Jihad in Palestine
Icon of Evil:
Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam
by David G. Dalin
and John F. Rothmann
Random House. 227 pp. $26.00

Haj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974), the mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian national movement from the 1920’s until the 1950’s, remains, in a field rife with competitors, one of the most unpleasant figures to bestride the Middle Eastern stage. For David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann, the authors of this new biography, the mufti was not merely the bridge between traditional forms of Islamic anti-Semitism and the modern genocidal anti-Semitism of Hitler; he was also the progenitor of the strain of radical Islamist jihadism that led ineluctably to Hamas, al Qaeda, and the ravings of the Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran.

There are the makings of an interesting thesis here. Most traditional accounts of the mufti’s historical role hold that, through his rigid maximalism and refusal to compromise with the Zionists, he made the creation of an independent Palestinian homeland impossible. Dalin and Rothmann imply that, although the mufti may indeed have lost the battle for Palestine, he posthumously won the war for Muslim hearts and minds, and fatally envenomed the region in the process.

No matter how many times the life of Haj Amin al-Husseini is recounted, it cannot fail to startle. In the 1920’s, as Dalin and Rothmann relate, this vicious sectarian was empowered as the leading Islamic cleric in the British Mandate of Palestine by none other than High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, a Zionist who had foolishly taken the advice of virulently anti-Zionist, if not anti-Semitic, consular officials. A rabble-rousing demagogue, the mufti proceeded to issue the inflammatory and entirely untrue declaration that the mosques of Jerusalem were “in peril” from the Jews, thereby inciting a series of bloody Arab riots. As a Jew-hating conspiracy theorist, he would in due course make common cause with the Nazis, spending much of World War II in Berlin from where he broadcast incendiary materials to the Arab World and recruited Bosnian and Croatian Muslims for the SS. A sworn enemy of the Hashemite ruling family of Jordan, he became the motive force behind the murder in 1951 of Jordan’s King Abdullah; he had already been responsible for the murder of many fellow Palestinians. Throughout, he did incalculable damage and no good whatsoever.

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In telling their tale, Dalin and Rothmann offer many intriguing tidbits. The problem is that at least some of them are questionable at best. For example, I was not previously aware that, accompanied by Adolf Eichmann, the mufti visited the gas chambers at Auschwitz where he urged the guards to be more efficient in their efforts. According to the book’s footnotes, the guided tour is attested by the memoirs of the Mossad agent who in 1960 seized Eichmann in Argentina and spoke intimately with him. Fair enough. But the detail of the mufti’s cheering on the guards derives from a single source, an article entitled “The Arab-Muslim Nazi Connection” in Canadian Friends, a publication issued by a Jerusalem-based organization called the International Christian Embassy. Surely there are better contemporaneous sources than this?

We are also told that, although a staunch upholder of an austere Islam, the mufti nonetheless enjoyed fine wines. Similarly surprising asides concern a number of players in the drama like Ronald Storrs and Sir Ernest Richmond, the two Mandate officials who were central to the elevation of Haj Amin as mufti. The authors give much credence to the rumor that the two men were “passionate” lovers. No evidence is cited for this alleged affair beyond the fact that the two men shared digs in Cairo and Jerusalem and that Storrs in his 1937 memoir thanked Richmond as “his most charming and hospitable friend and companion.”

Several points need to be made here. First, the language employed by Storrs was quite conventional for the era and cannot in itself be construed as an interwar form of “outing.” Second, the other supposed source for this claim is Elie Kedourie’s The Chatham House Version (1970); but Kedourie, though authoritative on the period, does not allege homosexuality of either man.  Indeed, Rory Miller, an excellent scholar historian who has trawled Storrs’s private papers, states that there is no hint of “gayness” in them. And the historian Kenneth Rose, who knew Storrs well and was invited to visit him on his deathbed in 1955, states that Storrs’s career came to an end because of stories of a heterosexual indiscretion in the colonies. Finally: why is the alleged homosexuality of Storrs and Richmond of any relevance here?

If such bits of information must be viewed with suspicion, how can one be sure of other poorly-sourced claims, such as the supposed influence of the mufti on the young Saddam Hussein through stories told him by his uncle Khairallah Talfah, an intimate of Haj Amin who helped organize a pro-Nazi putsch in Baghdad in 1941?

One might think that writing a book about the mufti ought to involve a detailed investigation of Arabic sources. In fact, scarcely any such source is cited in the bibliography or the notes—not even the mufti’s memoirs. Nor do the authors seem to have done any original research in the Bosnian, British, French, or even the U.S. national archives.

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The larger problem, though, is with the book’s central thesis; that the mufti was one of the founding fathers of the modern Islamist movement. If this were true, one would expect some of the most important Islamist websites—daawa-info.net, islamonline, hassanalbanna.org, and the like—to offer historical tribute to their illustrious predecessor. But they make no mention of the mufti. Nor does he feature much in the pronouncements of Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, Ayman al-Zawahiri, or other leading al-Qaeda figures.

In truth, the mufti was a very important political figure in his day, but ideologically speaking he was of little short-term or long-term consequence: among other failings, his Islamic scholarship was not of sufficient stature. As one Israeli scholar, Ehud Rosen, has pointed out, he did open the doors for the Muslim Brotherhood in a few countries, notably Syria during the 1930’s; but there are strong grounds for suggesting that the Brotherhood was far more important to him than he was to it. In any event, proving such trails of influence is a complex business, requiring a great deal more sophistication than is brought to bear in Icon of Evil.

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Worse, by building up the mufti into a vast global figure, Dalin and Rothmann somehow manage to underplay the magnitude of his specifically local legacy to the people he purported to represent. They thereby open the door to mischief of a kind they surely did not intend. Thus, in a discussion of Icon of Evil in the New York Times Book Review, the left-wing Israeli journalist Tom Segev lambastes the book’s implicit “suggestion that Israel’s enemies are Nazis, or the Nazis’ heirs.” This, to Segev, smacks of an agenda meant “to discourage any fair compromise with the Palestinians, and that is bad for Israel.”

Segev is here openly calling on historians to suppress an utterly discreditable passage in modern Middle Eastern politics, lest knowledge of it somehow bring harm to the current peace process. But it was, of course, the mufti himself who played a key role in making a “fair compromise” between the Zionists and the Palestinian Arabs impossible—not merely by joining hands with the Nazis but more critically by murdering his Arab rivals and by injecting a virulently sectarian discourse into the politics of the country. What a pity that Dalin and Rothmann should have made it easier for the likes of Segev to dismiss out of hand their portrait of this seminal Palestinian figure.