Andrew G. Bostom
During his October 6, 2013 speech
at Bar Ilan University, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded
to the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini. Mr. Netanyahu characterized
el-Husseini as, “the undisputed leader of the Palestinian national movement
in the first half of the 20th century.” The Prime Minister highlighted
the ex-Muft’s role in fomenting pogroms (dating back, in fact, to the
so-called “Nabi Musa” riots of 1920) during the decades between the Balfour
Declaration, and the eventual creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Netanyahu’s address
also focused on el-Husseini’s World War II era collaboration with the
Nazis, the clear implication being that the Mufti’s murderous, Jew-hating
ideology was simply another manifestation of Nazi evil, transplanted to
a local “nationalistic struggle” in the Middle East. I have just published
an extensive analysis (available as a downloadable pdf of 51 pp., and 120
references, embedded at the end of this
blog) entitled, “A
Salient Example of Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s Canonical Islamic Jew-Hatred—Introduction,
Text, and Commentary”
which demonstrates that Netanyahu’s rehashing of such conventional, pseudo-academic
“wisdom,” does not withstand any serious, objective scrutiny.
On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution
of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the
“Mandate for Palestine,” confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to
settle in the area of Palestine—anywhere between the Jordan River and
the Mediterranean Sea. The Congressional record contains a statement of
support from New York Rep. Walter Chandler which includes an observation,
about “Turkish and Arab agitators . . . preaching a kind of holy war [jihad]
against . . . the Jews” of Palestine. During this same era within Palestine,
a strong Arab Muslim irredentist current—epitomized by Hajj Amin el-Husseini—promulgated
the forcible restoration of sharia-mandated dhimmitude for Jews via jihad.
Indeed, two years before he orchestrated the murderous anti-Jewish riots
of 1920, that is, in 1918, Hajj Amin el-Husseini stated plainly to a Jewish
coworker (at the Jerusalem Governorate), I. A. Abbady, “This was and will
remain an Arab land . . . the Zionists will be massacred to the last man.
. . . Nothing but the sword will decide the future of this country.”
Despite his role in fomenting the1920
pogroms against Palestinian Jews, el-Husseini was pardoned and subsequently
appointed mufti of Jerusalem by the British high commissioner, in May 1921,
a title he retained, following the Ottoman practice, for the remainder
of his life. Throughout his public career, the mufti relied upon traditional
Koranic anti-Jewish motifs to arouse the Arab street. For example, during
the incitement which led to the 1929 Arab revolt in Palestine, he called
for combating and slaughtering “the Jews.” not merely Zionists. In fact,
most of the Jewish victims of the 1929 Arab revolt were Jews from the centuries-old
dhimmi communities (for example, in Hebron), as opposed to recent settlers
identified with the Zionist movement.
The mufti remained unrelenting in
his espousal of a virulent, canonical Islamic Jew-hatred as the focal tenet
of his ideology, before, during, and in the aftermath of World War II,
and the creation of the State of Israel. He was also a committed supporter
of global jihad movements, urging a “full struggle” against the Hindus
of India (as well as the Jews of Israel) before delegates at the February
1951 World Muslim Congress: “We shall meet next with sword in hand on
the soil of either Kashmir or Palestine.” Declassified intelligence documents
from 1942, 1947, 1952, and 1954 confirm the mufti’s own Caliphate desires
in repeated references from contexts as diverse as Turkey, Egypt, Jerusalem,
and Pakistan, and also include discussions of major Islamic conferences
dominated by the mufti, which were attended by a broad spectrum of Muslim
leaders literally representing the entire Islamic world (including Shia
leaders from Iran), that is, in Karachi from February 16–19, 1952, and
Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem, December 3–9, 1953. Viewed in their totality
these data do not support the current standard assessment of the mufti
as merely a Palestinian Arab nationalist, rife with a “transplanted”
Jew-hatred.
There is another parallel negationist
trend, which is widely prevalent: the claim that el-Husseini’s canonical
Islamic Jew-hatred somehow represented a suis generis “Nazification”
of Islam, which has “persisted” into our era. Paul
Berman articulated an
unabashed formulation of this broadly held thesis, proclaiming, that abetted
by the Nazis, el-Husseini “monstrously,” and “infernally,” “blurred
Islam and Nazism,” achieving
A victory of Himmler’s Islam…A
victory for the Islam of fanaticism and hatred over its arch-rival, the
Islam of generosity and civilization.
During 1938, a booklet Muhammad
Sabri edited, Islam, Judentum, Bolschewismus (Islam, Jewry, Bolshevism),
was published in Berlin by Junker-Duennhaupt [Dünnhaupt]. Sabri’s booklet
included Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 declaration—also deemed by some
as a “fatwa” (an Islamic religious ruling)—appealing to the worldwide
Muslim umma. El-Husseini’s declaration was extracted and reprinted,
separately, by the Nazi regime as Islam und Judentum (Islam and
Jewry), and distributed to Muslim SS units in Bosnia, Croatia, and
the Soviet Union.
As best as I can determine, the
first complete, annotated translation of this pamphlet, directly from the
German, was provided in my
essay. Moreover,
no scholar had ever identified, let alone comprehensively explicated, the
antisemitic Islamic motifs which punctuate el-Husseini’s pronouncement,
from beginning to end. Accordingly, the translation was followed by a detailed
commentary which addressed this critical (and frankly, self-fulfilling)
lacuna in the scholarship on el-Husseini’s Jew-hatred: identifying and
analyzing its traditionalist Islamic origins.
What follows is the crux of my analysis,
but to fully understand its arguments requires a careful reading of all
the evidence adduced in the original
essay.
Just before his concluding admonition
for a jihad to annihilate the Jewish community of historical Palestine,
Hajj Amin el-Husseini recapitulates the dominant thematic narrative, woven
together from a myriad of specific, canonical Islamic motifs, throughout
the 1937 proclamation:
[T]he Arabs have learned best
how they really are, that is, as they [the Jews] are described in the Koran
and in the sacred scriptures… The verses from the Koran and hadith prove
to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue
to try to destroy it.
El-Husseini’s own apt summary assessment
of the proclamation raises basic, important questions for those, in particular,
who expound the view that his Islam was a form of modern “ideological
chimerism,” spatchcocked from “fundamentalist elements” of the Muslim
creed, engrafted, fiendishly, to Nazism. What did attentive, full tallies,
comparing the numbers of Islamic and non-Islamic motifs cited by El-Husseini,
demonstrate? Specifically, regarding the latter, what examples (if any),
derived from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, or the writings of Nazi racial
theorists were presented? Did invocations of the Czarist Russian era forgery,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, accompany, or complement these
references to Nazi ideology? Was there any evidence that central themes
from European Christian antisemitism were invoked, to confirm Paul
Berman’s fulmination
about how “Nazified Islam” strove to demonstrate “that European and
Christian superstitions ought to be regarded as authentically Middle Eastern
and Islamic”?
What in fact could be readily
gleaned from a careful, objective reading of el-Husseini’s proclamation
was there were no concrete, substantive references to any
of these major non-Islamic sources of antisemitism. This absence of
references contrasted starkly with the numerous and specific antisemitic
motifs from Islam’s canonical texts—the Koran (consistent with its gloss
in authoritative Koranic commentaries), hadith, and sira—which el-Husseini’s
declaration invoked continuously, from opening to closing.
A simple enumeration conveyed el-Husseini’s
extensive use of references from Islam’s canonical texts: ten explicit
references to Koranic motifs (including eleven separate verses quoted directly
in the proclamation), with an additional six implicit references; two explicit
citations of the sira, and five implicit references; and two major, explicit
citations (with quotation) of hadith, accompanied by three additional implicit
references to the hadith literature. These citations are complemented by
an explicit reference to the great early Muslim scholar al-Tabari (d. 923),
and his monumental History.
Moshe Perlmann, an eminent scholar
of Islam’s Medieval era anti-Jewish polemical literature, made this rueful
summary observation in 1964:
The Koran, of course became a
mine of anti-Jewish passages. The hadith did not lag behind. Popular preachers
used and embellished such material.
The numerous salient examples of
Islam’s canonical Jew-hatred punctuating Hajj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937
declaration validated Perlmann’s concise overarching assessment of these
foundational Islamic sources, and their tragic application across space
and time, into the modern era.
El-Husseini’s promulgation of jihad
and canonical Islamic Jew-hatred in pursuit of the destruction of Palestinian
Jewry, and later, the nascent Jewish State of Israel, has reverberated
across the ensuing decades. Consider two complementary fatwas, one written
January 5, 1956, by then grand mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Hasan Ma’moun, and
another January 9, 1956, signed by the leading members of the Fatwa Committee
of Al Azhar University—Sunni Islam’s Vatican—and the major representatives
of all four Sunni Islamic schools of jurisprudence. These rulings elaborated
the following key initial point: that all of historical Palestine—modern
Jordan, Israel, and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, as well
as Gaza—having been conquered by jihad, was a permanent possession of
the global Muslim umma (community), “fay territory”—booty or
spoils—to be governed eternally by Islamic law.
Muslims cannot conclude peace
with those Jews who have usurped the territory of Palestine and attacked
its people and their property in any manner which allows the Jews to continue
as a state in that sacred Muslim territory. [As] Jews have taken a part
of Palestine and there established their non-Islamic government and have
also evacuated from that part most of its Muslim inhabitants. . . . Jihad
. . . to restore the country to its people . . . is the duty of all Muslims,
not just those who can undertake it. And since all Islamic countries
constitute the abode of every Muslim, the Jihad is imperative for both
the Muslims inhabiting the territory attacked, and Muslims everywhere else
because even though some sections have not been attacked directly, the
attack nevertheless took place on a part of the Muslim territory which
is a legitimate residence for any Muslim… Everyone knows that from
the early days of Islam to the present day the Jews have been plotting
against Islam and Muslims and the Islamic homeland. They do
not propose to be content with the attack they made on Palestine and Al
Aqsa Mosque, but they plan for the possession of all Islamic territories
from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Although free of eschatological
references, the January 1956 Al Azhar fatwas’ language and arguments—pronounced
from Sunni Islam’s most esteemed religious teaching institution—are otherwise
indistinguishable from those employed just over three decades later by
Hamas (in its 1988
covenant), revealing
the same conjoined motivations of jihad, and conspiratorial Islamic Jew-hatred.
Recent polling
data indicate that these
traditionalist Islamic views—espoused across a continuum of 75 years by
el-Husseini, Al Azhar University, and Hamas—resonate with the Palestinian
Muslim population. American pollster Stanley Greenberg performed what was
described as an “intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian
adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” As reported
in July, 2011 these data revealed that seventy-three percent of Palestinian
Muslims agreed with the dictates of the apocalyptic hadith (Sahih
Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985;
included in both el-Husseini’s 1937 declaration, and the 1988 Hamas Covenant)
calling for the annihilation of the Jews, to bring on the messianic age.
Eighty percent supported the destruction of Israel by jihad, and the need
to recruit the entire global Muslim community, or “umma” in this quintessential
Islamic cause. 119
Almost four decades ago Bat Ye’or
published a remarkably insightful analysis of contemporary Islamic Jew-hatred,
in particular, its annihilationist predilection. She hypothesized that
the rise of Jewish nationalism—Zionism—posed a predictable, if completely
unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order—jihad-imposed chronic dhimmitude
for Jews—of apocalyptic magnitude.
The pejorative characteristics
of Jews as they are described in Muslim religious texts are applied to
modern Jews. Anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism are equivalent—due to the inferior
status of Jews in Islam, and because divine will dooms Jews to wandering
and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront
and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad. Here
the Pan-Arab and anti-Western theses that consider Israel as an advanced
instrument of the West in the Islamic world, come to reinforce religious
anti-Judaism.
Bat Ye’or’s 1974 observations
have now been confirmed by the
first thorough textual analysis
of the exclusively Islamic sources utilized in a critically important 1937
pronouncement by Hajj Amin el-Husseini. One can only speculate as to why
such an investigation was not conducted decades earlier
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