Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam (6 page)

The mandatory government forbade the mufti to return to Palestine. After a short stay in Beirut, he moved to Damascus, Syria. During the following two years of his political exile in Syria, he directed the violence and terrorist activity of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, which continued until May 1939. Many of the more moderate Arab leaders of Palestine who had opposed the mufti and his policies were murdered at his command. The tool of political assassination employed by the mufti against his Palestinian Arab political opponents would become a plague in the political life of the Islamic Middle East.

The Mufti, the Founding of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Rise of Radical Islam

The events of 1929 had elevated the standing of Haj Amin al-Husseini throughout the Islamic world. He was now more than the leader of the Muslims of Palestine; he was also the defender of Jerusalem, the third holiest city of Islam. Al-Husseini had become the most revered defender of Muslim honor in the world. His call for a new world order based on Islam, and for a campaign of jihad against the British, the Jews, and the West, was striking an increasingly responsive chord.

On December 7, 1931, al-Husseini convened the World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem. Attended by 122 delegates representing all of the world’s Muslim countries except Turkey, it was convened to articulate the shared grievances of a united Islam against the West. The congress was especially virulent in its condemnation of Zionism and of British colonial government throughout the Muslim world, in Egypt, India, and Palestine. For the first time, with a united voice, the Muslim world was speaking in unison, stating its radical opposition to Western civilization, to both the culture and the politics of what Islam viewed as the secular West. It had a common enemy, Western imperialism and colonialism, as manifest in British colonial government in Muslim India and throughout the Islamic Middle East. As the convener and president of the World Islamic Congress, Haj Amin al-Husseini was now increasingly recognized as the preeminent voice of radical Islam and a new and powerful force on the world political scene.

His stature was further elevated by his emerging leadership role within the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic religious organization that had been founded in Egypt in 1928. The brotherhood’s goal was to create a new world order based on Islam, an objective it still pursues today. Many future leaders of radical Islam, such as Egyptian presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Al Sadat, began their political careers as young activists in the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1930s. Youssef Nada, chairman of Al Taqwa Bank, joined the Muslim Brotherhood during World War II, when he was recruited along with others in the Muslim Brotherhood by German military intelligence agents supervised by the mufti for espionage against the British colonial government in Egypt.
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Yasser Arafat became active in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 1950s.

The Muslim Brotherhood had been founded in Cairo by al-Husseini’s ideological soul-mate, Hassan al-Banna, a young Egyptian schoolteacher and political organizer who shared al-Husseini’s passionate hatred of the British and the Jews. Born into an impoverished Egyptian family in 1906, al-Banna had participated in a protest demonstration against the British at the young age of thirteen. While a college student in Cairo, he was deeply disturbed by the effects of Westernization that he saw there, especially the rise of secularism and the breakdown of traditional moral values, which he came to blame on British colonial rule in his native Egypt. At the age of twenty-two, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood, the first mass-based overtly political movement to oppose the ascendancy of secular and Western ideas and values, and British colonial rule, in the Middle East. By the late 1930s, it had established branches in every Egyptian province. A decade later, it had five hundred thousand active members in Egypt alone and a vast and loyal network of political supporters in Palestine and throughout the Arab Middle East.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a forerunner of Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda, was established as a pan-Islamic movement that believed in the virtue of a one-world Islamic utopia and the use of terrorism, when necessary, to achieve its goal. From the brotherhood’s inception, jihad (holy war) became one of its central tenets. Members of the brotherhood emphasized the honor and reverence given to those who sacrifice their lives as jihadist martyrs in the name of Islam, proclaiming, “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the name of Allah is our highest hope.”
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Muhammad Sa’id al-’Ashmawy, the distinguished Egyptian jurist and former chief justice of Egypt’s High Criminal Court, best described the Muslim Brotherhood when he referred to its ideology as a “perversion of Islam” and spoke of “the fascistic ideology” that infuses the worldview of the brotherhood, “their total (if not totalitarian) way of life…[and] their fantastical reading of the Koran.”
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This is a description that aptly defines the ideology of the mufti as well.

The philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood was characterized by the doctrine that a universal Islamic reawakening will bring about the establishment of a unified Islamic state throughout the Muslim world. The goal of this radical Islamic reawakening was the reestablishment of pan-Islamic political power and authority as represented by the rule of a caliph, the title bestowed upon the successors of the Prophet Muhammad.
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Both al-Husseini and al-Banna called for the reestablishment of the caliphate, which had been abolished by the Turkish government in 1924. Of course, each radical Islamic leader thought he should become the new caliph. “We want an Arabian United States with a Caliphate at its head and every Arab state subscribing wholeheartedly to the laws of the Koran,” declared al-Banna. “We must return to the Koran…. The laws of the Koran are suitable for all men at all times to the end of the world.”
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Al-Banna’s worldview was expressed most clearly in the Muslim Brotherhood’s newspaper,
Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun:
“No justice will be dealt and no peace maintained on earth until the rule of the Koran and the bloc of Islam are established. Moslem unity must be established. Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco all form one bloc, the Moslem bloc, which God has promised to grant victory, saying: ‘We shall grant victory unto the faithful.’ But this is impossible to reach other than through the way of Islam.”
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Adhering to the doctrine that only Muslim believers can govern in Islamic lands, al-Banna and his followers in the Muslim Brotherhood vehemently rejected the influence of the secular democratic West and the legitimacy of secular regimes throughout the Middle East.

The rise of radical Islam, and the evolution of its political and religious worldview, drew further inspiration from the writings of the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential theoretician, Sayyid Qutb, a contemporary of al-Banna and al-Husseini. Born in a village in Upper Egypt in 1906, Qutb studied in Cairo and for several years worked as a teacher and then as an official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education.
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He then embarked on a career as a writer and critic. The writings of Qutb had a profound ideological influence on the emerging radical Islamic movement, including its principal leaders—ranging from al-Husseini and al-Banna in the 1930s to Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Osama bin Laden in later decades—and its principal terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda.
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Together, al-Husseini, al-Banna, and Qutb constituted the founding fathers of radical Islam as we know it today.

In perhaps his most important and oft-quoted essay, “Our Struggle with the Jews,” Qutb claims that Jewish “wickedness,” “deception,” and “plotting” are what keep “the Muslim world in a state of estrangement from the teachings of the Qur’an, thereby depriving it of the real sources of knowledge and power.” The true aim of all Jews, he alleges, is to destroy Islam itself. Indeed, there is no other human group “whose history reveals the sort of mercilessness, [moral] shirking and ungratefulness for Divine Guidance as does this one…. The Jews perpetrated the worst sins of disobedience [against Allah], behaving in the most disgustingly aggressive manner and sinning in the ugliest way. Everywhere the Jews have been they have committed unprecedented abominations. From such creatures who kill, massacre and defame prophets, one can only expect the spilling of human blood and any dirty means which would further their machinations and evilness.”
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Chapter 3

Partners in Genocide

 Throughout the 1930s, until his departure from Palestine in 1937, Haj Amin al-Husseini continued to incite violence against the Jews of Palestine. At the same time, he began to make overtures to the new Nazi regime in Germany. In late March 1933, shortly after Hitler’s accession to power, al-Husseini had approached the German consul general in Jerusalem, Dr. Heinrich Wolff, and offered his support to the new Nazi government in Berlin,
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an offer he would reiterate to Nazi officials over the next few years. In January 1937, the mufti was quoted by
The New York Times
as to his willingness to ally himself with Hitler because of the common enemy shared by radical Islam and Nazi Germany: “We are fighting Zionism in Palestine, which is supported by the British,” stated al-Husseini. “What do we care who backs us, or who we align ourselves with, as long as it helps us to attain our goals…. We don’t care who we have to align ourselves with.” We, Arabs and Germans, “have a common enemy, the British and the Jews.”
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By 1938, after British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous capitulation to Hitler at Munich, al-Husseini’s overtures to Germany were officially reciprocated and became the basis of a nascent Islamic-Nazi alliance.

All across the Middle East, during the 1930s, sympathy for Nazi ideas and support for Germany had been spreading. Several of the new Arab political parties founded during the 1930s betrayed shades of the Nazi model. In 1935, when the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws were promulgated, telegrams of congratulation to the führer were sent from all over the Islamic world, especially from Morocco and Palestine, where German propaganda had been most active. Between 1933 and 1938, political parties such as the Syrian Popular Party and the Young Egypt Society, which were organized throughout the Arab Middle East, were explicitly anti-Semitic in their ideology and programs. The leader of Syria’s Socialist Nationalist Party, Anton Sa’ada, styled himself as the führer of the Syrian nation, and the party’s banner even featured the swastika. So, too, the anti-Semitic program of the Young Egypt Society, under the emerging leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Al Sadat, included vocal support for Nazi ideology, the publication and distribution of anti-Jewish propaganda, and the organization of boycotts against the Jewish community of Egypt.
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The pro-Nazi sensibility shared by al-Husseini and his collaborators among the new Arab leadership was recounted in an autobiographical memoir by a leader of the pro-German Ba’ath Party in Syria:

We were racists, admiring Nazism, reading its books and the source of its thought, particularly Nietzsche…Fichte and H. S. Chamberlain’s
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,
which revolves on race. We were the first to think of translating
Mein Kampf.
Whoever lived during this period in Damascus would appreciate the inclination of the Arab people to Nazism, for Nazism was the power which could serve as its champion, and he who is defeated will by nature love the victor.
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Between 1938 and 1941, it was this already emergent predisposition of the Arab people toward Nazism that al-Husseini effectively exploited in shaping the new alliance between the radical Islamic parties and monarchs of the Middle East and Hitler’s Nazi regime. King Farouk of Egypt, who was to become a close friend and ally of the mufti, was especially eager to do so. On April 15, 1941, King Farouk sent a secret message to Hitler welcoming a German occupation of his country and offering his support to the Third Reich. This message was conveyed secretly to the führer by Farouk’s father-in-law, Zulficar Pasha, the rabidly pro-Nazi Egyptian ambassador in Tehran. On April 30, Pasha, who would be the intermediary for several secret wartime communications between Hitler, the mufti, and the Egyptian king, received a response from Hitler himself, which he personally and promptly conveyed to King Farouk.
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King Farouk’s secret communications and subsequent collaboration with Nazi Germany, fostered and furthered by the mufti, beginning in 1941, form a little-known chapter in the history of the Arab-Nazi German alliance during World War II. In March 1943, at the urging of the mufti and with the approval of the führer, arrangements were made for Farouk to escape from Cairo to Nazi-occupied Europe in the event of an attempt on the Egyptian monarch’s life by the British, which the Nazi government thought likely to occur. In a letter to Farouk, the mufti assured the king “that he would be received with all honors due a friendly reigning sovereign” and that he would be given every possible means by the Nazis for continuing the activities of his Egyptian government in exile.
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In his appreciative response to the German offer of political asylum in the event of a possible British assassination attempt, Farouk noted that he “was still hoping for an Axis victory” and conveyed “his best wishes to the Mufti of Jerusalem and to all those who work with him for the success and victory of the Axis.”
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