The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (17 page)

The history of the family in the first decade of the Hamidi reign is the history of the municipality of Jerusalem, and in particular that of its mayor Salim. He was the grandson of Abd al-Salam and Musa Tuqan’s daughter, and the brother of Mufti Mustafa. His father, Hussein, was a prosperous merchant whose wealth enabled Salim to build up his political power. Salim was very much the head of the Tahiri branch of the family, though strictly speaking he descended from both branches, which may account for his special strength. He was more powerful than his nephew Tahir II, who had been
mufti
since 1865. Salim was regarded by the people of Jerusalem as the head of the citizenry – a novel title to replace the obsolete one of
naqib al-ashraf
. One of his sons was governor of the district of Jaffa, while the governor of the district of Jerusalem was a close friend of his immediate family.
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These
two power bases, that of mayor and
mufti
, both held by the Tahiri branch, would be consolidated by the ‘politics of notables’. During the British Mandate, Mufti al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni was always at odds with Mayor Musa Kazim. When they cooperated they achieved advances for their families and their people, and when they fought – as they did much of the time – they sowed dissension and reaped failures.

We have noted that the Tahiri branch of the family acquired great power while the Umari branch lost a great deal, especially when the post of
naqib
also passed to the Tahiri branch. At the end of the century, the post of
naqib
passed from Rabah to his brother Abd al-Latif al-Husayni, a man of many facets, remembered by Jerusalemites as the man who paved the road from the Jaffa Gate around the city wall to the Mount of Olives. Paved in honor of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who came into power in 1898, the new road extended to Augusta Victoria, a huge edifice named after the Kaiser’s wife.
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Abd al-Latif was a member of the district’s administrative council, hence his considerable influence over the management and development of the city. But he was the last Umari to hold the post of
Naqib
– the city council transferred it to the Tahiri branch, namely, to Ahmad Rasim, the son of Said, the grandson of Hassan and the father of Said II (about whom we will learn much more below). At the turn of the century the post was still in the hands of Ahmad Rasim, who kept it until his death, when it passed to his son, Said II. However, as we have seen, the post had already lost much of its significance in the reign of Abd al-Hamid II, and the secular revolution of the Young Turks in 1908 rendered it quite meaningless.

The Umaris did not vanish entirely from the political landscape, but they did grow weaker and apparently poorer. They recovered thanks to a move that had proved useful in the past. This time it was Umar Fahmi’s daughter Aisha – fittingly named after a woman famous in Muslim tradition for her financial shrewdness and political audacity – who saved the Umari branch. Her marriage to al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni reunited the two branches of the family. Such matches had not been customary in previous generations, when they were usually made within the branch. Modern Husayni women say that the family had previously preferred to form matrimonial alliances with other clans rather than marry between the branches. Aisha inherited a substantial estate from her father, which would be very useful to al-Hajj Amin. As previously noted, Umar Fahmi himself (in those days known as ‘Little Umar’, to distinguish him from his namesake in the time of
the Egyptian Muhammad Ali) had married a daughter of Musa Tuqan. (A sister of hers had married Abd al-Salam, the son of the first Umar, whose wedding was described at the opening of Chapter Three.) The matrimonial ties with the Tuqans linked the elite of Nablus with that of Jerusalem, enhancing the alliance between these two important cities and forming an urban connection that would become a stronghold of Palestinian nationality.

Though fifty years separated the weddings of grandfather and grandson, the ceremonies were the same. Marriages were agreed upon in advance and took place when the bride reached puberty.
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The mother of the groom would come to the girl’s house accompanied by her relatives, but only if the girl accepted the groom did the men begin to negotiate. (The role of the women was not as passive as often depicted.) In the evening, the male contingent would arrive and ask the girl’s father for his approval, after which the betrothal could proceed. In the following days the families negotiated the written contract, the bride price and so on. The wedding preparations consumed two hectic months. After the betrothal, the bride and then the groom took a traditional bath of purification, followed by the henna party, and only then came the wedding night. The evening began at the
hammam
, followed by an elaborate dressing ceremony, and concluded with the groom walking to the bride’s house. A month or two after the wedding, the bride’s father would hold a feast, but the guest list was made up by the groom’s family. In years to come, the women of the family would describe tensions that arose between the branches of the family because certain individuals of this or that branch were not invited to the post-wedding party.
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These events, like the new family homes built outside the city walls, were the highlights of the lives of those members of the family who did not take part in the high politics associated with the Husaynis’ aristocratic status.

However, Salim al-Husayni needed no matrimonial ties to preserve his standing, either in the family or in the city. His physical appearance in a photograph from the period gives no indication of his forceful personality. A short man, unusually dark-complexioned, he wears a grizzled beard and looks older than he actually was when the picture was taken. His reputation stemmed mainly from his being a
qadi asha’ir
– one who adjudicated Bedouin tribal conflicts – but he was above all the family’s foremost entrepreneur, a talent he had inherited from his father, Hussein. Thanks to his abilities, the family could sail through the upheavals in the Jerusalem
sanjaq
as the local economy
became linked to the rest of the world. The whole city benefited from his expertise: it was he who developed the concept of municipal services, and with the government’s help, he built a hospital in the Sheikh Badr neighborhood (the building still stands in the Mahaneh Yehudah market), paved roads, sank wells and laid sewage pipes. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to solve the problem of the water supply to the poor, but this would only be achieved under British rule.
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For eighteen years, between 1879 and 1897, Salim was on-and-off mayor of Jerusalem, and he is still credited with many improvements. It was his initiative to plant trees along Jaffa Road, install the first street-lights and employ the first garbage collectors. This last service was not strictly enforced.
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The numerous draft animals in the city made street cleaning difficult – even the square in front of the municipality, where the animals were habitually tethered, was full of dung. The British mandatory government could take credit for carrying out some of the cleaning operations and relieving the city of the excessive livestock and dung. Already in 1894 the British representatives complained that the new railway from Jaffa was causing the city to become overcrowded, and deliveries of goods were a problem. In response, Salim ordered barriers to be placed at the entrance of many streets, preventing camels and horseback riders from entering. Though photographs from 1900 show that there were still quite a few animals, during Salim’s mayoralty serious efforts were made to improve the cleanliness and sanitation in Jerusalem, and to cleanse its choked drainage channels.
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As well as caring for the city during the Hamidi period, the Husaynis also built themselves a family neighborhood.

It was during this reign that they began to feel the economic transformation that was affecting the entire Near East. For example, the aforementioned Musa al-Husayni, brother of Mufti Mustafa, personally benefited from the railway project since he was responsible for the supply of timber for the rail sleepers. The project brought him fame and one of the highest imperial decorations, which he was invited to Istanbul to receive ceremoniously. He died before the project was complete and left his sons – the fairly well-known Ismail and Shukri and the less-known Arif – great wealth and a priceless network of contacts in the Istanbul administration.
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At the start of the twentieth century, Arif would gain some renown by being appointed chief treasurer of the Ottoman Ministry of Education in Istanbul, a senior post that he filled successfully.

Profits from the guardianship of Muslim holy properties, notably the sale of their agricultural lands, enabled the Husaynis to bequeath a
handsome estate to the next generation. It is worth noting that this was an extensive range of religious properties, many of them of all-Islamic importance. Even after selling some of these, the family still owned considerable real estate in and around Jerusalem, and like others of their class they were buying property in the lowlands. Musa, Ismail and Rabah al-Husayni all owned lands in what is today called the inner plain. Many villagers registered their lands in the Husaynis’ names, or the names of other notables, because they could not afford the cost of registration and ownership. The first to do so were the villagers of Bait Nequba. In the 1870s, as a temporary measure, they registered village plots in the name of Ismail al-Husayni, who paid the land taxes. But they discovered that the temporariness was questionable, and the dispute between the villagers and Ismail over those lands continued throughout the Ottoman period and was not resolved even during the British Mandate.
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Proprietors of medium-sized lands preferred to deposit their properties in the
waqf
, which also yielded the Husaynis a handsome income.

THE 1880S – SETTLING OUTSIDE THE CITY WALLS

The first to realize these profits was Rabah al-Husayni. In 1870 he broke out of the city confines and built himself a house near the mosque of Sheikh Jarrah. In its time, Rabah’s palace had a novel style – spacious halls and rooms embellished with marble arches and carved wooden doors, built around a hexagonal patio full of climbing plants, variegated shrubs and fruit trees surrounding a hexagonal stone cistern. It was roofed with lightweight terracotta pipes to insulate it from extreme temperatures and faced with nari stone. The architect must have been partial to the six-sided form, which also dominates the main hall with its magnificent chandelier. A two-storey house with a basement, it covered two acres including the garden, and each of Rabah’s four wives had a separate wing. The first floor was the grandest, containing Rabah’s apartment and those of his wives, but it was the reception room, with the coffered wooden ceiling topped by a brightly painted dome, that most impressed visitors.
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The family remained here until the house was closed down at the end of the twentieth century by the Israelis. However, the palace still stands: it is now the American Colony Hotel. It was a striking architectural gem, especially in those days, when the surrounding area was
still largely unbuilt. But even today, amid the dense Israeli construction sites all around the city, it remains unusually attractive – as visitors to the hotel can testify.

In 1882 Mayor Salim joined Rabah and built a house next door. There, on the slope leading to the village of Sheikh Jarrah, the Husaynis began to establish a stronghold, a springboard for family members who wished to play major roles in the new world created by the Ottoman reformists, the European powers and the national movements of Jews and Palestinians. By 1894 the family already had six houses outside the walls, and in the early twentieth century it would be known as the Husayni neighborhood.

Salim’s house was also a grand structure for its time. Two-storied like Rabah’s house, it was more traditional. (Today it is the House of the Arab Child, an orphanage supervised by the family.) They had chosen the site well: the steep hillside near the mosque of Sheikh Jarrah faced Mount Scopus and overlooked a landscape of vineyards, strips of cultivated land, olive groves and fruit orchards and the road leading to Abu Tur. A handsome central edifice predated the arrival of the Husaynis, including Qasr al-Mufti and a few other palaces known as
qusur
. These were buildings originally designated for religious purposes, and some of them dated back to the time of Salah al-Din al-Ayubi (known in English as ‘Saladin’). Sheikh Jarrah and Abu Tur had sprung up around these structures, which had served Saladin’s warriors.
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Some of this land fell within the Husaynis’ religious properties and was used to build summer houses. Although a common practice, this was disapproved of by the public, who had a saying: ‘He who builds his house on the
waqf
risks having his roof fall down on the heads of his family.’

Completed in 1711, Qasr al-Mufti was originally the residence of Sheikh Muhammad al-Khalili (the Shafi’i
mufti
of Jerusalem in the early eighteenth century). Built north of the city wall, it may be seen today in the courtyard of the Rockefeller Museum. In the 1860s, it was used by the Husaynis as a summer house. There the family, accompanied by their servants, would enjoy the fresh air and open spaces through much of the summer, until the end of the British Mandate.

Today it is called the Mufti’s Palace, and the surrounding gardens the Mufti’s Vineyard. Tahir II made it into a permanent residence in 1864 and lived there until the 1890s, when he moved into a new house nearby. His new home was a grand two-storey villa built of Jerusalem stone, which like Salim’s and Rabah’s villas had its own water supply and a fountain in the central courtyard. Tahir’s house was one of
Jerusalem’s cultural centers: poets came to read their poems and talk about literature, and debates were held about politics, both local and imperial. Here Tahir’s son, the future al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni, would grow up. In 1966 the house became the Arab Academics’ Club, and it currently serves as a club and meeting place for Palestinian academics in Jerusalem.
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