Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi

Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi (born at Istanbul in 1853 – died at Amman on 4 June 1931) was Sharif and Emir of Mecca from November 1908, founder of the Arab Kingdom of the Hejaz and leader of the Great Arab Revolt, as the Arabic article describes him; he belonged to the Banu Qatadah branch of the Banu Hashim, descended from Hasan ibn Ali, who had governed Mecca since 1201. ^{1 2} After his correspondence with the British high commissioner Sir Henry McMahon he proclaimed the revolt against the Ottoman Empire on 10 June 1916 and became King of the Hejaz; he was proclaimed Caliph in March 1924 after Turkey abolished the caliphate, was defeated by Ibn Saud and abdicated to his son Ali in October 1924, was exiled to Cyprus, was brought back to Amman in late 1930, and died there and was buried at the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. ^{2 3}

Hussein bin Ali bin Muhammad bin Abd al-Mu'in bin Awn was born at Istanbul, where his father was living: the Arabic article gives the year 1853, the English article's body says he was born "in 1853 or 1854" while its lead prints 1 May 1853, the French gives "about 1853", and Wikidata the year 1853 — while the harvest queue from which this record comes gives 1854, one of the two years the English body allows; the museum follows the sources and states the difference. ^{1 2 3 4} He was the eldest son of Sharif Ali bin Muhammad, second son of Muhammad bin Abd al-Mu'in, a former Sharif of Mecca, and his mother Salah Bani-Shahar is described in the English article's body as a Circassian. ² Brought to Mecca at two or three in 1856, when his grandfather was reinstated as Sharif, he returned there after his father's death with his mother in 1861–1862 at the call of his uncle Sharif Abdullah. ² Raised at home, unlike Hashemite youths usually sent to grow up among Bedouin, he mastered Arabic and was educated in Islamic law and doctrine: he studied the seven Mu'allaqat with Sheikh Muhammad Mahmud al-Turkizi al-Shinqiti, and with Sheikh Ahmad Zayni Dahlan he studied the Quran, completing its memorisation before the age of twenty. ² He married his cousin Abdiyah bint Abdullah in 1875 and received the rank of Pasha in 1877; after a series of assassinations among his uncles he was sent back to Istanbul in 1892–1893 — the Arabic article dates the exile to 1893 after his dispute with his uncle Awn al-Rafiq — and remained there fifteen years, raising his children and following the politics of the Sublime Porte, until 1908. ^{2 1}

After the removal of his predecessor and the sudden death of his successor, Hussein was appointed Grand Sharif by decree of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in November 1908, arriving in Mecca amid the Young Turk Revolution; greeted by Committee of Union and Progress representatives as the "Constitutional Sharif", he replied that the constitution of the lands of God is the Shariah of God and the Sunnah of His Prophet, as the English article reports his words. ² In 1911 he joined an Ottoman campaign in Asir against Muhammad ibn Ali al-Idrisi with about five thousand men, broke the siege of Abha and defeated the Idrisid forces, then quarrelled with the Ottoman governor Suleiman Pasha over administering the reconquered territory by Bedouin and Sharifian norms and withdrew — an episode that deepened mutual distrust. ² As the CUP centralised the Hijaz and the Hejaz Railway strengthened Istanbul's grip, Hussein, prompted by his son Abdullah, exchanged ten letters with McMahon between July 1915 and March 1916, in which Britain assured him of an Arab empire between Egypt and Persia with stated exceptions. ² He proclaimed the revolt on 10 June 1916: Mecca fell on 9 July after a month of street fighting, Taif fell to Abdullah on 22 September, and on 2 November 1916 Hussein was proclaimed King of the Arabs, while his sons directed the fighting — Medina besieged until after the armistice, Aqaba taken, and Faisal's forces joining the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918 and entering Damascus on 1 October 1918. ² After the war Hussein refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 in protest at the Balfour Declaration and the mandates, and in 1920 and 1921 again refused to sign the treaties even for a conditional payment, saying he could not affix his name to a document assigning Palestine to the Zionists and Syria to foreigners. ² He undertook the last major restoration of the Masjid al-Haram in 1920 and funded a restoration of al-Aqsa Mosque with 26,672 liras. ² In 1917 and 1918 he issued decrees ordering the protection of Armenian refugees, and survivor testimony credits his forces with saving up to four thousand people. ² After the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the caliphate on 3 March 1924, Hussein was proclaimed Caliph — accounts place the proclamation on 3, 7, 11 or 14 March — convened an Islamic Congress at Mecca in 1924 comprising both Sunni and Shia Muslims, received the support of the last Ottoman sultan Mehmed VI according to The Times and Vatan, and sent 2,400 liras to support the exiled Ottoman family; Britain, France, the Zionists and the Wahhabis all opposed his caliphate. ^{2 3} Britain then withdrew support while Ibn Saud advanced; Hussein abdicated in October 1924 to his eldest son Ali, the kingdom fell completely on 23 December 1925, and the British removed Hussein from Aqaba to Cyprus in June 1925, where he lived at Nicosia under supervised residence, reading the Quran and Arabic newspapers and receiving visitors; his wife Adila Khanum died in 1929 and was buried at the Hala Sultan Tekke. ² Paralysed by a stroke in 1930 at seventy-seven, he was repatriated to Amman late that year, greeted by a large crowd, and there published articles in the newspaper al-Yarmouk defending his record; he died on 4 June 1931, and after a procession of some thirty thousand people he was buried inside the Arghuniyya on the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, Ibn Saud having refused him the burial in Mecca that he wished. ^{2 3 1}

Later Arab nationalist writers sometimes portrayed Hussein as the father of modern pan-Arabism, but some historians argue the Hashemites were still newer converts to Arabism in 1916 and not early Arab nationalists — a disagreement the English article states in its lead without settling it. ² His son Abdullah I created the Order of Hussein bin Ali in 1949, the highest order of Jordan; mosques bear his name in Aqaba and Ma'an and the al-Husseini mosque in Amman, as does a school in Ma'an, and his Aqaba house was restored at Jordanian initiative and reopened in 2024. ² Armenian researchers awarded him the title "Righteous of the Armenian genocide", and the Armenian presidents Serzh Sargsyan and Armen Sarkissian cited him in 2014 and 2020 as an example of tolerance and friendship between peoples. ² Poets including Ahmed Shawqi, who wrote on his funeral, and the Jordanian Mustafa Wahbi Tal wrote of him; he became a regular character in early twenty-first-century Jordanian cinema, and a 2020 Al-Araby documentary on his life had been viewed more than five million times by May 2023. ²

This section is read as a presentation of positions reported from the sources, not as a verdict of the museum.

The framing of the revolt is itself contested within the English article: it reports that Hussein framed his rising as a defence of the historic rights of the Hejaz and of Islam against CUP violations, rather than a modern nationalist movement, and also that after 1916 the pan-Arabs rallied behind him as their leading figure. ² The same article records that his troops committed war crimes in executing Turkish troops responsible for the Tafas massacre instead of taking them prisoner, and it quotes a British colonel's secret admission that Hussein would have grounds to consider that Britain had broken her pledged word, alongside the historian Ekrem Buğra Ekinci's view that British support was contingent and the revolt would have occurred without it. ² His caliphate, opposed by the British and French empires, the Zionists and the Wahhabis alike, received support from much of the Hejazi, Levantine and wider Arab population, but broad Muslim recognition did not materialise, as the article itself concludes. ^{2 3} The sources differ in details the museum states rather than merges: the English article's lead prints his death as "4 July 1931" while its body, the Arabic and French articles and Wikidata give 4 June 1931; the English article names four wives where the Arabic counts three marriages and distributes the daughters differently; and the short Urdu article dates the revolt's opening to 1915 and compresses the exile into "1924 to 1931 in Cyprus", against the fuller articles on both points. ^{2 1 5} His faith is recorded as unknown as to school in his data record: the English and French articles say in the same sentence that he had a Shafi'i and Hanafi education and allied with the Malikis against the Wahhabis "at a time when adherence to a madhhab was more fluid" — one content family, and an education in two schools rather than an attestation of his own; his teacher Dahlan was Mecca's Shafi'i mufti, but a teacher's school never counts; the French lead calls him caliph "for the Sunnis", describing his claim's constituency; and the English Faisal article reports that Iraq's Shia considered him "a Sunni Muslim from the Hejaz" — a contemporary perception of him as a Sunni, naming no school. With no source naming a school for the man himself, the value stays unknown under the two-source rule and the doubt rule, and his Hashemite descent — family background — is not used in its place. ^{2 3 4 6}

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• Later translations and edits of this article need periodic review with clear update dates.