Mufti: The True Story of the Man who Collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis to Create the Evil Legacy of Modern Jihad by John Hawkins; independently published; © 2024; ISBN 9798339-692140; 143 pages; $29.99 on Amazon. Amazon.com. Spend less. Smile more.
SAN DIEGO – This book is an amalgam of two genres: History and Graphic Non-Fiction. I don’t think it will satisfy devotees of either genre. For graphic arts fans, there are too many pages filled with writing, rather than drawings. For the serious student of history, phantasmagoric images detract from the work’s verisimilitude.
Two aspects of the purported history rang alarm bells for me. First, there was a message at the beginning of the book that said it is “in no way a disparagement of the Muslim people. There are a billion good Muslims and many great ones, such as Tawakkol Karman, Malala Yousafzai, Nobel Peace Prize Winners…” This message was repeated later in the book. If author Hawkins had a nagging doubt how his book would be interpreted, these disclaimers only heighten suspicions that animus might have come into play.
Second, an examination of the book’s end notes reveals that no original research was done by the author. There are no primary sources. The account is a rehashing of what other contemporary authors have written about Amin al-Husseini, who as Grand Mufti was the leader of the Muslim community in Jerusalem and an ally of Adolf Hitler.
The book’s premise is that the Mufti, along with Hussain al-Bana and Sayyid Qutb, was a progenitor of jihadism, which goal author Hawkins describes as the desire to first kill the Jews in the Middle East and second to annihilate the rest of us Jews around the world. He includes among the Mufti’s spiritual descendants Hassan Nasrallah, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khomeini, Anwar Sadat, Yasser Arafat, and Mahmoud Abbas, among others. Anwar Sadat? The Egyptian who was the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel? Jihadism is not his legacy. Peacemaking is. And he paid the ultimate price for it.
So, I cannot recommend this book. Serious students of history deserve a book with original research. Fans of graphic novels (or graphic non-fiction) deserve more straightforward storytelling.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World