Icon of Evil

Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam

David Dalin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351513968
• Print ISBN:
  9781412810777
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

A chilling, fascinating, and nearly forgotten historical figure is resurrected in this riveting work that links the fascism of the last century with the terrorism of our own. Written with vigor and extraordinary access to primary sources in several languages, Icon of Evil is the definitive account of the man who, during World War II, was called "the fuhrer of the Arab world" and whose ugly legacy lives on today.

With new and disturbing details, David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann show how al -Husseini ingratiated himself with his hero, Adolf Hitler, becoming, with his blond hair and blue eyes, an "honorary Aryan" while dreaming of being installed as Nazi leader of the Middle East. Al-Husseini would later recruit more than 100,000 Muslims in Europe to fight in divisions of the Waffen- SS, and obstruct negotiations with the Allies that might have allowed four thousand Jewish children to escape to Palestine. Some believe that al-Husseini even inspired Hitler to implement the Final Solution. At war's end, al-Husseini escaped indictment at Nuremberg and was harbored in France.

Icon of Evil chronicles al-Husseini's postwar relationships with such influential Islamic figures as the radical theoretician Sayyid Qutb and Saddam Hussein's powerful uncle General Khairallah Talfah and his crucial mentoring of the young Yasser Ararat. Finally, it provides compelling evidence that al-Husseini's actions and writings serve as inspirations today to the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations pledged to destroy Israel and the United States.

Chapter 1

Rendezvous with Destiny

Shortly after noon on November 28, 1941, just nine days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, left his luxurious mansion on Berlin’s fashionable Klopstock Street and was driven to the Wilhelmstrasse, the historic street on which were located most of the German government ministries. The mufti and the fuhrer were scheduled to meet at Adolf Hitler’s private office in the Reich Chancellery.

The meeting had been scheduled for the afternoon, to accommodate Hitler’s well-known penchant for working through the night and sleeping through much of the late morning. After a short drive down the elegant Wilhelmstrasse, imperial Berlin’s old center of power,¹ the large government Mercedes arrived at the corner of Voss-Strasse, in front of the Reich Chancellery, the opulent seat of Hitler’s government. It is plausible to assume that as the mufti’s driver turned south from Unter den Linden, which had been one of the main areas of Jewish shops in Berlin, he may have mentioned to al-Husseini, a recently arrived visitor to the German capital, that before Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, the land under the new Reich Chancellery had belonged to the Jewish department store magnate Georg Wertheim. Wertheim had been coerced into donating his Berlin property to the new Nazi regime.

As he was escorted down a long, marble-floored corridor, al-Husseini was suitably impressed by the monumental grandeur of one of the architectural wonders of the Third Reich, perhaps the greatest achievement of Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer. When the fuhrer had commissioned Speer to design and build the new Reich Chancellery in 1938, he had commented that the old building, which dated from Bismarck’s tenure in the 1870s, was “fit for a soap company”² and was not suitable as headquarters of the German Reich. Speer was to create an edifice of “imperial majesty,”³ an imposing building with grand halls and salons. Al-Husseini was driven through the Court of Honor, the building’s main entrance, ascended an outside staircase, and approached the visitors’ elaborately ornate reception room, immediately adjacent to Hitler’s personal office. As the mufti neared the reception room, he passed through a round room with domed ceiling and a gallery 480 feet long, the exquisitely furnished mirrored gallery that Hitler had praised as surpassing the famous Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. It boasted a length of nearly 1,200 feet, and its floor and walls were lined with dark red marble. Hitler’s immensely spacious private office and study, measuring nearly 4,500 square feet, was located immediately to its side.⁴

Following his arrival in Berlin three weeks earlier, rapturous crowds had hailed the mufti as the fuhrer of the Arab world. The week before his meeting with Hitler, al-Husseini had been honored at a reception given by the Islamische Zentralinstitut,⁵ a German-Islamic institute recently established in Berlin. As the mufti was driven down the Wilhelmstrasse, adoring crowds of Palestinian Arab expatriates lined the streets to cheer and pay homage to their revered leader, the Grossmufti von Jerusalem.

Hitler regarded the mufti with both deference and respect. With the possible exception of King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, al-Husseini was the most eminent and influential Islamic leader in the Middle East. The mufti, unlike Ibn Saud, was a trusted supporter of Hitler’s Germany, a man upon whom the Nazis could always rely.

The mufti began by thanking the fuhrer for the great honor he had bestowed by receiving him. In his effort to both flatter his host and solicit his patronage and support, the mufti told Hitler that he “wished to seize the opportunity to convey to the Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich, admired by the entire Arab world, his thanks for the sympathy he had always shown for the Arab and especially the Palestinian cause. . . . The Arab countries were firmly convinced that Germany would win the war and that the Arab cause would then prosper.” The Arabs, the mufti assured his host, “were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists. They were therefore prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an Arab Legion. The Arabs could be more useful to Germany as allies than might be apparent at first glance, both for geographical reasons and because of the suffering inflicted upon them by the English and the Jews.”⁶

The mufti’s objectives were far-reaching. He wanted to terminate Jewish immigration to Palestine, but he also hoped to help lead a holy war of Islam in alliance with Germany, a jihad that would result in the extermination of the Jews.⁷

As al-Husseini would write in his memoirs: “Our fundmental 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.’ “⁸

To the mufti’s delight, the fuhrer responded with a strong and unequivocal reaffirmation of his anti-Jewish position and of his support for the radical Arab cause, assuring the mufti that he was fully committed to pursuing a war of extermination against the Jews and to actively opposing the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. As the mufti would recount after their meeting, Hitler had assured him that “Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well. Germany’s objectives would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power [in Palestine] .”⁹ In that hour, the führer assured al-Husseini, the mufti would become the most powerful leader in the Arab world.

For the forty-six-year-old mufti, this meeting with the führer was his rendezvous with destiny. Haj Amin al-Husseini had been preparing for this moment for much of his adult life. He had gone to the Reich Chancellery to convince Adolf Hitler of his total dedication to the Nazi goal of exterminating the Jews. The führer had instantly embraced him, eagerly welcoming al-Husseini as his ally and collaborator.

At the conclusion of their ninety-five-minute meeting, the mufti could reflect with great satisfaction on what he had achieved: Only three weeks after his arrival in Berlin on November 7, the mufti’s dream of a more formal alliance between radical Islam and Hitler’s Germany had become a reality.

As the mufti stood up to leave, he and the führer embraced and shook hands. It was a handshake, each believed, that would change the world.

chapter 2

The Genesis of Modern Jihad: Haj Amin al-Husseini, Palestinian Nationalism, and the Birth of Radical Islam

Amin al-Husseini was born in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The year of his birth is given by various sources as 1893, 1895, and 1897, but it is generally agreed that he was born in 1895. He was educated first in Jerusalem, where he attended a Turkish government school, and then in Cairo, at the school of Sheikh Rashid Rida. Here, young al-Husseini was indoctrinated with a virulent anti-Semitism. It was as a teenager that al-Husseini first learned about the Prophet Muhammad’s historic antipathy toward the Jews of Medina, who actively opposed the Prophet and rejected his message. As descendants of those who opposed the founder of Islam, and who refused to accept the new faith that he preached, al-Husseini was taught, Jews would forever be condemned by Muslims as infidels who denied the truth of Muhammad’s message. This was a lesson that the impressionable al-Husseini would learn well as a student in Cairo, a lesson he would never forget and that would shape his own attitudes toward Jews throughout his life. In 1913, after briefly attending Al-Azhar University in Egypt, he fulfilled the Muslim religious obligation of pilgrimage to Mecca and thereafter added the title “Haj” to his name. From then on, he would be known as Haj Amin al-Husseini.

Al-Husseini never completed his academic studies at Al-Azhar University, a fact that would remain a source of controversy for his Muslim critics over the years. Since he’d dropped out of Al-Azhar without completing a degree, or the course of study necessary for ordination as a Muslim cleric and legal scholar, his Muslim opponents were able to belittle his academic credentials and maintain that he did not have sufficient accreditation to hold the position of mufti and spiritual leader in the Muslim religious community. Throughout his public career, al-Husseini tended to reinvent his own autobiography, claiming credentials and professional experience that he did not in fact possess. Thus, for example, from the outset of his career he would imply that he had been ordained as a Muslim cleric and that while at Al-Azhar he had completed the requisite studies in Sharia (Muslim religious law) to qualify for ordination. Had he done so, he would have been known as Sheikh Amin al-Husseini, a title that properly ordained members of the Muslim clergy were qualified to hold.¹

With the outbreak of World War I, al-Husseini enlisted in the Turkish army and became an officer. The Ottoman Turkish Empire, in whose army he fought, had allied itself with Germany, joining the Central Powers in its losing war against Great Britain, France, and the United States. History would prove that this was a tragically fateful— and foolish—decision for the once formidable Ottoman Turkish Empire: As British prime minister Herbert Asquith remarked at the time, the Ottoman Empire “in making this decision [to join the Central Powers] was in effect committing suicide and sealing its own doom.”² In 1918, after Germany and Turkey’s defeat, al-Husseini returned to his native Jerusalem, where he worked first as a clerk in the office of the Arab adviser to the British military governor and then as a teacher. As he began to assume a leadership role in Palestinian Arab public life in the aftermath of World War I, he exhibited political skill beyond his years. He quickly attracted the attention of Jerusalem’s young Palestinian Arab nationalists, who began to look to him for advice and leadership. This was advice and leadership that the young al-Husseini, hoping to embark on a political career, was most happy to provide. In Jerusalem, he began to develop a grassroots political organization in the city, mobilizing a coterie of followers and political supporters who shared his virulent hatred of the British and the Jews. A charismatic and spellbinding orator, he mesmerized crowds on the street corners and outside the mosques of his native city and soon attracted a significant political following, expanding and cementing what became a passionately loyal political base that would support him in the years to come. Beginning in 1918, he became a frequent contributor to Arab nationalist journals, writing articles that were violently anti-Jewish.³ In these essays, he did not hide his all-consuming hatred of the British and the Jews or his fanatical opposition to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Some more moderate Arab nationalists were ready to consider working together with the Jews of Palestine and to accept the idea of a Jewish state. Haj Amin al-Husseini was adamant in rejecting such a moderate, conciliatory approach. To him, any cooperation with the Jews was out of the question.

The roots of al-Husseini’s hatred of the Jews were clear and unambiguous. The Jews were the enemy. From his earliest point of awareness, young Amin knew that the Jews were not Muslims. He knew that the Jews were determined to take his homeland. He believed that the Jews were part of a grand conspiracy that would ultimately destroy Islamic civilization. For the mufti, reading The Protocols of the Elders of lion for the first time was a revelation. This was the book that explained his world, that accurately described precisely the events taking place in his beloved homeland, British-occupied Palestine. The British were clearly part of the very conspiracy described in the Protocols. British army officers in Jerusalem, fresh from Europe, were reading and widely distributing copies of the Protocols among themselves and to the Arabs of Palestine. If the Jews were to be prevented from succeeding in the nefarious conspiracy outlined in the Protocols, someone would have to raise the banner of Islam in jihad against this mortal enemy.

Al-Husseini saw himself as destined to fulfill that heroic role. He was born into one of the most patrician families of Arab Palestine, a family that could trace its lineage directly back to the Prophet Muhammad. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Husseinis were part of the political elite of Palestine. Members of the family served in the Turkish Parliament and as regional governors, mayors, and religious leaders. Growing up in turn-of-the- century Jerusalem, then still under Turkish Ottoman rule, the young al-Husseini was heir to a political dynasty that had been ruling Arab Jerusalem since the early 1880s. His father, Sheikh Tahr al-Husseini, had served as mufti of Jerusalem, as had his father, Mustapha al-Husseini, before him. When Amins father died in 1908, his older brother, Kamal al-Husseini, assumed his position,⁴ carrying on a family tradition that al-Husseini himself would later continue. In 1918, immediately after World War I, his cousin Musa Kasim Pasha al-Husseini became mayor of Jerusalem. A shrewd and successful politician who governed the Holy City as if it were his family’s personal fiefdom, Musa Kasim Pasha at first ruled with the complete support of the British mandatory government, which after World War I had replaced Ottoman Turkish rule in Palestine. As head of one of the leading Muslim families in the city, he emerged as the preeminent radical Islamic opponent of the British Mandate for Palestine, and of Great Britain’s pledge, in its Balfour Declaration of November z, 1917* to create a Jewish national home in Palestine.

The idea for a British mandatory government in Palestine had initially been established by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret deal that the Allies (chiefly Great Britain and France) had negotiated in 1916 to divide the Ottoman Empire—which included present-day Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates—among themselves. The Ottoman Turks had ruled most of these territories for centuries. Carving up the spoils under Sykes-Picot, England tightened its grip on Egypt (already under British rule) and also took control of Palestine, Iraq, several Gulf states, and Transjordan (today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan). At the Paris Peace Conference at the conclusion of World War I, the victorious Allies ratified the provisions of Sykes-Picot, stipulating that Palestine would be ruled by the British under a mandatory system. Under the mandate, Great Britain was responsible for all governmental, administrative, and security functions in Palestine. These moves reneged on promises of postwar independence that had been made to various Arab leaders by the flamboyant British representative in the region, T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia. In carving up the Ottoman Turkish Empire and establishing its British colonial administration in Palestine and throughout the Arab Middle East, the Allies had shaken the foundations of what had been the established political order in the Arab world.

The Balfour Declaration, which was published as a letter by British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, head of the London branch of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Introduction
• preface
• 1 Rendezvous with Destiny
• 2 The Genesis of Modern Jihad: Haj Amin al-Husseini, Palestinian Nationalism, and the Birth of Radical Islam
• 3 Partners in Genocide
• 4 The Mufti’s Reflection: What If Germany Had Conquered Palestine and Britain?
• 5 The Mufti’s Return to the Middle East
• 6 Mandate for Hate: Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Islamization of Anti-Semitism
• 7 The Mufti’s Legacy: Jew Hatred, Jihad, and Terror
• Acknowledgement
• Chronology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index