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Supreme Muslim Council

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aliasesSMC, Supreme Moslem Council

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Summary

The body established under the British Mandate to authorise Islamic services in Palestine — shari’a courts, waqf administration and mosque management — headquartered in Jerusalem with district employees, including a waqf committee, shari’a court and library in Gaza City; under the Egyptian Administration it was integrated into government, headed by the governor-general, and dissolved in 1957 (Governing Gaza, PDF p.210-211 / printed p.193-194, PDF p.217 / printed p.200).

Details

  • The Mandate replaced Muslim Ottoman authority, under which religious services had been part of the state authorised by the sultan, with British authority that was secular at best and Christian at worst; the Council was created to cope with that problem and to equalise the various religions within the new ecumenical authority (PDF p.210 / printed p.193).

  • Herbert Samuel tried from the beginning to impress on the Council the “undesirability of using places of devotion for the purposes of political propaganda”, and the Palestine government’s 1936 report to the League of Nations held that it was an administrative rather than a political body, dealing with Moslem religious affairs (PDF p.211 / printed p.194).

  • Despite that insistence, neither the Council nor Islamic personnel saw their services as so limited; the first national ‘ulama’ conference, convened by the Council, called for concerted work on Palestine’s moral terrain, from which the Gaza branch of the Society for the Preservation of Public Morals was established (PDF p.211-212 / printed p.194-195).

  • The 1948 nakba destroyed the financial and organisational basis of religious servicing in Gaza, through the loss of waqf land, which provided revenue for mosques and religious schools, and of the resources of the SMC in Jerusalem; the governor-general’s 1949 letter to the Egyptian Awqaf Ministry said the salaries of the preachers and muezzins had been stopped, and the ministry agreed to send carpets to the Gaza mosques and contribute 190 pounds to their budget (PDF p.217-218 / printed p.200-201).

  • The Administration reestablished the Council, absorbed it into government and in 1957 devolved its responsibilities to the governor-general, the Administration, the shari’a appeals court and the local waqf administration; Michael Dumper is quoted that the position of a higher echelon of the Council in the Strip controlling the local waqf committee had become “increasingly redundant” (PDF p.217 / printed p.200).

  • In Banko’s The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, the Supreme Muslim Council was newly created by the British to manage Muslim religious affairs, and the British appointment in 1921 of Hajj Mohammed Amin al-Husayni as both Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and its head represented the willingness of some elite Arabs to work alongside the mandatory government (The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, PDF p.78 / printed p.67).

  • Palestinian Arab populist groups rarely endorsed the agenda of the Mufti, the Jerusalem Husayni and Nashashibi factions or the members of the Supreme Muslim Council (PDF p.69 / printed p.58).

  • Neither the Mufti nor the Supreme Muslim Council supported the boycott of the 1922 Legislative Council elections, a stance that separated these traditional religious leaders from their middle-class and more secular counterparts (PDF p.87 / printed p.76).

Governing Gaza, Society for the Preservation of Public Morals, Community services, Herbert Samuel, Gaza

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