The fatwa of the Mufti of Jerusalem

In the spring of 1941 the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, leader of the Palestinian Arabs, who had been living in exile in Baghdad for a year and a half, called on Muslims throughout the world to wage holy war against Britain. He did so in the form of a fatwa – a legal opinion grounded in Islamic law – which was read out on Baghdad radio and rebroadcast by Axis stations. The fatwa was meant to give religious justification to the war that the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, installed in power by the army at the beginning of April, was waging against the British.

Some chronologies place the fatwa under 9 April 1941, citing the timeline of the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). That same timeline, however, gives the date as 9 May 1941, and other studies agree with this date: the fatwa was a response to the outbreak of Anglo-Iraqi fighting at Habbaniya on 2 May, not to the events of April. The April date is therefore most probably a mistake of one month. The proper context of the fatwa is May 1941, with Iraq at war with Britain and the Mufti as the spiritual patron of that war. 9 April 1941 was an important day for Iraq for another reason: in the House of Commons the Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, declared that London regarded the situation in Baghdad as “entirely unconstitutional” and would insist on full observance of the 1930 treaty of alliance. The conflict in which the Mufti would soon make his voice heard was just taking shape.

The Mufti in exile

Amin al-Husseini had been Mufti of Jerusalem since 1921 and, from 1922, president of the Supreme Muslim Council, which administered the property of religious endowments and the sharia courts in Palestine. He had been appointed by the British, who hoped that a member of Jerusalem’s most influential family would keep the peace. In 1936–1939, however, he headed the Arab Higher Committee, which led the Arab revolt in Palestine against British mandatory rule and Jewish settlement. In the autumn of 1937, after the murder of the British district commissioner for Galilee, the mandatory authorities dissolved the committee and stripped al-Husseini of his posts. The Mufti fled to Lebanon, where, under French supervision, he lived in the Christian village of Zouk Mikael and directed the continuing struggle from there. To his followers he remained the Grand Mufti, and the British continued to call him so.

After the outbreak of war the French demanded that he publicly support the Allies. Al-Husseini refused and in mid-October 1939 secretly left Beirut for Iraq. In Baghdad he was received as a hero: for Iraqi nationalists he was the best-known Arab leader of his time. The government of Nuri al-Said, though pro-British, could not ignore his popularity, and according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia the Mufti received money in Iraq both from the Iraqi government and from both belligerents. He quickly became one of the most important figures in Baghdad’s political life. Around him grew up a secret Arab Committee, made up of Iraqi politicians, the four colonels known as the “Golden Square” and exiles from Syria and Palestine. Three of the four colonels had once served alongside al-Husseini in the Ottoman army.

In the summer of 1940 the Mufti briefly allowed talks that might have brought him closer to London. The British Colonel Stewart Newcombe agreed with Nuri al-Said and Palestinian activists that the Arabs of Palestine would support Britain and accept the principles of the British White Paper of May 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, and that Iraq would send part of its army to fight alongside the Allies. At the end of August 1940 London backed out of these arrangements. From then on al-Husseini placed his bets on the Axis powers. His secretary, Uthman Kamal Haddad, travelled to Berlin and Rome in the summer of 1940 and again at the beginning of 1941 with drafts of a German–Italian–Arab declaration. In January 1941 the Mufti wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler asking him to recognise the independence of the Arab states, their right to unite and the right of the Arabs to do away with the Jewish national home in Palestine. Hitler issued no such declaration: he did not want to provoke Italy, which regarded the Levant and North Africa as its sphere of influence, or Vichy France, which ruled Syria and Lebanon.

April 1941

The coup that in the first days of April 1941 handed power to Rashid Ali and the colonels was prepared within the circle of the Arab Committee, and the Mufti was among its most important members. He took no office in the new “Government of National Defence”, but according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia he was the cabinet’s main link with Germany and Italy. The Reich had had no legation in Baghdad since September 1939, when Iraq broke off relations with it, so contacts ran through the Italian legation, the German embassy in Ankara and the Mufti’s own men. According to Haddad’s memoirs, at the beginning of April a secret reply from the German State Secretary, Ernst von Weizsäcker, to the January letter reached Baghdad: the Reich was ready to recognise the independence of the Arab states once they had won it for themselves. In the spring of 1941 the German Foreign Ministry agreed that the Mufti’s network should carry out sabotage behind British lines, to be financed by the Abwehr. It was also promised that if the Arabs rose against Britain, Germany would give them direct military assistance.

In those weeks Britain had weightier concerns. On 3 April the Afrika Korps entered Benghazi; on 6 April Germany attacked Greece and Yugoslavia, and General Archibald Wavell in Cairo had no troops to send to Iraq. Winston Churchill, however, had no intention of handing the Axis a country that carried the overland route from the Persian Gulf to Palestine and a pipeline supplying oil to Haifa, whose refineries and storage tanks the Italians had been bombing since the summer of 1940. The forces for Iraq were to come from India: on 18 April an Indian infantry brigade landed at Basra, the British invoking the 1930 treaty, which guaranteed them the right of transit. On 17 April Rashid Ali asked Germany for military assistance in the event of war. When further convoys arrived at Basra towards the end of the month, he refused permission for them to disembark, and on 30 April the Iraqi army occupied the plateau overlooking the British air base at Habbaniya. At dawn on 2 May aircraft from the base attacked the Iraqi positions. The Anglo-Iraqi War had begun, sometimes described under the name Operation Sabine.

The fatwa of 9 May

According to some accounts of the war, the Mufti proclaimed jihad against Britain as early as 2 May, when news of the fighting reached Baghdad. The formal fatwa, carrying his religious authority, was broadcast by Baghdad radio on 9 May 1941 and rebroadcast by German and Italian stations. Its text, translated into Italian, was printed the same year by the Roman orientalist monthly Oriente Moderno.

In Sunni Islam a fatwa is a legal opinion issued by a scholar on the basis of the Qur’an, tradition and the body of juristic writing. It is not absolutely binding, and its force depends on the authority of its author. Al-Husseini was not a jurist of the highest rank, but as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the third holy city of Islam, president of the World Islamic Congress of 1931 and leader of the Palestinian revolt, he was a figure known in the Arab world as few others were. It was precisely this authority that he wished to place at the service of Iraq’s war.

The text opened with an appeal: “I invite all my Muslim brothers throughout the world to join in the holy war for God, in defence of Islam and its lands against the enemy.” The Mufti presented Iraq as a state that “has placed itself in the vanguard of this holy struggle” and had hurled itself against “the most powerful enemy of Islam”, and it was the duty of every Muslim to support it by every means. What followed was an indictment of British imperialism: the British were said to have destroyed the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate, taken power in India from the Muslims, colonised Egypt, and seized Aden, the Hadhramaut, Oman, the emirates of the Persian Gulf and Transjordan. The most glaring proof of their hostility was Palestine, promised during the First World War to Sharif Hussein of Mecca and then given over to an “outrageous influx of Jews”. In Palestine, the Mufti wrote, the British had desecrated the Al-Aqsa mosque and declared war on Islam “in deed and in word”. He also cited words attributed to a former British prime minister, that the world would know no peace as long as the Qur’an existed. This saying, usually associated with William Gladstone, had long circulated in anti-British propaganda, but it has no support in the sources and is regarded as apocryphal. The fatwa ended by reckoning that more than 220 million Muslims lived under British rule, and with the call: “Heroic Iraq, God is with you, the Arab nation and the world of Islam stand solidly behind you in your holy struggle!”

The text contained no calls for violence against Jews. The enemy in it was Britain, and Jewish immigration to Palestine served as the crowning argument against it. In Baghdad itself, however, the atmosphere in May 1941 was becoming ever more menacing for Iraqi Jews: nationalist propaganda, part of the press and paramilitary youth accused them of siding with the British, and there were cases of extortion and sometimes murder.

The response

The call to holy war did not stir the Islamic world. In Palestine, where the Mufti had most followers, there was no uprising. Arab society was exhausted by the years 1936–1939, and its leaders were in prison, in exile or, like the Nashashibi family, at odds with al-Husseini. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, in May the German Foreign Ministry passed the Mufti the first large sums of money for “a major operation in Palestine in the near future”, but things went no further than the money. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Transjordan remained loyal to London. The Emir of Transjordan, Abdullah, a rival of the Mufti, sent his Arab Legion under John Bagot Glubb with the British column that set out from Palestine to relieve Habbaniya. Arab soldiers thus fought on both sides in this war.

Only small groups of volunteers from Syria and Palestine came to Iraq. The best known of their commanders was Fawzi al-Qawuqji, a veteran of the Palestinian revolt and, incidentally, a rival of the Mufti, who harassed the British in the desert of western Iraq with an irregular band. Axis help was meagre and late. At the beginning of May Joachim von Ribbentrop persuaded Hitler to send the former minister Fritz Grobba to Baghdad. Several dozen German and Italian aircraft reached Iraq via the airfields of Syria with the consent of the Vichy authorities. On 23 May, in Directive No. 30, Hitler called the “Arab freedom movement” Germany’s natural ally against England, but by the time he wrote it the Iraqi army was already losing the war.

The British regarded the Mufti as a dangerous adversary. As early as the autumn of 1940 Churchill and the War Office had agreed to his assassination, but the Foreign Office blocked the plan, fearing the reaction in Iraq. In May 1941 they turned for help to the commander of the Jewish armed organisation Irgun, David Raziel, whom they had earlier released from prison in Palestine, and sent him with a few men to Iraq on a sabotage mission. Raziel agreed to the mission on condition that he could attempt to kidnap the Mufti. He was killed on 20 May near Habbaniya when the car in which he was travelling was strafed by a German aircraft.

Flight and the Farhud

By the end of May British and Indian troops and the Arab Legion stood outside Baghdad. On 29 and 30 May Rashid Ali, the Mufti and most of the leaders of the coup fled to Iran. On 1 and 2 June, in the interregnum between the government’s flight and the arrival of the British, Baghdad saw a pogrom of the Jews known as the Farhud. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, 128 Jews were killed and some 1,500 homes and shops destroyed or looted; other estimates speak of more than 180 dead, and some Jewish sources give still higher figures. The Mufti’s role in these events has been judged in different ways. According to some studies, the commission of inquiry set up after the pogrom by the new Iraqi government laid the blame on German propaganda and on the influence of the Mufti and his entourage, and among the perpetrators were named young men from the nationalist Al-Muthanna club, with which the Mufti was connected. He himself later accused the Jews of having contributed to Iraq’s defeat through treachery. The Holocaust Encyclopedia states, however, that the documents do not confirm a direct link between his words or deeds and the pogrom.

Place in the war

The fatwa of May 1941 was al-Husseini’s first major public act as an ally of the Axis powers and a foretaste of the role he would play in the years that followed. From Iran, where the Japanese and Italian legations gave him asylum, he was smuggled by the Italians through Turkey and the Balkans to Rome after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of that country in August 1941. He was in Italy by 11 October 1941; on 27 October he was received by Benito Mussolini, and on 28 November in Berlin by Hitler. The conversation in the Reich Chancellery did not bring him the public declaration he had been seeking, but Hitler assured him that once the Caucasus had been broken through, Germany’s only aim in the Middle East would be the destruction of the Jews living there under British protection.

Until the end of the war al-Husseini lived in Germany and Italy, spoke in the Arabic broadcasts of German radio, recruited Muslims for Axis military formations, including the Bosnian Waffen-SS division Handschar, and intervened with the governments of the Reich’s allies against allowing Jewish children to leave for Palestine. The calls to holy war that in May 1941 he had directed against Britain increasingly included the Jews in his Berlin speeches. For the British the Iraqi episode was a warning: the rear through which oil, reinforcements from India and the road to Palestine all passed had proved fragile, and in June 1941, fearing a repeat of the Iraqi scenario, British and Free French troops entered Vichy-controlled Syria and Lebanon. The Arab lands of the Middle East remained in Allied hands until the end of the war, and the holy war to which the Mufti had called never broke out.