Last week, the historian Martin Kramer reported on his discovery that a photograph he had circulated of David Ben-Gurion and his wife Paula, seated next to the grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin Haj al-Husseini, had been mislabeled: the person in Muslim clerical garb was not the mufti at all. Now Kramer has discovered his true identity in a 25-year-old journal article, where it was captioned: “Ben-Gurion alongside Sheikh Tawfiq al-Taybi, president of the Supreme Muslim Appeals Court, before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 1946.” (The committee was tasked with determining the fate of Mandatory Palestine.) Kramer writes:
Sheikh Tawfiq al-Taybi wasn’t comparable to Ben-Gurion in any way. He’d served as a qadi, or religious judge, from 1920, working his way up through the Islamic courts around the country before reaching Jerusalem. In 1940, he became president of the appeals court; he fled for Lebanon in 1948. As far as I can tell from the records of the Anglo-American Committee, he didn’t actually testify. (The testimony of three other “Muslim Religious Dignitaries” is recorded.)
Read more on Sandbox: http://martinkramer.org/sandbox/2015/11/do-you-know-the-mufti-man/