As‘ad al-Shuqairi

As‘ad al-Shuqairi, son of Tawfiq al-Shuqairi, was born in Acre in 1860. He had three sons (Anwar, Abd al-Afu and Ahmad) and three daughters.

Shuqairi received his early education in Acre. Then, in 1875, he went to Cairo to enroll at al-Azhar seminary, where he resided in the riwaq al-sham, or the resident hostel for students who came from the Levant region. He regularly attended the lectures of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the pioneering preacher of religious reform, and then those of Afghani’s successor, Shaykh Mohammad Abdo.

After completing his studies and returning to Acre, Shuqairi joined the Ottoman judiciary and was appointed as a judge in the Sharia court of the Western Galilee town of Shafa Amr. Then, in 1904, he was transferred to the city of Latakiya in northern Syria, where he was appointed investigating judge. In 1905, he moved to Istanbul, where he was introduced to the Sufi shaykh Abu al-Huda al-Sayyadi, who was shaykh al-mashayikh, or master of the college of shaykhs of Sufi orders, and began to frequent his zawiya, or oratory of his order. Subsequently, al-Sayyadi secured him an appointment as librarian in the library of Sultan Abdul Hamid.

After staying a while in Istanbul, Shuqairi moved to Adana, where he was appointed chief justice of its Sharia Court of Appeals. There, he married a Turkish woman by whom he had two sons, Anwar and Abd al-Afy. However, his sojourn in Adana did not last long; the Ottoman authorities arrested him because of his ties to reformist leaders, such as Abdul Hamid al-Zahrawi, and deported him to Tibnine Castle in southern Lebanon. There, his second wife (who was also Turkish) gave birth to his third son, Ahmad who later played a key role in founding the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Shuqairi was released after the restoration of the Ottoman constitution in July 1908. He returned to Acre and ran as a candidate for the Third Ottoman Parliament. After his victory in the elections of autumn 1908, he moved to Istanbul. He became active in the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and was considered one of its stalwarts.

Along with Shukri al-Husseini, Shuqairi helped to establish a chapter of the CUP in Jerusalem. Several of the city’s dignitaries and notables joined him, including Isaaf al-Nashashibi, Musa al-Budeiri, Ali al-Rimawi, Khalil al-Sakakini, and Jurji Hanania. He was subsequently re-elected to the Fourth Ottoman Parliament in spring 1912 as the representative of the Acre district.

During that period, Shuqairi became one of the staunchest supporters of the idea of the  jamiʿa islamiyya (Pan-Islamism), which had originally been promoted by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. This prompted him to take a stand against the call for Ottoman "decentralization" that was being embraced by reformist Arab nationalist parties, and he fought to safeguard the unity of the Ottoman Empire and prevent its Arab provinces from seceding. Thus, he was strongly opposed to the First Arab National Congress, which was convened in Paris in June 1913 by representatives of reformist Arab nationalist groups.

After the outbreak of World War I and the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the war, Shuqairi was appointed mufti (chief jurist) of the Ottoman Fourth Army, and he grew close to its military commander, Ahmad Jemal Pasha, who ruled the provinces of bilad al-sham (the Levant) and the Hijaz. During that period, he headed the Arab Scientific Mission that traveled from Damascus to Istanbul in September 1915, to declare the loyalty of the people of the Levant to the Ottoman Empire.

Because of his close relationship with Commander Jemal Pasha, Shuqairi was accused of involvement in the affair of the Arab nationalists who were executed by Jemal Pasha in Beirut and Damascus in 1915 and 1916. However, he pleaded his innocence, and a number of ulama or religious scholars vouched for him, citing passages from Jemal Pasha’s memoirs as proof of his innocence.

After the end of World War I in September 1918, Shuqairi took refuge in the city of Adana, where his wife’s family lived, and spent a few months there. He then decided to return to Palestine, so he boarded a steamship that took him to the port of Haifa. There the British Mandate authorities arrested him because of his connections with Turkish officials. The British detained him in the Abu Qir prison camp near Alexandria, Egypt, for fourteen months. After his release from prison in 1921, Shuqairi returned to his native city Acre and stayed there for a few months under the scrutiny of the British security services.

Shuqairi continued to oppose the idea of pan-Arabism even after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. After the establishment of the Turkish Republic in the early fall of 1923, he cultivated cordial relations with the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk is believed to have gifted Shuqairi several crates filled with precious rare Arabic books.

Shuqairi was among those who opposed the leadership of Jerusalem mufti Mohammad Amin al-Husseini of the Palestinian national movement. The regions of northern Palestine were among the strongholds of the muʿaridun or “oppositionists”; the majlisiyyun or “councilists” supported the mufti through his leadership of the Supreme Muslim Council. Shuqairi joined Shaykh Suleiman al-Taji al-Faruqi and others in the founding meeting of the opposing Arab National Party, which was held in Jerusalem on 8 November 1923, but this party did not last long. As part of his opposition work to undermine the mufti’s leadership, Shuqairi also cultivated relationships with some Zionist politicians, including Frederick Kisch, who headed the political department of the Zionist Organization.

Shuqairi was among the prominent figures who took part in the Conference of the Palestinian Islamic Nation on 11 December 1931 in Jerusalem. This meeting was held by the oppositionists to Amin al-Husseini in response to the Pan-Islamic Congress, held under the latter’s auspices from 7-10 December, in the same city, and which was attended by 145 delegates from 22 countries.

On 2 December 1934, Shuqairi took part in the proceedings of the founding conference of the National Defense Party, convened in Jaffa and presided over by Raghib al-Nashashibi. He gave a speech during the conference but never officially joined the party. In June 1939, amidst the turmoil of the infighting witnessed during the Great Palestinian Revolt, his son Anwar was assassinated, which profoundly affected him.

Shuqairi passed away sometime in February 1940 in Acre and was buried alongside his son in the Nabi Saleh cemetery lying adjacent to the walls of the old city of Acre.

Shuqairi was a religious Azhari scholar and one of the eminent personalities from the city of Acre. He held a number of positions in the Ottoman judiciary. He was also one of the more high-profile members of the CUP. Appointed mufti of the Fourth Ottoman Army, he remained a loyal subject of the Ottoman Empire until its fall and was hostile toward the reformist Arab nationalists. Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the major figures in the opposition to Mufti Amin al-Husseini and his Supreme Muslim Council. Shuqairi was also known for his passion for literature and poetry, and around 1936, he composed his memoirs by dictating them to his brother Qasim al-Shuqairi. His son Ahmad intended to edit these memoirs to prepare them for publication, but his preoccupation with political work delayed his pursuing the matter, and the manuscript remained in his father’s library among his personal papers. Ultimately, the library was looted by the Zionists when they occupied Acre in 1948.

Sources

Abdul Hadi, Mahdi, ed. Palestinian Personalities: A Biographic Dictionary. 2nd ed., rev. and updated. Jerusalem: Passia Publication, 2006.

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https://www.maannews.net/articles/2097335.html

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