Hitler committed suicide, Nazi Germany disappeared. But the era’s legacy continued to shape Middle East events long afterward through their allies in the region. Al-Husaini emerged as Palestinian Arab and Islamist leader; many of the collaborationist nationalists and Islamists became top officials or leading forces in their countries; and there was continuity between the Arab nationalist and Islamist ideologies that had led them to collaboration with Nazi Germany and those that dominated the Middle East during the seven decades after Hitler’s fall.
While greatly diminished in importance, al-Husaini remained the historic Palestinian Arab leader until he was able to anoint Arafat as successor during meetings between them in 1968, and selected Said Ramadan as his successor to lead the European-based Islamist movement. Even more important was al-Husaini’s role as leader of the international Islamist movement, ensuring that it survived the lean years of the 1950s and 1960s. When Islamism revived in the 1970s, its ideology bore the mark of al-Husaini and the other wartime collaborators, especially the Muslim Brotherhood.
There was similar continuity with the radical Arab nationalist forces. In Egypt, Abd an-Nasir, as-Sadat, and other wartime collaborators seized power in 1952. They gave refuge to escaped Nazis who worked for them as advisers, intelligence operatives, and weapons developers. The Muslim Brotherhood, emerging as the most powerful force in Egypt after the 2011 revolution, was rooted in the German-Ottoman alliance in its ideological approach and its enthusiastic participation in the Nazi-Islamist alliances. In Syria and Iraq, the Ba’th party, which ruled both countries for decades, was created—as its founders later acknowledged—as a pro-Nazi party. It took many fascist elements into its ideology, structure, worldview, and propaganda. There were also connections with the Islamist revolution and the subsequent regime in Iran, whose two leading forerunners had worked closely with al-Husaini.
Of course, the Arabic-speaking world’s historical connection with Nazi Germany was not solely responsible for the existence of radical forces, anti-Western sentiments, terrorism, conflict with Israel, anti-Jewish hatreds, and repressive dictatorships. Yet this historical relationship, along with the ideas and motives prompting it, does help explain that history in all its deviations from what might otherwise have been expected.
It is precisely because of this tremendous influence that the history of this process remains so controversial in the West and ignored in the Middle East. At the moment the Muslim Brotherhood was beginning its takeover of Egypt, in February 2011, Tariq Ramadan, a respected Islamist intellectual who had held Western academic posts, wrote a New York Times op-ed article denying altogether that the Muslim Brotherhood and its leader, his grandfather, had been Nazi collaborators.1 On the contrary, he claimed that the Brotherhood was an antifascist organization opposed to violence and admiring “the British parliamentary model” in the 1930s and 1940s.
Actually, as demonstrated here, the Brotherhood was clearly well financed and armed by the Nazis before and during World War II.2 Collaborating with the Germans and al-Husaini, it planned an uprising to support the German army’s conquest of Egypt as well as to kill Cairo’s Jews and Christians. The only reason this plot failed was that the British stopped the German advance and forced King Faruq to replace pro-German politicians in the government. One aspect of the Brotherhood’s campaign to portray itself as moderate in the early twenty-first century was to rewrite its history.
Another controversy arose around a September 2009 exhibition in Germany organized by Karl Rössel, entitled The Third World in the Second World War, for Werkstatt der Kulturen, a publicly funded multi-cultural center in Berlin’s heavily Turkish and Arab neighborhood of Neukölln. A small part of the exhibition recounted Arab and Islamist involvement in Nazi crimes. The center’s director, Philippa Ebéné, canceled the project lest it produce German-Arab tensions. Berlin’s integration commissioner, Günter Piening concurred but eventually, following media criticism, let a smaller version of the exhibition to be shown. Angry at censorship of his work, Rössel charged that German historians and Middle East experts had misrepresented historic truth. Daniel Schwammenthal wrote about the affair in the Wall Street Journal: “What Mr. Rössel says about Germany applies to most of the Western world, where it is often claimed that the mufti’s Hitler alliance later discredited him in the region. Nothing could be further from the truth.”3
Why is the alliance of Middle Eastern political movements with Nazi Germany so many decades ago more than a mere historical footnote today? Because the forces that forged this partnership returned, after a brief interruption, to help shape the course of Middle East history ever since. In the Middle East, and nowhere else in the world, the Axis’s local supporters won political power in many countries and exerted significant ideological influence over many of the institutions and public debate.
Not just the doctrines but in many cases the very same individuals responsible for the Middle East’s post-1945 course had direct links to the German-Ottoman-Islamist and Nazi-nationalist-Islamist eras. These ideologies would also contribute to the ways in which Middle Eastern countries were governed. Militant nationalist and Islamist forces chose Germany’s side before and during World War II because that country’s system mirrored their own beliefs and desires. They were wrong in thinking that an autocratic state organized according to their preferred system would achieve rapid development and foreign conquests, but they were right in expecting it would ensure their power for a long time.
Comprehending this fact is the starting point for understanding modern Middle East history, its turbulence, tragedies, and its many differences from other parts of the world. Few people in 1945 would have believed that the militant Arab nationalism that found Nazi Germany so congenial could seize power in the main Arab countries within a few years and hold it for six decades. Fewer could have thought that it would totally dominate debate on every issue and wipe out the pro-Allied Arab moderates who’d been on the winning side in the war. And by the mid-1950s, with the nationalists victorious and their opponents in flight, hardly anyone would have seen Islamism as the successor to that political and intellectual power. Yet so thoroughly did first nationalism and, much later, Islamism triumph that these outcomes came to be taken for granted and made it seem impossible that history might ever have taken a more moderate direction.
Since 1945, Arab or Muslim collaborators with Nazism were not criticized, punished, or discredited at home for their actions. While Western societies agonized over the Nazi era’s lessons, in the Middle East these were regarded as Western problems. If discussed at all, the Holocaust was either dismissed as a Zionist fabrication—despite the fact that al-Husaini knew it was happening before most Nazi leaders did—or as an event that victimized Arabs and other Muslims who were forced to pay for Germany’s behavior toward the Jews despite having no role in it.4
In contrast to the laudatory treatment given Nazi Germany’s allies, moderate Middle Eastern leaders who opposed al-Husaini and alliance with the Axis were driven from public life and demonized as both failures and collaborators with imperialism. Yet in the 1930s and 1940s, those politicians had presided over institutions developing toward their own versions of parliamentary democracy, giving citizens and especially women more rights than the same countries offered a half-century later. Wealthy and from long-established families, the moderate elites were pragmatists, not ideologues. They were indeed corrupt and oligarchical but did not go in for mass murder, ruthless repression, systematic indoctrination, and foreign aggression.5 The revolutionary groups asserted that national success would come from copying Nazi Germany or fascist Italy and, later, Soviet Russia; moderate leaders believed progress required borrowing from Western democratic societies that had succeeded. They were willing to work with Britain or France but sought full independence. While opposing Zionism they did not want to sacrifice unlimited treasure and blood to the extent that the most damage would be inflicted on their own societies.
Since the old moderate leaders and parties were so thoroughly destroyed and their ideas so completely forgotten, liberal forces had to restart from scratch in the 1990s, and at an added disadvantage since their views were so discredited. Weak, facing fearful obstacles, and with a base limited to a small part of a proportionately tiny urban middle class, they could not compete with determined, organized, popular, and united Islamists. In the 2011 “Arab Spring,” just as in the competition of the 1930s and the battles of the 1950s, moderate forces were for a third time overwhelmed by radicals.6
Compared to the moderates’ broken history, the militant nationalists and Islamists remained firmly linked to the heritage of the Ottoman and Axis eras. For them, such connections became a source of strength not delegitimization as they boasted of having never compromised with imperialism or Zionism but of having fought bravely in a noble cause.
The Palestinian movement was particularly plagued by this cult of honorable defeat and by the continuity of Axis-style ideology, embodied in an event never before documented. On December 29, 1968, at a meeting in the ex–grand mufti’s home near Beirut, al-Husaini anointed Arafat as his successor. The movement would be directed by these two sequential leaders and their similar philosophy and methods for an astounding eighty-three years, from al-Husaini’s becoming grand mufti in 1921 to Arafat’s death in 2004.
In December 1968, the thirty-nine-year-old Arafat, leader of the Fatah guerrilla group, was about to take over a PLO hitherto dominated by the Nazi collaborator Abd an-Nasir. But Arafat’s success would be all the more secure if he received the seventy-one-year-old al-Husaini’s endorsement. Al-Husaini gave it after lecturing Arafat for several hours on how he should go about destroying Israel and replacing it with a Palestinian Arab state.7 Within a few weeks Arafat controlled the movement as thoroughly as al-Husaini had ever done.
It may seem peculiar that al-Husaini was revered rather than discredited among Palestinian Arabs and that the movement remained loyal to the same ideas, methods, and goals. Al-Husaini had rejected compromise before World War II then joined what turned out to be the losing side. Next he had rejected partition in 1947, throwing away the chance of establishing a Palestinian Arab state, and instead launched a war against the new Jewish state. Al-Husaini was personally responsible for the death of several hundred of Palestine’s Arabs, including the moderate leader an-Nashashibi, sentenced to death “for violating the national consensus.”8 Indeed, part of the projected war crimes indictment of al-Husaini included a list of thirty Palestine Arabs, in some cases entire families, whom his forces murdered in the late 1930s.9 Then, too, al-Husaini had assassinated the leaders of two Arab states, Lebanon and Jordan. The latter victim was King Abdallah, the man whom al-Husaini described in a wartime letter to the German Foreign Ministry as a “traitor, agent in the British service, and friend of the Jews who was rejected by God.”10
Figure 28. A Lebanese intelligence report obtained by the CIA describes a meeting at al-Husaini’s home in Beirut, at which leading Palestinian figures discussed the formation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank that would be “defended” by an “army” of Fatah fighters, commanded by Yasir Arafat—an important stage in the emergence of Arafat as the leader of the Palestinian movement.
Yet Arafat would repeat these themes from al-Husaini’s career: choosing to ally with the USSR, which would turn out to be the losing side in a global conflict, missing chances to create a Palestinian state, slaying moderate Arabs, embracing anticivilian terror as a strategy, and launching unsuccessful battles against Israel. Al-Husaini and Arafat met on several occasions in late 1968 and early 1969. Yet within a year of their friendly meetings, Arafat did three things that turned al-Husaini bitterly against him.
First, Arafat disregarded al-Husaini’s advice that the Palestinian movement should become the client of conservative, Islamic-oriented Saudi Arabia and not of nationalist Egypt which, al-Husaini warned, “Exploits the Palestinians as a pawn of the Soviets.” The Saudi king had let down al-Husaini by not following him into an alliance with Berlin but nevertheless proved a faithful friend in protecting and financing the grand mufti and the Islamist movement after the war.11 In the 1960s, the Saudis were the last bastion of Islamism. Like al-Husaini, they were virulently anti-Semitic, passionately supported the Palestinian cause, and opposed Abd an-Nasir. So close were al-Husaini’s relations with the Saudis that U.S. intelligence thought the ex–grand mufti was in effect the kingdom’s “liaison officer” for paying Saudi money to Arafat.12 One of al-Husain’s main Saudi supporters was the king’s adviser Khalid al-Qarqani, an admirer of Hitler who had advocated a pro-Nazi policy in the 1930s.
In 1948, Abd an-Nasir had wanted to cooperate with the grand mufti and offered to fight in Palestine under his command, but things changed when that young officer became Egypt’s ruler five years later and suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Husaini sided with his old Islamist comrades and became Abd an-Nasir’s enemy. Arafat correctly gauged the contemporary power balance and in 1969 joined forces with Egypt which, in turn, gave him control of the PLO.
Figure 29. Abd an-Nasir and Amin al-Husaini greet each other. In early 1948 the Egyptian idolized al-Husaini as a hero of the anti-British struggle. He offered to the grand mufti his troops belonging to a secret organization attached to the Free Officers movement. Al-Husaini misread this potential and asked an-Nasir to obtain the permission of King Faruq, so that the offer came to nothing. After an-Nasir took power and turned against the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1956 the two men’s ways parted and al-Husaini moved to Beirut.
Second, while al-Husaini hated the Communists, Arafat went to Moscow and took the USSR as a superpower patron. Despite distinctions between Nazi Germany and the USSR, the two great powers embraced, respectively, by al-Husaini and Arafat, they were also parallel in significant ways. Both opposed Western democratic states and the status quo in the Middle East, and both provided the model of a totalitarian state as the best way to achieve national strength and socioeconomic progress. While formerly pro-Nazi Arab nationalists chose Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s, Islamists refused to do so and were further marginalized.
The third dispute arose precisely because the two men’s worldviews were so much alike. Both rejected any dissent in Palestinian ranks, but now it was Arafat who was leader and al-Husaini who was the one to be silenced. When Arafat clashed with Jordan’s monarchy, as al-Husaini had so often done, he sought the ex–grand mufti’s help, visiting him for this purpose on February 20, 1969. Jordan’s King Husain, Abdallah’s grandson, had threatened to use his army against Arafat’s guerrilla forces that were destabilizing his country and threatening to drag it into war with Israel.13
Since Jordan’s regime was al-Husaini’s traditional enemy, Arafat expected that al-Husaini would back him. Instead, however, al-Husaini sided against Arafat, even writing the king to urge that he press Arafat harder.14 In the short time since he had humbly sought al-Husaini’s endorsement, Arafat had become confident that Cairo’s and Moscow’s backing meant he no longer needed the old man.15 Arafat’s forces attacked the headquarters of al-Husaini’s small Islamic Conquest group in a refugee camp near Amman, killing five men, and the survivors joined Arafat’s Fatah.16 Al-Husaini’s career in Palestinian politics was now truly at an end.
These clashes, however, do not negate the fact that in many ways Arafat was continuing the policies of his distant relative and discarded mentor. Just as al-Husaini had done in the late 1930s (forcing an Arab consensus against accepting British offers) and in the late 1940s (rejecting the UN partition plan), Arafat would also use the Palestine card to blackmail Arab leaders into yielding to his demands for no compromise.
Equally, as in al-Husaini’s day, the PLO made itself part of a wider “anti-imperialist” Arab nationalist struggle that saw Western democracies as its enemy. Accepting al-Husaini’s concept that militancy was always superior to moderation, Arafat concurred with the idea that defeat, no matter how devastating, was never a good reason for altering goals or principles.
Like al-Husaini, Arafat was determined that there be no compromise with the Zionists, no acceptance of a Jewish state in any form, and no moral limit on the violence used against the Jews. Al-Husaini had originated the movement’s deliberate use of anticivilian terror, believing it would defeat the Zionists. The 1944 Salama commando that had parachuted into Palestine under German command was intended as the first terrorist operation of this new conflict. Arafat also deliberately targeted Jewish civilians as an important military strategy.
Al-Husaini had successfully used threats of terror against the British and his alliance with Germany to stop Jews from leaving Europe or arriving in mandatory Palestine, but now it was too late to keep them out. They were already there. Arafat’s problem was to force on them a choice between fleeing and dying. As he explained: “[Violence will] create and maintain an atmosphere of strain and anxiety that will force the Zionists to realize that it is impossible for them to live in Israel. . . . The Israelis have one great fear, the fear of casualties [and such attacks will] prevent immigration and encourage emigration. . . . A quick blow by the regular armies at the right moment [will finish Israel off].”17 To gain total victory, al-Husaini had hoped to “combine Palestinian armed struggle with regular armies,” too: first with an advancing German army in 1941 and 1942, later alongside victorious Arab armies in 1948. Arafat adopted the same strategy and also failed when the armies of allied states were defeated in 1967, 1973, and 1982.
However, al-Husaini also gave Arafat an important new idea in their secret meetings. He suggested that Arafat adopt a two-stage strategy. First, the movement should gain control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured by Israel in 1967, and transform it into a Palestinian state. Next, it should use this land as a base for destroying Israel. Ironically, this was precisely the option al-Husaini had lost by rejecting partition in 1947 but now returned to in his discussions with Arafat.18
Arafat did not take this advice in formulating his plan for the upcoming February 1969 Palestinian National Council meeting in Cairo,19 but five years later he did accept this approach as the centerpiece of PLO strategy and it remained so ever after.20 Yet despite giving lip service to the two-stage notion, Arafat behaved in practice like the pre-1948 al-Husaini, rejecting proposals that might have given him control over a state he could have used this way. Only a quarter-century later did Arafat sign the 1993 “Oslo Accords” and even then, at the moment of truth in the 2000 Camp David summit, he repeated al-Husaini’s 1939 and 1947 error of rejecting compromise—even as camouflage for a two-state strategy—and instead opted for another war.21
Aside from the al-Husaini–Arafat connection, there were many other examples of individual, cross-generational, and organizational continuity between the Nazi and contemporary eras. One such story is that of the soldier in the German and al-Husaini armies, Hasan Salama, and his son Ali, the Fatah and PLO commando leader. Hasan was among al-Husaini’s top gunmen in the 1937–39 Palestine Arab revolt. He joined the German army, was trained as a commando, and parachuted into Palestine in 1944. Escaping the British, Salama rejoined al-Husaini in 1946 and became one of his top military commanders in a new war, only to be killed in the 1948 fighting.
Figure 30. Arafat looks “over the Wall” from East Berlin to West Berlin, November 2, 1971. As the sway of the ex-Nazis receded, the Soviets and their East European satellites gained influence over radical states and the Palestinian movement, and the Palestinian as-Saiqa organization in Syria received East German arms for five thousand troops. Nazi, Fascist, and Soviet influences inspired the rigid Arab dictatorships that were brought down in the revolts of 2011, mainly to the benefit of Islamists who thereby turned Islamism into an official state ideology. This was as decisive an event as the German-Ottoman jihad of 1914, the emergence of Saudi Arabia in 1932, Iran’s Islamist revolution in 1979, and Egypt’s elections that led to the former Muslim Brother Muhammad Mursi assuming in mid-2012 almost total power—for a year.
His son, Ali Hasan Salama, was born in 1940. Joining Arafat’s Fatah group, Ali received military training in Egypt, Moscow, and Beirut. He, too, was an ally of Germany, though in his case, it was Communist East Germany. Known as the Red Prince, he became operations chief for Fatah’s Black September terrorist group, hijacking airplanes and killing both Israeli civilians and moderate Arab officials. In 1972, Salama planned and coordinated the Munich Olympic Games operation that killed eleven Israeli athletes and a German policeman. So close was Ali Salama to Arafat that he founded and led the Palestinian leader’s Force-17 bodyguard, which also carried out terrorist attacks. Salama’s career finally ended on January 22, 1979, when an Israeli raid assassinated him in Beirut.
Organizational links to the Axisera past continue to the present day. The West Bank is ruled by the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, created by Arafat, al-Husaini’s heir and a former Muslim Brotherhood activist. This regime’s chief executive was Mahmud Abbas, successor of Arafat and al-Husaini in leading the Palestinian national movement. Abbas wrote a Moscow University dissertation asserting that the Zionists, not Arabs, had been the Nazis’ ally, while contradictorily asserting that a Zionist “declaration of war” on Germany in May 1942 had been the main factor convincing Hitler to wipe out the Jews. Thus, according to Abbas, the Zionists were responsible for the Holocaust; al-Husaini and the Palestinian Arab leadership had nothing to do with it.22
In 2007, Fatah and the PLO lost the Gaza Strip to a coup by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, whose worldview is indistinguishable from that of al-Husaini and the Brotherhood in the 1930s and 1940s. Thus, each of the two wings of the 1930s radical faction ruled its own Palestinian entity. This continuity extends further. Remarkably, almost six decades after Hitler died in a Berlin bunker, the Middle East’s four most important Muslim countries—Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Syria—are run by leaders politically descended from al-Husaini’s and Berlin’s allies.
In Egypt, officers who collaborated with Germany came to power in the 1952 Free Officers’ coup, and the new regime renewed that association by employing hundreds of former German Nazis. Indeed, in September 1953, when there was a rumor that Hitler was still alive and living in Brazil, as-Sadat wrote an open letter to the dictator in an Egyptian newspaper:
I congratulate you with all my heart, because though you appear to have been defeated, you were the real victor. You were able to sow dissension between Churchill . . . and his allies on the one hand and their ally, the devil, on the other. . . . I think you made some mistakes, such as opening too many fronts or Ribbentrop’s short-sightedness in the face of Britain’s . . . diplomacy. But you are forgiven on account of your faith in your country and people. That you have become immortal in Germany is reason enough for pride. And we should not be surprised to see you again in Germany, or a new Hitler in your place.23
Although as-Sadat later dramatically changed his country’s policy, this new approach did not result in an explicit renunciation of the Axisera past. And when the Egyptian regime was overthrown in February 2011 and the one-time nationalist collaborators’ heirs fell, the Muslim Brotherhood, their Nazi-era ally which had never changed its ideology, filled the vacuum.24
Iran was ruled by an Islamist regime based on the ideology of al-Husaini’s old allies, al-Kashani and Safawi, who energetically denied that the Nazis had committed the Holocaust and at the same time evinced a Nazi-style anti-Semitism. Khomeini, the Islamist revolution’s leader, had studied in pro-Nazi Iraq in the 1930s among teachers influenced by the German-directed World War I jihad and amidst a new wave of German-promoted Islamism.
In Iraq, pro-Axis forces returned to power when a Baghdad mob murdered Prime Minister as-Said, the pro-British rival of al-Kailani and al-Husaini, in 1958. Abd al-Karim Qasim, one of the pro-Nazi nationalists who fought for al-Kailani against the British in 1941, ruled Iraq from 1958 to 1963. His coup allowed al-Kailani himself, who had been living in Saudi Arabia since 1945, to return home. Once again, however, al-Kailani made a too daring bid for power that failed. Sentenced to death, he fled. Later pardoned, he settled down in Lebanon, not far from al-Husaini, and died there in 1965.
Shortly thereafter, in 1968, the Ba’th Party, in effect an Arab version of National Socialism, came to power in Baghdad. The new regime was soon to be led by Saddam Husain at-Tikriti, nephew and virtually adopted son of another al-Kailani supporter. His dictatorship ruled Iraq for thirty-five years and fell only to a U.S-led invasion in 2003. Even seventy years after the events and under a U.S.-installed regime, the errors of Iraq’s pro-Nazi past could still not be openly and honestly discussed inside the country.25
In Syria, Maruf ad-Dawalibi, one of al-Husaini’s wartime aides and postwar allies,26 founded the Islamic Socialist Front in 1949. He became Syria’s prime minister for a single day in 1951 and again for four months in 1961–1962.27 When the Ba’th Party came to power in 1963, ad-Dawalibi went into exile and, like most Islamist leaders of that era, became part of al-Husaini’s network. But the Ba’th Party, which would rule Syria for the next fifty years, had the same worldview, policies, and methods, namely those of a repressive, one-party dictatorship, as those it had had during the pro-Nazi era.28 Party members, wrote Michel Aflaq, a founder and chief ideologue of the party,
must be imbued with a hatred unto death, toward any individuals who embody an idea contrary to Arab nationalism. Arab nationalists must never dismiss opponents of Arabism as mere individuals. . . . An idea that is opposed to ours . . . is the incarnation of individuals who must be exterminated, so that their idea might in turn be also exterminated. Indeed, the presence in our midst of a living opponent of the Arab national idea vivifies it and stirs the blood within us.29
Saudi Arabia was governed by a dynasty that didn’t join the Axis when the king concluded that Berlin would lose the war,30 but after 1945, Saudi Arabia became the main patron of al-Husaini and the Islamists who had been collaborators. Saudi money and protection ensured the movement’s survival until it revived in the 1970s and began to scare even the Saudi monarchy due to its revolutionary ambitions.31
The Arabic-speaking world’s umbrella organization, the Arab League, established in 1946, was also filled with ex-Axis collaborators. Abd ar-Rahman Azzam, its first secretary general, had been one of al-Husaini’s agents working with the Nazis, and still pursued the Jewish genocide implemented in Europe, which he and al-Husaini hoped to spread to the Middle East. What they once expected German armies to accomplish was now to be fulfilled by Arab ones. At the start of the fighting in late 1947, Azzam told a press conference, “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”32
Abd ar-Rahman’s brother, Abd al-Wahhab Azzam, a Muslim cleric who had not been a Nazi collaborator, was nonetheless a major source for al-Husaini’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Aiman az-Zawahiri, Abd al-Wahhab’s grandson and Abd ar-Rahman’s grandnephew, would become one of al-Qaida’s main leaders and an architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks, almost exactly sixty years from the day al-Husaini arrived in Berlin to join the Third Reich’s war. And just as al-Husaini had applauded the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a large number of radical Arab nationalists or Islamists as well as the governments of Iran, Syria, and Iraq cheered the September 11 attacks as a new phase in the war against liberal Muslims, Western democracy, and the Jews.33
The Arab League’s most important intellectual figure was Sati al-Husri, its cultural director for two decades starting in 1947. He had been a major architect of radical Arab nationalism, a key supporter of the pro-German al-Kailani regime in Iraq, and a Nazi sympathizer. In his Arab League office, al-Husri frequently met with unrepentant Nazis, among them fellow Arab League employee von Leers. In the postwar period, former collaborators like al-Husri had tremendous influence on the next generation. Extremist nationalists set the tone for most of the media and schools; Islamists did so for religious education and mosques. Decades of indoctrination even before World War I, coupled with the predispositions of traditional society, ensured that large numbers of people held similar ideas.
The career of Kamil Muruwwa provides a good example of how veteran pro-Nazis shaped public thinking. In 1933, as a young editor of the Beirut newspaper an-Nida, he wrote von Ribbentrop that all Arab youth were enthusiastically pro-Hitler. Muruwwa translated parts of Mein Kampf into Arabic in 1934 and published it in daily installments. A German official recommended putting him on the payroll.34
As a German agent, Muruwwa received twenty-five hundred marks monthly, the equivalent of about one thousand dollars a month at the time and more money than many senior German civil servants were paid.35 He built intelligence-gathering networks in Lebanon and in 1940 became the German News Bureau’s Beirut correspondent. The following year, when the British captured Lebanon, he fled to Berlin where von Ribbentrop asked him to start his own Arab News Service. At al-Husaini’s recommendation, however, the Shiite Muruwwa was posted to Sofia to run a listening post that analyzed Arabic radio broadcasts and newspapers.
After the war, Muruwwa returned to Lebanon and founded the al-Hayat newspaper which became very influential36 and gave al-Husaini and his allies good press.37 Muruwwa falsely claimed, for example, that al-Husaini had never been a Nazi collaborator and instead had bravely rejected a German demand in 1942 to start a revolt in Palestine. In Al-Hayat, Muruwwa also followed the line on the Holocaust that prevailed in the Arab world from the 1950s onward. The Nazis had been right, merely and understandably reacting to the fact that “half a million Jews enslaved 80 million Germans,” and from this arose parallel conclusions for the Arabic-speaking world regarding the Jewish threat to dominate and destroy Arab civilization. In his newspaper as in much of the Arabic mass media, the continuing line was, as in the 1930s, that everything wrong in the Arab world was the fault of Western democracies and the Jews. Muruwwa was murdered in 1966 but the newspaper continued in family hands until purchased by a Saudi prince in 1990.38
The World Muslim Congress, the Islamist movement’s main international group, had been founded and led by al-Husaini, who offered its support to the Germans. After 1945 al-Husaini moved its headquarters to Karachi, and he selected Inamullah Khan, one of the co-founders, to be secretary-general in 1949. Khan received the 1988 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion—previously given to Mother Teresa, the Reverend Billy Graham, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and carrying a $370,000 award—to honor the Congress’s work.39 When accused of hating Jews, Khan said he merely opposed racist Zionists. This was also a favorite argument of the PLO, which often used using the word “Zionist” instead of “Jew.”40
The Syrian Islamist and former Nazi collaborationist agent Maruf ad-Dawalibi became al-Husaini’s successor as the group’s leader. In 1984, as Saudi Arabia’s delegate at a UN seminar on religious tolerance and freedom in Geneva, ad-Dawalibi explained: “Why did Hitler want to exterminate them?. . . It is because they call themselves the chosen people and allege they were chosen by God from among all the peoples. . . . The Talmud says if a Jew does not drink every year the blood of a non-Jew, then he will be damned for eternity.”41
Islamism’s successful remaking of its image and its sweeping under the rug its old participation in the German-Ottoman and Nazi-Islamist alliances was demonstrated by the continuity of institutions, ideology, and personnel. Al-Husaini’s personal heir in the global Islamist movement was Muhammad Said Ramadan. He was the son-in-law and aide of Hasan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s founder and leader until his assassination in 1949. Like Arafat, al-Husaini’s other political heir, Ramadan fought with Brotherhood forces in the 1948 war. He then moved to Pakistan to represent the group.
Thereafter, Ramadan’s career largely depended on al-Husaini’s patronage, and he would inherit the ex-grand mufti’s Islamist network, financial base, and institutional assets in Switzerland and elsewhere.42 At the 1951 World Muslim Congress meeting, al-Husaini made his young protégé a member of its secretariat,43 and two years later Ramadan became the congress’s secretary general. He moved to Damascus where he worked for both al-Husaini and the Brotherhood.44 Al-Husaini financed their joint magazine, al-Muslimin (The Muslims),45 which Ramadan co-edited with Mustafa Husni as-Sibai, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood leader.46
In 1958, when Syria merged temporarily with Egypt and Abd an-Nasir extended his repression of the Muslim Brotherhood there, Ramadan fled to Geneva where he became the Muslim Brotherhood’s and al-Husaini’s European representative.47 That post as the chief Islamist in Europe was previously held by Shakib Arslan, the kaiser’s and the Nazis’ most consistent Arab ally who up to 1945 had been subsidized by Hitler’s regime.48 Arslan’s views remained unchanged until his death in 1946.49 In 1959, Ramadan finished his dissertation on Islamic law at Cologne University, which urged Muslims to fight against Europe’s secular societies.50
Repressed by Arab nationalist regimes, the Islamists, like their Axis partners after 1945, fled into exile or went underground. Led by al-Husaini and the Muslim Brotherhood, they returned to their 1920s and 1930s strategies, when the Ottoman Empire’s collapse had destroyed their Young Turk patrons and Anglo-French rule had made it too hot for them at home. Retreating to Europe, the Islamists began building or taking over mosques, setting up student and other front groups, and creating or gaining control of Muslim associations and journals.51 Said Ramadan spent four decades on that task. The Brotherhood also founded Islamic institutes and built new mosques. By 2000, many of the Islamic communities throughout Europe adhered to Brotherhood ideology and were led by Brotherhood members.52
The focal point for much of this work was the mosque built in Munich by an Egyptian, Ali Ghalib Himmat, and an Uzbek, Nur ad-Din Namanjani. The fifty-eight-year-old Namanjani had been imam of a Turkic SS unit and was close to al-Husaini. Funds for the mosque were raised by al-Husaini in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia in 1961 as well as by contributions from German ex-Nazis.53 While other Munich Muslims at first resisted Ramadan’s and the Brotherhood’s control, in the end the group’s ability to provide funds carried the day.54
In 1961, Ramadan founded the Islamic Center in Geneva with Saudi money. He also took over the Islamic Center of Munich and, two years later, the Islamic Center of London as well. After Ramadan’s death, the Geneva center was led by his oldest son, Hani. Himmat became Ramadan’s successor in 1973 as leader in Munich, which remained the most important center for Islamism and the Brotherhood in West Germany.55
The Syrian Yusuf Mustafa Nada Ibada worked with Himmat, and during the 1980s, Himmat and Ibada also built the Muslim Brotherhood’s global financial network. For example, they founded the at-Taqwa Bank in 1988. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York, international investigations named Himmat and Ibada as major financiers of terrorism.56 Himmat left the Islamic Center of Munich in 2004 to become head of the Lugano Islamic Center in Switzerland.57
So Ramadan, leader of the new Islamist generation in the post-Nazi era, who had no publicly expressed opinion on the events of that time, was nevertheless the lieutenant of the ex–Nazi ally al-Husaini as well as son-in-law and aide of another collaborationist leader, al-Banna, and led the international expansion of a group, the Muslim Brotherhood, that had collaborated with the Nazis.
Many of his older colleagues were also Muslims who had been Nazi collaborators (Namanjani, ad-Dawalibi), assisted by German ex-Nazis concealed in West Germany’s government (Zech-Nentwig, Wolfrum). They used institutions created and subsidized by the Nazi regime (the Geneva center, the Central Islamic Institute of Berlin) and funds that Hitler’s government had paid al-Husaini for his collaboration, now managed by a Nazi banker (Genoud). And Ramadan’s protégés would become key financiers of the modern Islamist terrorist movement.
Yet at some point these factors ceased to affect Western perceptions of the Brotherhood. At a critical moment in the 2011 “Arab Spring,” as the Brotherhood moved to take control of Egypt and Tunisia, the director of U.S. defense intelligence, James Clapper, told Congress in February 2011 that the Brotherhood was a moderate, secular group that opposed violence.58
Such ideas were shaped and encouraged by the Brotherhood’s own campaigns. For example, the New York Times article by Tariq Ramadan, Said’s son, earnestly claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood was a pro-British, anti-Nazi organization.59 Born in Geneva in 1962, raised in Switzerland, and groomed for leadership from childhood, Ramadan would be Islamism’s best-known spokesman in the West, becoming professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University.
Any effort to persuade the West that it should tolerate or even assist the Muslim Brotherhood requires erasing its legacy of cooperation with the Nazis and, of equal importance, the ideological parallels between the Nazis and the Brotherhood, as well as with Islamism generally. Thus, Islamist organizations fail to acknowledge, much less explicitly reject, their pro-Axis past because of the potential damage to their interests and image. Yet the ideologies and concepts of the movement still largely parallel those of the Ottoman Empire during World War I; of Nazi Germany and al-Husaini in World War II; of Abd an-Nasir, Ba’thists, and the PLO during the Cold War; and of al-Qaida, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hizballah thereafter. A few examples are offered here.
Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian Islamist who became a top al-Qaida leader, explained the mobilization for jihad in terms that sound as if they came from von Oppenheim’s memos and the Ottoman declarations or al-Husaini’s advice to Nazi Germany. In other words, hatred against Jews and the West would be stirred up, thus generating mass support and leading to a jihad:
The one slogan that has been well understood by the nation and to which it has been responding for the past 50 years is the call for jihad against Israel [and] against the U.S. presence. . . . The jihad movement has moved to the center of the leadership of the nation when it adopted the slogan of liberating the nation from its external enemies and when it portrayed it as a battle of Islam against infidelity and infidels.60
In 1942, al-Husaini had advised the Germans that the most effective propaganda would be to preach hatred of the Jews, or in his words, “The Jewish attack and the plagues they carry.”61 He had also made this idea the centerpiece in his lectures to SS units and imams.62 This theme was echoed during the following decades. Here, for example, is Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s key theoretician and al-Husaini’s friend, in 1950 using almost precisely the same words:
The Jews did indeed return to evil-doing, so Allah gave to the Muslims power over them. The Muslims then expelled them from the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. . . . Then the Jews again returned to evil-doing and consequently Allah sent against them others of his servants, until the modern period. Then Allah brought Hitler to rule over them. And once again today the Jews have returned to evil-doing, in the form of “Israel” which made the Arabs, the owners of the land, taste of sorrows and woe.63
Similarly, Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, in its Covenant at the end of the 1970s quoted al-Banna, drew heavily on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as did al-Husaini, and echoed the radical Arab-Nazi line that went far beyond opposition to Zionism to portray the Jews as the world’s main evil force, the creators of Communism, cultural modernism, and Western imperialism in almost precisely the same words used in al-Husaini’s wartime speeches and German propaganda.
With their money, they took control of the world media. . . . They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution, and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. . . . With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate. . . . They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state . . . to enable them to rule the world. . . .64
Hamas’s Deputy Minister of Religious Endowments Abdallah Jarbu in a February 2010 television interview also spoke in terms parallel to Nazi and contemporary Islamist propaganda, calling Jews “subhu-mans,” and urging that they be “annihilated.” “The Jews,” he said,
are thieves and aggressors. . . . They want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but, in fact, they are a microbe unparalleled in the world. It’s not I who say this. The Koran itself says . . . “You shall find the strongest men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews.” May He annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience. I condemn whoever believes in normalizing relations with them, whoever supports sitting down with them, and whoever believes that they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people.65
The language az-Zawahiri and Usama bin Ladin employed in their February 28, 1998 jihad declaration against Jews and Crusaders (Christians) also closely paralleled al-Husaini’s speeches and Muslim Brotherhood materials of the 1930s and 1940s.66 Al-Husaini spoke of a Zionist-British conspiracy to destroy Islam. Al-Qaida and other Islamists in the post-1945 world—no longer needing to excuse fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as “good” Christians—broadened the enemy into a Jewish-Christian-American conspiracy.
Similar ideas came from the leading Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Yusuf al-Qaradawi. As al-Qaradawi put it:
Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.67
Like other nationalist and Islamist commentators, al-Qaradawi attributed the Holocaust solely to Hitler. Yet he showed his support by claiming the genocide enjoyed divine sanction and by predicting that Muslims would implement the next round.
In his October 2010 speech that called for and indeed predicted the revolution in Egypt a few weeks later, Muhammad al-Badi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme guide, expressed a vision that mirrored that of von Oppenheim and al-Husaini:
Waging jihad against both of these infidels [Israel and the United States] is a commandment of Allah that cannot be disregarded. . . . All Muslims are required by their religion to fight: They crucially need to understand that the improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained through jihad and sacrifice and by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.68
The copious references to holy texts in the statements above show that Islamists did not need to take ideas from German Nazis or Italian fascists. As al-Husaini had argued in the 1930s and 1940s, they had a parallel yet symbiotic world view, drawn from their own societies’ political traditions, history, and religion.
The common themes tying together Middle Eastern and European extremists included hatred of democracy (as distinct from merely holding elections); glorification of dictatorship; deification of the dictator-leader; organizing society by a systematic ideology that suppressed liberty and debate; and using Jews and the Western democracies as scapegoats whose destruction would bring peace and plenty.69
Of course, radical nationalists and Islamists drew inspiration from European partners. But those who worked directly with the Nazis as their comrades inherited the Middle East long after their counterparts in Berlin were reduced to ashes. The resulting history simultaneously realized von Oppenheim’s vision of transnational jihad and Hurgronje’s warning that this would produce a nightmare of bloody confrontations and out-of-control hatreds. As a consequence, the lasting influence of this worldview and strategies diverted Middle Eastern societies from better alternatives. Even the presence of so much valuable oil and gas did not keep the Middle East from falling behind Asia and South America in almost every index of political freedom, technological progress, and social well-being.
All of these facts do not make al-Husaini or al-Qaida—or for that matter Iran’s Islamist regime, the Ba’th governments in Iraq and Syria, Hamas, the PLO, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the dominant exponents of the Arab world’s mainstream discourse—into Nazis or fascists. But these groups demonstrated how the same radical vision that had once found the Nazis to be congenial, right-thinking allies had such a powerful, long-lived effect in shaping the contemporary Middle East. This is the terrible secret of modern Middle Eastern history.
