Summary
Leader of the Arab Orthodox laity and president of the lay Arab Orthodox Executive Committee, a political ally of the Nashashibi family and thus an opponent of the Mufti, whose rivalry with Niqula Khoury runs through Chapter 1 of ‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954) (PDF p.57-58).
Details
-
Khoury’s constant opposition to Farraj, the leader of the Arab Orthodox laity, allowed the Greek hierarchy, in Papastathis’s account, to follow a divide-and-rule doctrine and maintain its dominance (PDF p.57).
-
Both the Patriarchate and the lay Executive Committee presided over by Farraj stood against the Ramallah parish priests’ Clerical Committee and its aim of improving Arab participation in patriarchal elections: for the lay leadership the committee threatened its competence to represent the community as its sole political agent and would be under Husseini influence (PDF p.57).
-
Khoury accused the lay leaders of responsibility for Timotheos’s election — “were the direct reason behind his (i.e. Timotheos’) election” — an accusation Papastathis holds to be unsubstantiated by the Memoirs or any other archival source and better explained by Khoury’s dislike of Farraj (PDF p.58).
-
Farraj blocked Khoury’s selection as representative of the Arab Christian clergy to the Peel Commission, putting Grigorios Hajjar in his place, and opposed Khoury’s participation as a delegate to the Orthodox countries to promote the Palestinian cause (PDF p.58). Nassif records the same episode from Khoury’s telling: Farraj insisted the spokesman before the Commission should be Archbishop Hajjar (PDF p.41).
-
After Timotheos blocked Khoury’s Cairo appointment, Khoury was kept in Jerusalem under supervision by the Greek hierarchy and Farraj’s associates (PDF p.65). The editors’ note on the first Arab Orthodox Congress in Haifa records that it was organised under the authority of Iskandir Kassab and Ya’qub Farraj, gathering delegates from all the Palestinian (27) and Transjordanian local committees, and led to the constitution of an Executive Committee (PDF p.112).
-
The Memoirs give Farraj’s part in Khoury’s later years in his own telling: the Jerusalem municipal-election split between the Mufti’s candidate Nakhle Kattan and the Nashashibi candidate Farraj, which starved the National Orthodox School of community contributions (PDF p.116); the monastery men’s widening of the dispute between the clerical committee and Farraj’s lay committee after the 1932 priests’ conference, and Farraj’s committee ordering priests both to refrain from and to resume pronouncing Timotheos’s name (PDF p.120); Farraj’s resignation from the Arab Higher Committee with Ragheb Al-Nashashibi as the Royal Commission sailed (PDF p.128); his insistence that Grigorios Hajjar rather than Khoury speak for the Christians before the Commission (PDF p.129); and, in Khoury’s account, his throwing away Adel Arslan’s letters proposing a Balkan delegation and then sabotaging the delegation’s fundraising and Patriarchal authorization while professing help, so it left with only 70 pounds (PDF p.130-131).
Related pages
‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), Niqula Khoury, Arab Orthodox Movement, Grigorios Hajjar, Peel Commission