The Divergence of Judaism and Islam. Interdependence, Modernity, and Political Turmoil

The Road Not Taken: Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusseini and His Chickens · 267

proof for the Arab’s continued existence at home, together with the new
arrivals. They rather preferred to see it as a vacated home. They went
along their new road, leaving Memoirs of a Hen behind.

Notes

1. Ḥājj Amīn al-Ḥusseini (=al-Ḥusaynī) (1897–1974) was the Mufti (the Mus-
   lim religious head) of Jerusalem from 1921,a position held before him by his
   father and brother. But rather than being known as a religious leader, he was
   more known—since becoming a national leader of the Palestinian Arabs at the
   end of World War I—as the one who advocated, instigated and headed a fierce
   and ruthless armed struggle against both the Jews and the British. He was noto-
   rious for being a pro-Nazi sympathizer and for siding with the Axis powers in
   World War II. He even set a Palestinian Bureau in Berlin and Rome during that
   war. He also reached several agreements with Hitler.


2. Dr. Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusaynī, Mudhakkirāt dajāja (Cairo: Dār al-Ma ̔ārif bi-
   Miṣr, Silsilat “Iqra ̓” 8, n.d.), 9. All translations quoted from the Arabic and
   Hebrew sources in the article are mine.


3. Ibid., 152.


4. For details on Ṭāhā Ḥussein, see infra, note 13. Manṣūr Fahmī (1886–1959)
   was one of the intellectuals who dared write about “the Woman’s Question”
   in Islam, criticizing her isolation from the public sphere. In fact, this was the
   subject of his PhD dissertation for the Sorbonne, published in 1913. But unlike
   his predecessor, Qāsim Amīn—the most famous Egyptian intellectual to write
   about the subject, he later backed away from his advanced views after the storm
   his book caused in Egypt and the harsh criticism his writings received. Aḥmad
   Zakī was an intellectual who, like Ṭāhā Ḥussein, was both an academic and
   politician. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, he headed the Egyptian
   University in Cairo, and went on to be elected to the last Egyptian govern-
   ment before the 1952 Free Officers’ coup. He later moved to Kuwait, to become
   Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Al- ̔Arabī in 1958. He retired from this office at
   the end of the 1970s.


5. Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusaynī, “Ḥawl Mudhakkirāt dajāja ,” Al-Thaqāfa 250 (1943):
   20 (emphasis mine).


6. Jūrj Qanāzi ̔, “Qirā ̓a jadīda li-kitāb al-duktūr Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusaynī
   Mudhakkirāt dajāja,” Al-Karmil 2 (1981): 134–35.


7. George Kanazi (=Jūrj Qanāzi ̔), introduction to Isḥāq Mūsā al-Ḥusaynī,
   Memoirs of a Hen, trans. George Kanazi (Toronto: York Press, 1999), 7.


8. ̔Abd al-Raḥmān Yāghī, Ḥayāt al-adab al-filasṭīnī al-ḥadīth min awwal al-nahḍa
   ḥattā al-nakba (Beirut: Al-Maktab al-Tijārī lil-Ṭibā ̔a wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzī ̔,
   1968), 519. The book is based on the doctoral dissertation the author wrote at
   the University of Cairo under Dr. Suhayr al-Qalamāwī in the Department of
   Arabic Language there.