Mohammed Amin al-Husseini

Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (Arabic: محمد أمين الحسيني c. 1895-97 – 4 July 1974) was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in Mandatory Palestine.

Al-Husseini was the scion of the al-Husayni family of Jerusalemite Arab nobles, who trace their origins to the eponymous grandson of Muhammad. Husseini received education in Islamic, Ottoman, and Catholic schools. In 1912, he went to pursue further studies in Cairo's Dar al-Da'wa wa al-Irshad, an Islamic seminary under the tutelage of Salafist theologian Muhammad Rashid Rida. After studying there for two years, he went on to serve in the Ottoman army in World War I. At war's end he stationed himself in Damascus as a supporter of the Arab Kingdom of Syria. Following the Franco-Syrian War and the collapse of Arab Hashemite rule in Damascus, his early position on pan-Arabism shifted to a form of local nationalism for Palestinian Arabs and he moved back to Jerusalem. From as early as 1920 he actively opposed Zionism, and was implicated as a leader of the 1920 Nebi Musa riots. Al-Husseini was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for incitement but was 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. During the 1921–1936 period, he was considered an important ally by the British authorities.

His opposition to the British peaked during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. In 1937, evading an arrest warrant, he fled Palestine and took refuge successively in the French Mandate of Lebanon and the Kingdom of Iraq, until he established himself in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. During World War II he collaborated with both Italy and Germany by making propagandistic radio broadcasts and by helping the Nazis recruit Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS (on the grounds that they shared four principles: family, order, the leader and faith). On meeting Adolf Hitler he requested backing for Arab independence and support in opposing the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home. Upon the end of the war he came under French protection, and then sought refuge in Cairo to avoid prosecution for war crimes.

In the lead-up to the 1948 Palestine war, Husseini opposed both the 1947 UN Partition Plan and King Abdullah's designs to annex the Arab part of British Mandatory Palestine to Jordan, and, failing to gain command of the "Arab rescue army" (jaysh al-inqadh al-'arabi) formed under the aegis of the Arab League, built his own militia, al-jihad al-muqaddas. In September 1948 he participated in the establishment of an All-Palestine Government. Seated in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, this government won limited recognition by Arab states but was eventually dissolved by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1959. After the war and the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight, his claims to leadership were wholly discredited and he was eventually sidelined by the Palestine Liberation Organization, losing most of his residual political influence. 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 (kuttub), 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 Dar al-Da'wa wa-l-Irshad, 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 Izmir. 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. 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.