Nadene Goldfoot
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Hajj Mohammed Amin El-Husseini was born in 1893 and died in 1974. Muhammad Amin al-Husseini was born in Jerusalem. His father, Haj Tahir al-Husseini, married twice: Zainab, with whom he had two sons, Muhammad and Kamel, and Mahbuba, with whom he had eight sons. Muhammad Amin had one son, Salah al-Din, and six daughters: Zainab, Suad, Asma, Nafisa, Jihad, and Amina. He was educated in Jerusalem and then at al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo. He performed the pilgrimage with his family in 1913, while he was still a young man, and he was called “Haj” until the end of his life. In another directive, Amin was the half brother of Kamel; and being their father had 2 wives, it is possible to be confused. Amin was said to be the younger brother of Kamel.
He was the first Arab leader to instigate others to attack Jews in Palestine. He went against Emir Feisal, who later became King of Iraq and King of Syria and been on the plans for Palestine with the Jews' Chaim Weizmann and thought they were good until Husseini's riots changed his mind.
The Ottoman Empire entered WWI in 1915. Foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, who would ultimately be responsible for his government’s Balfour Declaration in November 1917 (the Peel Commission would later hear secret testimony from Lloyd George, too. A month after that declaration, British forces under General Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem in triumph. Four centuries of Ottoman rule were over, and Palestine’s British era had dawned.
In 1917, the Ottoman-appointed mufti of Jerusalem was Kamel al-Husseini, the son and grandson of previous muftis of the Holy City. Kamel immediately made himself invaluable to the Crown, helping calm the nerves of local Muslims wary of coming under a Christian power that, worse still, had just pledged to facilitate a “Jewish national home” in their land.
Kamel’s relations with the Jews would be equally correct; World Zionist Organization chief Chaim Weizmann once called him “one of my best friends.” So satisfied were the British with his leadership that over the following years they made him a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George and inflated his title to the hitherto unknown “grand mufti” of Jerusalem.
In April 1920, the illusion of calm was broken at the annual pilgrimage festival of Nebi Musa. The crowd that year was far larger than in previous years — some 70,000 Muslims poured into Jerusalem, some of them armed, chanting nationalist and militant slogans. Prominent Arabs addressed them from the balcony of the Arab Club. The mayor — an older, more hardline relative of the mufti named Musa Kazem al-Husseini — urged the crowd to “spill their blood” for Palestine. Over the next three days, mobs attacked Jews in the Old City, looting shops and homes. Five Jews were killed and over 200 injured, including 18 critically. Two sisters, aged 25 and 15, were raped.
According to the British military governor of Jerusalem, the “immediate fomenter of the Arab excesses had been one Haj Amin al-Husseini, the younger brother of Kamel Effendi, the mufti. Like most agitators, having incited the man in the street to violence and probable punishment, he fled.” Amin al-Husseini (who was in fact the mufti’s half-brother) fled to Damascus, then later Trans-Jordan, and was sentenced to 10 years in absentia for incitement to riot.
So what did Britain do? Britain hoped that replacing the military regime in Palestine with a civilian one might help calm tempers. Lloyd George tapped the only Jew in parliament, Samuel — author of the 1915 memo, and recently voted out of parliament — as high commissioner. He was to be the first Jew to govern the Land of Israel in 2,000 years. It was just months after the Nebi Musa riots, and one of his very first acts was to order a complete amnesty to those sentenced to prison for their role in them. Those included Amin al-Husseini.
In 1921, the high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, appointed Amin el-Husseini as the mufti of Jerusalem and head of the Supreme Moslem Council. May Day 1921 brought an outbreak of violence in and around Jaffa that dwarfed anything seen the year before: nearly 50 Jewish dead and 150 wounded over six days of bloodletting, and a similar number of Arabs killed by British troops and police. As shocking as Nebi Musa had been, the 1921 Jaffa riots were modern Palestine’s first mass-fatality event.
Samuel noted that several other people had received prison sentences, including Jews. Vladimir Jabotinsky — the Zionist activist who had co-founded Britain’s Jewish Legion in the Great War — had been slapped with 15 years after police found pistols and ammunition in his Jerusalem home. That amnesty was completely successful and the people who were amnestied gave no trouble. “I repealed all that, wiped it out and said, ‘Let us start fresh,’ and it worked out very well,” Samuel testified. “That amnesty was completely successful and the people who were amnestied gave no trouble.”Six months after that amnesty was granted, grand mufti Kamel al-Husseini died suddenly. He was just 54. Samuel had been in Jerusalem less than a year and was already faced with a succession crisis.
The Ottoman law that the British had inherited stipulated that the new mufti be chosen through a vote by Muslim religious experts and local leaders. The top three candidates would be presented to Samuel — formerly, they would have been given to the religious authorities in Istanbul — who would then select one.
Herbert Samuel, seated center, with Jerusalem church leaders and British officials, 1922. (Public domain)
“When this vacancy took place there was a Husseini who had been trained for the post of Mufti, namely, the present Mufti, Haj Amin,” Samuel told the commission. “He was a Haj, he had been on the pilgrimage; he had also been at a University, the University of El-Azhar in Egypt, where he had a Muslim theological training with a view to his being the representative of the family in that post. He was the only man in Palestine with that qualification.”It was a less-than-persuasive defense. The fact that Amin al-Husseini had been on pilgrimage — he had been on Hajj to Mecca a decade earlier with his mother, at 16 — was not a rare distinction, as the children of many prominent families had done the same. Nor was his religious education particularly formidable: Of the three leading candidates for the position, all had attended El-Azhar, likely for longer spells, and all were significantly older. Each had superior religious qualifications — one was inspector of the religious courts, another was a respected theological scholar and head of the Sharia appeals court, and the third was a religious judge. Those credentials entitled them, unlike al-Husseini, to the honorifics of ‘alim (expert) and sheikh — far superior to the mere Hajj of the pilgrim.
In 1936, as chairman of the Arab supreme Council, Husseini organized the Palestine disturbances for which he was sentenced to exile in 1937.
He then fled to Lebanon, and during World War II, participated in Rashidd Ali's pro-Axis coup in Iraq before going to Europe, where he assisted Hitler and was largely responsible for the liquidation of the Jews in the Moslem areas of Bosnia.
In 1946, he escaped to Egypt.
After 1948, he set up a short-lived "Palestine Government" in Gaza, and then did the same thing later in Cairo, Egypt.
Resource:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_Nebi_Musa_riots
The 1920 Nebi Musa riots or 1920 Jerusalem riots took place in British-controlled part of Occupied Enemy Territory Administration between Sunday, 4 April, and Wednesday, 7 April 1920 in and around the Old City of Jerusalem. Five Jews and four Arabs were killed, and several hundred were injured.[1] The riots coincided with and are named after the Nebi Musa festival, which was held every year on Easter Sunday, and followed rising tensions in Arab-Jewish relations. The events came shortly after the Battle of Tel Hai and the increasing pressure on Arab nationalists in Syria in the course of the Franco-Syrian War.
https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2023/11/viscount-herbert-louis-samuel-who-chose.html
https://www.palquest.org/en/biography/6563/muhammad-amin-al-husseini
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia-1992, 7th edition
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/address-to-american-arabs-by-haj-amin-al-husseini
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