The Jew is Not My Enemy (16 page)

In the spring of 2004, the leadership of the Muslim community
in Montreal erupted in outrage. One of their own had dared to wash Muslim dirty linen in public by suggesting, “Anti-Semitism has become an entrenched tenet of Muslim theology, taught to 95 per cent of the religion’s adherents in the Islamic world.”
¹

The response was instant. Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, exclaimed: “There is not an iota of evidence that this is correct.” I doubt if Elmenyawi was unaware of the works of Sayyid Qutb, but like most Islamists, his reliance on rhetorical flourishes overshadowed the facts. As we saw in
chapter 2
, there is definitely more than an “iota of evidence” that anti-Semitism has become part and parcel of Islamic teachings. Any Muslim with a mustard seed of integrity would have considerable difficulty denying the contemporary narrative of jihad in the mosques of the world – and particularly in the West – which have become a breeding ground for anti-Semitism. How else can one explain the fact that many clerics conclude their Friday sermon with a prayer to Allah to defeat the kuffar – Jews and Christians?

The man who uttered the unmentionable was Khaleel Mohammed, a former Montreal imam who currently teaches Islamic law at San Diego State University in California. Professor Mohammed’s credentials alone
should have deterred his detractors from denouncing him, but respecting dissent among Muslims is a virtue that Islamists are not known for.

Mohammed was no run-of-the-mill Islamophobe. A former soldier in the Canadian army, he has a bachelor’s degree in religion and psychology from Universidad Interamericana in Mexico City; an M.A. in religion, specializing in Judaism and Islam, from Concordia University; and a doctorate in Islamic law from McGill. And if his Western academic credentials in Islam were not sufficient, the good professor was also a graduate of the Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he studied sharia law.

However, responding with typical finger-waving umbrage and spewing allegations of racism and apostasy – histrionics that have become second nature to many fundamentalist imams – Montreal’s Islamists immediately dismissed Khaleel Mohammed’s comments as false and racist. They then added insult to injury by accusing him of “destroying efforts at building relationships between Jews and Muslims.” Mohamed Elmasry, the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress who would later say that killing all Israeli civilians over eighteen years of age was justified, called the professor’s remarks “outrageous.”

However, Mohammed stood his ground, telling the Montreal
Gazette
that although the Quran preaches respect for Judaism, the Hadith, a collection of the Prophet Muhammad’s oral proclamations written centuries after his death, contains anti-Semitic passages widely quoted by Muslim clerics. He said, “In Hadith literature … which Muslims have made to be part and parcel of Islamic teaching, you cannot respect the Jew, the Jew is God’s enemy until the end of time. And that’s ingrained.”

This depiction of the Jew as evil, said Mohammed, “has become part of Islamic theology, so the average Muslim learns anti-Semitism in probably a subtler form, not overt anti-Semitism, but learns it as part of his theology.”
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A deeply religious man with a dry sense of humour and a knack for naughtiness, Mohammed breaks every stereotype of an Islamic cleric one can imagine. With not a speck of facial hair and a complete absence of the guttural accent that has become the trademark of the mullah from Fiji to France, he is the type of imam who could salvage Muslims mired in the morass of ignorance and denial. But men like him have been chased from the mosque and excommunicated by their community. Still, he refuses to go away and continues to fight back the medieval madness that is creating monsters within the Muslim community.

The question that arises from the spat in Montreal is this: Is Khaleel Mohammed correct when he says the Quran preaches goodwill towards the Jews while the Hadith literature does the opposite? I wish to put his assertion to the test.

In the summer of 2009, the
National Post
asked me to write a piece on my experience with my holy book, the Quran, as part of a series about what Canadians read at the ages of four, fourteen, forty, and “forever,” the dawn of my dusk. I had first read the Quran sitting beside my mother and had studied the complex book many times, but as I wrote about my relationship with it, I was taken aback by how the book was being read and explained to our youth, starting from the very first lines that every Muslim child memorizes – the Sura al-Fatiha (The Opening).

These words are beautiful and profound, the Islamic equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer. But Muslims in the ninth century – that is, two hundred years after the words were revealed to Prophet Muhammad – inserted another meaning into the last verse that has unfortunately given divine validation to Muslim Judeophobia.

Until the day I wrote about this beautiful prayer, I had not probed beyond what I thought was the obvious meaning. This time I wondered who God was referring to when he talks about the people who have incurred his “wrath” or who have gone “astray.” I read the commentaries on this verse in the many English translations of the Quran that grace my library. As well, I read the exegeses by medieval scholars like Ibn Kathir (1301–1373), whose words carry tremendous weight in the Arab world to this day.
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What I discovered confirmed the premise of Khaleel Mohammed’s thesis. While the Quran verse spoke in generalities about human nature, Ibn Kathir associated the two negative comments in the sura specifically with Jews and, to a lesser degree, Christians. For centuries, these hateful additions by a mere mortal have acquired the status of divine truth or revelation.

Ibn Kathir has no doubt the verse is referring to Jews and Christians. He does not explain why Allah would not mention the two religious
communities by name or even by the reference “people of the book.” Instead, he writes:

Ibn Kathir invokes another Quranic verse to back up his commentary identifying the Jews as the people who have incurred the wrath of God. However, in neither verse does the word
Jew
appear. Undeterred, Ibn Kathir deftly slips in the word
Jews
between parentheses.

Since Ibn Kathir is considered the foremost authority on the Quran, his commentary sometimes far supersedes the Quran itself. With few Muslims willing to challenge him, his words have acquired divine status simply because they were uttered in antiquity. However, within the Arab world, brave voices of pious and learned Muslims have begun to speak out.

—

Prof. Mahmoud Ayoub of Temple University, a Lebanese-Muslim scholar of Islamic history, states that the Quranic text in the Sura al-Fatiha is not a reference to any religious community, but rather addresses two attributes of people who may belong to any racial or religious group. Prof. Khaleel Mohammed in his commentary quotes the scholar al-Nisaburi (d. 1327), who he says rendered the obvious interpretation: “Those who have incurred God’s wrath are the people of negligence, and those who have gone astray are the people of immoderation.”
⁴

Notwithstanding the few scholars who have rejected the notion that the opening chapter of the Quran has an anti-Jewish tone, the fact is that an overwhelming majority of exegetical works on the Quran have embraced this hostility towards Jews. After the copious Hadith was compiled, peppered with anti-Jewish content, this contempt for the Jew was superimposed on the Quran, literally putting words in God’s mouth. What the Creator did not say in the Quran, Muslim anti-Semites made sure he was made to.

From a young age, Muslim children read the Quran and are exposed to the negative depiction of Jews and Christians, but no one ever tells them that the Muslim holy book, which we believe is the very word of God, does not support this view.

Since most Muslim children do not understand or speak Arabic, one would have hoped they would escape this hate. However, the opposite is true. While Arab children can see that the opening verse of the Quran does not depict Jews negatively, the non-Arab child is at the mercy of his teacher at the madrassah, who may not know Arabic, but can sound as if he does, and tells the children the translation of the words in question is “Jews.” It is little wonder that the madrassahs of non-Arab Pakistan produce far more jihadis than the ones in Arab Egypt.

The imams who incorporate anti-Semitism into Islamic teachings do not act alone. They have the backing of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which pumps billions of dollars into its worldwide Islamist
enterprise by publishing anti-Semitic Islamic propaganda, at times through publishers based inside the United States.

In July 2006, NBC News reported on how Saudi textbooks preached intolerance and hate, despite a promised post-9/11 policy change. Schoolchildren were being taught from textbooks that equated Jews with “apes.” A study by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom found examples of intolerance, even hate, in numerous Saudi textbooks used in grades one through twelve. Some of the books, which are distributed not just inside the Saudi kingdom but also in North America, include the following:

• Jews and Christians are “enemies” of Muslims.
  
• Every religion other than Islam is “false.”
  
• “The hour [of Judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.”
  

Nina Shea of the Center for Religious Freedom said the Saudi textbooks “taught that Christians and Jews are the enemy of the Muslim, and that the Muslim must wage jihad in order to spread the faith in battle against the infidel.” What’s more, she said, “an eighth-grade text equates Jews with ‘apes’ and Christian infidels with ‘swine.’ This is the ideological foundation for building tomorrow’s terrorists.”

The Saudi hate machine is not restricted to describing Jews as apes in school textbooks. The Saudis have exported a version of the Quran to Canada and the United States that plugs the word
Jews
into the English translation of verses. Where the Quran refers to “people” who have “strayed from God’s laws,” the Saudis insert the word
Jews
in parentheses.
⁵
It is no coincidence that the Quran found in the home of the convicted New York Times Square bomber, Sohail Shahzad, was the same version distributed by Saudi Arabia in the United States.

This Saudi translation of the Quran can be obtained from any Saudi embassy and is distributed to almost every Sunni mosque throughout the world. In their plentiful footnotes, the translators supply the same
information that is provided in the works of Ibn Kathir, but they also insert references to Jews and Christians straight into the translation itself. Here is how they translate the last verse of Sura al-Fatiha: “Not the way of those who have earned Your anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).”

The Saudi translators have dragged Judeophobia from the footnotes straight into the opening verse of the Quran. What was before a reference saved for the commentary is now right there, smack on the seventh line of the first page of Islam’s holy book. In addition, if there was any doubt left in the mind of the innocent child reading the Quran for the first time, or the adult rereading it, the translators write in the preface: “Some additions, corrections, and alterations have been made to improve the English translation and to bring the English interpretation very close to the correct and exact meanings of the Arabic text.”

Although references to Jews in Hadith literature can be seen as hostile to Jews as a people, a study of the Quran reveals a much more positive image. In fact, the Quran, when read without being filtered through the prism of Hadith, is unlikely to trigger any of the virulent anti-Semitism that is so endemic in the Muslim world. Take, for instance, verses 5:20 and 5:21. The two are rarely discussed, but if read on their own merit, they would shock Muslims in how they authenticate the Jewish claim to their rightful presence in Palestine and Jerusalem.

5:20:
Call to mind when Moses said to his people: “O my people! Remember the favour which Allah bestowed upon you; He raised up prophets from among you and made you rulers and gave you that which had not been given to anyone in the world.

5:21:
“O my people. Enter the Holy Land, that Allah has destined for you, and do not turn your backs or you will turn about losers.”

The Hadith, on the other hand, delivers the opposite message – all of the land of Israel is Muslim territory, and it needs to be wrested from the evil Jews in a bloody battle to end all battles.

Until the twentieth century, most Islamic scholars read these verses as benign words about a people whom they had vanquished more than a millennium ago and who posed no threat to the Muslim world. Before the Zionist enterprise, the two verses in which Allah himself says the Holy Land has been “destined” for the Jews were interpreted as little more than a symbolic gesture. After all, Jerusalem and the Holy Land were under the governance of the Ottoman caliphate that ruled from Istanbul. Jerusalem was a sleepy backwater, where Muslim Arabs were the dominant population, living in relative peace alongside enclaves of Jews, Armenians, and other Christian groups. So what if God had promised the land to Jews under Moses? we Muslims could argue. Most Muslims viewed these verses with a historical detachment that is today conspicuous by its absence. In fact we argued that the sorry state of Jews before the twentieth century was because they had “turned their backs” on the Holy Land against the wishes of Allah even though he had “destined” the land to them.