“The enemy of your enemy is your friend,”
wrote the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Hajj Amin al-Husaini, about his
reverence for Nazi Germany that had fought his enemies, the (British)
colonialists and the Zionists. While this may have been an understatement, it is
common knowledge that the Palestinian Arab leader ruined his reputation by
collaborating with the Nazis. The exact nature and extent of his collaboration
and the solidity of its ideological foundations, however, were not fully
explored until the publication of this study. It is to the credit of these two
fine scholars, the late Israeli historian Barry Rubin and his colleague
Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, that they discovered documentary proof in German,
Yugoslav, Israeli, British and Russian archives of how the Grand Mufti made
maximal efforts to provide the Nazis—who were notoriously short of allies—with
as much assistance as he could.
Goebbels and Himmler were grateful to the
Grand Mufti for his support. With his usual self-gratulatory tone, Goebbels
wrote in his diary that al-Husaini was “intelligent and had good judgment.”
With the help of the Mufti, the Nazis hoped that they could win the support of
four hundred million Muslims. As late as May, 8, 1944, Himmler gave the Mufti
an entire afternoon of his precious time. During this meeting the two men
discussed horses, Arabic poetry and the achievements of the Muslim units that
the Mufti had helped enlist and which fought for the Third Reich. These
included the Hanzar (Khanjar) division which “had participated in the murder of
thousands of Bosnian Jews, Christian Serbs and Roma (“Gypsies”).”...
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Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Nazis,
Islamists and the Making of the Modern Middle East, New Haven & London:
Yale University Press, 2014, xiii plus 340 pp.
Reviewed by Johannes Houwink Ten Cate
“The enemy of your enemy is your friend,” wrote the
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, al-Hajj Amin al-Husaini, about his reverence for Nazi
Germany that had fought his enemies, the (British) colonialists and the
Zionists. While this may have been an understatement, it is common knowledge
that the Palestinian Arab leader ruined his reputation by collaborating with
the Nazis. The exact nature and extent of his collaboration and the solidity of
its ideological foundations, however, were not fully explored until the
publication of this study. It is to the credit of these two fine scholars, the
late Israeli historian Barry Rubin and his colleague Wolfgang G. Schwanitz,
that they discovered documentary proof in German, Yugoslav, Israeli, British
and Russian archives of how the Grand Mufti made maximal efforts to provide the
Nazis—who were notoriously short of allies—with as much assistance as he could.
Goebbels and Himmler were grateful to the Grand Mufti
for his support. With his usual self-gratulatory tone, Goebbels wrote in his
diary that al-Husseini was “intelligent and had good judgment.” With the help
of the Mufti, the Nazis hoped that they could win the support of four hundred
million Muslims. As late as May, 8, 1944, Himmler gave the Mufti an entire
afternoon of his precious time. During this meeting the two men discussed
horses, Arabic poetry and the achievements of the Muslim units that the Mufti had
helped enlist and which fought for the Third Reich. These included the Hanzar
(Khanjar) division which “had participated in the murder of thousands of
Bosnian Jews, Christian Serbs and Roma (“Gypsies”).”
After the defeat of the Third Reich, al-Husseini wanted
to persuade the world that he had collaborated out of opportunistic motives,
essentially because other Middle Eastern leaders accommodated the British and
French colonial powers, and Nazi Germany fought against those countries. During
the war, however, and especially before Nazi audiences, al-Husseini quoted the
Quran as proof that the Jews were terrorists, the bitterest enemies of the
Muslims, and haters of Muhammad. Second on his list of worst enemies were the
British. The Mufti added that he did his utmost to convince Muslims to join the
Waffen-SS, the elite army of Nazi Germany. Thousands followed the call of the
Mufti, although the contingent of Dutchmen outnumbered the Muslims among the
foreign volunteers in the SS. According to the Mufti, Nazi Germany was the
natural ally of the Muslims. He added that Germany was fighting against “World
Jewry,” England and Communism which oppressed forty million Muslims and wanted
to destroy Islam. However, there was much more to his collaboration. According
to the Mufti, the most important feature of their alliance was the fact that
Nazism and Islamism shared a common ideological basis.
The title of this seminal book, Nazis, Islamists and
the Making of the Modern Middle East is appropriate because Rubin and Schwanitz
document these ideological similarities. Indeed, Rubin and Schwanitz not only
have written a study of the collaboration of the Mufti with Nazi Germany but
also a study of the “making of the modern Middle East.” Both Islam and Nazism
preached the necessity of a community living in a single state under a single,
all-powerful leader [i.e., Das Führer Prinzip]. Furthermore, redemptive
anti-Semitism was central to the worldview of the Nazi religion. Both Islam and
Nazism glorified armed conflict and martyrdom as well as the notion of the
common good (as opposed to individual liberty), the family, motherhood,
physical labor and hatred of Jews. According to the Mufti, an Allied victory
would mean the triumph of the Jews and a disaster for Muslims and Islam. If
Germany and Islam would win the war, the Arabs would be united under their new
leader, namely the Grand Mufti, and the Jews would be destroyed. Despite the
setback of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, Haj Amin al-Husseini remained
the historic Palestinian Arab leader until Yasser Arafat succeeded him in 1968.
Rubin and Schwanitz have produced an extremely
well-researched and documented book, both on the Mufti and on the common
ideological ground shared by Nazi doctrine and political Islam in its radical
form. However, some of the authors’ assertions are not entirely convincing.
Along with Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, they state that the Mufti visited Nazi
death camps. Nazi leaders usually did not show these camps to foreign
sympathizers. They also note that the Mufti supported an “accelerated policy of
genocide that the Axis’ partner intended to spread to the Middle East” (160).
Had the Nazis been victorious in the Middle East, it is plausible that in
planning the most universal of genocides (to paraphrase Professor Yehuda
Bauer), they would have murdered the Jews there as well, since that was their
policy toward all Jews, even in territories that they had not yet conquered.
However, it is not likely that Hitler and his henchmen needed the support of the
Mufti in making their genocidal decision to kill the Jews. In their discussion
of the role of Haj Amin in the decision-making process of implementing the
Holocaust, Rubin and Schwanitz are skating on thin ice. They repeat the common
error of over-estimating the importance of the Wannsee Conference (20 January
1942). In fact, 1,100,000 million Jews had perished prior to that meeting. In
addition, they appear to have ignored much of the recent scholarship on this
decision-making process, particularly the works of Christopher R. Browning on
the origins of the Final Solution.
In any case, the above is but a minor criticism. The
main point is that Rubin and Schwanitz have provided a work based upon
excellent original research and have produced a well-written and seminal book
on the collaborationist policies of the Grand Mufti, who strove to become the
most important Arab leader of his time. It is always important to remember that
it was the Mufti himself who emphasized the ideological common ground of Nazism
and radical political Islamism. Rubin and Schwanitz have demonstrated its
continuity.
Johannes Houwink ten Cate is Professor of Holocaust
and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
