The Grand Mufti

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24910, 25 June 1946, Page 4

The Grand Mufti

Oi October 1, 1937, after an Arab

campaign against Jewish immigration to Palestine had been violently under way for nearly 18 months, the Government of Palestine dissolved the Higher Arab Committee, arrested four of its leaders, and dismissed the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from the presidency of the Moslem Supreme Council and the chairmanship of the General Wakf Committee. In these offices the Grand Mufti—the leader of the Mohammedan clergy in Palestine, or, as the Peel Commission’s Report described him, “ the head of a third parallel ? Government in Palestine ” —had control of funds amounting to £67,000 a year and the appointment of some 1500 clerics who preached his politics in their Friday sermons and during their tours of inspection. Whether the British authorities in Palestine sought to limit his influence still further is not clear. If they did, the Mufti had anticipated them. Three months earlier he had taken sanctuary in the Mosque of Omar; and by October 20 he was across the border, in the Lebanon. There, he was under French surveillance. The French scrutiny was, perhaps, not unsympathetic to Arab aspirations in Palestine. At any rate, the Mufti’s stay did nothing to improve AngloFrench relations. But when war broke out the Mufti moved on, and in October appeared in Iraq. There, too, he continued to en)barrass Britain. “ The Times ”, for instance, did not doubt that the Mufti had an influential hand in promoting Rashid el-Gailani’s coup of April, 1941, and in framing the policy that led, in May, to the Iraqi assault on the British garrison at Habbaniya. It was a short-lived affair. But it was launched at a time when British arms were being sorely tested in the Mediterranean theatre; and before Rashid el-Gailani—and the Mufti—had fled, the Germans had seized an opportunity, with Vichy’s connivance, to turn Syria also into a battleground. In Persia, the Mufti found time too short. Before he had been there three months, British and Soviet forces had marched in to forestall German intrigues. But again the Mufti kept a step ahead. In Italy in October, the following month he was in Berlin. After almost four years in Axis or Axisoccupied countries he came under French surveillance again, and last week found sanctuary in Egypt. He is likely to stay safe. It is already obvious that the Egyptian Government would be, at best, unw’illing to surrender him to Britain, even under extreme pressure; and it is a fairly safe guess that Britain will not wish to apply even the faintest P’-essure to that end. Significantly. Mr Attlee did not give Mr Churchill the assurance he sought when he

i asked the Prime Minister whether “further steps would be taken to 1 “ apprehend a man who is known as “ a bitter enemy of the Allied cause “ during the war ”. Nor, last October, announcing that the Muftj was in French hands, would the Colonial Secretary commit himself to say that the Muftj would be treated as a traitor or a war criminal. Again, at the time of the Persian affair, Mr Eden was invited to say that Britain would “ treat the “ Mufti for what he is, a declared “ enemy of this country ” —and parried Mr Noel-Baker’s questiofl. Marshal Broz’s Government will hardly have thought it was easing British difficulties when it abandoned its demand for the Mufti’s surrender for trial as a war criminal.