The Ansari family

The Ansaris of Jerusalem — the branch known as al-Danf — are among the city’s old Muslim families, self-identifying with the nisba al-Khazraji: by family tradition they descend from al-Khazraj, one of the two Ansar tribes of Medina. That lineage is the family’s own account, preserved in its records and memorial literature. What the documentation shows is a family woven into the religious life of the Haram al-Sharif: Sheikh Khalil Badr al-Ansari served as custodian (sadin) of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, and the family kept a handwritten register of its waqf endowments compiled from the records of Jerusalem’s sharia court by Sheikh Muhammad Amin al-Danf al-Ansari. The Ansaris married into the city’s governing families — Zulaikha al-Ansari was the wife of mayor Faidi al-Alami and the mother of Musa al-Alami.

The family’s name enters the national chronicle in the revolt of 1936. Sami al-Ansari — son of Sheikh Ibrahim al-Ansari, nineteen years old, a graduate of the Arab College who taught English at the Rashidiyya School, and Musa al-Alami’s maternal uncle — was shot on June 12, 1936, after he and Bahjat Abu Gharbiya ambushed the British police inspector Alan Sigrist near Bab al-Asbat; he died of his wounds within hours and was buried that evening at Bab al-Rahma cemetery after a mass funeral at al-Aqsa. “A hero fell yesterday on the field of honor,” Khalil al-Sakakini wrote in his diary, “the greatest hero Palestine has known.”

The twentieth century’s other documented son was Sheikh Khalil Badr’s own: Fahmi Khalil Badr al-Ansari (1940–2021), a Jerusalem historian and collector of the city’s heritage, born on May 26, 1940, who devoted his life to documenting Jerusalem and died on January 9, 2021 — buried, like Sami, at Bab al-Rahma cemetery.

Notable members

• Sami al-Ansari (d. 1936) — teacher and Arab College graduate, nineteen; killed after the Bab al-Asbat attack on a British police inspector, and eulogized by Khalil al-Sakakini as “the greatest hero Palestine has known.”
• Khalil Badr al-Ansari — custodian (sadin) of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods.
• Fahmi al-Ansari (1940–2021) — his son; Jerusalem historian and heritage collector.
• Zulaikha al-Ansari — wife of Jerusalem mayor Faidi al-Alami and mother of Musa al-Alami.

Sources

• Remembering Fahmi al-Ansari, “memory of Jerusalem” — Akhbar el-Balad (Arabic)
• Qasim al-Rimawi — PalQuest biography (Arabic)
• Assassination at Bab al-Asbat, quoting Sakakini’s diaries — Ultra Palestine (Arabic)
• Musa Alami — PalQuest biography