The Haj - Leon Uris [26]
‘May Allah bless your every breath and footstep, Haj Ibrahim.’
Ibrahim went to the knoll after evening prayer. With all the trees he could no longer see into Shemesh Kibbutz. Damned, but he liked Gideon Asch! If only his son, Kamal, turned out like Gideon ... why ... why ... the two of them could conquer all of Palestine.
9
Autumn 1929
HAJ AMIN AL HEUSSEINI, the Mufti of Jerusalem, assumed the pulpit. The mosque stood on a great plaza that had been the Temple Mount of Solomon and Herod. Since Islam it had been the site of Al Aksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed made his legendary ascension to heaven. Known now as the Haram esh Sharif, the Most Noble Sanctuary, it was considered the third most sacred site in all of Islam.
‘The criminal Jews are going to take the Haram esh Sharif by a signal of a ram’s horn blowing on Yom Kippur. They are going to destroy the Dome of the Rock and this mosque and rebuild their temple!’ the mufti shouted.
‘Death to the Jews!’ the congregation responded.
‘Hatred of the Jews is sacred!’ cried the mufti.
‘Death to the Jews!’ they chanted.
Out they poured, brandishing knives, clubs, and hidden pistols from beneath their robes. Frothing, enraged by the sermon, the Arab mob fell upon the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City nearby, a quarter inhabited by defenseless Hassidim. They tore into the little room-sized synagogues and burned Jewish holy books, smashed up shops, urinated and defecated on Torah scrolls, pulled beards, clubbed and garroted, and when it was done, thirty Jews had been murdered.
‘The Jews have destroyed Al Aksa!’
The word roared over Palestine from mosque to mosque accompanied by crudely faked photographs.
‘Death to the Jews!’
In the holy city of Safed in the Galilee, where the oriental Jewish scholars studied the mystical books of Cabala, eighteen were massacred.
‘Death to the Jews!’
In Abraham’s city of Hebron, where Jew and Moslem jointly worshiped at the tombs of the patriarchs, the burial place of Abraham and many biblical characters, the Arab mob murdered and dismembered sixty-seven unarmed and undefended men, women, and children.
Other attacks were coordinated as the Arabs spilled out of their mosques in Jaffa, Haifa, Beer Tuvia, and Hulda, spurred by the infamous lie that the Jews were taking over the Haram esh Sharif.
Using the pulpit and the power and position of his title as Mufti, Haj Amin al Heusseini moved through the decade of the 1920s and spread his tentacles into every corner of Palestine. He was a landowner of enormous properties, which were sharecropped in a feudal tradition. The Mufti’s domain was a destitute, illiterate fiefdom of desperate serfs who were easily aroused and manipulated into religious frenzy inside the mosque.
While the Jewish Agency flourished, the Mufti blocked creation of an Arab Agency, which would have caused him to cooperate with rival clans and diminish his personal ambitions. This left the Arab community with an impoverished and ineffectual health and education system and no plans for future progress.
Instead, the Mufti maneuvered. Arab life was completely centered around the Moslem religion. A Supreme Moslem Council was the major body controlling religious funds, religious courts, the mosques, moneys for orphans and education. Haj Amin al Heusseini seized the presidency of the Council, which, in addition to his title as Mufti, gave him a hammerlock on the Arab community.
As president of the Supreme Moslem Council he had vast funds at his disposal without having to make a public accounting. He likewise controlled the appointment of preachers, mosque officials, teachers, and judges. So broad and dominating had the Mufti’s powers become that he immodestly added the word ‘Grand’ to his title and thus became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The calm of the decade had been deliberately broken when he turned loose his ragged legions in a raw play for absolute power.
Although the carnage had been great in undefended Jewish holy cities, the Mufti’s gains had been limited. He had struck