Then Samuel, in turn, made a fatal mistake. One difficulty the British experienced in dealing with the Arabs was that they had no official leader, King Feisal’s writ running no further than the Jordan. So they invented the title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. In March 1921 its existing holder, head of an important local family, died. His younger brother was the notorious rioter Haji Amin al-Husaini, now pardoned and back on the political scene. The procedure for creating a new mufti was for a local electoral college of pious Arab Moslems to choose three candidates and for government to confirm
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