I didn't really mean to say he didn't have "influence", but i did say that his role wasn't some sort of traditional role that
represented Palestinian society.
e.g. as you mentioned they took the title "Grand Mufti of Constantinople" then grafted it onto the fabricated position "Grand Mufti of Jerusalem". The idea clearly was to break up Ottoman power into regional sectors, under British control, but to give it the veneer of legitimacy by borrowing Muslim terminology from elsewhere. e.g. "Grand Duke Of Luxembourg" is a real existing position, but I can't just, as I said, make a "Grand Duke of Washington DC" then externally appoint someone to that and act like they're some spokesperson for all Americans,
even if "Grand Duke of <somewhere else>" is a pre-existing position. That's just co-opting the terminology, nothing else.
And the rest, as you said, is that basically that he had excess influence purely because the British heavily clamped down on the traditional leadership, but
didn't clamp down on him - e.g. he was their puppet with the fake title, so they gave him leeway denied to everyone else. e.g. the Brits appointed him to a fabricated role with a grafted-on title then suppressed most other Arab leadership. Sure, that gave him power, but it doesn't necessarily make him a legitimate representative of his people, any more than Vichy France's ruler Marshal Philippe Pétain is seen as being a legitimate representative of French people, despite Petain's influence on France being far greater than the Mufti's on Palestine: Petain was the actual ruler of much of France, and his subordinates were demonstrably active in deporting Jews to the death-camps, yet we aren't sitting here holding French people as a whole accountable for that, right? The "Mufti" wasn't even
in Palestine when any of this stuff was going on, so how are we holding Palestinians responsible for his views on Nazi germany, when we're not holding French people's feet to the fire for actually sending off Jews to be killed?