The Al-Alami family

Writers on Palestine’s families — Mustafa Murad al-Dabbagh, Kamil al-Asali and Adel Manna among them, as quoted on the family’s own website — describe the Alamis as a sharifian house of Idrisid (Hasanid) descent that came to Jerusalem from Morocco in the Mamluk period and produced “scholars, jurists, muftis, Sufis and ascetics.” That genealogy is the family’s tradition rather than a documented fact. What outside sources confirm is the family’s standing in the late Ottoman city: the Alamis ranked among Jerusalem’s most prominent landowning families, their extensive properties and endowments managed as a collective, and their members held religious, administrative and municipal office across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The municipal lists give the family the mayoralty repeatedly in the late Ottoman city — Musa Faidallah al-Alami in 1869 and again from 1879 to 1881, Shahada al-Alami in 1877 — before the best documented of them, Faidi al-Alami (d. 1924): district officer of Bethlehem from 1902, mayor of Jerusalem from 1906 to 1909, then one of the three representatives of the Jerusalem sanjak in the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies through the First World War; he also compiled and published a concordance of the Qur’an. Faidi’s son Musa al-Alami (1897–1984) read law at Cambridge, rose in the Mandate government’s legal department, and was dismissed and exiled in 1937; after 1948 he built the Arab Development Society on land near Jericho, settling refugee families and training orphan boys — the lesson of his book ’Ibrat Filastin (The Lesson of Palestine).

The family’s religious line culminated in Sa’d al-Din al-Alami (1911–1993). Educated at al-Azhar, he served as a sharia judge in Ramallah and Nablus before the Jordanian waqf appointed him Mufti of Jerusalem in 1952 — some Palestinian sources give 1953 — in succession to Hussam al-Din Jarallah; he held the post for forty years, and after 1967 helped found and headed the Islamic High Council administering Muslim affairs in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. He died in Jerusalem on February 6, 1993, and was buried in the city; The Independent’s obituary recorded mourning notices published even by Jerusalem’s Israeli mayor.

Notable members

• Sa’d al-Din al-Alami (1911–1993) — Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (1952–93), succeeding Hussam al-Din Jarallah; headed the Islamic High Council after 1967.
• Faidi al-Alami (d. 1924) — mayor of Jerusalem (1906–09) and Ottoman deputy for the Jerusalem sanjak (1914–18); compiler of a Qur’an concordance.
• Musa al-Alami (1897–1984) — his son; Mandate-era lawyer and founder of the Arab Development Society for Palestinian refugees near Jericho.

Sources

• Musa Alami — PalQuest biography
• Obituary: Saad al-Alami — The Independent
• The Sa’d Edin al-Alami Collection — Palestinian Museum Digital Archive
• Faidi al-Alami — Wikipedia
• Musa Faidi al-Alami — Wikipedia
• The Alami family, quoting al-Dabbagh, al-Asali and Manna — the family’s own website