Husayni was born in 1894 into the Husayni family, one of the most influential families in Jerusalem. He went to the Church of England school, St Georges, where he was the first pupil to wear western style clothes and where he became an enthusiastic player of the new sport – football. On finishing his secondary education, aged eighteen, he entered the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut to study medicine. At that time the Medical faculty was alive with debate about the status of Arabs under a Government based in Istanbul and dominated by Turks and Turkish. Jamal became a member of the "Nadi Al-Arabi" (the Arab Club of Damascus) and "al-Muntada al-Adabi" movements in 1918-19 which, according to Isaac Friedman,