The Jarallah family

The Jarallahs were not always Jarallahs. Family tradition, recorded in the genealogical literature down to al-Dabbagh’s Biladuna Filastin, holds that the house began as al-Haskafi — from Hisn Kayfa in Diyar Bakr — with the Shafi’i scholar Shams al-Din Abu al-Lutf Muhammad ibn Ali al-Haskafi, who settled in Jerusalem in the ninth Islamic century; the family was known as Al Abi al-Lutf before the name Jarallah, “neighbor of God,” prevailed, said to recall an ancestor who lived as a mujawir beside the Meccan Haram. That is the family’s own account. What the documentary record confirms is a Jerusalem ulama dynasty: the Palestinian Encyclopedia preserves the poet-jurist Abu Bakr ibn Abi al-Lutf al-Haskafi — “his grandfather Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn Ali al-Haskafi settled Jerusalem, and the Haskafi family later became known as Jarallah” — who died in Damascus in 965 AH (1557–58 CE), and a study of Mujir al-Din’s chronicle counts a Jarallah among the teachers of the Mamluk-founded Uthmaniyya Madrasa.

Through the Ottoman centuries the family supplied the city’s preachers, muftis and judges. The genealogical record names Jarallah ibn Abi al-Lutf — born in Jerusalem in 1090 AH — preacher of al-Aqsa Mosque and teacher at the Salahiyya Madrasa, who served as qadi in Jerusalem, Damascus and Istanbul and died in 1144 AH; and the Hanafi mufti Jarallah ibn Abi Bakr, teacher at the Uthmaniyya Madrasa, who died in 1027 AH. In the nineteenth century Muhammad al-Fadl Jarallah held the Jerusalem muftiate until his death in 1856, and the same study of the old city’s madrasas notes that Jarallah houses still occupy parts of several of them.

The modern culmination was Hussam al-Din Jarallah (1884–1954). Al-Azhar-educated and a leading member of the Supreme Muslim Council, he won the most votes in the 1921 election for mufti of Jerusalem but was persuaded by High Commissioner Herbert Samuel to withdraw, allowing the appointment of his lifelong rival Amin al-Husayni; as consolation he was made chief qadi and inspector of Palestine’s sharia courts, and he later served as Minister of Justice of Transjordan from 1926 to 1929. On December 20, 1948, King Abdullah I named him Mufti of Jerusalem in place of al-Husayni, and he held the office until his death in Jerusalem on March 6, 1954, when Sa’d al-Din al-Alami succeeded him.

Notable members

• Hussam al-Din Jarallah (1884–1954) — Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (1948–54); 1921 election frontrunner who withdrew under British pressure; former Transjordan justice minister.
• Muhammad al-Fadl Jarallah (d. 1856) — Hanafi mufti of Jerusalem in the mid-nineteenth century.
• Jarallah ibn Abi al-Lutf (b. 1090 AH, d. 1144 AH) — preacher of al-Aqsa Mosque and qadi of Jerusalem, Damascus and Istanbul, per the genealogical record.
• Abu Bakr ibn Abi al-Lutf al-Haskafi (d. 965 AH/1557–58 CE) — poet and jurist of the family’s early Jerusalem generations.

Sources

• Hussam Eddin (Sheikh) Jarallah — PASSIA
• Hussam ad-Din Jarallah — Wikipedia
• Abu Bakr ibn Abi al-Lutf al-Haskafi — Palestinian Encyclopedia, An-Najah University
• Senior Arab officials’ petition naming Sheikh Hussam al-Din Jarallah (1936) — PalQuest
• Al Jarallah family genealogy, citing Mujir al-Din and al-Dabbagh — Salfit heritage site