ABSTRACT
During the 1920s and 1930s, Haj Amin al-Husseini was one of the first radical Islamic leaders to issue fatwas, or religious rulings, calling for jihad, or holy war, against Great Britain, the United States, the Jews, and the West. Since World War I, during which al-Husseini served as an officer in the Ottoman Turkish army, the fatwa has served as a major instrument by which Islamic religious leaders have impelled their followers to engage in acts of jihad, which invariably involved acts of violence and terrorism. In orchestrating the first intifada of the twenty-first century, Yasser Arafat was following in the footsteps of al-Husseini and continuing the tactics and legacy of terror that the mufti had introduced. The Egyptian-based journal of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Haj Amin al-Husseini had once contributed anti-Semitic and anti-Western diatribes, hailed Osama bin Laden "as a hero in the full sense of the word" and prayed that his followers would eventually "eradicate America.".
