Among the Palestinian exiles who visited the home of the Al-Husseini family in Cairo in the early 1950s was a 19-year-old youth named Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Husseini, who had been born in that city. The young man, who would later change his name to Yasser Arafat, often played with 8-year-old Faisal. The boy’s father, commander of the Holy Jihad Army, had been killed in the battle for the Qastel, a village outside Jerusalem, during the war of 1948. Arafat would sit the boy on his lap and read him verses from the Quran.
