Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (; 4 July 1974) was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in Mandatory Palestine. He was the scion of the family of Jerusalemite Arab nobles,: "the scion of one [of] the most influential notable families of Jerusalem." who trace their origins to the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
Husseini was born in Jerusalem, Ottoman Empire in 1897, he received education in Islamic, Ottoman, and Catholic schools. In 1912, he pursued Salafist religious studies in Cairo. Husseini later went on to serve in the Ottoman army during World War I. At war's end he stationed himself in Damascus as a supporter of the Arab Kingdom of Syria, but following its disestablishment, he moved back to Jerusalem, shifting his pan-Arabism to a form of Palestinian nationalism. From as early as 1920, he actively opposed Zionism, and as a leader of the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, was sentenced for ten years imprisonment but pardoned by the British. In 1921, Herbert Samuel, the British High Commissioner appointed him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a position he used to promote Islam while rallying a non-confessional Arab nationalism against Zionism.:"the leading Palestinian political group that developed during the mandate was very largely dominated by Islamic discourse and led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. However, it long found its basic support in Muslim-Christian Associations." During the 1921–1936 period, he was considered an important ally by the British authorities.: "There is an element of amnesiac historiography in the vilification of the mufti, influenced by his subsequent career after 1936. In fact, Husayni served the British exceedingly well for the decade and a half after his appointment, at least until 1936 when he felt obliged to align himself with a growing popular rebellion against his former British masters. One indication of how valuable the British perceived the mufti to be is the willingness of the notoriously tight-fisted Mandatory administration to subsidize him. When the revenues of the public awqaf properties declined after the Great Depression of 1929, and with it the revenues of the Supreme Muslim Council, the latter were supplemented by British subventions starting in 1931, which were naturally kept secret". His appointment by the British for the role of grand mufti of all Palestine (a new role established by the British) helped divide the Palestinian leadership structure and national movement.
While serving as grand mufti, he commissioned a Jewish contractor, Baruch Katinka, to build a mansion for him in Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.Amin al Husseini's dream home
In 1937, evading an arrest warrant for aligning himself against British rule as leader of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, he fled and took refuge in Lebanon and afterwards Iraq. He then established himself in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which he collaborated with during World War II against Britain, requesting during a meeting with Adolf Hitler backing for Arab independence and opposition to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Upon the end of the war, he came under French protection, and then sought refuge in Cairo. In the lead-up to the 1948 Palestine war, Husseini opposed both the 1947 UN Partition Plan and Jordan's plan to annex the West Bank. Failing to gain command of the Arab League's Arab Liberation Army, Husseini built his own militia, the Holy War Army. In September 1948 he participated in the establishment of an All-Palestine Government in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, but this government won limited recognition and was eventually dissolved by Egypt in 1959. After the war and the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, his claims to leadership were discredited and he was eventually sidelined by the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964.: "The leadership of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Arab Higher Committee, which had dominated Palestinian Arab political scene since the 1920s, was devastated by the disaster of 1948 and discredited by its failure to prevent it. The socio-economic base underlying the political power of traditional Palestinian Arab notables was severely disrupted." He died in Beirut, Lebanon, in July 1974.
Husseini was and remains a highly controversial figure. Historians dispute whether his fierce opposition to Zionism was grounded in nationalism or antisemitism, or a combination of both. Opponents of Palestinian nationalism have pointed to Husseini's wartime residence and propaganda activities in Nazi Germany to associate the Palestinian national movement with antisemitism in Europe.
Early life
Amin al-Husseini was born around 1897 in Jerusalem, the son of the mufti of that city and prominent early opponent of Zionism, Tahir al-Husayni.; . The al-Husseini clan consisted of wealthy landowners in southern Palestine, centered around the district of Jerusalem. Thirteen members of the clan had been Mayors of Jerusalem between 1864 and 1920. Another member of the clan and Amin's half-brother, Kamil al-Husayni, also served as Mufti of Jerusalem. In Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini attended a Qur'an school (), and Ottoman government secondary school (rüshidiyye) where he learned Turkish, and a Catholic secondary school run by French missionaries, the Catholic Frères, where he learned French. He also studied at the Alliance Israélite Universelle with its Jewish director Albert Antébi. Antébi considered al-Husseini his pupil, and refers to him in a letter.
In 1912 he studied Islamic law briefly at Al-Azhar University in Cairo and at the , under Rashid Rida, a salafi scholar, who was to remain Amin's mentor till his death in 1935. ; Rashid Rida's defense of traditional Islamic values and hostility to Westernization became a major component of Al-Husseini's religious persona. Like Rida, he believed that the West was waging a War against Islam and encouraged Islamic revolutions across the Muslim World to defeat European colonial powers and Zionism. However, Al-Husseini did not adopt his teacher's Islamic fundamentalism.
Though groomed to hold religious office from youth, his education was typical of the Ottoman effendi at the time, and he only donned a religious turban in 1921 after being appointed mufti. In 1913, approximately at the age of 16, al-Husseini accompanied his mother Zainab to Mecca and received the honorary title of Hajji. Prior to World War I, he studied at the School of Administration in Constantinople, the most secular of Ottoman institutions.
World War I With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, al-Husseini received a commission in the Ottoman Army as an artillery officer and was assigned to the Forty-Seventh Brigade stationed in and around the city of İzmir. In November 1916 he obtained a three-month disability leave from the army and returned to Jerusalem. He was recovering from an illness there when the city was captured by the British a year later. The British and Sherifian armies, for which some 500 Palestinian Arabs were estimated to have volunteered, completed their conquest of Ottoman-controlled Palestine and Syria in 1918.: "":Both local Palestinian Arabs and Jews played almost no role in the conquest of Palestine: the former enlisted after the Arab revolt and were active east of the Jordan, the latter were recruited after the conquest of Jerusalem and saw little military action. As a Sherifian officer, al-Husseini recruited men to serve in Faisal bin Al Hussein bin Ali El-Hashemi's army during the Arab Revolt, a task he undertook while employed as a recruiter by the British military administration in Jerusalem and Damascus. The post-war Palin Report noted that the English recruiting officer, Captain C. D. Brunton, found al-Husseini, with whom he cooperated, very pro-British, and that, via the diffusion of War Office pamphlets dropped from the air promising them peace and prosperity under British rule, "the recruits (were) being given to understand that they were fighting in a national cause and to liberate their country from the Turks". Nothing in his early career to this point suggests he had ambitions to serve in a religious office: his interests were those of an Arab nationalist.
Early political activism In 1919, al-Husseini attended the Pan-Syrian Congress held in Damascus where he supported Emir Faisal for King of Syria. That year al-Husseini founded the pro-British Jerusalem branch of the Syrian-based "Arab Club" (), which then vied with the Nashashibi-sponsored "Literary Club" () for influence over public opinion, and he soon became its president. At the same time, he wrote articles for the (Southern Syria). The paper was published in Jerusalem beginning in September 1919 by the lawyer Muhammad Hassan al-Budayri, and edited by Aref al-Aref, both prominent members of al-Nadi al-'Arabi.
Al-Husseini was a strong supporter of the short-living Arab Kingdom of Syria, established in March 1920. In addition to his support to pan-Arabist policies of King Faisal I, al-Husseini tried to destabilize the British rule in Palestine, which was declared to be part of the Arab Kingdom, even though no authority was exercised in reality.
During the annual Nabi Musa procession in Jerusalem in April 1920, violent rioting broke out in protest at the implementation of the Balfour Declaration which supported the establishment in Palestine of a homeland for the Jewish people. Much damage to Jewish life and property was caused. The Palin Report laid the blame for the explosion of tensions on both sides.. The report was never published, the newly appointed High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel informing the War Office that it was best forgotten. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, organiser of Jewish paramilitary defences, received a 15-year sentence. Al-Husseini, then a teacher at the Rashidiya school, near Herod's Gate in East Jerusalem, was charged with inciting the Arab crowds with an inflammatory speech and sentenced in absentia to 10-years imprisonment by a military court, since by then he had fled to Syria. It was asserted soon after, by Chaim Weizmann and British army Lieutenant Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, who worked in close concert, that al-Husseini had been put up to inciting the riot by British Field-marshal Allenby's Chief of Staff, Colonel Bertie Harry Waters-Taylor, to demonstrate to the world that Arabs would not tolerate a Jewish homeland in Palestine. for a reading which follows closely Meinertzhagen's reading of the events as a British army plot. The assertion was never proven, and Meinertzhagen was dismissed.Regarding the whole period preceding the riot, marked by conflicting rumours, Laurens writes:"For several months, the intelligence service Zionists organised in 1918 multiplied warnings about plots by Arab activists. These pieces of information never received any confirmation from the British (or French) intelligence service. Later Arab sources show this quite clearly: no one claimed responsibility for any planning () for the events, even several decades afterwards". .