CONCluSION • 239structure in place “to prevent or at least retard the rise of a nationalist
nonsectarian notion of Arab identity.” Indeed, the British treated Pal-
estine’s population as three separate groups differentiated by religious
affiliation— not merely in matters clearly related to religion— such that
the mandatory administration envisioned three separate electoral col-
leges of Muslims, Christians, and Jews that would elect members of a
proposed legislative council. It was only in the 1930s that the British
began to include “race” or “nationality” (not as a replacement for but
simply an addition to “religion”) as a category of classification of the
population in their census.^13
The British did not merely maintain the Ottoman millet system; in
certain respects, they actually expanded the Ottoman focus on religion
in defining groups in Palestine. As Rashid Khalidi has stressed, the Brit-
ish actually invented “Islamic” institutions that lacked precedent either
in Palestine or elsewhere in the Islamic world. These inventions in-
cluded the Supreme Muslim Council (al- Majlis al- islāmī al- aʿlā), which
was granted extensive powers including control over the revenues of
the country’s public awqāf^14 as well as over appointments of a wide
variety of religious bureaucrats and other officials.^15 The British also
significantly refashioned other religious institutions, especially the po-
sition the British named the grand mufti of Palestine (muftī filasṭīn
al- akbar), vastly expanding the authority of the former position of Je-
rusalem’s mufti for the Hanafi rite.^16 In other words, far from muting
or limiting the place of religion in public life, the British in Palestine
consolidated and fortified Islamic religious institutions and positions
(even if for ends entirely their own). Thus, despite the fall of the Is-
lamic Ottoman Empire and the advent of the British Mandate, even if
one considers simply the legal, public frameworks of Palestinian soci-
ety, there is ample reason to suspect that religion would have persisted
as a primary lens of mutual perception.
And evidence suggests that religion remained at the center of the
encounter, indicated not least by the fact that the moments of greatest
conflict in the mandate period were generally associated with religious
festivals or locations with strong religious valences.^17 Consider the riots
of 1920 at the time of the Nabī Mūsā pilgrimage to a location where
the biblical Moses was believed to have been buried; or the calls “to
protect al- Aqsā from Jewish attacks” in the wake of the incidents at
(^13) Likhovski, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine, 37– 38.
(^14) Plural of waqf, an Islamic legal endowment.
(^15) On the Supreme Muslim Council, see Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council.
(^16) Khalidi, The Iron Cage, 55– 56. See also Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council,
17– 20.
(^17) On this pattern, see Wasserstein, “Patterns of Communal Conflict in Palestine.”