The Jew is Not My Enemy (17 page)

However, the centuries-old status quo was about to change. After the First Zionist Congress met in Switzerland in 1897 with the aim of establishing a Jewish state – and the resulting Balfour Declaration made such a state possible – the same verses of the Quran would take on a whole new meaning. Was the Jewish state of Israel a reflection of Allah’s promise in the Quran? And if that was the case, what about the Muslims who had lived for centuries on that land, ever since the Arabs sprang out of the deserts of Arabia to conquer what were then Byzantine Christian lands?

The two verses were hotly debated by Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, the founder of the Islamic Movement in Israel, and Khaleel Mohammed at a conference in Jerusalem in 2004 – an exchange that
unfortunately can take place only outside the domain of Islamic institutions or countries. Mohammed told the audience attending the panel discussion, “Focusing on Elements of Tolerance and Openness in the Koran,” that verses 5:20 and 5:21 were not the only passages in the Quran that validated a Jewish presence in the Holy Land. He listed several others, among them verse 10:93, which is even more explicit than 5:20 in endorsing a Jewish presence in the Holy Land.

There is little agreement among past or contemporary Islamic scholars and Muslim academics about the exact location of the “beautiful dwelling place” that Allah gave to the Jews. While al-Tabari’s medieval commentary on this verse mentions Palestine and Jerusalem as the land God assigned to the Jews, it also lists other possibilities, such as Mount Sinai “and that which is around it,” Syria, Jericho, Damascus, and Jordan. Others like Taj Hashmi, previously a professor of Islamic and Asian history at the University of British Columbia, however suggest this Holy Land is not in historical Palestine, but in the Sinai. He wrote to me, “As I see it, God wanted Jews of eastern Egypt to enter the ‘Holy Land,’ which seems to be the Sinai peninsula rather than Jerusalem.” Sheikh Muhammad al-Husseini, a British imam who teaches a course on the Quran at the Leo Baeck College in London, says: “They are pointing to the same area – it is not Egypt,
Saudi or Iraq.” According to al-Husseini, “the traditional commentators from the eighth and ninth century onwards have uniformly interpreted the Koran to say explicitly that Eretz Yisrael has been given by God to the Jewish people as a perpetual covenant. There is no Islamic counterclaim to the Land anywhere in the traditional corpus of commentary.”
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Khaleel Mohammed says that among the verses of the Quran that are pertinent to the issue of the Holy Land, 5:21 is the most significant, not because of what it says, but because of the manner in which medieval Muslim exegetes explained it. To elucidate his point, he rendered verse 5:21 in as literal a manner as possible, translating the Arabic word
kataba
as “written.” Mohammed says the word
kataba
“has definite theological connotations: in Islam, as in Jewish belief, it conveys the idea of decisiveness and finality, e.g. in ‘written Torah’ as opposed to ‘oral Torah.’ In some twenty-two instances in the Quran where this action is attributed to God (directly
kataba
or indirectly,
kutiba)
, it likewise conveys the idea of decisiveness, finality, and immutability. One such example is the verse (2:183) used by Muslims to indicate that the Ramadan fast is compulsory: Kutiba alaykum al-siyaam … literally, ‘written upon you is the fast’ – but understood to mean, ‘Obligatory upon you is the fast.’ ”
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One of the earliest commentaries on the Quran was made by the eighth-century scholar Muqatil ibn Sulayman. According to Sulayman, the word
kataba
in verse 5:21 means “ordered.” Thus, Moses was saying to the Israelites: Enter the Holy Land as God has ordered you to do. (Muqatil even specifies the Holy Land as Palestine.) But what he states next is bound to shock many Muslims unaccustomed to reading the early commentaries on the Quran. According to Sulayman, Allah instructs Moses to order the Jews: “Do not retreat from that land, or you will be losers. This is because God said to Abraham, when he was in the Holy Land, ‘Verily, this land in which you now stand will be an inheritance for your son after you.’ ” No wonder Sulayman’s works are banned in present-day Egypt.

Khaleel Mohammed’s position did not sit well with Sheikh Darwish. The cleric dismissed the American professor’s premise, claiming since he was an Arab, he was more familiar with the relevant verse than an American academic of Indian ancestry and Guyanese birth. Sheikh Darwish told the audience that verse 5:21 of the Quran does not prove any ownership of the land. “The verse says that Musa’s people must enter the Holy Land. Does ownership derive from this? When I invite someone to enter my office, does the office become his? Definitely not.”

In Darwish’s opinion, the fact that Abraham and Jacob paid for their burial site in present-day Hebron with money is evidence enough that the land did not belong to the children of Israel. “If we’re talking about religion, then according to Islam only the prophets inherit from one another. Mohammed succeeded all the prophets who came before him, including Musa, who is Moses, and he brought the word to all human beings. This does not mean that the Muslims are claiming the lands of others if they do not have certification of ownership in the land registry, and the use of the world ‘kataba’ does not justify anything.”
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Sheikh Darwish not only ignored the American professor’s argument by making a horribly skewed analogy; he chose to go against
every classical exegete by denying the significance of the word
kataba
. What was until the nineteenth century a purely academic argument about the meaning of a word in the Quran is now staring Muslims in the face, yet our clerics respond with little more than clichés and pamphleteering rhetoric.

According to Darwish, the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is national and political, not religious. “The Palestinians are fighting against the occupation, not against Judaism, and therefore it is necessary to reach a political compromise with them, not a religious compromise,” he explains. Here he is right, but did he not see the irony that in dismissing Mohammed’s position, he too invoked biblical references, to Abraham’s paying for his own burial site? And so the question that confounds Muslims is this: If, as Sheikh Darwish says, this a political dispute, not a religious one, then why do he and Hamas rely on divine texts to make their case against Israel? If the eminent Islamic scholar genuinely believes the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is one of politics, then he must agree that the religious incitements to violence, exemplified by calls to jihad, and talk of ethereal virgins are wrong and must cease.

We Muslims cannot have it both ways. If we choose to refer to the Hebrew Bible on one aspect of the argument – using Abraham’s purchase of his place of burial as evidence that he did not own the land – then why not use the Hebrew Bible to resolve the matter? Or, as Khaleel Mohammed asks: “Are we to assume somehow that when Jews claim biblical sanctity for their views, they are somehow misinformed regarding the interpretation of their own book, and need a Muslim … to advise them?”
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It would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that the Quran does contain some pretty harsh language about Jews and, to a lesser degree, Christians. The voluminous book
The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism
,
edited by Andrew Bostom, dedicates an entire chapter to highlighting no fewer than fifty-two verses that are said to depict Jews negatively. However, most of these verses do not contain the words
Jew
or
Banu Israel
in the original text. The mention of Jews, as we have seen, has been added by Muslim scribes in the commentary.

Still, there is no question that the Quran does contain verses that curse the Jews. As a Muslim, some have left me deeply troubled. For instance, God has this to say about the Jews:

And if the curses were not sufficient, Allah ratchets up his wrath against the Jews by promising his “anger” on the children of Israel:

If God Almighty curses all Jews for the actions of the few that disobeyed Moses three thousand years ago, then how does he feel about all of us Muslims because of the few who not only disobeyed Prophet Muhammad but massacred his entire family? Could God be talking about us Muslims in the above verse, and not the Jews? After
all, God does say that his promised wrath on the Jews would cease if “they make an alliance with God and alliance with men.” What if the Jews did make an alliance with God, thus ending the wrath? What if, instead of the Jews, the wrath of God is now on us Muslims? Is the joke on us?

Sadly, too many Muslims use their holy book not for reflection and wisdom, but as an idol of worship or as a guide for political action. Scores of books using Quranic verses to generate hate and anger are sold throughout the Muslim world. And it is not just in the Muslim world that this literature is being circulated. For instance, as early as 1963, one Akbar Ali in the U.K. published
Israel and the Prophecies of the Holy Quran
, in which the author uses the Quran to launch a hate campaign against Jews. He writes:

The author then asks the rhetorical question about Jews: “Why has so much degradation and humiliation become part of their destiny? After all what is wrong with them.” I wish he had posed this question to the Muslims of the world today, because it is we who find ourselves in so much “degradation” and “humiliation” that he pins on the Jews.

The challenge of reconciling the Quran and Islam with modernity, the nation state, and universal human rights falls at the feet of individual Muslim reformers, scattered across the globe. Despite being starved of resources and lacking the organizational skills of their Islamofascist adversaries, these Muslim reformers are getting their voices heard.

Women such as Amina Wadud of the United States, Fatema Mernissi in Morocco, Farzana Hassan and Raheel Raza in Canada, and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in Britain are posing serious challenges to the men in cloaks and beards. Standing alongside them are men such as Dr. Zuhdi Jasser in Arizona, Imam Muhammad al-Husseini of Britain, Professors Khaleel Mohammed and Abdullahi Amed An-Na’im in the United States, Sa’d al-Din Ibrahim of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo, former president Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia, and Pakistan’s Javed Ahmad Ghamidi. They are joined by Muslim politicians like the French parliamentarians Fadela Amara and Rachida Dati, Danish M.P. Naser Khedar, and British minister Baroness Sayeeda Warsi in marking new territory for Muslims who believe in liberal democracy and the separation of religion and state. Some have paid dearly for standing up against the Islamists. The former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by the Taliban in 2008, and the killing of Iranian teenager Neda Agha-Soltan probably became the most widely witnessed death in human history when she was shot dead by police on June 20, 2009, as she demonstrated against the ruling ayatollahs of Iran.

The task of these Muslim reformers is obstructed not just by the Islamists and the jihadis but also by non-Muslims who would rather
these reformers fail so that Muslims continue to be seen as a people devoid of reason and consumed by hate.

For instance, the scholar Robert Spencer has written a number of books analyzing Islam and the Islamist movement. Since any attempt by Muslims to end Muslim hate for the Jews is a serious impediment to Spencer’s thesis that Islam itself is the problem, he does his best to undermine the work of Muslim reformers. In a piece for the
Middle East Quarterly
, Spencer dismisses the position of Imam al-Husseini, saying that although the imam’s position is “an extremely comforting message to supporters of Israel, it is not true and is based on a partial and inaccurate reading of the Qur’an.” He makes the argument that “if this exegesis [of al-Husseini] is correct, why does the Islamic world from Morocco to Indonesia manifest such hostility to Israel? Why have so few Muslims noticed that God wants the Jews to possess the Holy Land?”

Spencer relies on the Islamic extremists’ perspective. He writes, “This is simply not a mainstream view or one that most of those who are familiar with the totality of the Qur’an would ever advance. It gives Jews and all supporters of Israel hope, yes, but only a false hope.”
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