Islam Under the Palestine Mandate: Colonialism and the Supreme Muslim Council 9781350986893, 9781786731272

Table of contents :
Cover
Author Bio
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Plates
A Note on Transliteration
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Islam under Empire
2. Building a Religious System
3. Islam and Politics in Palestine
4. The Mufti and the Supreme Muslim Council
5. Religion and Politics at the Western Wall
6. The Fall of the Supreme Muslim Council
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Nicholas E. Roberts is Associate Professor of History and co-chair of the International and Global Studies program at The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. He holds a PhD from the joint History and Middle East and Islamic Studies program at New York University. His research articles have appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies, the Arab Studies Journal and History Compass, and he has received several awards, including a Fulbright fellowship and a Lady Davis fellowship to conduct research in Israel and Palestine.

“Islam under the Palestine Mandate lucidly explores why and how the British established a new set of Islamic institutions in mandatory Palestine, including the Supreme Muslim Council and the position of Grand Mufti. A valuable contribution to scholarship on modern Palestine, this study also illuminates the links between colonial rule and sectarianism.” Zachary Lockman, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and of History, New York University “One might well ask if yet another book on British mandate Palestine is needed. In this case, the verdict is very much ‘yes.’ Nicholas E. Roberts’ book provides a much-needed corrective to a topic too often understood solely in the context of the Israeli –Palestinian conflict. Roberts resituates Palestine’s mandatory history within a contemporaneous context, one reflective of British imperial policies aimed at controlling Muslim majority subject populations – of which Palestinians were but one. British colonial actors understood Islam as constituting both a potential basis of opposition that needed to be managed, and a means of countering burgeoning nationalist movements, often enough, via the creation of religious institutions (such as the Supreme Muslim Council) that reified religious communities and traditions.” Erik Freas, Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East History, Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York “Writers on the modern Middle East still too often assume that ethnonationalist conflict in pre-1948 Palestine is best understood as a unique case, in isolation from developments elsewhere in the colonial world. Bucking this trend, Nicholas E. Roberts places the Palestine Mandate authority’s machinations squarely in dialogue with those of British administrators elsewhere in the empire. In doing so, he exposes how colonial strategies of rule embracing Muslim socio-political institutions criss-crossed the globe. In Palestine, these strategies would exacerbate fault lines both within the Palestinian Arab community and, ultimately, between Palestinians and Zionists. The success with which Roberts has mined the archives to cast light on these manifold connections makes this book a must-read not only for Middle East scholars, but all those interested in the intersection of Islam and nationalism in contemporary politics.” Paul Sedra, Associate Professor, Department of History, Simon Fraser University

ISLAM UNDER THE PALESTINE MANDATE Colonialism and the Supreme Muslim Council

NICHOLAS E. ROBERTS

For Mary, Will, and Jack, whose love sustains me

Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2017 Nicholas E. Roberts The right of Nicholas E. Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Library of Modern Middle East Studies 57 ISBN: 978 1 78453 135 5 eISBN: 978 1 78672 127 3 ePDF: 978 1 78673 127 2 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Garamond Three by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

List of Plates A Note on Transliteration Acknowledgements Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Islam under Empire Building a Religious System Islam and Politics in Palestine The Mufti and the Supreme Muslim Council Religion and Politics at the Western Wall The Fall of the Supreme Muslim Council

vi viii ix 1 19 42 66 96 118 149

Conclusion

169

Notes Bibliography Index

177 225 239

LIST OF PLATES

Plate 1 Aerial view of Jerusalem in 1931 with al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock in the foreground. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-137058. Plate 2 The Dome of the Rock from the Northeast. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-M361-375A. Plate 3 Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-M32- P-46. Plate 4 The British arrival in Jerusalem, December 1917. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-M31- 1844. Plate 5 Three “fathers” of mandatory Palestine: Field-Marshall Lord Edmund Allenby (l.), Lord Arthur Balfour (c.), and High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel (r.) at the dedication of Hebrew University, March 1925. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-M32- B-430. Plate 6 Muhammad Hajj Amin al-Husayni, mufti of Jerusalem, 1921 – 37 and president of the Supreme Muslim Council, 1922 – 37. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-M33-4150. Plate 7 The calm before the storm: the Yorkshire military band preceding the Nabi Musa procession, April 1920. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-M31-14636.

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vii

Plate 8 British show of force in Jerusalem after the Western Wall riots of 1929. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-M33-4138. Plate 9 Notable politics in action: the 1930 Arab Delegation to London. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-M32- 4149. Plate 10 Members of the Arab Higher Committee in 1936, a year before the mufti’s escape from the country. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LCM33-9157.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

This work generally follows the International Journal of Middle East Studies system of transliteration from Arabic into English. For the sake of clarity, I have used commonly accepted Anglicized versions of Arabic words, personal names and place names, while typically providing an IJMES transliteration in brackets on their first use.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the encouragement and generosity of many people. At New York University, where this project began, I benefited greatly from the inspiration and encouragement of Khaled Fahmy, Michael Gilsenan, Yonni Kotsonis, and especially Zachary Lockman whose support and advice were essential for the completion of this book. I would also like to thank Lauren Benton and Manu Goswami for their illuminating and useful comments on my dissertation. I am also grateful to my fellow students at NYU for pushing me to defend and rethink my ideas and for motivating me with their own research. I have particularly cherished the friendship, advice, and assistance that I have received over the years from Paul Sedra, Noah Haiduc-Dale, Liat Kozma, and Shana Minkin. Much of the writing for this book was done while I taught at Carroll University (ne´e Carroll College) and at Sewanee: The University of the South, where I currently work. Besides helping me establish a career as a professor of Middle Eastern history during a time of great difficulty in the academic job market, I am forever grateful to these institutions for surrounding me with such inspiring and supportive colleagues. While there are many people who have helped me at these institutions, I would particularly like to thank the departmental chairs who have supported my research and teaching: Kimberly Redding at Carroll and John Willis, Harold Goldberg, and Woody Register at Sewanee. Most importantly, my work has been immeasurably improved by the friendship and close working relationship I have with Roger Levine and Kelly Whitmer at Sewanee. Their good cheer, unfailing support, and critical insights have made me a better scholar and teacher.

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I am indebted to the staff of the following libraries for their assistance in locating source material: The National Archives, London; the British Library, London; the Middle East Center Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Rhodes House Library, Oxford; the Israel State Archives, Jerusalem; The Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem; and the Jerusalem Municipal Archives, Jerusalem. This project was also made possible by generous funding from a Department of State Fulbright Fellowship to Israel, a Lady Davis Fellowship to Hebrew University, Sewanee’s James D. Kennedy III endowed Faculty Fellowship, and a faculty research grant from Sewanee, as well as various grants I received from NYU during my dissertation. I will forever be grateful for receiving this financial support, without which I never would have been able to complete the research that I undertook in Israel and Britain. At I.B.Tauris, I would like to thank my editor Sophie Rudland, and before her Maria Marsh, for their constant support for the project and for guiding me through this entire publication process. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of this work for pushing me to develop some of my ideas further, particularly my discussion of how Britain’s treatment of Islamic institutions in Palestine fitted with practices elsewhere in the empire. I am also grateful for Charlotte Weber’s copy-editing assistance, which has made this book a much clearer and more engaging read. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the steadfast support of my friends and family, who have buoyed me up in times of stress with their good humour and kind words. Great thanks go to my mother Sharon Roberts and late father Richard Roberts for their love and unstinting encouragement of all of my academic and personal endeavours. But most of all I am grateful to my wife Mary, who has been by my side throughout the long and meandering journey from research idea to completed book without asking too many times when I might be finished. Her love and support have sustained me more than she can possibly know. I now look forward to finally spending more time with her and our two wonderful sons, Will and Jack.

INTRODUCTION

On October 4, 1920, British intelligence warned the mandatory government in Jerusalem that Muslim prayer leaders at the al-Aqsa Mosque were planning to dedicate their Friday sermon to the Ottoman caliph for the first time since the British occupation in December 1917. Arguing that this change in the khutba (Friday sermon) dedication was “a significant move . . . proposed in furtherance of the [pan-Islamic] agitation,” intelligence officer E. P. Quigley implored the government to take action lest pan-Islam arouse the “fanaticism of the Moslems.”1 Though skeptical of Quigley’s alarmist tone, the chief secretary and his staff worried that this endorsement of the caliph might unsettle Palestinian Muslims, who had clashed with Jews six months earlier at the Muslim Nabi Musa festival in April 1920. In response, Chief Secretary Wyndham Deedes asked each of his district governors and the Palestine police to report back on the local reception to this change. Was this change in the khutba dedication another challenge to the British occupation? Did it signal Muslim rejection of Christian rule in Jerusalem? Could it be an attempt by outsiders, whether Kemalists, pan-Islamists, or even the French, to foment an Islamic uprising? In the end, the feared Islamic uprising never materialized. But the fact that a simple change in the khutba dedication, which was nothing more than a return to past practice, caused weeks of worry for the Palestine government speaks to the anxiety British officials felt toward Islam at the beginning of their occupation. The khutba incident was no one-off moment of anxiety; ever since Britain had occupied Palestine at the end of World War I, colonial officers had fretted about what they understood

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to be Islam’s unique ability to rouse local Arabs, whether in the form of tribal attacks against Jewish settlements or urban unrest, as seen in the deadly Nabi Musa riots of April 1920. Thanks to Orientalist stereotypes about the retrograde Middle East, British officials were conditioned to view Arabs as being too backward to understand politics, leading officials to initially turn to Islam and local “custom” to explain Arab political behaviour. For many, religious fanaticism was seen as the wellspring of Arab political activism and unrest not nationalism. This was especially apparent in British accounts of “disturbances” to the colonial order, such as at the Nabi Musa festival of 1920 or at the Western Wall in 1929, which were often blamed upon the primeval fanaticism of the local population.2 During such moments of crisis, and to a lesser extent during official debates over local practice, such as the debate over the khutba, Islam appeared frightening because it was an element of indigenous life beyond the control and understanding of the colonial authorities. As a result, one of the biggest concerns for British officials at the beginning of their rule in Palestine was the management of the country’s Islamic affairs, a topic that has received little attention from scholars. The British drive to domesticate Islam would also be a reaction to local politics, specifically to the activities of various Arab nationalist organizations that began to challenge colonial rule shortly after the British occupation. At its height after World War I, the British Empire ruled over more Muslims than any polity had up to that point in world history, making Britain, according to Benjamin Disraeli, the world’s greatest Muslim power. Even if we do not accept Disraeli’s self-serving characterization, the fact that more than half of the world’s Muslims lived under British control ensured that “governing the religious affairs of Muslims became central to imperial rule.”3 Whether in utilizing religious leaders and Islamic institutions to enhance Britain’s control over Muslim populations or in combating Islamic resistance movements, officials across the empire saw the management of Islam as a major tool for maintaining colonial order. For that reason scholars, such as Robert Crews, Julia Clancy-Smith, Benjamin Hopkins, and Faisal Devji among others, have interrogated how European empires have interacted with Islamic movements and Islamic institutions across the Middle East, Africa, and Euroasia. But little has been written about Islam in the British Mandate for Palestine.4 Religious matters in general have been

INTRODUCTION

3

given short shrift in discussions of the mandate period. Due to the ongoing scholarly and public interest in the Arab– Israeli conflict, books have tended to concentrate much more on the development of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism or on economic and political conflict between the two sides than on religion, despite the fact that religious issues were often at the centre of the conflict, as in the Western Wall riots of 1929. This book addresses this lacuna by analyzing the ways in which imperial officials understood and managed Islam in mandate Palestine and the impact of their approach on Palestinian politics. Rather than seeing policies toward Islam as peripheral to the imperial project, I argue that they were central to the consolidation of British rule. In the pages that follow, I show how Britain’s approach to Palestinian Islam was developed out of British officials’ selective reading of Ottoman precedent, their limited understanding of Palestine and Palestinians, and their experience ruling Muslims in other colonial contexts. At the same time, I investigate how that approach was also fundamentally shaped by the more immediate geopolitical and local concerns of Protestant Christian officials who ruled over a land holy to three religions and coveted by numerous nations. In the second half of the book, I then consider how Britain’s policies toward Islam influenced the country’s politics through an investigation of the activities of the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC), a Muslim-run religious institution created by the Palestine government to run the religious affairs of the Muslim community, but which also became a powerful force in Palestinian politics under its powerful leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni.

Islam as Threat and Opportunity The debate over the khutba dedication reveals two major British views about Islam. For Quigley and other intelligence agents, Islam was first and foremost a threat because of its potential to challenge the colonial order. British opinion held that Middle Easterners were more prone to fanaticism than Westerners, Arabs more easily led than Europeans, and Muslims more apt to combine matters of church and state than Christians, a condescending attitude famously summed up by the Earl of Cromer’s ruminations about “the want of accuracy . . . of the Oriental mind.”5 At the heart of Arab irrationality was Islam, most often described by British writers as a retrograde faith or a dangerous political ideology. The fact that

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Britain had had to put down a number of Islamic insurgencies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries proved to many British commentators that the faith was inherently dangerous. Whether in the form of the Sepoy Rebellion in India in 1857 or Britain’s encounters with “mad Mullahs” on the Northwest Frontier of British India or its difficulties putting down Islamic uprisings in Somaliland, Sudan, and Northern Nigeria, Islamic resistance appeared to British intelligence and a fair number of colonial officials to be part of a fanaticism at the heart of Muslim societies. Britain’s difficult postwar experience in the Middle East only heightened fears of Islam. Mass revolts against British and French rule in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, as well as smaller demonstrations in many countries, including Palestine, could and would be blamed upon Muslim fanaticism, particularly when rebellions were endorsed by religious fatwas advocating revolution or by political leaders who used Islamic language to rally the masses against European rule.6 According to Martin Thomas, the tendency to view the empire’s Muslim subjects as “predisposed to religious fanaticism or political extremism” was especially prevalent among intelligence agents.7 Preferring to search for secret conspiracies rather than look too closely at the political and economic grievances of local populations, Quigley and men of his ilk often painted a picture of the Muslim world as a hotbed of secret political intrigues in which panIslamism, Turkish irredentism, and, to a lesser extent, Bolshevism competed for Muslim minds. Opposing that position were those, most often officials in the upper echelons of the Palestine government, who saw Islam as a traditional element of society that needed to be accommodated within the colonial order. Many of these administrators believed that if Britain managed Islam well, Islamic institutions could serve as check against what they saw as the inherent fanaticism of the peasant and the political opportunism of the Western-educated effendi (notable) class. This more sympathetic but equally Orientalist approach toward Islam was seen in the sceptical reactions of Civil Secretary Wyndham Deedes, High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, and various British district governors to Quigley’s warnings about the khutba. For while they recognized the political dimension of the khutba and saw its potential for abuse, their experience serving in Muslim countries made them dismissive of Quigley’s claims about a pan-Islamist conspiracy,

INTRODUCTION

5

with Deedes writing in a private note that Quigley’s reports made him doubt the agent’s ability to do his job.8 After speaking with their staffs, the civil secretary and high commissioner decided to let the mufti of Jerusalem offer prayers to Mehmed VI Wahid al-Din at the al-Aqsa Mosque on October 29 and wait to see what would happen. Just in case there was local unrest, Deedes called upon his police and district governors to closely monitor local responses to the khutba for the next six weeks or so.9 While intelligence officers like Quigley continued to hint at vague political conspiracies,10 British governors stated unequivocally that there was nothing nefarious behind the change in the dedication, which they saw as a non-political matter. H. H. Postlethewaite, the district governor in Nablus, for example, wrote that he did not “connect the revival of this custom with any conspiracies or intrigues. It has been the rule from time immemorial to mention the Caliph’s name in prayers and it is natural that this custom, which lapsed temporarily since our occupation, should be revived.”11 Postlethewaite’s opinion was quite sensible given that in British Iraq, local imams had continued to dedicate their sermons to the Ottoman sultan with little impact on local politics, though it is not clear whether he or his bosses knew about practices in Iraq. At the same time Harry Luke, the acting district governor of Jerusalem, pointed out that rather than hurting Britain, the dedication helped by giving blessings to the sultan rather than to the Turkish nationalist Mustafa Kemal, to whom Britain was resolutely opposed at the time.12 Most importantly, every district governor, including those who were more disposed to view Islam as dangerous, reported back to Deedes that the reintroduction of the sultan’s name had made no noticeable impact on local politics.13 For his part, the mufti, Kamil al-Husayni, explained in a meeting with the high commissioner that the change in the khutba dedication had nothing to do with politics. Noting that he had been averse to dedicating prayers to the sultan in advance of the ratification of the San Remo Resolution, he expressed regret for giving into pressure from his fellow Muslims to include the sultan’s name in the Friday prayers. He also apologized for not informing the British authorities in advance about the change, an apology that the high commissioner was prepared to accept on account of the recent decline in the mufti’s health (he would die in March 1921).14

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Although the khutba scare proved to be a false alarm, it revealed to the Palestine government the danger of continuing to operate in the wake of the deadly Nabi Musa riots of April 1920 without an Islamic institution in place that it could count on to administer Islam in a loyal and politically quiescent manner. One month after the change in the khutba dedication, Samuel sent Secretary of State Lord Curzon a letter calling for the creation of a body to oversee Islam, in which he argued that “The establishment of an elected Council . . . concerned with purely religious matters will, I think, meet the desire of the Muslim population for some representative body, and may serve to check any agitation for political autonomy.”15 This desire to make Muslims happy by responding to their religious rather than their political demands would be central to the Palestine government’s approach toward the Muslim community from that point onward. Samuel’s objective would be realized through the government’s creation of the Supreme Muslim Council in December 1921, one of the main subjects of this book. Recognized by the mandatory government as the representative institution of the Palestinian Muslim community, the SMC enjoyed an official recognition that was denied to every political and social organization created by Palestinian Muslims and Christians themselves. Charged with overseeing the religious affairs of the Muslim community, most notably the administration of the country’s Islamic courts and awqaf (Islamic pious endowments), the SMC fulfilled Samuel’s desire to create a Muslim-run religious institution, though the council would never be a purely religious body. The council’s autonomy and the government’s endorsement of its status as the representative institution of the Muslim community meant that the council would be involved in local politics from its inception. As we shall see, this was condoned by British officials, who positioned the SMC as an intermediary institution between the colonial government and the local population that would give Muslims greater control over their own affairs in exchange for keeping the peace. But as in other colonial contexts, British efforts to stage-manage native politics ended up having unintended consequences. For although the SMC acted as a counterweight to Palestinian nationalism for more than a decade, it ultimately became active in nationalist politics itself and served as the platform for its highly controversial leader, the mufti of Jerusalem Muhammad Amin al-Husayni (better known as Hajj Amin al-Husayni), to emerge as an anti-colonial leader during the Palestine Revolt of 1936–39.

INTRODUCTION

7

Contextualizing the Supreme Muslim Council The establishment of the Supreme Muslim Council has come to be seen by many scholars, and particularly Israeli scholars, as one of Britain’s greatest strategic errors in Palestine. Reading backward from Hajj Amin’s participation in the Palestine Revolt and his later alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II, scholars such as Yehoshua Porath and Uri Kupferschmidt have argued that the British decision to create the council was a mistake born of the naivety of colonial officials toward Islam. In his study of the SMC, Kupferschmidt goes so far as to call the establishment of council “an act of appeasement towards the Palestinian Muslims,” born of “the ever present fear of ‘the raising of the religious cry,’ with all the adverse publicity and dangers for Imperial interests which it could possibly entail.”16 Popular histories of the mufti, which tend to present Hajj Amin as a Nazi mastermind behind the violence of the mandatory period and as the inventor of the anti-Semitic Palestinian rejection of the State of Israel, similarly dismiss the British for their lilylivered approach to Muslims.17 To put it simply, these ideas about Britain’s actions are wrong. The idea that the creation of the SMC was an act of appeasement misrepresents British motivations at the time and seems to reflect a contemporary partisan discourse about the dangers of giving in to Islamic terrorism and/ or Palestinian nationalism. If we look at imperial concerns of the period as detailed in government reports, official correspondence, and the private papers of leading figures in the history of the British Mandate, a more complex and interesting picture of Britain’s invention of the SMC emerges. An investigation of British and Israeli archival materials, as well as newspaper reports from the period, memoirs from officials and leading Arab figures of the mandate period, and a wide range of secondary readings, reveals that rather than representing an act of appeasement, the creation of the SMC was overdetermined by the organizational and political needs of the colonial state. My analysis shows that the establishment of the SMC was not forced onto the Palestine government but was the product of Britain’s attempt to indirectly rule its Muslim subjects through a local intermediary, an approach to governance that should be familiar to anyone who has studied imperial policies elsewhere in the empire. Indeed, it is my intention, contra Kupferschmidt and Porath, to show that British policymaking toward Islam in Palestine was not unique when compared

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to other colonial contexts. In doing so, I hope, like Laura Robson, “to move Palestinian historiography away from a focus on the genesis of the ArabIsraeli conflict and the concomitant conception that the modern history of Palestine is sui generis in every way because of the Zionist presence.”18 To be sure, Britain’s support for Zionism had a large influence on how officials interacted with the Muslim community, but I will show that imperial policies toward Muslims developed elsewhere in the empire also had a great impact on the British approach in Palestine. British policy toward Islam in Palestine was influenced by three factors. First, it was shaped by a communalist approach to the local population that bears some resemblance to British policies in India, where officials divided the population into communities along religious lines and then attempted to satisfy the “communal” interests of each group. In Palestine, the division of the population into three religious communities – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish – was seen as protecting the “natural” divisions in society and was justified by the government claiming, rather disingenuously as we shall see, to be following the Ottoman policy of dividing confessional communities into millets, that is, religious communities with legal autonomy over their own religious affairs. The creation of the SMC can therefore be seen as a logical outcome of Britain’s adoption of this neo-millet approach in Palestine, for in the absence of a local institution to represent the Muslim community, it became necessary for the British to invent one. Second, a lack of political and material support from London for postwar nation building, the terms of the mandate itself, and the small scale of British settlement worked against a large-scale colonial intervention into local religion. British officials had no desire or money to build a state-run religious system as had existed during the Ottoman period or to recreate some version of India’s Anglo-Muhammadan legal system. In creating the SMC and placing a member of the traditional elite in power, officials chose to adopt a policy of religious non-interference, also originally developed in India, which they believed to be the most efficient and least fractious way to administer religion. Finally, in elevating a particular notable family – the Husaynis – to an intermediary position between the colonial government and the Muslim population, the imperial power was applying its tried-and-true method of indirect rule to the Palestinian context. If officials like Samuel and Deedes believed that Islam could be useful to the imperial project,

INTRODUCTION

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they understood that success in this matter required identifying and elevating the right Muslims to positions of power, individuals I refer to as “good Muslims,” a term suggested by Jonathon Reynolds’s 2001 article, “Good and Bad Muslims: Islam and Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria.”19 But while the impetus for identifying and courting local intermediaries came from the general colonial preference for indirect rule, it also conveniently built upon the pre-existing Ottoman “politics of notables” whereby local elite families had been empowered by the Ottomans to act as intermediaries between the state and the local population.20

Ottoman Rule and Islam One of the most persistent contemporary myths about Palestine is that Muslims, Jews, and Christians have always been and will always be divided by their religious identities. This myth holds that the ArabIsraeli conflict is a manifestation of an ancient competition for Jerusalem between the Abrahamic faiths rather than the product of a modern struggle between rival nationalist movements. A quick look at the city’s history during the late Ottoman period helps to show the problems with this ahistorical understanding of intercommunal relations. In contrast to the unwavering political significance of Palestine/Israel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, for most of the Ottoman period this sparsely populated, poor, and strategically insignificant territory was a political backwater. The territory that became the British Mandate for Palestine was never ruled as a separate administrative unit called Palestine under the Ottomans but was instead divided between different provinces (eyelets or vilayets) or administrative districts (sanjaks), with Jerusalem becoming an independent district (mutasarifiyya) in 1872.21 Indeed, it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the territory’s fortunes changed, with European interest in the “Holy Land” forcing the Ottoman government to take a more active role in the administration of the Jerusalem district that culminated in the district’s independence from the rest of the territory. As in most empires, the military and administrative presence of the Ottoman state was lighter on the periphery of the empire, particularly before the Tanzimat period (1839– 76) of centralizing reforms. For centuries, most major administrative functions, such as tax collection or

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the supervision of the waqf system, had been farmed out to prominent local Arab notable families, such as the Husaynis, Nashashibis, Khalidis, Alamis, and Nusaybas. And even with increased Ottoman administrative control in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “politics of the notables” remained central to the running of Palestine right up to the British arrival. The division of the territory into separate districts meant that identities tended to be built around sub-state loyalties and regional identifications. While the population was overwhelmingly Arab in ethnicity and Muslim in religious affiliation, local inhabitants identified themselves in myriad ways: with their village, their family, their clan (hamula), their religious community, or their occupation. A Syrian (shami) identification was also strong among the intellectual and commercial elite due to the area’s inclusion in the province of Syria until the late nineteenth century, as well as its economic ties to Damascus, an important factor in determining why some Palestinian politicians called for the country’s union with Syria after World War I.22 Undoubtedly one of the most important sources of identity for local inhabitants was religion. As Donald Quataert writes, “One’s religion – as Muslim, Christian, or Jew – was an important means of differentiation in the Ottoman world.”23 Throughout the empire, where people worshipped, whom they married, how they married or got divorced, their rights of inheritance, whom they associated with, where they lived, and in certain periods even what clothes they wore were affected by their religious identity.24 The holiness of Jerusalem further enhanced these identifications for Palestinians, since the city was a significant destination for Christian and, to a lesser extent, Jewish and Muslim pilgrimage and contained sites that were among the holiest places for the three major monotheistic religions.25 The Palestinian calendar was also full of festivals that brought members of individual religious communities together in private and communal gatherings, such as the Jewish festivals of Purim and Yom Kippur, the Christian festivals of Easter, Christmas, and the Orthodox celebration of the Holy Fire, and Muslim holy celebrations such as Ramadan, the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, and the festivals of Nabi Musa and Nabi Saleh.26 Strengthening the sense of religious identity was the Ottoman millet system. That system recognized various Jewish and Christian religious communities as millets (literally, “nations”), granting them a modicum

INTRODUCTION

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of self-government under the protection of the state: principally the right to provide education and welfare to its members, to collect taxes, and to administer personal law.27 Based upon the Islamic concept that Jews and Christians were entitled to protection due to their status as ahl al-kitab, “people of the book,” the system marked those communities as different from the empire’s majority Muslim population, as shown by the restrictions placed upon their right to worship in public and participate in civil society and their special tax status.28 By the late nineteenth century, however, due to the modernizing reforms of the Tanzimat period, many of those restrictions had been lifted, freeing nonMuslims to serve in government positions and to worship more publicly. While this was intended to create a more unified non-sectarian Ottoman citizenship, the results of such reforms were mixed, for while the reforms helped Christians and Jews improve their social and political standing in Palestine, the increased visibility of non-Muslims and the perception that they had been granted new rights without being given new duties caused tension between the empire’s various religious communities.29 It would be a mistake, however, to exaggerate the importance of religion, which was one of a number of identifications that defined the population. As Rashid Khalidi has argued, in the pre-mandate period, local inhabitants had multiple and overlapping loyalties with “the Ottoman state, the Arabic language, and the emerging identity of Arabism, as well as their country and local and familial foci.”30 Such identifications were not mutually exclusive and could co-exist with a Palestinian identity that emerged among Arab intellectuals in the early twentieth century.31 Here it is good to bear in mind Eric Hobsbawm’s sage reminder that before the modern period and the rise of the nationstate, “men and women did not choose collective identification as they chose shoes, knowing that one could only put on one pair at a time.”32 Indeed, one reason nationalism became so powerful in the modern world is that it naturalized the idea that local identities, economies, languages, and collective memories necessarily submit to the nation and, more perniciously, that they have always submitted to the nation. The overlapping and diverse ways in which local inhabitants identified themselves meant that religion was never the sole factor determining how individuals approached their world. This would soon be made clear to the British authorities when they received petitions after their occupation of the country from groups who chose to identify themselves (and therefore

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their demands) in a multiplicity of ways: in the archives we see petitions from “The Representatives of Ramla,” or “The Muslims of Nablus,” or “the butchers, merchants of cereals and manufacturers,” although all shared a common concern with “our country” (biladna), which was nearly always referred to as Palestine.33 While religion had an impact on an individual’s life choices and life experience, it did not lead to the kind of segregated patterns of settlement seen in Israel/Palestine today. Donald Quataert maintains that patterns of residential settlement in the Ottoman Empire demonstrate that “overall, residential exclusivity by community was not the rule in the 1700–1922 era.” Instead, other criteria, such as wealth and occupation, determined urban segregation.34 This observation is borne out in research on the demography of Ottoman Palestine, particularly on the urban development of Jerusalem, which indicates that religious communities lived together in mixed neighbourhoods and engaged in everyday social and economic interactions, an argument made most recently in Menachem Klein’s Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron.35 We also know from accounts of the Ottoman and mandate periods by Palestinian writers such as Wasif al-Jawhariyyeh, Khalil al-Sakakini, and Hala al-Sakakini that a great deal of social, cultural, and religious interchange occurred between the three communities. Christians attended Muslim religious festivals (particularly Nabi Musa), entered Muslim holy places (it was customary for Christian families to picnic on the grass within the Haram al-Sharif), and on occasion even studied the Qur’an.36 Meanwhile, Muslim folk festivals were celebrated alongside Orthodox holidays (such as the Ceremony of the Holy Fire), and Easter celebrations merged with the festivities of Nabi Musa. Religious interaction also extended to Jewish festivals, such as Purim and Pesach, that were celebrated by Muslims and Christians in Jewish neighbourhoods.37 Finally, as Michelle Campos has identified in her aptly titled book Ottoman Brothers, elite Palestinians in late-Ottoman Jerusalem embraced a shared political consciousness, “civic Ottomanism,” that in many ways trumped religious identification.38 This is not to say, of course, that religious communities lived in complete harmony during the Ottoman period. As Campos has rightly pointed out, “religious, economic, and political rivalry appeared from time to time, and the practical aspects of ‘living together’ could be a source of tension,” particularly around

INTRODUCTION

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religious holidays.39 It is also clear that in the last years of Ottoman rule, the arrival of Zionism and Arab nationalism and the creation of more exclusive patterns of settlement (such as in the New City of Jerusalem) created fissures between the Arab and Jewish communities, though not between Muslims and Christians. In short, the British belief that the population of Palestine had always divided itself along religious lines and that intercommunal tension was normal in the Ottoman Palestine is not borne out in an investigation of the history of the late-Ottoman period. While religion was important to the residents of Ottoman Palestine, it did not predetermine their political beliefs or behaviour. It therefore makes little sense to assume, as British officials often did, that conflict between Arabs and Jews was simply the consequence of an inherent antipathy between Muslims and Jews. Instead, we need to look at how relations between Palestine’s religious and ethnic communities were impacted by Britain’s approach to Middle East governance after World War I, which, as Michelle Campos has found, was built upon “Lord Curzon’s ‘unmixing of peoples’ and the colonial powers’ promotion of ‘traditional’ tribal and sectarian differences in the Middle East.”40

Understanding the Palestine Mandate Palestine was part of the mandate system but was a mandate like no other. Formally recognized in 1922 as one of five new mandates carved out of the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire, the country was formed out of the Ottoman districts of Jerusalem, Acre [‘Akka], and Nablus, which Britain had conquered at the end of World War I. During the war various plans and commitments to divide the Middle East had been developed, with Palestine and its holy places vaguely “promised” to a future Arab state in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of 1915, envisioned as an international zone in the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, and pledged as the future site of a “Jewish National Home” in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. It was the latter commitment to Zionism that determined the country’s political status after the war, with the Balfour Declaration becoming part of the terms of the Mandate for Palestine of 1922. The Balfour Declaration, a letter of support on behalf of the British government for the establishment of a Jewish national home in

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Palestine, written just three weeks before Britain’s conquest of Jerusalem, promoted Jewish interests above those of Palestine’s majority-Arab population in three important ways. First, Jews, as the subject of the declaration, were mentioned by name, whereas Arabs were unmentioned, existing only in a negative sense as being part of “the nonJewish communities of Palestine.” Second, the declaration recognized the Jewish community as having national rights in Palestine, whereas these non-Jewish communities merely had “civil and religious rights.” Finally, the declaration pledged, albeit in a rather vague manner, that Britain would support those Jewish national rights by helping with the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, while offering no positive support for Arab civil and religious rights and no recognition of Arab national rights in any form. Although events and individuals would challenge Britain’s commitment to Zionism throughout the mandate, the Balfour Declaration remained a guiding principle of British rule, committing the mandatory government to support the national rights of the country’s Jewish minority (the bulk of which had only recently arrived in Palestine) over its Arab majority. Class A mandates, such as Palestine, had been recognized in the League of Nation’s Covenant (1919) as “independent states” that needed tutelage by outside (i.e., Western) powers to prepare them for survival in the modern world. National independence would eventually replace mandatory rule, according to this arrangement, with Britain and France working to train the local population in the art of governance. But Britain’s commitment to the creation of the Jewish national home precluded any real possibility for Arab independence, leading British officials to rule the country directly and consistently resist Palestinian Arab calls for representative government.41 For the first two years of its existence, British Palestine was controlled by a military administration (the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration South or OETA) under the leadership of a chief administrator. Then, from June 1920 until the end of the mandate, the country was placed under civilian government (referred to throughout this study as the Palestine government) headed by a high commissioner. Assisting him in Jerusalem was a civil secretary (from 1922 known as the chief secretary), an attorney general, two assistant civil secretaries, and the heads of such departments as the Education Department, the Public Works Department, and the Palestine Police Department. Britons would hold

INTRODUCTION

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all of these senior positions throughout the mandate period. The country’s district governors (called district commissioners from the late 1920s onward) were also all British, as were the senior members of their staffs. This arrangement meant that local Arabs and non-British Jews could only work in lower-ranking government positions, such as teachers in government schools, civil servants in the colonial bureaucracy, or as drivers and labourers for the colonial authorities.42 Officials in Palestine, many of whom had served elsewhere in the empire, were well aware that the mandate committed them to provide some form of representative government and some of them searched for ways to bring Arabs and Jews into the government without upsetting their commitment to the terms of the Balfour Declaration. One approach, attempted at different times during the mandate, was to offer the local population positions on various legislative and administrative councils. But such proposals were always crafted to ensure that Arabs could have no ability to change the terms of British rule,43 particularly Britain’s legal commitment to the Balfour Declaration, and were roundly rejected by Arab politicians, who rightly came to complain, as the journalist and Palestinian nationalist activist Jamal al-Husayni would in 1932, that “the people of Palestine have no political existence other than that of a very low-grade colony.”44 Britain’s strong grip on the reins of political power was far less detrimental to the Jewish community. Imperial support for the Jewish national home meant that the yishuv (the community of Jews living in Palestine before the creation of the State of Israel) was granted a degree of autonomy denied to Arabs. And by granting a Jewish Agency the right to assist and advise the British government in the development of the country in Article 4 of the Palestine Mandate of 1922, the British gave the Zionist Organization a unique political role to play in Palestine.45 Moreover, as the economic historian Barbara Smith has pointed out, the British government’s sympathy for the Zionist cause, or at least its close working relationship with the Zionist leadership, permitted and frequently encouraged (through political and financial support) the creation of a separate and superior Jewish economy.46 The denial of meaningful political participation, the economic inequality of the mandatory period, the lower level of education and technical training of Arabs as compared to Jews, and the fractiousness of the Arab political elite frustrated Palestinian Arab attempts to gain

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independence or even political representation. As in other colonial contexts, this denial of political representation would lead Palestinians to respond with public demonstrations against the imperial authority and its Zionist allies, which occasionally became violent, as seen at the Nabi Musa festival in Jerusalem in 1920, at the May riots in Jaffa in 1921, at the Western Wall in August 1929, and most decisively during the Palestine Arab Revolt of 1936–39. The fact that British rule was never accepted by the predominantly Arab population of Palestine, and at times was violently opposed by it, led the security-minded British authorities to focus most of their attention on keeping order in the country. From the outset, British plans for development were severely constrained by concerns about how such matters as educational reform or economic modernization might upset the local political situation and threaten the peace. Security concerns would demand a conservative approach to ruling and developing the country, which, added to the parsimony of the British government, led to underdevelopment, if not colonial neglect, in Palestine. This conservatism would also play out in the British approach to religion, where British officials sought ways to protect the religious status quo, which they perceived to be the strict communal independence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. In doing so they would reify those communal divisions and thereby encourage the very sectarian tensions they sought to avoid.

Argument As a study of how British officials in Palestine understood Islam, established new Islamic institutions, and struggled against Islamic political movements, the book is intended as a contribution to a growing new literature on European imperialism’s engagement with Islam.47 As such, this book is not a history of how Muslims lived under British rule, nor a detailed history of Islamic institutions and personalities during the British Mandate period, though I do touch upon the career of Hajj Amin al-Husayni at some length. Instead, this study seeks to place Britain’s encounter with Islam in Palestine within the larger colonial project to control Palestine. Rather than seeing religious issues as peripheral to British policymaking, this book will show how efforts to shape Islamic

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institutions in Palestine were a key tool in the attempt by colonial authorities to control the Palestinian population. The book is divided into six topical chapters that follow a roughly chronological order from the late nineteenth century until the SMC’s fall from power in 1937. In the first chapter, I consider how Britain’s experience of ruling Muslim populations elsewhere in the empire shaped its understanding of Islam and Muslims in Palestine and established the parameters of British policy toward Islam. In Chapter 2, I consider how and why British officials built their approach to religion in Palestine around two Ottoman-era religious concepts: the protection of the “status quo” and the millet system. I argue that the imperial preference for non-interference in religious matters and the terms of mandate rule pushed colonial officials to adopt a conservative religious system in Palestine modelled on Ottoman precedents. But I also show how the colonial authority reworked these Ottoman concepts to help divide the population along communal lines. Chapter 3 considers the relationship between Islam and nationalist politics in the first decade of British rule in Palestine. I argue that the Nabi Musa riots of 1920 opened British eyes to the powerful way in which Islam could combine with nationalism, affecting Britain’s approach to religion and politics for the rest of the decade. The creation of the SMC is therefore shown to be part of a larger effort to control nationalist politics in the 1920s. As such, the establishment of the council was as much about bringing political order to Palestine as bringing order to the country’s religious system. Chapter 4 examines the creation of the SMC and the British decision to back Hajj Amin al-Husayni as its leader, despite his dubious qualifications. I argue that in order to bring order to Palestine’s Muslim community, the British established the SMC as the institution representing the Muslim millet. Hajj Amin was then backed as the Muslim millet-bashi (ethnarch) due to their belief that as a “good Muslim” he would be able to keep his community quiet. In Chapter 5, I consider how the Supreme Muslim Council came to be involved in a nationalist struggle over religious space that concluded in deadly riots at the Western Wall, a development that challenged and ultimately doomed the British approach to institutional Islam. Here the breakdown of a more secular Arab politics (as detailed in Chapter 3) allowed room for the SMC to become more involved in nationalist

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politics and for Hajj Amin to emerge as leading political figure at the end of the 1920s. Finally, in Chapter 6, I consider how Hajj Amin used his newfound prominence in the 1930s to become involved in pan-Islamist politics rather than to build a broad-based nationalist movement. Here I suggest that the mufti’s politics alienated important actors in the nationalist movement, such as Palestinian Christians and Arab notables not aligned with the Husayni family, leading to new forms of political engagement that helped bring about the Palestine Arab Revolt of 1936–39, an uprising that culminated in the downfall of the mufti and an end to the SMC’s influence in British Palestine. The book ends with a conclusion that analyzes the efficacy of British policies towards Islam in Mandatory Palestine and considers how the British approach influenced the State of Israel’s approach to Islamic institutions.

CHAPTER 1 ISLAM UNDER EMPIRE

The British conquest of Jerusalem in December 1917 ended four hundred years of Ottoman rule and brought centuries of Muslim control over the Holy City to a sudden close. For the first time since the Crusades, Jerusalem was under Christian rule. The city’s political status also changed, with Jerusalem becoming the capital of the new country of British mandatory Palestine. The transition from Ottoman to British control, from Muslim to Christian rule raised all sorts of questions about religion. What would happen to the country’s holy sites? Would religious communities retain their traditional rights or would Britain alter the religious balance of power? Would Christian churches, particularly the Protestant Church (a late arrival to Jerusalem), be favoured over other faiths? How would local Judaism be affected by Britain’s support of the Jewish national home? And what would become of Islam, the religion of the majority of the population, now that the country was no longer under Muslim control? One thing that immediately became obvious was that the Ottoman religious system could not continue under British rule, at least not in its entirety. Ottoman administrative arrangements dealing with the local Jewish and Christian communities could perhaps continue under the British, but it was clear that a new approach to Islam would have to be developed. Under the Ottomans, Islam was effectively the religion of the state, with the government overseeing the religious affairs of its Muslim population. Religious bureaucracies in Istanbul supervised the empire’s Islamic courts and its waqf (or pious endowment) system, while Ottoman governors controlled the appointment and dismissal of

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local qadis (Islamic judges) and muftis (jurisconsults). That system was ended with the demise of the Ottoman Empire, leaving each successor state with the task of developing its own approach to governing Islam. British officials were not starting from scratch when they began to craft their approach to Islam in Palestine. Britain’s encounter with Muslim populations in India, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East over the previous three centuries had produced a lively imperial discourse about Islam and a variety of colonial approaches toward its administration. For this reason, while the Supreme Muslim Council may well have been a “hybrid institution . . . never conceived of by Islam in the past,” as Zionists complained at the council’s founding, it was not invented out of wholly new cloth.1 The recognition, creation, and empowerment of local Islamic institutions, many of which functioned autonomously from imperial authorities, can be found in a variety of imperial contexts, and the hybrid religious and political role of the council, to which the Zionists were referring, was not without precedent. The SMC was certainly an invented tradition, but it was not dreamed up on the spot by colonial officials – if we are to understand the council, we must begin by understanding how the British Empire approached Islam in other imperial contexts.

Islam as Backward British ideas about Islam were profoundly shaped by its imperial encounter with the non-European world. The spread of European hegemony in the nineteenth century led many Europeans to regard their military dominance as proof of the superiority of their civilization and as justification for their conquest of the more benighted corners of the globe. For scholars who adopted a civilizational view of history, such as Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee, or who were influenced by Social Darwinian ideas about the innate superiority of the “white” race, the rise of the West, shown most stunningly in its military and technological prowess, was self-evident proof that modern European society was the pinnacle of human social development.2 In contrast to the dynamic and scientific West, the East appeared as backward and lethargic in nineteenth-century writings, with the Muslim world presented as “increasingly rigid, inflexible, tyrannical,

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intolerant and hostile to outside influences.”3 Where once Muslim societies functioned as a foil against which Enlightenment scholars could criticize their own societies, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, they now came to be used, as Zachary Lockman has noted, as a screen against which to project the superiority of the European way of life and the righteousness of imperial expansion.4 Central to European ideas about Muslim societies was the sameness of the Muslim experience, based upon the notion that there existed a singular Muslim weltanschauung. The nineteenth-century French religious scholar Ernest Renan’s statement that “The bent of mind inculcated by the Muhammadan faith is so strong, that all differences of race and nationality disappear by the fact of conversion to Islam,” presented Muslims as decidedly pre-modern, even anti-modern, in their thinking. In condemning Muslims to a permanent state of backwardness, Renan conjured up the image of a man locked in a diving bell: “The mind of a true [Muslim] believer is fatally limited, by the species of iron circle that surrounds his head, rendering it absolutely closed to knowledge.”5 While Renan’s ideas would be challenged by a handful of Britons, such as the anti-imperialist Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the idea of Islam’s incompatibility with civilization pervaded imperialist ideas about Islam. The ontological inferiority of the “Oriental” (meaning Arab) was most famously expressed in the Earl of Cromer’s statement in his 1908 book Modern Egypt: Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into untruthfulness, is, in fact, the main characteristic of the Oriental mind. The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature very skeptical and requires proof before he can accept any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description.6 Cromer went on to explain to his readers that Islam was at the heart of this unbridgeable gulf between the Arab and European mind. Viewing Islam as an intolerant and inflexible legal code, Cromer took it as

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axiomatic that the faith was incompatible with the rational values of the modern (read: Western) world. Moreover, much like Renan, he believed that Islam’s backwardness could not be cured, for “reformed Islam is Islam no longer; it is something else.”7 Not everyone was as openly condescending toward Islam as Renan and Cromer, but the notion of Europe’s superiority over the Muslim world was baked into European imperialism. The British concept of the “White Man’s Burden” and the French notion of the mission civilisatrice, however cynically invoked, depended upon a shared understanding that Muslims, like other non-Europeans, needed saving from their outmoded faith if they were to become civilized. Indeed, the justification for the mandate system, under which Britain took formal legal control of Palestine in 1922, depended upon an unquestioned belief that Muslim populations were “unable to stand by themselves in the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”8

Ottoman Palestine as Backward Arab and Muslim backwardness was a common trope in nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century British accounts of Ottoman Palestine. Before the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman Palestine had been a veritable terra incognita for the British public, with few European pilgrims or adventurers visiting the Holy Land.9 But beginning in the 1840s, European powers began to compete for power and prestige in Ottoman Jerusalem, putting Palestine on the imperial map and bringing the Holy Land into the British public consciousness.10 Jerusalem and other biblical sites became objects of intense scholarly and popular fascination, bringing thousands of scholars, novelists, painters, photographers, and tourists to the country. According to Simon Goldhill, “More European descriptions of journeying in the Holy Land were published in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century than in the previous fifteen hundred years put together – at least 2,000 extended essays or books or two a month for seventy-five years.”11 Hundreds of thousands of commercial and tourist photographs of the country and its people would also be produced, bringing Palestine into late nineteenth-century British living rooms as an object of curiosity and religious longing. In addition, with its strong emphasis on inculcating students with Christian values, the British educational system, which from 1880 onward made school

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attendance compulsory, introduced millions of Britons to the history of the Holy Land. This would lead one British soldier in Palestine to make the extraordinary claim that “At school . . . I probably knew far more about the geography of Palestine than of my own country,” a statement that recalled Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s comment to Chaim Weizmann during World War I that he knew the names of towns in Palestine better than the names of towns on the western front.12 Britons who came to mandatory Palestine, like that unnamed soldier, arrived with “a pre-formed vision of the Holy Land almost invariably shaped by reading and listening to the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and influenced by a tradition of scriptural illustration and Orientalist art seen from earliest childhood, often vividly recalled.”13 As A. J. Sherman’s observation suggests, such a vision was necessarily partial. With attention focused on Palestine’s biblical past and not infrequently on its exotic present, the country’s modern development in the late Ottoman period and its Arab Muslim culture were largely written out of British accounts of the country. Nineteenth-century images of Palestine, as Naomi Shepherd and Simon Goldhill have pointed out, quickly fell into cliche´, a parade of stories of encounters with the same exotic cast of local characters – Jews, Armenian priests, Samaritans, Russian peasants, and the ubiquitous Bedouin – and the production of thousands of nearly identical photographs of same few sites – the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, the Pool of Bethesda, Rachel’s Tomb, and the view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.14 The structure of tourist visits, with their itineraries built around biblical history, encouraged such a narrow understanding of Palestine. Tours put on by Thomas Cook from the 1860s onward “combined visits to the Holy Places, Christian missions and their schools, and ‘biblical excavations’; the parties carried not only maps and guide books but bibles and hymn books, and sang as they went.”15 The fact that a biblical vision of the country had more commercial appeal back home encouraged a myopic vision of Ottoman Palestine as an ancient and decayed Holy Land. David Roberts, a famous nineteenth-century painter of Levantine landscapes, for instance, presented Palestine as a set of biblical and historical sites, with people appearing on the canvas only for the sake of perspective or to add some local exotic flavour.16 And as authenticity came to be conveyed through the presentation of Palestine as an ancient, picturesque, and traditional land, British photographers

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and travel writers came to concentrate their gaze on such elements of local life as “‘backward’ labor – ancient styles of threshing, say, or weaving from a pre-industrial age,” rather than showing Jerusalem’s modernization under its dynamic municipality.17 Another way of showing backwardness was to concentrate on the “foreignness” and timelessness of local traditions. In describing the bazaar in Jaffa, the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, who visited Palestine on an extended Grand Tour in 1844, focused his attention on gambling, storytelling, and water pipe smoking, the paradigmatic activities of the idle Easterner: The devotion and energy with which all these pastimes were pursued struck me as much as anything. These people have been playing thimble-rig and casino; that story-teller has been shouting his tale of Antar, for forty years; and they are just as happy with this amusement now as when they first tried it. Is there no ennui in the Eastern countries?18 Thackeray’s Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo (1846), Eliot Warburton’s Crescent and the Cross (1844), and Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (1844) established a genre of British travel writing on the Holy Land that was built around picturesque and often humorous descriptions of biblical sites, Bedouins, Christian monks, camels, water pipes, and fleas (the Eastern version of which Thackeray assured his readers, “bites more bitterly than the most savage bug in Christendom”).19 At the same time, Jerusalem and Palestine also began to appear in British novels, frequently as a place of Jewish and British redemption, as in Benjamin Disraeli’s popular novels Alroy (1833) and Tancred (1847) and Charlotte Tonna’s Judah’s Lion (1843).20 Modern Arabs and Turks rarely appeared in such books and if they did they were not sympathetic characters, since they did not fit the narrative of Palestine as an exotic and fallen land upon which the European needed to act. Disillusion with the contemporary state of the Holy Land was also a common trope in travel accounts of Palestine, being most famously expressed (and exaggerated) in Mark Twain’s 1869 work, The Innocents Abroad.21 Like Twain, though without his trademark wit, British travellers from the nineteenth century onward, particularly those who were ardent

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Protestants, came to highlight the shocking difference between the imagined and actual Jerusalem, a point explored at length in Issam Nassar’s 2003 article, “In Their Image: Jerusalem in Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives.”22 References to the squalor and disrepair of the Old City of Jerusalem, the ubiquity of bakshish among Arabs, the shock of commercialism at the country’s holy sites, and the local “mummeries done in the name of Christianity” were presented as clear evidence of the fallen state of the country under Ottoman rule.23 As Nassar points out this negative image of Jerusalem stemmed from a comparison of the earthly city both with the Holy City of British imagination and with larger European cities. Neither appropriately biblical nor properly developed, like modern London, Jerusalem could not but fail to measure up to British expectations. And then there were the people who had the gall to make money from the tourist and pilgrim industry. As one soldier during the mandate period explained to his parents, “In Jerusalem and Bethlehem one sees greater disregard for all the great principles common to all faiths than anywhere I’ve ever been. It is absurd to talk of the brotherhood of man here. Everyone has to make money out of religion here, either by fair means or foul and one is thoroughly disgusted by the tricks that are resorted to.”24 Academic scholarship about Palestine in the nineteenth century, despite its positivist pretentions, was no better in providing an accurate portrait of the country. British scholars suffered from a similar myopia born of what might accurately be described as their biblical gaze upon Palestine. The most prominent academic visitors to Ottoman Palestine were scholars involved in the fields of biblical scholarship, archaeology, and the new discipline of historical (or biblical) geography, academic fields that saw Palestine’s importance lying not in its Arab Muslim present but in its Judeo-Christian biblical past.25 As Naomi Shepherd has noted, these “antiquarians came to Palestine to verify what they had read, or to prove a particular theory – not to document what they found.”26 The techniques that these scholars employed – the identification of biblical sites through the analysis of local Arabic place names, the unearthing of biblical artefacts by sifting through (and discarding) hundreds of years of the archaeological record (the Muslim parts mainly), and the preparation of biblical maps by transposing the ancient Holy Land onto the features of Ottoman Palestine – ensured that the Arab and Muslim character of the country

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was ignored, if not completely erased in British scholarship. Instead, British observers “scoured” the East for “illustrations” that could confirm the biblical narrative: how native farming methods conformed to those mentioned in the Bible, how contemporary marriage processions could be compared to biblical scenes, and how “eastern salutations” mimicked biblical greetings.27 Even formal ethnographic studies of the local population, such as those carried out by Charles Clermont-Ganneau for the Palestine Exploration Fund, wrote of the Palestinian peasantry (who were overwhelmingly Muslim) as “the modern representatives of those old tribes which the Israelites found settled in the country, such as the Canaanites, Hittites, Jebusites, Amorites, Philistines, Edomites, etc,” rather than considering how they defined themselves or comparing them to peasants elsewhere in the Middle East or Europe.28 But nowhere was the backwardness of local Arab society made more apparent than in British accounts of Palestinian religious traditions. Local Arab Christian and Muslim festivals shocked the sensibilities of British visitors, who described Palestinian religious practices as irrational and fanatical. The British diplomat and traveller Robert Curzon’s 1849 description of the Greek Orthodox Holy Fire celebration in Jerusalem became famous for its concentration on the animalistic and exotic nature of the local Christian celebration celebrated at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. “At one time,” Curzon incredulously exclaimed, “before the church was so full, they made a race-course round the sepulchre; and some, almost in a state of nudity, dance around with frantic gestures, yelling and screaming as if they were possessed.” Curzon went on to explain to his English readers that this Christian celebration would have not been out of place at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, the site of the London Circus.29 British writers also highlighted the exotic colour of Muslim festivals, such the annual Nabi Musa (Prophet Moses) festival. In 1915, two members of the Palestine Exploration Fund described an unruly spectacle of dervishes from all parts of the land, each sect with its special banner, and their drums decorated with calico of the same colours as their banners. Each man has a sword suspended from his neck, and a spear in his hand. They also carry tambourines and cymbals, and the shout “Allahu¯ akbar!” (God is most great) and flourish their swords.

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Behind these are the shaba¯b (young men) of Jerusalem with their banner in their midst, carried by . . . the Sheikh esh-Shaba¯b and they, too, make play with swords and knives and revolvers, which they fire into the air . . . at the end of the procession come young men accompanying the Mufti, and assisting him to carry the banner of Nebi Mu¯sa.30 For British Protestant writers, the exoticism of local religious celebration conflicted with their notions of proper religious decorum and reinforced the notion that Arabs were ontologically different from themselves, especially when they were Muslims, but even when they were Christians. The exotic, loud, and primitive nature of Palestinian worship was taken as a clear sign by British observers of the latent fanaticism at the heart of Arab societies, a fanaticism that made Muslims particularly threatening to the empire.

Islam as Dangerous British fears about Islam date back to the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857– 58, the most successful uprising against European imperialism in the nineteenth century. Beginning as a mutiny of Muslim and Hindu sepoys (soldiers) against their British officers, the rebellion soon expanded into a mass uprising against the British East India Company, which took control of much of northern India for fourteen months before it was put down by a brutal British counterinsurgency. Despite the mass-based and cross-sectarian nature of the uprising, which was aimed at stopping the Anglicization and Christianization of Indian society, British writers pinned the blame for the uprising on India’s Muslim aristocracy, who had the most to gain by a return to Mughal rule. According to Faisal Devji the framing of the rebellion as a Muslim uprising ensured that the mutiny “quickly came to constitute the single most important illustration of the danger that Islam posed to British power.”31 The post-mutiny period brought about two changes in Britain’s relationship with its Indian subjects that would have a lasting impact on its approach toward Muslim populations across the empire. The first development was Queen Victoria’s announcement of Britain’s new policy of non-interference toward India’s religious traditions, as the new Crown-controlled government came to focus on India’s economic and

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infrastructural development and made “a point of avoiding where it could any interference with Indian religion and custom.”32 While missionary and educational interventions did not suddenly cease across the empire (although in India missionary work was curtailed), the policy of non-interference ensured that the assimilation of subject populations to British cultural norms would no longer be a major objective of imperial rule. While an outwardly more tolerant approach to governance, this change in policy would lead to a destructive reification of “traditional” ethnic and religious differences in many colonial contexts, including in British Palestine. The newfound respect for Indian culture in the British Raj was also tempered by a shift toward viewing Indian Muslims as a security threat. After the uprising, Indian Muslims were no longer trusted by the Indian government to share in the governance of India or even to mix freely with the country’s British inhabitants. As the colonial authorities came to treat natives, particularly Muslims, as a potential danger and British citizens separated themselves from the Indian population by settling in newly constructed European suburbs and socializing in whites-only social clubs, a damaging physical and psychic distance developed between the British and their Indian subjects, which would eventually lead to the rise of a successful independence movement.33 The title of W. W. Hunter’s 1871 book, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel Against the Queen? encapsulated British fears of Indian Muslims. A required textbook for those entering the Indian Civil Service, the Scottish historian and Indian Civil Service member’s study became one of the most influential accounts of Indian Muslim politics in the nineteenth century. Although Hunter concluded that Indians were not in fact obligated by Islamic doctrine to rebel against the monarchy, he cautioned his readers that Islam was still dangerous because it could easily be used to encourage Indians to take up arms against the government. For Hunter, Islam was inherently rebellious, leading him to warn of the potential of unscrupulous outsiders (e.g. Wahhabis) to use the faith to rally the “seditious masses in the heart of our Empire and the superstitious tribes on our Frontier.”34 The frontier that Hunter had in mind was British India’s northwest frontier with Afghanistan, the site of a number of tribal uprisings against British rule during the nineteenth century. Much like the Soviets in the twentieth century and the Americans in the twenty-first, British

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officials in nineteenth-century India viewed this region as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, where politics was driven by “the irrational and violent religion of the Frontier’s inhabitants.”35 British records more commonly referred to Hunter’s “superstitious tribesmen” as “Hindustani fanatics,” a breed of zealous fighters commanded by such colourful figures as the “Mad Faqir” Mullah Saidullah. Saidullah had led 10,000 Pashtun fighters against the British in 1897, but was known to British officials and the general public primarily through this dismissive sobriquet or the equally patronizing title of the “Mad Mullah.”36 Such condescending language was typical in British descriptions of rebellious Muslim leaders along the frontiers of the empire, with Muhammad Ahmed, the leader of a successful revolt in the Sudan in the 1880s, made famous in Britain under the title of the “Mad Mahdi” and Muhammad ‘Abd Allah Hasan, the leader of a rebellion in British Somaliland in the first decade of the twentieth century, described in British newspapers, like Siadullah, as the “Mad Mullah.” In presenting Muslim rebels as driven by primitive “tribal” superstitions and their leaders by a religious madness, British officials and journalists chose not to confront the impact of imperial actions on local politics.37 Madness here connoted fanaticism, not clinical insanity, a judgment that rendered these Muslims, in an echo of Renan’s thinking, as irrational and anti-modern actors. Such anti-colonial uprisings could then be presented as hopeless and impotent Muslim “holy wars” against modernity to British politicians and the general public. In imperial discourse, Muslim rebellions, like contemporaneous African revolts, would be represented as manifestations of the atavistic urge of the faithful to defend tradition against modernity that could only be overcome by the imposition of greater European control.38

The Fanaticism of Palestinian Muslims The notion that Palestinian Arabs were a backward and religious people without a real history would have a profound impact on the ways in which British officials understood their behaviour. Although there would be some internal debate about the economic and political capabilities of the Arab population, British policies, influenced as they were by the logic of the Balfour Declaration and the mandate system, treated Arabs as incapable of modern development. Consequently, whether in the field

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of education, politics, economics, or medicine, the Palestine government took upon itself the role of protector of the Arab community, a role enshrined in the terms of the Mandate for Palestine and zealously defended by the Palestine government throughout the mandate in the face of Arab nationalist petitions, protests, and violence. As Bernard Wasserstein has explained, this led to British officials adopting “a paternalistic conception of themselves as Platonic guardians entrusted with the duty of managing affairs and defending the interests of the ‘bemused’ Arab peasants who (unlike the Jews) ‘obviously couldn’t . . . manage their own affairs satisfactorily.’”39 At the same time, it contributed to the belief that Arabs, and especially the Muslim peasantry, were not particularly interested in politics and had little in the way of nationalist sentiment. In the nineteenth century, as Naomi Shepherd has noted, “Virtually every European traveller or resident described an absence of ‘patriotism’ whether of the Moslem, Jew, or other ethnic group. The country’s heterogeneous composition was an obstacle to its moral redemption, as ‘they could neither be united for religious nor for political purposes.’”40 Such a view can hardly be surprising given the interest of European travellers in cataloguing the many differences between the various sects and ethnic groups of Palestine and their reflexive tendency to pigeonhole local inhabitants by their communal identities. But this understanding of Palestinian behaviour distorted British understandings of Palestinian society because it caused travellers to routinely ignore the civic activism and political views of the urban elite in the late Ottoman period. Similar ideas about Arab political apathy can be seen in the postwar period, with the Foreign Office’s 1919 handbook on Palestine and Syria arguing, The bulk of the population are fellahin, that is to say agricultural workers owning land as a village community or working land for the Syrian effendi. They have for centuries been ground down, overtaxed, and bullied by the Turk, and still more by the Arabspeaking Turkish minor official and by the Syrian and Levantine landowner. They have little, if any, national sentiment, and would probably welcome any stable form of government which would guarantee to them reasonable security and enjoyment of the fruits of their labour.41

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In British thinking the fellah was a salt-of-the-earth character whose political behaviour was motivated by prosaic concerns about his survival rather than any kind of political ideology. But it was also understood that he was capable of becoming angry, if not violent, should his honour or that of his family or religion be called into question. For British officials, religious passions burned quietly under the surface of Palestinian society, as shown by the policeman Richard Adamson’s observation that in Jerusalem, “the bitter hatred of centuries [lay] still smoldering, ready to burst into flame again at a later date.”42 It is for this reason that Ronald Storrs, the military governor of Jerusalem, despaired upon his arrival in Palestine that “Moslems are far more orthodox here than in Egypt . . . so is everybody, worse luck.”43 Officials were caught off guard when Arabs engaged in organized political activities, such as forming various literary-cum-political societies or organizing demonstrations against the Balfour Declaration, and were frequently reduced to accusing Palestinians of misunderstanding the rules of politics. The British military governor of Jaffa, for example, exasperated by the political propaganda of the Muntada al-Adabi (The Literary Society), complained to his superiors in May 1919 that “freedom of speech is not understood in this country, and the privilege is invariably abused.”44 As I shall argue in Chapter 3, this way of thinking about Arab politics was part of an attempt to downplay or ignore Arab nationalism by presenting nationalist activism, whether organized by political parties or emerging spontaneously in the form of public demonstrations and/or revolutionary violence, as unrepresentative of broader Arab public opinion and motivated by fanaticism or religious incitement.45 To be sure, this condescending attitude toward nonEuropean political behaviour was common across the empire, but in Palestine, where officials tried hard to reconcile Arabs to the terms of the mandate, it had the effect of preventing officials from understanding the political demands of the Arab population until far too late.

The Spectre of Pan-Islam W. W. Hunter’s warnings about outsiders agitating Indian Muslims was part of a general European fear of Muslims uniting across national boundaries in the late nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1880s, British officials began to identify and monitor a new form of transnational Muslim

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politics, which came to be termed the pan-Islamic movement.46 From the beginning pan-Islam was always more of an intellectual idea than a bona fide movement, with calls for Islamic union by such figures as the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II and the itinerant Muslim intellectual Jamal al-Din al-Afghani failing to produce much in the way of political organization. This did not, however, stop Europeans in the late nineteenth century from conjuring up “vague but threatening notions of secretive cabals of cruel and fanatical Muslims plotting to overthrow colonial rule everywhere across the Muslim world in an orgy of bloodshed.”47 Muslim critics at the time viewed this invocation of a Muslim bogeyman as a means for Europeans to justify their occupation of the Muslim world as an act of self-defence. According to one unnamed Muslim thinker quoted in a 1919 Foreign Office report on panIslamism, the pan-Islamic movement was “a phantasm abstracted from the Moslem profession of religious fraternity, and magnified by the European imagination.” Or as another put it in the same report, “the notion of a Pan-Islamic movement was an invention of European politicians, whose purpose was to excite animosity against the Moslems and so justify fresh attempts against such independence as any of them still possessed.”48 Also driving British anxieties was a very real concern among imperialists about the outbreak of anti-imperial uprisings across what many saw as an overextended British Empire. A series of colonial crises from the Cape Colony to China and from Jamaica to New Zealand raised difficult questions about the utility and purpose of empire. More worryingly, from 1885 onward, British officials faced organized nationalist opposition in India, and after 1906, a Muslim nationalist political party, the All-India Muslim League, not to mention various nationalist parties in British Egypt. Rather than seeing this spread of nationalist politics as an inevitable product of the spread of imperialism and globalization, British intelligence agents saw it as part of a nefarious plot against the empire advanced by a disparate collection of Islamic leaders and thinkers. “The Pan-Islamic Movement,” a handbook prepared by the historical section of the Foreign Office in 1919, defined pan-Islam as “the notion of uniting the Islamic communities for the purpose of resisting European aggression and ultimately ousting European rulers from Asia and Africa.”49 In an effort to show that the movement was real despite Muslim criticism, the handbook traced the

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evolution of the pan-Islamic idea from its first appearance among Bukharan Muslims in the 1870s to its exploitation in the 1880s by the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II and its popularization by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh in the 1880s and 1890s, before ending with a discussion of the Young Turks’ exploitation of the language of Islam during World War I. But rather than quoting panIslamists at length or discussing their ideas in detail in order to show how they worked in concert or at least how their ideas influenced each other, the handbook clumsily linked these disparate figures by concentrating on anti-imperial religious and political rhetoric, which suggests that what really united these figures was their desire for independence, rather than their desire to spread Islam around the world. The Foreign Office’s 1919 handbook on pan-Islam represented the culmination of more than three decades of British reaction to Muslim anti-imperialism. One of the earliest efforts to control the spread of panIslamic ideas, according to David Motedel, was Lord Cromer’s banning of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh’s pan-Islamic journal al-‘Urwa al-Wuthqa (The Firmest Bond) in the mid-1880s, which was itself a reaction to the pan-Islamic rhetoric espoused by ‘Urabi rebels during the 1882 revolt.50 But it is likely that British concerns about pan-Islam originated in India, as earlier indicated by Hunter’s alarm over the potential of Wahhabism to agitate Indian Muslims to revolt. A series of letters exchanged between the India Office, the Indian viceroy, and colonial officials in the Hijaz and Egypt during World War I illustrates the centrality of India in British fears of a pan-Islamic movement. Britain’s war against the Ottoman Empire caused great concern among Indian Muslims about the status of the Muslim holy places in the Hijaz and the future of the caliphate. British officials in India warned that “the uninstructed mind of the masses is incapable of distinguishing between religion and politics, and is liable to confuse them easily in the absence of the right guidance,” and asked their counterparts in the region to control anticolonial Muslim rhetoric.51 Colonel Cyril Wilson, the British agent in Jeddah [Jidda], and Valentine Vivian, the assistant director of criminal intelligence in India, cautioned their superiors that the “Hedjaz has been a breeding ground for fanaticism,” where Indian pilgrims were imbibing anti-imperial sentiments from radicalized Indian residents of the holy cities, and

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called for British propaganda to counter the deliberate misrepresentation of Britain’s actions.52 Motivating their concerns was the discovery by British intelligence in August 1916 of three letters written on silk that outlined a plot to overthrow British rule by a small group of Indian Muslims who called themselves the Junudu ‘l Rabbaniyya, or “Soldiers of God.” According to British intelligence, the “Silk Letters movement” was a plot by Deobandi Muslim leaders to create “a union among Islamic kings with a view to the liberation of Islamic countries under infidel rule with particular reference to India.”53 Though the plot was ineffective, it played upon every British fear about pan-Islam: the Deobandi movement had originally been influenced by Wahhabism, the great outside threat identified in W. W. Hunter’s 1871 book; the plot brought together Muslim activists in India, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia under the title of the “Army of God”; and its leaders intended to make common cause with Britain’s Turkish and German enemies. As Sir Charles Cleveland, the director of the Criminal Intelligence Department in Delhi, put it, the plot “is all very pathetic and ineffective but nevertheless the danger of the cauldron of fanaticism boiling over is ever present.”54 Pan-Islam remained one the great Foreign Office bugaboos after the war, alongside Bolshevism and Turkish nationalism. A number of breathless reports on Islamic groups in India, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East were produced as part of a postwar effort to survey the imperial lay of the land.55 A subtle shift in British thinking about pan-Islam is evident in imperial accounts of such groups as the Khilafat movement, an Indian Muslim protest movement centred upon the defence of the Islamic caliphate that was founded in 1919 by two brothers, Muhammad ‘Ali and Shawkat ‘Ali. For whereas before and during the war imperial planners worried about the pan-Islamic movement’s potential to unite Muslims across national boundaries and strengthen the Ottomans, they now were worried about the use of panIslamic language by activists within specific national contexts. By combining a strident criticism of Britain’s treatment of Islam with a call for greater Indian Muslim autonomy, the Khilafat movement unveiled a form of Islamic politics with a populist appeal that could more easily support the larger Indian nationalist movement than the secretive plots of groups like the Silk Letters movement.

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Although Quigley’s warnings about a pan-Islamist plot behind the change in the khutba came to be dismissed by the Palestine government, as we saw above, his concerns tapped into a larger postwar fear of panIslamic ideas being used against the empire. Like Bolshevism, pan-Islam came to be treated by British officials as a potent and easily communicable virus of the mind (to borrow a concept from Richard Dawkins) that threatened to upset Britain’s postwar global order. As one British memorandum on pan-Islamism in Central and East Africa from 1917 put it, “Islam affords a free-masonry which is not hindered by custom, tribe or dialect,” a warning that sounds eerily like those issued today by so-called Western “terrorism experts” about the dangers of borderless Islam.56 It is for this reason that officials in Palestine would keep tabs on pan-Islamic movements elsewhere in the empire and particularly on the pan-Islamic affiliations of the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, including his friendship with the leaders of the Khilafat movement.

Finding Good Muslims British correspondence about the Silk Letters case reveals that officials saw themselves as engaged in a battle with pan-Islamists for Muslim hearts and minds. As one unnamed officer explained in a letter from November 1916, Indian fanatics can be dealt with, the political agitators can also be dealt with, by repressive measures; but the large section of loyal educated Moslems, what about them? It contains all the big men who can command the services of large numbers. For their support we have to fight the pan-Islamists and other agitators.57 Counter-propaganda was employed to challenge the pan-Islamist narrative but colonial officials quickly recognized that Muslims were unlikely to listen to non-Muslims talk about Islam. As a result, imperial agents turned to “moderate” Muslims to serve as intermediaries between the British Empire and its Muslim subjects. The reliance on Islamic religious figures as imperial intermediaries had a long history within the empire. Lord Lugard and other British officials in West Africa had long championed Islam as a force for stability

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in African society and used religious leaders as part of their system of indirect rule. As Jonathon Reynolds has noted, Lugard believed that Islam, while inferior to Christianity, was well suited to Africans because, It has undeniably had a civilizing effect, abolishing the gross forms of pagan superstition and barbarous practices, and adding to the dignity, self-respect and self-control of its adherents. Its general effect has been to encourage abstinence from intoxicants, a higher standard of life and decency, a better social organization and tribal cohesion, with a well-defined code of justice.58 Since indirect rule depended upon tribal cohesion and social organization, Islam was useful to the imperial administrator, but only if the faith was handled carefully. If Islam was “subject to waves of fanaticism,” as Lugard believed, then British officers ran the risk of creating their own Frankenstein’s monster if they empowered the wrong type of Islam or the wrong kind of Muslim leader.59 Colonial administrators therefore sought to identify “good” Muslims and promote them over “bad” Muslims. In the case of Northern Nigeria this meant championing the Qadariyya brotherhood, which imperial agents saw as “a particularly state-friendly and ‘non-fanatical’ branch of Islam,” over local members of the Mahdiyya, Sanusiyya, and Tijaniyya brotherhoods, who were less happy about the British presence.60 On the East African coast, British officials oversaw a similar expansion of Islam as a way of controlling the colonized. Much like Lugard, colonial administrators in Kenya and Zanzibar viewed Islam as a civilizing force in black African society and considered the Arab Muslim patricians along the coast “to be the most ‘civilized’ part of the population.”61 Recognizing Islamic institutions “as an integral part of power structures [they] sought both to subordinate and preserve,” British officials chose to make use of those patricians as intermediaries between the colonial state and the mixed Arab and black African population by placing them in charge of local Islamic courts.62 Once again what mattered most to British officials were not the religious qualifications of these men, nor their titles, but their ability to serve the colonial state. As Felicitas Becker has argued, “Ultimately colonial officials were more interested in finding effective intermediaries than in

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sustaining the status of their patrician allies, or in the nuances of origins and social allegiance among them.”63 Judgments about who were “good” or “bad” Muslims in each of these African contexts were highly subjective, but they were never arbitrary. What the good/bad dichotomy boiled down to was a judgment on Muslim loyalty to the colonial state. In a similar manner, the oft-invoked concept of “fanaticism,” whether in the African or other imperial contexts, was strongly associated in British documents with an individual’s or group’s disloyalty to the empire rather than with their religious fervour. Or perhaps more accurately, those who were disloyal to the British were automatically judged to be more in thrall to religious passion, “mad” in the reporter’s parlance, than those who had the sense to work with the colonial authorities. This style of thinking would also come to influence British thought about Muslim actors in Palestine. As we shall see below, the British choice of the al-Husayni family to run the religious affairs of the Muslim community had a great deal to do with the magnanimous reception of the British occupying forces by Kamil al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem. A member of an old, established, notable family that had decades of experience serving as intermediaries between the Ottoman state and the local population, the mufti represented the kind of conservative and moderate leader that British imperialists liked. Convinced that the mufti would be a reliable ally and therefore a “good Muslim,” the government would quickly elevate him to the status of grand mufti and decorate him with an imperial honour by making him a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George (CMG). In contrast, ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who headed a brief insurrection against the British in 1935, represented the imperial archetype of the “bad Muslim” because of his status as an outsider (al-Qassam was born in Syria and participated in anti-French activity before coming to Haifa in 1920), his radical understanding of Islam, his revolutionary ideals, and his grassroots organizing of the masses. As the brother of Kamil al-Husayni, Hajj Amin al-Husayni would long be considered a “good Muslim,” even when he involved himself in politics against the express wishes of his imperial partners. Indeed, it was only when he turned against the Palestine government in the Palestine Revolt of 1936–39 that he would finally be placed on the other side of the ledger and come to be described in British records as a “colonial renegade.”64

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British Policies toward Islam British policies toward Islam differed across the empire but shared an overarching concern with ensuring that it could not easily be used against the colonial state by anti-imperialist forces, be they nationalist politicians, “reactionary” tribal leaders, nativist insurrectionists, or millenarian preachers. The policies of non-interference and indirect rule, as well as warnings by men on the spot about the dangers of meddling in local religious matters, ensured that British officials never took direct control over the practice of Islam or engaged in the kind of violent crackdowns against Muslim populations seen in the Russian Empire. But the imperial drive to domesticate Islam did lead British experts and officials to intervene in local Muslim affairs.65 Although approaches varied from colony to colony, British policies mostly sought to make sure the administration of Islamic law and Islamic religious endowments (awqaf) remained in friendly hands. British fascination with Islamic law came from the Orientalist belief that the shari‘a held the key to understanding Muslim behaviour, a consequence of the philological bias within Orientalist scholarship and the widely held supposition that religious dictates shaped the lives of the empire’s Muslim subjects. The imperial interest in controlling Islamic law also came from the great emphasis placed upon codifying law in the nineteenth-century British Empire, particularly in India where Utilitarian thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, demanded the creation of a “systemized, hierarchical legal structure” to ensure that “The Rule of Law” replaced “The Rule of Men.”66 The imperial push to control the waqf system was an attempt to ensure that the large sum of money generated by Islamic endowments was controlled by “good Muslims.” Whoever controlled the awqaf would have a great deal of financial and social capital, which could be spent either in service of or in opposition to the empire. British officials therefore worked hard to place their chosen intermediaries in control of the waqf system, although more often than not this simply meant trying to make allies of those who already controlled the purse strings. The most well known, but also most quixotic, British approach to Islam was adopted in India, where legal experts and Orientalist scholars developed a hybrid legal system that came to be known as AngloMuhammadan law. Blending together elements of English common law

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and the shari‘a, this system gave civil courts in British India the ability to apply Islamic legal provisions in cases that dealt with the personal status of Muslims or touched upon the waqf. First developed under the East India Company, Anglo-Muhammadan jurisprudence acted, according to Scott Kugle, “as the interface between the East India Company (as an early modern state) and the surrounding society, which it could not comprehend but had to control.”67 While presenting themselves as administering the same law as their Mughal predecessors, Company officials worked to codify and systematize Islamic law, reifying the shari‘a so that it could be used as a tool for the exercise of colonial power. This process of codification would transform Islamic jurisprudence from “law as process” to “law as structure,” eliminating the traditional flexibility of Islamic jurisprudence by repackaging “Muhammadan law” as a unified code that existed separately from traditional Muslim legal authorities. As Kugle rightly argues, this had the effect, along with the establishment of a colonial bureaucracy to administer Islamic law, of transferring the adjudication of Islamic law away from Muslim scholars to officers of the East India Company, effectively allowing British officials to control and shape the practice of law.68 It is important to note that the development of Anglo-Muhammadan law began before the Sepoy Mutiny and Britain’s subsequent adoption of a more hands-off approach to native culture. This made the Indian approach unique among the approaches to Islam adopted in Britain’s Muslim colonies, the majority of which were acquired after 1858. Instead of adjudicating Islamic law themselves, British administrators elsewhere in the empire managed Islam through local intermediaries, with varying degrees of official oversight. By partnering with “good Muslims” (that is, Muslims who were understood to be supportive of the colonial state), officials worked to develop Islamic institutions across the empire that would be both friendly to colonial rule and acceptable to the local Muslim population. British non-interference in Islamic matters can be seen in the “veiled protectorate” of Egypt, where British officials recognized the mufti of Cairo as the country’s grand mufti, after Khedive Ismail’s creation of the office in 1895. Lord Cromer argued in 1908 that if Islamic reform was to occur in Egypt, it needed to be initiated by the Egyptians themselves rather than forced upon them by the British, and largely stayed out of Islamic matters when he ruled the country.69 But in neighbouring

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Sudan, British officials adopted a much more hands-on approach – creating a Board of Ulama in 1901, promoting “representatives of orthodox Islam” over “popular” religious figures, and monitoring religious figures sympathetic to Mahdism – as part of an attempt to prevent Islam from being used again to fight colonialism, as it had in the 1880s.70 A policy of religious non-interference could also be found in the Malay States, where British agents made the local sultans subject to oversight from British residents but allowed local rulers to retain control over traditional Malay religion.71 Meanwhile, in Cyprus, British officials worked alongside local leaders in administering awqaf through the appointment of two delegates, one Muslim and one British, to oversee the waqf system. In Northern Nigeria another kind of bifurcated system was established through the creation of both British and native (both tribal and Islamic) courts, with the British resident having the right of final approval for the appointment of judges and the right to inspect courts and review court cases at any time.72 In short, British policies toward Islam ran the gamut from the light touch adopted in Egypt and the Malay States to the more interventionist approaches adopted in Northern Nigeria and the Sudan, with India standing apart with its quixotic hybrid system of British and Islamic law. This gave British officials in Palestine a wide range of imperial precedents from which to develop their own approach to Islam. It is for this reason that Uri Kupferschmidt’s and Yehoshua Porath’s argument that the creation of Supreme Muslim Council was a completely aberrant development should be treated with scepticism. While there is some merit to Kupferschmidt’s statement that “The Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine was a body unique in the history of those Muslim countries administered by Colonial and Mandatory governments,” and Porath’s contention that the council represented “a vastly different state of affairs from that in other territories under direct British rule,” it would be wrong to imply, as they do, that the establishment of the SMC was out of step with developments elsewhere.73 Indeed, when he established the council, Herbert Samuel, the first high commissioner of the British Mandate, explained to the Foreign Office that while the some aspects of the council were novel, the SMC built upon precedents found elsewhere in European imperialism:

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It is also worth noting that the desire to set up a new Moslem body for the supervision of Wakfs is but a local expression of developments that have occurred elsewhere during the long process of disintegration through which the Ottoman Empire has passed. For instance, in Egypt the Egyptian Administration instituted a Ministry of Awkaf; in Bosnia and Herzegovina also the Austrian Government found it necessary to constitute a Central Council at Sarajevo to administer local Wakfs, and in Cyprus similar action was taken. On the other hand, there does not appear to be a precedent for investing the power of appointing and dismissing judges of the Religious Courts (that remain Government Courts), in an elected Moslem body, but the circumstances in Palestine and the natural desire of the Moslem community to exercise autonomy in their religious affairs appear to justify this new departure. It is to be remembered also that a safeguard is provided in the condition that all such appointments must have received prior approval of the Government.74 To understand how the SMC came to take the shape that it did we need to start with an account of those “circumstances in Palestine” to which Samuel referred in his letter. We must turn first to those early days when, after the initial euphoria of the British conquest of Jerusalem had worn off, the country’s Christian occupiers struggled to develop a religious system that would protect the sanctity of Palestine and its holy places.

CHAPTER 2 BUILDING A RELIGIOUS SYSTEM

Immediately after the occupation of Jerusalem, foreign governments and religious groups began sending letters to British officials demanding to know what they planned to do with the Holy City. Testifying to the international significance of the holy sites and the international dimension of the Palestine question, letters poured in from Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, and Jewish representatives in Europe, the Middle East, and as far away as India and the Americas. For these letter writers the British occupation represented an opportunity and a threat – with a Christian power sitting in Jerusalem for the first time in centuries, the moment appeared ripe for a change in the religious landscape of Palestine. But no one knew what direction that change might take. The change in administration in Jerusalem led to an intense jockeying for power among Britain’s wartime allies. Through the dispatch of diplomatic correspondence and official representatives to Palestine, the French government pressured British officials to allow France a diplomatic and military presence in the country in order to protect Roman Catholics, its traditional prote´ge´s.1 The Zionist Organization, encouraged by the recently promulgated Balfour Declaration, called on the military authorities to allow the Jewish community to buy the Western Wall from the Muslim community in order to give Jews control over their holiest site.2 Other petitioners, such as the Vatican and the All-India Muslim League, implored the occupying forces to protect existing religious arrangements out of fear that Britain would ignore the rights of non-Protestants and non-Jews.3 Meanwhile, Palestinian Arab groups both

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within Palestine and abroad appealed to the new government to respect the country’s Muslim and Christian heritage by granting Arabs (and not Jews), “the boon of self Government . . . enjoyed by other countries recently liberated,” as stated in a 1920 petition from the Jaffa branch of the Muslim-Christian Association, one of the first Arab nationalist societies in Palestine, which will be further discussed in Chapter 3.4 In a private note sent to his colleagues in the Foreign Office in February 1918, Mark Sykes, the co-author of the Sykes-Picot agreement and one of the main architects of Britain’s Middle East strategy, argued that whatever form Palestine’s government would take, the new regime would have to “fulfill three requirements: 1) it must guarantee the inviolability of the Holy Places, 2) it must offer honest opportunity to Zionist colonization, 3) it must guarantee the existing population against expropriation, exploitation or subjection.”5 Sykes’s note succinctly pointed out the three main constituencies that British officials believed they had to appeal to in order to secure their position in Palestine: the international community, the Zionist Organization, and the Arab population. His ordering of those constituencies was no accident. The paramount objective for British diplomats and officials on the ground in Palestine was to get Britain’s wartime allies to accept its control of Palestine as a fait accompli. Because of the Balfour Declaration and the influence of the Zionist Organization in London, officials were also bound to take up the issue of Jewish immigration. Only after these first two constituencies were dealt with would British officials consider Arab rights, though in keeping with the language of the Balfour Declaration, Sykes did not deign to mention Arabs by name.6 British wartime planners worried about securing the status of holy places because they feared that European governments would use them as a means to gain a political role in Jerusalem, as they had in the late Ottoman period.7 It was not enough to simply raise the Union Jack over the city; in order to rule with a free hand, the colonial authorities needed to develop an approach to religion that kept outside powers from intervening in Palestinian affairs. This chapter analyzes the development of that approach out of a series of debates about religion in British Palestine that took place between officials in the Foreign Office in London, the Arab Bureau in Cairo, and the government headquarters in Jerusalem.

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As I will show, British officials adopted and tweaked the imperial policy of non-interference as their solution to this problem. In committing to a policy of respecting the religious status quo, the Palestine government assured other European powers that their interference in the religious politics of Jerusalem was unnecessary, since nothing would change with respect to the administration of Christian religious sites. At the same time, officials came to believe that a hands-off policy toward Islam could help their relations with the Muslim community. In giving Muslims the ability to run their own religious institutions and holy sites, the government hoped to prevent religion from being used as an issue to rally Palestinians against British rule, as had occurred in India and Africa. It is important to note that non-interference here did not mean adopting a laissez-faire approach to religion. Rather, British officials worked hard in the aftermath of their occupation to craft a clear approach to religious sites and institutions. Building upon the Ottoman concepts of the “status quo” and millet system, officials created a religious system they felt best served the “natural” communal divisions of Palestinian society by granting Muslims, Christians, and Jews institutional control over their own religious affairs. To do this, the Palestine government would come to recognize existing religious institutions as intermediaries between it and each community, with the exception of the religious authorities of the Muslim community, which, in a clear break from the status quo, had to be invented. It is significant for the history of Palestine that this neo-millet approach to religion was not nearly as conservative or neutral as British officials claimed. Religion had been just one of a number of ways by which individuals identified themselves in the late Ottoman period (albeit one of the more important identities); under the British it would become a primary way of differentiating people, whether in the censuses and yearly administrative reports of the Palestine government or in everyday intelligence reports. Naturally this policy of dividing communities along ethno-religious lines, that in the South Asian context is referred to as communalism, encouraged separation and conflict between those communities, especially when combined with nationalist politics. The most obvious split here would be between Arabs and Jews, although, as we shall also see, British policies would help to create separation between Muslims and Christians in Palestine.

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Embracing the Status Quo In the build-up to Britain’s takeover of Palestine in December 1917, the Protestant bishop of Jerusalem Rennie MacInnes proposed that the conquest of Palestine should result in the redistribution of holy sites to the benefit of the Christian faith.8 Writing from his wartime residence in Cairo, he implored the Egyptian Expeditionary Forces to adopt a policy whereby “in all lands of which we become possessed, every building originally erected as a Christian church which is now used as a mosque or held by Muslim hands, be officially taken back into Christian possession.”9 Although unorthodox, MacInnes’s proposals would not have seemed as outlandish then as they appear now. The Times’s editorial about the conquest of Jerusalem, for example, proclaimed that “the deliverance of Jerusalem though its influence on the war may be relatively remote, must remain for all time a most memorable event in the history of Christendom,” and linked the event to the Crusades.10 Indeed, the Crusader motif was so prominent in British writings about the Levantine campaign that the Department of Information’s Press Bureau, concerned about the feelings of the empire’s Muslim subjects, would issue a communique´ in 1917 calling upon the press to avoid referring to British actions as a Crusade or holy war.11 Leading British officials in Palestine, such as the commanding officer of the Egyptian Expeditionary Forces, General Edmund Allenby, and Edward Keith-Roach (who would later become the district commissioner of Jerusalem) would also make reference to the Crusades when they entered Palestine, giving hope to some that the war represented a Christian conquest of the Muslims.12 Imperial history also provided numerous examples of British agents, particularly missionaries, intervening in local religious traditions. MacInnes may have pushed this issue further than most, but he certainly was not alone in seeing the British victory as having a religious purpose and expecting that Christianity would gain from the British occupation.13 Against this perspective must be weighed the fact that religious non-interference had been a governing principle of British imperialism since the Indian Mutiny of 1857 –58. Queen Victoria’s announcement that the British would respect the religious traditions of its Indian subjects would be followed up by the Government of India’s Religious Endowments Act of 1863, which made it unlawful for the government

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in India to superintend or manage the country’s religious establishments. A similar policy of religious non-interference would also be adopted in Africa, as part of British indirect rule, with Lord Milner, the high commissioner for Southern Africa, stating in 1901 “that native institutions should not be unnecessarily interfered with; that their existing system of communal tenure and tribal government, and their traditional customs, so far as they are not in gross conflict with civilized ideas, should be respected.”14 Even so, it is striking how consistent and forthright British officials were in rejecting MacInnes’s proposal as incompatible with the colonial agenda in Palestine. Wyndham Deedes, the intelligence officer of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (and later civil secretary in Palestine), argued that the bishop’s proposals, besides being impracticable, were likely to cause anti-British sentiment in the Muslim world and exacerbate Muslim-Christian tensions within Palestine.15 Captain Philip Graves, an official with the Arab Bureau in Cairo, which coordinated Britain’s wartime political activity in the Middle East, agreed by pointing out that MacInnes’s proposal amounted to an endorsement of the view that the conquest was a Christian crusade. Graves concluded that while such a position might seem natural to a Christian bishop, if adopted as a British position it would call into question “our reputation for justice and religious toleration.”16 During the debate over MacInnes’s proposal, Capt. Stewart Symes, private secretary to the high commissioner of Egypt and occasional advisor to the Arab Bureau, advised the military administration to “disturb the status quo in the occupied territories as little as is compatible with the army’s requirements,” on the grounds that this policy would “prove the check to proposals of an impolitic nature made by ecclesiastics of various denominations and . . . by Foreign and Allied governments.”17 Symes’s proposal, made some two months before Britain’s occupation of Jerusalem, was the first time that the “protection of the status quo” entered the lexicon of imperial planning in Palestine. The phrase “the protection of the status quo” would then come to pepper the language of military and civilian policymaking in the months and years that followed, emerging as one of the central political doctrines of British rule in mandatory Palestine. British references to protecting the status quo built upon Ottoman policies at the Christian sites, which were collectively referred to as the

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Status Quo, as I will explain below. It is important to note, however, that the decision to protect the status quo did not result from Britain’s great respect for Ottoman precedent – to the contrary, wartime planners consistently denigrated Ottoman rule as backward and cruel – but out of the exigencies of wartime planning. The “status quo” policy was developed to address the inviolability of the holy places, which Sykes had rightly identified as one of the more pressing problems facing Britain after the war.18 British officials would come to defend Ottoman precedents at the holy sites because this served their immediate imperial interests, most particularly their desire of keeping other powers away from Palestine. Appeals to the protection of the status quo would then be used by the mandatory power to justify a wider range of British policies, even if those policies had only a tenuous connection to Ottoman precedent or the traditions of the country. Major-General Allenby, the commander of the victorious Egyptian Expeditionary Forces, who expressly barred Rev. MacInnes from the proceedings, made the first public commitment to protecting the religious status quo at the opening ceremony of the British occupation on December 11, 1917.19 After stating that the city was under martial law, he reassured the gathered crowd of Jerusalemites that, “every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer, of whatsoever form of the three religions, will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faiths they are sacred.”20 A month later, after a clash between Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians at the Church of the Nativity, he reiterated this position and used the specific term “status quo” publicly for the first time when he sent a notice “to inform all heads of religious communities that the “Status Quo Ante Bellum” will be strongly maintained during the period of military administration and that a Christian administration will not tolerate unseemly incidents in the Holy Shrine.”21 Four days later, Under-secretary for Foreign Affairs Lord Hardinge informed the Foreign Office that the French government had also agreed to uphold the “status quo,” an encouraging sign that the concept was already working to allay European concerns about the British occupation.22 Allenby’s policy of protecting the status quo would be continued by his military successors Major-General Arthur Wingram Money, MajorGeneral H. D. Watson, and Lieutenant-General Louis Bols, with the

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latter affirming in one of the last speeches by the military administration that non-interference would continue under civilian rule because of the Balfour Declaration’s pledge to protect the civil and religious rights of the country’s Arab population.23 This proved to be the case when the first High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel pledged in 1921 that his government would “not . . . intervene in Moslem religious matters. We want the Moslem population of Palestine to feel that with respect to their Wakfs and Sharia Courts they are to have the management of their own religious affairs.”24 Samuel had little respect for the Ottoman past, viewing Ottoman rule as “having fostered poverty and backwardness in Palestine” and Ottoman law as being “desperately inadequate” for a modern state, but he saw the value of recycling Ottoman religious precedents, particularly the Ottoman millet system, because of his view that non-intervention would be the best approach for ensuring stability in Palestine.25 Inoculating their administration from foreign criticism was not the only reason that administrators adopted non-intervention; the legal and financial constraints of postwar empire building and their own prejudices about how to rule the predominantly Arab population overdetermined the adoption of the “status quo” policy. In the first place, international regulations governing military occupation limited interference in religious affairs. Article 46 of the Hague Convention of 1907, which clearly influenced Allenby’s pledge and was later incorporated into the regulations of the military administration, mandated that “family honour and rights, individual life, and private property, as well as religious conviction and worship, must be respected,” under military occupation.26 The financial constraints of the postwar British exchequer also placed limits on what these administrators could do by forcing them to apply the cost-cutting “Cromer system” of rule to Palestine, which emphasized “the importance of low taxation, efficient fiscal administration, careful expenditure on remunerative public work, and a minimal interference in the internal and external traffic of goods.”27 As Barbara Smith has pointed out, “the argument that the ill-tempered British taxpayer could not be expected to bear the burden of supporting the emergent Jewish National Home in Palestine,” prevailed during the mandate period and led to under-investment in the local economy, the educational system, and infrastructure.28

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The preservation of the religious status quo was also part of a conservative approach to governance across the empire that emphasized the preservation of local traditions over the large-scale modernization of society, giving the lie to the notion that British imperialism was committed to a civilizing mission.29 In British Palestine, this played out in the mandatory government’s privileging of agricultural training over Western-style education, its preservation of the historical aspects of the Old City at the expense of modern development, and its partnership with old elites rather than the emerging Palestinian Arab middle class.30 Finally, there is little doubt that the decision to protect the status quo was influenced by the Balfour Declaration’s pledge that, “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine [emphasis added].” For the military administrators, who otherwise saw the declaration as detrimental to their ability to govern the predominantly Arab country, this pledge represented the best way of balancing Arab interests against Britain’s commitment to support the establishment of a Jewish national home.31 It should be noted here that Herbert Samuel, the first British high commissioner for Palestine, saw things somewhat differently. Although he never became a member of the Zionist Organization, Samuel had long been sympathetic to the Zionist cause and had presented a 1915 memorandum to the British Cabinet entitled, The Future of Palestine, which called for the settlement of Jews in Palestine as a way of strengthening British and Jewish interests in the country.32 After the war, he continued his advocacy for Zionism by serving as chairman of an advisory committee that prepared Zionist proposals for the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.33 Unlike his military predecessors in the OETA, who viewed Jewish immigration as a threat to the security of the country because of its detrimental impact on the Arab community, Samuel believed that a greater Jewish presence in Palestine would benefit everyone regardless of their religion or ethnicity. As a result his support for the protection of the status quo came from his belief that the policy would help in his plan of reconciling the Arab community to the changes brought about by the development of the country under British and Jewish direction. As Laura Robson has argued, Samuel embraced the millet system in particular because he believed it would function, “like India’s communal courts, as a potentially stabilizing element in the

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upheaval of colonial occupation.”34 But even if his specific reason for embracing the status quo differed, Samuel shared his military predecessors’ view that the best way of ruling the Palestinian population was to provide official protection for Arab civil and religious rights.

Rethinking the Status Quo Initially the concept of the status quo focused on the status of the country’s holy places in deference to the Ottoman-era Status Quo, a nineteenth century edict that defined the rights of Christian sects at various Christian sites. Fairly soon, however, the concept was stretched to cover all kinds of religious matters in the country and at times nonreligious issues, as officials found creative ways to apply the “status quo” policy to serve imperial needs. It was this extension of the Ottoman concept of the status quo that explains its power and lasting popularity in British policymaking. The Ottoman “Status Quo” was a retrospective term used by the Palestine government and European Christians for two Ottoman edicts ( firmans) that established guidelines over the ownership and usage rights of Christian sects at Palestine’s holy sites.35 Those rights had been laid out in a firman from 1767 that divided the Church of the Holy Sepulchre among its claimants and recognized the Greek Orthodox community as pre-eminent. In 1852, Sultan Abdulmecid issued another firman reconfirming the 1767 decision by stating that the Ottoman government recognized the status quo religious arrangements at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Deir al Sultan, and the Sanctuary of Ascension in Jerusalem, plus the Tomb of the Virgin near Gethsemane and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.36 The British built on the Status Quo of 1852 by adding Muslim and Jewish sites to the list of holy places covered by the concept, as Michael Dumper has pointed out in his comprehensive analysis of politics at Jerusalem’s holy places.37 We can see this broadening in Lionel Archer Cust’s “The Status Quo at the Holy Sites,” an unpublished government report from 1925 that functioned as the main guide to the country’s religious sites for British officials. Cust, who served as aide-de-camp to High Commissioner Herbert Samuel and later as private secretary to High Commissioner John Chancellor, wrote his report as part of an effort to define the concept proposed eight years earlier by Stewart Symes from

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Cairo. Symes, who in 1925 became chief secretary to the Palestine government, had left the policy deliberately vague, knowing it would have to be fleshed out by British experts after the war. With its descriptions of which rooms, which lamps, which steps, which hours of worship were owned by which community at each site during the Ottoman period, Cust’s report did just that, giving historical weight to the “status quo” policy while also providing British administrators actionable intelligence about the holy sites. By compiling and systematizing Ottoman religious arrangements at these sites, Cust elevated customary rules and arrangements worked out between the sects and local Ottoman representatives into something akin to religious regulations, making his work useful to colonial administrators looking for clarity in dealing with the politics of the holy places. As was common in colonial ethnography, Cust gave greater saliency to these traditional arrangements than was perhaps merited simply by gathering them together and editing them into a colonial report. In doing so, Cust was following the lead of those late nineteenth and early twentieth century religious and archaeological scholars discussed in the last chapter, whose anthropological, historical, and topographical studies provided the British military with useful intelligence about Palestine during World War I. But the best comparison for Cust’s report is the type of ethnographic work produced by experts in British India and Africa that was intended to illuminate the religious and tribal divisions of native populations for colonial administrators, such as H. H. Risley’s classic 1908 work, The People of India or Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston’s 1913 article, “A Survey of the Ethnography of Africa: and the Former Racial and Tribal Migrations of that Continent.”38 In Palestine itself, Cust’s analysis worked alongside Norman Bentwich’s reports about Palestinian law, J. B. Barron’s study of Palestinian waqf, Ernest Richmond’s book on the Dome of the Rock, and C. R. Ashbee’s studies of local arts and crafts to provide ethnographic intelligence on Palestine and Palestinians to the Palestine government.39 Under the Ottomans, the 1852 Status Quo Agreement was designed to regulate Christian holy sites, so that disputes between local Christian sects over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity would not escalate into international incidents, though it failed spectacularly to head off the coming Crimean War. Arrangements at Jewish and Muslim sites were not included in the terms of the Status

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Quo because the administration of those sites caused no problems for the Ottomans. Moreover, as a Muslim power, the state had a political and financial interest in administering Muslim religious sites directly. The British had no interest in controlling Muslim sites directly and were concerned about the potential for political disputes to emerge at the holy sites of all three communities, which led their conception of the status quo to be more expansive. We can see this in Cust’s broadening of the list of sites covered by the status quo to include additional Christian sites such as the Grotto of the Milk and the Shepherd’s Field in Bethlehem, and, most significantly, the Western Wall and Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, the latter site holy to both Muslims and Jews.40 Although unmentioned in Cust’s report, this was innovative, because it suggested that Islamic, Jewish, and Christian places could, and indeed should, all be dealt with under a single religious system. While Cust’s report redefined the status quo on the page, British officers in the field pushed the concept even further away from its Ottoman origins. In his memoirs Ronald Storrs (the military governor of Jerusalem from 1917 until 1920 and governor of Jerusalem from 1920 until 1926), who fancied himself a modern-day Solomon in his treatment of the city’s thorny religious issues, praised the status quo for acting as “a strong tower of defence against the encroachments from all quarters to which O.E.T.A. was continually subjected.”41 Influenced by his experience serving in the British administration in Egypt from 1904 until 1917 and by his Orientalist sensibilities, Storrs viewed the Palestine question from the perspective of a colonial agent and not in terms of the metropolitan interest of promoting the Jewish national home. In fact, unlike Samuel or Norman Bentwich, the country’s first attorney general and the most overtly pro-Zionist official in the Palestine government, Storrs regarded the Balfour Declaration as the greatest abrogation of the status quo policy.42 For Storrs, the status quo policy was valuable for protecting the traditional values of local society, which were not only found in local religious practices but also in “traditional” ways of living. In his memoirs, Storrs mentions the government protecting the status quo at religious sites but also points out that “the now famous doctrine of the Status Quo was the bedrock of the General [Allenby]’s policy (as it must be of any honest military occupation) in secular as well as religious matters.”43 Indeed, Storrs’s own great contribution to the protection of the status quo was decidedly secular:

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the preservation of Jerusalem’s traditional architecture and handicrafts through the Pro-Jerusalem Society, a quasi-governmental society that Storrs had founded in 1918 and which was active in the city until Storrs become the governor of Cyprus in 1926.44 When looking through British records it becomes clear that the status quo policy was used by officials to justify a range of disparate measures: the placement of British Muslim guards at the Haram alSharif, the rejection of the Zionist Organization’s plan to purchase the Western Wall, the provision of a “customary” military band at the Nabi Musa festival, the decision to respect the traditional religious precedence among local Christian sects, the restriction of Protestant missionary work, the decision to grant each religious community the right to maintain its own religious courts and pious endowments, and even Storrs’s decision to ban modern signage and building materials in the Old City. Taken altogether, they suggest how quickly the notion of the status quo evolved under the British from its narrow and specific Ottoman meaning into a kind of shorthand for the customary way of doing things. It was this shift to a more elastic definition that gave the status quo policy its power, for British officials found that they could easily justify any new policy to local inhabitants, to themselves, and to the Permanent Mandates Commission, so long as they could identify some tradition, however weak or invented, that they were protecting. Notably, in situations where customs were not fully defined (such as at the Western Wall) or remained contested (such as the rights of Christian sects at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity), experts such as Cust had to pick and choose which traditions to follow, in effect creating a new definition of what was customary practice. This is an important point because it meant that protecting the status quo was never as conservative an activity as the language of the term suggests. As Ellen Fleischmann has nicely put it, British officials “maintained certain religious or tribal structures in order to facilitate administration, mediate conflict, and impose control, retaining those ‘customs’ or practices that benefited their objectives in certain ways while creating or developing others that suited their purposes.”45 To be sure, this practice was not unique to policymaking in Palestine, for it followed the kind of colonial reification, protection, and invention of religious tradition in places such as India and Africa, as ably described in the work of Terence Ranger, Nicholas Dirks, Bernard Cohn, Mahmud

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Mamdani, and Gyanendra Pandey.46 It should be pointed out that this did not mean that the “status quo” was a purely invented concept or that it was imposed solely from on high. The provision of a military band at the Nabi Musa festival, the posting of guards at the Haram al-Sharif, and the decision to give religious communities control over their own religious courts were decisions based upon Ottoman precedents and responded to real demands from the local population, not the whims of colonial agents. But it also has to be remembered that the power to define which precedents were chosen and which were ignored remained squarely in the hands of those agents. As Mamdani has written in relation to the construction of customary law in Africa, “custom was often the outcome of a contest between various forces, not just those in power or its on-the-scene agents . . . [But] the terms of the contest, its institutional framework, were heavily skewed in favor of state-appointed customary authorities.”47 In the case of Palestine, the terms of the contest and the institutional framework were defined not only by the needs of the colonial regime but also by the Balfour Declaration, which operated throughout the mandate period to privilege the political needs of the Jewish community over those of the Arab community. While Britain’s status quo policy ended up reinforcing the declaration’s restriction of Arab rights to religious and civil matters, it had a far different effect on Jewish rights. Simply put, for the Jewish community, the protection of their religious rights was supplementary to, rather than a substitute for, their national rights.

Building a New Millet System In Cust’s report on the status quo at Palestine’s holy sites we can also see how British experts used the Ottoman concept of the millet to divide Palestinians into separate religious communities. The Ottoman millet system granted various non-Muslim religious communities a modicum of self-government: the right to provide education and welfare to its members, and to collect taxes and administer personal law.48 Cust linked the status quo in the Ottoman period to the millet system by stating that the former applied “only to the Orthodox, Latin and Armenian Orthodox rites,” according to the Ottoman government’s “Administrative Organization of the ‘Rayas,’” i.e., non-Moslem Ottomans, into “millets” or “nations.”49 His inclusion of Jews in his rewriting of the

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status quo arrangements was novel but made some sense given that the Ottoman authorities had customarily recognized the Jewish community as a millet. However, his reference to Muslims in discussing arrangements at the Western Wall (which was technically part of the Muslim-owned Haram al-Sharif) and Rachel’s Tomb (which was a shared Muslim and Jewish site), was a major departure from Ottoman practice, because it suggested that the Muslim community might also be treated as a millet under British rule. While Muslim religious authorities, especially in the pre-modern period, had provided the same sort of civil society services as their Christian and Jewish counterparts and took up a similar intermediary position between the state and its Muslim subjects as the Christian and Jewish millet authorities did, Islam’s unique place in the Ottoman state meant that its religious authorities were never granted the same autonomous millet status. As the sultan, the Ottoman leader had a traditional right in Islamic law to oversee the practice of Islam in his domains, and as caliph he was obliged to lead the Muslim community, even if most sultans, excepting Abdulhamid II (1876– 1909), made little reference to that title.50 Islam was effectively the state religion of the Ottoman Empire, even before this was recognized in the Fundamental Law of 1876, with the shari‘a court system, awqaf, and Muslim holy places legally bound to the state and administered by religious bureaucrats in Istanbul. Given this Ottoman precedent, Cust hesitated to place the Muslim community into the same millet structure as the Christian and Jewish communities. Not only did he not include Islamic sites such as al-Aqsa Mosque or the Dome of the Rock in his list of holy places covered by the status quo agreement, but he made no clear reference to Muslims as forming a separate millet. But other officials had no qualms about viewing Muslims as a separate communal bloc tantamount to a millet, although they did not use that terminology. As William Ormsby-Gore, for example, in his capacity as a member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, proposed as early as January 1919: The largest possible measure of cultural autonomy should be given to Jews, Christians and Mohommedans [sic ] respectively. That is to say that the Government of Palestine should recognize certain definitely constituted bodies, each entirely Jewish, Christian or

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Moslem as the case might be, which would deal with education . . . Similarly as partially carried out in the past, under Turkish regime, the assessment of the tithe and collection of taxes should be left to each community. In the matter of petty justice and civil causes, the Jews should go to Jewish magistrates and the Mahommedans to Mahommedan magistrates. There must of course be “mixed” Palestinian courts for the graver crimes and for disputes between Jew and Gentile.51 Communal autonomy under recognized religious bodies, separate religious school systems, communal tax collection, and independent religious courts: Ormsby-Gore’s proposal was a clear call for Britain to create a neo-millet system in Palestine. That call would eventually be addressed through Article 83 of the Palestine Order-in-Council of 1922, which stated that “each religious community recognised by the Government shall enjoy autonomy for the internal affairs of the community subject to the provisions of any Ordinance or Order issued by the High Commissioner.”52 For his part, Herbert Samuel, the high commissioner at that time, saw the millet system as central to Britain’s religious policy and boasted later to the House of Lords about his improvement of the system: The Turks, who with centuries of experience had developed a certain amount of wisdom in these matters . . . dealt with religious communities as such under the system known as millets . . . Consequently I continued and developed it, and I made it my duty to organise these communal entities . . . Education, religious endowments, marriage laws and other matters were dealt with, not in geographical areas, but by communities. The political system of that country should, in my judgment, be based mainly on these lines.53 While it is true that under the Ottomans, education, marriage laws, and religious endowments were handled separately by religious communities, Samuel’s idea that Palestine’s political system should be based upon a separation of the population along religious lines went against government practice in the late Ottoman period, when the notion of a shared Ottoman citizenship was being promoted. Moreover, there is

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some question whether Samuel’s conception of the millet system was accurate in the first place. In a debate reminiscent of debates among subaltern studies scholars about the createdness of caste in India, Ottomanists have questioned whether the millet arrangements of the Ottoman period ever really amounted to the kind of system described by European observers like Samuel.54 Donald Quataert, for example, has argued that the term millet was not used to designate Ottoman nonMuslims until the early nineteenth century and that scholars have exaggerated its power in structuring Ottoman society.55 Here too, any consideration of the importance of the millet system has to take into account the fact that the reforms of the Tanzimat period had worked to break down differences between the empire’s religious communities. Quataert’s observations about scholars exaggerating the power of the millet system could just as easily be applied to colonial officials, who were predisposed to seeing subject populations as divided along religious and ethnic lines. As Laura Robson has argued, officials in the Palestine government had only the most rudimentary understanding of Ottoman policies, and, more often than not, substituted their own Orientalist conceptions of Palestinian society for actual precedent.56 This can be seen in Edward Keith-Roach’s argument while drafting the municipalities law in 1921 that it was prudent for Britain to “recognize in the law the division which exists in fact, and to form separate registers of Mohammadans, Christians, and Jews,” a position that ignored the fact that the three communities had voted together in Ottoman municipal elections.57 And there is good evidence that when British officials based their laws upon specific Ottoman statutes they relied on European compendiums of Ottoman laws, particularly George Young’s 1905 work Corps de Droits Ottomans, which did not cover the modernization of Ottoman law in the last years of the empire.58 The a priori assumption that differences in Palestine were religious rather than political would have profound effects on the way the British approached their subject population. Because they presumed the population to be divided along religious lines, British officials tended to see the adoption of separate policies for Muslims, Christians, and Jews as a natural response to the demands of those constituencies. In contrast, policy proposals that were intended to bring those communities together, such as an aborted attempt to create a shared Palestinian identity, were treated with some suspicion.

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The Rise and Fall of the Holy Places Commission While the status quo policy became the backbone of Britain’s religious system in Palestine, it was not the only approach to solving religious issues proposed after the occupation. Another proposal that gained a lot of traction was for the creation of an international commission to decide disputes at Palestine’s holy sites. The commission idea emerged at the beginning of 1919 in separate proposals from Ormsby-Gore and Reverend P. N. Waggett, an army chaplain in the Egyptian Expeditionary Forces, who was considered the foremost authority on religion in Palestine during and after the war.59 Their proposals envisioned an international commission made up of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish representatives to handle disputes at Palestine’s holy sites, freeing Britain from having to deal with such delicate religious matters. This would also benefit Britain’s position in the country by helping to satisfy the demands of European governments for a say in the country’s religious affairs without permitting them to interfere in local politics. Their proposal was enthusiastically taken up by metropolitan officials, such as Mark Sykes, and Arthur Balfour, who saw how the formation of an international commission could be useful in securing the support of sceptical European powers for Britain’s position in Palestine at the postwar peace conferences. From 1919–22, Balfour and other members of the Foreign Office spent hours talking up the proposal for an international Holy Places Commission to their European counterparts, going so far as to draw up various lists of potential members (Reverend Waggett was pencilled in as the commission’s secretary and King Hussein of Mecca was chosen as one of the commission’s Muslim representatives).60 Through British efforts, the proposal was first introduced at the San Remo conference and, despite some French reluctance, was eventually adopted as part of Article 95 of the Treaty of Peace with Turkey of 1920 (also known as the Treaty of Se`vres).61 But in the end, the inability of British, French, Italian, Vatican, and Greek Orthodox representatives to agree on the commission’s powers and composition ensured that the Holy Places Commission never came into being.62 Despite the great hope officials had originally placed in the commission, the Foreign Office did not spend any time mourning the collapse of the proposal in 1922, for by that time Britain’s position in Palestine was assured. The promulgation of the Mandate for Palestine in

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July 1922 gave international legitimacy to Britain’s control over Palestine, meaning that there was little reason to continue courting European powers with the promise of an international commission. It should be noted that the proposal for a Holy Places Commission did not die off completely, for Article 14 of the Mandate for Palestine (July 24, 1922) stated that under the auspices of the League of Nations, “A special commission shall be appointed by the Mandatory [i.e., Britain] to study, define and determine the rights and claims in connection with the Holy Places and the rights and claims relating to the different religious communities in Palestine.”63 To address this article, officials in Palestine and London briefly explored the possibility in 1922 of forming a commission of judges in London that would hear disputes over Palestine’s holy sites. When it was decided that this was impracticable, the Palestine government chose to ignore the article and in 1924 granted the high commissioner for Palestine the final say in all religious disputes.64 This was confirmed in the Palestine (Holy Places) Order-in-Council 1924, which stated that cases having to do with holy sites would not be decided through any court system but would be brought before High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, whose decisions would be “final and binding on all parties.”65

Creating the Millets With the high commissioner functioning as the final arbiter of religious disputes after 1924, the millet model became central to the Palestine government’s approach to religion in Palestine. Writing a year after the Palestine (Holy Places) Order-in-Council, Archer Cust argued in his aforementioned “The Status Quo at the Holy Places” that the status quo’s protection ultimately depended upon local religious authorities having control over their own religious affairs in a manner consistent with Ottoman precedent.66 Building on Article 83 of the Palestine Order-in-Council of 1922, which recognized the autonomy of the country’s religious communities, the Palestine government issued the Religious Communities (Organisation) Ordinance of 1926, which created a legal mechanism for the government to recognize religious communities and defined the rights of those communities. The ordinance placed the right of recognition of religious communities in the hands of the high commissioner, subject to the approval of the secretary

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of state. It went on to grant those communities the “capacity to acquire and hold immovable and movable property of every description, to enter into contracts to execute any deeds and to sue and be sued under the titles granted to them,” and the “power to impose upon members of the community contributions or fees for communal purposes which shall be recoverable in the same way as municipal taxes and fees.”67 While we can understand these ordinances as giving de jure recognition to these communities, the colonial authorities had granted them de facto recognition much earlier, when the military administration worked with local religious leaders to rebuild a religious system from the remnants of the Ottoman system. The religious institutions of the Jewish and Christian communities were the first to be recognized when Proclamation 42 of April 24, 1918, announced that “the jurisdiction of the Courts of the Christian and Jewish Communities in matters of personal status of Ottoman subjects shall be as it was before the Occupation.”68 Inevitably, some changes were made when Britain took over. In a departure from the traditional Ottoman practice of having a single hakham bashi (chief rabbi) drawn from the Sephardic community, they came to recognize two chief rabbis for the Jewish community (one Ashkenazi and Sephardic), a practice that continues in the State of Israel today. But this was more an evolutionary than revolutionary change, since Ashkenazi rabbis had been recognized in various Levantine cities in the late Ottoman period. More importantly, while the number of chief rabbis made a difference to the Jewish community itself, it did not change the relationship of the state to Jewish communal institutions, such as local rabbinical courts, which remained autonomous from the government. The British arrival also did not radically change the Christian community’s relationship with the state. While the British consulate had championed the cause of the Protestant community during the late Ottoman period, the Palestine government adopted a hands-off approach toward the Christian community, in part to allay Catholic fears that it would favour Protestantism, but mainly because Britain’s position in the country no longer depended upon its protection of Christians. Shortly after the occupation, the military authorities withdrew their support for missionary work and ended the practice of providing official representation at Protestant church services in a signal to locals and the international community of its commitment to non-interference in

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religious matters.69 That said, there were instances when the government intervened in local Christian affairs, such as when it became involved in leadership battles in the Greek Orthodox Church and took charge of that church’s finances after it became insolvent in the early 1920s. Such interventions were justified, however, as fitting with the spirit of protecting the status quo: in this case, the government’s intervention was intended preserve the church’s place in Palestine.70 The few times that British policies toward Christian groups broke with existing custom, such as when the government forced the Orthodox Church to sell off part of its landholdings in the new city to raise cash, despite the fact that that land formed part of a waqf and was therefore inalienable under Islamic (and Ottoman) law, were exceptions that proved the rule that British officials were happy to leave Christian institutions and clerical hierarchies as they found them when they arrived in Palestine.71 The replacement of Ottoman rule with British rule had a much more profound impact on Muslim religious authorities. Because the occupation severed the financial and administrative ties between Islamic bodies in Palestine and their parent institutions in Istanbul, such as the Ministry of Evkaf and the office of the shaykh al-Islam [Turkish: s¸eyhu¨lislam; the grand mufti in Istanbul who was the chief judge in the empire], it became necessary for the Palestine government to establish new religious arrangements to ensure that the shari‘a court system still operated, the collection and distribution of waqf funds continued, and religious appointments and dismissals proceeded as before. Britain was not a Muslim power, making it impossible for the country to recreate the same relationship that the Ottoman state had with those institutions. Moreover, with one eye fixed on India, the British government had no desire to be seen as intervening excessively in Muslim affairs anywhere in their empire, let alone in as sensitive a location as Jerusalem. It is for this reason that Herbert Samuel announced in a meeting with Muslim leaders on August 24, 1921, that his administration would not intervene in Muslim affairs: Formerly under the Turkish rule there was a Turkish authority in these matters, the Sheikh Ul Islam, in Constantinople. Now Palestine is cut off from the Government of Constantinople and there is a Local Government in Palestine, but this Government in

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Palestine which is not a Moslem one, is most anxious not to intervene in Moslem religious matters. We want the Moslem population of Palestine to feel that with respect to their Wakfs and Sharia Courts they are to have the management of their own religious affairs.72 This policy of non-interference, encapsulated in the status quo approach of British officials, meant that the partial administration of religious law or religious institutions, as occurred in British India, was never seriously contemplated in Palestine.73 It also explains why the Palestine government was reluctant to involve itself in the administration of Islamic affairs, as the British authorities had done in Cyprus, Sudan, and Nigeria by intervening in the appointment of the ulama or by placing British officials on waqf councils, as discussed in the last chapter. Instead, the Palestine government chose to create an autonomous local body to oversee the country’s shari‘a court system and waqf administration. In fact, this approach had been adopted long before Samuel’s announcement to Muslims that he was committed to non-interference, as shown in a series of government policies toward Islamic institutions implemented between 1918 and 1921.

Inventing the Muslim Millet One of the first orders of business for colonial officials was the reconstitution of the local Islamic court system, which had been badly disrupted by the war and the Ottoman withdrawal. In June 1918, the military authorities formally abolished the right of legal recourse to the Ottoman Court of Cassation and the shaykh al-Islam, both located in Istanbul, and three months later established a Shari‘a Court of Appeal in Jerusalem in their place.74 British legal experts presented this change as fitting with Ottoman practice, going so far as to replace all references to the defunct Court of Cassation in Istanbul with references to the new Shari‘a Court of Appeal when quoting from Ottoman legal texts. But there was a striking paradox at the heart of the British attempt to follow the Ottoman system in a post-Ottoman era, for in so doing, British officials had created an institution that had never been seen before in Palestine. Other novel Islamic institutions would soon follow, such as

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the Central Wakf Committee, the Central Moslem Authority, and most significantly, the Supreme Muslim Council. British officials chose the mufti of Jerusalem, Kamil al-Husayni, to head the new Shari‘a Court of Appeal and when he died in March 1921, the position passed to a member of the al-Khalidi family. This established a policy by which Islamic law would be administered by the local Muslim notability and would be distinct from British common law, which was administered by British and local judges in a separate secular court system. The scope of Islamic law was similar to what it had been during the Ottoman period in that Islamic courts were given jurisdiction in cases that had to do with personal status issues, mainly marriage, divorce, and inheritance cases. But under the British, Islamic law applied solely to Muslims, a change from the Ottoman period, when Jews and Christians had made use of Islamic courts, particularly in cases related to inheritance and the guardianship of minors.75 Since the existence of an independent religious court system was one of the central privileges accruing to recognized millets under Ottoman rule, this shift further emphasized British treatment of the Muslim community as a millet. British officials then began the process of creating a Muslim-run body to permanently oversee the administration of Muslim law and the waqf system. At first the Palestine government adopted a system whereby a “president of the wakf administration” and a “director general of wakfs,” appointed by the government from the local Muslim community, ran the waqf system, with the government’s Finance Department reviewing the annual waqf budget. This approach replicated Britain’s policy in Cyprus, where from 1914 onwards British officials controlled the appointment and dismissal of all Muslim officials.76 Attesting to the continued respect of British officials for the mufti, the high commissioner appointed Kamil alHusayni as the new president of the waqf administration, known officially as the Central Wakf Committee. As Herbert Samuel wrote to the Foreign Office in November 1920, despite these moves to grant Muslims more control over their religious affairs, “the control exercised by the Government over the Administration of Moslem Wakfs was resented by Moslem opinion.”77 In response, the high commissioner quickly set up a meeting with Muslim leaders in order to retool the administration’s oversight of awqaf and shari‘a courts. British records give no indication of the process by

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which representatives of the Muslim community were chosen, except that the gathered body consisted “of Muftis, principal Ulema, and Moslem Notables,” who met with the high commissioner, the attorney general, the civil secretary, and other British officials.78 At that meeting three resolutions were reached: 1. That the Government should retain financial control over the administration of Moslem Wakfs; 2. That appointments to the judicial offices in the Shari‘a Courts should be made by a Moslem authority; 3. That in order to prepare a scheme to give effect to the above resolutions a Committee should be appointed.79 Seven British officials and nine Muslim representatives, including the mufti of Jerusalem (Kamil al-Husayni), the mufti of Haifa (Muhammad Murad), the mufti of Safad (Asad Kaddourah), the mayor of Jerusalem (Raghib al-Nashashibi), and the mayor of Nablus (Omar Zaytar), came together to form the new Committee for Moslem Religious Affairs proposed in the third resolution.80 The committee soon proposed that a “Central Moslem Authority” made up of local Muslims be established to oversee the entire administration of the shari‘a court system, including the supervision of the shari‘a courts and the nomination and dismissal of qadis and muftis.81 According to this arrangement the decisions of the Central Moslem Authority would be subject to the approval of the Palestine government, which would also retain financial oversight of its annual budget.82 The committee proposed an even more independent system for the administration of awqaf, with the Central Moslem Authority overseeing the entire waqf system and the colonial government retaining only limited financial oversight through a single British inspector.83 Although these measures granted Muslims greater control over their religious affairs, the conference’s Muslim participants rightly argued that the new proposal still did not give the Muslim community full control.84 At a follow-up meeting in August 1921, representatives of the Palestine government addressed these complaints by conceding that the Central Moslem Authority alone would control appointments to the shari‘a courts and that British oversight of the waqf system would be reduced to an annual review of the waqf budget. It was at this meeting

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that the high commissioner expressed to these Muslim leaders his strong commitment to non-intervention mentioned above.85 By August 1921, then, Britain had pledged itself to support an independent Muslim religious authority in Palestine as part of its neomillet approach to the country’s religious communities. That authority would soon come to be invested in the Supreme Muslim Council, as we shall see in Chapter 4. But first, we must understand how British fears about Muslim politics also factored into the creation of the SMC.

CHAPTER 3 ISLAM AND POLITICS IN PALESTINE

On the morning of April 4, 1920, Arab attacks against Jews at the annual Nabi Musa festival broke the uneasy peace of British occupation. The fighting began when recently arrived pilgrims from Hebron began assaulting Jewish onlookers near Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate. With few British troops in the city, the attacks quickly spread throughout the Jewish quarter, leading to four days of violence between Arabs, Jews, and British forces. By the time order was restored nine people had lost their lives, a further 244 individuals had been wounded, and numerous buildings lay in ruins. “All the carefully built relations of mutual understanding between British, Arabs, and Jews seemed to flare away in an agony of fear and hatred,” lamented Ronald Storrs, reflecting British anguish at the riot’s impact on communal relations.1 Before Nabi Musa, Storrs and his fellow officers had assumed that Palestine’s Arab majority would soon come to accept British rule. They reassured themselves and their superiors back home that local Muslims were “religious [but] not bigoted” and that there was an “absence of religious intolerance in Palestine.”2 At the same time, they took for granted that the Palestinian peasant, motivated purely by material interests, was uninterested in nationalist politics.3 It was assumed that Arabs would soon come around to supporting the mandate once they saw the benefits of stability and development of British rule. But the violence at Nabi Musa delivered a starkly different message – that Arabs were

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far from being reconciled to British rule and were prepared to take up arms to protect their religious homeland. At Nabi Musa, the British came to realize the potential for Islam to be used to challenge the colonial state. As a result, British intelligence agents, political officers, and colonial planners spent much of their time after the festival developing ways of controlling Palestinian politics so that religion would not be used in the same way again. Central to the British approach was an attempt to neutralize the voices of Arab activists who had been active at Nabi Musa. In withholding their recognition of Arab nationalist groups, in ignoring Palestinian petitions and entreaties, and in restricting the ability of Arab political activists to organize, the Palestine government sought, with some success, to limit the power of the nationalist message. Working in parallel to this strategy of Palestinian nationalist marginalization was the Palestine government’s development of the Supreme Muslim Council as an institution that could be counted upon to ensure that the Muslim community was politically quiescent, a process that will be explored in more detail in the next chapter. The establishment of the SMC may thus be viewed as an attempt to keep Muslims away from nationalist politics, making the creation of the council as much about politics as it was about religion. To understand why this was the case, we must explore the Nabi Musa riots of 1920 and their place in Palestinian nationalist politics, as well as the British reaction to this threat to the colonial order.

Understanding Nabi Musa In seeking to understand why Muslim peasants began rioting at the festival, officials first focused on religion. The perpetrators of Arab attacks against Jews were uneducated peasants from Hebron, proof enough to some that their actions must have been motivated by religious fanaticism rather than politics. Others blamed the violence on what they saw as an eternal religious struggle between Muslims, Christians, and Jews over Jerusalem, what the police officer Richard Adamson referred to as “the bitter hatred of centuries still smoldering” in 1920s Jerusalem.4 Finally, British intelligence agents, perhaps influenced by the Foreign Office’s anxiety about the pan-Islamic movement and Turkish nationalism, blamed foreign agents provocateurs for exploiting religion to incite the crowd.5

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But, as British officials soon realized, it was not religious fanaticism that had motivated the uprising at Nabi Musa – it was nationalism, albeit a nationalism that was infused with religious language and concerns. When the Hebronites entered Jerusalem that fateful April morning, they came singing “patriotic hymns against the Zionists, Jewish settlers, and the British in the wake of the Balfour Declaration,” as the singer Wasif Jawhariyyeh observed in his memoirs.6 According to Zionist intelligence, Arab activists among the crowd, which it estimated at 60,000 to 70,000, sang out, “You King Faysal, do not worry, your troops gather,” and “You victorious King Faysal, your troops destroy walls,” a clear attempt to link the crowd to Faysal bin Husayn’s panArabist cause.7 After entering the city, the pilgrims then listened to a series of nationalist speeches given from the balconies of the Arab Club (one of the leading Arab nationalist societies) and the municipality building before moving on to clash with local Jews. The speakers were not traditional religious figures but Western-educated politicians and political activists, such Musa Kazim al-Husayni, the mayor of Jerusalem who had previously had a long career in the Ottoman administration; Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the future mufti of Jerusalem who was then a young anti-Zionist activist with little interest in a religious career; and ‘Arif al-‘Arif, an educator and editor of the pro-Faysal Arab nationalist paper Suriyya al-Junibiyya (Southern Syria). And their speeches called upon the assembled crowd to defend the nation, not Islam, although at that this moment the nation referred to was the Greater Syrian Kingdom of the Hashemite emir Faysal bin Husayn, of which Palestine was considered an integral part.8 Most importantly, the 1920 festival took place at a moment when national movements and anti-colonial revolutions were shaking the Middle East. Held in the wake of the 1919 Egyptian revolution and just a month after the proclamation of Faysal as King of Syria, the 1920 Nabi Musa festival gave Palestinian Arabs the opportunity to express their own desire for self-determination and, most particularly, their opposition to Zionist immigration.9 Despite catching the colonial authorities unaware, the Nabi Musa riots were not a bolt out of the blue. While the riots were the first time that Zionism and Arab nationalism publicly tested each other during the mandate period, as Roberto Mazza has rightly argued, the riots were the culmination of months of Arab nationalist organization and activism.10

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It would be the Palin Commission, the British commission of enquiry charged with investigating the reasons for the violence at Nabi Musa, that first recognized the importance of nationalism at the festival.11 Taking a sober look at the riots after the dust had settled in Jerusalem, the commission delivered a report in July 1920 that rejected the idea that rioters were driven by religious fanaticism. While suggesting that agents provocateurs may have played some role in inciting the crowd, the commission concluded that the major cause of the violence at Nabi Musa was “the alienation and exasperation of the feelings of the [Arab] population of Palestine.”12 At the root of this alienation, according to the report, was the Arab view, which the commission did not share, that the Balfour Declaration was incompatible with Arab self-determination. In order to address this alienation, the report recommended that British officials educate Arabs about their rights under the declaration and make sure that Arab political activities, particularly the loose rhetoric of political activists, were more closely controlled in the future. The most obvious transformation after the riots was the transfer of Palestine from military to civilian rule. Discredited as being too handsoff and pro-Arab to adequately enforce the terms of the Balfour Declaration, the military authorities would be replaced in the summer of 1920 by a civilian administration headed by Herbert Samuel, the proZionist, Jewish high commissioner.13 Shifting away from the laissezfaire policies of the OETA, the country’s new civilian government worked to address the threat of “Arab alienation” by developing controls on the practice of Arab politics. At the same time, Samuel pushed for the establishment of a “representative body” for the Muslim community that would “serve to check any agitation for political autonomy,” as mentioned in the previous chapter.14 These parallel developments have not been well understood by scholars. Yehoshua Porath and Bernard Wasserstein have presented the rise of the SMC as occurring after the failure of the Palestine government to create political institutions for the Arab community.15 That is, the creation of the SMC as the main “institution of quasi-government in the Arab community” only occurred because Arabs had rejected the government’s attempt to give them political representation on a proposed legislative council and an Arab Agency.16 In reality, the SMC had been created more than a year before the legislative council elections and the British proposal of an Arab Agency, with the Palestine

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government seeing the SMC as a check on Arab government rather than a means toward its creation. What I am arguing here is that we cannot separate the establishment of the Supreme Muslim Council from the British response to the Nabi Musa riots. As in India after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the shift from military to civilian rule in Palestine was accompanied by a policy of non-interference in religious matters that operated alongside a system of governance that treated Muslims as a security risk and thereby worked to limit their political activities. In this way, the establishment of the SMC, which will be discussed more fully in the following chapter, was part of a larger project to control Palestinian politics.

Palestinian Nationalism before Nabi Musa Although Palestinian Arabs had been involved in a number of Ottomanist and Arabist political societies before World War I, the number of Palestinians involved in Arab nationalist organizations was tiny.17 As C. Ernest Dawn has stated, perhaps only a score of Palestinians were involved in the major regional Arab nationalist societies of the period, and even if we add to that number individuals involved in local nationalist associations and secret societies, the number of political activists in Ottoman Palestine was “infinitesimal,” as Yehoshua Porath has put it, when compared to the number of notables who remained allied with the Ottoman state.18 Furthermore, while Arabs were united in their opposition to Zionism, those who were active in the politics of late-Ottoman Palestine did not share the same opinions about Arab nationalism, Ottomanism, or the future of their territory.19 World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire were the catalysts for members of the Palestinian elite to embrace Arab and Palestinian nationalism. During the war, the Arab Revolt and the brutal rule of Jamal Pasha in Syria brought more Palestinian Arabs into politics, though as a whole the Arab community remained quiescent and loyal to the Ottoman authorities. But with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Woodrow Wilson’s call for national self-determination, and the (vague) European wartime promises of Arab self-government, Arab nationalist activity took off after the war, giving birth to a number of Palestinian political and cultural societies that would be active in the earliest years of the British Mandate. The most prominent of these

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societies were the Literary Society (al-Muntada al-Adabi) and the aforementioned Arab Club (al-Nadi al-‘Arabi), which began as local branches of Arab nationalist (meaning in this case Greater Syrian) organizations centered in Damascus, the capital of the short-lived Syrian Kingdom of Emir Faysal, and the Muslim-Christian Association (al-Jamiah al-Islamiyya al-Masihiyya), a homegrown organization that supported Palestinian autonomy. The two former parties were mostly made up of younger members of the Palestinian notability who were drawn to the Arab nationalist messages coming out of Syria, as Muhammad Muslih and Bayan al-Hout have pointed out.20 In contrast to their elders, who were drawn to the Muslim-Christian Association, members of this generation had been in their 20s and 30s during the last years of Ottoman rule and had consequently never served in the Ottoman administration. Instead, men such as ‘Izzat Darwaza and ‘Awni ‘Abd al-Hadi (co-founders of the Istiqlal Party in 1932), Jamil al-Husayni (secretary of the Arab Executive from 1921 to 1934), and Muhammad Amin al-Husayni (the mufti of Jerusalem and head of the SMC from 1921 onward), gained their first political experience by joining the earliest Arab nationalist groups that emerged in Paris, Istanbul, Cairo, and Damascus in the late Ottoman period. Arab students had created the original branch of the Literary Society in Istanbul in 1909 as an Arab cultural society in the imperial capital.21 The group’s Arabist message resonated with educated Arabs elsewhere in the empire and branches of the society soon came to be established in towns across Iraq and Syria before and during the war.22 In 1915, Damascus became the organization’s headquarters and it was there that the society became involved in political debates about the Arab Revolt, Arab nationalism, and the potential for an Arab kingdom being founded by the family of Sharif Husayn of Mecca. In November 1918, Jamal al-Husayni, one of the society’s original founders in Istanbul, established the first Palestinian branch in Jerusalem, although the club would soon come to be controlled by Jerusalem’s al-Nashashibi family. The Arab Club emerged out of the same Damascene political environment as an offshoot of the Arab Youth Society (al-Jamiyyah al-‘Arabiyya al-Fatat), a club that had originally been founded by Arab e´migre´s in Paris around 1911.23 The Arab Club in Damascus was founded in 1918 with financial support from the British, Emir Faysal,

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and the Arab Youth Society, as a pro-Sherifian cultural society. Branches of the club were then established elsewhere in the region to advance a Sherifian brand of Arab nationalism, such as in Nablus and Jerusalem, with the latter branch, established in early 1918 by Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, becoming particularly influential in postwar Palestinian nationalism. Both the Literary Society and Arab Club presented themselves to the British authorities as social clubs dedicated to the renaissance (al-nahda) of Arab culture and literature in Palestine, but were essentially Arab nationalist societies that strongly opposed Zionism and advocated unification with Syria as a means for protecting Palestinian rights. The main difference between the two clubs lay in the former’s association with the prominent Nashashibi notable family and the latter’s tie to their rivals, the Husaynis. While scholars have focused much attention on the Husayni-Nashashibi rivalry during the mandate period, the rivalry had little appreciable impact on notable politics in the years before the Nabi Musa riots of 1920, as shown by the two societies working together to draft joint letters of protest to the Palestine government, organize public demonstrations against the Balfour Declaration, and coordinate their responses to the King-Crane Commission in 1919.24 While the younger generation of the notability was drawn to panArab nationalism, older members of the elite organized themselves into various branches of what became known as the Muslim-Christian Association, which championed Palestinian independence under British rule. Unlike their younger colleagues, the older generation was politically experienced, with many of its leaders having enjoyed long careers in the Ottoman administration.25 Perhaps because of their experience of working with the Ottomans, members of the MCA were more amenable to accepting Palestine’s independence under British tutelage than their younger counterparts, who called for the country’s immediate integration into Emir Faysal’s Arab kingdom. Originally founded in Jaffa in early November 1918, the MCA spread to Jerusalem two weeks later and then went on to establish some fifteen branches throughout the country over the next year or so, giving the MCA a greater reach than either the Literary Society or the Arab Club, whose branches were most active in Jerusalem.26 The statutes of the MCA defined it as an organization that aimed to increase the political, economic, and educational power of the Arab

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community as a means for protecting its national rights “morally and materially.”27 The joint Muslim and Christian membership was central to the association’s claim “to look after the interests of Palestine generally,” and there is some evidence that a religious quota system operated to ensure that both Muslims and Christians were represented in the organization.28 While the Muslim-Christian Association’s name suggested a unique focus on intercommunal unity, the society was not alone in bringing Muslims and Christians together.29 The Arab cultural renaissance of the nahda in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a cultural movement that had brought Christian and Muslim intellectuals together across the Levant. At the same time, Muslim and Christian members of the notability had worked together in the Ottoman administration and local municipal government in the late Ottoman period.30 It was no surprise then that many of the cultural societies and political parties that formed in the last years of Ottoman rule contained both Christians and Muslims and that such mixed memberships continued in the organizations created during the British period, such as the MCA, the Literary Society, and the Arab Club.31 Despite the fact that mixed membership was the norm in Arab organizations, British officials and their Zionist counterparts saw the mingling of Muslims and Christians as surprising and unnatural, leading their intelligence agents to constantly look for and exaggerate splits between Muslims and Christians in these early organizations.32

Religion and Palestinian Nationalism The leading figures in these societies had received a Western-style education and presented their nationalist demands in the familiar prose of European diplomacy but their demands were also suffused with religious motifs and language. Having attended kuttabs (Quranic schools) in their youth, being part of families with long experience in religious administration, and often having a personal connection with their faith, it was natural for these activists to blend their demands for Arab self-determination with calls for the protection of Palestine as an Islamic space. As Nels Johnson has argued, Islam provided these elite nationalists with a language that resonated far beyond their social class:

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For no other ideological idiom could speak to the outside world’s vast Muslim population, for whom the prospect of Jerusalem under non-Muslim control was anathema. No other single idiom held so much potential threat for the British, who feared a backlash among their Muslim colonies. No other idiom was as comprehensible to the Palestinian masses, among whom the concept of a secular nationalism was foreign. And none other was so totally and legitimately monopolized by the a‘yan [notability].33 Palestinian nationalists worked to spread their message in a number of ways during the mandate period – organizing political demonstrations, boycotts, and petitions; holding educational events and working to spread nationalist values in local schools; putting on nationalist theatre performances; and publishing nationalist newspapers – but the mosque sermon would prove to be one of the most effective methods for encouraging the general Arab population to defend their nation.34 According to Muslih, Shaykh Hasan Abu Sa‘ud, the shafi‘i mufti of Jerusalem, preached some of the first Arab nationalist sermons of the mandate period at al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.35 Meanwhile, Raghib al-Dajani called upon his fellow Muslims to defend the country from Jewish takeover in a sermon from the pulpit of the Jaffa mosque in January 1920.36 They would be followed in the early and mid-1920s by preachers aligned with the SMC, such as Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Muzaffar, who used al-Aqsa and other Palestinian mosques to promote nationalist actions such as the boycott of the legislative council elections. Most significantly, al-Aqsa Mosque would come to be used by Hajj Amin al-Husayni himself to promote his defence of the Haram al-Sharif during the conflict over the Western Wall in 1928– 29. That religion was important in Palestinian nationalism does not make it a unique or backward form of nationalism. While it may not conform to the ideal (and unrealistic) type of secular nationalism described in the works of Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, or Ernest Gellner, it represents a blending of religion and politics that is common in national movements throughout the world, including in supposedly secular western Europe, as scholars such as Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann have argued.37 But historians of Israel/ Palestine do not need to look very far to understand how “nationalism

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feeds on a [religious] symbolic repertoire that is already available but also transforms it in significant ways,” for the history of Zionism also shows how religious identity and sacred history could easily be integrated into, or perhaps more accurately, be appropriated by, a national movement.38 But most importantly, Palestinian nationalists were following the lead of Islamic modernists, such as Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida, who had long preached the importance of Islam for rejuvenating the Egyptian nation.39 A study of Arab petitions during the early years of the mandate reveals that Arab nationalists mined “the quarry of [religious] history to dig up arguments to aid them in their present-day quarrels.”40 Arab petitioners invoked the Bible to show that Jewish rule had only been brief in Palestine and that the presence of more Jews in Palestine could only lead to war, rebellion, and disorder, an argument that relied in part on the recycling of contemporaneous European anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews being a disruptive presence in society.41 Arab groups also portrayed the Jewish religious connection to Palestine as weak or even invented because Jews had no significant religious sites in the country, a patently incorrect argument that may have been based on the fact that Jewish sites, including the Western Wall, had been peripheral to Arab life under Ottoman rule.42 In contrast, Arab petitions presented the country’s Christian and Muslim character as visible and undeniable. Arab petitioners highlighted Palestine’s unique status as the country of Jesus’s birth, ministry, death, and resurrection, with its Holy City of Jerusalem being the first qibla (direction of prayer) in Islam, the site of the “farthest mosque” mentioned in the Qur’an, and the place from which Muhammad had ascended to heaven on his night journey.43 Arab nationalists argued that a Zionist takeover of Palestine would threaten the country’s Christian and Muslim religious legacy and deny Arabs their birthright. They also appealed to the Holy Land’s place in the international community by arguing that handing over the country to its Jewish population would be deeply unfair since there were only 14 million Jews around the world compared to some 350 million Muslims and 750 million Christians, who viewed Palestine as sacred land.44 It is notable that in the early 1920s, Arab petitions emphasized both the Islamic and Christian history of the country. Contrary to Yehoshua Porath’s argument that Palestinian politicians used Islamic references to

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appeal to Muslims at home and Christian references for a European audience,45 Palestinian petitions regularly combined Muslim and Christian claims to the country into a single Arab religious claim to Palestine, as can be seen in two petitions sent to the British authorities in March 1920, the first from a group calling itself “The committee for all who made the demonstration in Acre” which stated that “Palestine is the center of the hopes of all Moslems and Christians in the world,” and the second from the “Muslims and Christians of Gaza,” which presented the country as the land “where Moslems and Christians have their worship places, where Jesus was born and died, and where there is the greatest church in the world and the greatest Muslim mosque for Muslim and Christian visitors.”46 At the beginning of the mandate, Arab politicians presented Palestine as a shared religious space, an indication that Palestinian nationalism at that time was not tied to a particular religious group. But that would change over the course of the 1920s, as the mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husayni came to take a leading role in Palestinian nationalism, giving rise to an Islamization of Palestinian nationalism that will be explored in Chapters 5 and 6.47

Nationalism and Nabi Musa Another reflection of the blending of Islam and nationalism in mandatory Palestine was the annual Nabi Musa festival, which quickly became a nationalist event under the British. Originally established as a Muslim alternative to the annual Easter and Passover celebrations, by the time of the British arrival Nabi Musa had become the annual event that brought Palestinians together from all over the country. Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht have described Nabi Musa as central to the emergence of a Palestinian “civil religion,” but it is perhaps more accurate to see the festival as foundational to a sense of Palestinian national identity.48 Hala Sakakini, who was the daughter of the Palestinian Christian educator Khalil Sakakini, captured the nationalist aspects of Nabi Musa in her book Jerusalem and I: Only once in my life did I attend this exciting pageant. Again it was in the company of Aunt Melia, who had many Muslim friends. We sat on a high spot on the slope north of St. Stephen’s Gate. The place was densely crowded. Everywhere you could see the Arab flag

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with its green, red, white and black colours fluttering high above the heads. The scene filled us with enthusiasm and national pride. Every now and then strong young men would link their arms together and, forming circles, would start dancing the “dabkeh” and singing. It was thrilling to watch and wonderful for the spirit. Although the Nabi Musa feast was supposed to be a religious occasion, it was in fact a national day in which all the Arabs of Palestine, Christians and Moslems alike, shared.49 Though Sakakini’s memory of the festival may be coloured by nostalgia, it is notable that her father described the 1919 Nabi Musa festival as a nationalist (qawmi) celebration in his diaries.50 More importantly, the festival’s status as a national holiday, which gave it the potential to be used in Palestinian nationalism, can be seen in its historical development, particularly in the late nineteenth century. As the name suggests, the Nabi Musa festival celebrates the Prophet Moses, who Palestinian Muslims believe died near Jericho. His burial site on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho became a local shrine (maqam) that functioned as an important pilgrimage site during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods. The local Muslim belief that Moses’s journey had ended in the Promised Land conflicts with the beliefs of Christians, Jews, and other Muslims, who hold that Moses died and was buried on Mount Nebo in present-day Jordan. This meant that the shrine and the festival attached to it were exclusively local traditions, an important factor in their transformation into symbols of Palestinian national identity. The Nabi Musa shrine was constructed in 1269 CE upon the orders of the Mamluk sultan, Baybars, adding the site to the “chain of Islamic shrines built by the Ayyubids and the Mamluks to honor and venerate prophets, the companions of Prophet Mohammad and saints and holy men.”51 According to Khaled Marrar, author of a modern tourist guide to the site, the shrine was established in order to underline the Islamic character of Palestine, especially the desert east of Jerusalem, which otherwise contains a number of Christian holy sites.52 Traditional pilgrimages (ziyarat) to the site had been occurring since the late twelfth century – that is, even before the construction of the shrine – but it was most likely Salah al-Din’s conquest of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 that transformed those pilgrimages into a religious festival that

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was, in the words of Haim Gerber, both a “national” holiday and an antiCrusader celebration.53 It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, however, that an official Nabi Musa festival was established when “highranking state and religious officials imposed their order over the ceremonies, invited Ottoman authorities to participate, and limited the ceremonial role of the mostly peasant pilgrims.”54 The impetus for the formalization of the festival came partly from the centralizing ethos of the Tanzimat reform period and partly from the Porte’s desire to counter growing European influence in Jerusalem, although, as Gerber has pointed out, the Ottomans had been interested in the shrine and the festival since the early eighteenth century.55 Unlike other local saints, Moses was “a public saint whose power was beyond the control of a single family, clan or kin-group,” giving the Nabi Musa festival an all-Palestinian quality that could be useful to the Ottomans and that was lacking in the festivals of other local prophets, such as Nabi Saleh or Nabi Rubin.56 As patrons of the festival, the Ottomans were able to create stronger relationships not only with the notable elite, who helped put on the festival, but also with the general population, through the local government’s provision of gifts to the festival’s pilgrims, a practice unique to the Nabi Musa festival.57 At the same time, the Ottoman authorities used the festival as counter-programming to the city’s Easter celebrations, which became popular events in the nineteenth century under the patronage of Jerusalem’s large and powerful European community. By fixing the beginning of the Nabi Musa festival to the Friday before Good Friday in the Greek Orthodox Julian calendar rather than to the lunar calendar typically used for Muslim ceremonies, the Ottomans created a Muslim festival that could rival Easter.58 The first festival under British rule was celebrated in April 1918 without incident, leading British officials to conclude that Palestinians saw Nabi Musa as a purely religious event. Glowing British accounts of that first festival assured readers back home that while political competition had originally been behind the Ottoman promotion of the event, “happily the pilgrimage has lost all such significance and is now regarded purely as a religious exercise.”59 Gilbert Clayton, the chief political officer of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, boasted that the “impression produced in Moslem circles” by Britain’s success in putting on the festival “has been excellent and on all sides were heard expressions

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of gratitude to the Commander-in-Chief and loyalty to His Majesty the King.”60 A year later the festival took on an entirely different cast when Arab politicians gave nationalist speeches at the festival for the first time.61 Alongside their usual religious singing, the pilgrims sang nationalist songs and chanted “Long Live Emir Faysal” and “Long Live King Husayn,” expressing the first public demonstration of Arab dissatisfaction with British occupation. As Khalil Sakakini later observed, the 1919 festival was the moment Nabi Musa became transformed into a nationalist celebration, as manifested in the appearance of anti-Zionist and Arab nationalist chants.62 The transformation of a religious celebration into a nationalist event was not unprecedented in the British Empire. In India, under the influence of the social reformer, lawyer, and independence activist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Ganesha Chathuri festival in the Indian state of Maharashtra (a traditional celebration of the elephant god Ganesh) was transformed into a rallying point for Indian nationalism in the 1890s. 63 Closer to home in Ireland, country-wide religious celebrations such as Saint Bridget’s Day and Saint Patrick’s Day had helped forge a sense of shared identity among the country’s Catholic population during the nineteenth century, with the latter celebration becoming an Irish nationalist festival in the twentieth century. Before the 1919 festival, British intelligence and Zionist officials warned the military authorities about potential disorder at Nabi Musa. In a March 20, 1919, letter to Ronald Storrs, the British intelligence agent J. N. Camp warned the military governor of Jerusalem that “the greatest precautions must be taken if disorder is to be prevented during the period from April 10 – 25,” on account of Muslim and Christian opposition to Zionism.64 In response, Storrs’s assistant, General Waters-Taylor, warned that particular attention needed to be paid to pilgrims from Hebron and Nablus, “both places being fanatic and warlike,” a reading of the situation that seems to have deliberately ignored the political context within which the festival was taking place.65 At a time when Palestinians were beginning to publicly express their opposition of the Balfour Declaration (widely known in Palestine by the time of the 1919 festival) and sympathy for the anticolonial revolution in neighbouring Egypt (which began a month before the festival), this “national” festival presented an excellent

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opportunity for Arab nationalists to share their demands for selfdetermination with a wider audience. As important to the spread of this nationalist message was the fact that by nature religious festivals allow for the expression of political sentiment without much threat of government intervention. As Robert Bezucha has explored in his study of the Catholic Carnival’s place in the politics of 1848 France, religious festivals the world over were “traditionally a time when the residents of a community stretched the limits of tolerated behavior,” giving revellers, or in our case pilgrims, a temporary space to challenge the political order.66 The Christian power’s reluctance to intervene in Muslim religious matters further helped to make the festival a safe space for Arabs to express opposition to the terms of British rule.

Violence at the 1920 Nabi Musa Festival As it turns out, the expected violence arrived a year later at the April 1920 Nabi Musa festival. In February and March of that year, Arab nationalists had held two large political demonstrations against the terms of British rule in Jerusalem, with further demonstrations taking place in March in Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa.67 In addition, Arab nationalist groups had been producing a steady stream of petitions and editorials protesting British policy during the build-up to the festival.68 “The Administration,” as the Palin Commission report later stated, was “in full receipt of information from their agents, both as to foreign activities and as to the propaganda carried on by various [Arab nationalist] clubs.”69 Despite this, British officials, particularly Ronald Storrs, the military governor of Jerusalem, convinced themselves that the lack of violence at the 1918 and 1919 festivals had shown that the local population had accepted Britain’s authority in Palestine. For this reason, Storrs decided to keep a minimal troop presence in the city during the 1920 festival, which proved to be a disastrous decision when violence broke out around the city’s Jaffa Gate. Although Zionist officials and the British officer Richard Meinertzhagen, who viewed the riots as a pogrom, accused the military administration of deliberate neglect, imperial hubris seems a more likely explanation for Storrs’s lack of preparation before the 1920 festival.70 It would seem that British officials came to believe their own propaganda, which boasted about

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Britain’s ability to keep the peace in Jerusalem with far fewer troops than their Ottoman predecessors, although they may also have placed too much faith in the ability of Arab leaders to maintain order, like ‘Arif al-’Arif, who called upon the pilgrims to remain peaceful during the festival.71 Recreating the moment that violence broke out at the festival is difficult due to the confusion of eyewitness accounts, but it seems clear that some combination of nationalism and religious chauvinism motivated the Arab attacks on April 4, 1920. Local residents and colonial officials offered numerous conflicting explanations for the outbreak of violence in their testimonies before the Palin Commission of Enquiry, often in defence of their respective positions in the ongoing Arab-Jewish conflict. The mayor of Jerusalem, Musa Kazim alHusayni, asserted that a quarrel between a Jewish boy and an Arab boy had been the catalyst for the riot but insisted that Jews had been provoking Arabs in the build-up to the festival.72 A British soldier testified that the violence had started after a Jewish youth threw a rock at a banner carried by pilgrims from Hebron, an observation corroborated by an eyewitness from Hebron.73 Jewish eyewitnesses, in contrast, argued that Arab attacks were not only unprovoked, but were part of a preconceived plan to attack the Jewish community. Indeed, prominent Zionist leaders such as Chaim Weizmann, Max Nurock, and Nachum Sokolow argued before the commission and to the Palestine government directly that the riots were nothing less than a pogrom.74 The eyewitness testimony of the British lieutenant and reserve inspector L. Harrington, best captures the crowd’s sudden and unpredictable shift toward violence: On Sunday 4th, inst. about 9:15am– 9:30am I came into Jerusalem via the Mamilla Road when I reached the Jaffa Gate, coming up the hill towards the gate I observed a large procession which I recognized as the Hebron pilgrims, whom we were expecting somewhat later. I had been instructed to be on the spot when the procession arrived, and I reined up at the side of the road and watch the pilgrims go by. There was the usual dancing and singing, and when they reached the top of the hill just outside the Jaffa Gate, a man named Aref El Aref [sic] addressed the crowd.

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He also got on a white horse and rode amongst the crowd. The effect of his speech seemed to me to turn the crowd up the Jaffa Road towards the Municipality buildings, and I started to ride with them. Outside the Municipality the crowd stopped and speeches were given from the balcony of the Municipality and from the balcony of the Society known as the Nadi el Arabi [sic ]. The speeches given from the Nadi el Arabi appeared to me to excite the crowd and I saw the photo of the Emir Feisal held above the head of one of the speakers on the balcony of the Nadi el Arabi. The exhibition of the photograph was received with great acclamation by the crowd clapping and cheering. Immediately after the speeches the crowd began to move towards the Birket Mamilla, but was instantly checked by the Commandant of the Hebron Police, Moh. El Hajazi and turned towards the Jaffa Gate. They moved in this direction and everything appeared to be going quite smoothly with the usual sword swinging and dancing. I rode about the centre of the procession to the Jaffa Gate until I reached a point opposite the Grand Hotel, then there was a momentary check and Aref El Aref came to me and pointed behind me said “Mr. Harrington, you had better see what that man wants or he will cause trouble.” I turned round and looked behind me towards the Jaffa Gate, and saw a small boy running with a Muslim after him. I cannot say whether he was pursuing him. Immediately the whole street was in an uproar. Sticks and stones started to fly. People rushed inside the gate from outside and vice-versa. Jews were seized and beaten.75 Although other witnesses before the Palin Commission contradicted certain aspects of Harrington’s testimony, his account presents what has become the accepted narrative of that day: the energetic arrival of the Hebron pilgrims, the speech given by ‘Arif al-‘Arif and his ride on horseback, the nationalist speeches given from the balconies of the municipality building and the headquarters of the Arab Club, and finally, the outbreak of violence at the Jaffa Gate. Over the course of the next four days, Arabs rioted in the Jewish quarter of the Old City, killing five Jews and wounding a further 211, most of whom were religious Jews unconnected or hostile to

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Zionism.76 British attempts to put down the riots were initially ineffectual due to the military’s lack of security preparation, the poor performance of the Arab civil police (some of whom sided with the rioters), and the military’s unwillingness to commit to house-to-house operations in the twisting alleys of the Old City. Bernard Wasserstein has also argued that the military’s decision not to allow Jewish paramilitaries to operate during the riots contributed to the high level of violence, a debatable point given that the greater involvement of the Jewish defense forces under the command of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, would likely have led to even more intercommunal violence.77 After quelling the violence and reimposing military law, the OETA authorities moved to punish members of the Arab notability who had played prominent political roles at the festival. Hajj Amin al-Husayni and ‘Arif al-‘Arif were charged with incitement for giving nationalist speeches at the festival, although they fled Palestine before they could be arrested. Initially sentenced in absentia to ten years’ imprisonment, both men, along with Jabotinsky, who had been handed a fifteen-year sentence for arming Jews during the riots, would be fully pardoned within six months, in a gesture of magnanimity by Herbert Samuel’s new civilian administration.78 The mayor of Jerusalem, Musa Kazim al-Husayni, who had also given a nationalist speech from the balcony of the municipality building, was not so fortunate. Dismissed by Ronald Storrs for overstepping the bounds of his official position, he was replaced by Raghib Bey al-Nashashibi, considered by the British to be more reliably moderate (i.e. more pro-British) in his politics. Not coincidently, Musa Kazim’s dismissal allowed Britain to split the mayoralty and muftiship of Jerusalem between the rival Nashashibi and Husayni families, which the Palestine government then played off against each other through the 1920s and 1930s.

Palin’s Post-mortem In order to understand the violence at Nabi Musa, the British government dispatched a commission of enquiry to study the riots. Arriving in May 1920, the military committee headed by Major-General Philip Palin sat in session for some fifty days and interviewed 152 witnesses in eight different languages before delivering its report on

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Nabi Musa at Port Said on July 1, 1920.79 Although sent by the British government to determine the immediate reasons for the violence at Nabi Musa, the commission soon broadened its mission, over Zionist objections, to consider how political, social, and economic conditions in the country negatively impacted the Arab community. Although its report was never published, the commission’s conclusion that Arabs suffered from a sense of “alienation” would have a profound impact on British policymaking in the years to come. In response to Zionist claims that the riots had been a pogrom, the commission found that there existed “no evidence of any definite plan on the part of an organized body of rioters and the whole affair has the appearance of spontaneity,” a conclusion that actually finds some support in Zionist intelligence reports from the period.80 It also categorically rejected the accusation made by Meinertzhagen and others that British officers had been involved in or condoned the riots. Admitting that the “exact incident which caused the explosion has not been clearly ascertained,” it blamed the unprecedented injection of politics into the festival – highlighted by the exhibition of a portrait of Emir Faysal, the giving of speeches of a “flagrantly political character” by members of the Arab notability, and the presence of agents provocateurs in the crowd – for creating a political tinderbox in Jerusalem.81 Most significant to British officials was the commission’s finding that though the violence could not be justified, it could be explained as resulting from “the alienation and exasperation of the feelings of the [Arab] population of Palestine.”82 The report identified six sources of that alienation: (a) Disappointment at the non-fulfilment of promises made to them by British propaganda. (b) Inability to reconcile the Allies’ declared policy of selfdetermination with the Balfour Declaration, giving rise to a sense of betrayal and intense anxiety over their future. (c) Misapprehension of the true meaning of the Balfour Declaration and forgetfulness of the guarantees determined therein, due to the loose rhetoric of politicians and the exaggerated statements and writings of interested persons, chiefly Zionists. (d) Fear of Jewish competition and domination, justified by experience

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and the apparent control exercised by the Zionists over the Administration. (e) Zionist indiscretion and aggression, since the Balfour Declaration, aggravating this feeling. (f) Anti-British and anti-Zionist propaganda working on the population already inflamed by the sources of irritation aforementioned.83 In a certain sense, these findings were groundbreaking for recognizing the political agency of the Arab population. A year earlier, colonial officials had ignored the King-Crane Commission’s report that Levantine Arabs desired self-determination; now the Palin Commission admitted that Arabs wanted to control their own political affairs. But at the same time, the report presented such desires as unreasonable. As the six sources of alienation suggest, the commissioners saw the desire of Arabs for self-determination as being driven by their resentment toward Zionism and their misunderstanding of the terms of British rule rather than any genuine sense of nationhood. The implications for British policymakers were clear: what needed to be changed after Nabi Musa were not the terms of the occupation but Arab perceptions about British rule. By clearing up “Arab misapprehensions” about British rule and controlling the “loose rhetoric of politicians,” British officials would be able to win over the Arab population.

Reaching out to Arabs Although Herbert Samuel declined to publish the Palin report, due to the perceived sensitivity of airing its criticisms of Zionist provocations, its findings would have a lasting impact on his administration’s policies after Nabi Musa.84 Samuel arrived in Palestine on June 30, 1920, the day before the delivery of the Palin report. His appointment as the country’s first high commissioner was not without controversy, for being Jewish and an early supporter of Zionism meant that Samuel’s impartiality was called into question by both Arab politicians and British officials.85 While Mazza is correct to state that Samuel’s appointment represented a double victory for Zionists in that his appointment led to the end of the pro-Arab military administration and put a Zionist at the head of the Palestine government, that victory

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proved to be somewhat bitter-sweet, as Samuel’s desire to appear evenhanded would be heavily criticized by Zionists.86 Before accepting his position at the head of the country’s new civilian government, Samuel had visited Palestine in order to understand the country’s future potential. Struck by the intensity and depth of Palestinian hostility to Zionism, he argued that the only way British rule could work would be to convince Arabs that Zionism posed no threat to their position in the country (something Samuel genuinely believed) and show them the benefits of British rule by adopting “active measures to promote their well-being,” an approach similar to that adopted in post-Mutiny India.87 Samuel’s view that Arab alienation could best be overcome by clearing up Arab misperceptions about British rule, rather than changing the underlying nature of that rule, echoed the findings of the Palin Commission. As a result, after accepting his job as the country’s first high commissioner, Samuel set out to reconcile Arabs to the terms of British rule, a task that would prove to be quite fruitless. To show the magnanimity of his civilian administration, Samuel began his rule by pardoning Arabs and Zionists who had been jailed for their actions at Nabi Musa, and in October 1920, drew a further line under that episode by granting pardons to Hajj Amin al-Husayni and ‘Arif al-‘Arif. In that same month, the high commissioner established an advisory council consisting of eleven British, four Muslim, three Christian, and three Jewish members, all of whom he appointed himself. Praised in London for showing the “wise and tactful manner” of Samuel’s approach, the council was seen as positive first step toward granting Arabs and Jews greater self-governance.88 Officials in Palestine and London also reached out to Arabs by emphasizing how the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the mandate provided the government with an obligation to protect Arabs as well as Jews. Shocked by a recurrence of violence at Jaffa in May 1921 (where a further forty-eight Arabs and forty-seven Jews were killed), Samuel expressed his dismay about the “unhappy misunderstanding” that Arabs had about Britain’s support for the establishment of the Jewish national home in a speech on June 3, 1921. Stating that Britain had no intention of creating a Jewish-ruled Palestine, he attempted to reassure Arabs by pledging that “The British government, the trustee under the Mandate for the happiness of the people of Palestine, would never impose upon

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them a policy which that people had reason to think was contrary to their religious, their political, and their economic interests.”89 Indicating his government’s intention to balance its support for the Jewish national home against Arab interests, Samuel also announced new restrictions on Jewish immigration, provoking outrage among Zionist leaders. In 1923, Samuel even offered the Arab community the opportunity to create an Arab Agency, although the proposed agency would have very little of the power of its Jewish counterpart, as I will explain below. Winston Churchill’s White Paper of June 1922, a formal statement of Britain’s approach to Palestine in the wake of the Nabi Musa and Jaffa riots, officially endorsed Samuel’s “dual obligation” approach towards the two communities. Stressing that the British government had never “at any time contemplated, as appears to be feared by the Arab Delegation, the disappearance or subordination of the Arab population, language or culture in Palestine,” the White Paper explained to Arabs that the creation of the Jewish national home would not “be a burden upon the people of Palestine as a whole.”90 This commitment to recognizing Arab rights alongside Jewish rights in Palestine – the so-called “dual obligation” – also found its way into the text of the Mandate for Palestine, promulgated in July 1922, through its inclusion of the terms of the Balfour Declaration and the injunction in Article 6 that the mandatory authority ensure “that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced” by Jewish immigration.91 British officials also attempted for a brief period in the early 1920s to bring select Arab leaders into the governance of Palestine, with the hope that this would help them become reconciled to British rule. In order to forge a unified political community that would include both Jews and Arabs, Samuel’s government sought to develop a Palestinian constitution and institutions of shared governance. At the centre of that initiative was Samuel’s proposal for the creation of a legislative council with an elected membership to replace the advisory council made up of government appointees. It was hoped that by allowing the Arab community to elect their own representatives to serve on the legislative council, Arabs would come to feel that their interests would best be served by working with the government rather than against it.

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While the 1922 White Paper and Samuel’s proposals to increase Arab participation in the political process appeared to indicate a rebalancing of British priorities, they did little to alter the terms of British rule. Indeed, given Samuel’s support for Zionism and Churchill’s belief that the Balfour Declaration was “manifestly right,” the option of abandoning or watering down Britain’s support for the declaration was never seriously considered after Nabi Musa or the Jaffa riots.92 Although the White Paper emphasized Britain’s dual obligation to the inhabitants of Palestine, that obligation was little more than a restatement of the terms of the Balfour Declaration, with its inherent favouring of Jewish interests in the country. So while Churchill’s White Paper sought to educate Palestinian Arabs about how their rights were protected under British rule, as the Palin Commission had recommended, it did nothing to change the underlying terms of British rule, which were the true cause of “Arab alienation.” The Palestine mandate’s commitment to ensure that “the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced,” a statement that did not even mention Arabs by name, signalled to everyone that Jewish national rights would continue to take precedence in British planning.93 Samuel’s proposals to bring Palestinians into the governing process also offered Arabs little of real political substance, in that they promised Arabs the trappings of power but not power itself. The proposed legislative council would have had little more than an advisory role and was constructed in such a way that its British officials could always outvote its Arab members.94 Similarly, the proposed Arab Agency could never have been an equivalent to the Jewish Agency, for it was not granted anything like the level of independence and international standing given to the Jewish Agency, which was “entitled to diplomatic representation in Geneva before the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission, in London, and elsewhere.”95 Moreover, unlike the Jewish Agency, whose members were elected, the Arab Agency would have been made up of individuals appointed by the high commissioner. As Charles Smith, quoting Bernard Wasserstein, has aptly put it, rather than being steps toward eventual Arab autonomy, Samuel’s proposals and those of his successors were “designed to ‘emasculate Arab nationalist opposition to the mandatory system’ while excluding them from a position in which they might be able to exert influence against the system.”96

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Palestinian Arab politicians, keenly aware of the limits of British compromise, complained that these proposals neither addressed their desire for political representation nor fulfilled Britain’s obligations as the mandatory power. In February 1922, a delegation of Palestinian Arab politicians made it clear to Churchill and other members of the colonial office that these British proposals fell well short of their demands: Whilst the position in Palestine is, as it stands to-day, with the British Government holding authority by an occupying force, and using that authority to impose upon the people against their wishes a great immigration of alien Jews, no constitution which would fall short of giving the People of Palestine full control of their own affairs could be acceptable.97 This desire for self-determination and absolute rejection of further Jewish immigration would lead Arab nationalists at the fifth Palestine Arab Congress in August 1922 to reject the White Paper, the Palestine constitution, and the mandate itself. More spectacularly, Arab nationalists, through the Arab Executive (an executive committee originally founded by Arab politicians at the Third Palestinian Arab Congress in Haifa in December 1920), organized a highly successful boycott of the government’s legislative council elections in 1923 by holding mass demonstrations across the country, encouraging imams to oppose the elections from their pulpits, and printing denunciations of the elections in the local press.98 Arab politicians then roundly rejected Samuel’s plan B, the Arab Agency proposal, for failing to give Arabs the same autonomy as the Zionist authorities. Arab rejection of these policies was also influenced by the fact that acceptance of any of these proposals would have implied their approval, however tacit, of the terms of the Balfour Declaration. To agree to the terms of the mandate or the White Paper would have meant accepting that Arab rights were a secondary concern to the establishment of the Jewish national home. Serving on the legislative council or agreeing to the creation of an Arab Agency would have entailed Arab participation in a system that placed them in a subordinate position. As Rashid Khalidi has poignantly explained, “This was something that the Palestinians felt they could not do without denying their own rights, their own national narrative, and

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the evidence of their own eyes, which told them that Palestine was an Arab country and belonged to them.”99

Controlling Arab Politics While Samuel failed to reconcile Arabs to the terms of British rule, he had much greater success controlling what the Palin report had called “the loose rhetoric of politicians.” Though they failed to bring Arabs into the political process, Samuel’s proposals for including Arabs in the governance of Palestine set the ground rules for how Arabs could legitimately practice politics under British rule. Individuals who took up positions in British-created institutions (such as the advisory council or the Supreme Muslim Council) or who were British appointees to political offices (such as Raghib al-Nashashibi, appointed to the Jerusalem mayoralty after Nabi Musa) would be considered legitimate political actors by the Palestine government, while those who engaged in political activities outside of those positions (such as in unrecognized nationalist organizations, religious movements unaffiliated with the SMC, or in cultural associations) would be treated as politically suspect by the government. As we shall see in the next two chapters, the establishment of the SMC would give the mufti of Jerusalem the authority to act as the representative of the Palestinian people, which was otherwise denied by the British to members of the Muslim–Christian Association, the Literary Society, the Arab Club, and the Palestine Arab Executive. As in post-Mutiny India, after Nabi Musa British officials no longer saw the subject population as apolitical or uninterested in nationalism; to the contrary, they now became preoccupied with the potential for Arabs to abuse politics. In May 1919, the military governor of Jaffa had warned that “freedom of speech is not understood in this country, and the privilege is invariably abused. Freedom of speech, so innocuous in Europe, is impossible in Eastern Countries and we are only asking for trouble by allowing it.”100 After Nabi Musa that opinion became widely accepted by British officials, who sought to place limitations on the free exercise of Arab political speech. The Palestine government instituted its first controls at the Nabi Musa festival itself, by adopting, in the words of Edwin Samuel (the high commissioner’s son), a more organized “management of religious ceremonies.”101 This involved a re-routing of the parade route so that

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Muslim pilgrims were kept away from the Jewish quarter, an increase in the British troop presence at the festival, and a ban on Arabs carrying unauthorized banners at the festival.102 At the same time, the Palestine government reached out to the Husayni family to use its influence to keep the crowd under control at the 1921 Nabi Musa festival, a topic that will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter. In stark contrast to its non-interference policy toward religion, the government then began to intervene in the Arab public sphere to control the free exercise of politics. Press censorship would be used in the early years of the mandate, particularly after the Jaffa riots of 1921, as a method of controlling political discourse.103 The government also routinely reminded Arabs serving in government positions that they could not join any political parties or participate in public demonstrations, lest they lose their position as Musa Kazim al-Husayni had. Police surveillance of Arab political organizations and meetings, the government’s cultivation of informants within the Arab community, and its creation of a “blacklist” of political opponents were measures designed to both intimidate and gather actionable intelligence about Arab nationalist groups such as the Arab Club, the Literary Society, the MCA, and the Arab Executive.104 The Palestine government’s new interest in understanding and cataloguing the activities of Arab clubs and organizations after Nabi Musa would be shown by the production of a report in December 1920 on Palestinian Arab groups that detailed the composition and activities of the country’s various political parties and secret societies. Intelligence reports would monitor such developments as the change in the khutba, the activities of groups in the Jaffa riots, and the organizations involved in the boycott of the legislative council elections. British surveillance also went beyond Palestine, as when British officers collected information about Palestinian Arab delegations that travelled to Egypt, India, and Europe. The Palestine government also introduced legal mechanisms for controlling the activities of individuals deemed a threat to public order. The Prevention of Crime Ordinance issued in October 1920 gave the government the right to detain individuals suspected of illegal activity, including seditious actions designed to cause friction between the country’s religious communities.105 The government followed this up by issuing a public notice on December 3, 1920, that informed Palestinians that all public meetings that took place in the streets had to

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receive prior approval from a British district governor and that no public meetings could take place between sunset and sunrise, as provided for in the Ottoman law regulating public meetings.106 The government then issued the Police Ordinance of February 22, 1921, which granted the district commandant of police or his assistant the right to “direct the conduct of all assemblies and processions on the Public roads, or in the Public streets and thoroughfares, and proscribe the routes by which and the time at which such processions may pass.”107 The impact of these new legal measures would be seen after the Jaffa riots of May 1921, when the government arrested members of the Jaffa branch of the Arab Club en masse, tried them before special courts, and punished them for their role in inciting the crowd.108 After those riots, the government used the Ordinance for the Prevention of Crime to enact collective punishment against local villagers, an approach to fighting crime that would be strengthened by the Collective Responsibility for Crime Ordinance, published in the government’s Official Gazette in December 1921.109 While such security measures were mild compared to those adopted by the Palestine government during and after the Palestine Arab Revolt of 1936 – 39, they began the practice of treating Palestinians as a collective security problem. While this law-and-order approach to handling Arab politics worked to secure Britain’s control over the country in the short term, it would lengthen the growing distance between the Palestine government and the Arab community, a state of affairs that paralleled the post-Mutiny history of British-Indian relations. Indeed, Jamal al-Husayni, the secretary of the MCA, warned the British high commissioner shortly after the promulgation of the Prevention of Crime and Collective Responsibility for Crime ordinances that these laws were “not accepted by the Nation,” and that British actions demonstrated the “great weakness in the administration of Public Security and in the Legal Administration.”110

The Muslim Millet and Politics The Palestine government’s decision to treat the Muslim community as a separate millet and Samuel’s push for the creation of a Muslim-run body to oversee the country’s Muslim affairs would also play a major role in British attempts to curb and contain Arab politics. Arguably, the

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government’s decision to empower Muslim religious leaders at the expense of Arab nationalist politicians would be its most effective tool for preventing Palestinian nationalism from dominating Arab political discourse in the 1920s. Samuel’s proposal that the “establishment of an elected Council of four concerned with purely religious matters will, I think, meet the desire of the Muslim population for some representative body, and may serve to check any agitation for political autonomy” indicated that the SMC was created as a counterweight to the activities of the nationalist organizations discussed in this chapter.111 As we shall see in the next chapter, the SMC’s primacy in Arab society would be secured by the Palestine government granting the council official recognition, allowing it a fair amount of autonomy, and providing it limited access to the corridors of power, rights that were denied to all other Arab organizations during the mandate, including the early nationalist organizations, the Arab Executive, the Arab Higher Committee, or the Istiqlal and the many other nationalist parties created in the mid-1930s. While Arab rejection of the legislative council and the Arab Agency also contributed, the government’s consistent policy of refusing to recognize nationalist groups and leaders as representatives of the Arab community – even when they had been elected to represent the Palestinian community at the various Palestinian Arab congresses – played the decisive role in the marginalization of Arab nationalist politicians.112

The Impact on Arab Politics The objective behind Britain’s post-Nabi Musa approach was to contain Arab nationalism so that there would be no popular uprising in Palestine like the 1919 Egyptian Revolution or the 1920 Iraqi Revolt. In this task the Palestine government was highly successful. British policies helped steer the Arab community away from the kind of popular mobilization found in the Jerusalem demonstrations of February and March 1920, the Nabi Musa uprising of 1920, and the Jaffa riots of 1921 and return it to the notable politics of compromise of the Ottoman period.113 British officials were helped in this endeavour by the Arab notability, who, despite their loud rejection of the legislative council and Arab Agency proposals, failed to encourage a mass political movement against the colonial government, as Rashid Khalidi has emphasized in The Iron Cage.114

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Rather than creating a mass political movement of the sort found in British Egypt and India, Arab notables chose to pursue their interests through petitions and private meetings with the Palestine government in the misguided hope that the strength of their legal and moral arguments would persuade the British to abandon the Balfour Declaration. Arab nationalists also organized various Palestinian Arab congresses in the 1920s in order to bring the various nationalist groups together to develop a common policy towards Zionism and British rule and to create a unified nationalist organization in the form of the Arab Executive. The convening of seven Palestinian Arab congresses in the 1920s was also clearly designed to persuade officials of the strength of the nationalist movement. But these congresses made little impression on the Palestine government, which regularly disputed the representative nature of such congresses and ignored their petitions.115 The dispatch of two Palestinian Arab delegations to entreat with the British government in London and the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations in Geneva in 1921 and 1923 was equally ineffectual, mostly because British officials refused to recognize or listen to the delegation unless it accepted the terms of British rule. In many ways the high point of Arab nationalist activity was the successful Arab boycott of the legislative council elections in 1923, which brought Palestinian political groups together in a common project. But that victory was of the pyrrhic sort, for the Arab decision not to participate in government led British officials to rule the country directly without any input from its Arab population. In such an environment, the notable strategy of attempting to wrest concessions through petitions and private audiences with the government was bound to be ineffective. The failure of Arab politicians to achieve any major concessions from the Palestine government would lead to a loss of momentum for nationalist politics in the second half of the 1920s, as shown in the long gap between the sixth Palestine congress of 1923 and the seventh congress in 1928 compared to the six congresses held between 1919 and 1923. Equally significant was the greater willingness of Palestinian nationalists to accept the terms of British rule by the end of the 1920s, as shown when the Seventh Palestinian Arab Congress ended “with a unified Palestinian call for a legislative body, and for the first time the final resolutions did not include explicit attacks on the mandate and the Balfour Declaration.”116

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In short, by the end of the 1920s, the Palestine government had shown no sign of backing away from its support for the Balfour Declaration, and the Arab nationalist politics practised initially by such groups as the Arab Club and the Literary Society and later by the Arab Executive seemed to have run its course. If Arabs hoped to challenge the colonial state, they would need to find a new platform from which to mount that challenge. Waiting in the wings was the Supreme Muslim Council, to which we now turn.

CHAPTER 4 THE MUFTI AND THE SUPREME MUSLIM COUNCIL

In April 1921, High Commissioner Herbert Samuel met twice with Muhammad Amin al-Husayni to take his measure of the young Palestinian notable. Samuel wanted reassurance that Hajj Amin had renounced his nationalist politics and would work with the government in leading the Muslim community. The latter spoke of his “earnest desire to cooperate with the Government,” and pledged to Samuel that he would use his family’s influence to maintain tranquility in Jerusalem, a promise that mattered greatly a year after riots at the Nabi Musa festival.1 Suitably impressed by his political maturation, Samuel decided that Hajj Amin, who had not yet turned thirty and had few religious qualifications, would be the government’s choice to succeed his late brother, Kamil al-Husayni, as the next mufti of Jerusalem. Samuel’s decision represented a remarkable turnaround in Hajj Amin’s fortunes. A year earlier, he had been sentenced along with his fellow nationalist ‘Arif al-‘Arif to ten years’ imprisonment for his alleged role in inciting violence at the Nabi Musa festival. Both men had fled to French-controlled Syria before their cases went to trial and lived in exile until Samuel, the newly installed high commissioner, decided to pardon them during a visit to al-Salt, Transjordan, in August 1920. Now, just eight months after that pardon, Samuel was prepared to offer Hajj Amin the most prominent religious position in mandatory Palestine.

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Grasping to understand this sudden and surprising rehabilitation of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, some scholars, like Elie Kedourie, have seen the hand of pro-Husayni officials in British decision making, particularly the “notorious” pro-Arab political secretary Ernest Richmond.2 But pro-Arab influence in Government House was more than balanced by the influence of pro-Zionist officials such as Norman Bentwich and Wyndham Deedes, who opposed his appointment. Another common explanation, particularly among Israeli historians, has been to argue that Samuel and other British officials were hoodwinked by the charisma of Hajj Amin into believing that he was a changed man.3 But to accept this argument we would have to also accept that Samuel and his staff were naı¨ve or gullible officials, thereby ignoring their years of experience in politics and foreign service. The problem with these two explanations is that they start with the assumption that in supporting Hajj Amin al-Husayni the Palestine government must have been acting against its own interests, when in fact the opposite was true. The reason why Samuel met with Hajj Amin in April 1921 was precisely because he saw him as useful to the Palestine government. After the violence at Nabi Musa in 1920 and Jaffa in 1921, Samuel and his staff had come to see the support of the Arab notability as an important factor in keeping the peace in Palestine. And while they had some initial doubts about Hajj Amin’s politics, those doubts were less important than their desire to place the charismatic young notable at the head of the Muslim neo-millet that was being created through British policymaking. In some ways, Samuel’s championing of the Husaynis was part of a British attempt to harness the Ottoman politics of notables for the colonial project, but more importantly it put into action the policy of promoting “good Muslims” to positions of power, which had been a hallmark of the imperial approach to Islam since the Indian Mutiny. As I shall argue below, the military authorities elevated Kamil al-Husayni to the position of grand mufti and gave him control over the Shari‘a Court of Appeal and the Central Wakf Administration because they saw him as a loyal and moderate Muslim leader whom they could count on to lead the emerging Muslim neo-millet. While his death in March 1921 was disruptive for imperial officials, the government stayed the course by supporting a candidate from his family as the mufti’s successor. In appointing Hajj Amin mufti in 1921 and head of the

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Supreme Muslim Council at the beginning of 1922, officials made a conscious decision to grant the Husayni family, whom they regarded as useful and loyal intermediaries, lasting institutional and financial power. In return Hajj Amin al-Husayni was expected to keep the peace within the Muslim community. For almost eight years the young mufti, despite his earlier nationalist activism, would keep up his side of the bargain, earning plaudits from officials in Palestine and Britain.

The Husaynis and the Politics of Notables The concept of the “politics of notables,” as defined by Albert Hourani, refers to the situation in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, especially in provincial capitals like Damascus, in which members of the urban notability acted as intermediaries between the Ottoman state and the local population. That relationship was based on a quid pro quo: the Ottoman government granted members of the Arab elite political and religious offices in return for their pledge to keep order within their communities.4 Under the Ottomans, members of the Arab notability served in political and religious roles (as city mayors, as qadis and muftis, as administrators of the waqf system, as members of local councils, etc.) that gave them the ability to shape their own legal, political, and social environment. This was true even after the centralizing reforms of the Tanzimat period and the state’s increased military and administrative control over Jerusalem in the late nineteenth century.5 By taking advantage of Western educational opportunities and new political careers brought about by those reforms, members of the notability adjusted to the increased Ottoman presence (i.e., defended their intermediary positions as notables) by taking up positions in local governance, such as on administrative and municipal councils, which emerged in Palestine in the late nineteenth century.6 Palestinian notables also served in the Ottoman parliament (such as Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi, who was a member of the first Ottoman parliament, and Sa‘id Bey al-Husayni, who served under the CUP government), in positions within the Ottoman administration (such as Shukri al-Husayni, who held a senior post in the treasury of Abdulhamid II), and in the highest posts of provincial administration (such as Musa Kazim al-Husayni, who was an Ottoman governor in a number of different provinces).7

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The Husaynis, alongside the Khalidis, ‘Alamis, Jarallahs, and Nashashibis, constituted the ruling elite of the Ottoman administration in Jerusalem.8 By the time of the British arrival, the Husaynis had emerged as the most powerful notable family in late Ottoman Jerusalem. The family’s good relations with the powerful European consuls who arrived in the late nineteenth century, its success in gaining positions in the late-Ottoman administration (particularly in the new Jerusalem municipality), and the enlargement of its landholdings as Palestine became more integrated into the world economy had helped the Husaynis become the leading powerbrokers in the city by the time of the British arrival. Indeed, when the British entered Jerusalem in December 1917, the family controlled the two most powerful positions in the city, if not the country: the muftiship and the mayoralty. The Husayni family had a long tradition of holding religious office in Palestine. The first Husayni to hold the position of mufti of Jerusalem had been ‘Abd al-Qadir ibn Karim al-Din al-Husayni at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the family had held the office of mufti more or less continuously since the end of the eighteenth century. In addition, members of the Husayni family had held other important religious posts such as naqib al-ashraf (the acknowledged representative of the descendants of the Prophet) and shaykh al-haramayn (the keeper of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque), although those offices had lost much of their power by the end of the Ottoman period.9 The Husaynis’ rise to political prominence came from their involvement in municipal politics after 1863, the year that the first municipal council was established in the city. Seeing the council as an emerging power base for elite politics in late-Ottoman Jerusalem, the family ran candidates in council elections in the 1870s and 1880s, securing control of the mayoralty in the Hamidian period under Umar Fahmi al-Husayni and Salim al-Husayni.10 At the outset of the Young Turk period, members of the rival Khalidi and Dajani families briefly held the mayoralty, but the post quickly returned to the family, with Hussein al-Husayni serving as mayor from 1909 until the British occupation in 1917. Because mayors were first chosen by the city council during the Ottoman period (unlike in the British period), candidates had to appeal to the council’s membership, which was made up “not only of notables

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but also the leaders of non-Muslim communities, and representatives of the poorer classes.”11 This provided the family excellent experience in the coalition building essential to the politics of notables, as best shown in the career of the city’s last Ottoman mayor, Hussein al-Husyani (1909– 17), who was elected with the help of Jewish votes, was well liked by local Christians for his handling of their demands, and was popular with the city’s foreigners because of his American education and understanding of Western culture.12 As one would expect from Hourani’s description of notable politics, the Husaynis’ power was also based upon their extensive landholdings in Palestine. Particularly important in the family’s accumulation of wealth and power in the late Ottoman period, according to Ilan Pappe and Gabriel Baer, was its success in having its members appointed as mutawallis (trustees) of various waqfs in and around Jerusalem and its subsequent ability to transfer public waqf domains into private property.13 The most religiously important of their landholdings was the waqf of Nabi Musa, which the Husayni family had administered for generations. Thanks to this waqf the family oversaw the annual Nabi Musa festival, the biggest festival on the Palestinian religious calendar and the only festival that brought together Arabs from all around the country. The Husyanis’ supervision of the festival during the Ottoman period had allowed them to develop lasting relationships with a wide variety of people within the Palestinian Arab community, including nonJerusalemites and Christians who participated in the festivities, which as we saw in the last chapter came to take on the appearance of a national, if not a nationalist, celebration. Their oversight of the festival also gave them valuable experience in working with imperial authorities, since putting on the festival required coordination between its patrons and the Ottoman governorate. A final factor that contributed to the prominence of the Husayni family was their success in cultivating a good standing in Istanbul and Damascus, which until 1874 had been the provincial capital for the Jerusalem region. As Butrus Abu-Manneh has detailed, the Husaynis were skilled in raising their prominence within the empire through gift giving, the formation of advantageous marriage alliances, and the creation of political relationships with the most powerful families in those cities.14 The Husaynis were thus plugged in not only to

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Palestinian society but also to the wider Middle East, an important quality for a family that sought prominent political and religious office under the Ottomans and the British.

Promoting a “Good Muslim” Many of the influential political positions that Palestinian Arab notables had managed to assume during the Ottoman period were lost to them with the imposition of direct British rule. Most obviously, Palestinian Arabs, like other imperial subjects, could not participate in the British Parliament, as they had in the Ottoman Parliament. Nor were they able to take up positions in the British government or serve in influential positions within the imperial administration. Back home in Palestine, the British Mandate, which included the terms of the Balfour Declaration, ensured that only the Jewish community was granted a distinct political role. So while Arab notables could still serve as local mayors and village elders or work as government employees, they were given no real power to influence government politics. But there was one area where British officials were actively seeking Muslim leadership, in the administration of religion. As we saw in Chapter 2, religious dignitaries from the leading notable families retained their positions after the British occupation and were called upon to help the Palestine government create the Central Wakf Committee and the Central Moslem Authority. This arrangement allowed British officials not only to develop institutions that would be acceptable to the Muslim community but also to prepare those dignitaries to take over the administration of the community’s religious affairs. From the beginning it was clear that British officials regarded the mufti of Jerusalem as the pre-eminent figure among the religious elite, since they saw the muftiship as the only position with the authority to lead the Muslim millet. Most significant here was the fact that Kamil alHusayni had proved himself to be an ally to the British, for in the days after the conquest of Jerusalem, he had been active in smoothing relations between the occupying British forces and the local Muslim community. His efforts at making sure that “the question of naming of the Muslim ruler during Friday prayers did not develop into a political issue,” his diffusion of tensions after the Nabi Musa riots, and his maintenance of friendly relations with the Jewish community and

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prominent British officials such as Ronald Storrs, convinced the British that they had found a willing partner.15 Kamil al-Husayni’s appointment as president of the Shari‘a Court of Appeal and head of the Central Wakf Committee gave him a level of prominence that was unprecedented for a mufti of Jerusalem.16 Because Ottoman religious institutions in Istanbul oversaw the administration of Islam in the country, the mufti of Jerusalem was a relatively minor position during the Ottoman period. Indeed, the qadiship of Jerusalem was a more prominent position in late-Ottoman period. And while the mufti’s jurisdiction extended over the powerful independent Jerusalem district, he had no authority over the Ottoman districts of Nablus and Acre. When British rule unified these Ottoman provinces into the new country of Palestine and established Jerusalem as a colonial capital city for the first time since the Roman period, the muftiship of Jerusalem quickly rose in stature.17 Almost overnight, Kamil al-Husayni, as the mufti of a colonial capital and then as the president of the country’s Shari‘a Court of Appeal, became the putative head of Palestinian Islam. Kamil’s position at the top of the Muslim religious hierarchy was strengthened by the military authorities referring to him as the grand mufti (al-mufti al-akbar) from 1918 onward, which effectively transformed the muftiship of Jerusalem into the muftiship of Palestine. This was a novel office in Palestine. Although there had been a grand mufti of Istanbul in the Ottoman Empire, who also held the position of shaykh al-Islam, there had never been an equivalent position in Palestine. According to Uri Kupferschmidt, the British decision to elevate Kamil was influenced by their experience in Egypt, where British officials commonly referred to the Hanafi mufti of Cairo as the grand mufti of Egypt.18 This seems plausible, since prominent military officials in Palestine like Gilbert Clayton, Ronald Storrs, and Stewart Symes had previously served in Egypt and would have been familiar with that title. The creation of the grand muftiship made Kamil al-Husayni the leader of the Palestinian Muslim community, equivalent in status to other communal leaders such as the chief rabbi or the Greek Orthodox patriarch, an important step in the colonial power’s millet-building process. But there is some evidence that the mufti was considered to be a primus inter pares by the British, for he was given a higher position than the Christian patriarchs and chief rabbis of the Jewish community in the

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order of precedence at official ceremonies. Kamil al-Husayni was also alone among local religious and political leaders in being granted a CMG (Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George) in 1918, an honour given to colonial officials and indigenous leaders for their service to the empire.19 As David Cannadine has argued, awards like the CMG extended the class hierarchies of British society into their colonies by integrating indigenous elites into the British Empire.20 The mufti’s honour can therefore be seen as a clear attempt by British officials to transform the mufti into a client of the imperial power. The mufti’s willingness to work with the military authorities has often been explained by making reference, as Philip Mattar has done, to the fact that he was by nature “apolitical, amiable, and cooperative,” especially in comparison to his successor Hajj Amin al-Husayni.21 Kamil al-Husayni may have been friendly, but he was not as apolitical as Mattar has suggested. While the mufti participated in the ceremony of laying the foundation of the Hebrew University and had cordial relations with the Jewish community, this did not stop him from becoming an opponent of Zionism. In the wake of the Nabi Musa festival of April 1920, the mufti signed an anti-Zionist petition sent by Arab leaders to the Palestine Government and confessed to the English travel writer George Whittingham that, while he was neither anti-Jewish nor antiChristian, he was an anti-Zionist.22 He also made a major political statement by returning his CMG after British soldiers forcibly searched his house after the Nabi Musa riots. To be sure, Kamil never rebelled against the British, as his brother and successor Hajj Amin would in the mid-1930s, but his actions suggest that given time, he might have. However, his health quickly and irreversibly declined after the Nabi Musa festival, leading to his withdrawal from public life and his eventual death in March 1921.

Finding a New Mufti Almost immediately British officials lamented the death of Kamil al-Husayni. Despite the grand mufti’s opposition to the Balfour Declaration, he had remained a trusted and well-respected ally of the British authorities until the end. Out of respect to the mufti, the Palestine Government issued its condolences to the Husayni family and committed to providing a stipend for his immediate family.23 But the

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government now faced the problem that he had no obvious successor. No single notable had the same combination of qualities that had made Kamil such a useful ally: his friendliness with the British, his influence in the Arab community, and his strong religious qualifications. Shaykh Husam al-Din Jarallah, the inspector of the Shari‘a Court of Appeal, and Shaykh Khalil al-Khalidi, the acting president of the Shari‘a Court of Appeal following Kamil’s death, had the requisite religious credentials and had shown themselves to be friendly to the British in their positions as religious officials, but neither had the same level of influence in Palestinian society as the late mufti.24 Looking to harness the power of the Husayni family to the British cause, officials decided to turn instead to Kamil’s younger brother, Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, whom the family presented as his brother’s successor. Through a brilliant campaign of petitions, the Husaynis promoted Hajj Amin as the popular choice to succeed his brother as mufti of Jerusalem. The family solicited and sent in numerous madhbatas (petitions) supporting Hajj Amin’s appointment from people throughout the country, creating the perception that he was both the people’s choice and (according to modern parlance) the candidate of inevitability. In the very same message that formally announced the death of the mufti to the British authorities, the qadi of Jerusalem, Muhammad Abu Sa‘ud, authoritatively declared Hajj Amin his brother’s successor: To-day the Mufti of Jerusalem, Kamel Eff. El Husseini, has passed away. His death is a great misfortune to the Moslem world. His brother Hajj Amin Eff. is his successor. Kindly disseminate the above to the Muftis and Cadis of Palestine so that in-memoriam services be held, and so that they may rejoice at hearing that a worthy successor has been found to the late Mufti.25 In short order, messages and petitions calling for Hajj Amin’s appointment flowed into the British headquarters from the “inhabitants” and “Muslims” of Jerusalem, Gaza, Safad, Tulkarm, Jaffa, Haifa, Jenin, Bani Mura, Hebron, Beisan, and Balqa’, as well as from the ‘Adwan tribe.26 The Palestine government even received a petition of support from the third Palestine Arab Congress, which was held in December 1920.27 Such petitions indicated to the British that the muftiship of Jerusalem was now indeed a matter of concern far

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beyond the city and that Arabs throughout Palestine, including elite politicians at the Arab Congress, were rallying behind Hajj Amin al-Husayni. In response to these petitions, the Nashashibi family, the great rivals of the Husaynis, organized their own petition drive in support of their candidate, Husam al-Din Jarallah.28 However, it is clear from British records that the Husaynis were the clear winners in this petition race, leading Storrs to advise Samuel that the petitions were undeniable proof of Hajj Amin’s popularity among the native population.29 Arguably, the conservatism of Britain’s approach to religion also predisposed the Palestine government to support Hajj Amin’s candidacy. To appoint another individual to the position would have broken the Husaynis’ traditional hold on the office. Religious offices were technically not supposed to be hereditary positions in Ottoman or Islamic law, but to support the candidacy of someone else would have meant upsetting what the British saw as the status quo. Yehoshua Porath and Taysir Jbara have rightly suggested that the appointment of Hajj Amin also had the benefit of splitting the leadership of the Arab community, or at least the Arabs of Jerusalem, between the Husaynis, who held the muftiship, and their great rivals the Nashashibis, who now held the mayoralty of Jerusalem, following the dismissal of Musa Kazim al-Husayni as mayor for his actions at the 1920 Nabi Musa festival.30 This is corroborated by ‘Izzat Darwaza’s observation to Kamil al-Husayni before his death, as recounted in Ilan Pappe’s history of the Husayni family, that Samuel’s decision to pardon Hajj Amin had less to do with creating goodwill than with creating balance between the Husayni and Nashashibi families.31 No doubt these political calculations were at the forefront of British thinking, but Samuel and other officials made a point to emphasize that in supporting Hajj Amin, they were following the will of the people. The hollowness of that argument would soon be made apparent when their chosen candidate finished a distant fourth in elections for the muftiship.

Hajj Amin’s Qualifications for the Muftiship The Palestine government immediately tipped its hand when it extended its formal condolences upon Kamil’s death not to his son Tahir, as was the conventional practice, but to his brother Hajj Amin.32

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That Hajj Amin was considered a viable successor to Kamil is at first glance surprising. Up to that moment, Hajj Amin had been more involved in Arab nationalist politics than religious affairs. As we saw earlier, his career as a political activist culminated in his infamous nationalist speech at the Nabi Musa festival in 1920, for which the military authorities sentenced him to ten years’ hard labour. Although he was soon pardoned, this act of insurrection, which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, raised obvious doubts about his suitability for holding office. Hajj Amin’s weak religious qualifications also argued against his appointment. Though he came from a family of ‘ulama, his educational path was more typical of that of the younger generation of late-Ottoman Arab notables (Hajj Amin was born around 1895), who received a secular rather than a religious education.33 Although he had received religious instruction at home and attended a Muslim elementary school (kuttab) in Jerusalem during his youth, he later attended a Turkish government school (founded in 1891), where he became fluent in Turkish, and a local French school, E´cole de Fre`res (founded in 1875), where he studied French.34 In 1912, his brother Kamil al-Husayni sent him to study at the venerable al-Azhar University in Cairo so that he could gain a religious education. But while in Cairo, Hajj Amin spent more time studying at the famous Muslim reformer Rashid Rida’s Dar al-Da’wa wal-Irshad (School of Advocacy and Guidance) and involving himself in Palestinian political societies. Philip Mattar has suggested that he may also have taken literature classes at the University of Egypt (now Cairo University), indicating that the young notable was less excited about a religious career than his older brother.35 Finally, shortly before the war he received training at the secular Ottoman Military Academy in Istanbul in preparation for his service as an officer in the Forty-Sixth Division of the Ottoman army.36 In contrast to all his rivals in the election for the muftiship, Hajj Amin lacked experience working as a religious official. While Husam alDin Jarallah was the Inspector of the Shari‘a Courts, Shaykh Khalil al-Khalidi was the acting head of the Shari‘a Court of Appeal, and Musa al-Budayri was the qadi and supervisor of the ‘Umar mosque, Hajj Amin was not a learned ‘alim and had little practical experience working in Palestine’s Islamic institutions. His turn to religion was only recent and tied to his ambition to succeed his brother as mufti, which was attested

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to by the fact that it was only just before the election that Hajj Amin exchanged the modern suit that he had worn as a young nationalist activist for the turban and beard traditionally worn by religious officials. Those deficiencies should seemingly have disqualified Hajj Amin from consideration for the position of mufti, but British officials had a more generous opinion of his qualifications. For one thing, prominent officials within the Palestine government, including most significantly Herbert Samuel, regarded Hajj Amin as more of a political opportunist than a committed activist. At the beginning of the British occupation, Hajj Amin had worked as a clerk in the office of Gabriel Haddad, a Christian Arab attache´ to the military governor, Ronald Storrs, and in the government’s Department of Public Works in Qalqiliya. As a result, British intelligence reports from the period describe him as being “reliably pro-British” like the rest of his family. While it is true that Hajj Amin then became a persona non grata in Palestine after the Nabi Musa festival of 1920 and would briefly make it onto the government’s “black list” of political activists, it was understood that his politics at this time were anti-Zionist rather than anti-British, which made the young man redeemable in the eyes of Samuel. His religious qualifications were undeniably weak, but religious qualification had always been of secondary importance to colonial officials in their cultivation of Muslim intermediaries, as we saw in Chapter 1. And having transformed the muftiship into the grand muftiship, it can be argued that the position itself carried its own authority in British Palestine, regardless of the qualifications of its office-holder. Moreover, as Uri Kupferschmidt has stated, it was not unprecedented for individuals with weak religious qualifications to be appointed to muftiships in the late Ottoman Empire.37 This is not to say that the decision to appoint Hajj Amin was unanimous. The attorney general, Norman Bentwich, and civil secretary, Wyndham Deedes, opposed his appointment, with Deedes later resigning in protest at Hajj Amin being granted too much autonomy by the Palestine government. Opposing them was the assistant civil secretary, Ernest Richmond, who became Hajj Amin’s chief advocate. These two sides represented the divide within the upper echelon of the Palestine government between pro-Zionists (Bentwich and Deedes) and pro-Arabs (Richmond and Storrs). But in the end the decision to support Hajj Amin was made by Herbert Samuel, whose practical politics trumped his

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personal sympathies for the Zionist position. Samuel hoped to use the powerful Husayni family as a partner in the colonial project and believed that by giving Hajj Amin religious office his interest in politics would be curbed. Here the career of ‘Arif al-‘Arif after Nabi Musa undoubtedly influenced Samuel’s treatment of his fellow conspirator Hajj Amin, for after receiving his pardon, ‘Arif al-‘Arif had settled into a position in the Palestine government, where he came to be viewed as a loyal and quiescent employee.38 Samuel, suitably encouraged by Hajj Amin’s pledge to use his office to keep the peace in Jerusalem, duly expected him to be similarly rehabilitated through government service.39 The thought must have also crossed Samuel’s mind that having Hajj Amin close to him was preferable to having him fall into opposition, where he would likely be more dangerous.

The Election Debacle Although Samuel gave his blessing and support to Hajj Amin’s candidacy during that April 11th meeting, the process by which he appointed the future mufti turned out to be shambolic. The problem lay with the results of an election held the very next day to decide which three candidates from a field of six would be considered for appointment to the office of mufti of Jerusalem. British officials followed the traditional Ottoman practice for electing a mufti, whereby the governing power appointed the mufti from three candidates chosen by local Muslim electors. Persuaded by the impressive show of support that Hajj Amin received after his brother’s death, they fully expected their favoured candidate to emerge as one of the top three vote-getters, but he finished fourth in the election, behind Husam al-Din Jarallah, Khalil al-Khalidi, and Musa al-Budayri.40 The Husayni camp immediately criticized the election results on procedural and political grounds. Since the electoral committee had been made up of individuals on the Shari‘a Court of Appeal and the municipality who came from rival notable families, the family began by attacking the committee’s makeup. They argued that the college of electors was unrepresentative and did not conform to Ottoman practice because it omitted members of the administrative council (which no longer existed at that point) and did not include all the country’s imams and religious teachers.41 Next they raised the incendiary accusation that

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Zionists had interfered in the elections by supporting other candidates, particularly the top vote-getter Husam al-Din Jarallah. In the middle of the night on April 19, 1921, a week after the election, Hajj Amin’s supporters put up posters in the Old City that proclaimed that the outcome of the election was evidence of a Zionist plot to take over Palestine: Wake Up “Moslems” The Jews are interfering in the election of the Mufti Awake and prevent danger before it occurs. The accursed traitors whom you all know, have combined with the Jews, to have one of their party appointed Mufti on the following conditions: (1) To assist the Jews in the exchange of Moslem Wakfs and their sale to them specially the Wakf of Abu Maidan near the Wailing Wall. (2) To assist the Jews in killing the national spirit of the country. (3) To agree to all Jewish Zionist claims and to accept them on behalf of the Moslems. (4) To help in handing over to the Jews the Haram Esh-Sharif, the Dome of the Rock and El Aksa that they might pull them down and build in their place the Temple and the place of Sacrifice as stated by Alfred Mond and the president of the Zionist Commission Dr. Eder. Moslems you must know what you have been brought to in your own country if the Jews mock your religious feelings and public opinion and use their influence in appointing the man of their choice who would be under their orders. The pride of Islam is dead, but God wants to punish you for having opposed the Moslem Government of the Caliphate, which protected the religion. Will you accept the shame to have a Jewish Zionist Mufti and that your religious affairs should become a plaything in their hands?42 British policemen tore down the posters before daybreak, but the message, which linked the local population’s nationalist fears of Zionist

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immigration to religious fears of a Jewish takeover of the Haram al-Sharif, must have passed quickly through Jerusalem’s Arab community. This combination of a call to defend the Haram al-Sharif and the nation from Zionist takeover would become a hallmark of Hajj Amin’s message to Muslims in Palestine and the wider Middle East, as we will see in the next chapter. We can also see a slippage between the poster’s use of the term “Zionist” and “Jew,” which suggests that the mufti’s supporters hoped to play on local anti-Semitism as well as antiZionism. The most troubling part of the poster for the British police, however, must have been its pro-Ottoman penultimate sentence. Coming just six months after the controversial reintroduction of the caliph’s name in the khutba at al-Aqsa, this fresh appeal to the Ottoman rule undoubtedly worried British officials and explains the quick removal of the posters. Although the police were quick to act against such crude pro-Husayni propaganda, the failure of the Palestine government to choose a new mufti from among the first three candidates helped the Husayni cause by throwing the election results into doubt. Unwilling to endorse the election results, Samuel toyed with the idea of holding new elections but ultimately decided that the election result could stand if one of the top three vote-getters could be persuaded to drop out and let Hajj Amin stand in his place.43 While Jerusalem waited for the high commissioner’s next move, Hajj Amin shrewdly took up his brother’s traditional place at the head of the annual Nabi Musa celebration, which took place shortly after the election. When the festival passed without any unrest or political demonstrations, Samuel was reassured that Hajj Amin would keep to his word in protecting the tranquility of Jerusalem. And when Hajj Amin invited Samuel to a meal at his house that conformed to Jewish dietary laws, the high commissioner became convinced that his government needed to move forward with his appointment. In early May, shortly after deadly rioting in Jaffa, which added to the urgency of solving the succession issue, Ronald Storrs approached the mayor of Jerusalem, Raghib al-Nashashibi, to request that he drop his support for Husam al-Din Jarallah and help persuade Jarallah to withdraw his candidacy. The mayor, whom the Palestine government had appointed a year earlier, honoured the government’s wishes by persuading Jarallah, who was also a government employee, to drop out. With Hajj Amin al-Husayni now one of the three top vote-getters, Samuel could

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now appoint him mufti of Jerusalem, which he proceeded to do on May 8, 1921. Uri Kupferschmidt and Yehoshua Porath make much of the fact that Samuel did not officially confirm his appointment in writing but instead quietly announced it in the Palestine Gazette, which they interpret as evidence of Samuel’s embarrassment over the government’s intervention in the election.44 But the more significant message of the appointment was that, despite the election debacle, British support for Hajj Amin as the mufti never seriously wavered. In appointing Muhammad Amin al-Husayni as the mufti of Jerusalem, the high commissioner had got his man.

The Creation of The Supreme Muslim Council With Hajj Amin installed as the new mufti of Jerusalem, the Palestine government could finally move ahead with its plans to establish the institution in charge of the religious affairs of the Muslim community. As we saw in the last chapter, the Palestine government in consultation with the Committee for Moslem Religious Affairs had decided six months earlier to place Islamic affairs under the control of a “Central Moslem Authority.” The functions of this authority were outlined in a November 9, 1920, meeting between government officials and Muslim representatives: (a) To supervise the administration of Moslem Waqfs. (b) To nominate and dismiss Kadis of the Moslem Religious Court, and the Members of the Moslem Court of Appeal subject to approval of the Government. (c) To exercise the functions formerly vested in the Sheikh El Islam in regard to the appointment of Muftis, viz. to select one of the three persons elected by the special Electoral College as candidates for the post of Mufti.45 As the last function makes clear, the creation of the Central Moslem Authority was driven by an official desire to transfer oversight of Islam from the Ottoman authorities to a local body. It had taken more than a year for the “Central Moslem Authority” to take concrete form, owing to Kamil al-Husyani’s death, the drawn-out process of appointing his

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successor, and the long negotiations between the government and Muslim representatives over the autonomy and scope of the new institution, but finally, on December 20, 1921, Samuel signed the Supreme Muslim Council Order, giving the Muslim community oversight of its own religious affairs.46 The Muslim millet now had its own controlling institution. The order established the council as a five-person body, with a president (rai’s al-‘ulama) and four members. Two of these members were to be drawn from the liwa’ (district) of Jerusalem and one each from the liwa’s of Nablus and Acre, ensuring that the three former Ottoman districts had representation on the council. The act also called for elections to decide who should serve on the council, laying out a process that involved the formation of an electoral college chosen by the inhabitants of each liwa’ “in accordance with the Ottoman Law of Election to the Chamber of Deputies.”47 By folding the existing General Waqf Committee and other subcommittees of the waqf administration into the new council, the order gave the SMC the authority to administer and control Muslim endowments throughout the country, allowing it to take control over the sizeable annual awqaf budget.48 The SMC was also given the right to appoint and dismiss the director and ma’murs (administrators) of the waqf system. The administration of the shari‘a court system was also granted to the council, with the nomination, appointment, and dismissal of all qadis, members of the Shari‘a Court of Appeal, inspectors of the shari‘a courts, and other court officials coming under its purview. Finally, the order gave the SMC the right to appoint and dismiss muftis.49 The great autonomy given to the council, which Samuel admitted was unprecedented, would give its members, and especially its leader, a great deal of financial muscle and religious prestige. At the height of its strength the council managed more than one thousand religious personnel, annual revenues exceeding P£75,000, a network of educational and charitable institutions, and tens of thousands of dunums of waqf land.50 At the same time, it would be the only Arab-run institution given official recognition by the Palestine government. As such, the SMC would become not only the most powerful Muslim institution in Palestine but arguably the most significant organization in Palestinian Arab society.

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The Mufti’s Consolidation of Power On January 9, 1922, the electoral college met for the first time and elected Muhammad Murad (the mufti of Haifa, for the Acre liwa’), ‘Abd al-Latif Salah (a Nabulsi lawyer, for the Nablus liwa’), Sa‘id Shawa (a Gazan landowner, for the Jerusalem liwa’), and ‘Abdullah Dajani (an ‘alim from Jaffa, also for the Jerusalem liwa’) as members of council. At the same time, Hajj Amin al-Husayni was elected the council’s president, which was something of a foregone conclusion considering his status as the mufti of Jerusalem. It was the SMC and not its president that replace the Ottoman shaykh al-Islam as the supervisor of Palestinian Islam. As one of a five-member council, the president had to share power with four other elected officials, theoretically ensuring that no single member could dominate the council. But Hajj Amin quickly cultivated alliances with his fellow council members and consolidated his control over the SMC. Of the four councillors elected in the January 9, 1923, elections, three became strong allies of the mufti. Hajj Amin granted Sa‘id Shawa from Gaza extensive powers in the south of the country in exchange for his loyalty and used similar methods to make allies of ‘Abdullah Dajani in Jaffa and Muhammad Murad in Haifa. Only ‘Abd al-Latif Salah of Nablus, according to Kupferschmidt, dared to voice opposition to the mufti’s positions, which would bring him into conflict with Hajj Amin.51 The mufti also appointed his extended family members and loyal deputies to positions throughout the shari‘a court system and the waqf authority in order to consolidate his power throughout the institution.52 While these measures ensured that the mufti’s authority over the council was not challenged from within, it was challenged from outside. Hajj Amin and his supporters, commonly referred to as the Majlisiyyun (“Councillors,” due to their control of the SMC) were opposed in the 1920s and early 1930s by a rival group called the Mu‘aridun (Opposition), led by Nashashibi family. The Nashashibis were the strongest rivals of the Husaynis among the notable families of Jerusalem. They had been granted the mayoralty of Jerusalem after Musa Kazim al-Husayni was stripped of that position for his role in the Nabi Musa riots of 1920, and formed the most important opponents of the mufti next to the Palestine Zionist Executive. In the early years of the SMC, the Nashashibis sent numerous complaints to the Palestine government

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about the nepotism and corruption of the Husayni-dominated SMC and called into question the idea that the mufti should have control over the religious institutions of the Muslim community.53 These complaints were particularly strong in 1925 –26, when the SMC was required by its charter to hold new elections, a moment when the opposition tried to blunt Hajj Amin’s power within the council and even to get him removed from office.54 After an election process brought to a halt by numerous lawsuits over voting irregularities, in which Opposition candidates had done very well, the Opposition succeeded in getting the Palestine High Court to annul the 1926 election results. In lieu of new elections the government decided to simply appoint two allies of the mufti and two representatives of the Opposition to the council with the understanding that the Opposition would then drop its opposition to Hajj Amin’s continued presidency of the council.55 Despite these complaints, British officials did not fundamentally change their minds about the mufti. To the contrary, John Shuckburgh, the head of the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office, would boast in 1926 that “the institution of a Supreme Moslem Council in 1921, has, on the whole, been one of our most successful moves in Palestine. It practically gave the Mohammedans self-government in regard to Moslem affairs.”56 Accordingly, British officials did not react when Hajj Amin al-Husayni, in reaction to the Opposition victory, pushed through an amendment that reduced the power of the elected members of the municipalities – the “foci of the Opposition,” according to Uri Kupferschmidt – in order to insulate himself against any future challenge by the moderate opposition.57

The Supreme Muslim Council in the Colonial Project Why did British officials show such little concern about the mufti’s power grab when his actions defeated their original intention to have power balanced among the council’s five members? This is an important question given that Hajj Amin’s control over the SMC gave him the platform to challenge Jewish and Zionist actions at the Western Wall at the end of the 1920s and become a leader of the Palestine Arab Revolt of 1936–39. Reading British records, it becomes clear that colonial inaction did not result from ignorance of Hajj Amin’s actions. Even before the Nashashibi complaints about the mufti’s nepotism and

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corruption, British officials had been aware of his high-handedness and political intrigues, as shown in British intelligence reports about the SMC providing support in its mosques for the Arab community’s boycott of elections to the legislative council in 1923.58 But any doubts that officials had about the mufti’s actions were allayed by the official view that Hajj Amin was helping to keep the peace in Palestine. So long as there was no further violence on the streets, officials considered Hajj Amin to be living up to his side of the bargain and were happy to turn a blind eye to corruption and nepotism within the SMC. Because security was always more important than democratic reform in Palestine, as in other colonial contexts, British officials may even have seen his consolidation of power as beneficial for ensuring that the mufti could more easily control his community. The historical record would suggest that Britain saw little use for democracy in their treatment of Arabs throughout the empire, and Palestine was no exception.

Imperial Politics and the Creation of the Supreme Muslim Council Uri Kupferschmidt has argued that the politicization of the SMC was allowed to happen because British officials wanted the council to become the Arab equivalent of the Jewish Agency.59 But there is no evidence to suggest that British officials ever considered the SMC to be anything like an Arab agency. As we have seen, from the beginning of the occupation, officials were concerned with creating a neo-millet institution that could control the religious and civil affairs of the Muslim community. In fact, British officials proposed the establishment of an entirely separate political entity referred to as an “Arab Agency” in July 1923, a year and a half after the SMC had been established, although, as suggested earlier, that proposal was rejected by the Arab community because it would have created “a pale reflection of the Jewish Agency,” with no international standing, no real independence, and few of the political powers of the Jewish Agency.60 Instead of creating the SMC as an Arab agency, that is, a political institution to represent the national rights of the Arabs, British officials established it as a religious body that would divert Palestinian Arabs from nationalist politics. Just as religious office was intended to curb Hajj Amin’s political ambitions, the establishment of the SMC was

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meant to blunt Arab demands for self-determination. As argued in the previous chapter, the establishment of the SMC and the government’s crackdown on political organizations were two sides of the same coin, for both policies were intended to control Palestinian Arab politics. Another argument advanced by Kupferschmidt is that the SMC was an anomalous innovation within the context of colonial religious policymaking. He argues that not only did Britain’s religious approach in Palestine differ from the Anglo-Muhammedan legal system it adopted in India, but it also broke in important ways from its approach in Cyprus, Egypt, and Sudan, where British administrators established some form of financial and regulatory control over waqf ministries and shari‘a affairs.61 According to Kupferschmidt, Palestine was also an “exceptional case” when it came to the British and French mandates set up after World War I, for in other countries the two powers had “retained some measure of control over the Shari‘a Courts although they shared this control to different degrees with local governments (through Ministries or Departments of Justice) and rulers (e.g. the King of Iraq and the Emir of Jordan).”62 But the British officials behind the creation of the SMC did not think that the council was a break from precedent. J. B. Barron, director of revenue and customs, explained in his 1922 report “Mohammedan Wakfs in Palestine” that the SMC grew out of British experiences elsewhere. Though he admitted that British practices in Palestine differed from those in Cyprus (where the corresponding body was appointed by the high commissioner) or Iraq (where the Department of Awqaf was under the supervision of the judicial secretary), he did not view the creation of the SMC as alien to the overall approach to Muslim institutions in the British Middle East. He also pointed out that a direct precedent for British policies in Palestine, at least when it came to religious endowments, could be found in the “Wakf Mohammedan Assembly” of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been operating since Austria’s annexation of the territory in 1908.63 More fundamentally, the diversity of approaches toward Islam across the British Empire argues against Kupferschmidt’s view that there was a colonial template for dealing with Islam that the British ignored in Palestine. The creation of the SMC, just like the creation of the Board of ‘Ulama’ in the Sudan or the development of Anglo-Muhammadan law in India or the institution of a bifurcated legal system in Nigeria, was a

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colonial response tailored to the local religious and, even more importantly, to the local political context. For officials like Barron and Samuel, the establishment of the SMC addressed two problems that Britain faced in dealing with Palestinian Muslims. The first was the immediate problem after the conquest of Jerusalem of finding or developing a local institution that could oversee the religious affairs of the Muslim community in the neo-millet religious system adopted by the occupying government. The second was the longer-term British concern with curbing Palestinian calls for independence, which could not be accommodated within the terms of the mandate. Designed to administer to the “civil and religious rights” of the Muslim community, the SMC was always intended, as Samuel had noted, “to check any agitation for political autonomy.”64 For a number of years the SMC would serve its purpose well within the colonial project but as political conditions changed in the late 1920s, the council would emerge as a major champion of Palestinian nationalism, particularly at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

CHAPTER 5 RELIGION AND POLITICS AT THE WESTERN WALL

The Western Wall riots, or al-Buraq Revolt of August 1929, were a watershed in the history of the Palestine mandate.1 For the first decade of British rule in Palestine, colonial officials stubbornly believed that Arabs and Jews could be reconciled under British rule. Herbert Samuel and his successor Herbert Plumber (high commissioner 1925–28) believed that if the British were able to keep the peace, put the right kind of institutions into place, persuade Zionists to keep quieter about immigration, and show Arabs the benefits of economic development, then the two sides would find a way of living together. But the bloody violence of 1929 shattered that illusion. For the remaining nineteen years of the mandate, British officials found themselves managing a conflict rather than building a shared nation state. The riots were the culmination of an almost year-long political struggle between Jews and Muslims over rights of ownership and access at the Western Wall, which was precipitated by the removal of a screen used by Jewish worshippers at the Wall during Yom Kippur services in September 1928. As the last remnant of the Second Jewish Temple, the Western Wall is the holiest site in Judaism, but as the retaining wall of the Haram al-Sharif complex, the raised rectangular area that houses the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, the Wall had been Muslim property since the seventh century, with the exception of the period when Jerusalem was under Crusader control. After seven years without major conflict, the Western Wall became the site of a proxy war between

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Zionism and Palestinian nationalism that was fought in the press and on the streets, leading eventually to the deaths of some 133 Jews and 116 Arabs. The numbers killed in the rioting shocked British officials, as did the nature of the violence, which took the form of massacres in Jerusalem and other cities throughout Palestine. The brutal and extensive violence served as a wake-up call for British officials. If 1922–28 were the “quiet years” of the mandate, “during which it seemed legitimate to hope that the two communities would settle down side by side,” as one British report put it, the period after 1929 would be marked by the “abandonment . . . of all progress towards self-government,” and the steady unravelling of the mandate.2 As Hillel Cohen’s recent book, 1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict makes clear, much can be written about the role that the murderous events of 1929 played in the polarization of Arabs and Jews in Israel/Palestine, but in this chapter I am more interested in how the struggle over the Western Wall functioned as a transformative moment for the SMC and its ambitious leader, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. The SMC’s championing of the Muslim position at the Wall would earn it support from the Palestinian Arab community at large, including from some Arab Christians, who came to view struggles over Muslim sites as nationalistic struggles, and from Muslims beyond Palestine.3 And as the most vociferous defender of the Haram al-Sharif, Hajj Amin would emerge as the leading figure in Palestinian Arab politics in the 1930s and would arguably be the face of Palestinian nationalism until the emergence of Yasser Arafat in the 1960s. Scholars have often blamed the Western Wall riots on what they see as Hajj Amin’s deliberate politicization of a simple dispute over religious practice. Yehoshua Porath, Uri Kupferschmidt, and Bernard Wasserstein have written of the riots as being caused by mufti’s cynical exploitation of the dispute over the screen “in order to intensify the struggle against the Jews.”4 In this narrative, the Western Wall struggle and the violence that followed were products of the mufti’s inveterate antipathy towards Jews and his driving ambition to dominate Palestinian politics. But the struggle over the Western Wall did not begin in 1928; it began almost a decade earlier when Chaim Weizmann attempted to purchase the Wall for the Jewish people. Although not the first attempt by a Jewish leader to buy the most holy site in Judaism, Weizmann’s action led to the status of the Wall

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becoming a bone of contention within the larger Zionist and Palestinian nationalist struggle over space in mandatory Palestine. It is to this longer history of the struggle over the Wall that we must turn if we are to understand Hajj Amin’s place at the Wall in 1929. Rather than analyzing how much blame should be placed on the mufti for the events of 1929, which is typical in accounts of the Western Wall riots, this chapter will look at how the longer struggle over the Wall allowed for the mufti to emerge as a political actor. I will argue that the mufti’s emergence as the loudest voice at the Western Wall in 1928–29 was overdetermined by his consolidation of power as the leader of the Muslim neo-millet in the 1920s, by the government’s recognition of the SMC as the supervisor of Haram al-Sharif and the Abu Madyan waqf (the endowment that included both the Maghribi quarter in front of the Western Wall and the Wall itself), and by the absence of other strong Arab political leaders in the late 1920s. Before proceeding it is important to note the difficulty of separating the religious from the political in this struggle over the Western Wall. To designate an action or motivation as religious or political is nearly impossible because the Western Wall issue brought together religious and nationalist longings for the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount on both sides of the struggle. It is for this reason that purely religious and purely political explanations of the violence of 1929 are inadequate, as Alex Winder has argued in a 2012 article on the riots.5 For in seeking to explain the violence as a product of a conflict between Islam and Judaism over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, the religious explanation ahistorically assumes that the two religions are bound to be in conflict over religious space, thus ignoring the specific political context of the events of 1929. While it may be tempting to view conflicts over holy sites, such as at the Western Wall or the Ayodyha Mosque in India, as an inevitable outcome of the clash between two incommensurable religious identities, this misses the fact that religious identity itself is not fixed but is, in the words of Glen Bowman, “an emergent, situational, and ofttimes contingent property.”6 The Muslim and Jewish religious identities and positionings at the Wall were not essential and unchanging, but were influenced by the political and social conditions of mandatory Palestine. At the same time, as Winder points out, a concentration on the immediate political events of 1928– 29 ignores deeper social structures

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that contributed to longer-term tensions between the two communities, such as the growing physical and social separation between religious communities in Jerusalem, which as we have seen was encouraged by the Palestine government’s communalist policies, as well as British urban planning practices, which I have explored elsewhere.7 As Winder rightly concludes, in the events of 1929, “politics and religion were intertwined, playing on existing divisions and alliances.”8 This helps explain why the mufti of Jerusalem was so well placed to take a leading role in the conflict over the Western Wall, but before getting to that moment we need to begin with a consideration of his political activities as the president of the Supreme Muslim Council.

The “Quietism” of the Mufti While Hajj Amin was undoubtedly an ambitious leader, his ambitions were tempered for much of the 1920s by his position as a colonial client. In making Hajj Amin the millet-bashi (ethnarch) of the Muslim community, the British had granted the mufti enormous social capital and financial power in return for his pledge to keep his community quiet and his own nose out of politics. It would appear that the young mufti took the latter commitment seriously, for the SMC stayed out of the major Arab political issues of the time, at least publicly. After assuming religious office, Hajj Amin withdrew from the Arab Club, the nationalist society he had helped found, which closed shortly thereafter. He and his fellow councillors would only play a background role in Palestinian nationalist politics for the rest of the 1920s, which could be seen in their non-involvement in the various Palestinian Arab congresses that took place during the decade, their non-endorsement of the 1923 boycott campaign against the legislative council elections, and their non-participation in Arab protests against Lord Balfour’s visit to Palestine in 1925. Until the Western Wall struggle, the political affairs of the Palestinian community would instead be managed by the Arab Executive (led by Hajj Amin’s uncle and eventual political rival Musa Kazim al-Husayni), what remained of the Muslim-Christian Associations, and the emerging Arab Opposition, headed by Raghib al-Nashashibi, the mayor of Jerusalem. The mufti’s public quietism did not mean that he conceived of the SMC as a purely religious body. From the beginning, he realized the

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council’s potential to be much more than the ecclesiastical body described in the Palestine government’s “Order Establishing the Supreme Muslim Council.”9 Indeed, at the very moment he became the council’s president in 1922, Hajj Amin outlined his intention to use the SMC, “to represent the Muslims of this country honourably and properly inside and outside the country.”10 The meaning of those words would become clear when Hajj Amin worked methodically over the next few years to consolidate his position at the head of the Muslim community and then use that position to defend the religious and non-religious interests of his community. The boycott campaign is instructive of the council’s approach to politics during this period, in that the council can be seen intervening only behind the scenes, where their activities could not be so easily monitored by the Palestine government. As British intelligence reported at the time, while the SMC took no public position on the boycott campaign it allowed preachers, such as Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Muzaffar, a leading figure in the Arab Executive and friend of the mufti, to use its mosques to sermonize against the election. When al-Muzaffar gave a particularly rousing speech in front of some four thousand Muslims at al-Aqsa Mosque in March 1923, the Palestine government was forced to step in and warn the mufti about using places of worship for political purposes.11 The mufti complied with the Palestine government’s request but later that year, British district governors reported that the council was again using its mosques to propagandize, this time against the rival Arab National Party of the Nashashibis.12 British and Zionist intelligence agents also accused the mufti of being involved in more clandestine and radical activities, which by their very nature are hard to verify. According to Chaim Kalvarisky, a Zionist intelligence agent active in promoting Arab opposition to Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the mufti had a hand in the violence not only at Nabi Musa in 1920 but also in Jaffa in 1921, as part of a grand plan to take over the country. His source for this information was the mufti’s nephew Tahir al-Husayni, son of the previous mufti Kamil al-Husayni, who was disgruntled that Hajj Amin had received the muftiship instead of him. Perhaps because of the fantastical nature of these claims, the unreliability of the informant, or British mistrust of Kalvarisky, the Palestine government did not follow these up.13

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British intelligence agents were more alarmed by what they identified as the “Moslem self-sacrificing society,” an organization that first emerged in Haifa in 1924 before opening up cells in Nablus, Jerusalem, and Gaza.14 British intelligence reports based upon the work of Arab informants from the mid-1920s reported that members of the Jerusalem branch “have sworn to sacrifice themselves for Haj Amin [sic] and act as his body guard and carry out propaganda in his favour among the Moslem inhabitants,” and claimed that its members received jobs in the SMC or the al-Aqsa Mosque.15 But the Palestine government took no action against this group, perhaps because it viewed these Arab informants as unreliable or because senior members of the Palestine government, such as Ernest Richmond, viewed the intelligence service as prone to exaggeration or simply because the group had taken no action against British or Jewish targets.16 It is clear from British records that officials did not consider the political activities of the SMC to be serious enough to warrant government intervention. “It is generally believed throughout the Jaffa District that the Council is at least as active in political as in religious affairs and surprise is from time to time expressed that the Government should tolerate this almost overt intervention in politics on the part of persons in the receipt of official emoluments,” wrote Ronald Storrs to the chief secretary in January 1924, before blithely explaining that this “was to be anticipated, and though deprecated, and as far as possible lessened, should be discounted and to a certain extent excused.”17 Storrs does not detail what he meant when referring to the council’s involvement in political affairs, nor does he explain why this was to be expected, but it seems likely that officials like Storrs “anticipated” and “excused” such actions because Hajj Amin as the president of the SMC was the “ethnarch” of the Muslim community, as Acting High Commissioner Harry Luke described him in 1928.18 Another factor that explains why British officials chose not intervene was the mufti’s success in making sure that the council’s political activities were subtle enough to produce little evidence of wrongdoing. When the Palestine government asked its district governors to look for evidence of the council’s involvement in politics in 1923, the British governor of Gaza wrote back to share his belief that Hajj Amin was behind propaganda in his district against the moderate Arab National Party but conceded that he did not know whether local imams and

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khatibs (preachers who give the Friday sermon) had been ordered to take a particular political line.19 Similarly, the district governor for Samaria charged the SMC with pushing a political agenda among its members but noted that he had no evidence that it was ordering people to propagandize from the mosques in his district.20 Meanwhile, the district governor of Haifa simply stated, “It is certainly believed by Moslems as well as Christians in this part of the country that the organization of the Supreme Muslim Council is actively supporting the efforts of the Executive Council of the Palestine Congress.”21 British officials may also have welcomed the mufti’s involvement in politics as a way of encouraging further division within the Arab notability. Given the divide and rule strategy of colonial occupation, British inaction would have seemed like a prudent course of action, for Hajj Amin’s entrance into the political realm would naturally put him at odds with his Nashashibi rivals, who controlled the mayoralty of Jerusalem, and potentially put him into competition with his uncle Musa Kazim al-Husayni, who headed the Arab Executive. In the opinion of many British officials, the Supreme Muslim Council faithfully fulfilled the duties assigned to it by the government throughout the 1920s. Under the council’s oversight, the shari‘a court system and the waqf administration functioned without the need for British oversight and without much complaint from the country’s Muslim population. While there were occasional criticisms about the corruption and imperiousness of the SMC, those criticisms paled in comparison to the vociferous disapproval of Britain’s approach to Muslim affairs before the creation of the council. British officials such as Ronald Storrs and Ernest Richmond also enjoyed a cordial relationship, if not friendship, with the mufti and genuinely considered him a moderate voice in Palestinian politics. Most significantly, since the mufti had been in power, there had been no recurrence of the kind of violence that had erupted in Jerusalem and Jaffa at the beginning of the decade. Whatever their motivations may have been, it seems clear that through the mid-1920s British officials were satisfied with the SMC’s performance and showed no interest in intervening in its affairs. Not all officials were sanguine about the mufti’s performance, but the prevailing British opinion was summed up in the aforementioned comment made in 1926 by John Shuckburgh of the Colonial Office that “the institutions

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of a Supreme Moslem Council in 1921, has, on the whole, been one of our most successful moves in Palestine.”22

Consolidating Power through the Council While Hajj Amin kept a low political profile during much of the 1920s, he worked hard to enhance his religious reputation at home and abroad in a publicity campaign built around SMC’s oversight of the Haram al-Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam. Enhancing the mufti’s prestige as a champion of Palestinian Islam, the campaign would not only transform Hajj Amin into the pre-eminent religious figure in Palestine but would also position him to be the foremost defender of the Palestinian position when the struggle between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism over the Western Wall intensified in 1928. The mufti’s use of the Haram al-Sharif to burnish his reputation began with the SMC’s campaign to repair the Dome of the Rock. Inaugurated in 1923, this campaign led the council to send six fundraising delegations (two of which were headed by Hajj Amin himself) to Egypt, the Hijaz, India, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain in 1923 and 1924. While those delegations helped the SMC succeed in its short-term goal of raising money, the greater payoff came in the mufti’s creation of lasting relationships with Muslim groups outside of the country, such as the Indian Khilafat movement, and his success in promoting the idea around the Middle East and in Palestine itself that the SMC was the great defender of the faith in Palestine. The proposal to repair the Dome of the Rock actually originated within the Palestine government, which then brought the SMC into the project. The first British study of the Dome of the Rock occurred shortly after the British occupation and before the end of the war, when the OETA authorities commissioned the architect Ernest Richmond to study the site. Richmond’s study, which was completed in the spring of 1920, concluded that the bones of the structure were fine but that its “skin” needed to be replaced.23 Impressed by Richmond’s report, Herbert Samuel initiated a project to repair the site because he believed that once completed the “effect throughout the Moslem world, of which this is the third most sacred shrine, would be favourable and instantaneous.”24 At first, Samuel planned for the Palestine government to fund and carry out the repairs, but Lord Reading, the viceroy of India,

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and Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary, warned him that Muslims around the world, and most worryingly Indian Muslims, might view this as a British attempt to take control of the holy site.25 Samuel therefore reached out to the mufti to ask for the SMC’s help in organizing the campaign. With the mufti’s acceptance, the campaign to repair the Dome of the Rock became a joint project between the government and the SMC. For its part, the government provided Richmond’s architectural study of the dome, offered technical assistance, built and funded a workshop for making “traditional” tiles (an Armenian potter was brought in from Kutiye, Turkey), and protected the Haram through urban planning and antiquities ordinances. Meanwhile, the SMC became the public face of the project, headlining fundraising campaigns to the Muslim world and helping to find Muslim craftsmen to work on the site. Due to his partnership with the Palestine government, the mufti’s official fundraising appeal, his 1923 “General Appeal to the Muslim World,” emphasized the renovation of the Dome of the Rock as a means for protecting the site’s Islamic “art treasures,” “precious tiles,” and “gift mosaics.”26 A rather different message was delivered in the SMC’s fundraising speeches in the Muslim world, as shown in a September 1923 Foreign Office report, which explained how the council’s delegation to the Hijaz was carrying out pan-Arab propaganda based on the “stock rumour” that the Dome of the Rock was being placed under Jewish control.27 A month later a telegram from British intelligence in Cairo reported that another delegation travelling to India via Egypt was engaging in similar propaganda, this time with the collusion of the Indian Khilafat Committee and the Turkish government in Ankara.28 Further telegrams from India confirmed that the threat of a Jewish takeover of the Haram al-Sharif was central to a publicity campaign aimed at uniting the Muslim world behind the mufti.29 As we have seen, the mufti was no stranger to using the defence of the Haram al-Sharif in his political propaganda, having used the threat of a Jewish takeover of the Haram during his electoral campaign for the muftiship in 1921. In reviving such rumours, the mufti sought once again to present himself as the true Palestinian defender of Islam against its Zionist enemies, a conflation of religion and nationalism that allowed him to take a political stance against Zionism without falling foul of the imperial authorities.

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The 1923– 24 Dome of the Rock fundraising campaign would provide a solid foundation for the mufti’s later involvement in the pan-Islamic movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Building upon the relationships the council forged with foreign Muslims, Hajj Amin would dispatch a large Palestinian delegation to the 1926 Congress of the Islamic World held in Mecca during the Hajj and put on its own Muslim congresses in Jerusalem in 1928 and 1931.30 The delegation sent to India also established a lasting relationship between the council and the pan-Islamic Indian Khilafat Committee, whose leaders, the brothers Shawkat ‘Ali and Muhammad ‘Ali Johar, would work closely with the mufti on pan-Islamic matters in the early 1930s, as will be explained in the following chapter.31 But the main benefits of the fundraising campaign were felt at home. The SMC’s successful campaign drew some P£84,000 in donations from political and religious figures throughout the Muslim world, which the council then used to fund not only repairs to the Dome of the Rock but other projects, such as the council’s ill-fated construction of the Palace Hotel.32 Most importantly, the campaign allowed the SMC to establish itself as the definitive protector of the Haram al-Sharif, shunting aside the MCA and Arab Executive, who had presented themselves as the defenders of the Haram before the SMC had been formed.33 The Dome of the Rock campaign also aided the Husayni family’s struggle with its Nashashibi rivals. The establishment of the Nashashibi Hizb al-Watani, or National Party, in November 1923 created a credible Opposition party to the Husayni-controlled Arab Executive and the Supreme Muslim Council. In fact, as Yehoshua Porath notes, the National Party’s first attack against the Husaynis was not directed against the Arab Executive but against the SMC, which it accused of promoting the interests of the Husaynis at the expense of the wider Palestinian community.34 Arguing through their party that the council had overstepped its duties as a religious body, the Nashashibis would unsuccessfully press the government to recognize Hajj Amin as being patently unqualified for office.35 In response, the SMC emphasized its protection of the holy places as evidence of its strong track record of representing Palestinian Muslim interests. By promoting its protection of the Haram al-Sharif in its newspaper al-Jami‘a al-‘Arabiyya (Arab Union), in discussions during Friday prayers, and eventually through the creation of an organization called

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the Society for the Defense of the Mosque of al-Aqsa and the Holy Places, the SMC was able to head off Nashashibi criticism and convince Palestinians that it had their best interests in mind. The council’s successful promotion of its defence of the Haram al-Sharif was not the only way that it consolidated its position as the representative of the Muslim community. As the traditional patrons of the Nabi Musa festival, the Husaynis were able to use the religious festival to promote their own familial interests. Although no further violence occurred at Nabi Musa after 1920, subsequent festivals remained political affairs, with nationalist songs and slogans being raised against Zionism and colonial rule and in favour of Hajj Amin alHusayni, a development that encouraged Palestinians to think of the success of the mufti as a national concern.36 In the view of at least one member of the Nashashibi Opposition, such slogans attested to the fact that this “national” festival, as he called it, was being exploited by the SMC to hail its president.37 Indeed, such partisan actions would lead members of the Nablus MCA to curtail their participation in the festival in the 1920s.38 In its 1922– 23 annual statement, the SMC outlined its efforts to turn religious festivals into cultural, educational, and economic events for the Arab community. The SMC, according to the statement, “has been happy to revive [these festivals], has worked to refine them, to reorganize their management, to increase their amenities. It has attempted to turn some of them into cultural and educational fairs and industrial exhibits, in order to encourage Arab culture and national crafts.”39 It is not clear exactly how industrial exhibits and educational fairs were integrated into religious festivals but this broadening of the festivals’ purpose was an effort to transform them into national events, centred around the country’s Muslim heritage, that could compete with the nationalist festivals and fairs being put on at the time by the Jewish community, while also raising the prestige of the Husayni family.40 The council also built various charitable, cultural, and economic institutions during the early 1920s that extended its influence into the wider Palestinian community. The SMC established and subsidized a network of Muslim private schools; constructed an Islamic museum on the grounds of the Haram al-Sharif in 1922; built an Islamic orphanage in Jerusalem in 1923 at which Muslim children received vocational training; established libraries in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Hebron, and

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Acre over the course of 1920s; and set up pharmacies in Jerusalem in 1924 and Hebron in 1928.41 In addition, the SMC provided financial assistance to the local community, such as subsidies to peasants and funding for local craft industries. Even though not all of these projects met with success, they demonstrated the council’s desire to create Palestinian institutions that could compete with those of the Zionist Organization and foreign Christian bodies, an important factor in the council’s popularity at the end of the 1920s. The diversification of the SMC’s mission during the 1920s placed the council in a good position to present itself as a national organization at the end of the decade when the popularity and influence of pre-existing nationalist organizations such as the Arab Executive and the MCA were on the wane, though it should be noted that the majority of its work was directed towards the improvement of Palestine’s Muslim community. The council’s political and economic projects enabled Hajj Amin al-Husayni to spread his influence throughout the country and establish a system of patronage (which built upon the Husayni family’s preexisting relationships with Muslim and Christian notables) that tied local communities, particularly Jerusalem’s community, to the council. In this way, the SMC slowly and steadily became a religio-national institution in the Palestinian Arab community. From that powerbase, the SMC would be well placed to involve itself in a nationalist competition between Arabs and Zionists that centered on the country’s holy sites, most particularly the Western Wall.

Competition over the Wall The roots of the Western Wall confrontation can be traced back to the first year of the British occupation, when the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann approached OETA authorities in March 1918 with a proposal to purchase the Wall from the Muslim community for 70,000 Egyptian pounds.42 Weizmann’s interest in ha-Kotel ha-Ma’aravi (The Western Wall) was not religious; like other secular Zionists at the time, Weizmann had little regard for the traditional community of Jews who prayed at the Wall, but he viewed the Western Wall itself as a potent national symbol for the Jewish people and an important way of reaching out to religious Jews. As he explained in a letter to Lord Balfour in May 1918, Weizmann saw the Wall as the only religious site in Palestine that

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was, “in some sense left to us,” before he complained to the foreign secretary that despite the ability of Jews to worship there, the “Wailing Wall is not really ours.”43 The purchase of the Wall, he assured his friend, would enable the Jewish people to own one of the few concrete symbols of Jewish heritage left in Palestine and help rally “all the Jews, especially the great masses of orthodox Jewry in Russia, Galicia and Roumania, as well as England, Germany and America round the platform which we have created, namely a Jewish Palestine under British auspices.”44 Weizmann was well aware that Britain’s respect for the status quo complicated his ability to purchase the Wall. Instead of fighting against the status quo, Weizmann attempted to redefine the boundaries of the Haram al-Sharif, in order to separate the Wall from the rest of the Haram complex: The Jews do not wish to touch the Christian and Moslem sanctuaries. We should however like to feel that Palestine was not wholly composed of holy places. There must be territorial limits placed to these holy places, so that we should know exactly what they are. The Jews should retain the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and [we] would like the Commission to fence it round, and to mount a Jewish guard round it.45 Weizmann hoped to put plan into action by purchasing the Wall in March 1918, but was immediately met with strong opposition from local residents who protested that the Wall was holy to Muslims and part of their neighbourhood. Known to Arabs as al-Ha’it al-Buraq (Buraq Wall), the Wall also held religious significance to Muslims as the site where Muhammad stabled his steed al-Buraq after his Night Journey from Mecca to Jerusalem.46 At the same time, the Wall abutted an Arab neighbourhood, known as the Maghribi quarter, that had been established as the Abu Madyan waqf during the reign of Saladin to accommodate Moroccan pilgrims to Jerusalem. Weizmann considered the neighbourhood little more than “a group of miserable, dirty cottages and derelict buildings, which makes the whole place from the hygienic point of view a source of constant humiliation to the Jews of the world,” and euphemistically called for it to be “cleaned up” in order to give the Wall a “dignified and respectable appearance.”47 But the strength of

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Arab opposition to his plan in 1918 convinced British officials that his purchase of the Wall would cause instability in Jerusalem and they therefore decided to reconfirm Muslim ownership of the Wall and pledge that the Maghribi neighbourhood, as waqf property, would be protected from encroachment.48

The Wall as a Nationalist Issue The failure of Weizmann’s proposal did not end Jewish calls for the Western Wall to become Jewish property. As Mary Ellen Lundsten explored in her 1978 article, “Wall Politics: Zionist and Palestinian Strategies in Jerusalem, 1928,” the Western Wall functioned as a signifier of Jewish national identity during the mandate period, with “the Jewish National Fund issu[ing] stamps in booklets portraying Jewish symbols at the Wall and signifying the relationship between Jewish jurisdiction over the “Holy Places” and Zionist land acquisition throughout Palestine.”49 Other Jewish publications were even more provocative, with foreign Jewish newspapers publishing pictures of the Dome of the Rock with a Star of David on top, an image that suggested that the entire Haram would eventually come under Jewish ownership.50 Important figures in Jewish and Zionist circles also spoke of the need for a Jewish takeover of the Haram al-Sharif. The Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Kook, argued in 1919 that the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif) was “bound in the end to revert to us,” and called upon the British to let the Jewish community protect the Wall, a religious argument that was nevertheless seen as provocative by local Muslims.51 Moreover, while the chief rabbi contended that the future of the Temple Mount was a matter for heaven, he came to view the status of the Wall in nationalist terms, like the mufti of Jerusalem, as shown in an interview in the Hebrew newspaper Do’ar Hayom, which described the chief rabbi in 1929 as having tears in his eyes “at the moment that he was told that the national anthem had been sung for the first time before the Western Wall, that the national flag had been flown in honour . . . and that the youth swore to defend the Wall.”52 Most distressing for local Muslims were the words of Sir Alfred Mond, the British minister of health and a strong financial backer of Jewish immigration to Palestine, who proposed in a speech in London in the spring of 1921 that a new “edifice” needed to be erected where

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“Solomon’s Temple once stood.”53 As we have seen, that statement would be presented as evidence of a Jewish plot to take over the Haram al-Sharif in the posters put up in support of Hajj Amin’s candidacy for the muftiship in April 1921, and would regularly be trotted out by the SMC, along with pictures from Jewish newspapers of the Dome of the Rock emblazoned with a Star of David, as evidence that the Haram al-Sharif was under threat of a Jewish takeover. In response to these attempts to claim the Western Wall as Jewish property, the Palestinian community came to defend its rights at the Haram al-Sharif. As we saw earlier, petitions from Arab nationalist groups in the early 1920s spoke of Palestine as a Muslim space and warned the Palestine government about Zionist attempts to take over the Haram. The need to defend the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque would also become part of Palestinian outreach to neighbouring Arab countries, as shown in the Arab Executive’s promise to defend the Haram in its July 1922 message to the Egyptian people and the SMC’s fundraising campaigns throughout the Muslim world in 1923 and 1924.54 Finally, according to Yitzhak Reiter, in an effort to strengthen Palestinian Muslim attachment to the Western Wall, Hajj Amin emphasized the Wall’s religious significance by reviving interest in the traditions of Isra’ (the Prophet’s Night Journey from Mecca to the “Farthest Mosque” of al-Aqsa) and Mi‘raj (his consequent ascension to heaven), which to that point had not been particularly important to Palestinian Muslims.55 Once the Western Wall emerged as a bone of contention between Muslims and Jews and by extension to Zionist and Palestinian politicians, activities at the site came to be heavily scrutinized. In 1920, an attempt by the Muslim religious authorities to repair portions of the Wall came under heavy criticism by the Palestinian Zionist Executive, who viewed the action as a deliberate attempt to “annoy Jews who chose to exercise their customary right to pray at the Wall,” and called for the transfer of maintenance responsibilities to the Jewish community.56 In Palestine, the right to maintain and clean areas of religious space was a sign of ownership, as evidenced by the sporadic disputes between Christian sects over their rights under British rule to clean as small an area as a single step of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.57 For local Muslims, the Zionist call for the transfer of maintenance responsibilities was seen as another attempt to appropriate the Wall for the Jewish community. It would appear that the Palestine government was

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sympathetic to this argument, for it rejected the Zionist demand. But in an effort to find some compromise between the Zionist and Muslim positions, the government permitted the waqf authorities to repair the upper courses of the Wall (built during the period of Muslim rule), while the government’s Department of Antiquities took over the repair of the lower (Herodian) and middle (Greco-Roman) courses. That decision, which no doubt seemed equitable to British officials, only served to encourage both sides to push for greater rights at shared religious sites from that point onward, as was shown at the Tomb of Rachel near Bethlehem when Muslims complained about Jewish repairs in 1921, leading to the Palestine government choosing to complete the repairs itself in 1925.58 The dispute over shared religious space returned to the Western Wall in 1922, when Muslims complained about Jews bringing benches to their religious services. The presence of benches at the Wall was not unprecedented in the Ottoman period, but in the politically charged environment of mandatory Palestine, their reappearance caused a fuss. While the Jewish authorities explained to the government that the benches were necessary in an area that was otherwise devoid of places to sit, the Muslim authorities accused Jews of bringing benches in order to establish a permanent Jewish presence at the Wall. Before the Palestine government could find a quiet resolution to this problem, the local Arab and Jewish press took up the issue, leading both sides to dig in their heels. A British political report from May 1922 noted that the Palestine government had no choice but to ban benches at the site, since they had been “officially forbidden during the Turkish regime,” but went on to state that “it would appear that this prohibition has not been observed since the military occupation, and apparently before it, benches had in fact been introduced by means of monetary arrangements with the neighbouring Muslims.”59 This tension between formal rights of worship and customary practice would become the key issue in the decade-long Arab and Jewish struggle over the Western Wall. For Muslim groups such as the SMC, the status quo at the Wall had been clearly spelled out in Ottoman regulations, such as a 1910 letter from the Ottoman government to the waqf administration that stated, “The place which is designed for prayer by Jews shall be used by them as in previous times. No chairs, curtains, tents, or other articles are to be brought or laid at the place.”60 Jews, on

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the other hand, viewed customary practice as the best measure of what should be permitted, rather than the Ottoman regulations, which had been made by a government that had always been remote from Palestine and which in any case no longer existed. In an effort to figure out the legal issue involved in the bench dispute the Palestine government decided in 1922 to convene a committee, chaired by the chief justice of Palestine, Sir Thomas Haycraft, to look into the matter. But that committee never met, perhaps because the government felt that the issue would be better handled by the proposed Holy Places Commission, which, as we have seen, never came into being.61 Without a modus vivendi established at the Wall, the struggle would continue throughout the 1920s. The SMC’s involvement in the Western Wall dispute began in earnest in 1925 when it complained to the Palestine government that Jews had once again placed benches on the pavement in front of the Western Wall during Yom Kippur. As in 1922, the government responded to the SMC’s complaints by stating that benches were not permissible at the site and had a member of the Jerusalem District Commissioner’s staff remove them from the Wall. In response, the Zionist Organization lodged a protest with the government about its interference into Jewish religious practices on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar and dispatched a formal complaint about the government’s actions to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations.62 Ignoring the Zionist Organization’s complaints, the Palestine government chose to uphold its decision on the basis of the Holy Places Order in Council of 1924, which granted the high commissioner the right to decide all religious disputes.63

The 1928 –29 Western Wall Struggle By 1928, this small-scale struggle over the Western Wall had been going on for around ten years without resolution. In some ways the dispute was a microcosm of the larger struggle between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism under British rule. The dispute involved an attempt by Zionist politicians to take control over the site, which the Jewish community (whether Zionist or not) considered their religious birthright, but which was under Arab control, an attempt that was made possible by Palestine’s occupation by the British. In response an Arab

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opposition movement emerged, which used the Wall issue to combine religion and nationalism into a powerful message of resistance against Zionism and Britain’s support for the Jewish National Home. Finally, the Wall dispute, much like the wider conflict, led to a hesitant and halfhearted search by the Palestine government to find an equitable and workable solution, which only ended up creating further uncertainty and anger on all sides. But the Wall struggle differed from the larger conflict in one significant way, namely, that the Palestine government did not favour the Jewish position at the Wall. British officials consistently recognized the Western Wall as Muslim property and, apart for a brief flirtation with Weizmann’s idea of a Zionist purchase of the site, made it clear that they had no intention of handing the site over to the Jewish community. What the Palestine government supported instead was Jewish rights of worship at the Wall, as Ronald Storrs pointed out in a letter to the Secretary of State in October 1925: Such is the strength and continuity of the tradition that the Jews may be said to have established an absolute and acknowledged right of free access to the Wall for purposes of devotion at any hour of the day or night throughout the year. Although it is sometimes asserted by Moslems that they could legally erect a wall debarring public approach, no Mandatory Government could countenance so flagrant an infringement of the status quo. On the other hand, the Jewish right is no more than a right of way and of station, and involves no title, express or implied, of ownership either of the surface of the Wall or of the pavement in front of it.64 In theory, this arrangement sounded straightforward: under the British, the Muslim community would continue to own the Wall and the Jewish community would retain their longstanding right to worship at the site. The problem was that in practice, certain acts associated with worship fell into a grey area in which they could be viewed, depending upon perspective, either as part of the protected right of worship or as unlawful innovations designed to broaden Jewish rights at the site. For much of the 1920s, the act of bringing benches to the Wall fell into this grey area, but in 1928 a fresh dispute emerged over the placement at the

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Wall of a mechitza, a traditional screen designed to divide male and female Jewish worshippers during Yom Kippur services. The Western Wall struggle of 1928– 29 began on September 24, 1928, when a British policeman, at the request of local Muslims, forcefully removed the mechitza. Reported as a grave injustice in Jewish newspapers around the world, the incident soon evolved into a cause ce´le`bre between the Jewish and Muslim communities, playing out in fiery articles in the local and international press, in petitions to the Palestine government, and ultimately in the streets of Jerusalem, Safad, and Hebron in a series of violent attacks (mostly by Arabs against Jews) that claimed the lives of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs. During the struggle over the Wall, Hajj Amin emerged as the most vigorous defender of the Muslim position. The mufti issued strident calls in the press for Palestinians to defend Muslim rights at the Wall, rallied thousands of Muslims at al-Aqsa Mosque to protect the Haram al-Sharif, created a Society for the Protection of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Muslim Holy Places, and gathered Muslim leaders from around the region to discuss the Wall issue at an Islamic conference in 1928. Those actions breathed life into what had been a moribund Palestinian nationalist movement and raised Hajj Amin’s political profile in Palestine and the wider Middle East, but also led to accusations, which have persisted to this day, that the mufti was solely to blame for the violence of 1929. For Zionists, the mufti’s campaign at the Wall confirmed their longheld view that, despite religious office, Hajj Amin had remained an unreconstructed enemy of the Jews, who had simply been biding his time before striking against them. Palestinian writers would also present the mufti as the main protagonist at the Wall, though in a positive sense, such as in ‘Izzat Darwaza’s praise of the mufti for bringing about a nationalist uprising against the Palestine government and the Jewish national home.65 The British however, saw Hajj Amin’s role as more ambiguous. The Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929, also known as the Shaw Commission Report, which was the official British post-mortem of the riots, categorically dismissed the accusation that the mufti had been guilty of incitement at the Wall by pointing to evidence that violence had been greatest in areas of the country where the mufti’s influence was weakest, and vice versa.66 But at the same time the report drew a stark comparison between the mufti’s vociferous defence of Muslim rights at the Wall and what it described as

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the pacific attitude of the Zionist Organization and the Va’ad Leumi (the National Council of the Jewish community) during most of the struggle.67 If we look more closely at the events themselves, it becomes apparent that Hajj Amin al-Husayni was the leading aggressor in this struggle but was far from alone in politicizing the Wall issue. The mufti’s strong response to Jewish complaints about the removal of the screen began six days after Yom Kippur when he convened a large demonstration at the Haram al-Sharif on September 30, 1928. In front of a crowd of supporters, Hajj Amin made a strident appeal to the Muslim community to join him in defending the holy site: To All Our Muslim Bretheren You are aware that there has been during these days an attempt against the Buraq . . . that the people who are anxious to usurp the western portion of the wall of al-Aqsa have made up their mind to take this very step in order to infringe upon your right and that of all Muslims . . . Religious duty demands that every Muslim look with watchful eyes upon the imminent danger menacing the Muslim community.68 Two days later the SMC dispatched a pointed letter of protest to the government warning about Jewish plans to take over the Wall. This was followed by a meeting on October 8 between Hajj Amin and Harry Luke (who was in charge during High Commissioner John Chancellor’s absence from the country), during which the mufti submitted a memorandum accusing the Jews of trying to take possession of the Western Wall and implored the government to stop Jewish propaganda.69 At the same time, Hajj Amin appealed to Muslim groups outside Palestine for support, relying on the relationships he had cultivated with Muslims in India, Egypt, and elsewhere in the Muslim world over the previous five years.70 He then invited Muslim leaders to attend a conference in Jerusalem on November 1, 1928, that was dedicated to the defence of the Haram. While that conference failed to draw as many leaders as he had hoped, it succeeded in linking the Western Wall struggle to the wider pan-Islamist movement against Western imperialism and would lay the

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groundwork for a much larger Islamic conference in Jerusalem in 1931, which will be discussed in the next chapter. The 1928 conference also led to the dispatch of a formal letter of protest to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations and to the creation of the Society for the Protection of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Muslim Holy Places, which, under the mufti’s direction, became the loudest champion of Muslim rights at the Haram al-Sharif.71 Finally, the SMC took its defence of the Haram al-Sharif to the Wall itself. In the months that followed, the SMC introduced changes to structures that abutted the Wall area and altered Muslim practices near the Wall in a clear effort to provoke Jewish worshippers. The SMC’s reconfiguration of a wall that overlooked the area where Jews worshipped led to a great deal of construction noise and the occasional dropped brick, while its opening up of a new entrance to the area from the Haram complex turned the pavement in front of the Wall into more of a thoroughfare for the area’s local Muslim community than had been the case before. The council’s establishment of a zawiya (a religious school) near the Wall, at which a loud dhikr ceremony (a sufi devotional act that involved repeated recitation of the names of God) was performed, also disrupted Jewish worship at the site. Jewish officials also reported that the mufti was behind an increase in the volume of the call to prayer from mosques near the Wall.72 “Primarily designed to annoy the Jews,” as the Shaw Commission described it, the mufti’s actions clearly heightened the conflict over this shared space. But concentrating only on the mufti misses the ways in which Zionist provocations also contributed to the escalation of the dispute. As the SMC’s October 8 memorandum to Harry Luke points out, the Jewish community had been the first to politicize the screen’s removal: The Moslem Supreme Council meet you to-day concerning a very serious matter to which, it hopes, you will pay the greatest attention in consideration for its grave consequence over the present and future of the country. The matter in question is the agitation and active wide-spread propaganda undertaken by the Jews with a view to influencing the London Government and other Powers, as well as the League of Nations in order to take possession of the Western Wall of the Mosque of Aqsa, called al-Burak, or to raise claims over that place.73

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Although these words would be included in the Shaw Commission’s report, the commissioners downplayed the role of Jewish political agitation in the Wall issue, choosing instead to praise the Zionist organization and the Va’ad Leumi for their peaceful approach in the struggle and the restraint of the Hebrew press, which, unlike the Arab press, they saw as not raising tensions over the Wall until July 1929.74 As Philip Mattar has argued, British officials and later historians have constructed a selective and misleading reading of Jewish actions at the Wall by ignoring the days immediately following the removal of the screen.75 For the first six days after its removal, it was the Jewish community that was up in arms, sending letters of protest to the Palestine government and the Permanent Mandates Commission, holding large protests and declaring a general strike in Jerusalem, and penning angry articles about British actions in the Hebrew press. For Ilan Pappe those activities prove that: The Mufti was not the first to drag the opponents into the battlefield. It was the World Zionist Federation which, shaken by the incident, charged the British police with aggression against the Jewish worshippers who refused to dismantle the arch and the screen they had set up. Four days later a big Jewish demonstration took place in Jerusalem, in which the more extreme elements threatened to seize the policeman who had dismantled the screen and tear him limb from limb. Then a general strike was declared. The Hebrew papers poured fire and brimstone on the gentiles – specifically the Muslims – and the national poet H. N. Bialik bemoaned the desolate Western Wall. Subsequently Harry Lock [sic ] of the government Secretariat stated that “Jewish public opinion has turned what was essentially a religious matter into a political-racial one.”76 What is interesting is that Bialik, the Hebrew newspapers, and other champions of the Jewish position engaged their audience with the same emotional argument that the SMC used in regard to the holy site: that the Western Wall was in grave danger and that the Jewish community’s place in Palestine was dependent upon its protection. It is not surprising then that the Jewish community would produce its own society to

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defend the Wall, the Pro-Wailing Wall Committee, the counterpart to the mufti’s Society for the Protection of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Muslim Holy Places. For six days the SMC did nothing in response to these Zionist actions: no formal protests were sent to the Palestine government, no demonstrations were convened, and the council’s mouthpiece, al-Jami‘a al-Arabiyya, did not print any angry articles in response. Such actions were unnecessary because the removal of the screen was a victory for the SMC and there was little need for the council to intervene in what was initially a dispute between the Jewish community and the Palestine government. It was only on September 30, 1928, after nearly a week of British silence in the face of the Zionist protests, that the mufti reacted by convening a rally at the al-Aqsa Mosque to loudly promote the Muslim position at the Wall.77 This sequence of events suggests that the Western Wall struggle did not come solely from the SMC and its president exploiting “what seemed to them a Jewish provocation, in order to intensify the struggle against Jews,” as Porath has presented it, but resulted from a contest over religious space that became a moment when Zionists and Palestinian nationalists competed for primacy in Jerusalem.78

Two Nationalisms at the Wall The fact that the two sides mirrored each other’s behaviour in their struggle over the Wall suggests that in many ways their actions at the Wall were mutually constitutive. The Wall issue is therefore perhaps best understood through the lens of relational history, an alternative approach to studying nationalism originally proposed in Perry Anderson’s 1986 article “Agendas for Radical History.” Calling for a shift away from the myopic nation state focus of conventional accounts of nationalism, Anderson proposed that historians concentrate instead on the ways in which national identities are shaped through the interrelationships and interactions between different nation states, peoples, and cultures, a call heeded in the Israel/Palestine context by Zachary Lockman, Salim Tamari, Baruch Kimmerling, and others.79 In the case of the Western Wall struggle, the issue served as a framework within which these two communities could contest and negotiate the boundaries between and within themselves. As such, the

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political dispute and eventual violence at the Wall should be seen not simply as the outcome of a nationalist conflict, but as a constitutive moment for Zionism and Palestinian nationalism and a formative moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict, as Hillel Cohen has persuasively argued in his recent book on the riots and their impact on Jewish and Palestinian relations.80 That the Supreme Muslim Council and the Zionist authorities represented the two sides at the Wall in 1928 had to do with specific developments in local politics during the 1920s. The consolidation of the SMC’s power has been discussed above but its rise also depended upon the fact that at the end of the decade there was no other strong political party or institution that could have stepped in to represent Palestinian interests at the Wall. By 1927, the energy of the Palestine Arab congresses had largely dissipated, leading the Arab Executive, the political organization that styled itself as the representative of the Palestinian people, to close its office in Jerusalem. The country’s various Muslim-Christian Associations had also largely become inactive by the end of the 1920s.81 The political unity that had operated within Palestinian politics in the early years of British rule had collapsed shortly after the 1923 boycott campaign, leading to the rise of the Nashashibi Arab National Party as a strong alternative voice to the Husayni-dominated SMC and Arab Executive, as shown by its success in municipal elections in 1927 and its ability to control the agenda of the seventh Palestine Arab Congress of June 1928.82 The rise of the National Party also led to a successful challenge of the mufti’s control over the SMC by persuading the government to invalidate the council’s 1926 election results and place two Opposition candidates on the council. According to Bernard Wasserstein, Hajj Amin’s actions at the Wall can be seen as an opportunistic attempt by the mufti to halt the rise of the Opposition by securing a propaganda victory for his family.83 But this goes too far in emphasizing the opportunism of the mufti, for Hajj Amin had been involved in disputes at the Wall for years, having protested against Jewish practices at the Wall on two occasions in 1922, two occasions in 1923, four occasions in 1926, and twice in 1928, as the mufti explained in his memorandum of October 8, 1928.84 Moreover, the competition between the Husaynis and Nashashibis was less important in explaining the rise of the mufti’s influence than the fact

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that the political influence of Palestinian politicians as a whole, whether a Musa Kazim al-Husayni or a Raghib al-Nashashibi, had diminished over the course of the decade as a result of the failure to the traditional elite to bring about any tangible change in British policies in Palestine. The strong Zionist response to the removal of the screen in 1928 was in stark contrast to their more measured responses in 1922 and 1925 and reflected confidence among Zionist leaders about their position in Palestine. According to British estimates the size of the Yishuv had grown from 55,000 people in 1918 to 149,554 in 1928, and the Jewish community had purchased over a third of the land it would own by the end of the mandate period.85 While the period of 1926– 28 had not been kind to the Jewish economy, by the end of 1928 the Jewish national home could be deemed a success, given the fact that the Jewish community controlled the main commercial and industrial concerns in the country and operated a well-organized shadow government and educational system. Even if the Palestine Zionist Executive had no designs on the Haram al-Sharif, its aggressive posturing at the Wall illustrated to everyone that it was prepared, like the mufti, to use the Wall issue to advance its own interests.

The British Role at the Wall British officials first tried to intervene in the Western Wall struggle in November 1928, by clarifying the Palestine government’s position towards Muslim and Jewish rights at the Western Wall.86 A White Paper published in that month reiterated that the removal of the screen had been necessary and reconfirmed the government’s view that the Wall was the absolute property of the Muslim community. The White Paper was praised by the SMC and the wider Arab community, who expected the government to use its findings as the basis for solving the conflict over the site. But the very same White Paper undercut that expectation by stating that “it would be a convenience to all the parties concerned if a protocol could be mutually agreed upon between the Moslem and Jewish authorities regulating the conduct of the services at the Wall in such a way as to satisfy normal liturgical requirements and decency in matters of public worship.”87 Not surprisingly, this passing of the buck back to the two communities did nothing to solve the issue.

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In early 1929, the Palestine government decided to look at Ottoman precedents once again in the hope that it could find some arrangement that would be acceptable to both sides. British officials asked the two religious communities to provide written documentation that supported their respective positions, with the intention of using those documents to craft a compromise position. The SMC quickly responded to the government’s request and provided documents from the Ottoman and Egyptian period, including an irade (sultanic decree) from 1840 and the 1910 decision from the Ottoman government mentioned above, which stated that Jews had no right to bring chairs or other objects to the Wall. The Jewish authorities provided nothing in response. Since no written documents existed to support a Jewish right to bring benches or screens to the Wall, the Chief Rabbinate and the Palestine Zionist Executive ended up simply reiterating their position that Jewish rights existed independently of any legal document. This brought back an old conundrum for the Palestine government, namely whether rights at the Wall should be based upon formal rights or customary practice. The difficulty of sorting out this question compelled Harry Luke, chief secretary at the time, to complain in November 1928 that “the more I study the whole question the more I am impelled to the conclusion that it becomes increasingly difficult among the contending claims to define the nature of the status quo and the extent of the area of the Wall and the Waqf property to which it may be deemed to apply.”88 Similarly, High Commissioner John Chancellor wrote in June 1929 that the British could never reach a decision until experts were able “to define what is meant by the phrases ‘status quo’, ‘permitted under the Turkish regime’, ‘established practice’ and ‘allowed to take’” when used in various British statements and White Papers. Besides representing a confession of sorts that British officials had been arbitrarily applying the status quo concept in their policymaking, Chancellor’s statement illustrated his government’s continuing reluctance to follow Ottoman legal precedent as the SMC demanded.89 Sympathetic to the Jewish position that customary practice under the Ottomans allowed Jews to bring objects to the wall, Chief Secretary Harry Luke and Attorney General Norman Bentwich decided to draw up a set of formal rules that would define what Jews would be allowed to bring to the site, despite the fact that the Jewish religious authorities did not provide any documents to support their case.90 But those rules would only emerge in

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September 1929, too late to head off the rioting that ended up taking place at the Western Wall in late August. The British attempt to seek a compromise did not sit well with the mufti, who in May 1929 accused the government of failing to carry out the terms of the White Paper of November 1928, which, as we have seen, declared that the Wall was the absolute property of the Muslim community. A month later, the Jewish community expressed its own anger at the Palestine government for permitting the SMC to undertake a disruptive construction project at the northern end of the Western Wall in June 1929.91 Such deliberately provocative action on the part of the SMC initiated a period of intense and angry editorializing in the Hebrew press and elicited demands from the Va’ad Leumi (which had previously been quiescent according to the Shaw Commission) for the government to expropriate the Wall and give it to the Jewish community. Jewish frustration with the government’s inability to control the site also led to the creation of the Pro-Wailing Wall Committee, which was formed by Joseph Klausner, a supporter of the militant right-wing Zionist Revisionist Party of Vladimir Jabotinsky.92 The British tactic of delaying its decision at the Wall continued its policy throughout the 1920s of hoping that the two sides would reach a political arrangement of their own. But by not taking a definitive position at the Wall, British officials invited each side to think that the government would support their position, leading both sides to dig in their heels at the Wall and ultimately seek a resolution to the struggle through violence rather than negotiation.

Violence and Recrimination Facing heated criticism from both sides, the British high commissioner, John Chancellor, wrote to the colonial secretary in June 1929 that the Arab and Jewish positions in Palestine were irreconcilable. In his letter, he despaired that without clear evidence supporting Jewish rights to bring benches and other items to the site, the only way forward would be to base British policy on documentary evidence, a position that favored the SMC’s position and went against Luke and Bentwich’s ongoing project to develop rules for Jewish worship at the site.93 But then the high commissioner took the surprising decision to go on leave to England, putting his proposed resolution to the dispute on hold.

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Perhaps Chancellor still held out hope that the two sides might work out some accommodation on their own in his absence or felt that the situation did not yet warrant British intervention, but his actions turned out to be an example of imperial negligence, for while the high commissioner was resting in London, the two sides took matters into their own hands. The slide to violence began in mid-August 1929 when a series of Jewish and Arab demonstrations at the Wall raised the political temperature in Jerusalem. The first big demonstration was held in Tel Aviv on August 14, drawing six thousand Jewish participants who shouted, “The wall is ours!” and “Shame on the Government!”94 That same night a prayer vigil was held in Jerusalem that drew an additional three thousand Jews to the Wall. The next day religious Jews once again gathered at the Wall but were joined by baton-wielding members of the ultra-nationalist Beitar youth movement (allied to Vladimir Jabotinsky’s militant Revisionist Zionists), who marched to the Wall, raised the Zionist flag, sang the Jewish national anthem, and shouted “the wall is ours!”, “Shame on those who profane our holy places!”, “Shame on the government!” and other deliberately provocative statements.95 The next day a counter-demonstration was held by the SMC after the conclusion of Friday morning prayers at al-Aqsa Mosque, in which Muslim protestors visited the Wall to listen to sermons and raise banners supporting Muslim ownership of the Wall. According to police reports and testimony before the Shaw Commission, some of the Arab demonstrators also burned Jewish prayer books and the prayer notes that Jews traditionally place in the Wall.96 Over the next week a series of isolated incidents caused tensions to rise to unprecedented levels. On August 17, a brawl between Arabs and Jews caused a number of injuries and the death of one Jew. His funeral on August 20 turned into a mass Jewish demonstration, followed by counter-protests by the SMC’s Society for the Protection of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Muslim Holy Places. Seeing that the peace in Jerusalem was quickly unravelling, the government called upon the mufti and chief rabbi to preach sermons of understanding to their followers and arranged for a secret meeting between Zionist and Arab leaders in order to calm their rhetoric. But those efforts turned out to be too little, too late when Arabs began attacking Jews in Jerusalem on Friday, August 23, 1929.

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Unlike the situation at the Nabi Musa festival in 1920, the violence in Jerusalem in 1929 quickly spread to other parts of the country, with particularly gruesome attacks against Jews occurring at Hebron and Safad. All told, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were killed and 339 Jews and 232 Arabs were wounded in a week of violence that was only brought to an end after additional British troops were sent from Egypt. Those attacks, as well as the violence that occurred in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the village Motza, are beyond the scope of this book, but as Hillel Cohen’s 1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict makes clear, the grisly nature of the massacres was unprecedented in the history of Arab and Jewish relations in the country. Indiscriminate in targeting the old and the young, males and females, nationalists and non-nationalists, Arab attacks, and to a lesser extent Jewish reprisals, came to be seen by Arabs and Jews as a clear sign that the two sides could never share the country, and, as Cohen has argued, led to a permanent hardening of the boundaries between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.97 After the violence of 1929 the Palestine Zionist Executive accused the mufti of inciting the Arab population to attack Jews and charged the government with deliberate neglect, charges that came close to echoing their claim that the violence at Nabi Musa in 1920 had been a pogrom. Like the earlier Palin Commission, the Shaw Commission report of May 1930 found no evidence that the Muslim authorities had planned the attacks in advance, although one of its members, H. Snell, broke with the majority opinion to stress his opinion that the mufti should bear full responsibility for the riots. The commission found that the mufti had put together the Buraq campaign to defend the Wall from what he perceived to be Jewish attempts to take over the space, but denied that his intention had been to use the campaign to foment violence. Instead, the rush to violence was caused by “the force of circumstances,” specifically Muslim fear and anger towards the Zionist community.98 The report also contained a frank and pessimistic analysis of the political situation that suggested, for the first time, the untenability of British rule in a country that was home to two irreconcilable nationalisms. The report concluded that the struggle at the Wall had not arisen out of a religious contest but came out of a deeper “racial antipathy” that existed between Arabs and Jews. While “racial antipathy” was an overblown description of what was at base a national

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conflict, the report accurately summed up the division between the two groups: From the beginning the two races had no common interest. They differed in language, in religion, and in outlook. Only by mutual toleration and by compromise could the views of the leaders of the two peoples have been reconciled and a joint endeavour for the common good have been brought about. Instead, neither side had made any sustained attempt to improve relationships. The Jews, prompted by eager desire to see their hopes fulfilled, have pressed on with a policy at least as comprehensive as the White Paper of 1922 can warrant. The Arabs, with unrelenting opposition, have refused to accept that document and have prosecuted a political campaign designed to counter Jewish activities and to realize their own political ambitions.99 The report’s bleak analysis was groundbreaking in pointing out the futility of hoping that the political aspirations of the two sides could be reconciled simply by living under British rule. Up to that point British officials, at least publicly, had expressed their belief that Arabs and Jews would be reconciled to each other’s presence in Palestine as they came to see the benefits of living and working together under British rule. The Shaw Commission report expressed for the first time that reconciliation was no longer expected by British officialdom. It would be a few more years before a formal plan for partitioning the country was introduced in the Peel Commission plan of 1937, but it is no exaggeration to say that the idea of a two-state solution emerged with the Shaw Commission report in 1930. What that report missed of course were the numerous ways that the Palestine government had unwittingly contributed to the “antipathy” that had emerged between the two sides. In establishing a political system that divided the population along confessional lines and failing to develop any shared sense of Palestinian citizenship, the Palestine government had encouraged Jews and Arabs to think of themselves as separate and rival peoples from the outset of the British occupation. And at the Western Wall the two sides found a cause to express their “national pride, love of homeland, and devotion to holy places,” as well as their fear and hostility towards their neighbours, who were

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increasingly seen as strangers.100 At the Wall, the Palestine government also failed in its duty to maintain order, for the government consistently failed to take decisive measures to defuse the conflict and intervene before the war of words turned into something more violent. For the mufti, the events of 1929 were a triumph. While the riots gave all Arab political groups a renewed sense of purpose, his strong and public defence of the Haram al-Sharif transformed him into the leader of the Palestinian national movement.101 The rise of the mufti’s fortunes had been made possible by his vigorous defence of the Western Wall as a Palestinian and Muslim site, which “enabled [the SMC] to give the struggle against the Jews a religious dimension and to enlist the support of the urban and rural masses, who until then had not been attracted by the secular nationalist slogans.”102 But was the mufti’s defence of the Wall primarily about defending the site for the Palestinian nation, or for Islam? What did the mufti’s Islamic language mean for Palestinian Christians? And what of the future? Did the mufti’s involvement in this struggle mean that he was now committed to a policy of resistance against Zionism and the terms of British rule or was his presence at the Wall simply about protecting his own interests? The answers to these questions would be revealed in the mufti’s decision making after the riots, the subject of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 6 THE FALL OF THE SUPREME MUSLIM COUNCIL

As the leader of a populist movement that numbered some one million individuals, according to a British poll conducted in 1931, the mufti was well placed to use the riots as a springboard for launching a popular nationalist movement against British rule.1 Lionized by Arabs throughout the country as “the captain of the 1929 Intifada and the one who had successfully defended the Haram al-Sharif and its shrines,” the mufti could have used his popularity to mobilize his countrymen to take political action against the British government, but Hajj Amin never seized that opportunity.2 In contrast to Zionist leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, who adopted a more confrontational approach to the Palestine government in the 1930s, Hajj Amin fell back into his position as a colonial intermediary, choosing to work with the Palestine government rather than against it. And while he still remained involved in political activities, he turned his attention toward pan-Islamist politics rather than strengthening the nationalist movement in Palestine. In considering the path from 1929 to the Palestine Arab Revolt of 1936–39, this final chapter investigates the reasons why the mufti chose not to adopt a position of resistance after the Western Wall struggle and the impact his actions had on Palestinian nationalism. I will argue that the mufti’s decision making was guided by his interest in selfpreservation, his personal ambition to be a leading figure in pan-Islamic politics, and his approach to politics, which emphasized elite politicking

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rather than popular politics. But at the same time I will also highlight how his room for manoeuvre as a political leader was limited by his position as the leader of the Muslim neo-millet. As we shall see, the mufti’s approach to politics allowed him to retain his power in the country into the 1930s and increase his influence in the wider Muslim world, but it did not help the cause of Palestinian nationalism. Over the long-term the mufti’s brand of politics ended up alienating important constituencies in the nationalist movement, including members of the nationalist notable elite, who resented the mufti acting in his own interests; Palestinian Christians, who were turned off by his Islamization of Palestinian nationalism; and a younger generation of Arab politicians, who saw the mufti’s moderate politics as ineffectual and weak. The failures of the mufti as a nationalist leader would lead to the emergence of more radical political and religious groups in the mid-1930s that were willing to take Palestinian nationalism in a more confrontational direction.3 Outflanked by such groups, the mufti would finally abandon his moderate stance during the Palestine Arab Revolt and become the leader of the Arab Higher Committee in 1936, an action that led to his ouster from his religious positions and the reorganization of the SMC.

The Return to Moderation To understand Hajj Amin’s actions after 1929, it helps to return to the struggle and to consider what the mufti was trying to do in defending the Western Wall. There is little doubt that from his position as the selfstyled protector of Palestinian Islam, Hajj Amin “fanned the flames of al-Buraq,” particularly during the fateful struggle between September 1928 and August 1929, but it is also true that the mufti “operated within the bounds of the status quo,” as Hillel Cohen and Rana Barakat have argued.4 Consistent with the conservative politics of his notable class, the mufti saw pressure group politics, not radical action, as the best way to get the Palestine government to support the Muslim position at the Wall. So while he encouraged his fellow Muslims to organize and make as much noise as possible on the streets and in the press in order to force Britain’s hand, he never called for or had the desire to smash the political system. The violence that then took place came about because “the mufti lost control over the events,” as the peasantry,

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who placed much less faith in the Palestine government, began to attack Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere against his wishes.5 It is for this reason that the Shaw Commission, despite its misgivings about his rhetoric during the months before the riots, found the mufti innocent of the charge that he had incited the violence of August and September 1929, and in fact praised him for the manner in which he “exerted his influence in the direction of promoting peace and restoring order.”6 Immediately after the violence of 1929, Hajj Amin reassured the British high commissioner, John Chancellor, that he would continue to maintain order within his community and cooperate fully with the government. According to Chancellor, Hajj Amin saw cooperation “as his duty not only to the Government, to God, and the people, but also to his own conscience,” though self-preservation must have been foremost in the mufti’s mind.7 According to the mufti’s biographer Philip Mattar, the mufti put his pledge to Chancellor into action by graciously accepting a draft settlement to the Palestine problem developed by the British explorer and Arabist Harold St. John Philby in October 1929 and then adopting a moderate stance during negotiations between the British government and a new Palestinian delegation sent to London in May 1930.8 As had been the case before the 1929 riots, the mufti’s desire to protect his position in the early 1930s trumped any desire he had to confront Zionism or British rule. This was evident a month after the Western Wall riots when the mufti rejected an offer from the Syrian militant leader Shakib Wahab to help the Palestinian struggle by organizing bands of guerilla fighters.9 To be sure, the mufti would later meet with radical opponents of the British government, including the Islamic rebel ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam, and come to be involved in the Arab nationalist parties that formed in the mid-1930s, but he worked even harder to maintain good relations with the colonial power.10 The delegation that travelled to London in 1930 was the fourth to be dispatched to the imperial capital, following earlier missions sent in 1921 and 1922, and showed the renewed confidence Palestinian nationalists had about their chances of changing British policies in Palestine. However, it quickly became clear to the delegates that their position in London was as hopeless as ever, for upon their arrival at London’s Victoria Station, they were not met by an official representative but by three elderly ladies “waving a Palestinian flag enthusiastically.”11

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Made up of six of the most prominent Husayni and Opposition politicians, including Musa Kazim al-Husayni, the leader of the Arab Executive, ‘Awni ‘Abd al-Hadi, a lawyer who would later found the Istiqlal party, Raghib al-Nashashibi, the major of Jerusalem, and Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the delegation had every reason to believe that they represented the Palestinian people and fully expected to be listened to after the momentous events of 1929. But British officials never recognized the delegation as acting in any official capacity. In British records, the delegation was listed merely as a “Deputation to the Prime Minister and the Secretary for the Colonies from Arab Palestinian interests regarding the position of Palestine,” as Rashid Khalidi has insightfully pointed out. This casual dismissal of the leading Palestinian politicians of the day was par for the course and would be followed by British officials summarily ignoring the delegation’s political demands.12 In hindsight it is difficult to understand why Hajj Amin and his fellow delegates chose to adopt the same strategy of negotiation and petitioning that had failed to bring Arabs any major political concessions during the 1920s. In choosing to send another delegation to London they turned their back on an opportunity to channel the momentum of the Western Wall struggle into building the kind of mass-based political movement in Palestine that was created by the Wafd Party in Egypt or the Congress Party in India.13 After his success in 1929, the mufti could have used the SMC to promote popular demonstrations, boycotts, or strikes against the government, actions that had been carried out with some success in other colonial contexts. Admittedly, such activism would have been difficult to pull off in the face of stiff opposition from the much stronger British and Zionist camps, although it would arguably have been far more effective in 1929 than they turned out to be in 1936, by which point the Jewish national home was far more established. Hajj Amin’s reluctance to adopt such a confrontational approach flowed from what Philip Mattar has described as his “dual policy” approach to politics, which had been present even at the moment of the mufti’s greatest political triumph: He neither incited nor planned the August 1929 violence. He was constantly aware that if he, as an official of the Palestine

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government, challenged the British, they might exile him to political obscurity as quickly as they had granted him religious power in 1921. He was equally aware that the British were too strong for the Palestinians to challenge. Consequently, he practiced a dual policy between 1921 and 1936: cooperating with the British on the one hand while verbally opposing Zionism and seeking an Arab Palestine on the other. Such a policy worked well for him during the 1928– 29 dispute: it confirmed to most British officials his compliance while it verified to most Palestinians his anti-Zionism. Already by late 1929, however, he was pressed by an emerging anti-British mood to choose between the two masters he was serving, the British and his own people.14 Hajj Amin’s “dual policy” was a product of the intermediary position that he had been placed in by the British. Tasked with representing the Muslim millet in his role as the president of the SMC, Hajj Amin was expected to not only keep the peace within his community but also to be its advocate. And when his community turned against the Palestine government in the 1930s, the mufti’s position would become increasingly untenable. The mufti’s ability to walk right up to the line of rebellion without stepping over undoubtedly saved him from British prosecution. After the riots, the government arrested hundreds of Arabs, but chose not to reprimand the mufti, despite the Shaw Commission’s criticisms of his actions. The government also decided to leave the SMC’s organizational structure and pro-Husayni personnel intact, making only minor changes such as instituting greater government control over the council’s finances. Such an outcome was in striking contrast to its decision after the Nabi Musa riots of 1920 to sentence the young Muhammad Amin to ten years’ imprisonment for incitement, even though at that time he held no leadership position and enjoyed little influence within the Palestinian community. What was crucial, as Mattar’s quote reveals, was the fact that the mufti never challenged the British right to rule in Palestine during the struggle at the Western Wall. Although the mufti would later boast that his actions in 1929 had been directed against British colonialism, from his appointment in 1922 until the Palestine Revolt of 1936, the mufti never publicly broke with the British government. His opposition to the

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government instead took place out of the public eye, such as in his private meetings with government officials, his petitions to the Palestine government, or his behind-the-scenes support for the anti-colonial actions of others.15 As we have seen, British and Zionist intelligence agents were well aware of the mufti’s political machinations, but the Palestine government had been content to leave him alone because he had made no effort to organize a broader mass movement against colonial rule, such as a civil disobedience campaign of the type that had been successful in British Egypt or India, or an armed popular revolt as had broken out in Iraq, Egypt, and Syria. But while the British still made no move against Hajj Amin after the violence of 1929, they began to more closely monitor his political balancing act to see which way he might fall as the gulf between the Palestine government and the Arab population grew in the 1930s.

The Mufti’s Turn to Pan-Islamist Politics Upon his return from London, Hajj Amin might have used the British government’s rejection of the Palestine delegation as motivation to fight even harder for Palestinian national rights, as his uncle and fellow delegate Musa Kazim al-Husayni did on the pages of the family owned al-Jami‘a al-‘Arabiyya newspaper.16 The mufti might have used the delegation’s snub in London to rally his fellow notables and the broader Palestinian populace into the streets in much the same way that the Egyptian Wafd had done after its failure to be heard at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Instead, the mufti chose to direct his political activities outward to the Muslim world. To a certain extent this shift in focus helped the Palestinian cause by bringing it to a wider Muslim audience, but the mufti’s turn to pan-Islamism in the early 1930s took his attention away from the nationalist movement, which soon fractured into multiple factions. Hajj Amin’s turn to the Muslim world was not surprising given his past experience working with Muslim leaders and his newfound prominence in the Muslim world as the defender of the Haram al-Sharif. More immediately, the mufti needed financial and moral support to mount a legal defence of his actions at the Wall and to provide funds for Arab families impacted by the riots, which led him to turn for help to the Muslim leaders and pan-Islamist activists with whom he had forged

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relationships during his Dome of the Rock fundraising campaign and his trips to Mecca during the 1920s. Those leaders responded by donating large sums of money to aid the SMC’s efforts to help Arab victims of the rioting and by appearing in support of the mufti at a 1930 meeting of the League of Nations’ Commission of Inquiry into the rights of Jews and Muslims at the Western Wall. Particularly important to the mufti was his relationship with Shawkat ‘Ali and his brother Muhammad ‘Ali Jouhar, two brothers who had led the Indian Khilafat movement, the pan-Islamic Indian Muslim campaign that sought to unite all Muslims under the caliphate. The mufti’s relationship with the two brothers began in 1922 when Hajj Amin wrote to Muhammad ‘Ali to send someone to Palestine to take care of the Indian lodge in Jerusalem.17 Further contact was made in 1923–24 when a delegation led by Jamal al-Husayni, the secretary of the MCA and second cousin of the mufti, visited India in order to raise money for the SMC’s renovation of the Dome of the Rock. In 1924 and 1926, the mufti met the two brothers face-to-face during his pilgrimage to Mecca and two years later he hosted Muhammad ‘Ali during his brief visit to Jerusalem. The mufti also met with the ‘Ali brothers in Cairo in 1930, on a stopover during the Indian Muslim delegation’s journey to the London Round Table Conference for India.18 The mufti’s relationship with the two brothers was built around their mutual interest in promoting Jerusalem as “a religious Islamic center of importance for the entire Muslim world.”19 For the mufti, promoting Jerusalem’s status as a Muslim city would help to further elevate his position in Palestine and the wider Muslim world, while also helping in his local struggle against Zionism. For the Khilafat movement, Jerusalem was useful for its religious significance and its status as neutral space in relation to the various pretenders for the position of caliph, although as Moaz Azaryahu and Yitzhak Reiter have pointed out, “for Shawkat Ali, Al-Quds was not to be the seat of the Khalifat, but a center of Islam that would exert influence on the Muslim world.”20 A strategic alliance with the Khilafat movement was also undoubtedly attractive to Hajj Amin because of the political and financial power of India’s vast Muslim population. Indian Muslims could provide financial backing for his program in Palestine and would be central to the mufti’s plan to establish Jerusalem as a stopover for Muslim pilgrims returning from the Hajj or Umra pilgrimage. But the

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real power of the community lay in its potential to exert pressure on the British government to pay more attention to the Palestinian cause.21 The mufti’s relationship with the ‘Ali brothers was so strong that he was able to persuade the family of Muhammad ‘Ali to consent to having his body buried on the Haram al-Sharif following his death in London on January 4, 1931, shortly after the conclusion of the Round Table Conference. As Azaryahu and Reiter argue in their 2015 article on the geopolitics of Muhammad ‘Ali’s interment, the burial was entirely an exercise in propaganda. In offering prayers for the memory of Muhammad ‘Ali in mosques throughout Palestine and holding a grand funeral procession for the body, the mufti, “cultivated the image of the Mufti as a leader capable of ‘great deeds’ in the arena of international Muslim politics.”22 The burial of the body on the Haram al-Sharif also helped to underline the Islamic claim to the Temple Mount complex, an ongoing concern for the mufti in the wake of the 1928– 29 Western Wall struggle. Not surprisingly, Zionist officials opposed the burial, which they claimed, with good reason, was being done for political and not religious reasons. But the British government preferred that Muhammad ‘Ali be buried in Jerusalem rather than back in India, where his burial might cause unrest, and over Zionist objections allowed for Muhammad Ali’s body to be interred on the Haram al-Sharif on 23 January 1930, though, of course, the Palestine government did not mention the geopolitical reasons behind their decision, choosing instead to explain that they had no right to intervene in the communal affairs of the Muslim community. Muhammad ‘Ali’s burial on the Haram al-Sharif would be followed later that year by the burial of Sharif Husayn ibn ‘Ali, a sign of the mufti’s desire to transform the Haram al-Sharif into a religious centre for all Muslims. But while this was a short-term propaganda victory for the mufti, it did not lead to the Haram al-Sharif becoming a pantheon for the Muslim world.23

The 1931 Islamic Congress in Jerusalem After Muhammad ‘Ali’s burial, Hajj Amin worked with his brother to convene an Islamic congress in defence of the Islamic holy places in Palestine in Jerusalem in December 1931. As Erik Freas has outlined in an illuminating article on the mufti’s pan-Islamic politics, Hajj Amin

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had originally approached Shawkat ‘Ali after the Western Wall riots “about the possibility of establishing a worldwide Muslim organisation in defence of Palestine and its Islamic holy places.”24 ‘Ali readily agreed, seeing the proposal as a useful means for advancing his pan-Islamist politics, and used his organization to promote the idea of creating a “Supreme Islamic Council” in Jerusalem made up of representatives from Muslim countries. Nothing came of ‘Ali’s proposal, but a few days after the publication in February 1931 of the MacDonald “Black Letter” (a letter from the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald to the Zionist chairman Chaim Weizmann rescinding controls on Jewish immigration that had been proposed in the 1930 Passfield White Paper), Shawkat ‘Ali and the mufti discussed organizing a pan-Islamic congress in Jerusalem to draw attention to the Palestinian cause. The General Islamic Congress, which convened in Jerusalem in December 1931, drew over 130 delegates from some 20 countries to Jerusalem and stands as one of the most important of a series of panIslamist congresses of the 1920s and 1930s. The conference built upon not only the more limited 1928 Islamic Congress in Jerusalem, which Hajj Amin had used to focus worldwide Muslim attention on the Palestinian issue during the Western Wall struggle, but also upon the earlier Pilgrimage Congress in Mecca in 1924, the General Islamic Congress for the Caliphate in Cairo in 1926, and the Congress of the Islamic World in Mecca in 1926, gatherings that had given rise to an amorphous and shifting coalition of pan-Islamist activists.25 For some observers, the 1931 Jerusalem conference represented a maturation of pan-Islamist politics, with H. A. R. Gibb writing shortly afterward that it showed the development of an “organizational aptitude” in Islam and Alfred Nielsen describing the conference as a “modern experience of pan-Islamism” in a 1932 article in the journal Muslim World.26 Bringing such famous figures as Shawkat ‘Ali, Rashid Rida, Muhammad Iqbal, ‘Abd al-Rahman ‘Azzam (later secretary general of the Arab League), Shukri al-Quwwatli (who would twice be president of Syria), Riyad al-Sulh (who later served as the Lebanese prime minister), and Ziya al-Din Tabata’i (a prominent exiled Iranian political leader) to Jerusalem, the conference succeeded in drawing the attention of influential Muslim leaders to the Palestinian issue. The congress would be marred, however, by differences between its two major organizers, Hajj Amin, who wanted to focus on the fate of

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Palestine, and Shawkat ‘Ali, who preferred to use the occasion to discuss pan-Islam’s wider confrontation with the West.27 Unlike the burial of Muhammad ‘Ali, the Palestine government regarded the convening of the congress with alarm because of the potential for Muslim leaders to discuss sensitive political topics, although officials conceded that it would be difficult to justify banning what would ostensibly be a religious gathering. Of most concern to the British government in London was the potential for Indian Muslim delegates to reopen debate about the reintroduction of the caliphate and for North African delegates to push for a general condemnation of European colonialism in the wake of Italy’s brutal takeover of Libya. For the Palestine government and its Zionist allies, the great threat here was the possibility of the congress issuing a denunciation of the government’s policy of supporting the establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine, which might lead to further unrest. After considering leaning on the mufti to cancel the congress, John Chancellor (high commissioner, 1928 – 31) decided that the conference could go ahead, so long as the mufti consented to avoid the discussion of sensitive political issues. Once again Hajj Amin proved to be cooperative and “promised that no political discussions on Tripoli, the caliphate, or al-Buraq would take place. In a second meeting he even agreed to change any reference in the declared statement about the congress which might harm relations between Muslims and nonMuslims.”28 However, as Freas has pointed out, Hajj Amin did not inform the participants of the conference of those assurances and as a result “political questions remained very much on the agenda, not only concerning Palestine, but with respect to the whole region.”29 This was reflected in the conference’s general resolution against colonialism, its support for the defence of the Haram al-Sharif from further encroachment, its call for the establishment of an Islamic university in Jerusalem, and the decision by delegates to hold future Islamic congresses in Jerusalem. Although the conference was concerned with Palestine, it was, according to Freas, “first and foremost an ‘Islamic’ affair,” which meant that the mufti’s nationalist message was subsumed into a wider debate about the defence of Islam.30 This raised pointed questions from Arab Christians among others about the mufti’s intentions. Did the Islamic tenor of the conference make the mufti’s vision of Palestinian identity

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religiously exclusive? Was the call to transform Jerusalem into a centre for pan-Islam helpful or hurtful to the Palestinian cause? And was the congress more about advancing the mufti’s political ambitions than the Palestinian national movement? Rashid Khalidi has made the case that the weakness of the mufti as a national leader stemmed from the fact that “among all the other leaders of national movements in Arab countries during the interwar period (with the sole exception of Libya), and among Palestinian leaders as well, the mufti was alone in being a religious dignitary, whose base of power was a ‘traditional’ religious institution.”31 For Khalidi, this explains why the mufti failed to develop the same kind of inclusive secular nationalist movement as seen in other Arab countries of the period. The mufti’s championing of the Palestinian cause at an Islamic conference would certainly support Khalidi’s contention, for the resolutions adopted at the congress, such as the decision to create an Islamic rather than an Arab university, emphasized the need to protect Palestine as a Muslim country rather than a Palestinian country. And the mufti’s comfort in reaching out to and working with foreign Muslim leaders rather than his fellow countrymen suggested that he was more committed to pan-Islamist than nationalist politics, although it has to be noted that among the attendees to the 1931 conference, it was Hajj Amin alone who consistently pushed for the conference to focus on the Palestine question. I would argue that the problem here, which Khalidi touches upon in his quote, was not so much that Hajj Amin was a religious dignitary, for religious leaders have played important roles in many nationalist movements, but that the “traditional” religious institution he filled limited his possibilities for action. When the British made him president of the SMC, they expected him to act first and foremost as a Muslim leader. As such, the mufti’s defence of the Haram al-Sharif and his engagement in pan-Islamist politics can be seen as a logical outcome of his position as the “ethnarch” of the Muslim community and would therefore be more easily excused by British officials than his engagement in any kind of nationalist politics. For this reason, it becomes rather difficult to sort out whether the mufti used his position to fulfil his personal interest in becoming a pan-Islamist leader or whether the position itself determined his course of action.

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The Alienation of the Opposition and Christian Arabs The question of whether the mufti was more committed to a defence of the Palestinian nation or to becoming a leader the pan-Islamist movement mattered little to the Opposition and Arab Christians who viewed the mufti as an unacceptable political partner due to his exclusionary politics. For the Opposition, the 1931 Islamic Conference was principally about the mufti’s self-aggrandizement and as a result its members issued a manifesto before the conference attacking the preparatory committee as unrepresentative of Palestinian Muslims because of the Opposition’s exclusion. When the Islamic Conference went forward without its participation, Raghib al-Nashashibi convened a rival conference, the Congress of the Palestinian Muslim Nation at the King David Hotel, which was attended by some one thousand local notables and shaykhs.32 The break between the mufti and Palestinian Christians was less dramatic but was seemingly just as irreparable by 1931, owing largely to the Islamization of Arab nationalism under Hajj Amin al-Husayni. The shift away from the shared Muslim and Christian nationalist language used by political activists at the very beginning of the mandate period, as discussed in Chapter 3, happened fairly early on in the mandate period but only became pronounced in the late 1920s with the rise of the SMC as a major political actor. With the creation of a Palestinian branch of the Young Men’s Muslim Association in early 1928, which campaigned against the underrepresentation of Muslims as compared to Christians in the employment of the Palestine government, and the rise of the SMC as a vocal defender of Palestine as a Muslim country, Palestinian nationalism assumed a more Islamic tone and language that alienated many Christians. Important here also was the rise of tensions and violence between the two communities, especially after the 1932 murder of Jamil Bahri, a Christian journalist, during a dispute between Muslims and Christians over a cemetery in Haifa. In a December 1932 letter to his son, the Arab Christian educator Khalil al-Sakakini despaired that “no matter how sincere my patriotism is, no matter how much I do to receive this nation . . . as long as I am not a Moslem I am nought. If you desire to amount to anything, then be a Moslem and that will be peace.”33 As a result of their alienation from the mufti’s brand of politics, many of his co-religionists would go on to join parties associated with the Opposition that practised a more moderate

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and secular nationalism, such as the Nashashibi’s Arab National Party in the 1920s or the National Defense Party, the Reform Party, and the National Bloc Party, which all formed in the 1930s.34 In 1931, the growing split between Muslims and Christians became apparent when Jerusalem concurrently hosted the General Islamic Congress and the Second Arab Orthodox Congress, a conference organized to deal with the issue of Arab Christian representation in the Greek Orthodox Church. Although the congresses exchanged letters of support in a show of solidarity, they came to represent rather different visions of Palestinian identity. At the Orthodox Congress, delegates promoted a Palestinian nationalism built around the Arab identity of the participants, a consequence of the Arab laity’s ongoing struggle against the Greek-dominated higher clergy and the tendency of Palestinian Christians to emphasize an ethnic vision of Palestinian nationalism over and above a religious vision, although it should be noted that most Christians regarded the Haram al-Sharif as an important Arab concern and some even saw Islam as an important part of Arab identity.35 In contrast, the resolutions adopted at the General Islamic Congress emphasized Palestine’s status as an Islamic land and promoted the idea that Islam was central to Palestinian nationality. As previously noted, the resolution to create an al-Aqsa Mosque University in Jerusalem as a Palestinian equivalent to Hebrew University, was notable because it signified that this would be an Islamic and not a Palestinian Arab university.36 The congress also adopted resolutions calling for the defence of Muslim holy places and lands and the combating of “Christian missionary efforts and campaigns among the Muslims.”37 While these resolutions showed Hajj Amin’s success in promoting “the Palestinian nationalist cause as a pan-Islamic one – that is, as a matter of defending the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem – in a way that strengthened the relationship between Arab national identity and Islam,” they had a detrimental impact on Palestinian unity, for they “had the effect of effectively diminishing (at least temporarily) the role of Palestine’s Christian Arabs within the Palestinian nationalist movement.”38

The Mufti and the Conservative Politics of Notables Another factor that explains why Hajj Amin decided not to embrace a more popular politics after the Western Wall struggle was his elitist

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discomfort with the Palestinian masses. Throughout his religious and political career Hajj Amin worked within the rarefied air of the Palestinian elite, interacting largely with fellow members of the notability, with high-ranking British officials, and more infrequently, with Jewish leaders. According to Ilan Pappe, Hajj Amin, unlike his Nashashibi rivals, did not “take any interest in the life of the fellahin, and he missed an opportunity to win mass support for his national movement.”39 While there were moments when he and his associates exhorted the Palestinian people to take action to protect Palestine or Islam, such as at the 1920 Nabi Musa Festival, in the legislative council election boycott campaign of 1923, in the 1928 – 29 Western Wall struggle, or in the mufti’s 1933 campaign against selling land to Jews (which combined a nationalist call to action with religious exhortations about protecting the Holy Land from takeover), those moments were not followed up by a deeper engagement with the Palestinian masses. And while the SMC also provided social welfare services to Muslims, whether in the form of education, food, or housing for the orphaned, the council’s outreach to the non-elite was not part of any long-term strategy to draw them to his political movement. The mufti’s disposition toward conservative politics was also typical for his class of notable politicians. Because of their experience as valued intermediaries between the Ottoman state and the Arab population and their valuable service in the Ottoman parliament, the Palestinian notability clung to the idea that their voices would be heard by the new imperial power long after it became clear that the terms of the Balfour Declaration precluded Arab participation in the governance of Palestine. Throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, the Palestinian political elite maintained a cordial relationship with the Palestine government in the belief that, as Khalidi has put it, “by simply continuing to negotiate with British officials, combined with a little genteel pressure, they would eventually be able to persuade Britain to change its policy and hand over the reins of power to the country’s ‘natural’ rulers, that is to say themselves.”40 The Palestinian notability’s approach to nationalist politics was similar therefore to the politics adopted by the nationalist elite in British India, as described in Ranajit Guha’s 1997 work, Dominance without Hegemony:

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All the transactions between the two parties [the British Raj and the Indian bourgeoisie] which made up the stuff of elite politics followed from an understanding to abide by a common set of rules based on the British constitutionalist parliamentary model. It was a matter of playing cricket. If a nationalist agitation ran into difficulty, the bureaucracy would gloat that Gandhi was on a poor wicket, and he would, on his part, condemn the administration as “un-British” whenever he felt outraged by the harshness of official violence.41 The difference in Palestine, of course, was the fact that leaders like Hajj Amin never switched, or switched far too late, to the alternative political strategies later adopted be Indian nationalists that challenged the economic and political hegemony of the colonial state, such as practices of civil disobedience, self-rule (swaraj), and economic self-sufficiency (swadeshi). In retrospect, the politics of the notable elite seems absurd and naı¨ve given the greater unity, influence, and economic power of their Zionist competitors. But that judgment has to be tempered by our knowledge that the terms of the mandate effectively denied Arabs the freedom to pursue their national rights, and our understanding of how the Palestine government worked to forestall alternative forms of political engagement in Palestine. A final factor that helps explain the mufti’s limited political approach after the Western Wall struggle was his consistent unwillingness to share power with his rivals in the Palestinian national movement. Naturally, the national movement was strongest when the various factions in the notability came together around a shared issue, as during the 1923 campaign to boycott the legislative council elections or during the Western Wall struggle, but in the 1930s the mufti engaged in political activities that were divisive and showed little interest in bringing his fellow notables together in a shared movement. The mufti’s hostility towards any individual or group that threatened his position meant that he had been waging a political battle with his Nashashibi rivals ever since his appointment to the muftiship; in the 1930s, he extended this competition to his own family when he began to compete with Musa Kazim al-Husayni for leadership of the Palestinian cause. Needless to say this led to a

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fracturing of the national movement, which played right into the hands of the country’s British rulers.42

The Rise of Alternative Politics in the 1930s The ineffectiveness of the moderate approach adopted by the mufti and the Arab Executive in the early 1930s led to opposition from a younger generation of Arab nationalists who wanted to directly challenge the colonial regime. After the failure of the 1930 Palestinian delegation to London more confrontational forms of opposition from below began to appear in Palestine. In 1932, Palestinian merchants refused to take part in the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv, a trade fair that had been organized by the Palestine government.43 In solidarity, employees in the Departments of Education and Transportation also resigned their posts. Around the same time labour unions, professional associations, and youth organizations such as the Young Men’s Muslim Association and Arab Boy Scouts began to articulate a more populist message of national resistance, which advocated confronting the government through boycotts and even strikes.44 The early 1930s also saw the creation of a number of nationalist political parties, whose sudden emergence on the political scene can be compared to the flowering of nationalist parties in Egypt following the Dinshaway incident of 1906. In a different political context, the emergence of these parties may have been the precursor to the formation of a unified national independence movement, but by the 1930s the Jewish national home was so embedded in Palestine that these parties could do little to bring about Arab independence. Since these new parties were usually associated with particular notable families, such as the Husaynis’ National Youth Party and the Nashashibis’ National Defense Party, they also tended to continue the factionalism of Palestinian politics. The Istiqlal Party, which was formed in 1932 by individuals with experience in pan-Arab politics, was one exception to this trend. Mostly made up of younger lower middle-class and middleclass activists, Istiqlal called for Palestinians to rise above the factional interests of the notability and create a unified mass movement to confront the imperial power. Influenced by the tactics of India’s Congress Party, Istiqlal advocated non-cooperation with the colonial power through boycotts and non-compliance with unjust laws, an approach at

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odds with the political interests of the notability but in line with the popular mood of Palestinians. Although the party never enjoyed mass popularity, in its brief existence it helped popularize a more confrontational approach to the colonial power, as Weldon Matthews has detailed in his excellent study of the party.45 The most violent challenge to British rule that emerged in the early 1930s was ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam’s religious uprising against the Palestine government. A Syrian-born Palestinian, al-Qassam had participated in anti-French resistance in Syria before moving to Haifa in the 1920s where he became known as a charismatic Muslim preacher at the city’s Istiqlal mosque. A supporter of Hajj Amin’s candidacy to the muftiship, he would be appointed marriage registrar at the Haifa shari‘a court in 1929 by the SMC, although the council had little other contact with al-Qassam.46 As a religious and political figure al-Qassam represented the quintessential “bad Muslim” as described by Jonathan Reynolds, in that he was a charismatic outsider who was driven to oppose the colonial regime through a movement that worked outside the traditional politics of notables. Indeed, al-Qassam’s movement sought to use violence to smash both British rule and the political system of the colonized elite. In the early 1930s, al-Qassam grew disillusioned with British rule and returned to his insurgent politics by creating an anti-Zionist and antiBritish group called the Black Hand, made up of lower-class rural and urban young men from the Haifa region. Referring to each other as sheikhs and wearing full beards, al-Qassam’s group resembled a dervish order more than a political movement.47 And in associating their mission with the Muslim defence of Palestine against the Crusaders and calling upon Muslims to follow in the footsteps of early Islamic heroes, the group adopted what would today be called a jihadi outlook, which was at odds with the way that all other Arab groups practised politics in Palestine. Indeed, as Nels Johnson has argued, al-Qassam’s movement had a class-based anti-notable and anti-ulama perspective that put it far outside the mainstream of Palestinian politics at the time.48 Beginning in 1931, the group began attacking and killing Jews in the villages around Haifa in 1931, which led to the arrest and hanging of some of its members, but al-Qassam was acquitted due to a lack of evidence tying him to its activities. Then in November 1935, al-Qassam launched a jihad against Jews and the Palestine government, the first

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Arab attack against the government since the beginning of the mandate. After the group killed a Jewish policeman near Ein Herod, the government mounted a manhunt to find Qassam, which ended with his death in a gunfight with British police near the village of Ya’bud on November 20, 1935.49 Although al-Qassam’s uprising had little impact on the Palestine government, his death immediately transformed him into a national martyr and potent symbol of Palestinian resistance for a population that had grown tired of the ineffective politics of the Arab notability. Some six thousand Palestinians attended al-Qassam’s funeral in Haifa, most of them members of the lower classes, the largest Arab gathering in the history of the mandate. Rather than ending armed resistance against the government, his death encouraged other Palestinians to take up arms against the British, putting great pressure on the notable leadership and its preferred strategy of negotiation. Hajj Amin had been opposed to the militant actions of al-Qassam, which did not comport with his more moderate approach to politics. When Qassam had approached the mufti about declaring a jihad against the British in 1935, the mufti rejected his request out of hand, just as he had turned down Shakib Wahab’s offer of paramilitary support after the Western Wall riots.50 But given the preacher’s great popularity among the Arab masses, Hajj Amin had little choice but to join the public commemoration of his death, which many mourners viewed as a martyrdom to the nationalist cause.

The Mufti and the Revolt By this point, Hajj Amin had lost much of the influence he had had over the nationalist movement at the beginning of the decade. With the emergence of a range of political organizations and a growing desire for militant action on the part of the younger generation, his brand of moderate, deliberative politics seemed obsolete. Rather than directing the flow of politics, Hajj Amin found himself pushed along by a growing wave of nationalist opposition to the colonial state. In the early 1930s, members of the Husayni family, such as the aged Musa Kazim al-Husayni and his son ‘Abd al-Qadir, who would play a central role in the coming revolt and more famously in the 1948 war, had adopted a confrontational stance toward the Palestine government,

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with the former heading demonstrations against the British and the latter resigning his government post in protest at Jewish immigration.51 With the Opposition parties and his own camp adopting a more defiant stance, Hajj Amin could do little else but join the popular drift towards confrontation in the spring of 1936. The Palestine government was also slow to act and only at the last minute did it attempt to stop the outbreak of violence by offering to reopen talks with Arab notables about the creation of a legislative council. That proposal offered too little and came too late for the Palestinians and as a result, in April 1936, the Palestinian Arab Revolt began, with a series of Arab attacks against Jews. As violence erupted across the country, Hajj Amin and the other notable leaders formed the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) in an effort to control the course of the brewing revolution. Forced by a revolution from below, the notability finally came together to form a united front. With the mufti as its chairman, the AHC organized a countrywide strike that lasted for six months. In organizing the strike, Hajj Amin, according to Ilan Pappe, broke an explicit British order for the first time since the beginning of the mandate by travelling around the country to drum up support for the AHC.52 While successful in its boycott of Jewish and government enterprises, the strike would be highly debilitating for the Palestinian people and ultimately help the Jewish economy become even stronger and more self-sufficient. The Arab notables also organized their own armed groups to participate in the revolution, but those too proved unhelpful to the Palestinian movement as they would eventually come to fight each other as the revolution collapsed in the face of British counterinsurgency.

The Fall of the Mufti and the Reorganization of the SMC By participating in the Arab Revolt, Hajj Amin became a colonial renegade in the eyes of the Palestine government, despite his attempt at first to maintain a moderate position.53 Although Arthur Wauchope (high commissioner, 1931– 38) would later write that Hajj Amin had “allowed himself to be pushed into extreme courses,” the mufti had shown in the revolt that he was unable or unwilling to keep up his end of the bargain he had initially made with Herbert Samuel in 1921.54 As a result, the British dropped their support for the mufti and attempted to

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arrest Hajj Amin on July 17, 1937. He escaped the police by taking refuge in the Haram al-Sharif, where he remained until he fled the country for Beirut disguised as a Bedouin in October 1937. When the second, bloody stage of the Arab revolt began with Arab gunmen assassinating the British district commissioner for the Galilee, Lewis Andrews, while he walked to church in Nazareth on 29 September 1937, the Palestine government moved against the AHC and the SMC. The Palestine government outlawed the AHC, arrested its main leaders (but not the mufti), and exiled a number of them to the Seychelles.55 Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who remained holed up in the Haram al-Sharif, was stripped of both his presidency of the SMC and his office as the mufti of Jerusalem. With his flight from Palestine a short time later, Hajj Amin would play no further role in the country’s religious affairs. The dismissal of Hajj Amin al-Husayni did not end the Supreme Muslim Council but led to major changes in its structure and relationship with the Palestine government. Hajj Amin’s dismissal was accompanied by that of one other member of the five-person SMC and the resignation of a third. In the place of these other two councillors, the Palestine government appointed two new members who were not attached to the Husayni bloc. Government officials also decided to leave the presidency of the council vacant until the end of the mandate. Another change was the creation a new three-member Awqaf Committee, made up of two British officials and one Arab member, to take charge of the waqf system, which gave the Palestine government control of the council’s finances. To further assert its control over institutional Islam, the Palestine government then dismissed nine shari‘a court employees and twelve waqf officials who had been close to the mufti. With these changes, the SMC lost its autonomy and influence in Palestinian society, and the council played little part in the tumultuous events of the 1940s.56

CONCLUSION

At the height of the Western Wall struggle in June 1929, Harry Luke, the government’s chief secretary, lamented that the “delegation to the Supreme Muslim Council of jurisdiction so extensive and powers so wide” was “to some extent almost an abdication by the Administration of Palestine of responsibilities normally incumbent upon Government.”1 The events of the Arab Revolt showed Luke’s warning to be prescient, for the mufti’s turn against the British had been made possible in large measure by the autonomy granted to him by the Palestine government. The reconfiguration of the council in 1937 was the government’s belated attempt to put things right. In instituting government oversight of the waqf and shari‘a court systems and making all appointments to religious positions subject to the high commissioner’s approval, the British adopted a far more hands-on approach to institutional Islam that brought practices in Palestine in line with those found elsewhere in the British Empire. Most accounts of the mandate period have presented the SMC’s involvement in the Palestine Arab Revolt as evidence of Britain’s failure to deal adequately with Palestinian Islam. Working backward from the events of 1937, scholars like Kupferschmidt and Porath have sought explanations for the British “mistake” of granting excessive power to the council, rather than trying to understand how the SMC may have benefited the British in the years before the revolt. This book has attempted to do something different by analyzing the logic and efficacy of Britain’s approach to institutional Islam. Rather than assuming from the outset that Britain’s policy toward Islam was a failure, I have

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considered how the construction of the SMC and the empowerment of the mufti of Jerusalem fit with the British approach to governing Palestinian Muslims. To understand whether that approach was a success or failure, I find it useful to turn to one of the only times during the mandate period that British officials debated the merits of the SMC at length – a 1932 discussion in the Colonial Office about a plan to reform the council. Up to that point, the Colonial Office had been pleased with the way that the Palestine government had managed the country’s Islamic affairs, as shown by John Shuckburgh’s glowing praise of the establishment of the SMC as “one of our most successful moves in Palestine.”2 But in March 1932, Arthur Wauchope, the high commissioner of Palestine, asked the Colonial Office to reconsider its position toward the SMC by presenting the draft of an order-incouncil that would place Palestine’s awqaf system under close British supervision and remove the country’s shari‘a courts from the control of the SMC, reforms that were designed to address the council’s financial mismanagement and corruption under Hajj Amin al-Husayni.3 What was striking about the Colonial Office’s debate about the SMC and its potential reform was that its officials were unanimous in their opposition to the high commissioner’s plans. Arguing that the council helped fulfil Britain’s obligations toward the Muslim population and served as a useful tool for controlling Palestine’s Arab majority, the Colonial Office warned the Palestine government against meddling too much in the affairs of the Muslim community. According to these officials the SMC worked and needed no reform. For N. L. Mayle, the high commissioner’s proposals conflicted with Britain’s legal commitment to non-interference in religious matters, which he viewed as guaranteeing the autonomy of the SMC. In a minute from 30 March 1932, Mayle argued that Wauchope’s proposals might rightly be seen by Muslims as a breach of Article 2 of the Palestine Mandate, which made the mandatory responsible for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of the country’s inhabitants, and Article 9, which obligated the British to fully guarantee respect for the personal status of the various religious communities that made up the country. Any benefit to the government to be gained through greater control over the council would be outweighed, he believed, by the bad feelings that British intervention would engender.4

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Mayle’s colleague H. F. Downie took a different tack by arguing that the autonomy of the SMC was essential for keeping order in Palestine: Considering that Moslems form the majority of the population, and that the Arabs have always agitated and continue to agitate for a self-governing Arab state on the lines of Iraq, it is clear that the policy of conceding to the Moslem community a generous measure of self-government in religious affairs offered the only prospect of securing any degree of Arab cooperation or peaceful government.5 With the country’s Arab population still pushing for independence in 1932, Downie maintained that it was dangerous for the government to withdraw its support for Muslim self-governance, warning that an increase in government control might lead to a “hostile campaign” by the Muslim authorities or even a recurrence of populist violence.6 Other officials weighed in with opinions that reiterated the Colonial Office’s view that there was little reason to fix an arrangement that was not broken. As a result, Wauchope dropped his plan to reform the SMC through new legislation and looked instead to the 1932 council elections as a means for reforming the institution. The 1932 debate about the SMC is worth highlighting because it reveals that senior British officials saw the council, a decade after its creation, as one of the successes of British policymaking in Palestine, not one of its failures. Mayle’s and Downie’s analyses of the SMC also help to draw our attention back to the two main objectives behind Britain’s creation of the SMC, which I have discussed at length in this book. The first and most immediate objective was to create a Muslim-run institution to supervise the affairs of Palestine’s Muslim community so that the Palestine government could stay out of the country’s religious matters. The second was to create an institution that might serve to draw the attention of Palestinian Muslims away from nationalist politics. Judged by these two objectives, the council has to be regarded as a policymaking success. As we saw in Chapter 2, the British policy toward Islam grew out of its broader attempt create a new religious system to replace the Ottoman system that had collapsed with the empire during World War I. Determined to keep foreign governments from intervening in religious matters, British officials chose to let local communities run their

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own religious affairs, a policy that fitted well with Britain’s policy of non-interference in local religions across the empire. The neo-millet system that they created allowed for the civil and religious affairs of the local population to be placed under the control of local communal bodies, such as the Christian patriarchates, the Jewish rabbinate, and in the case of the Muslim community, a Central Moslem Authority, which would come to take the form of the Supreme Muslim Council. Here the creation and empowerment of the SMC, far from being unnecessary, was crucial for the invention of the Muslim neo-millet, which had no real historical precedent. Britain’s elevation of the muftiship of Jerusalem to the grand muftiship and its promotion of the mufti as the president of the SMC, as explored in Chapter 4, was also integral to the creation of the Muslim neo-millet, for it created a clear and undisputed authority figure for the Muslim community. In granting one of the leading Muslim notable families leadership of the Muslim community, the Palestine government established a useful patron-client relationship, in which the mufti was granted power in exchange for ensuring that his community remained peaceful. By hitching the preexisting influence of the Husayni family to the invented tradition of the SMC, the Palestine government strengthened both institutions in order to use them as an intermediary between the government and its Muslim subjects. At the same time, the council was intended to be a counterweight to Arab calls for independence. With the British committed to supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, Arab nationalism could have no real future under British rule. Despite the terms of British rule, nationalist organizations such as the Arab Club, the Literary Society, the Muslim-Christian Associations, and the Arab Executive organized powerful demonstrations and petitions against British rule, as we saw in Chapter 3. In response, officials such as Samuel proposed the creation of a Muslim authority that would function as a “check” against this Arab “agitation for political autonomy.”7 The government’s desire to channel Palestinian Muslim political energies away from these nationalist organizations led it to promote the SMC as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian Muslim community by granting the council official recognition, which was denied to all other Arab institutions, and giving it generous latitude for action, as I have explained above.

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The SMC’s religious charge was also useful as a means for controlling religious rhetoric, which officials worried might be used to motivate the masses to oppose British rule. While there was some anxiety about panIslamism, as explained in my introduction and Chapter 1, their main concern was the possibility of Islamic language being used to incite people to defend their nation and communities, as happened at the 1920 Nabi Musa festival. With a “good Muslim” given a position of authority over Palestine’s Islamic community through the SMC, the British felt confident that the conduct of local judges, muftis, and preachers would be monitored and, if needed, controlled by the Muslim community itself. The SMC was not without its faults but if judged upon its ability to fulfil these two objectives, the council was a great success. From its establishment at the end of 1921 until its reconfiguration in 1937, the Palestine government did not have to intervene in the religious affairs of the country’s Muslim population, which would have invited criticism not only from Palestinian Muslims but also, more alarmingly, from Muslims in India. And as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4, the government’s promotion of the SMC as the representative institution of the Muslim community worked successfully alongside its crackdown on homegrown Palestinian political societies to marginalize Palestinian nationalist organizations by the end of the 1920s. However, the SMC’s emergence as a major political player during the Western Wall struggle and its later participation in the Arab Revolt shows that the empowerment of SMC was not an unqualified success. Without the authority and autonomy that came with his position as head of the SMC, Hajj Amin would not have had the same success in presenting himself over the course of the 1920s as the great defender of Palestinian Islam, and it is likely that his role at the Western Wall would have been much less impactful had he been only one of a number of equally prominent muftis. Moreover, had he been more integrated into the British administration, his influence during the Arab Revolt would likely have been less significant. Given the mufti’s ambition to make a name for himself as a prominent Arab leader, the decision to grant him so much autonomy seems unwise in retrospect. But as the last two chapters have revealed, the very arrangement that gave him power and influence, his position as a colonial intermediary, also placed constraints on his actions. To adapt Marx, it would seem that while the mufti made his own history, he could not do

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what he pleased, because he operated under circumstances not of his own making but created for him by the colonial power. Because his position was dependent upon British support, the mufti was careful to avoid taking a public stand against the Palestine government throughout much of the 1920s, preferring instead to assist Palestinian political efforts, such as the campaign to boycott the 1923 legislative council elections, from behind the scenes or in a clandestine manner. And when the mufti became the public face of the Palestinian Muslim side in the 1928–29 Western Wall struggle, he made sure that his political campaign to defend the Wall was directed against Zionism and Jews rather than the British authorities and then called upon Muslims to desist from violence when riots broke out in August 1929. After the Western Wall struggle, when Hajj Amin was at the height of his political power and could conceivably have launched a popular movement against British rule, he chose to reconfirm his commitment to the Palestine government and to use the traditional moderate political tactics of the Palestinian notability to push for gradual change. Of course, the mufti would eventually adopt a more radical approach during the Palestine Arab Revolt when he became the leader of the Arab Higher Committee, but as we saw in the last chapter, even here he was hesitant to involve the SMC in such actions as the general strike and was slow to take a public stance in support of the revolt. While the mufti’s break with the Palestine government in 1936 was undoubtedly destabilizing for the colonial authorities and represented the breakdown of the government’s system of administering Islam, the fact that it occurred relatively late in the mandate period matters. By 1936, Britain had been in control of Palestine for nearly two decades during which the colonial state had been able to secure its economic, military, and political control over the country and Zionist immigrants had been able to build up a lasting Jewish presence in Palestine. Whereas a popular uprising may have made a difference early on in the mandate, the Palestine Arab Revolt of 1936 – 39 did little to challenge the building up of the Jewish national home and the eventual establishment of the State of Israel, even if it shook the confidence of British officials in their ability to govern their troublesome colony. In essence, although the British approach to Palestinian Islam did not prevent the religious authorities from turning against the Palestine government, it bought the colonial authorities a great deal of time to

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secure their rule, and therefore that approach should be considered a great success.

Palestinian Islam after the SMC Neither the Kingdom of Jordan nor the State of Israel adopted the British approach to governing Palestinian Islam. The Supreme Muslim Council was formally abolished in 1951, as the Jordanian government, which directly controlled the Haram al-Sharif and the Old City of Jerusalem at that time, chose to control Islam through its own state-run Islamic institutions. And while Jordan no longer has direct political control over the site, its administration of Islamic affairs in East Jerusalem from 1948–67 has allowed it to retain a role at the Haram al-Sharif through its oversight of the Islamic Waqf Authority, which was originally created by the Jordanians in 1948 and which controls and manages the site today. As for the new state of Israel, the British experience with the SMC was a major factor in the government’s decision to place waqf and shari‘a affairs under the direct supervision of Israeli state agencies.8 As Alisa Peled has pointed out, this has had a detrimental effect on Islamic institutions within Israel. According to Peled, the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs, “made great efforts in the 1950s to secure control of the vast financial resources of the waqf, and not always for the sole benefit of the Muslim community.”9 The ministry was also found negligent in its safeguarding and maintenance of Muslim holy sites. This disjointed Israeli approach to Islam was intended to keep Muslim authorities weak and ended up creating an ineffectual and unpopular Muslim leadership. But, as Peled explains, this policy ultimately backfired on the Israeli government, when those authorities were challenged by the Islamic Movement, an Islamist group that combines nationalism and Islam into a single political agenda.10 Ironically then, the Israeli approach, which was developed in explicit contrast to the British approach, fostered the very movement that the Israeli government feared. In other ways, however, the Israeli government has continued British practices, such as in its decision not to intervene in the everyday functioning of shari‘a courts and the waqf system and its noninterference in Islamic law. Such continuities are detailed in Robert Eisenman’s Islamic Law in Palestine and Israel: A History of the Survival of the Tanzimat and Shari‘a in British Palestine and the State of Israel (1978)

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and Yitzhak Reiter’s Islamic Endowments in British Palestine (1996), books that attest to the manner in which Ottoman Islamic precedent was transmitted to the Israeli state through the British occupation. The conflict between Arabs and Jews over religious space in Jerusalem has also persisted under Israeli sovereignty. The origins of today’s clashes and protests at the Western Wall, on the Haram al-Sharif, and throughout and beyond the Old City of Jerusalem over rights of access, questions of ownership, and the politics of archeological practices may be traced back to the tensions that erupted in 1929. And whether we see a Hajj Amin al-Husayni, a Yasser Arafat, an Ariel Sharon, or a Benjamin Netanyahu as the figure responsible for stoking the flames, the conflict remains best understood as one between two rival nationalisms controlled by a colonial state that was/is happy to let ethnic and religious groups develop in isolation from and in opposition to one another.

NOTES

Abbreviations CZA Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem ISA Israel State Archives, Jerusalem PRO Public Records Office, National Archives, Kew

Introduction 1. Quigley to Civil Secretary, October 4, 1920, ISA, 2/5/163/78/CID/S; and Quigley to Civil Secretary, November 4, 1920, ISA, 2/5/163/78/CIS/S. Quigley viewed the leading figures in this movement as ‘Arif al-‘Arif (who had been a central figure in the Nabi Musa riot) and Shaykh Abdul Qadir al-Muzafar (a member of the Nadi al-Arabi [Arab Club] political society and later a member of the Arab Executive). 2. The 1920 Nabi Musa festival was a case in point, with officials seeing the “disturbance” as an eruption of peasant fanaticism rather than a protest against British rule. Similarly, early Arab attacks against Jewish settlements would be framed as examples of the traditional religious chauvinism of the peasant rather than as a rejection of settler colonialism. 3. David Motadel, “Introduction,” in Islam and the European Empires, ed. David Motadel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1. 4. Two notable books that have examined Britain’s approach to religion in Palestine are Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); and Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). Khalidi’s discussion of Britain’s “communitarian paradigm” in Palestine has

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been particularly helpful to me in thinking through how the British constructed their religious system in Palestine. 5. Lord Cromer’s famous assessment of Arabs can be found in his influential and eminently quotable 1908 work, Modern Egypt, vol. 2 (New York: MacMillan, 1908), 146: Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into untruthfulness, is, in fact, the main characteristic of the Oriental mind. The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature very sceptical and requires proof before he can accept any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the oriental on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description. Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in logical faculty. 6. In Iraq, for example, British forces faced resistance in Najaf from the Society of Islamic revival as early as 1918, and the 1920 Iraqi Revolt was encouraged in part by a fatwa issued by Ayatollah al-Shirazi following the arrest of his son. See Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 33 – 44. 7. Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 26. 8. There is good evidence that the experience of serving in Muslim countries, particularly Egypt, led government officials like Ronald Storrs, Harry Luke, and Edward Keith-Roach to adopt a more sympathetic and romantic understanding of Arab and Islamic traditions. See Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, 55. Deedes’s note is attached to Quigley to Civil Secretary, November 4, 1920, ISA, 2/5/163. 9. Richmond to District Governors, December 9, 1920, ISA, 2/5/163. 10. In addition to blaming pan-Islamists, the police accused pro-French Arab notables for changing the dedication in order to discredit the sharif of Mecca, who had been Britain’s chief Arab ally since the Arab revolt of 1916. See Ghowne to Civil Secretary, December 13, 1920, ISA 2/5/263. 11. Postlethewaite to Civil Secretary, December 13, 1920, ISA, 2/5/2631/523/DG. 12. Luke to Civil Secretary, November 2, 1920, ISA, 2/5/163/1523/DG. 13. Postlethwaite and Luke were not alone in thinking that the khutba dedication had nothing to do with a plot against British rule. The district governor of Jaffa [Yaffa], W. F. Stirling, discounted the idea that French agents could be against the candidature of the sharif to the caliphate, “unless they are very ignorant.” The district governor in Beersheba [Bir al-Sab‘a] stated that he had no reason to suspect that the grand mufti had any political motive in reintroducing the caliph’s name. Only District Governor G. S. Symes in Haifa suggested that the khutba dedication might have been a political act, although he also conceded that it was a return to past practice. Each of these governors

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noted that Arab public opinion had not been affected at all by the change in the dedication. See Luke to Civil Secretary, December 13, 1920, ISA, 2/5/263/1523/DG; Stirling to Civil Secretary, December 15, 1920, ISA, 2/5/2631/523/DG; Postlethewaite to Civil Secretary, December 13, 1920, ISA, 2/5/2631/523/DG; F. F. Kerry-Levack to Civil Secretary, December 27, 1920, ISA, 2/5/2631/523/DG; and G. S. Symes to Civil Secretary, December 19, 1920, ISA, 2/5/2631/523/DG. Samuel to London, no date (most likely early January 1921), ISA, 2/5/163. Samuel to Curzon, November 29, 1920, PRO, FO 141/442/4. Uri Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council: Islam under the British Mandate for Palestine (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 17. Yehoshua Porath similarly argues that the “Government came to feel, it appears, that the gratification of the Muslims’ wishes in this respect [the creation of the council] and the appointment of al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni to the head of a Muslim council wielding real power, would placate to some extent the opposition to the Zionist aspect of the Mandate and at least prevent the outbreak of violence.” Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement 1918– 1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974), 200. Early books of this type were Simon Wiesenthal’s Grosse Mufti: Grosse Agent der Achse [Grand mufti: the great agent of the Axis] (Salzburg: Reid, 1947); Moshe Pearlman’s The Mufti of Jerusalem: The Story of Haj Amin el-Husseini (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947); and Joseph Schechtman’s influential The Mufti and the Fuehrer: The Rise and Fall of Haj Amin el-Husseini (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1965). The most well-known recent portrayal of the mufti in this manner can be found in Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel, in which the mufti is tendentiously described as “a virulent anti-Semite whose hatred of Jews was both religious and racial. He was eventually a close ally and advisor to Adolf Hitler, and an active supporter of the ‘final solution’ – the mass murder of European Jewry.” Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 41. More recently, right-wing authors in the United States have discovered this topic, as seen in the publication of two books by right-wing talk radio hosts: Chuck Morse, The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini (Lincoln: iUniverse, 2003); and David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann, Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (New York: Random House, 2008). The political agenda of these recent works is made clear in a statement from the publisher that Dalin and Rothman’s work “links the fascism of the last century with the terrorism of our own.” See Random House, “Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam,” Random House website, http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/ books/36368/icon-of-evil-by-david-g-dalin-and-john-f-rothmann/ (accessed May 7, 2016).

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The mufti’s relationship to the fu¨hrer was also infamously emphasized in a series of controversial bus advertisements sponsored by Pamela Gellar’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, which sought to portray Islam as inherently anti-Semitic. And most famously, Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the mufti for the Final Solution in an October 21, 2015, speech to the World Zionist Congress that was roundly criticized by historians and pundits for its misrepresentation of history to suit the political needs of the Israeli prime minister. Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, 14. Jonathan Reynolds, “Good and Bad Muslims: Islam and Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (2001). Hourani’s concept of the “politics of notables” refers to the situation in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, especially in provincial capitals like Damascus, in which leaders of the local notability acted as intermediaries between the Ottoman state and the local population. This relationship was based on a quid pro quo. The Ottoman government granted these notables political and religious offices in return for their help in maintaining order in their provinces. Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in The Modern Middle East: A Reader, eds Albert Hourani, Philip Khoury, Mary Wilson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 83 – 109. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the land had been divided between the province (eyalet) of Sham (Syria) governed from Damascus, and the eyalet of Sidon, but after provincial reforms in the nineteenth century, which were designed to centralize the power of the state, the area became part of a single Syrian province. This province (now termed a vilayet) was further subdivided into the district of Acre (which also included Haifa, the Sea of Galilee, Safad, and Tiberias), the district of Nablus (which also included Beisan, Jenin, and Qalqiliya), and the district of Jerusalem (which also included Bethlehem, Jericho, Jaffa, Gaza, and Hebron). A further reorganization of the territory occurred in 1872, when the vital Jerusalem district became an independent district (mutasarifiyya), with its own governor who reported directly to Istanbul. And finally, in 1878 the districts of Nablus and Acre were removed from the oversight of Syria, to become part of the newly created province of Beirut. For a discussion of the lively debate over Palestinian independence vs. confederation with an Arab Greater Syria in Palestinian politics after World War I, see Muhammad Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia, 1988); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and Porath, Emergence. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700– 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 173.

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24. In different periods and places in Ottoman history, Christians and Jews were forced to wear clothes that differentiated them from Muslims and were typically prohibited from wearing green, a colour traditionally associated with Islam. See Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 25. For Jews “Eretz Israel” (Palestine) is the holy land promised to Abraham and his descendants by God. Jewish holy sites include the Western Wall in Jerusalem, which is the last remaining ruins of the Second Temple and the holiest site in Judaism; the Tomb of the Machpelach (Patriarchs) in Hebron; and Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem. For Christians Palestine/Israel is tied to the biblical story of Jesus and consequently Christian sites are tied to his life history in Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Galilee. Muslims consider Palestine to be holy because Jerusalem was the first qibla (direction of prayer) in Islam before Muhammad received a revelation stating that the direction of prayer should be toward Mecca. Jerusalem is also the site of the “Farthest Mosque” (identified today with al-Aqsa Mosque) mentioned in the Qur’an as the place Muhammad travelled to on his night journey. Major Muslim holy sites include the Dome of the Rock, from which Muhammad is believed to have ascended to heaven, and al-Aqsa Mosque (which together make up the Haram al-Sharif), the tomb of Nabi Musa in Jericho, the shrine of Nabi Samwil north of Jerusalem, and Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem. The country was also full of numerous minor places of worship, such as the many local Muslim zawiyas (saints’ shrines) that dotted the countryside. The most complete account of these shrines is by Tawfiq Canaan, an Arab member of the Mandate-era Palestine Oriental Society. See Tawfiq Canaan, Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (London: Luzac & Co., 1927). 26. The festival of Nabi Musa is a Muslim festival that celebrates the Prophet Moses, whom Palestinian Muslims (as opposed to Christians and Jews or Muslims in other places) believe crossed the Jordan River and died in Palestine. The shrine commemorating the site of his death lies near Jericho, just off the main road connecting Jerusalem and Jericho. The festival brought together Muslims throughout the country in the last years of Ottoman rule and during the mandate period became a nationalist festival attended by Christians as well as Muslims. The festival of Nabi Saleh is more regional in scope and commemorates a preIslamic Arab prophet in the village of Nabi Saleh near Ramallah. 27. Justin McCarthy’s book Ottoman Turks offers a good overview of the main millets – the Greek Orthodox, the Armenian Gregorians, the Jews – and other groups he terms de facto millets – the Nestorians, Syrian Orthodox, and Maronites. See Justin McCarthy, Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1997), 128– 31. 28. Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, 5. 29. Ibid., 5 – 6. The reader should also consult Erik Freas’s recently published book Muslim-Christian Relations in Late Ottoman Palestine: Where Nationalism and Religion Intersect (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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30. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press), 6. 31. As Khalidi points out, Najib ‘Azuri, a former Ottoman official in Palestine, argued in 1908 that “the progress of the land of Palestine depends” upon the expansion of the district of Jerusalem to include the northern regions of the country. Three years later the newspaper Filastin (Palestine) was first published in Jaffa, which would take a strong Palestinian nationalist and anti-Zionist stance throughout the mandate period. But this identification with Palestine came very late in the Ottoman period, even if we accept Khalidi’s, Alexander Scho¨lch’s, and Haim Gerber’s contention that this was based upon pre-existing religious notions of the Holy Land. See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 28 – 30; Haim Gerber, Remembering and Imagining Palestine (London: Palgrave, 2009), 42 – 80; and Alexander Scho¨lch, Palestine in Transformation: Studies in Social, Economic, and Political Development (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993). 32. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 123. 33. In these petitions we find locals identifying themselves according to their hometowns – “the representatives of Ramla,” “the inhabitants of Tul Karem,” – their religion – “the Muslims of Nablus,” “the leading Muslims and Christians of Jaffa,” – or their occupation – “butchers, merchants of cereals and manufacturers.” Despite their disparate backgrounds these petitioners saw themselves as part of a larger Palestinian community. A petition from “the chiefs of the bedouin tribes residing in al-Jazira,” for example, stated that “we join our countrymen in their protests and confirm them and add to them the protests of the inhabitants of the desert . . .” It is to be noted that even when petitioners lobbied for their land to become part of Syria, they referred to that land as Palestine. For a collection of these petitions see ISA, 2/1/30 Files I and II, as well as 2/5/131. 34. Quataert, Ottoman Empire, 177– 8. 35. See Menachem Klein, Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron (London: Hurst, 2014). To give one example, the Jewish quarter has seen an uneven and mixed pattern of settlement throughout its history, with Muslims and Armenian Christians making up a significant part of the population until the birth of the State of Israel. Moreover, Jewish settlement in the Old City was not confined to the Jewish quarter before the mandate period, a fact emphasized by modern Jewish settler groups who argue that they are merely resettling space in the Muslim and Christian quarters that had accommodated Jews in the past. See Michael Dumper, The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem in the Middle East Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 39 – 71. Because of the more mixed and fluid nature of settlement in the Ottoman period, both Salim Tamari and Rochelle Davis have warned scholars about using modern-day terminology to describe Ottoman Jerusalem, such as terms

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that describe the various quarters of the Old City. See Salim Tamari, “Jerusalem 1948: The Phantom City,” in Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and Their Fate in the War, ed. Salim Tamari (Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 1999); and Rochelle Davis, “Ottoman Jerusalem,” Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighborhoods and Their Fate in the War, ed. Salim Tamari (Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 1999). See for instance Salim Tamari, “Jerusalem’s Ottoman Modernity: The Times and Lives of Wasif Jawhariyyeh,” Jerusalem Quarterly 9 (2000); Hala Sakakini, Jerusalem and I: A Personal Record (Jerusalem: Habesch, 1987); and John H. Melkon Rose, Armenians of Jerusalem: Memories of Life in Palestine (London: Radcliffe Press, 1993). Salim Tamari, “Jerusalem’s Ottoman Modernity.” Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 18. Ibid., 250. A promise to offer the Arab population the opportunity for independence after ten years was made in 1939 during the build-up to World War II but was forgotten after the war – at no other time did British officials discuss the possibility of Arab national independence. The only attempt to build a representative government in Palestine – the proposal to create a legislative assembly in 1923 – did not offer Arabs proportional representation and never came into existence anyway. In drawing this distinction between Palestine and the other mandates, I do not want to suggest that the other mandatory regimes adhered to the spirit of benevolent tutelage at the core of the mandate system of rule. The failure of the French to allow Arabs real participation in government in Syria and Lebanon is well known and argues against the notion that mandatory rule ably prepared those populations for independent rule. However, it is clear that the promise of Arab independence had a much greater resonance in these mandates, while it remained a dream permanently deferred in Palestine. The government’s reluctance to share power was evident in the famous mistreatment of the Cambridge-educated George Antonius, who was repeatedly passed over for promotion by junior and inferior British colleagues in the Education Department despite his strong qualifications. See Susan Boyle, Betrayal of Palestine: The Story of George Antonius (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001). In their legislative council proposal, for example, British officials set aside ten seats for Arab representatives, with local representation being divided along communal lines: eight seats for Muslims, two for Christians, and two for Jews. But ten positions on the council were also allotted to government officials, plus a final position for the high commissioner at the head of the body. This ensured that any unified Arab vote could be outvoted by a unified British vote, with or without Jewish help.

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44. Jamaal Bey Husseini, “The Proposed Palestine Constitution,” in “Palestine: A Decade of Development,” special issue, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 164 (November 1932): 25. 45. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 37. 46. Barbara Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy 1920– 29 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993). The divided economy of Palestine is the subject of two other strong accounts, Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: 1882 –1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 47. See Islam and the European Empires; Nile Green, Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Christopher Low, “Empire and the Hajj: Pilgrims, Plagues, and Pan-Islam under British Surveillance,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 2 (2008); Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Scott Alan Kugle, “Framed, Blamed and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2001); Jonathan Reynolds, “Good and Bad Muslims: Islam and Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (2001); and Francis Robinson, “The British Empire and the Muslim World,” in The Twentieth Century, eds Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, vol. 4 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Wm. Roger Louis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Chapter 1 Islam under Empire 1. This quote comes from an undated Zionist memorandum on the SMC, CZA, S25/10/373 and is also quoted in Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 5. The novelty of the council is a major point of emphasis in Kupferschmidt’s monograph and in Porath’s The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, and is also mentioned in more general accounts of the mandate period, such as Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917– 1929 (Blackwell: Oxford, 1991). 2. My discussion of the development of Orientalism owes much from class discussions on the topic with my dissertation advisor, Zachary Lockman. His later book on the topic is highly recommended. See Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2004). 3. Lockman, Contending Visions, 76. 4. Ibid., 37. 5. The statement came from Renan’s lecture “Islam and Science,” which he gave at the Sorbonne in 1883. Quoted in Lockman, Contending Visions, 79.

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6. Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2 (New York: MacMillan, 1908), 146. 7. Ibid., 229. See also Lockman, Contending Visions, 94. 8. See Article 22 of League of Nations, Covenant of the League of Nations, 28 April 1919, http://www.refworld.org/docid/3dd8b9854.html 9. As Naomi Shepherd has pointed out, “Blake’s poetry might invoke a heavenly Jerusalem, but in his contemporary Pinkerston’s Modern Geography, while Aleppo and Damascus, well-known Syrian trading centres, were mentioned, the earthly Jerusalem was not.” Naomi Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders: The Western Rediscovery of Palestine (London: Collins, 1987), 13. 10. Britain established the first consulate in Jerusalem in 1839. This marked a departure from the practice of placing European missions along the Levantine coast as a way of promoting European commerce in the region. Originally created in response to a rising Russian influence in the city, the consulate under William Tanner Young (1839– 46) and James Finn (1846– 63) would come to champion the British position in Jerusalem through the protection of the city’s Protestant and Jewish communities. 11. Simon Goldhill, “Jerusalem,” in Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, eds David Gange and Michael Ledger-Lomas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 72. 12. As quoted in A. J. Sherman, Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918– 1948 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997), 16. Undoubtedly, this soldier would have been referring to the instruction about the Holy Land that he would have received in religious education classes that were and still are part of the British school curriculum. I can attest from experience that such classes usually include instruction about the geography of biblical Palestine. 13. Ibid., 16. 14. Shepherd, Zealous Intruders, 186. 15. Ibid., 180. 16. See Linda Osband, Famous Travellers to the Holy Land: Their Personal Impressions and Reflections (London: Prion, 1989). 17. Goldhill, “Jerusalem,” 93 and Shepherd, Zealous Intruders,190. 18. Quoted in Famous Travellers, 127. 19. Warburton’s book was particularly successful, being printed in 17 editions over the next 40-odd years. 20. For an analysis of Disraeli’s and Tonna’s works, see Heidi Kaufmann, English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Reflections on a Nested Nation (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009). 21. For a discussion of Benjamin Netanyahu’s and other Zionist’s misuse of Twain’s observations to make the case for Palestine’s emptiness, see Robert Mackey, “Netanyahu’s Embrace of Mark Twain,” The Lede (blog), New York Times, May 20, 2009, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/ netanyahus-embrace-of-mark-twain/. 22. Issam Nassar, “In Their Image: Jerusalem in Nineteenth Century British Travel Narratives,” Jerusalem Quarterly File 19 (2003): 6 –22.

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23. The mummeries quote came from Harriet Martineau’s bestselling travelogue, as quoted in Goldhill, “Jerusalem,” 75. 24. H. D. Myer to parents, January 5, 1919, as quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, 39. 25. The pioneering figure of biblical geography had been the American scholar Edward Robinson, who conducted research in the Middle East in the late 1830s and early 1850s, but by the second half of the nineteenth century, British scholars dominated the field. George Adam Smith became a giant in the field thanks to his 1894 work, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land, which was published in some thirty different editions and remained the central text in the field for decades. The Historical Geography of the Holy Land would have a great influence on British perceptions of Palestine, with General Edmund Allenby consulting the work before his conquest of Palestine and Prime Minister David Lloyd George using the book during British discussions about the future borders of mandatory Palestine. 26. Shepherd, Zealous Intruders, 195. 27. Ibid., 90. 28. Charles Clermont-Ganneau, “The Arabs of Palestine,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly (1875), 208, as quoted in Nadia Abu el-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 38. 29. Curzon witnessed the festival of the Holy Fire as part of a Grand Tour to Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Greece in 1833– 34, an experience described in his book Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, published in 1849. See Famous Travelers, 37. 30. This passage is quoted in Eddie Halabi, “The Transformation of the Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem 1917– 1937: From Local and Islamic to Modern and Nationalist Celebration,” (PhD dissertation: University of Toronto, 2007), 91. The original can be found in E. Masterman and R. Macalister, “Occasional papers on the modern inhabitants of Palestine,” Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement (1915): 176–7. 31. Faisal Devji, “Islam and British Imperial Thought,” in Islam and the European Empires, ed. David Motadel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 261. 32. Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850– 2004, 4th edn (London: Pearson, 2004), 50. 33. Ibid., 55. 34. Devji, “Islam and British Imperial Thought,” 262. 35. Bernard Hopkins, “Islam and Resistance in the British Empire,” in Islam and the European Empires, 157. 36. Ibid., 159. 37. Ibid., 150. 38. We can see here colonial officials engaging in much the same kind of “culture talk” about Islam adopted by Western commentators after 9/11, as discussed in Mahmood Mamdani’s article, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism.” Like their American counterparts a

NOTES

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40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

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century later, British writers presented Islam as a unified, binding culture, with “no history, no politics, and no debates,” and Muslims as “premodern people” whose “public behavior, specifically their political behavior, can be read from their religion,” allowing these imperialists to blithely ignore their own role in fomenting anti-colonial opposition. Mahmood Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” in Political Islam: A Critical Reader, ed. Fre´de´ric Volpi (London: Routledge, 2011), 111. Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 54. This statement includes a quote from G. S. Symes, who was the district governor of Galilee and Samaria from 1920 to 1925, and chief secretary of Palestine from 1925 to 1928. Shepherd, Zealous Intruders, 94. Great Britain, Foreign Office, “Syria and Palestine Handbook” (London: 1919), 56 – 7, in PRO, FO 373/5/E132. See Richard Adamson’s personal account of “The Holy Fire in Jerusalem, Easter, 1920,” Richard Adamson Papers, GB 165-001, Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Storrs, Orientations, 346. Lieutenant-Colonel H. H. Postlethwaite to Civil Secretary Wyndham Deedes, May 29, 1919, ISA, 2/5/155. Occasionally, British intelligence reported on the real political or economic concerns of the local population, such as General Water-Taylor’s report that Jaffa residents were protesting on account of a “local grievance of taxation of their orange groves.” However, the vast majority of British reports dismissed Arab protest as the actions of a fanatical population acting out. See General Waters-Taylor to the Chief Administrator OETA, February 7, 1919, ISA, 2/5/155/3026(A). According to the Foreign Office’s handbook “The Pan-Islamic Movement,” prepared by the historical section in 1919, the first mention of the term panIslam in English was in an article in The Times in January 1882, which followed a couple of months after the term’s first appearance in French. PRO, FO 373/5/6. Lockman, Contending Visions, 91. “The Pan-Islamic Movement.” Ibid. Motadel, “Introduction,” 23. S. H. Ahmad’s strictly confidential report on Indian Muslim politics is included with British intelligence research in PRO, FO 882/12. It is unclear exactly who Ahmad was but he almost certainly was working as a native “agent” for the Indian government when he wrote this report. V. Vivian, Assistant Director of Criminal Intelligence, to Colonel C. Wilson, Pilgrim Officer in Jeddah, December 7, 1916. PRO, FO 882/12. V. Vivian, “Summary of the ‘Silk Letters Case’” included in his letter to Colonel C. Wilson, Pilgrim Officer in Jeddah, ibid. Saul Kelly, “‘Crazy in the Extreme’? The Silk Letters Conspiracy,” Middle Eastern Studies 49, no. 2 (2013): 165.

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55. This can be seen in a number of breathless reports that British intelligence agents and Foreign Office officials produced after the war: see for example the two-part May 1919 report, “Activities of the Pan-Islamic Movement, Turkish Nationalists and Bolsheviks in Asia,” PRO, FO 141/433/2 and FO 141/433/3, and the Foreign Office’s 1919 handbooks on “The Rise of Islam and the Caliphate” and “The Pan-Islamic Movement,” PRO, FO 373/5/6. 56. Capt. Philipps, “‘Africa for the African’ and ‘Pan Islam’: Recent Developments in Central and Eastern Africa,” a memorandum sent from the Foreign Office to Cairo on October 16, 1917. PRO, FO 882/15 57. This quote comes from the first note of a series of three notes on Indian Muslim politics from November 17, 1916, that is included in the Arab Bureau correspondence on Indian politics in the Hijaz. PRO, FO 882/12. 58. Lord Lugard, Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1922), 78, originally quoted in Jonathan Reynolds, “Good and Bad Muslims: Islam and Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (2001): 603. 59. Ibid. 60. Reynolds also suggests that the Qadariyya were favoured because they were more inward-looking and less knowledgeable in terms of Islamic scholarship than other brotherhoods that were active in missionary work throughout northern Africa. In Reynolds’s words, “the more inward-looking the North’s Muslims could be made, the safer the Anglo-Muslim government of the region would be,” a sentiment that demonstrated that fear of pan-Islam also played a role in British Africa. Reynolds, “Good and Bad Muslims,” 605– 8. 61. Felicitas Becker, “Islam and Imperialism in East Africa,” in Islam and the European Empires, 117. 62. Ibid., 123. 63. Ibid., 124. 64. Colonial Office, “Memorandum on Colonial Renegades – Palestine: The Mufti of Jerusalem,” PRO, CO 968/121/1. 65. See Robert D. Crews, “The Russian Worlds of Islam,” in Islam and the European Empires, 35 – 52. 66. Scott Kugle argues that the shift toward formalizing and codifying the law occurred in India and England at roughly the same time but utility-minded reformers enjoyed more success in bringing reforms to India, “where power was already in the hands of the few, and arbitrary government could overpower opposition.” See Kugle, “Framed, Blamed and Renamed,” 277. 67. Ibid., 258. 68. Ibid., 259. 69. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 515. 70. See Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 12; and Awad al-Sid al-Karsani, “The Establishment of Neo-Mahdism in the Western Sudan, 1920– 1936,” African Affairs 86, no. 344 (1987): 385– 404. Here Prime Minister Lord Salisbury’s call for Britain to take “a predominant voice in all matters

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72.

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connected with the Sudan” represented a very different position than the one taken by Cromer in Egypt. As quoted in William Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004), 106. Philip Curtain, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 104– 7. See Suleimano Kumo, “The Application of Islamic Law in Northern Nigeria: Problems and Prospects,” in Islamic Law in Nigeria: Application and Teaching, ed. S. Khalid Rashid (Lagos: Islamic Publications Bureau, 1986); Ahmad Algazali, British Administration and the Development of Northern Nigeria 1900– 1954 (MA thesis: University of Pittsburgh, 1967); and J. N. D. Anderson, Islamic Law in Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1955), 174. Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 1; and Porath, Emergence, 199. Samuel to Curzon, January 7, 1921, PRO, FO 371/6390/E1061.

Chapter 2 Building a Religious System 1. At the same time Francois Georges-Picot (of the Sykes-Picot agreement) travelled to Palestine to present himself as the legitimate representative of the Holy See at the local Lent and Easter ceremonies and to push for the right of French troops to guard local Catholic sites, much to the consternation of other Catholic groups and to the annoyance of British officials. See French Ambassador to FO, March 1918, PRO, FO 371/3389/56069; and French Ambassador to FO, March 28, 1918, PRO, FO 371/3389/56084. 2. In a May 1918 letter to Arthur Balfour, Chaim Weizmann argued that Jews deserved a holy site of their own and saw the purchase of the Wall as a way of saving the site from “some doubtful Moghreb [sic ] religious community.” Weizmann’s argument was based upon the notion that the Wall was a Jewish site that had been and was still being encroached upon by local (Muslim) development, a concept that would lead ultimately to the erasure of the Maghrebi neighbourhood in 1967. Weizmann to Balfour, May 30, 1918, CZA, L3/310. 3. The Vatican was initially concerned about the impact of British rule on Catholic rights in the country, leading Herbert Samuel to travel to Rome a week before taking power as high commissioner in Palestine in order to reassure the pope about British intentions. See Samuel to Curzon, June 26, 1920, ISA/RG 100/649/6. Later, in the early 1920s, the Vatican opposed the creation of an international commission on holy places (discussed later in this chapter), which had been proposed by British officials to deal with religious questions at Palestine’s holy sites. For correspondence between the Vatican and British officials see PRO, CO 733/33/47428, CO 733/33/48659, CO 733/33/49851, CO 733/33/55907, CO 733/55/2168, FO 371/6389/E5879, and FO 371/6389/E7124. The Indian viceroy forwarded the petitions on

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

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behalf of Muslim rights in Palestine by the All-India Muslim League to the Foreign Office. See PRO, FO 371/4164/20404 and FO 371/4164/23796. The mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husayni would later enjoy strong support and friendship from the brothers Shawkat ‘Ali and Muhammad ‘Ali Johar, members of the Muslim League and the founders of the Khilafat movement in India. MCA Jaffa to Military Governor at Jaffa, June 1920, PRO, FO 371/5114. Diasporic groups of Palestinians and Syrians – with names such as “Union Sirio de Torreon, Coah, Mexico,” and the “Colonia Palestina Residente en la Republica de El Salvador” – expressed similar reservations about the creation of a Jewish national home in such a Christian and Muslim land. However, they tended to call for Palestine to be joined to Arab-ruled Syria. Petitions and letters from Palestinian communities in the West (mostly from South America) are found in the records of the Foreign Office, evidence of the strong interest that Palestinians abroad retained in their homeland. These groups, which have not been studied by scholars, appear to have been small Palestinian and Syrian social and political clubs formed in some of the major cities of the Western Hemisphere. See PRO, FO 570/10/114 and Watha’iq al-harakah alwataniyah al-Filastiniyah 1918– 1939: min awraq Akram Za‘itar [Documents of the Palestinian nationalist movement, 1918– 1939 from the papers of Akram Za‘itar], ed. Bayan Nawhid al-Hut (Beirut: Mua’ssasat Ad-Dirasat AlFilistiniyah, 1979), 8 – 11. Sykes private note, February 15, 1918, PRO, FO 882/14, PA/18/2. The declaration referred to the Arab-majority population of Palestine merely as “non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” an indication of the British view that Arabs, unlike Jews, lacked a national identity. Stuart Symes was one of a number of officials who warned of the potential for other countries to become involved in religious affairs. See G. S. Symes to Clayton, September 12, 1917, PRO, FO 882/14. Bishop MacInnes was the bishop of Jerusalem from 1915 until 1931, but lived in Cairo during World War I. In fact, because MacInnes was appointed to his position during the war, he would only set foot in Jerusalem for the first time in 1918. The bishopric of Jerusalem had been established in 1841 as a joint British and Prussian project, but in 1887, following Prussia’s withdrawal from the joint arrangement, the bishopric became an Anglican Episcopate. MacInnes to High Commissioner Egypt, May 2, 1917, PRO, FO 882/14, PA/17/7. The Times, December 11, 1917. For an excellent discussion of the crusader theme in British wartime writings and the controversy this caused, see Eitan Bar-Yosef, “The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign,” Journal of Contemporary History 36, no. 1 (2001): 87 – 109. In his first public speech after taking command of Jerusalem, Allenby would describe the conquest of Jerusalem as marking the end of the Crusades, a

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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21. 22.

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comment that led Muslim dignitaries to leave in disgust, as recounted in the memoirs of the Jerusalem musician Wasif Jawhariyya. Keith-Roach claimed to have dedicated his life to Jerusalem after seeing a gravestone of a crusader who was related to him through marriage. Meanwhile, the British command in Palestine boasted in its press propaganda that “two of the commanders who have played a great part in the South Palestine campaign are descended from knights who fought in the wars of the Crusades.” See Wasif Jawhariyya, al-Quds alintidabiyya fi al-Mudhakarat al-Jawhariyya: al-kitab al-thani min mudhakarat almusiqi Wasif Jawhariyya 1918–1948 [Mandate Jerusalem in the memoirs of alJawhariyya: the second volume of the memoirs of the musician Wasif Jawhariyya, 1918–1948], ed. Issam Nassar and Salim Tamari (Jerusalem: Institute for Jerusalem Studies, 2005), 280; and General HQ in Egypt to the Foreign Office: Wingate to FO, 14 February 1918, FO 371/3383/29296 Ronald Storrs, for example, noted in his memoirs that “undenominational Christians” made “strong suggestions” that the centuries-old practice of having a local Muslim family open and close the doors of the Holy Sepulchre “was an outrage, which no Christian Governor should tolerate.” Storrs wisely continued the tradition, which has persisted to this day. Storrs, Orientations, 348. Quoted in Porter, Lion’s Share, 185. Wyndham Deedes, “Note on Bishop MacInnes’ Letter of May 2, 1917,” PRO, FO 882/14, PA/17/8. Graves to Deedes, October 15, 1917, PRO, FO 882/14, PA/17/12. Emphasis in the original. G. S. Symes to Gilbert Clayton, September 12, 1917, PRO, FO 882/14, PA/17/11. Sykes private note, February 15, 1918, PRO, FO 882/14, PA/18/2. Two weeks before the occupation, Allenby informed the high commissioner in Egypt that the Protestant bishop of Palestine would be barred from entering Jerusalem as part of the occupying ceremony. Clayton to Wingate, October 25, 1917, PRO, FO 882/14, PA/17/13. Allenby’s proclamation, titled “Proclamation of Martial Law”, was made on December 11, 1918. See FO 608/99/3. The proclamation can also be found in Great Britain, Proclamations, Ordinances, and Notices Issued by O.E.T.A (South) to August 1919 (Cairo: Printed by Oriental Advertising Company, 1920), 35. G.C.O. Egypt to C.I.G.S., January 25, 1918, PRO, FO 371/3388/489. Although this agreement initially caused the British administration some problems when the French insisted that they should share the “burden” of protecting the status quo, it effectively stopped the French from assuming the role of protector of the Roman Catholic community. PRO, FO 371/3388/18170. Bols’s specific pledge read as follows: “There will be no interference with religious customs or Holy Places or any curtailment of religious liberty, subject only to the maintenance of public order and security.” Bols to Secretary of State, June 7, 1920, PRO, FO 371/5114/E6914.

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24. Deedes to Colonial Office, PRO, CO 733/6. 25. Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, 51 – 4. 26. The article comes from the “Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land,” which was part of the Hague Convention of 1907. The article was incorporated into the regulations that were used by the British during the war. Clause 378 of the Hague Convention also called for the occupying power to continue to financially support and protect local religious clergy unless they organized opposition against the military forces. See Great Britain, War Office, Manual of Military Law (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1914), 343 and 291. 27. Gideon Biger, An Empire in the Holy Land: Historical Geography of the British Administration in Palestine: 1917– 1929 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 20. 28. Smith, Roots of Separatism, 6. It was for this reason that High Commissioner Herbert Samuel assured the British taxpayer in 1924 that “all that has been accomplished by the Government of Palestine has been done with its own resources. Great Britain has paid nothing towards the cost of civil administration.” The quote came from the high commissioner’s introduction to a handbook that accompanied Palestine’s display at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. See Palestine Pavilion Organizing Committee, Palestine Pavilion Handbook and Tourist Guide (London: Fleetway Press, 1924), 21. Besides Smith’s and Biger’s accounts of Palestine’s economic development the reader is directed to Ylana Miller, Government and Society in Rural Palestine 1920– 1948 (Austin: University of Texas, 1985); and Warwick Tyler, State Lands and Rural Development in Mandatory Palestine, 1920– 1948 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001). 29. For British policies elsewhere in the postwar Middle East see Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Tancred Bradshaw, Britain and Jordan: Imperial Strategy, King Abdullah I and the Zionist Movement (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). 30. This emphasis on agricultural or vocational training was not unique to Palestine and was also seen in British Egypt and India. For more information on the ways in which British officials promoted preservation in urban planning see Nicholas E. Roberts, “Dividing Jerusalem: British Urban Planning in the Holy City,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 4 (2013): 7 – 26. The reader is also encouraged to consult the society’s records, which are published in two books: Jerusalem 1918–1920: Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council during the Period of the British Military Administration, ed. C. R. Ashbee (London: John Murray, 1921), and Jerusalem 1920– 1922: Being the Records of the Pro-Jerusalem Council during the First Two Years of the Civil Administration (London: John Murray, 1924). 31. The Balfour Declaration was generally seen as an obstacle to sound governance in Palestine by officials in the OETA administration. This is shown by the

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33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

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complaints of Major General Bols and Major General Watson that the Balfour Declaration was unworkable and should be rescinded. The declaration was even criticized at one point by Wyndham Deedes, an administrator who was otherwise very sympathetic to Zionism. For a good discussion of the views of these military commanders see Wasserstein, British in Palestine. Samuel’s Cabinet memorandum, The Future of Palestine, can be found in the Herbert Samuel Papers, GB165-0252, Middle East Centre Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford. A good account of his thinking at the time, which was influenced to a certain degree by discussions with leading Zionists Chaim Weizmann, Nahum Sokolow, Lord Rothschild, and Moses Montefiore, is found in Bernard Wasserstein, Herbert Samuel, a Political Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 200– 40. Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Sir Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2001), 85. Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, 49. A succinct account of the Status Quo can be found in Michael Dumper, The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem in the Middle East Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 20 – 1. For an account of the Status Quo from a Franciscan point of view see the work of Albert Rock, The Status Quo in the Holy Places (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1989). Earlier sectarian conflict and competition over these sites is described in Rock, The Status Quo. The British public first became aware of this competition through Robert Curzon’s account of the Ceremony of the Holy Fire and other Orthodox celebrations in Robert Curzon, Visits to the Monasteries in the Levant (London: Century Publishing, 1983), which was originally published in 1849. Dumper, Politics of Sacred Space, 20 – 1. Risley’s book is discussed extensively in Nicholas Dirks’s excellent discussion of the ethnographic state in his book Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). See H. H. Risley, The People of India (London: W. Thacker, 1908); and H. H. Johnston, “A Survey of the Ethnography of Africa: And the Former Racial and Tribal Migrations in That Continent,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 43 (July–December 1913): 375–421. While much has been written in post-colonial and subaltern studies about the importance of ethnographic knowledge for ruling British India and Africa, the power of such studies to shape British policies in Palestine remains a topic ripe for scholarly analysis. See Cust, “The Status Quo at the Holy Places,” PRO, CO 733/132/2. Storrs, Memoir, 312. Ibid. Laura Robson’s book considers the political divide between the pro-Arab views of “field” officers such as Storrs, Edward Keith-Roach, Harry Luke, and E. T. Richmond and the pro-Zionist attitudes of Samuel and Bentwich, who served from Government House. See Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, 56. Ibid., [emphasis added].

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44. See 192n30. 45. Ellen L. Fleischmann, The Nation and Its “New” Women: The Palestinian Women’s Movement, 1920– 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 33. 46. See Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Gyanendra Pandey, “The Colonial Construction of ‘Communalism’: British Writings on Banaras in the Nineteenth Century,” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India; Thomas Metcalfe, The Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; and Mahmud Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 47. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 22. 48. Justin McCarthy’s book Ottoman Turks offers a good overview of the main millets – the Greek Orthodox, the Armenian Gregorians, the Jews – and other groups he terms de facto millets – the Nestorians, Syrian Orthodox, and Maronites. See McCarthy, Ottoman Turks, 128–31. 49. Cust, “Status Quo.” 50. The Muslim identity of the empire was emphasized by Abdulhamid as a conservative reaction to the pressure of European confrontation. Selim Deringel offers a very useful account of the place of Islam during the Hamidian period in Selim Deringel, The Well Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I.B.Tauris, 1998). The power of Islam at the end of empire was revealed in the sultan’s call for a jihad against the Entente powers during World War I. 51. Ormsby-Gore, “Proposals Regarding the Future Government of the Separate Palestinian State,” January 23, 1919, PRO, FO 608/98/588. 52. The full text of the Palestine Order-in-Council 1922 can be found on the United Nation’s website, https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/ C7AAE196F41AA055052565F50054E656. 53. Samuel speech to House of the Lords, December 8, 1938, PRO, FO 371/21871. I first encountered this comment on page 53 of Laura Robson’s Colonialism and Christianity in Palestine. 54. Ottomanists have especially questioned the coherence of the Ottoman millet system before the nineteenth-century Tanzimat reforms. See Benjamin Braude, “Foundation Myths of the Millet System,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, eds Braude and Lewis, vol. 1 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982): 69 – 88; Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and Masters, Christians and Jews. The debate about the createdness of the caste system in India is discussed in Cohn, Colonialism

NOTES

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56. 57.

58.

59.

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and Its Forms of Knowledge; Pandey, “The Colonial Construction of ‘Communalism’”; Dirks, Castes of Mind; and Metcalfe, The Ideologies of the Raj. Donald Quataert, Ottoman Empire, 173. Quataert notes, for example, that patterns of residential settlement in the Ottoman Empire demonstrate that “overall, residential exclusivity by community was not the rule in the 1700– 1922 era,” and that other criteria, such as wealth and occupation, were the main factors behind urban segregation. Quataert, Ottoman Empire, 177– 8. Robson, “Colonialism and Christianity,” 51. Keith-Roach to Curzon, February 14, 1921, ISA, HC/570/10, italics added. Ilan Pappe discusses how Salim al-Husayni needed Jewish votes to be voted in as mayor of Jerusalem in the municipal elections of 1892. Ilan Pappe, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis, 1700– 1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 116. Young’s compendium of Ottoman law was a favourite of D. G. Hogarth, the eminent Oxford don who came to head Britain’s Arab Bureau in Cairo during World War I. In a 1906 book review, Hogarth had written, “To discover the actual state of Ottoman law on points vitally affecting themselves has long been the despair of men of affairs in Turkey, and to trace the genesis of existing Ottoman usage has been no easier for historical students. Mr. Young’s book will be of inestimable service to both.” D. G. Hogarth, “Corps de Droits Ottomans par George Young,” The English Historical Review 21, no. 81 (1906): 186. Hogarth would have brought the book with him to Cairo during the war. It is likely that the book then travelled to Palestine when officers from the Arab Bureau, such as Gilbert Clayton, Wyndham Deedes, and G. S. Symes, were seconded to the Egyptian Expeditionary Forces. There is no direct evidence for this in records from that time, but later records note that some “additional” 20 copies of Young’s book were sent from the Colonial Office to Palestine in 1922 at the urging of Hogarth, where the book came to be used by Herbert Samuel to resolve religious questions pertaining to conversion and the affairs of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem. See High Commissioner to Churchill, April 12, 1922, ISA, High Commissioner’s Files, Record Group 1, 573/6/231 and PRO, CO 733/5/CO44266 and CO 733/63. Because of the book’s 1905 publication date, it did not cover modernizing and centralizing legal reforms from the CUP period, such as the conversion of shari‘a courts into national courts of personal status with new family rights laws and the transformation of the waqf system into what Michael Dumper has called “an embryonic social welfare arm of a government bureaucracy.” As a result, British Palestine would end up having one of the more conservative legal systems of those territories that had formerly been under Ottoman control. See Michael Dumper, Islam and Israel: Muslim Religious Endowments and the Jewish State (Washington, DC: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1994), 8; and Eisenman, “The Young Turk Legislation.” Ormsby-Gore to Foreign Office, “Palestine: The Holy Places,” January 23, 1919, PRO, FO 608/98; and Waggett’s report, which is undated but is

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60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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included in a letter from Gilbert Clayton to the Foreign Office from February 5, 1919, PRO, FO 608/98. See PRO, CO 733/6/50887, CO 733/10/21965, CO 733/152/5, CO 935/1/1, T 161/118, FO 681/88 and ISA, 1/572/1. Officials in the Palestine government and the Colonial Office suggested candidates for the commission that were either anglophiles or clients of the British Empire, such as King Hussein of Mecca, and proposed that the commission be chaired by an American Protestant rather than a Roman Catholic. A place on the commission was also proposed for Waggett, who would have served as the commission’s secretary. See PRO, CO 733/10/21965. According to the historian Paul Hanna it was the Italian Premier Francesco Nitti who proposed the formation of the commission. His proposal was a compromise between the French position, which called for the continuation of French protection over Roman Catholics and opposed the inclusion of the Balfour declaration in the Treaty of Peace with Turkey, and the British position, which was committed to the Jewish national home and could never accept a French protectorate. See Paul Hanna, British Policy in Palestine (Washington: American Council on Public Affairs, 1942), 55. British plans for the Holy Places Commission were criticized heavily both before and after the promulgation of the Mandate for Palestine. PRO, FO 371/7785 and FO 371/7786 contain more than a score of letters that describe French, Italian, and the Vatican’s opposition. Greek Orthodox criticism can be found in Patriarch Daminos to Foreign Office, August 9, 1922, FO 371/7786/ E7947 or Patriarch of Constantinople to Foreign Office, August 24, 1922, FO 371/7786/E8449. In addition, a letter from the League of Nations to the Foreign Office, September 8, 1922, includes letters from 11 different Greek Orthodox groups that discuss the proposed commission. League of Nations, “Mandate for Palestine, July 24, 1922,” Modern History Sourcebook website, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1922mandate. html, accessed May 10, 2014. The 1922 proposal almost certainly failed not only because it would been difficult to find judges who had a competent understanding of the religious issues at stake but also because such a system would have made it nearly impossible to resolve religious disputes expeditiously. The text of the Palestine (Holy Places) Order in Council (1924) can be found as an appendix in Cust, “Status Quo.” Ibid. Robert Harry Drayton, The Laws of Palestine (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1933). Great Britain, Proclamations, Ordinances, and Notices, 10. Soldiers and officials were able to attend services provided they attended in a private capacity. British intervention eventually led to the creation of a commission in the early 1920s to address the financial problems of the Orthodox Church that

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72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

77. 78. 79.

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was formally called “The Commission Appointed by the Government of Palestine to Inquire into the Affairs of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.” Most of the land would be bought up by Zionist land-purchasing agencies to form the backbone of Jewish West Jerusalem. These land sales were highly controversial within the Arab community, with ‘Isa al-‘Isa, who was himself a member of the Orthodox Church, railing against the sale of the church’s land to Zionist interests in his newspaper Filastin. See Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 100. The topic of Greek Orthodox land sales would also be criticized in a petition from the Arab Executive to the League of Nations in 1925; see Executive Committee of the Palestine Arab Congress to League of Nations, April 8, 1925, ISA/RG 2/6/176. Deedes to Colonial Office, PRO, CO 733/6. In India, the British took control over Islamic religious law by integrating the shari‘a into a hybrid system dubbed Anglo-Muhammadan Law, in which judges were empowered to apply either Islamic or common law as the case dictated. British control over Hinduism was even stronger. Franklin Pressler observes that “A little-recognized aspect of modern south Indian history is that the British colonial state penetrated Hindu religious institutions, both temples and maths (monasteries), deeply and systematically. This penetration was something that was neither unknown at the time nor unintentional.” He sees this penetration as part of the state’s attempt to “spread the administrative net over all religious institutions,” due to officials’ belief that religion was a major threat to their power. See Franklin Presler, Religion under Bureaucracy: Policy and administration for Hindu Temples in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 7 –15. This was Proclamation 42, which was promulgated on June 24, 1918. Great Britain, Proclamations, 10. For a further discussion of this early legislation see Robert Eisenman, “The Young Turk Legislation, 1913– 17 and Its Application in Palestine/Israel,” Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: Political, Social, and Economic Transformation, ed. David Kushner (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press, 1986). See Great Britain, Palestine and Transjordan Administration Report for 1920 (London, 1921), 91 – 2; and Daphne Tsimhoni, “The Status of Arab Christians under the British Mandate in Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 20, no. 4 (1984): 173. See Samuel to Curzon, November 14, 1920, ISA, 100/649/7. As Kupferschmidt correctly points out, the Cypriot experience was frequently referred to by legal experts in Palestine in their search for an Islamic system for Palestine. Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 10. Ibid. See Government of Palestine, The Committee for Moslem Religious Affairs (Jerusalem, 1921), 5. Ibid.

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80. The Muslim members on this committee were Kamil al-Husayni (the mufti of Jerusalem and president of the Shari‘a Court of Appeal), Muhammad Murad (mufti of Haifa), ‘Abdullah Jazzar (mufti of Acre), Asad Kaddourah (mufti of Safad), Nimr Hamad (ma‘mour of Wakfs, Nablus), Raghib al-Nashashibi (mayor of Jerusalem), Omar Zaytar (mayor of Nablus), ‘Abdullah al-Dajani (Jaffa), and Said Shawa (Gaza). The list of members is found in a pamphlet on the conference published by the Palestine government. According to this publication Kamil al-Husayni was unable to attend meetings due to his declining health. See The Committee for Moslem Religious Affairs, 5. 81. This new body would be made up of the inspector of the Shari‘a Courts and four elected Muslim notables. See Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 21 – 2. 82. The Committee for Moslem Religious Affairs, 5. 83. Ibid. 84. Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 22. 85. Ibid.

Chapter 3 Islam and Politics in Palestine 1. Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1937), 387. 2. These quotes come from reports sent home to London early in 1918. See PRO, FO 371/3383 and PRO, FO 371/3391/37361. 3. Great Britain, Foreign Office, “Syria and Palestine Handbook” (London, 1919), 56 – 7, in PRO, FO 373/5/E132. 4. See Richard Adamson’s personal account of “The Holy Fire in Jerusalem, Easter, 1920,” Richard Adamson papers, GB 165-001, Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford. 5. Pan-Islamism, Bolshevism, and Turkish nationalism were three great bugaboos that concerned the Foreign Office in its reports on the Middle East after World War I, leading to the production of numerous reports on the movement’s impact on national politics. See for example, its two-part May 1919 report, “Activities of the Pan-Islamic Movement, Turkish Nationalists and Bolsheviks in Asia,” PRO, FO 141/433/2 and FO 141/433/3, and the Foreign Office’s 1919 handbooks on “The Rise of Islam and the Caliphate” and “The Pan-Islamic Movement,” PRO, FO 373/5/6. 6. The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, 1904– 1948, ed. Salim Tamari and Issam Nasser (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2014), 136. 7. Zionist intelligence report from April 2, 1920. CZA, L4/738. 8. For a discussion of the lively debate over Palestinian independence vs. confederation with an Arab Greater Syria, see Muslih, Origins; Porath, Emergence; and Khalidi, Palestinian Identity.

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9. Zionist intelligence had reported as early as March 17, 1919, that the troubles in Egypt had inspired Arabs to hope that the revolt would spread to Palestine to remove the British. CZA L4/748. 10. Roberto Mazza, Jerusalem: From the Ottomans to the British (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009), 167. 11. Because Palestine was under the control of the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration at the time of the festival, the commission was a military court of enquiry. Arriving in Palestine in May 1920 the commission was charged with discovering the immediate reasons for the outbreak of violence at the festival but soon came to consider political, social, and economic tensions in the country. The commission consisted of Major-General P. C. Palin (Chairman), Brigadier-General G. A. Wildblood, and Lieutenant-Colonel C. Vaughn-Edwards with Mr. MacBarnet (a judge from the Court of Appeal in Egypt) as legal advisor. 12. PRO, WO 32/9614. 13. Mazza, Jerusalem, 166. 14. Samuel to Curzon, November 29, 1920, PRO, FO 141/442/4. 15. Porath discusses the emergence of the Supreme Muslim Council only after discussing the confrontation between Arab nationalists and the British government. Similarly, Wasserstein, writes about the rise of the SMC after describing the rise and fall of the Palestine constitution. See Porath, Emergence, 123– 207 and Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 132–4. 16. Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 132. 17. The involvement of Palestinian Arabs in nationalist politics dates from the very end of the Ottoman period when members of the Arab elite joined parties opposed to the Committee of Union and Progress, which took control of the Ottoman Empire in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. Unhappy with the proTurkish and secular approach of the CUP, Arab notables joined political societies with Islamist and/or Arabist platforms, such as the Levantine branches of the Society of Muhammedan Union (an Islamist opposition party founded in Istanbul in 1908), al-Fatat (the Arab nationalist “Arab Youth Society,” originally established in Paris in 1909 or 1911), and the Decentralization Party (created by Syrian e´migre´s in Cairo in 1913). Others joined local political organizations with explicitly anti-Zionist programs, such as the political association founded in Haifa in 1910 by Najib Nassar, the publisher of the Arab nationalist al-Karmil newspaper, and Jaffa’s “The Patriotic Ottoman Party,” established around the same time. For a good discussion of these groups see James Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 51–86; Muslih, Origins, 60–8; and Porath, Emergence, 26–30. 18. Porath counts only twenty-four Palestinians as active in Arab nationalist societies, while C. E. Dawn puts the number at twenty-two, with a further ten joining during the war. Porath, Emergence, 20; C. Earnest Dawn, “The Rise of Arabism in Syria,” Middle East Journal 16 (1962): 148– 9.

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19. Nassar’s political association and the Patriotic Ottoman Party both stridently opposed Zionism, for example, but the former did so with an Arab nationalist perspective that the latter did not share, illustrating Donna Robinson Divine’s point that “the threads of an Arab nationalist consciousness can surely be found embedded in the programs and discussion of these nascent political organizations, but so can expressions of absolute political loyalty.” Divine, Ottoman Palestine, 162. 20. As Bayan al-Hout points out, the early Arab political societies drew upon the notable youth. Hajj Amin al-Husayni, for example, was only 21 when he helped found the Nadi al-Arabi political society in 1918. Bayan al-Hout, alQiyadat wa al-Mou’assasat, 86. For a thorough description of these societies see Muslih, Origins; and Gelvin, Divided Loyalties. 21. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, 66. 22. According to Muhammad Muslih, the Literary Society’s membership numbered in the thousands by the end of the Ottoman Empire. 23. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, 56. 24. Evidence for coordination between the two groups can be found in Zionist intelligence reports of the groups meeting together and working to draft joint petitions. See CZA, L4/738, CZA L4/758. A number of these joint petitions can be found in ISA, 2/1/30 (Files I and II). 25. The first president of the MCA (and mayor of Jerusalem), Musa Kazim alHusayni, for example, had served as the Ottoman qai’maqam (subgovernor) of Jaffa, Safad, and Acre, and as the district governor of Yemen. His high standing during the Ottoman period was reflected in the honorific “Pasha” that was attached to his name. His successor as president, ‘Arif al-Dajani, who was also a pasha, had served in a number of roles in Ottoman administration before becoming mayor of Jerusalem in the final years of Ottoman rule. 26. al-Hout, al-Qiyadat wa al-Mou’assassat, 81. 27. The statutes stated that the “purpose of the society is to elevate the interests of the country (Palestine) connected with agriculture, technics [sic ], economics and commerce, the revival of science and the education of the national youth and the protection of national rights, morally and materially.” ISA, 2/5/155. 28. The Jerusalem branch for example was composed of “forty members 10 of whom are of the Moslem Relief Society, 5 Latins and 5 Greek Orthodox and 10 of the villages,” which indicates that some form of religious quota system was in place. It is unclear if this ratio was kept in other branches. Ibid. 29. Although it should be noted, as Mushammad Muslih has pointed out, that Christians were overrepresented in the MCA, as compared to their percentage in the wider Arab population. Muslih, Origins, 162– 4. 30. For a discussion of their participation in government see Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers; and Muhammad Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism.

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31. A political association founded by Najib Nasser, the publisher of the Haifa paper al-Karmil, in 1910 is a good example of this. For while, his association, like his newspaper, championed the rights of Arabs in his Greek Orthodox Church, it also attracted a sizeable Muslim membership on account of its antiZionism. Porath, Emergence, 29. The Literary Society’s position towards Christians became a matter of debate in February 1921 when Jamal al-Husayni suggested at a meeting of the Literary Club that the Young Men’s Muslim Club be “amalgamated” with the club and the Christian members be expelled. A British intelligence report noted that the society’s membership rejected the proposal because it would cause hostility from the Christian population. Quigley to Chief Secretary, February 15, 1921, ISA, 2/5/157/2223/10. 32. Ronald Storrs, for example, observed in November 1918 that “What is remarkable in the present documents is the solidarity evidenced between Moslems and Arab Greek Orthodox; a state of things quite inconceivable in Egypt where either party would only be too pleased to see the others [sic ] rights diminished.” Storrs to OETA HQ, November 16, 1918, PRO, FO 371/5124/E213403. Zionist intelligence agents paid particular attention to splits and differences between the organization’s Muslim and Christian members, reporting on various occasions that the group’s Jerusalem branch was preparing to kick out its Christian members. See Zionist intelligence reports from April 5– 7, 1919, in CZA, L4/748; and from March 9, March 22, and March 25, 1920, in CZA, L4/738. Since this action was never taken, it is difficult to say whether this was a credible report or wishful thinking on the part of the intelligence agency. 33. Bracketed comment added. Nels Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism (London: Kegan Paul, 1982), 16. 34. For an overview of this nationalist outreach see Muslih, Origins, 169; and Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, 81. Zionist intelligence papers contain more specific references to the ways in which Arab nationalists worked to spread their message to students at St. George’s school and the Zion school (most likely a reference to Bishop Gobat’s school on Mt. Zion) in Jerusalem. See CZA, L4/739. 35. Muslih, Origins, 168. 36. Zionist Intelligence report from January 26, 1920, CZA, L4/137. 37. Peter Van der Veer’s and Hartmut Lehmann’s edited work, Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, offers a useful corrective to the simplistic and Eurocentric view that “nationalism comes thus in a package with individualism and secularism, as required by the industrial transformation of an agrarian world,” advanced by Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Gellner. Peter Van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann, “Introduction,” in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, eds Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 5. 38. Ibid., 7. 39. Abduh, for example, argued on the pages of his journal al-Manar that he and his mentor al-Afghani had sought to “reform the nation through the

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reformation of al-Azhar [the most prestigious university in Sunni Islam] and to bring progress to the nation through the progress of al-Azhar.” This was based on his view that the strength of the nation was dependent upon the strength of its religious and moral core. Excerpt from Muhammad Abduh, “The True Reform and its Necessity for Al-Azhar,” al-Manar 10, no. 28 (February 1906): 758– 65, reprinted in Mansour Moaddel and Kamran Talattof, Contemporary Debates in Islam: An Anthology of Modernist and Fundamentalist Thought (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 45 – 51. 40. Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 41. These two arguments can be most clearly found in a March 1920 petition from the “Muslims and Christians of Gaza,” which argued that Moslems and Christians have been the proprietors of this country since thousands of years. It is not just to give it to the Jews who lived temporarily in some towns of Palestine, then, emigrated by captivity to another country and were scattered. The Jewish nation that endeavours today to establish the Bolshevist tendencies that threaten the world with destruction and give rise to disturbances and conspiracies in every country, has no right to establish herself in Palestine where peace rules, where Moslems and Christians have their worship places where Jesus was born and died, and where there is the greatest church in the world and the greatest Muslim mosque for Muslim and Christian visitors. Likewise, another petition that month from a group that identified itself as “The Committee of all who made the demonstration in Acre,” stated that “wherever the Jewish nation went, they were the cause of revolutions and at last they were persecuted for it. How could the Peace Conference decide their settlement among us while this is their character and behavior? What right have they in this country whose language, religion, nationality are different to theirs?” In these petitions we can perhaps see the influence of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was becoming known in the Arab world at the time. It should be noted, however, that Palestinian Arabs typically made a distinction between the new Jewish settlers and the Sephardic Jewish community, which had long resided in the Palestine and with whom they got along well. The first petition can be found in File I of “Petitions from the Civil Population of Palestine,” ISA, 2/1/30, while the second petition is in File II of “Petitions from the Civil Population of Palestine,” ISA, 2/1/30. 42. See “Petition from the Nablus Liwa to the Paris Peace Conference,” January 1, 1919, Watha’iq al-harakah al-wataniyah al-Filastiniyah, 11. 43. For a selection of these petitions see File I and II of “Petitions from the Civil Population of Palestine,” ISA, 2/1/30; and Watha’iq al-harakah al-wataniyah al-Filastiniyah.

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44. Porath, Emergence, 41. 45. Ibid., 42. 46. The petition can be found in File I of “Petitions from the Civil Population of Palestine,” ISA, 2/1/30. 47. See Robson, Colonialism and Christianity; and Noah Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917– 1948 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 48. Roger Friedland and Richard D. Hecht, “The Pilgrimage to Nabi Musa and the Origins of Palestinian Nationalism,” in Pilgrims & Travelers to the Holy Land, eds Bryan F. Le Beau and Menachem Mor (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 1996), 94. 49. Sakakini, Jerusalem and I, 49. 50. Khalil Sakakini, Yawmiyat Khalil al-Sakini, vol. 3 (Jerusalem: Muassasat alDirasat al-Maqdisia, 2004), 219. 51. Khaled Marrar, Maqam An-Nabi Musa: The Shrine of Prophet Moses (Jericho: Committee for the Promotion of Tourism in the Governorate of Jericho, 1998), 15. 52. Marrar, Nabi Musa, 6 and 16. 53. The quotation marks are in the original. Gerber, Remembering and Imagining Palestine, 71 – 5. 54. Halabi, “Transformation of the Festival,” 77. This has led Halabi to classify the shrine’s history into two periods, the “traditional ziyarah,” which occurred from the twelfth to the mid-nineteenth century, and the “modern mawsim (festival).” See Halabi, “Transformation,” 66. 55. Ibid. The Ottomans repaired and modified the pilgrimage site in 1730, 1819, and 1885. See Gerber, Remembering and Imagining Palestine, 73. 56. Friedland and Hecht, “Pilgrimage to Nabi Musa,” 93. 57. The partnership between the Ottoman authorities and the notability at Nabi Musa worked both ways, with the al-Husayni family using its position at the festival to buttress its power in Jerusalem. See Abu-Manneh, “The Husaynis: The Rise of a Notable Family in 18th C. Palestine.” At most Muslim religious festivals the celebrants are expected to provide gifts. At the Eid al-Fitr, for example, worshippers are required to pay the zakat al-fitr, alms for the month of Ramadan that are distributed to local needy Muslims. The gifts at the Nabi Musa festival were funded by the Ottoman state. See Friedland and Hecht, “Pilgrimage to Nebi Musa,” 93. 58. The mausim al-Nabi Musa (“pilgrimage season to Nabi Musa”) would begin on the Friday preceding Good Friday according to the Greek Orthodox calendar and end on the Thursday of Easter week (Maundy Thursday). The two best accounts of the festival are Halabi’s dissertation and Tawfiq Canaan’s Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine, the latter offering invaluable information about local Muslim popular religious practice during the early years of the mandate. Information on the recent history of the site and the festival can be found in Marrar, Maqam al-Nabi Musa, 75 – 82. Gilbert Clayton

204

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62. 63. 64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70.

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also wrote about the festival; see Clayton to GHQ, Egyptian Expeditionary Force, May 2, 1918, FO 371/3391/92045. Ibid. Clayton to FO, May 2, 1918, FO 371/3391/78488. It is unclear who gave these speeches but it is likely that one of the speakers would have been Musa Kazim al-Husayni, who was the mayor of Jerusalem and a member of the al-Husayni family who were the patrons of the festival. Khalil Sakakini, Yawmiyat Khalil al-Sakini, 219. Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, The Concise History of Modern India, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 151– 2. Camp to Storrs, March 20, 1919, ISA, 2/1/43. The Zionist Commission had even greater fears about the potential for violence; see Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 39. Waters-Taylor to OETA Headquarters, April 1, 1919, ISA, 2/1/43. Robert Bezucha,“Masks of Revolution: A Study of Popular Culture During the Second French Republic,” in Revolution and Reaction: 1848 and the Second French Republic, ed. Roger Price (London: C. Helm, 1975), 237. The demonstrations, which were organized by the Arab Club and the Literary Society nationalist organizations took place on February 27 and March 8 and included political speeches calling for Arab self-rule. The February demonstration was a response to a speech by the chief administrator of the OETA, Major-General Bols, that reaffirmed the British commitment to the Balfour Declaration. The March demonstration was influenced by Faysal’s recent declaration that he was the king of Syria and Palestine. See WO 32/9614. References to the demonstrations in Haifa, Jaffa, Safed, and Acre, including Zionist criticisms of Arab language, can be found in ISA, 2/1/30. Examples of these petitions can be found in File I and II of “Petitions from the Civil Population of Palestine,” ISA, 2/1/30; and Watha’iq al-harakah alwataniyah al-Filastiniyah. WO 32/9614. Meinertzhagen was the chief political officer of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force who broke almost completely with his superiors over the issue of British culpability for the events of April 1920. Meinertzhagen had witnessed a pogrom in Odessa in 1910, an event that had turned him into an ardent non-Jewish Zionist. After the festival Meinertzhagen vigorously argued that the event had been a pogrom and blamed officials like Storrs for their role in the violence. In truth, besides being zealously pro-Zionist, Meinertzhagen was prone to exaggeration, if not outright fabrication. Reprimanded for overstepping the bounds of his position and undermining the work of his military superiors, Meinertzhagen would soon be reassigned to the Colonial Office in 1921. Recent scholarship has addressed Meinertzhagen’s biographical fabrications as well as his falsifications and fabrications in his later ornithological studies, which brought him some renown. See Brian Garfield, The Meinertzhagen Mystery: The Life and Times of a Colossal Fraud (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007);

NOTES TO PAGES 80 –84

71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80.

205

Alan Knox, “Richard Meinertzhagen-A Case of Fraud Examined,” Ibis 135, no. 3 (1993): 320–5; and R. Dalton, “Ornithologists Stunned by Bird Collector’s Deceit,” Nature 437, no. 7057 (2005): 302. For an overview of the debate about British intentions see Mazza, Jerusalem, 165–78. Zionist intelligence reported that ‘Arif al-‘Arif had called on his fellow nationalists to maintain order on at least two different occasions before the Nabi Musa festival, with the argument that violence at a religious festival would hurt the nationalist cause. See March 31, 1920 and April 2, 1920 reports in CZA, L4/738. CZA, L4/840 Ibid. Max Nurock, the head of the Zionist Commission, for example, testified that he had been warned by a British officer that Muslims had planned to use the festival as a means to carry out an anti-Jewish riot. See CZA L4/840. A letter from the Zionist Commission to the Zionist leader Nachum Sokolow was even more explicit: “la situation presente exactement le tableau d’un vrai pogrom. Sont coupables quelques incitateurs arabes et l’attitude hostile d’un grand nobre des autorites locals vis a vis des juis.” Zionist Commission (Beirut) to Sokolow, April 9, 1920, PRO, FO 371/5117/E3017. Weizmann described the riot as a pogrom in a meeting with Allenby in Cairo shortly after the Nabi Musa festival, as mentioned in Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 65. This accusation was strenuously objected to by the military authorities and was rejected out of hand by the court of enquiry, which considered it to be a deliberately provocative characterization of the events. See PRO, WO 32/9614. Testimony of the 27th Witness (unnamed) in front of the Court of Enquiry, L4/837. Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 64. Ibid., 65. At the same time Samuel pardoned Vladimir Jabotinsky (the founder of the right-wing Revisionist movement) and members of his Jewish paramilitary, who had been sentenced to lengthy prison sentences for organizing an illegal militia. Jabotinsky’s Jewish Defense Forces had been organized in the wake of the attack on the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai, where the famous Joseph Trumpeldor had been killed. The commission consisted of Major-General P. C. Palin (chairman), Brigadier-General G. A. Wildblood, and Lieutenant-Colonel C. VaughnEdwards, with Mr. MacBarnet (a judge from the Court of Appeal in Egypt) as legal advisor. PRO, WO 32/9614. Later historians have largely agreed with the commission’s findings. Yehoshua Porath for instance devotes two pages to the issue of premeditated violence at the festival and reaches the conclusion that although some Arab politician had planned to use the festival to promote Arab nationalism there was no evidence of a plot to cause violence by members of the major Arab political societies (the Arab Club, the Literary Society, and

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85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

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Jam‘iyyat al-Ikha’ wa al-‘Afat [Assocation of Brotherhood and Purity]). Nor does he find evidence of a British plot to assist in the planning of the violence, despite Zionist claims at the time that officials such as Colonel Waters-Taylor knew about the attacks in advance. Porath, Emergence, 98 –9. Zionist intelligence reported that in a March 31, 1920 meeting of the Literary Society, ‘Arif al-‘Arif had called upon his fellow nationalists to maintain order at the festival, a proposal that was accepted by the group, which pledged not to bring any arms to the festival. The next day, a Zionist agent reported that the mufti of Jerusalem, Kamil al-Husayni, had resisted calls by nationalists to give a blessing to Faysal at al-Aqsa Mosque, which would suggest that the religious authorities were committed to keeping nationalist politics out of religion on the eve of the festival. PRO, WO 32/9614 Ibid. Ibid. The call for suppressing the report came from Palestine’s new high commissioner, Herbert Samuel, who felt that old wounds would be reopened by its publication, and from the Zionist Commission, which complained that the commission had exceeded the initial terms of the enquiry by criticizing the impact of Jewish immigration on the Arab position in Palestine. By July 1920, Samuel had already decided to pardon the main protagonists in the event: ‘Arif al-‘Arif and Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who had been found guilty of incitement, and Vladimir Jabotinsky and his Zionist colleagues, who had organized an illegal Jewish militia, and no doubt felt that he had put the unpleasantness behind him. The commission’s findings also undoubtedly conflicted with Samuel’s personal belief that the political grievances of the Arab community were largely superficial and could be overcome by better British propaganda. See PRO, WO 32/9614. The best analysis of Samuel’s commitment to Zionism and its impact on his approach in Palestine can be found in “Herbert Samuel and the Palestine Problem,” which is the fourth chapter of Wasserstein’s The British in Palestine. In that chapter, Wasserstein points out that while Samuel had the support of Prime Minister Lloyd George, his appointment was opposed by General Allenby, Lord Curzon in the Foreign Office, and most of the higher-ups in the OETA. Although Arab notables were initially welcoming to Samuel, Arab politicians would eventually call into question his impartiality. Matta, Jerusalem, 178. The quote is taken from a letter sent from Samuel to Storrs on May 30, 1920, which is quoted in Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 87. Ibid., 93. CZA, Z4/16055 as quoted in ibid., 110. Great Britain, “British White Paper of June 1922,” The Avalon Project at Yale Law School website, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1922.asp, accessed June 12, 2014.

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91. League of Nations, “Mandate for Palestine, July 24, 1922,” Modern History Sourcebook website, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1922mandate. html, accessed May 10, 2014. 92. Churchill’s statement was made in response to Musa Kazem al-Husayni’s protest in March 1921 that Jews were threatening to overrun Palestine. See Musa Kazem al-Husayni to Churchill, March 28, 1921, PRO, CO 733/2/56ff, as quoted in Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 97. Chisolm Brunton, a captain in the Palestine police who observed Churchill during his visit to Palestine in 1921, would later write that he “upheld the Zionist cause and treated the Arab demands like those of a negligible opposition to be put off by a few political phrases and treated like bad children.” See Captain Chisolm Brunton to G.H.Q., May 13, 1921, Captain Chisolm Dunbar Brunton Collection, GB 165-0040, Middle East Centre Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford. 93. League of Nations, “Mandate for Palestine, July 24, 1922,” italics added. 94. As mentioned above, British officials proposed giving Arabs ten out of the twelve seats available to local representatives on the legislative council in recognition of their demographic majority in Palestine. As we might expect, membership on the council was to be organized along religious lines, with eight seats allocated to Muslims, two to Christians, and two to Jews. But this would be balanced by ten positions allotted to government officials plus the high commissioner who was placed at the head of the body, which ensured that a bloc Arab vote could be outvoted by a unified British vote. 95. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 45. 96. Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Boston: St. Martin’s Press: 2007), 125. 97. Great Britain, “Palestine Correspondence with the Palestine Arab Delegation and the Zionist Organization (Cmd. 1700)” (London: H.M.S.O, 1922), https://unispal. un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/48A7E5584EE1403485256CD8006C3FBE. 98. For example, the Haifa newspaper al-Karmil published an article titled, “La Nintichab” [Let’s not vote] on February 24, 1923, that condemned the legislative council proposal for failing to give Arabs a majority on the council and warned its readers that voting might signal Arab approval of the Constitution and the Balfour Declaration. The article would be followed by a similar call for boycotting the elections on March 3, 1923. “La Nintichab,” al-Karmil, February 24, 1923, and March 3, 1923. 99. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 33. 100. Lieutenant-Colonel H. H. Postlethwaite to Civil Secretary Wyndham Deedes, May 29, 1919, ISA, 2/5/155. 101. Edwin Samuel, A Lifetime in Jerusalem: The Memoirs of the Second Viscount Samuel (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1970), 59. 102. For a description of British police arrangements toward festivals in the 1940s see Gibbs Papers GB165-0117, Middle East Centre Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

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103. The decision to censor newspapers was not popular with the Colonial Office, which complained about the continuation of press censorship long after the Jaffa Riots. See CO 733/5. 104. The blacklist can be found in a letter sent from Quigley to the Chief Secretary on October 7, 1920, in ISA, 2/5/157. 105. The ordinance would be published in the government’s Official Gazette from December 15, 1920. PRO, CO 742/1. 106. This public notice would be published in the Official Gazette from January 1, 1920. PRO, CO 742/1. Wyndham Deedes would follow up by issuing another public notice on January 25, 1921, that reassured or warned people, as the case may be, that religious processions would be granted permits. It is not clear to what extent this regulation impacted political gatherings. Certainly it did not end all public gatherings, as can be seen in the complaint from the British subdistrict governor of Tul Karem [Tulkarm] to the Arab major of Tul Karem about an illegal meeting that was held in the city in June 1922 to form a local branch of the MCA. C. F. Reading to major of Tul Karem, June 19, 1922, ISA, 2/5/158. 107. The ordinance was issued in the March 15, 1921, Official Gazette, PRO, CO 742/1. 108. Porath, Emergence, 134. 109. Ibid., 132. 110. Jamal al-Husayni to High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, January 21, 1922, ISA, 2/5/158. 111. Samuel to Curzon, November 29, 1920, PRO, FO 141/442/4. 112. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 42 and 59. 113. Ibid., 78. 114. Ibid., 65 – 104. 115. Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 95. 116. Pappe, Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty, 232.

Chapter 4 The Mufti and the Supreme Muslim Council 1. This meeting is described in a letter from Samuel to Deedes: High Commissioner to Civil Secretary, April 11, 1921, ISA, 2/10/245. The meeting is also covered in Norman Bentwich and Helen Bentwich, Mandate Memories (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 191– 2. 2. For a critique of Kedourie’s argument see Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement (New York: Columbia, 1988), 26. 3. Ilan Pappe rightly suggests that the fact that many of these historians are Israelis and some are unsympathetic to the Palestinian nation, such as Elie Kedourie, factors into this assessment of the mufti. Pappe, Rise and Fall, 86. 4. Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables.”

NOTES

TO PAGES

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5. In 1872, the Ottoman state transformed the vital Jerusalem district, which had been controlled out of Damascus, into an independent district (mutasarifiyya), with its own governor who reported directly to Istanbul. At the same time, the Ottoman government increased its financial and security investment in Palestine, helping to fuel the financial and demographic growth of cities such as Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa. As Ruth Kark has observed, Jaffa and Jerusalem were transformed in the latter half of the nineteenth century from small, almost forgotten towns to the main urban centres of the country, with Jaffa enjoying a fifteen-fold expansion and Jerusalem an almost six-fold increase in size from 1840 to 1917. See Ruth Kark, “The Contribution of the Ottoman Regime to the Development of Jerusalem and Jaffa, 1840– 1917,” in Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: Political, Social, and Economic Transformation, ed. David Kushner (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press, 1986), 46. 6. Local municipal councils were formed from 1863 onward, beginning with the establishment of the majlis baladi in Jerusalem. Ottoman laws of provincial administration promulgated in 1864 and 1871 also led to the creation of a local administrative council, staffed by Ottoman Turkish functionaries and urban notables. See Carter V. Findley, “The Evolution of the System of Provincial Administration as Viewed from the Center,” in Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, 12. The elite’s use of secular education to protect its position in Palestinian society is shown in Rashid Khalidi’s account of the changing educational and career paths of his family in the nineteenth century, specifically in the contrast he draws between the traditional religious career of al-Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali al-Khalidi (1781 – 1865) and his third son, Yusuf Diya’ al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi (1842 –1906), who attended Malta Protestant College, Istanbul’s Imperial Medical College, and Istanbul’s Robert College before serving in the first Ottoman parliament, becoming a three-time mayor of Jerusalem, and working as an Ottoman diplomat. See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 65 – 8. 7. See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 65 –8; and Pappe, Rise and Fall, 105, 186. 8. Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 7. 9. Ibid., 6. 10. Pappe, Rise and Fall, 86. 11. Ibid., 87. 12. Ibid., 167. 13. For a discussion of the importance of waqf properties for Jerusalem’s notable families see Gabriel Baer, “Jerusalem’s Families of Notables and the Wakf in the Early 19th Century,” in Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, 109– 22. See also Pappe, Rise and Fall, 86. 14. Butrus Abu-Manneh, “The Husaynis: The Rise of a Notable Family in 18th C. Palestine,” in Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, 93 – 108. 15. Porath, Emergence, 187; Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 8; and Taysir Jbara, Palestinian Leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni (Princeton, NJ: The Kingston Press, 1985), 27.

210

NOTES

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102 –105

16. Under Ottoman law the Shaykh al-Islam was the final judicial authority in Islam. 17. Jerusalem had been the provincial capital of the Roman province of JudaeaPalaestina. 18. Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council, 19. For a discussion of the position of the Cairo mufti see Rudolph Peters, “Muhammad al-Abbasi alMahdi (D. 1897), Grand Mufti of Egypt, and His “al-Fatawa al-Mahdiyya,” Islamic Law and Society 1, no. 1 (1994): 66 – 82. In Arabic the mufti’s title was actually mufti al-diyar al-misriyya (mufti of the Land of Egypt) not mufti alAkbar. The mufti of Jerusalem was also drawn from the Hanafi madhab. 19. The order of precedence is discussed in ISA, 1/573/3/385. 20. Cannadine’s argument, contra much post-colonial literature, is that class and not race played a decisive role in empire. In the context of Palestine it is difficult not to see the ethnic divide as paramount, due to the competition between Arabs, Jews, and the Palestine government. But it should be pointed out that during the military period, when Kamil al-Husayni was granted his award, this competition was not as strong as it would become later in the mandate, nor did British officials see it as intractable. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 21. Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 8. 22. See ISA, 2/140 for more information about this petition. Whittingham’s conversation with the mufti is recounted in Pappe, Rise and Fall, 199. 23. Porath notes that the pension given to the late mufti’s family was far larger than that prescribed by Ottoman law. Porath, Emergence, 190. 24. Shaykh Husam al-Jarallah was the inspector of the Shari’a Court of Appeal. Khalil al-Husayni became the acting head of the court after the death of Kamil al-Husayni, when the British decided to separate the offices of mufti and qadi. Three months later he would be appointed to the position permanently. See ISA, 2/20/245. 25. Muhammad Abu Sa’ud al-’Awri to District Governor of Jerusalem, March 21, 1921, ISA, 2/10/245. The qadi followed up this note with at least two further requests that Hajj Amin be appointed mufti. Porath notes that his support was somewhat surprising given the fact that al-’Awri was a moderate in his relationship with the government and the Jewish population. Porath, Emergence, 190. 26. These letters of support can be found in ISA, 2/10/245. 27. Porath, Emergence, 190. 28. D.D.P.S. to Assistant Civil Secretary (Political), March 23, 1921, ISA, 2/10/245. 29. British correspondence found in ISA, 2/10/245 reveals an administration that was impressed by the apparent countrywide support for the mufti. See also Pappe, Rise and Fall, 217. 30. See Porath, Emergence, 192; and Jbara, Palestinian Leader, 41. There is no smoking gun in the archival records for this particular example of Britain’s

NOTES

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

TO PAGES

105 –108

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“policy of divide and rule,” as Jbara has called it, unlike in the 1930s when there is ample evidence of British support for the Nationalist Party of the Nashashibi Mu’aridun (Opposition). Pappe, Rise and Fall, 206. Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 23. The exact year of the mufti’s birth is unclear. As Mattar has discussed in his biography of the mufti, Hajj Amin alternatively gave his year of birth as 1896 on visa applications between 1921 and 1923 and as 1895 on passport and visa applications between 1926 and 1934, which may be explained by a change in the way he computed his birth year according to the Islamic calendar (1333 AH) into the Western calendar. The mufti himself added to this confusion by originally writing down 1897 on his 1926 application before crossing out the final seven and writing a five. Yehoshua Porath, among other scholars, has used 1893 as the mufti’s birth year. See Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 156n22. Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 8. The Ottomans established the first government secondary school in 1891, where students could attend classes in Arabic, Turkish, French, and the basic sciences. Students were also inculcated in a sense of Ottoman patriotism. See Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 50 – 1. These details about Hajj Amin’s education are based on interviews that Mattar had with the mufti’s family and close associates. See Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 9 – 11. Hajj Amin served in Izmir and in various locations near the Black Sea during the war and did not see any action. Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 20. ‘Arif al-‘Arif’s name was struck from the government’s “black list” when he promised Deedes that he would no longer engage in conspiracies. He served as a district officer in Jenin, Nablus, Beisan, and Jaffa and in 1926 was seconded to the government of Transjordan as a chief secretary. For a discussion of his career in Palestine, see Wasserstein, The British in Palestine, 180–3. This meeting is described in a letter from Samuel to Deedes: High Commissioner to Civil Secretary, April 11, 1921, ISA, 2/10/245. Philip Mattar also notes that the high commissioner met with Hajj Amin on April 1, 1921, “to sound him out on his candidacy.” Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 26. According to Taysir Jbara the breakdown in votes in the election was as follows: 1. Husam al-Jarallah (19 votes), 2. Khalil al-Khalidi (17), 3. Musa alBudayri (12), 4. Hajj Amin al-Husayni (9), Muhammad Abu Su‘ad al-‘Awri, qadi of Jerusalem (3), and Amin al-‘Awri, member of the Shari‘a court (2). These original figures come from a quote in an article by A. S. Yehuda in the New York Times, January 2, 1944, that was republished in Joseph Schechtman, The Mufti and the Fuehrer (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1965). It is difficult to verify the accuracy of these figures, since there are no official tallies extant. See Jbara, Palestinian Leader, 42.

212

NOTES

TO PAGES

108 –112

41. A minute from Ernest Richmond laying out the Husayni position, argued that the late election had been “irregular and illegal because it did not proceed from the action of elected Municipalities and elected Administrative Councils. These do not exist and we cannot legally by means of the nominated bodies that have taken their place.” See Richmond Minute on “Protest over elections from representatives in Jaffa,” May 3, 1921, ISA, 2/10/245. The details of this argument are well covered in Porath, Emergence, 191. 42. The text of this proclamation comes from a British translation attached to a letter from the district commandant of police in Jerusalem to the district governor of Jerusalem. In that letter the policeman notes that five copies of the proclamation had been posted in the Old City between 11:00pm and 12:00am. See A. P. Albina, for District Commandant of Police, Jerusalem to District Governor of Jerusalem, April 20, 1921, ISA, 2/10/245. 43. Ernest Richmond privately agreed that the elections were invalid and suggested that The following method might be considered. To issue by means of gazette, press and possibly notices that the recent election having been shown to be irregular is null and void, that in view of the reception by the Government of Mazbatas from the Mudarisin, Imams, Ulemas [sic ] and numerous individuals throughout Palestine, in favour of the appointment of Al Hajj Amin Al Husseini, the Government considers it to be clearly proved that the people of Palestine desire the nomination of Al Hajj Amin and consequently hereby nominate him. Richmond Memorandum on the “Grand Mufti”, no date, ISA, 2/10/245. 44. Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 20; and Porath, Emergence, 193. 45. “The Committee for Moslem Religious Affairs,” Official Gazette, May 15, 1921, in PRO, CO 742/1. 46. While the order was signed by the high commissioner on December 20, 1921, it was published in the Official Gazette on January 1, 1922. 47. See article two of the “The Order Establishing the Supreme Muslim Council Order,” Official Gazette, January 1, 1922. PRO, CO 742/1. 48. Originally the funds made available to the SMC through waqf tithes was around P£50,000 but after a series of financial reforms, British officials set the rate at P£23,000 in 1932, which was the amount of money that the Palestine government gave the council from that point onward in lieu of actually collecting waqf tithes. 49. There were some qualifications involved with these rights. The council’s nominees for qadi or for membership on the Shari‘a Court of Appeal were technically subject to approval by the Palestine government, though it does not appear that the government ever exercised this right. The council was also required to send notice to the government of the dismissal of any officials from the waqf administration or the shari‘a courts, although again it appears that this requirement was rarely fulfilled or exercised. The council’s awqaf budget

NOTES

50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

TO PAGES

112 –115

213

was also to be sent to the Palestine government for information purposes. Finally, while the council was given the right to appoint muftis, the election of candidates for each muftiship was to be decided by a proposed independent “Special Election College,” or in the case of the mufti of Beersheba, by the tribal shaykhs of the district. See Article 8 of “The Order Establishing the Supreme Muslim Council Order,” Official Gazette, January 1, 1922. PRO, CO 742/1. The Palestine Government report of 1924 stated that the Supreme Muslim Council employed 552 waqf officers, 91 individuals in 15 shari‘a courts, and a further 550 marriage registrars (ma’dhuns), for a total of 1,193 employees. See Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 58. The revenues for the council averaged E£60,378 during the 1920s. This figure would rise in the 1930s and 1940s, so that over the course of the mandate the average was £76,639 (Egyptian or Palestinian). See Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 173. A dunum is the Arabic equivalent of the Ottoman Turkish do¨nu¨m, a measure of area that corresponded during the Ottoman period and for the first decade of British period to 919.3 square meters (9,895 square feet). In 1928, the measurement was changed to refer to 1,000 square meters and is still used as a measurement of land in Israel. Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 65. This nepotism is well detailed in Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 69 – 71. The complaints of the al-Nashishibis and other complainants are collected in ISA, 2/172, ISA, 2/6/189, and ISA, 2/190. Article 2 of “The Order Establishing the Supreme Muslim Council” stated that the members of the council would be elected for a period of four years, except for the Rais al-Ulama, who would be the permanent president of the council. See the “The Order Establishing the Supreme Muslim Council Order,” Official Gazette, January 1, 1922, PRO, CO 742/1. Porath, Emergence, 237. The new elections led to the creation of a council with three members drawn from the majlisiyiin – Hajj Amin al-Husayni, Muhammad Murad, and Sa‘id Shawa – and two members from the Opposition – ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Taji and Amin al-Tamimi, although the latter eventually became a great ally of Hajj Amin. Shuckburgh to CO, November 3, 1926, PRO, CO 733/13. Sir John Evelyn Shuckburgh had been brought by Winston Churchill from the India Office to head the Middle East Department when it was founded in February 1921. Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 29. British intelligence reported that the council’s mosques were used by Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Muzaffar, a close ally of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, and other preachers to propagandize against Arab participation in elections to the legislative council in 1923. See Quigley to Storrs, “Daily Intelligence Summary,” February 22, 1923, ISA, 2/10/242 I.

214

NOTES

TO PAGES

115 –122

59. Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 17. A similar argument is made by Yehoshua Porath, who contends that the British created the council and appointed Hajj Amin as its head in order to placate the Muslim community. See Porath, Emergence, 200 60. Ann Mosely Lesch, Arab Politics in Palestine, 1917 –1939: The Frustration of a National Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 186– 7. 61. See Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 6 – 16. 62. Ibid., 14. 63. J. B. Barron, “Muhammedan Wakfs in Palestine,” unpublished draft report, PRO, CO 733/20. Barron would later turn this report into a published book on awqaf. 64. Samuel to Curzon, November 29, 1920, PRO, FO 141/442/4.

Chapter 5

Religion and Politics at the Western Wall

1. The violence of August 1929 was originally called the “Political Disturbances of August, 1929” in official British writings, as in the Shaw Commission’s official title: “Commission on the Political Disturbances of August, 1929.” Over time the events came to be called the “Western Wall Riots” or “Wailing Wall Disturbances” in Western scholarship, linking the violence to the breakdown of order at the Wall. The term al-Buraq Revolt has been preferred in the work of Palestinian historians and Israeli historians who are sympathetic to the Palestinian position, such as Ilan Pappe, reflecting a more political understanding of the violence. Among Israelis, the events have often been described as the 1929 Massacres in reference to the massacres that occurred in Hebron and Safad or referenced more simply as Meora’ot Tarpat, “the Events of 5689 Anno Mundi” 2. Great Britain and Palestine 1915– 1945, Information Papers No. 20, 3rd edn (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1946), 42 and 44. 3. Erik Freas, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Haram al-Sharif: A Pan-Islamic or Palestinian Nationalist Cause?” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 1 (2012), 29. 4. Porath, Emergence, 266. 5. Alex Winder, “The ‘Western Wall’ Riots of 1929: Religious Boundaries and Communal Violence,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 1 (2012): 6 – 23. 6. Glen Bowman, “Introduction: Sharing the Sacra,” in Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places, ed. Glen Bowman (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 4. 7. Winder, “Western Wall Riots,” 11; Roberts, “Dividing Jerusalem.” 8. Winder, “Western Wall Riots,” 13. 9. The order described the Supreme Muslim Council as a body that would supervise the waqf system and administer the Islamic court system. “The Order Establishing the Supreme Muslim Council Order,” Official Gazette, January 1, 1922, PRO, CO 742/1.

NOTES

TO PAGES

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215

10. Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council, 57. The quote comes from the Palestine Official Gazette, January 1, 1922. 11. See Quigley to Storrs, “Daily Intelligence Summary,” February 22, 1923, ISA, 2/10/242 I. 12. The warning is mentioned in Samuel to Colonial Office, March 9, 1923, PRO, CO 733/43/133ff. Porath states that the mufti complied with this request but only after he was warned again after al-Muzaffar preached at the al-Aqsa Mosque a second time. Porath, Emergence, 154. The district governors’ reports on the SMC can be found in the following files: District Governor of Gaza to Chief Secretary, December 12, 1923, ISA, 2/6/172; District Governor of Samaria C. H. F. Cox to Chief Secretary, December 11, 1923, ISA, 2/6/172; and District Governor of Haifa G. S. Symes to Chief Secretary, December 6, 1923, ISA, 2/6/172. 13. Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 278. Kalvarisky was a quixotic figure who was involved in his own private project to win Arab support for Zionism through bribery. For more information on Kalvarisky, see Neil Caplan, “ArabJewish Contacts in Palestine after the First World War,” Journal of Contemporary History 12, no. 4 (1977): 635– 68. 14. See “Moslem Self-Sacrificing Society,” ISA, 2/5/166. 15. Broadhurst to Chief Secretary, May 7, 1924, ISA, 2/5/166. It is not clear from these reports but it seems likely that the organization was a revival or simply a continuation of the underground revolutionary group known as al-Fida’iyya (The Self-Sacrificers), which had originally been founded in Jaffa in 1919 under the name “The Black Hand” by members of the Arab Club and Literary Society and had been active in various forms throughout Palestine until 1923. Porath, Emergence, 129. 16. During the khutba scare mentioned in the introduction, Ernest Richmond, the assistant political secretary, argued that he could no longer continue receiving police reports, since “these reports (and I have had several similar) are unsatisfactory in the sense that while on the one hand they denote a serious situation on the other (a) there are no proofs or even very convincing arguments þ (b) they do not accord with my reading of the situation (for what it is worth).” Richmond was the most prominent pro-Arab official in the Palestine government but his view that intelligence reports were prone to exaggeration was widely held. See Richmond’s marginal notes on Quigley to Chief Secretary November 4, 1920, ISA, 2/5/163. 17. Storrs to Chief Secretary, January 4, 1924, “The Moderate Party,” ISA, 2/6/172. 18. Luke to High Commissioner January 14, 1929, PRO, CO 733.172. 19. District Governor of Gaza to Chief Secretary, December 12, 1923, ISA, 2/6/172. 20. District Governor of Samaria C. H. F. Cox to Chief Secretary, December 11, 1923, ISA, 2/6/172.

216

NOTES

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124 –127

21. District Governor of Haifa G. S. Symes to Chief Secretary, December 6, 1923, ISA, 2/6/172. Italics added. 22. Shuckburgh to CO, November 3, 1926, PRO, CO 733/13. 23. Richmond’s “Report on the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem” was delivered sometime in April 1920. For commentary on the report, see CO 323/824. Richmond’s work would later be published as an illustrated book in 1924: Ernest Tatham Richmond, The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem: A Description of Its Structure and Decoration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). 24. Samuel to Curzon, August 24, 1920, ISA, 2/6/184. 25. Samuel’s plea to Curzon to take up the matter of the repair of the Dome of the Rock included a request to open up public subscriptions in Britain and across the empire to fund the repairs. Samuel to Curzon, August 24, 1920, ISA, 2/6/184. The viceroy of India reminded Curzon that British funding would be looked upon as a sign that the British were taking over the Muslim holy places, especially given that the Khilafat Committee (a nationalist organization of Indian Muslims) was using the fact of British control over the sites to motivate the Muslim population of India against imperialism. See Viceroy of India to Curzon, February 11, 1920, ISA, 2/6/184. 26. ISA, 2/6/184. Such language endeared the SMC to officials such as Ernest Richmond, who saw this as a sign that Muslims were developing “a more appreciative outlook regarding” monuments. See Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground, 69. 27. Oliphant to His Majesty’s Consul, Jeddah, September 13, 1923, ISA, 2/6/184. 28. Scott to Foreign Office, September 10, 1923, ISA, 2/6/184. This delegation was headed by Jamal al-Husseini, a leading figure in the Muslim-Christian Association, indicating the close relationship that the SMC had with Arab political groups. 29. ISA, 2/6/184. 30. Palestinian participation in the Muslim congresses of the 1920s is outlined in Martin Kramer, Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslim Congresses (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 124. The mufti’s interest in the Muslim Congresses would lead to his organization of a Muslim congress in defence of the holy places in Jerusalem in 1928 and a larger General Islamic Congress in 1931, also in Jerusalem. 31. The Indian Khilafat Committee would remain a strong supporter of the mufti throughout the rest of his tenure. The relationship was so close that one of its main leaders, Muhammad ’Ali, was buried at the Haram al-Sharif upon his death in 1931. See Chapter 6. 32. Philip Mattar gives some rough figures in his book about the mufti: A delegation to Hijaz was sent in July 1923 (during the hajj) raising P£12,000 and to India in October, raising another P£22,000. Delegations in 1924 to Hijaz, Iraq, Kuwait, and Bahrain raised the total sum to P£84,000. Contributing to this success were King Fu’ad of

NOTES

TO PAGES

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Egypt, who gave P£10,000, Nizam al-Haydarabad of India, who contributed P£7,000 and King Faysal of Iraq, who gave about P£6,000. Since the Palestine pound was not issued until 1927, it is likely that these figures represent the Egyptian pound that was used in the country until that time. It is difficult to translate the P£84,000 figure into today’s money but 84,000 pounds sterling in 1924 would be around £4.5 million or $6.2 million in 2016 money. Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 29. 33. For example, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Muzaffar had represented the Arab Executive as the protector of the Haram al-Sharif in a July 1922 address to the Egyptian people: The Islamic Palestinian people, who have stood guard over the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Noble Rock for 1,300 years, proclaims to the Islamic world that these Holy Places are in great danger from Zionist aggression . . . We, as vigilant loyal guardians charged by God with preservation of the Third of the Holy Precincts . . . have devoted ourselves to its protection . . . It is to the aid of the Faith that we call you, Egyptians and Muslims, with constant and breaking hearts.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

‘Al-Ahram, July 4, 1922, as quoted in Nels Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Notables (London: Kegan Paul, 1982), 27. Porath, Emergence, 231. These petitions can be found in ISA, 2/172; ISA 2/189; and ISA, 2/190. Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 233. Ibid., 231. Porath, Emergence, 234. Quoted in Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 234. For an analysis of the role that Jewish cultural and economic fairs played in the construction of Jewish national identity in mandatory Palestine see James Gelvin, The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of Conflict, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144– 55. For more details on these institutions see Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council, 135– 45. Ilan Pappe, “Hajj Amin and the Buraq Revolt,” Jerusalem Quarterly File 6, no. 6 (2003): 8. Yehoshua Porath points out that both Nissim Bechar and Baron Edmond de Rothschild had attempted to buy the Wall before World War I, but these attempts had not led to the same level of tensions between the Arab and Jewish communities of Palestine. Porath, Emergence, 258, 259. Weizmann to Balfour, May 30, 1918, CZA L3/310. Ibid. Minutes of the second meeting of the Zionist Commission, March 14, 1918, CZA L3/285. The site is referred to in the seventeenth sura of the Qur’an, which refers to Muhammad’s visit to the “further mosque,” considered by Muslims to be a reference to the al-Aqsa Mosque.

218

NOTES TO PAGES 130 –132

47. Weizmann’s full quote deserves to be cited in order to show his condescending view of the neighbourhood: [The Western Wall] is surrounded by a group of miserable, dirty cottages and derelict buildings, which makes the whole place from the hygienic point of view a source of constant humiliation to the Jews of the world. Our most sacred monument, in our most sacred city, is in the hands of some doubtful Moghreb [sic ] religious community, which keeps these cottages as a source of income. We are willing to compensate this community very liberally, but we should like the place to be cleaned up; we should like to give it a dignified and respectable appearance.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

CO 733/132/44051-053442, cited in Mary Ellen Lundsten, “Wall Politics: Zionist and Palestinian Strategies in Jerusalem, 1928,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 1 (1978): 7. This did not completely end attempts by the Jewish community to buy the Wall. Ilan Pappe mentions a second attempt by Weizmann to purchase the Wall in 1928 but he was warned against pursuing the proposal by High Commissioner John Chancellor. A year later Chancellor suggested to the mufti that he might allow the Jews to buy the area in front of the Wall in order to establish a place of worship. See Pappe, “Buraq Revolt,” 8 and 11. The sale of the Wall was also suggested in 1929, when Prince Muhammad Ali Pasha (a member of the Egyptian royal family) suggested selling it to the Jewish community for £100,000 as a means of placating the Arab community. This proposal was not followed up. Lundsten, “Wall Politics,” 8. Examples of these pictures as well as a discussion of how they were used in Zionist and Arab propaganda can be found in Daniel Bertrand Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 126ff. Kook’s words were reproduced in the Palin Commission report, PRO, WO 32/9614. As reprinted in Hillel Cohen, 1929: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2015), 74. Lundsten, “Wall Politics,” 9. The Arab Executive’s address is mentioned in al-Ahram, July 4, 1922, as quoted in Johnson, Islam and the Politics of Meaning, 27. Yitzhak Reiter’s argument is referenced in Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht, “Sacred Urbanism: Jerusalem’s Sacrality, Urban Sociology, and the History of Religions,” paper presented at the conference “Jerusalem across the Disciplines,” February 19 – 21, 2007, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 26. Quoted in Lundsten, “Wall Politics,” 8. British records from the mandate period have a number of files on disputes over these Christian sites, which typically baffled British officials. For a good

NOTES

58.

59. 60.

61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

TO PAGES

132 –137

219

introduction to this competition see L. G. A. Cust, “The Status Quo at the Holy Places,” PRO, CO 733/132/2; and Rock, The Status Quo in the Holy Places, although the latter displays a pro-Franciscan bias. Muslim complaints led the Palestine government to offer to undertake the repairs itself. The Jewish community did not find this solution acceptable and decided to withdraw its application for repairs. Repairs at the site were again proposed in 1925 and this time the government’s Public Works Department was given permission to undertake structural repairs; however, they were not allowed to conduct repairs inside the tomb. PRO, CO/733/22. This correspondence was brought to the attention of the military governor of Palestine in 1920 by Mufti Kamil al-Husayni and was later quoted in notes by Attorney General Norman Bentwich on the “Memorandum on the Western or Wailing Wall, 1928,” ISA, 3/359. There is no indication in the archives for why the committee never met but it is possible that British officials decided that such a matter would be best handled by the proposed international Holy Places Commission, and then dropped the entire issue as tensions lessened. See Bentwich, “Memorandum on the Western or Wailing Wall, 1928,” ISA, 3/359. In the first years of the British occupation of Palestine, the government showed genuine concern about these kinds of petitions but by 1925 it had become apparent that the League of Nations would always defer to the British authorities in the governance of Palestine. The letter is quoted in the notes by Bentwich on the “Memorandum on the Western or Wailing Wall, 1928,” ISA, 3/359. This is shown in the description of the struggle over the Wall and the resulting violence as the thawra al-Buraq (the al-Buraq revolt). See Mohammad ‘Izzat Darwazeh, Muthakirat Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwazeh [The Memoirs of Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwazeh], vol. 1 (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 1993). Martin Kolinsky, “Premeditation in the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929?” Middle Eastern Studies 26, no. 1 (1990): 23. The official title of the commission – the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929 – was a clue to the kind of sober middle ground that the commission intended to stake out. By calling the event “disturbances” the British carefully avoided drawing attention to either the Arab view that the event was a national uprising or the Jewish view that it was a pogrom. Al-Jami‘a al-‘Arabiya, October 1, 1928. The text of this memorandum is reprinted on page 31 of the Shaw Commission Report. See Great Britain, Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929, Cmd. 3530 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1930). See for example, Hajj Amin to Shawkat Ali, October 17, 1928, PRO, CO 733/173/67314/26. Bernard Wasserstein, who makes reference to the letter,

220

71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

87.

NOTES

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137 –142

notes that the letter never reached its destination since it was intercepted by British intelligence in India and forwarded to the Palestine police. Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 229. Shaw Commission Report, 32. The report also noted that a similar organization called “The Committee for the Defence of the Buraq el-Sharif” had been established before then. Shaw Commission Report, 74; Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 229. Shaw Commission Report, 31. Specifically, the report stated, “No evidence was brought before us of any intemperate articles appearing in the Hebrew Press in Palestine prior to the resumption of the building operations in the neighbourhood of the Wailing Wall on the 20th July last [i.e., 1929].” Shaw Commission Report, 42. See Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem. Pappe’s text should read Harry Luke, not Harry Lock. Ilan Pappe, “Hajj Amin and the Buraq Revolt,” Jerusalem Quarterly File 6, no. 6 (2003): 9. Ibid. Porath, Emergence, 266. See for example Perry Anderson, “Agendas for Radical History,” Radical History Review 36 (1986): 26 – 45; and Zachary Lockman, “Railway Workers and Relational History: Arabs and Jews in British-Ruled Palestine,” Comparative Studies in Society and Social History 35, no. 3 (July 1993): 601– 27; and Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine 1906– 1948 (Berkeley: University of California, 1996). A good brief overview of relational history’s place in historiography on Israel/Palestine can be found in Abigail Jacobsen, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and Jewish Rule (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 17 – 18. Cohen particularly highlights how the indiscriminate nature and sheer horror of the violence in 1929 caused a hardening of the lines between the Arab and Jewish communities. See Cohen, Year Zero, 253– 60. For a discussion of the history of the MCAs see Porath, Emergence, 274– 85. Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 222. Ibid., 220– 5. Shaw Commission Report, 74. The SMC also protested against Jewish actions in 1925 but this protest is not mentioned in the memorandum. The population figures were given by William Ormsby-Gore during a parliamentary debate on May 2, 1929; see HC Deb 02 May 1929 vol 227 c1714. The censuses of 1922 and 1931 showed a growth in the Jewish community from 83,790 to 174,606, with the Jewish percentage of the population rising from 11.14 to 16.9. The information about land purchases comes from Pappe, Buraq, 11. See Great Britain, Colonial Office, The Western or Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Cmd. 3229 (London: November 1928). The government’s position was stated in the White Paper itself. Ibid.

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221

88. Luke to Secretary of State for the Colonies (Amery), November 30, 1928, ISA, 3/359. 89. High Commissioner to Secretary of State, June 14, 1929, ISA, 3/359. 90. This would eventually lead to the high commissioner promulgating a set of rules in September 1929 (i.e., in the wake of the riots of 1929) that allowed Jews to bring certain objects to the Wall – books, mats, lamps, and scrolls – but not benches or screens. See ISA, 3/359. 91. This construction had originally begun in May 1929 but had been halted by the government and the case referred to the Law Officers in London. In the middle of May 1929 the government received a response from London that confirmed that the SMC was well within its rights to build at the site since it enjoyed complete ownership of the Haram al-Sharif. This decision was forwarded to the SMC on June 11 and construction recommenced on July 20. 92. Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 230 93. Ibid., 232. 94. It was Keith-Roach who had given the original order to remove the screen. This demonstration is discussed in ibid. 95. Beitar or Brit Trumpeldor was a revisionist Zionist group that took its name from a Jewish settler Joseph Trumpledor who was considered an early martyr for Zionism having lost his life in an attack on the village of Tel Hai by a Bedouin tribe in 1919. Shaw Commission Report, 54 and 155. 96. Wasserstein, British in Palestine, 233. 97. Cohen makes the persuasive argument that after 1929, the distinction made by both Jews and Arabs between the Jews of the old Yishuv and the new Zionist immigrants no longer operated. With Arabs killing/murdering both Zionists and non-Zionist Mizrahi Jews, the latter were drawn toward their Zionist co-religionists and away from their Muslim and Christian neighbours with whom they had shared a language and culture. Cohen, Year Zero, 255–60. 98. Shaw Commission Report, 75. 99. Ibid., 64. 100. Cohen, Year Zero, 74; Winder, “Western Wall Riots.” 101. According to Porath, the 1928– 29 Western Wall struggle brought about the revival of the Jaffa MCA, and with the surge in nationalist feeling after the riots, MCAs were revived in Ramallah, Ramlah, and Lydda. The events of 1929 also led to revitalization of the Arab Executive. See Porath, Emergence, 280 and 289. 102. Ibid., 266.

Chapter 6

The Fall of the Supreme Muslim Council

1. The British poll is mentioned in Pappe, Rise and Fall, 246. 2. Ibid. 3. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 82.

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4. Cohen’s analysis of the mufti’s actions at the Wall is based on Rana Barakat’s 2007 dissertation on the events of 1929. See Cohen, Year Zero, 93. 5. Ibid. 6. Shaw Commission Report, 77. 7. Chancellor to Passfield, October 5, 1929, PRO, CO 733/175/67411/II/2. 8. Philby’s plan, which revived the idea of representative government that the Arabs had rejected earlier in the decade, was only given in a private capacity. Its rejection by Zionist officials and by the Colonial Office meant that it was never taken up by the Palestine government. 9. Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 51. 10. Hajj Amin had contact with the militant Black Hand organization, which under ‘Iz al-Din al-Qassam launched attacks on Jewish villagers and Palestine policemen, though the mufti explicitly rejected al-Qassam’s militant approach. 11. Pappe, Rise and Fall, 145. 12. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 42. 13. Ibid., 63. 14. Mattar, Mufti of Jerusalem, 49. 15. As seen in his support for the campaign to boycott the legislative council elections or his supposed support for secret groups such as the Fida’yin, mentioned in Chapter 5. 16. Pappe recounts that the disgruntled Musa Kazim embarked on a propaganda campaign in the pages of the family owned newspaper al-Jamaa’ al-Arabiyya in 1931 to convince the Arab public that they still had to fight against the Zionist takeover of the Haram al-Sharif. Pappe, Rise and Fall, 245. 17. Moaz Azaryahu and Yitzhak Reiter, “The Geopolitics of Interment: An Inquiry into the Burial of Muhammad Ali in Jerusalem, 1931,” Israel Studies 20, no. 1 (2015): 34. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. On this note, Azaryahu and Reiter note that the close relationship between the mufti and the ‘Ali brothers would lead to a Palestine Day being held in India on May 16, 1930. Azaryahu and Reiter, “Geopolitics of Interment,” 34. 22. Ibid., 38. 23. Jerusalem would instead become the site of a Zionist pantheon after the reinterment of Herzl’s remains in what has since become Israel’s national cemetery on Mt. Herzl. Azaryahu and Reiter, “Geopolitics of Interment,” 52. 24. Freas, “Hajj Amin al-Husyani,” 34. 25. See Kramer, Islam Assembled. 26. Freas, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni,” 39. 27. Mattar, Mufti, 62. 28. Ibid., 61. 29. Freas, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni,” 38. 30. Ibid., 39.

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31. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 61. 32. Kramer, Islam Assembled; Freas, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni,” 44. 33. Daphne Tsimhoni, “The Arab Christians and the Palestinian Arab National Movement during the Formative Stage,” in The Palestinians and the Middle East Conflict, An International Conference Held at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Haifa, April 1976, ed. Gabriel Ben-Dor (Ramat Gan, Israel: Turtledove Publishing, 1978), 76. 34. See Erik Freas, “Muslim-Christian Relations in Palestine during the British Mandate Period,” (PhD dissertation, University of St. Andrews, 2006), 287. 35. Freas, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni,” 46. 36. Ibid., 50. 37. Kramer, Islam Assembled, 192. 38. Freas, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni,” 51. 39. Pappe notes that the Nashashibis created ties with rural farmers through village shaykhs and in the 1930s created a Farmers’ Party that the Husaynis did not attempt to counter. Pappe, Rise and Fall, 228– 9. 40. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 79. 41. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4. 42. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 63. 43. Pappe, Rise and Fall, 259. 44. Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 258. 45. The best scholarly account of the Istiqlal is Weldon Matthews, Confronting an Empire, Constructing a Nation: Arab Nationalist and Popular Politics in Mandate Palestine (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2006). 46. Al-Qassam was one of the signatories of a letter of support from Haifa for Hajj Amin’s candidacy to the muftiship. Pappe, Rise and Fall, 214. 47. Freas, “Muslim-Christian Relations,” 291. 48. Johnson, Islam and Revolt, 39 – 44. 49. Pappe, Rise and Fall, 270. 50. The mufti’s meeting with Qassam is recounted in Pappe’s book, which is based upon the memoirs of ‘Izzat Darwaza, the general secretary of the General Islamic Congress in 1931 and the secretary of the SMC in 1936. Pappe, 169. 51. Pappe, Rise and Fall, 263. 52. Ibid., 272. 53. The mufti’s participation in the revolt obviously put him in a difficult position, as he was still technically an employee of the Palestine government. He tried at least initially to maintain a moderate position by refraining from using his position as mufti and head of the SMC to give the revolt a religious dimension and by maintaining only a partial strike of SMC employees, but in heading the AHC he was forced to take a more confrontational stance. Freas, “Muslim-Christian Relations,” 310. 54. Wauchope to Ormsby-Gore, November 3, 1936, CO 733/387/2, as quoted in Freas, “Muslim-Christian Relations,” 310.

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55. Even before the disbanding of the AHC, the Palestine government had imprisoned a number of Arab politicians involved with the AHC, some of whom served out their sentences in concentration camps. 56. For a discussion of the council between 1937 and 1948 see Kupferschmidt, Supreme Muslim Council, 255.

Conclusion 1. Harry Luke memorandum enclosed in HC to Secretary of State for the Colonies, June 18, 1929, PRO, CO 733/172. 2. Shuckburgh to CO, November 3, 1926, PRO, CO 733/13. 3. Wauchope to Colonial Office, March 12, 1932, CO 733/222/7. 4. Minute by N. L. Mayle, March 30, 1932, CO 733/222/7. 5. Minute by H. F. Downie, April 9, 1932, CO 733/222/7. 6. Ibid. 7. Samuel to Curzon, November 29, 1920, PRO, FO 141/442/4. 8. For a good account of Israeli policy see Alisha Rubin Peled, Debating Islam in the Jewish State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001). Kupferschmidt also offers a brief account of Jordanian and Israeli policy; see Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council, 257– 61. 9. Peled, Debating Islam, 5. 10. Ibid., 15.

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INDEX

‘Abd Allah Hasan, Muhammad, 29 ‘Abd al-Hadi, ‘Awni, 71, 152 Abduh, Muhammad, 33, 74, 201n39 Abdulhamid II, Sultan, 32, 33, 55, 98 Abdulmecid, Sultan, 50 Abu Madyan Waqf, 120, 130 Abu Sa‘ud, Hasan, 74 Abu Sa‘ud, Muhammad, 104 Adamson, Richard, 31, 67 advisory council, 86, 87, 90 al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din, 32, 33 Ahmed, Muhammad, 29 ‘Ali, Muhammad, 34, 127, 155, 156, 158 ‘Ali, Shawkat, 34, 127, 155– 8 All-India Muslim League, 32, 42 Allenby, Edmund, 45, 47, 48, 52 Andrews, Lewis Yelland, 168 anti-imperialism, 21, 29, 32, 33, 38 anti-Semitism, 75, 110 al-Aqsa mosque, 1, 5, 55, 74, 99, 109, 110, 118, 122, 123, 128, 132, 137, 145 Anglo-Muhammadan Law, 8, 38, 39, 116, 197n73 Arab Agency, 69, 87, 88, 89, 93, 115 Arab Boy Scouts, 164 Arab Bureau, 43, 46 Arab Club (al-Nadi al-‘Arabi), 71 – 3, 82, 90 – 2, 95, 121, 172

Arab Executive, 71, 89 – 95, 121, 124, 127, 129, 132, 141, 152, 164, 172 Arab Higher Committee, 93, 150, 167, 168, 174 Arab National Party, 122, 123, 127, 141, 161 Arab Youth Society (al-Jamiyyah al-‘Arabiyya al-Fatat), 71, 72 Arafat, Yasser, 119, 176 ‘Arif al-‘Arif, 68, 81, 82, 108 charged with incitement, 83, 96 pardoning by Samuel, 86, 96 Ashbee, C. R., 51 al-Azhar University, 106 ‘Azzam, ‘Abd al-Rahman, 157 Balfour, Arthur, 58, 121, 129 Balfour Declaration, 13, 42, 85, 162 Arab opposition to, 15, 31, 68, 69, 72, 79, 84, 89, 94, 95, 114 and British policy, 14 – 15, 43, 48, 49, 54, 86, 87, 88, 94, 101 Barron, J. B., 51, 116, 117 Beitar, 145, 221n95 Ben-Gurion, David, 149 Bentham, Jeremy, 38 Bentwich, Norman, 51, 52, 97, 107, 143, 144 Bialik, H. N., 139

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biblical geography, 25, 186n25 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, 21 Bols, Louis, 47 Bolshevism, 4, 34, 35 al-Budayri, Musa, 106, 108 Camp, J. N., 79 Central Moslem Authority, 63, 64, 101, 111, 172 Central Wakf Committee, 63, 97, 101, 102 Chancellor, John, 50, 137, 143, 144, 145, 151, 158 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 23, 26, 50, 51, 53, 132 Church of the Nativity, 47, 50, 51, 53 Churchill White Paper see white papers Churchill, Winston, 88, 89 Clayton, Gilbert, 78, 102 Clermont-Ganneau, Charles, 26 Cleveland, Charles, 34 Collective Responsibility for Crime Ordinance of 1921, 92 Committee for Moslem Religious Affairs, 64, 110 communalism, 8, 16, 17, 30, 44, 55, 56, 121 Congress Party (India), 152, 164 congresses Congress of the Islamic World in Mecca (1926), 127, 157 Congress of the Palestinian Muslim Nation (1931), 160 General Islamic Congress for the Caliphate in Cairo (1926), 157 General Islamic Congress in Jerusalem (1931), 127, 138, 156– 61 Islamic Congress in Jerusalem (1928), 127, 136, 137, 138, 157 Pilgrimage Congress in Mecca (1924), 157 Cromer, Earl of (Evelyn Baring), 3, 21, 22, 33, 39, 48, 178n5

crusades British references to, 45, 190n12 Curzon, Lord George Nathanial, 6, 13, 126 Curzon, Robert, 26 Cust, Lionel Archer, 50 – 2, 54, 55, 59 Cyprus British Islamic policy in, 40, 41, 62, 116 al-Dajani, ‘Abdulla, 113 al-Dajani, Raghib, 74 Damascus, 10, 71, 98, 100 Dar al-Da’wa wal-Irshad, 106 Darwaza, ‘Izzat, 71, 105, 136 Deedes, Wyndham, 1, 4, 5, 8, 46, 97, 107 Delegations Palestinian Arab to London and Europe, 94, 151 Supreme Muslim Council to Muslim world, 125– 7, 132 Deobandis, 34 Disraeli, Benjamin, 2, 24 Dome of the Rock, 23, 51, 55, 99, 109, 118, 155 fundraising campaign to repair, 125– 7, 155 and nationalism, 131, 132 Downie, H. F., 171 “dual obligation”, 87, 88 East India Company, 27, 39 E´cole de Fre`res, 106 Egypt, 4, 21, 31, 32, 33, 45, 46, 52, 75, 91, 102, 106, 125, 146, 152, 164 Britain’s Islamic policy in, 39 – 40, 41, 116 Palestinian delegations to, 125, 126, 132, 137 revolution of 1919 in, 68, 79, 93, 94, 154 Egyptian Expeditionary Forces, 45, 46, 47, 58, 78

INDEX fanaticism Arab, 2, 3, 27, 31 Islamic, 1, 4, 27, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37, 67 –9 Faysal, King of Syria, 68, 71, 72, 79, 84 France (and French), 1, 4, 14, 22, 37, 42, 47, 58, 80, 96, 106, 116, 165 Gandhi, Muhatma, 163 Gibb, H. A. R., 157 “good Muslims” British concept of, 9, 35 – 7, 38, 39, 173, 188n60 grand mufti Egypt, 39, 102 Istanbul, 61, 102 Palestine, 37, 97, 102 Graves, Philip, 46 Greater Syria, 10, 68, 71, 72, 180n21, 180n22 Greek Orthodox Church, 50, 58, 61, 78, 102 relationship with SMC, 161 Haddad, Gabriel, 107 Hague Convention of 1907, 48, 192n26 Haifa, 37, 64, 80, 89, 104, 113, 123, 124, 160, 165, 166 Haram al-Sharif, 12, 118 and Hajj Amin al-Husayni, 148, 149, 154, 159, 168 in Islamic politics, 156, 158 and Jordan, 175 in nationalist politics, 74, 109, 110, 118– 42,176, 217n33 opinion of Arab Christians about, 161 and the “status quo”, 53 – 5 See also al-Aqsa mosque; Dome of the Rock; Western Wall Harrington, L., 81 Haycraft, Thomas, 134 Hebrew University, 103, 161 Hebron (and Hebronites), 66– 8, 79, 81, 82, 104, 128, 129, 136, 146

241

Hegel, Wilhelm Friedrich, 20 Hijaz, 33, 125, 126 Holy Fire celebration, 10, 12, 26 Holy Places Commission, 58 – 9, 134 Hunter, W. W., 28 – 9, 31, 33, 34 Husayn ibn ‘Ali, Sharif, 71, 79, 156 Husaynis, 8, 10, 18, 37, 72, 83, 91, 97, 98– 100, 103, 104, 105, 108, 110, 114, 127, 128, 141, 164 See also al-Husayni, ‘Abd al-Qadir; al-Husayni, ‘Abd al-Qadir ibn Karim al-Din; al-Husayni, Hajj Amin (Muhammad); al-Husayni, Hussein; al-Husayni, Jamal; al-Husayni, Kamil; al-Husayni, Musa Kazim; al-Husayni, Sa‘id Bey; al-Husayni, Salim; al-Husayni, Shukri; al-Husayni, Tahir; al-Husayni, Umar Fahmi al-Husayni, ‘Abd al-Qadir, 166 al-Husayni, ‘Abd al-Qadir ibn Karim al-Din, 99 al-Husayni, Hajj Amin (Muhammad) as anti-colonial leader, 6, 174 anti-Zionism of, 68, 126 appointment as mufti, 97, 105– 11 and Arab nationalism, 71 and boycott campaign of the legislative council elections, 115 charged with incitement, 83, 96 as colonial intermediary, 115, 121, 149, 151, 153 conservative politics of, 161– 3 consolidation of power in SMC, 113– 15, 125– 9 as defender of the Western Wall and Haram al-Sharif, 74, 118, 132, 136– 41, 144– 6, 150, 154 dismissal of, 167– 8 and Herbert Samuel, 96– 8 to muftiship, 104 and Nabi Musa, 68, 83, 106 and Palestine Arab Revolt, 7, 166– 7

242

ISLAM UNDER THE PALESTINE MANDATE

and Palestinian nationalism, 72, 76, 83, 140– 2, 148 pan-Islamic politics of, 35, 154– 61 pardoned by Samuel, 86, 96 petitions in support of his election, 104 “quietism” of, 121– 5 al-Husayni, Hussein, 99, 100 al-Husayni, Jamal, 15, 71, 92, 155, 201n31, 216n28 al-Husayni, Kamil, 5, 37, 63, 64, 96, 104, 106, 122 anti-Zionism of, 103 appointment to Shari‘a Court of Appeal and Central Wakf Committee, 97, 102 death of, 103 elevation to grand mufti, 97, 102, 103 granted C.M.G., 37, 103 relations with British, 101– 3 al-Husayni, Musa Kazim, 68, 81, 98, 121, 124, 142, 152, 154, 163, 166 dismissal from mayoralty, 83, 91, 105, 113 al-Husayni, Sa‘id Bey, 98 al-Husayni, Salim, 99 al-Husayni, Shukri, 98 al-Husayni, Tahir, 105, 122 al-Husayni, Umar Fahmi, 99 Hussein– McMahon correspondence, 13 India, 4, 8, 20, 27 – 35, 42, 44, 45 – 6, 51, 53, 57, 70, 79, 86, 90 – 7, 120, 125, 126, 127, 137, 154, 155, 156, 158, 162, 163, 173 Britain’s Islamic policy in, 38– 40, 49, 61, 62, 116 See also ‘Ali, Muhammad; ‘Ali, Shawkat; All-India Muslim League; Congress Party; Khilafat Movement indirect Rule, 7, 8, 36 Iqbal, Muhammad, 157 Iraq, 4, 5, 71, 93, 125, 154, 171 Britain’s Islamic policy in, 116

Islamic congress see congresses Islamic university in Jerusalem proposal for, 158– 61 Ismail, Khedive, 39 Israel, 7, 12, 15, 18, 60, 74, 140, 174, 175, 176 Istanbul, 19, 55, 61, 62, 71, 100, 102, 106 Istiqlal party, 71, 93, 164 Italy, 58, 158 Jabotinsky, Vladimir (Ze’ev), 83, 144, 145 Jaffa, 24, 31, 43, 72, 74, 80, 90, 104, 113, 123, 128, 146 riots (1921), 16, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 97, 110, 122, 124 Jamal Pasha, 70 al-Jami‘a al-Arabiyya, 127, 140, 154 Jarallah, Husam al-Din, 104– 6, 108–10 al-Jawhariyyeh, Wasif, 12, 68 Jerusalem British and European ideas about, 22 – 7, 31 British conquest of, 14, 19, 41, 42, 46, 117 demonstrations in, 80, 93, 139, 145 European competition over, 43 –4 and Nabi Musa, 16, 66 – 9, 77 New City, 13, 61 notable politics in, 71 – 2, 74 Old City, 25, 49, 53, 82, 83, 109, 110, 175 Ottoman period, 9, 12, 13, 22, 78, 98 – 100 religious significance of, 10, 50, 75, 130, 155, 176 violence in, 124, 136, 146 See also congresses: General Islamic Congress in Jerusalem (1931); congresses: Islamic Congress in Jerusalem (1928); muftiship of Jerusalem

INDEX Jewish Agency, 15, 88, 115 Jews, 1, 43, 52, 77, 87 in British policymaking, 14 – 16, 30, 44 conflict with Arabs, 66, 67, 68, 75, 81 – 3, 86, 89, 109, 146, 151, 162, 165, 167, 174, 176 holy places, 52, 75, 118, 120, 131, 156 and the millet system, 54 – 7 in Ottoman Palestine, 9 – 13, 23, 24, 63 Samuel on, 49 and the Western Wall, 42, 52, 118, 119, 129– 48, 155 Zionism, 42 Jordan (and Transjordon), 77, 96, 116, 175 Kaddourah, Asad, 64 Kalvarisky, Chaim, 122, 215n13 Keith-Roach, Edward, 57 al-Khalidi, Khalil, 104, 106, 108 al-Khalidi, Yusuf Diya’, 98 Khilafat movement, 34, 35, 125, 126, 127, 155– 8 See also ‘Ali, Muhammad; ‘Ali, Shawkat khutba dedication 1920 controversy about, 1, 3 – 6, 91, 178n13 King-Crane Commission, 72, 85 Kinglake, Alexander, 24 Klausner, Joseph, 144 Kook, Abraham, 131 League of Nations covenant, 14 enquiry into rights of Jews and Muslims at Western Wall, 155 and Holy Places Commission, 59 Permanent Mandates Commission of, 53, 88, 94, 134, 138, 139

243

legislative council boycott against elections for, 89, 93, 115, 121, 122, 163, 174 proposal for, 87, 88, 183n43 Libya, 158, 159 Literary Society (Muntada al-Adabi), 31, 71, 72, 73, 90, 91, 95, 172 Lloyd George, David, 23, London, 25, 26, 43, 59, 86, 88, 94, 131, 138, 145, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 158, 164 Lugard, Lord Frederick, 35 – 6 Luke, Harry, 5, 123, 137, 138, 143, 144, 169 MacDonald, Ramsay, 157 MacInnes, Bishop Rennie, 45, 46, 47, 190n8 Maghribi quarter, 120, 130, 131 Mandate for Palestine (legal document), 13, 15, 58, 59, 87 mandate system, 13, 22, 29, 116, 183n41 See also Mandate for Palestine Mayle, N. L., 170– 1 Meinertzhagen, Richard, 80, 84, 204n70 Mill, John Stuart, 38 millet system, 8, 10– 11, 17, 92, 181n27 British ideas about, 44, 48, 49, 54 – 6, 59 creating the Muslim millet, 62 – 5, 101, 102, 112, 153 scholarly debates about, 57 See also neo-millet system Milner, Lord Alfred, 46 Mond, Alfred, 109, 131 Money, Arthur Wingram, 47 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Bre`de et de, 21 muftiship of Jerusalem, 101– 2, 172 elections to, 108– 11, 212n43 See also grand mufti Murad, Muhammad, 64, 113, 198n80

244

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Muslim-Christian Associations (MCA), 43, 71 – 3, 90 – 2, 121, 127– 9, 141, 155, 172 statutes of, 72 – 3 al-Muzaffar, Abd al-Qadir, 74, 122 Nabi Musa festival, 1, 2, 6, 10, 12, 26, 54, 77, 128, 181n26, 203n58 1918 festival, 78 1919 festival, 77, 79 nationalism at, 76 – 9, 103, 110 riots in 1920, 16, 17, 66 – 70, 80 –5, 113, 122, 153 shrine associated with, 77 and Supreme Muslim Council, 128 traditions associated with, 77 – 8 waqf associated with, 100 Nablus, 5, 12, 13, 64, 72, 79, 102, 112, 113, 123, 128 nahda, 72, 73 Nashashibis, 10, 71, 72, 99, 105, 113, 114, 122, 124, 127, 128, 141, 164 See also al-Nashashibi, Ragib al-Nashashibi, Ragib, 64, 110, 121, 142, 152, 160 appointment as mayor of Jerusalem, 83, 90 National Bloc Party, 161 National Defense Party, 161, 164 National Youth Party, 164 nationalism, 11 Arab, 13, 70, 71, 199n17 Egyptian, 32 and Nabi Musa, 68, 76 – 80 Palestinian, 6, 68, 69, 70 – 6, 93, 117, 119, 125, 145– 50, 182n31, 199n17 and religion, 73 – 6, 81, 126, 135 See also Zionism neo-millet system, 8, 44, 56, 97, 115, 117, 120, 150, 172 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 176 Nigeria, 36 British Islamic policy in, 40, 62, 116

non-interference in religion, 8, 17, 27– 8, 38 – 40, 44 – 6, 48, 60, 70, 91, 172 and Christian missionary work, 60 and the “status quo”, 62 novels, 22, 24 Nurock, Max, 81 Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) South, 14, 49, 52, 69 Opposition (“Mu‘aridun”), 113, 114, 121, 127, 141, 160, 167 Ormsby-Gore, William, 55, 56, 58 Ottomans, 3, 9 – 13, 17, 43, 98 – 101, 180n21, 209n5, 209n6 as “backward”, 22 – 7 laws, 57, 92, 112, 113, 195n58 and the Nabi Musa festival, 77 – 8, 81 religious policies, 19 – 20, 44 – 63, 102, 105– 8, 133, 134, 143, 176 See also millet system; politics of notables Palestine (and Palestinians), 9 – 13 in British and Western scholarship, 25 – 6, 186n25 “fanaticism” of, 2, 27, 29 – 31 Palestine Arab Congresses, 89, 94 Palestine Arab Revolt, 37, 92, 166– 7, 169, 174 Palestine Exploration Fund, 26 Palestine (Holy Places) Order-inCouncil 1924, 59 Palestine Mandate, 13 – 16, Palestine Order-in-Council of 1922, 56, 59 Palestinian Arab delegations see delegations Palin Commission, 69, 80, 82, 86, 88 report of, 83 – 5, 90 pan-Islam, 1, 18, 31 – 5, 127, 137, 149, 154, 157, 158, 173 and the Nabi Musa riots, 67

INDEX Paris Peace Conference, 49, 154 Peel Commission Plan, 147 Philby, St. John, 151 Plumer, Herbert, 118 Police Ordinance of 1921, 92 politics of notables, 9, 10, 98, 180n20 conservatism of the, 161– 3 and the Husaynis, 97 –101 Postlethewaite, H. H., 5 Prevention of Crime Ordinance of 1920, 91 Pro-Jerusalem Society, 53 Pro-Wailing Wall Committee, 140, 144 Protestantism, 3, 19, 27, 45, 53, 60 Qadariyya brotherhood, 36 al-Qassam, ‘Izz al-Din, 37, 151, 165– 6 Quigley, E. P., 1, 3, 4, 5, 35 al-Quwwatli, Shukri, 157 Rachel’s Tomb, 23, 52, 133 Reading, Lord (Rufus Isaacs), 125 Reform Party, 161 Religious Communities (Organization) Ordinance of 1926, 59 Renan, Ernest, 21, 22, 29 Richmond, Ernest, 51, 97, 107, 123, 124, 125 Rida, Rashid, 75, 106, 157 Roberts, David, 23, Roman Catholic Church, 42, 54, 60, 79, 80 Saidullah, Mullah (Saidullah Khan), 29 al-Sakakini, Hala, 12, 76, 77 al-Sakakini, Khalil, 12, 76, 79, 160 Salah, ‘Abd al-Latif, 113 Samuel, Herbert, 4, 59, 69, 87 and Hajj Amin, 83, 96 – 8, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 167 and Islam, 6, 8, 48, 61, 62 – 3, 69, 172 on the millet system, 56 –7, 92, 93

245

and Nabi Musa, 83 and Palestinian nationalism, 89, 90 and Supreme Muslim Council, 40, 41, 112, 117, 125, 126 and Zionism, 49, 69, 85 – 8 San Remo Conference, 5, 58 Second Arab Orthodox Congress, 161 Sepoy Mutiny/Rebellion, 4, 27, 39, 45, 70, 90 Se`vres, Treaty of, 58 shari‘a (Islamic law), 38, 63 courts of, 6, 19, 48 Shari‘a Court of Appeal, 62, 97, 106, 108 Sharon, Ariel, 176 Shaw Commission, 136, 138, 139, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151, 153 Shawa, Sa‘id, 113 shaykh al-Islam, 61, 62, 110 Shuckburgh, John, 114, 124, 170 Silk Letters Movement, 34 Society for the Protection of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Muslim Holy Places, 136, 138, 140, 145 Sokolow, Nachum, 81 Spengler, Oswald, 20 “status quo” British concept of, 17, 44 – 54, 143 Ottoman edict regarding, 50 –1 Storrs, Ronald, 31, 52, 53, 66, 102, 110, 123, 135 on Balfour Declaration, 52 and Hajj Amin, 105, 107, 124 and Nabi Musa, 79, 80 Sudan Britain’s Islamic policy in, 40, 62, 116 al-Sulh, Riyad, 157 Supreme Muslim Council, 3, 6, 7 – 9, 20 and Arab Agency, 69, 115 as check on Palestinian nationalism, 67, 70, 90, 92 – 3, 117, 171, 172 establishment of, 111– 12 financial and institutional power of, 112, 213n50

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members of, 113 place in the colonial project, 8, 114– 17 political activities of, 121– 5, 127 reorganization of, by British, 167–8, 169 scholarly views about, 7, 40 structure of, 112 and the Western Wall struggle, 137– 41 Sykes, Mark, 43, 47, 58 Sykes-Picot agreement, 13, 43 Symes, G. Stewart, 46, 50, 51, 102 Syria, 4, 10, 30, 37, 68, 70, 71, 96, 151, 154, 157, 165 See also Greater Syria Tabata’i, Ziya al-Din, 157 Thakeray, William Makepeace, 24 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 79 Tonna, Charlotte, 24 tourists see travel accounts Toynbee, Arnold, 20, travel accounts, 22 – 6, 30, 77, 103 Twain, Mark, 24 Va’ad Leumi, 137 Vatican, 42 Victoria, Queen of Britain, 27, 45 Vivian, Valentine, 33 Wafd party (Egypt), 152, 154 Waggett, P. N., 58 Wahab, Sahkib, 151, 166 Wahhabism, 28, 33 waqf (pl. awqaf), 6, 10 19, 38, 39, 40, 48, 51, 55, 61, 62, 63, 64, 98, 100, 111, 112, 113, 116, 120, 124, 130, 131, 133, 143, 168, 169, 170, 175, 212n49, 214n63 Warburton, Eliot, 24, Waters-Taylor, L. R. E., 79 Watson, H. D., 47 Wauchope, Arthur, 167, 170, 171

Weizmann, Chaim, 23, 81 attempts to buy Western Wall, 119, 129– 31, 189n2 Western Wall, 52, 55, 74, 75, 132 British policies at, 135, 142– 4 as nationalist issue, 129– 34, 140– 2 Ottoman regulations about, 133– 4, 143 political struggle over, 74, 114, 134– 40, 163, 174 riots at, 118– 21, 136, 144– 8, 174, 214n1 Zionist attempts to buy, 42, 53, 119, 129– 31 “White man’s burden”, 22 white papers Churchill White Paper (1922), 87, 88, 89, 147 Passfield White Paper (1930), 157 White Paper on Western Wall (1928), 142, 144 Wilson, Cyril, 33 Wilson, Woodrow, 70 Young, George, 57, 195n58 Young Men’s Muslim Association, 160, 164 Zaytar, Omar, 64 Zionism, 3, 13, 20, 75 Arab opposition to, 16, 68, 70, 72, 75, 79, 85, 86, 103, 109, 110 British support for, 8, 15, 52, 88, 97 and Hajj Amin, 107, 114, 125, 126, 148, 151, 153, 155, 174 and Nabi Musa riots, 68 Samuel on, 49, 69, 86, 88 and Western Wall, 119, 125, 126, 128, 134– 5, 141, 142, 148 Zionist Organization (and Palestine Zionist Executive), 15, 42, 43, 49, 53, 113, 129, 132, 134, 137, 142, 143, 146

Plate 1 Aerial view of Jerusalem in 1931 with al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock in the foreground.

Plate 2

The Dome of the Rock from the Northeast.

Plate 3

The Western Wall as it looked during the mandate period.

Plate 4

The British arrival in Jerusalem, December 1917.

Plate 5 Three “fathers” of mandatory Palestine: Field-Marshall Lord Edmund Allenby (l.), Lord Arthur Balfour (c.), and High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel (r.) at the dedication of Hebrew University, March 1925.

Plate 6 Muhammad Hajj Amin al-Husayni, mufti of Jerusalem, 1921 – 37 and president of the Supreme Muslim Council, 1922 – 37.

Plate 7 The calm before the storm: the Yorkshire military band preceding the Nabi Musa procession, April 1920.

Plate 8 British show of force in Jerusalem after the Western Wall riots of 1929.

Plate 9 Notable politics in action: the 1930 Arab Delegation to London. Hajj Amin is in the center of the photo and to his left is Musa Kazim al-Husayni.

Plate 10 Members of the Arab Higher Committee in 1936, a year before the mufti’s escape from the country. Raghib al-Nashashibi, the mayor of Jerusalem, and Hajj Amin al-Husayni stand on the left of the front row.