The Mufti
There was another wind blowing in the post World War I years and that was the sinister wind of totalitarianism. That ill wind cut a swath across Europe in the form of Mussolini’s Fascism and in the ascendance of the two world order socialist movements, Hitler’s Nazism and Lenin’s Communism. Nazism profoundly influenced the Middle East in the years leading up to and including World War II, and Soviet Communism picked up the gauntlet in the post World War II years. Those European political and philosophical exports found fertile ground in traditional pan-Arabism, a bloody chauvinistic tradition of world conquest, one that runs contrary to more peaceful Islamic traditions. Modern pan-Arabism, formed on the crucible of the two secular European political faiths, is now made manifest in the beliefs and actions of the pan-Arabist radical Islamic Jihad we face today.
Faisal’s enlightened vision of sovereign Arab nations co-existing with a sovereign Jewish State was eclipsed by the radical pan-Arab designs of Haj Amin al-Husseini, named as Mufti of Jerusalem by the British Governor of the Palestine Mandate, Sir Herbert Samuel, in 1921. This was after al-Husseini had been convicted in absentia for his involvement in a slaughter of Jews in Jerusalem in 1920, known in Israel today as Bloody Passover. The liberal Samuel, himself a British Jew, pardoned al-Husseini, returned him from exile, and chose him as Mufti and head of the political Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine in spite of the fact that he had been opposed by the Palestinian Arab population who placed him in fourth place in a field of four Arab candidates for the position of Mufti.![]()
