He was present with his father when Sherif Hussein launched the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1916; the beginning of Zionist immigration to Palestine; the early years of the establishment of communism in the Soviet Union, and was one of the few Arabs who fought on the Republican side against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.[5] At the outbreak of World War II, he wrote a book in which the thesis of the incompatibility of Nazism with Islam was passionately argued.[6][lower-alpha 1]