The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (20 page)

It was not only through the careers of these three central figures that the family expanded its influence. Another member who contributed was Abd al-Salam II (1850–1915). He was the son of Umar Fahmi, who had been governor of Gaza, while Abd al-Salam III was governor of Jaffa. This is not the place to expatiate on his life, except to note that he was also known as a poet and left a respected volume of poetry about Jerusalem.
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This Umari sub-branch illustrates the Husaynis’ spread throughout Palestine – Gaza, Jerusalem and Jaffa – and the wide range of their influence in the administration and in cultural life.

FACING OLD AND NEW CHALLENGES

The declining status of the
qadi
, in Jerusalem as in other cities, revealed the power acquired by the family due to its integration into the Ottoman administration. Again, the
qadi
was the only outside appointee other than the governor. The
muftis
and
naqibs
– most of whom during the Hamidi reign were members of the Husayni clan – now began to move into areas that had previously been the
qadi
’s purview. The latter’s position was already weakened, as the Tanzimat had created a secular judiciary that functioned alongside the religious one.
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This reversal in the relations of
qadi
and
mufti
concluded in 1913, when Ottoman law decreed that ‘The head of the local hierarchy is the
mufti
.’
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During that period, as previously noted, the post of
sheikh al-haram
also reverted to the Husaynis: Bashir, the son of Abd al-Salam and grandson of Umar Fahmi – that is, a scion of the Umari branch – was appointed to the post. But it had lost its significance, and possessing it did not help the weakened branch of the family.

The historian Yusuf al-Dabagh comments that the family’s dominance of the city’s life was fairly limited. He describes the period as ‘democratic’: the aristocratic families did not really control the life of the city but were concerned with particular aspects that affected the townspeople as a whole. The Ottoman government, however, seemed to regard it as considerable dominance.

The increasing power of the Husaynis aroused the resentment of the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, especially Rauf Pasha, the last governor during the reign of Abd al-Hamid II. Over the last two years of the sultan’s reign (1907–9), Rauf Pasha repeatedly complained that the Husaynis were inciting the populace against the sultan. Fortunately, he said, the sultan had a servant who was the right man in the right place, who was able to overcome them ‘for the good of the people’. He told the central government that he had succeeded in controlling the ‘parasites’ – namely, the Husaynis, Khalidis and Nashashibis.
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The family’s growing power also reawakened the tension in its relations with the foreign consuls, who had become much stronger since the kaiser’s visit. As the British consul John Dixon reported, this was due to Jerusalem’s growing importance in the eyes of the world, and as a result the Western consuls became an even more dominant element in the city than they had been in Finn’s time. In the past fifteen years the city’s population had doubled, as had its area, and since the opening of the railway link with Jaffa, commerce had also doubled.
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As the consul walked around the market, he rejoiced to see the finest British goods on display and to hear English spoken everywhere, both by the many missionaries living in the city and the numerous tourists who frequented it. ‘Hundreds of British tourists come here twice a year, spring and autumn,’ he wrote. He also complained about his numerous duties and his low salary. Most of the European consuls had been promoted to consuls-general, but not Dixon – not because Britain was less interested in Jerusalem than the other powers but because of bureaucratic parsimony.
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During the final years of Abd al-Hamid’s reign, which ended in 1909, the European influence was so dominant that the sub-district of Nazareth was detached from the district of Acre and attached to the Jerusalem
sanjaq
, thus putting all the Christian holy places under one umbrella and ‘facilitating the services to the pilgrims’. But near the end of his reign, the sultan restored Nazareth to the district of Acre.
⁴⁷

The process of economic and technological transformation driven by the foreign presence in the city accelerated in the early twentieth
century. European influence was visible everywhere, and the increasing trade with Europe affected the patterns of life in towns and villages throughout Palestine. The new destination of the external trade and its growth in the three districts that would later form the British Mandate of Palestine – Jerusalem, Nablus and Acre (the last two being part of the Vilayet of Beirut, with its capital in Sidon) – would promote a certain economic unity among them. These districts did not need to use the Port of Beirut, and their external commerce could operate from within their territory. Foreign trade meant an increase of cash crops, with cultivators turning into hired laborers and agriculture being modernized. In the city, the effects could be seen in the growing number of foreign banks, in the postal services and in insurance companies.
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Though the Husaynis became wealthier in the early twentieth century, they were not affected by the capitalist trend and did not join the world of finance. The capitalization of Jerusalem’s economy sustained three principal groups – Jerusalemites of Greek and Italian origin who operated energetically and accumulated fresh capital, a small number of Jewish settlers who arrived at the beginning of the century and the German Templers.
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But if the rules of the capital market did not directly affect the Husaynis, other European imports did reshape their world. For example, the installation of a clock tower over the Jaffa Gate, one of the many towers built in honor of the sultan throughout the empire, revolutionized the perception of time and space among the people in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Palestine. According to the intriguing analysis of Benedict Anderson, a scholar of nationality, the clock caused people to relate differently to the reality around them and gave rise to a new political-cultural relationship that eventually became known as nationality. Until the end of the First World War, younger people in Jerusalem set their daily timetable by the clock tower, while the older people continued to live by a dual timetable – a Western one when required to fix a precise time, and the traditional one determined by prayers and meal times.

The more traditional scholars of Arab nationalism agree that the encounter with Europe catalyzed the formation of national identity. It was a complex encounter that included several economic aspects and the advent of new technology which enabled speedy physical access to information and new places and made it possible for people to compare cultural worlds in terms of values. For the Palestinians in general, and the Husaynis in particular, this phenomenon was personified by a new kind of Jew, the Zionist.

The Zionists saw themselves as a national movement that acted as a colonialist project, and they therefore claimed ownership over Palestine and attempted to occupy it by force. This new actor on the ground obliged the Palestinians to think in a totally different way about their own survival and existence. But it was too early to realize this. At this stage, what Zionism did seem to trigger on the Palestinians’ side was an impulse to sharpen their local national identity – and here the Husaynis had a major role to play.

FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH ZIONISM

Individual Husaynis encountered Zionism in various circumstances and reacted in a variety of ways. It is hard to know to what extent the association of the family with the pre-Zionist Jewish elite in Jerusalem affected its attitude towards Zionism when it appeared. Apparently it had little or no effect, just as there was little or no connection between the world of the old Jewish community in Palestine and the new world that the Zionist immigrants were trying to create.

The first Husayni to confront the new phenomenon was Mufti Tahir II, who found himself at the forefront of the struggle against Zionism in its earliest manifestations. Like other Muslim clerics in the empire, he viewed the Zionist movement as part of the concerted Western effort to undermine Ottoman rule in the shrinking empire. Already in 1882, these clerics prevailed on Sultan Abd al-Hamid II to pass a law banning Jewish immigration. From the day the law was passed – even before he became
mufti
in 1883 – and for the rest of his life, Tahir cooperated with the Ottoman religious establishment and, working like a one-man research institute, studied Zionism’s nature, meaning and aims. It was at his initiative that the authorities in Istanbul decided in 1889 to limit Jewish immigration and permit foreign Jews to spend no more than three months in Palestine, and then for religious purposes only.

Tahir was thus in the vanguard of the anti-immigration front. The issue of land was more problematic, at least in the first decade of the Zionist presence. It is doubtful he succeeded in persuading his kinsmen of the importance of this issue, especially as he himself sold some land – though not a great deal – in the vicinity of Jerusalem to Zionist groups.

On the other hand Salim, who said nothing about immigration, took his time when asked to sell land or to approve land transactions in the
city council, which he headed. In 1890 the council first discussed the possibility of Jewish immigrants settling in the city and the desire of some of them to purchase plots of land. As usual, the council’s summer session dealt with the population figures, and it discovered that a full third of the registered inhabitants were Jews – a marked increase over the number reported in previous sessions.
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The city began to take on a Jewish character, at least according to the Ottoman records of the time. During the Hamidi reign, Jews who owned properties and houses paid taxes, and so every annual report revealed the demographic change in the city. Salim was convinced that this was not accidental and that it might indicate a plot to take over the city. Together with the Jerusalem notables, he organized a petition to the authorities to forbid the purchase of land by Jews and to the sultan to issue a
firman
to that effect.
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A year later the sultan did issue such an order, but pressure from the British government made it ineffectual.

But while Salim believed that such action was necessary, he did not apparently see Zionist immigration as something new. He had become accustomed to the growing foreign presence in the city since the Crimean War and tended to view it as a general European scheme to take control of the city, a drive that had begun with the first consuls. His was not, therefore, a specifically anti-Jewish attitude. The family as a whole and Salim in particular had good relations with the Jewish community, notably in the economic sector. Before becoming mayor, Salim had had commercial and real-estate dealings with some Jerusalem Jews and business associations with several, primarily the Rokah family. In the 1870s he and Yitzhak Rokah were partners in a hotel in Bab al-Wad. Rokah had leased it in 1877 with Salim’s help (that is, the lease was registered in Salim’s name) and managed it, and the profits were divided between them. These profits derived from the taxes levied on travelers from Jaffa to Jerusalem and were endorsed on the tax receipts. This partnership persisted until the opening of the Jaffa–Jerusalem railway.
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(The hotel, by the way, is still there along Route 1 connecting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, just as you begin the ascent to the city.)

When Salim became mayor of Jerusalem amid an influx of Jews into the municipality, this did not damage these relations but in fact improved them, if only because the Jewish vote was needed. In the municipal elections of 1892, for example, 700 of the enfranchised Muslims cast their votes, as well as 300 Christians and 200 Jews, who among them elected ten representatives to the city council.
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Salim’s
first mayoralty had been by appointment, but in 1892 the post was obtained by election, and he needed the Jewish votes. (Both systems were used irregularly until the end of the century.) Then, as now, votes were won by responding to the demands of the various communities. One of the main demands of the Jewish community was the enlargement of the space in front of the Western Wall. The Husayni family were guardians of important religious properties whose sale or lease could have eased the crowding at the Wall. In 1887 Mustafa al-Husayni agreed to sell to Nissim Bakhar and Edmond de Rothschild part of the Abu Maidian religious property. Named after a Maghrebi saint, this property was under the Husaynis’ guardianship and included the Western Wall area. But the deal fell through for unknown reasons.
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The Husaynis were able to respond favorably to the less far-reaching demands of the Jewish community and thus obtain their votes for the mayoralty. For example, Salim acceded to the request of three Jewish notables to pave the Western Wall square so that some sewage work being carried out nearby would not sully the Jewish holy site.
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In fact, this was the last time that the Jewish presence at the Wall was treated as a communal-religious, rather than national, issue. In 1897, when the Baron de Rothschild wished to buy the Western Wall square from the Muslim religious authority and the mayor almost agreed, both branches of the family became alarmed, especially the
sheikh al-haram
, Bashir al-Husayni, the son of Abd al-Salam II, who managed to block the sale. The Husaynis’ ability to do so was due to the fact that the purchase of lands required the approval of the city council as well as the governor.
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