in 1924, while next door in Iran, Reza Shah Pahlavi was introducing laws to enable a break with medievalism. Farther east, in India, the Muslim leadership – represented by Muhammad Iqbal, the philosopher-poet; Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became the founder of Pakistan; and Sir Sultan Mohamed Aga Khan, one of the founders of and the first president of the All-India Muslim League – were all Muslim modernists.

The Islamic traditionalists were deeply troubled by these steps towards modernity in the Muslim world. They saw these developments as a threat to their own power. To counter the march of history, the clerics would tell their congregations that science, technology, and European ideas were satanic, indeed an attack on Islam itself. Atatürk was labelled a Jew; Reza Shah a Shia, and thus a Jew; and the Aga Khan a British stooge. This resistance to modernity gave birth to the contemporary Islamist movement, whose leading protagonists were Hasan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Syed Maududi, who established the Jamaat-e-Islami, in India. (I will
later examine Maududi’s role as the creator of the Islamist monster let loose in Pakistan. The Jamaat-e-Islami in India and in Pakistan became the vessel in which Saudi-funded Islamic extremism was nurtured.)

At a time when the Muslim world yearned to move forward and embrace the twentieth century, al-Banna, al-Husayni, and Maududi demanded a return to governance under sharia law as a rebuttal to Western civilization, which they viewed as essentially a Jewish conspiracy against Islam. However, until the 1930s, the Grand Mufti, despite his own Islamist leanings, was happily sucking up to the British colonial authorities while strengthening the grip of his Supreme Muslim Council over the Arab population of Palestine. The obvious hypocrisy of being anti-West while seeking help from the West is still the norm in Arab diplomacy and politics.

In 1922, when protests against steady Jewish immigration and Zionist land purchases erupted across Palestine, the Mufti refused to be associated with the demonstrating crowds and kept his distance from the movement, unwilling to risk his close ties to Sir Herbert Samuel, to whom he owed his title, wealth, and power. Not only did the mufti let down the Palestinians in the protests of 1922, he also brought together other notables of the landed aristocracy to put an end to the peaceful protest of the Palestinians who had stopped paying taxes to the British administration.