Sheikh Ibrahim al-Akki

Sheikh Ibrahim al-Akki was a religious scholar, merchant and landowner in Akka during the last decades of Ottoman rule and the first years of the British Mandate. He held large olive groves and village lands in the Akka district and Marj Ibn Amer, and traded along the coast between Akka, Haifa and Beirut. Family members remember him as the head of the extended family: Eid visits began at his house. His mother, Amna Arrabi, was the daughter of Sheikh Qasim Arrabi, the mufti of Akka, and his wife, Fatima, was also an Arrabi. Both women's gravestones survive in Akka.

He began in trade and later served as head of Akka's municipality, then as qadi and mufti, according to a profile on the Akka news site akkanet.net. The title Sheikh marked his religious learning, and he moved in the circle of Akka's senior figures, among them Sheikh As'ad al-Shuqayri, the al-Sa'di family and the trustees of the city's family endowments. His family name, al-Akki, first meant simply 'of Akka'; by his time it was an established family name in court and land records.

Two public missions stand out. In September 1915, during the First World War, he was one of Akka's delegates to the Syrian scholarly mission to Istanbul organised by Jamal Pasha's Fourth Army; the mission's own chronicle, published in Beirut in 1916, names him among its members. The delegation travelled by rail through Aleppo and Konya, was received by Sultan Mehmed V Reshad, the Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha and Enver Pasha, and visited the front at Gallipoli. After Ottoman rule ended, Akka's notables chose him and Abdul Fattah al-Sa'di, later mayor of Akka, to represent the city at the General Syrian Congress in Damascus (1919–1920). The Congress called for the independence and unity of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, rejected the Balfour Declaration and foreign mandates, and recognised Faisal as king. He was also a member of the Palestinian ulama conference of 1935.

In 1932 and 1934 the Jaffa newspaper Falastin listed him as president of the Sadiqi and Shaabi family solidarity society, and he sits at the centre of the society's committee photograph. He died in 1938 and is buried in the Sheikh Mubarak cemetery near the shore in Akka. In his eulogy, the editor of the newspaper al-Karmil wrote that if the country had ten men like him, Zionism could not have found a foothold in Palestine. He was the father of Ahmad al-Akki.