Islam under the Palestine Mandate

Colonialism and the Supreme Muslim Council

Nicholas E. Roberts

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786721273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Concerns about the place of Islam in Palestinian politics are familiar to those studying the history of the modern Middle East. A significant but often misunderstood part of this history is the rise of Islamic opposition to the British in Mandate Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s. Across the empire, imperial officials wrestled with the question of how to rule over a Muslim-majority countries and came to see traditional Islamic institutions as essential for maintaining order. Islam under the Palestine Mandate tells the story of the search for a viable Islamic institution in Palestine and the subsequent invention of the Supreme Muslim Council. As a body with political recognition, institutional autonomy and financial power, the council was designed to be a counterweight to the growing popularity of nationalism among Palestinians. However, rather than extinguishing the revolutionary capacity of the colonized, it would become a significant opponent of British rule under its highly controversial president, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni.
Making extensive use of primary sources from British and Israeli archives, this book offers an innovative account of the Supreme Muslim Council's place within a colonial project that aimed to control Palestinian religion and politics. Roberts argues against the standard view that the council's creation was an act of appeasement towards Muslim opinion, showing how British actions were guided by techniques of imperial administration used elsewhere in the empire.

CHAPTER 1

ISLAM UNDER EMPIRE

The British conquest of Jerusalem in December 1917 ended four hundred years of Ottoman rule and brought centuries of Muslim control over the Holy City to a sudden close. For the first time since the Crusades, Jerusalem was under Christian rule. The city's political status also changed, with Jerusalem becoming the capital of the new country of British mandatory Palestine. The transition from Ottoman to British control, from Muslim to Christian rule raised all sorts of questions about religion. What would happen to the country's holy sites? Would religious communities retain their traditional rights or would Britain alter the religious balance of power? Would Christian churches, particularly the Protestant Church (a late arrival to Jerusalem), be favoured over other faiths? How would local Judaism be affected by Britain's support of the Jewish national home? And what would become of Islam, the religion of the majority of the population, now that the country was no longer under Muslim control?

One thing that immediately became obvious was that the Ottoman religious system could not continue under British rule, at least not in its entirety. Ottoman administrative arrangements dealing with the local Jewish and Christian communities could perhaps continue under the British, but it was clear that a new approach to Islam would have to be developed. Under the Ottomans, Islam was effectively the religion of the state, with the government overseeing the religious affairs of its Muslim population. Religious bureaucracies in Istanbul supervised the empire's Islamic courts and its waqf (or pious endowment) system, while Ottoman governors controlled the appointment and dismissal of local qadis (Islamic judges) and muftis (jurisconsults). That system was ended with the demise of the Ottoman Empire, leaving each successor state with the task of developing its own approach to governing Islam.

British officials were not starting from scratch when they began to craft their approach to Islam in Palestine. Britain's encounter with Muslim populations in India, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East over the previous three centuries had produced a lively imperial discourse about Islam and a variety of colonial approaches toward its administration. For this reason, while the Supreme Muslim Council may well have been a “hybrid institution … never conceived of by Islam in the past,” as Zionists complained at the council's founding, it was not invented out of wholly new cloth.¹ The recognition, creation, and empowerment of local Islamic institutions, many of which functioned autonomously from imperial authorities, can be found in a variety of imperial contexts, and the hybrid religious and political role of the council, to which the Zionists were referring, was not without precedent. The SMC was certainly an invented tradition, but it was not dreamed up on the spot by colonial officials – if we are to understand the council, we must begin by understanding how the British Empire approached Islam in other imperial contexts.

Islam as Backward

British ideas about Islam were profoundly shaped by its imperial encounter with the non-European world. The spread of European hegemony in the nineteenth century led many Europeans to regard their military dominance as proof of the superiority of their civilization and as justification for their conquest of the more benighted corners of the globe. For scholars who adopted a civilizational view of history, such as Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Oswald Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee, or who were influenced by Social Darwinian ideas about the innate superiority of the “white” race, the rise of the West, shown most stunningly in its military and technological prowess, was self-evident proof that modern European society was the pinnacle of human social development.² In contrast to the dynamic and scientific West, the East appeared as backward and lethargic in nineteenth-century writings, with the Muslim world presented as “increasingly rigid, inflexible, tyrannical, intolerant and hostile to outside influences.”³ Where once Muslim societies functioned as a foil against which Enlightenment scholars could criticize their own societies, as in Montesquieu's Persian Letters, they now came to be used, as Zachary Lockman has noted, as a screen against which to project the superiority of the European way of life and the righteousness of imperial expansion.⁴

Central to European ideas about Muslim societies was the sameness of the Muslim experience, based upon the notion that there existed a singular Muslim weltanschauung. The nineteenth-century French religious scholar Ernest Renan's statement that “The bent of mind inculcated by the Muhammadan faith is so strong, that all differences of race and nationality disappear by the fact of conversion to Islam,” presented Muslims as decidedly pre-modern, even anti-modern, in their thinking. In condemning Muslims to a permanent state of backwardness, Renan conjured up the image of a man locked in a diving bell: “The mind of a true [Muslim] believer is fatally limited, by the species of iron circle that surrounds his head, rendering it absolutely closed to knowledge.”⁵

While Renan's ideas would be challenged by a handful of Britons, such as the anti-imperialist Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the idea of Islam's incompatibility with civilization pervaded imperialist ideas about Islam. The ontological inferiority of the “Oriental” (meaning Arab) was most famously expressed in the Earl of Cromer's statement in his 1908 book Modern Egypt:

Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into untruthfulness, is, in fact, the main characteristic of the Oriental mind. The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature very skeptical and requires proof before he can accept any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description.⁶

Cromer went on to explain to his readers that Islam was at the heart of this unbridgeable gulf between the Arab and European mind. Viewing Islam as an intolerant and inflexible legal code, Cromer took it as axiomatic that the faith was incompatible with the rational values of the modern (read: Western) world. Moreover, much like Renan, he believed that Islam's backwardness could not be cured, for “reformed Islam is Islam no longer; it is something else.”⁷

Not everyone was as openly condescending toward Islam as Renan and Cromer, but the notion of Europe's superiority over the Muslim world was baked into European imperialism. The British concept of the “White Man's Burden” and the French notion of the mission civilisatrice, however cynically invoked, depended upon a shared understanding that Muslims, like other non-Europeans, needed saving from their outmoded faith if they were to become civilized. Indeed, the justification for the mandate system, under which Britain took formal legal control of Palestine in 1922, depended upon an unquestioned belief that Muslim populations were “unable to stand by themselves in the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”⁸

Ottoman Palestine as Backward

Arab and Muslim backwardness was a common trope in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British accounts of Ottoman Palestine. Before the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman Palestine had been a veritable terra incognita for the British public, with few European pilgrims or adventurers visiting the Holy Land.⁹ But beginning in the 1840s, European powers began to compete for power and prestige in Ottoman Jerusalem, putting Palestine on the imperial map and bringing the Holy Land into the British public consciousness.¹⁰ Jerusalem and other biblical sites became objects of intense scholarly and popular fascination, bringing thousands of scholars, novelists, painters, photographers, and tourists to the country. According to Simon Goldhill, “More European descriptions of journeying in the Holy Land were published in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century than in the previous fifteen hundred years put together – at least 2,000 extended essays or books or two a month for seventy-five years.”¹¹ Hundreds of thousands of commercial and tourist photographs of the country and its people would also be produced, bringing Palestine into late nineteenth-century British living rooms as an object of curiosity and religious longing. In addition, with its strong emphasis on inculcating students with Christian values, the British educational system, which from 1880 onward made school attendance compulsory, introduced millions of Britons to the history of the Holy Land. This would lead one British soldier in Palestine to make the extraordinary claim that “At school … I probably knew far more about the geography of Palestine than of my own country,” a statement that recalled Prime Minister David Lloyd George's comment to Chaim Weizmann during World War I that he knew the names of towns in Palestine better than the names of towns on the western front.¹²

Britons who came to mandatory Palestine, like that unnamed soldier, arrived with “a pre-formed vision of the Holy Land almost invariably shaped by reading and listening to the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and influenced by a tradition of scriptural illustration and Orientalist art seen from earliest childhood, often vividly recalled.”¹³ As A. J. Sherman's observation suggests, such a vision was necessarily partial. With attention focused on Palestine's biblical past and not infrequently on its exotic present, the country's modern development in the late Ottoman period and its Arab Muslim culture were largely written out of British accounts of the country. Nineteenth-century images of Palestine, as Naomi Shepherd and Simon Goldhill have pointed out, quickly fell into cliché, a parade of stories of encounters with the same exotic cast of local characters – Jews, Armenian priests, Samaritans, Russian peasants, and the ubiquitous Bedouin – and the production of thousands of nearly identical photographs of same few sites – the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock, the Pool of Bethesda, Rachel's Tomb, and the view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.¹⁴

The structure of tourist visits, with their itineraries built around biblical history, encouraged such a narrow understanding of Palestine. Tours put on by Thomas Cook from the 1860s onward “combined visits to the Holy Places, Christian missions and their schools, and ‘biblical excavations’; the parties carried not only maps and guide books but bibles and hymn books, and sang as they went.”¹⁵ The fact that a biblical vision of the country had more commercial appeal back home encouraged a myopic vision of Ottoman Palestine as an ancient and decayed Holy Land. David Roberts, a famous nineteenth-century painter of Levantine landscapes, for instance, presented Palestine as a set of biblical and historical sites, with people appearing on the canvas only for the sake of perspective or to add some local exotic flavour.¹⁶ And as authenticity came to be conveyed through the presentation of Palestine as an ancient, picturesque, and traditional land, British photographers and travel writers came to concentrate their gaze on such elements of local life as “‘backward’ labor – ancient styles of threshing, say, or weaving from a pre-industrial age,” rather than showing Jerusalem's modernization under its dynamic municipality.¹⁷

Another way of showing backwardness was to concentrate on the “foreignness” and timelessness of local traditions. In describing the bazaar in Jaffa, the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, who visited Palestine on an extended Grand Tour in 1844, focused his attention on gambling, storytelling, and water pipe smoking, the paradigmatic activities of the idle Easterner:

The devotion and energy with which all these pastimes were pursued struck me as much as anything. These people have been playing thimble-rig and casino; that story-teller has been shouting his tale of Antar, for forty years; and they are just as happy with this amusement now as when they first tried it. Is there no ennui in the Eastern countries?¹⁸

Thackeray's Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo (1846), Eliot Warburton's Crescent and the Cross (1844), and Alexander Kinglake's Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (1844) established a genre of British travel writing on the Holy Land that was built around picturesque and often humorous descriptions of biblical sites, Bedouins, Christian monks, camels, water pipes, and fleas (the Eastern version of which Thackeray assured his readers, “bites more bitterly than the most savage bug in Christendom”).¹⁹ At the same time, Jerusalem and Palestine also began to appear in British novels, frequently as a place of Jewish and British redemption, as in Benjamin Disraeli's popular novels Alroy (1833) and Tancred (1847) and Charlotte Tonna's Judah's Lion (1843).²⁰ Modern Arabs and Turks rarely appeared in such books and if they did they were not sympathetic characters, since they did not fit the narrative of Palestine as an exotic and fallen land upon which the European needed to act.

Disillusion with the contemporary state of the Holy Land was also a common trope in travel accounts of Palestine, being most famously expressed (and exaggerated) in Mark Twain's 1869 work, The Innocents Abroad.²¹ Like Twain, though without his trademark wit, British travellers from the nineteenth century onward, particularly those who were ardent Protestants, came to highlight the shocking difference between the imagined and actual Jerusalem, a point explored at length in Issam Nassar's 2003 article, “In Their Image: Jerusalem in Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives.”²² References to the squalor and disrepair of the Old City of Jerusalem, the ubiquity of bakshish among Arabs, the shock of commercialism at the country's holy sites, and the local “mummeries done in the name of Christianity” were presented as clear evidence of the fallen state of the country under Ottoman rule.²³ As Nassar points out this negative image of Jerusalem stemmed from a comparison of the earthly city both with the Holy City of British imagination and with larger European cities. Neither appropriately biblical nor properly developed, like modern London, Jerusalem could not but fail to measure up to British expectations. And then there were the people who had the gall to make money from the tourist and pilgrim industry. As one soldier during the mandate period explained to his parents, “In Jerusalem and Bethlehem one sees greater disregard for all the great principles common to all faiths than anywhere I've ever been. It is absurd to talk of the brotherhood of man here. Everyone has to make money out of religion here, either by fair means or foul and one is thoroughly disgusted by the tricks that are resorted to.”²⁴

Academic scholarship about Palestine in the nineteenth century, despite its positivist pretentions, was no better in providing an accurate portrait of the country. British scholars suffered from a similar myopia born of what might accurately be described as their biblical gaze upon Palestine. The most prominent academic visitors to Ottoman Palestine were scholars involved in the fields of biblical scholarship, archaeology, and the new discipline of historical (or biblical) geography, academic fields that saw Palestine's importance lying not in its Arab Muslim present but in its Judeo-Christian biblical past.²⁵

As Naomi Shepherd has noted, these “antiquarians came to Palestine to verify what they had read, or to prove a particular theory – not to document what they found.”²⁶ The techniques that these scholars employed – the identification of biblical sites through the analysis of local Arabic place names, the unearthing of biblical artefacts by sifting through (and discarding) hundreds of years of the archaeological record (the Muslim parts mainly), and the preparation of biblical maps by transposing the ancient Holy Land onto the features of Ottoman Palestine – ensured that the Arab and Muslim character of the country was ignored, if not completely erased in British scholarship. Instead, British observers “scoured” the East for “illustrations” that could confirm the biblical narrative: how native farming methods conformed to those mentioned in the Bible, how contemporary marriage processions could be compa...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• A Note on Transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Islam under Empire
• 2. Building a Religious System
• 3. Islam and Politics in Palestine
• 4. The Mufti and the Supreme Muslim Council
• 5. Religion and Politics at the Western Wall
• 6. The Fall of the Supreme Muslim Council
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates section