Amin al-Husseini: Difference between revisions

Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (ca. 1895 - July 4, 1974, أمين الحسيني, alternatively spelt al-Husseini), Mufti of Jerusalem was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and a Muslim leader in Palestine and Egypt. He is from the prominent al-Husayni clan of Jerusalem. Known for his anti-Zionism, al-Husayni fought against the establishment of a Jewish state in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine particularly during the Great Arab Revolt. Sent into exile in 1937, Husseini collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and helped recruit Muslims for the Waffen-SS. During the 1948 Palestine War, he led the Palestinian Arab opposition to Zionists and opposed King Abdullah's ambitions in Palestine but without success. Afterwards, he lost most of his remaining political influence and he died in 1974.

Amin al-Husayni was born in 1893^[1] or 1895 in Jerusalem^[2] to a prominent al-Husayni clan. The al-Husaynis were wealthy landowners in southern Palestine, and thirteen members of the clan were mayors of Jerusalem between 1864 and 1920; another member of the clan, Kamal al-Husayni, was Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Amin al-Husayni attended a government school in Jerusalem and Al-Azhar University in Cairo,^[1] studying Islamic law for about one year and founding an anti-Zionist society. In 1913 at the age of 18, al-Husayni went to Mecca and received the honorific of Hajj. Prior to World War I, al-Husayni studied at the School of Administration in Istanbul.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, al-Husayni joined the Ottoman Turkish army, received a commission as an artillery officer and was assigned to the Forty-Seventh Brigade stationed in and around the predominantly Greek Christian city of Smyrna. In November 1916 he left the Ottoman army on a three month disability leave and returned to Jerusalem where he remained for the duration of the war. After the British conquered Palestine and Syria in 1918, he was employed in various positions by the British military administration in Jerusalem and Damascus, including one where he recruited soldiers for Faisal's army.

Part of a series on
Palestinians
Demographics
Definitions Palestine History Name People Origin Nakba Diaspora
Politics
Previous Arab Higher Committee Depopulated villages All-Palestine Protectorate Government Fedayeen militias PLO National Authority (PNA) (political parties) Current Fatah Hamas PFLP Islamic Jihad Politics of the Palestinian National Authority Enclaves Governorates Cities Gaza Strip governance (Hamas) Governorates of the Gaza Strip National Council (PNC) Legislative Council (PLC) Flag Law Palestine West Bank Gaza Strip East Jerusalem
Religion / religious sites
Christianity Islam Judaism Al-Aqsa Cave of the Patriarchs Church of the Holy Sepulchre Church of the Nativity Dome of the Rock Great Mosque of Gaza Joseph's Tomb Lot's Tomb Nabi Samwil Rachel's Tomb
Culture
Art Cinema Costume and embroidery Cuisine Dabke (dance) Handicrafts Language Literature Music
List of Palestinians
v t e

In 1919 al-Husayni attended the Pan-Syrian Congress held in Damascus where he supported Emir Faisal for King of Syria. That year al-Husayni joined (perhaps founded) the Arab secret society El-Nadi al-Arabi (The Arab Club) in Jerusalem and wrote articles for the first new newspaper to be established in Palestine, Suriyya al-Janubiyya (Southern Syria). The paper was published in Jerusalem beginning in September 1919 by the lawyer Muhammad Hassan al-Budayri, and edited by Aref al-Aref, both prominent members of al-Nadi al-Arabi.

During the annual Nebi Musa procession in Jerusalem in April 1920, al-Husayni, then a teacher at the Rashidiya school in Jerusalem, incited the Arab crowds against the Jews. For his role in the riots, al-Husayni was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in absentia, since he had already fled to Transjordan.^[1]

Until late 1921 al-Husayni focused his efforts on Pan-Arabism and Greater Syria in particular, with Palestine understood as a southern province of an Arab state whose capital was to be set in Damascus. Greater Syria was to include territory now occupied by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. The struggle for Greater Syria collapsed after Britain ceded control over present day Syria and Lebanon to France in July 1920 in accordance with the prior Sykes-Picot Agreement. The French army entered Damascus at that time, overthrew King Faisal and dissolved Greater Syria.

al-Husayni then turned from Damascus-oriented Pan-Arabism to a specifically Palestinian ideology centered on Jerusalem, which sought to expel the Jews and foreigners from Palestine, thus in his mind restoring it to Dar al-Islam.((fact|date=October 2007))

Following the death of Amin's brother Kamil al-Husayni, the former Mufti, the British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel pardoned Amin al-Husayni. Al-Husayni and another Arab had been excluded from an earlier general amnesty because they had fled before their convictions had been passed down. Elections were held, and of the four candidates running for the office of mufti, al-Husayni received the least number of votes. Nevertheless, Samuel, anxious to keep a balance between al-Husaynis and their rival clan the Nashashibis ^[3], decided to appoint Amin al-Husayni Mufti of Jerusalem,^[1] a position that had been held by the al-Husayni clan for more than a century.

In 1922 al-Husayni was elected President of the newly formed Supreme Muslim Council, which controlled the Waqf funds worth annually tens of thousands of pounds, and the orphan funds, worth annually about 50,000 pounds. In addition, he controlled the Islamic (Shariah) courts in Palestine. Among other functions, these courts were entrusted with the power to appoint teachers and preachers.

Al-Husayni launched an international Muslim campaign to improve and restore the mosque known as the Dome of the Rock. Indeed, the current landscape of the Temple Mount was directly affected by constructions built as a result of al-Husayni's fundraising activities. Al-Husayni also served as president of the World Islamic Congress, which he founded in 1931.

The British initially balanced appointments to the Supreme Muslim Council between the Husaynis and their supporters (known as the majlisiya, or council supporters) and their rivals, the Nashashibis and their allied clans (known as the mu'aridun, the opposition) ^[4], for example by replacing Musa al-Husayni as mayor of Jerusalem with Ragheb al-Nashashibi. The mu'aridun or 'Opposition', were more disposed to a compromise with the Jews, and indeed had for some years received annual subventions from the Jewish Agency. ^[5] During most of the period of the British mandate, bickering between these two families seriously undermined any Palestinian unity. In 1936, however, they achieved a measure of unity when all the Palestinian groups joined to create a permanent executive organ known as the Arab Higher Committee under al-Husayni's chairmanship.

Al-Husayni's role in the1929 Palestine riots, including the 1929 Hebron massacre and the 1929 Safed massacre, was hotly disputed at the time. An observer on the Commission noted that during the interview, the Mufti held a copy of the notorious The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.^{[citation needed]} The Jewish Agency charged him with responsibility for inciting the violence, and in the Shaw commission of enquiry the majority acquitted the Mufti of responsibility for the riot. In a minority opinion Mr Snell insisted on the Mufti's responsibility, in that he was fully aware of the dangers of incitement in religious propaganda and failed to exercise his authority as a religious leader in restraining outbreaks of violence. ^[6]. Snell's opinion was, several years later, endorsed by a further British re-investigation, which considered the Mufti's innovations at the Wailing Wall doubly provocative, in aiming to both annoy the Jews, and to emphasize Muslim ownership of the site. It concluded that the Wailing Wall episodes constituted 'one of the principle immediate causes of those disturbances'^[7]

The League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission stated its belief that the Mufti's accusations against the Jews were both untruthful and incendiary, basing its judgement on evidence in the Shaw Report ^[8]. It adduced the Mufti's memorandum, delivered to the British authorities, on October the 8th, in which the Mufti accused the Jews of wishing to take possession of the sector called Al Buraq. This accusation had been challenged in turn by the Jewish National Council in Palestine, in an open letter dated November 1928^[9]. In fact, the Revisionist newspaper Doar Hayom had begun ‘to agitate the Jews for a fight against the Mufti' over the property, claiming on its pages that, ‘the wall is ours’. ^[10] The Mufti did not accept these assurances, the accusation was repeated, and led to a widespread conviction in the Arab community that the Jews did indeed wish to take possession of the Mosque of Omar. A decade after this complex set of charges and counter-charges, the Mandates Commission concluded that al-Husayni’s accusations had exacerbated Arab hostilities. Reviewing the evidence, Benny Morris documents the frequent anxieties, in propaganda and formal petititons to the authorities, expressed by Arabs over a possible loss of their traditional rights over the Wall to Jews whose claims and innovations were seen as challenging those rights. In 1922 the Palestinian delegation to Mecca during the hajj had declared: 'the Holy Places are in great danger on account of the horrible Zionist aggressions'. On September 23-24, 1928 the Supreme Muslim Council complained about the setting up of a screen at the Wailing (or Western) Wall to separate men and women. The Mandatory constabulary used force to protect the ownership rights of Muslims over the Wall and the adjacent passage used by the Jews, but there was increasing pressure from 'Right-wing Zionists' to take control of the Wall. On August 14, 1929, a demonstration of some 6,000 Jews in Tel Aviv, chanted 'The Wall is ours'. That evening, 3,000 gathered at the Wall for prayer. The following day, 100s of Jews - including members of the extremist Betar movement - demonstrated at the wall with batons. The mufti-inspired disturbances shook Britain's commitment to the Balfour Declaration, but by early 1931 well-applied Zionist pressure in the press and lobbying by Chaim Weizmann in London had rescued the status quo ante.^[11]

On 19 April, 1936 a spontaneous Arab rebellion broke out in Palestine, sparked by a minor incident, but feeding on anger aroused by the arrival of a further 164,267 Jewish immigrants over the preceeding three years. Soon the rebellion had spread across the country. The Palestinian effendi establishment, worried at the prospect of losing control over the insurgent masses, who have threatened a general strike, formed the Arab Higher Committee under the Mufti's chairmanship, which then sought to channel widespread discontent into manageable forms of protest. Thus the Committee prevailed on the insurgents to call off the Arab general strike, until a promised Royal Commission could be convened but, at the same time, called for nonpayment of taxes and the shutting down of municipal government. In addition, it demanded an end to Jewish immigration, a ban on land sales to Jews, and national independence. Jewish colonies, kibbutzim and quarters in towns, became the targets for Arab sniping, bombing, and other forms of attacks. While the Haganah initially advocated a policy of restraint, splinter groups like the Irgun quickly joined in exacerbating the spiralling violence.^[12]

In July 1937 British police were sent to arrest al-Husayni for his part in the Arab rebellion, but, tipped off, he managed to escape to the Haram where the British deemed it inadvisable to touch him. In September, he was removed from the presidency of the Muslim Supreme Council and the Arab Higher Committee was declared illegal. In October, he fled to Lebanon, where he reconstituted the committee under his leadership. Al-Husayni retained the support of most Palestinian Arabs ((fact|date=October 2007)) and used his power to punish the Nashashibis. He remained in Lebanon for two years, but his deteriorating relationship with the French and Syrian authorities led him to withdraw to Iraq in October 1939.

The rebellion itself lasted until 1939, when it was finally quelled by British troops. It forced Britain to make substantial concessions to Arab demands. The British abandoned the idea of establishing Palestine as a Jewish state, while Jewish immigration was to continue but under severer restrictions, with a quota of 75,000 places spread out over the following five years. On the expiry of this period further Jewish immigration would depend on Arab consent. Besides local unrest, another key factor in bringing about a decisive change in British policy was Nazi Germany's preparations for a European war, since would forseeably, develop into a worldwide conflict. In British strategic thinking, securing the loyalty and support of the Arab world assumed an importance of some urgency. While Jewish support was unquestioned, Arab backing in a new global conflict was by no means assured. By promising to phase out Jewish immigration into Palestine, Britain hoped to win back support from wavering Arabs.^[13]. Al-Husayni nonetheless felt that the concessions did not go far enough, and he rejected the new policy. See also Peel Commission, White Paper of 1939.

In 1933, within weeks of Hitler's rise to power in Germany, al-Husayni sent a telegram to Berlin addressed to the German Consul-General in the British Mandate of Palestine saying he looked forward to spreading their ideology in the Middle East [2], especially in Palestine and offered his services. Al-Husayni's offer was rejected at first out of concern for disrupting Anglo-German relations by allying with an anti-British leader. But one month later, Al-Husayni secretly met the German Consul-General Karl Wolff near the Dead Sea and expressed his approval of the anti-Jewish boycott in Germany and asked him not to send any Jews to Palestine. Later that year, the Mufti's assistants approached Wolff, seeking his help in establishing an Arab National Socialist (Nazi) party in Palestine. Wolff and his superiors disapproved because they didn't want to become involved in a British sphere of influence, because the Nazis desired further Jewish immigration to Palestine, and because at the time the Nazi party was restricted to German speaking 'Aryans' only.^[14]

On 21 July 1937, Al-Husayni paid a visit to the new German Consul-General, Hans Döhle, in Palestine. He repeated his former support for Germany and 'wanted to know to what extent the Third Reich was prepared to support the Arab movement against the Jews.' He later sent an agent and personal representative to Berlin for discussions with Nazi leaders.

In 1938, though Anglo-German relations were a concern, Al-Husayni's offer was accepted. From August 1938, al-Husayni received financial and military assistance and supplies from Nazi Germany and also from fascist Italy, with which his enemy, Jabotinsky's Irgun had just broken off ties. Though in the ensuing war, the Mufti was strongly pro-Axis, this did not reflect the position of the entire Palestinian leadership. Al-Husayni's cousin Jemal, for example, was in favour of cutting a deal with Britain for Palestine. ^[15]

In May 1940, the British Foreign Office declined a proposal from the chairman of the Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council in Palestine) that they assassinate al-Husayni, but in November of that year Winston Churchill approved such a plan. In May 1941, several members of the Irgun, (several members of which were themselves feeling out the Nazis in Beirut about a possible collaboration between the Jewish underground and Germany to throw the British out of Palestine), including its former leader David Raziel were released from prison and flown to Iraq on a secret mission which, according to British sources, included a plan to 'capture or kill' the Mufti. The Irgun version is that they were approached by the British for a sabotage mission and added a plan to capture the Mufti as a condition of their cooperation. The mission was abandoned when Raziel was killed by a German plane.^[16]

In April 1941 the Golden Square pro-Nazi Iraqi army officers, led by General Rashid Ali, forced the Iraqi Prime Minister, the pro-British Nuri Said Pasha, to resign. From his base in Iraq, al-Husseini issued a fatwa for a holy war against Britain a month later, in May. [3]. Forty days later, British troops occupied the country and the Mufti was once more forced into exile, this time to Germany, via Iran, Turkey and Mussolini's office in Rome.^[17]. Throughout the the war, the Mufti repeatedly made requests in Berlin to 'the German government to bomb Tel Aviv.'^[18]

Upon al-Husayni's arrival in Europe, he met the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop on November 20 1941 and was officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 30 1941 in Berlin.^[19] He asked Hitler for a public declaration that 'recognized and sympathized with the Arab struggles for independence and liberation, and that it would support the elimination of a national Jewish homeland'. Earlier, al-Hussayni submitted to the German government a draft of such a declaration, containing a clause:

Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries, as required by the national and ethnic (völkisch) interests of the Arabs, and as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.^[20]

This petition was made some months before before the Wannsee Conference made a secret determination to embark on the Final Solution. The Italian regime had never expressed any interest in the physical extermination of its native Jewish communities.

Hitler refused to make such a public announcement, but 'made the following declaration, requesting the Mufti to lock it deep in his heart:

1. He (the Führer) would carry on the fight until the last traces of the Jewish-Communist European hegemony had been obliterated.
2. In the course of this fight, the German army would - at a time that could not yet be specified, but in any case in the clearly foreseeable future - gain the southern exit of Caucasus.
3. As soon as this breakthrough was made, the Führer would offer the Arab world his personal assurance that the hour of liberation had struck. Thereafter, Germany's only remaining objective in the region would be limited to the Vernichtung des...Judentums ['destruction of Jewry', sometimes taken to be a euphemism for 'annihilation of the Jews'] living under British protection in Arab lands..'^[21].

Despite these assurances, it later emerged that Hitler detested the Mufti, and that he had little if any influence over the Nazis^[22]

In his book The Mufti and the Führer, the Revisionist historian Joseph Schlechtman insinuated that the execution of the Final Solution was linked directly to Al-Husayni's move to the Reich, even if he was not the sole or major factor in the shaping of the decision:

.'It is hardly accidental that the beginning of the systematic physical destruction of European Jewry by Hitler’s Third Reich roughly coincided with the Mufti’s arrival in the Axis camp.'^[23]

The Mufti was in Berlin during the war, but later denied knowing of the Holocaust. Defendants at the Nuremberg trials, including Adolf Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny, accused him of having actively encouraged the extermination of European Jews. Eichmann himself enjoyed spreading what became known as the Sarona legend, according to which he was on intimate terms with al-Husseini.^[24] This testimony was subsequently dismissed as without factual basis by the court examining the issue during Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. 'The trial revealed only that all rumours about Eichmann's connection with Haj Amin el Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, were unfounded. (He had been introduced to the Mufti during an official reception, along with all other department heads).'^[25][26]. It should be noted that some recent research, however, apparently argues that al-Husayni did work with Eichmann for the despatch of a special corps of Einsatz commandos to exterminate the Jews in Palestina, if Rommel managed to break through the British lines in Egypt.^[27]

However, Husseini did intervene on May 13,1943, with the German Foreign Office to block possible transfers of Jews from Bulgaria, Hungary and Roumenia, after reports reached him that 4000 Jewish children accompanied by 500 adults had managed to reach Palestine. He asked that the Foreign Minister 'to do his utmost' to block all such proposals and this request was complied with.^[28]. A year later, on the 25th July, 1944, he wrote to the Hungarian foreign minister to register his objection to the release of certificates for 900 Jewish children and 100 adults for transfer from Hungary, fearing they might end up in Palestine. He suggested that if such transfers of population were deemed necessary, then:-

'it would be indispensable and infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control, as for example Poland, thus avoiding danger and preventing damage.'^[29]

Among the acts of sabotage al-Husayni attempted to implement was a chemical warfare assault on the second largest and predominantly Jewish city in Palestine, Tel Aviv. Five parachutists were sent with a toxin to dump into the water system. The police caught the infiltrators in a cave near Jericho, and according to Jericho district police commander Fayiz Bey Idrissi, 'The laboratory report stated that each container held enough poison to kill 25,000 people, and there were at least ten containers.' [4].

In his memoirs after the war, Husayni noted that "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours'.'^[30]

Recent Nazi documents uncovered in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Military Archive Service in Freiburg [5] by two researchers, Klaus Michael Mallmann from Stuttgart University and Martin Cüppers from the University of Ludwigsburg, indicated that in the event of the British being defeated in Egypt by Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps the Nazis had planned to deploy a special unit called Einsatzkommando Ägypten to exterminate Palestinian Jews and that they wanted Arab support to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state. In their book the researchers concluded that, "the most important collaborator with the Nazis and an absolute Arab anti-Semite was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem.'^[31]

The Mufti established close contacts with Bosnian and Albanian Muslim leaders and spent the remainder of the war conducting the following activities:

• Assisting with the formation of Muslim Waffen SS units in the Balkans
• The formation of schools and training centers for Muslim imams and mullahs who would accompany the Muslim SS and Wehrmacht units.

al-Husayni continued to work as a propagandist for Nazism to the Arabs and a recruiter of Muslim volunteers for the German armed forces, until war's end. Beginning in 1941, Al-Husayni visited Bosnia, and convinced some local Muslim leaders that a Muslim S.S. division would be in the interest of Islam. Despite his efforts, only half of the 20,000 to 25,000 Muslims recruits he anticipated joining up actually volunteered. ^[32] Al-Husayni helped organize and integrate these Bosnian Muslims into several divisions of the Waffen SS and other units. The largest was the 13th Handschar division^[33] of 21,065 men which conducted operations against Communist partisans in the Balkans from February 1944.^[34] Though Al-Husayni insisted that, 'The most important task of this division must be to protect the homeland and families (of the Bosnian volunteers); the division must not be permitted to leave Bosnia,' the request was ignored by the Germans.^[35]

On March 1, 1944, while speaking on Radio Berlin, al-Husayni said:

'Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.'^[36]

After the Second World War, al-Husayni fled to Switzerland, was detained and expelled back to Germany, was captured by the French and put under house arrest in France after he was sentenced by the Yugoslav Supreme Military Court to three years imprisonment and two years of deprivation of civil rights as convicted war criminal. During the Nuremberg Trials, Eichmann's deputy Dieter Wisliceny testified that The Mufti was one of the initiators of the extermination of European Jewry and a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the initiation of the Final Solution. In 1948, Husayni escaped and was given asylum in Egypt. Jewish groups petitioned the British to have him indicted as a war criminal. The British declined because such a move would have added to their growing problems in Egypt and among Palestinians - where al-Husayni was still popular. Yugoslavia unsuccessfully sought his extradition.

From his Egyptian exile al-Husayni used what influence he had to encourage Egyptian participation in the 1948 war. Although the mufti was involved in some of the high level negotiations between Arab leaders before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War at a meeting held in Damascus in February 1948 to organize Palestinian Field Commands, the commanders of his Holy War Army, Hasan Salama and Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, were allocated only the Lydda district and Jerusalem respectively. This decision paved the way for undermining the Mufti's position among the Arab States. On 9 February, only four days after the Damascus meeting, he suffered a severe setback at the Arab League's Cairo session, when his demands for the appointment of a Palestinian to the League's General Staff, for the formation of a Palestinian Provisional Government, for the transfer of authority to local National Committees in areas evacuated by the British, and for both a loan for Palestrinian administration and an appropriation of large sums to the Arab Higher Executive for Palestinians entitled to war damages were all rejected.^[37]

The Arab League blocked recruitment to the mufti's forces,^[38] which collapsed following the death of his most charismatic commander, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, on 8 April.

Following rumors that King Abdullah of Transjordan was re-opening the bi-lateral negotiations with Israel that he had previously conducted in secret with the Jewish Agency, the Arab League, led by Egypt, decided to set up the All-Palestine Government in Gaza on 8 September (year?) under the nominal leadership of the mufti. Avi Shlaim writes:

The decision to form the Government of All-Palestine in Gaza, and the feeble attempt to create armed forces under its control, furnished the members of the Arab League with the means of divesting themselves of direct responsibility for the prosecution of the war and of withdrawing their armies from Palestine with some protection against popular outcry. Whatever the long-term future of the Arab government of Palestine, its immediate purpose, as conceived by its Egyptian sponsors, was to provide a focal point of opposition to Abdullah and serve as an instrument for frustrating his ambition to federate the Arab regions with Transjordan.^[39]

Abdullah regarded the attempt to revive the mufti's Holy War Army as a challenge to his authority and on 3 October his minister of defence ordered all armed bodies operating in the areas controlled by the Arab Legion to be disbanded. Glubb Pasha carried out the order ruthlessly and efficiently.^[40]

During the 1948 War, the Mufti is also alleged to have said, I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!' ^[41]

The Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah, had assigned the position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to someone else, and al-Husayni, appears to have had contacts with the Arab conspirators behind King Abdullah's assassination in 1951. followed Abdullah was succeeded by King Talal, who refused to allow al-Husayni entry into Jerusalem. Within a year, King Talal was declared incompetent, but his successor King Hussein renewed the ban on al-Husayni entering the city.

Al-Husayni died in Beirut, Lebanon in 1974. He wished to be buried in Jerusalem, but the Israeli government refused this request.

• The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry's report of April 20, 1946 stated: "The flight of the Mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini, to Italy and Germany, and his active support of the Axis, did not lose for him his following, and he is probably the most popular Arab leader in Palestine today." ^[42]
• Israeli historian Tom Segev paraphrased a letter that the commander of the British forces in the British Mandate for Palestine, General Evelyn Barker, a publically anti-Zionist, wrote to his wife in around May 1947 about the mufti's legacy: "Haj Amin al-Husseini, the former mufti, thought only of his own interests and not of his people, and had done the Palestinian Arabs a great disservice. The mufti sought only to augment his political power. The Arabs had only dissension and petty jealousies. Their tragedy was that they had no real leadership."^[43]
• Yasser Arafat's interview with the London-based Arabic language newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat was reprinted by a leading Palestinian daily Al Quds (August 2, 2002):

Interviewer: I have heard voices from within the Palestinian Authority in the past few weeks, saying that the reforms are coordinated according to American whims...

Arafat: We are not Afghanistan. We are the mighty people. Were they able to replace our hero Hajj Amin al-Husseini?... There were a number of attempts to get rid of Hajj Amin, whom they considered an ally of the Nazis. But even so, he lived in Cairo, and participated in the 1948 war, and I was one of his troops."

• John Marlowe said: "The dominant figure in Palestine during the Mandate years was neither an Englishman nor a Jew, but an Arab — Haj Amin Muhammed Effendi al Husaini... Able, ambitious, ruthless, humourless, and incorruptible, he was of the authentic stuff of which dictators are made."^{[citation needed]}

• Arab Higher Committee
• Palestinian nationalism
• Grand Mufti of Jerusalem
• Islam and antisemitism
• Arabs and antisemitism
• Palestinian political violence
• Nazi Germany

• Carpi,Daniel. The Mufti of Jerusalem: Amin el-Husseini, and his diplomatic activity during World War II, October 1941-July 1943, in Studies in Zionism, Vol VII (1983), pp101-131.
• Elpeleg,Zvi, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin Al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement, tr. David Harvey, ed. by Shmuel Himelstein Frank Cass Publishers, 1993, ISBN 0-7146-3432-8)
• Jbara,Taysir. Palestinian Leader, Hajj Amin Al-Husoyni, Mufti of Jerusalem]], Kingston Press Series. Leaders, Politics, and Social Change in the Islamic World, No 5, Kingston Press, 1985, ISBN 0-940670-21-6)
• Khalidi, Rashid. 'The Formation of Palestinian Identity: The Critical Years, 1917-1923' in James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni (eds.) Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, (Columbia University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-231-10695-5)
• Laqueur, Walter and Rubin, Barry M. The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict (Penguin Books 6th Rev edition, 2001, ISBN 0-14-029713-8)
• Levenberg, Haim. Military Preparations of the Arab Community in Palestine: 1945-1948. London: Routledge, 1993. ISBN 0-7146-3439-5
• Lewis, Bernard. The Jews of Islam, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1984, ISBN 0-691-00807-8}}
• Lewis, Bernard. The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. New York: Scribner, 1995.
• Mattar, Philip. The Mufti of Jerusalem (Columbia University Press revised edition, 1988, ISBN 0-231-06463-2)
• Mattar, Philip. 'Al-Husayni and Iraq's quest for independence, 1939-1941' in Arab Studies Quarterly 6,4 (1984), 267-281.
• Nicosia,Francis R. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, Transaction Publishers, 2007 ISBN 076580624X
• Parfrey, Adam. (ed.) Extreme Islam: Anti-American Propaganda of Muslim Fundamentalism, Last Gasp, 2002, ISBN 0-922915-78-4)
• Moshe Pearlman|Pearlman, Moshe. Mufti of Jerusalem: The Story of Haj Amin el Husseini, (V Gollancz, 1947)
• Philip Rees,Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 Macmillan Library Reference, 1991, ISBN 0-13-089301-3)
• Schechtman, Joseph B.. The Mufti and the Fuehrer: The rise and fall of Haj Amin el-Husseini, (T. Yoseloff, 1965)
• Taggar, Yehuda , The Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine Arab Politics, 1930-1937 (Outstanding These from the London School of Economics and Political Science) (Garland Pub, 1987, ISBN 0-8240-1933-4)
• van Paassen, Pierre Days of our Years (Hillman-Curl, Inc., 1939, LC 39027058) pp. 363-373

• Article on Amin al-Husayni, including a picture with Hitler

• Robinson, Glenn E. (1997). Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-21082-8
• Sachar, Howard M. (2006). A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, 2nd ed., revised and updated. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0679765638
• Schlor, Joachim (1999). Tel Aviv: From Dream to City. Reaktion Books. ISBN 1-86189-033-8
• Scholch, Alexander (1985) "The Demographic Development of Palestine 1850-1882", International Journal of Middle East Studies, XII, 4, November 1985, pp. 485-505
• Segev, Tom. One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate. Trans. Haim Watzman. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001.
• Shahin, Mariam (2005). Palestine: A Guide, Interlink
• Sayigh, Yezid (2000). Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-829643-6
• Shlaim, Avi (2001). Israel and the Arab Coalition. In Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds.). The War for Palestine (pp. 79-103). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-79476-5
• Zertal, Idith (2005). Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-85096-7
• "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" 1990 Macmillan Publishing Company New York, NY 10022
• "Himmler's Bosnian Division; The Waffen-SS Handschar Division 1943-1945" by George Lepre. Algen: Shiffer, 1997. ISBN 0-7643-0134-9
• Deutsche - Juden - Völkermord. Der Holocaust als Geschichte und Gegenwart (Germans, Jews, Genocide — The Holocaust as History and Present). Klaus Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt, 2006.
• The Trouble with Islam Today by Irshad Manji, St. Martin's Griffin (paperback), 2005, ISBN 0-312-32700-5

This August 2007's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

• HUSSEINI, HAJ AMIN (1895-1974) at passia.org (with photos)
• Islamic Fascists?
• Mufti's Biography at the Jewish Virtual Library
• A biographical sketch of Haj Amin al-Husseini, Michal Gado, at "Omedia"
• Hajj Amin al-Husseini: the Mufti of Jerusalem (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)