The Jew is Not My Enemy (18 page)

Other critics of Islam such as Andrew Bostom similarly dismiss the work of Muslim reformists, arguing that the only way Muslims can bring about an enlightenment in their faith is by rejecting Islam itself. In an interview with the online magazine Jewcy.com, Bostom said, “I think Islam needs to undergo such a process [enlightenment]. And we see its possibilities in a person like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A mass movement of enlightenment amongst Muslims is required. Ibn Warraq’s book,
Leaving Islam
, had a very interesting concise history of the real freethinkers within Islam.”
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a fascinating writer who has rejected Islam. Ibn Warraq is a brilliant scholar who has contributed much to the continuing debate about Islam. However, because they have left Islam, the two would be the last people on earth who could bring about any reform in Islam or an era of enlightenment among the Muslims. One
billion plus Muslims on this planet are not going to give up their faith, no matter how hard Hirsi Ali or Ibn Warraq may try to make them.

On one hand, we have well-intentioned former Muslims who have walked away from Islam, either becoming atheists or converting to another religion. On the other, we have Islamic extremists who would rest only when these former Muslims were killed. In between these two extremes are the vast majority of Muslims, ranging from the liberal who barely ever visits the mosque to the orthodox conservative who prays five times a day. All these Muslims live with varying degrees of suspicion of the Jews. We have a choice. Either we allow ourselves to be consumed by hatred, or we approach Jews as fellow human beings, at worst as adversaries in a political dispute, not as monsters destined to be our enemy for all time. God makes it explicit in the Quran that he is referring not to all Jews but only to a specific group, at a specific time. Here is the Quran on the subject of Christians and Jews:

As mere mortals, we need to dig deeper into our souls and search for the humility that is required of us as Muslims. We need to be scared of ourselves, not of God, for it is we who are the instruments
of our own destruction, not him. Hating Jews is no cure for the scars we have inflicted on ourselves – we who massacred the family of Prophet Muhammad, yet have the audacity to lecture Jews that they disobeyed Moses.

Whereas Islamists and radical jihadis have had to use some fancy semantic footwork to incorporate anti-Semitism into the Quran, there is no such need where the Hadith literature is concerned.

A number of scholars have written about the negative portrayal of Jews in the Hadith. One article that stands out for me is “Demonizing the Jews,” by Kadir Baksh.
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The author cites several traditions from the Hadith collections, including two quotes attributed to Prophet Muhammad that are used today by many Islamic clerics to portray Jews in negative light:

The sad significance of both Hadith is that they do not foster any hope for peace until the end of times. In the first, the Jew is the enemy against whom the final battle of good against evil must be fought. In the second, the Jew is presented as the Antichrist – that virulent Judeophobic concept imported from a medieval Christian misunderstanding of the epistles of John. Imams who agitate against lasting peace with Israel rely extensively on these two supposed sayings of Prophet Muhammad to justify anti-Jewish rhetoric. Is it any wonder that despite the Oslo
and Madrid agreements, despite the Road Map and talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood–inspired Hamas refuses to accept any peace with the Jews?

For Muslims, the two Hadith stories concerning Jews present a challenge. If they are accurate – as most Muslims are taught by clerics to believe they are – then there is no point in making peace with Israel. In which case, Hamas is on the path of righteousness while the rest of us who call for an end to the occupation and the creation of a sovereign state of Palestine are wrong. Could we, who believe in peace with the Jews, be going against the very wishes of Prophet Muhammad? Where does this leave the leaders of Egypt and Jordan who have signed peace treaties with Israel? What about Israel’s own substantial Muslim population, let alone Muslims who serve in the Israeli army? Should they view the Jews around them as enemies because a ninth-century text claims the Prophet of Islam said so?

(For the non-Muslim reader accustomed to discussing religious texts with some degree of objectivity, these questions may sound quaint. Unfortunately, few Muslims are willing to study their religious texts with historical detachment. The vast majority of insular Islamic clerics and their students consider such a detached approach an act of apostasy, making it extremely difficult to have a discussion of the kind I am doing in this book. Most Muslims have a deep emotional intimacy with their religious texts, making any discussion of the subject a potential cause of unintended hurt or insult.)

While the Hadith talks of an endless conflict with the Jews, it contradicts the Quran, which Muslims believe is the very word of God. The Quran commands explicitly: “To you your religion and to me mine.” Elsewhere in the Quran, God says, “Let there be no compulsion in matters of faith.” How do we reconcile these words of God with the Hadith literature written by oridnary men who demand we continue fighting the Jews until the end of time?

For some Islamic scholars the answer is simple: the Hadith are spurious, man-made texts, written two hundred years after the death of the Prophet, and should therefore be read not as divine texts, but merely as the observations or opinions of its contributors. There is much in the Hadith that makes sense and is a source of piety, but there is a lot that is outrageous and embarrassing and stands in contradiction to the Quran.

In addition, there is no requirement in the Quran for Muslims to obey or pay heed to instructions written by anyone other than Allah or his Messenger. In fact, one verse unambiguously describes the Quran itself as the Hadith: “God has revealed the best Hadith, a book that is consistent with itself, yet repeating (its teachings)” (39:23). Elsewhere, the Quran states: “These are God’s signs that We recite to you with truth. So, in which Hadith, after God and his signs do they acknowledge?” (45:6).

With such clear direction in the Quran, why pay reverence to man-made Hadith texts that can best be described as hate literature, when Muslims know we have no obligation to embrace them?

The eminent Muslim scholar and modernist Fazlur Rahman has written about how the Quran became overshadowed by interpretations that sometimes differed markedly from the obvious meaning of the text. According to Rahman, it is indeed true that “whatever views Muslims have wanted to project and advocate have taken the form of Quranic commentaries.”
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Thus, if a certain individual or group had a specific political agenda, they had a choice. They could convince the congregation or the community of the merits of their case by a rational method, or they could take a supposed saying of the Prophet from the Hadith, blend it with the commentary of the Quran, and then present this dubious combination as a confirmation of their ideology. This latter method, ensuring that any opposition to their doctrine would be labelled opposition to Islam itself, has been used by Islamists throughout history.

The two texts from Hadith quoted above are not the only ones that suggest Prophet Muhammad framed Jews in a negative light. The Muslim Students’ Association, a U.S.-based Islamist organization that is accused of deriving its inspiration from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, its Indo-Pakistani-Bangladeshi manifestation, has posted on its website English translations of what it calls the three “most authentic” Hadith books, Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, and Sunan Abu Dawud. Here is a selection that is available to all Muslim students around the world.

From labelling Christians and Jews pigs and apes to prohibiting Muslims from playing chess, Hadith literature has been a source of much embarrassment to Muslims. If we Muslims continue to study these Hadith texts as if they were divinely ordained, and believe that they should shape our lives in this day and age, then we will have considerable difficulty convincing anyone that Islam is a pluralistic religion that promotes peace and harmony among peoples. Eventually, any student of Islam will pick up these Judeophobic Hadith and literally throw the book at us. We will lose credibility among the nations of this world and be remembered as a people who are anti-Jewish above all.

This is precisely why Muslim reformers like Sa’d al-Din Ibrahim have called for a re-evaluation of how Muslims relate to their faith in contemporary times. Ibrahim and other Muslim thinkers issued a statement in 2004 that called for “confronting all institutions – whether composed of clerics or lay persons – that claim a monopoly over religion
[Islam] and the proper interpretation of its holy text. Instead, a new spirit should seek to establish the right of ijtihad for all, under the banner of an Islamic reformation relevant to the current century.” In addition, these scholars called on the world’s Muslims to rely exclusively on “the Quranic text as the sole authentic source to be utilized for reviewing the entire Islamic heritage.”
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The controversy about the Hadith’s authenticity as a religious text goes back to the seventh century. In medieval times, discussing the validity of Hadith texts was the domain of political and religious leaders who would proclaim edicts that the ordinary citizen simply had to follow without question. Beginning in the eighteenth century, this changed dramatically. The political leadership in Islamdom was replaced by the colonial authorities, while the clergy lost the patronage of the caliphs to enforce religious discipline and conformity. In addition, with the advent of the printing press, this debate was no longer controlled by the clergy or the calligraphists who controlled the written word. The doors were flung open to the emerging educated middle classes in the early twentieth century in Turkey, India, and Egypt.

Dale Eickelman, who teaches anthropology at Dartmouth College, says, “Today, the major impetus for change in religious and political values comes from below.”
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Many of today’s Muslims, Eickelman says, have bypassed the clergy and are engaged in what he refers to as the “reconstruction” of their religion, community, and society. This democratization of religious debate could not have been possible at any time in the era before mass communications allowed the free flow of ideas and the right to free speech without fear for one’s life. Nevertheless, the obstacles remain formidable. The Egyptian group Ahl al-Quran, or People of the Quran, has been brutally suppressed by the Egyptian authorities as well as the traditional orthodoxy.

Among the key figures of the Muslim world who challenged the use of Hadith as a source of Islamic law was the Egyptian Rashad
Khalifa. Khalifa immigrated to the United States in 1959, earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and settled in Tucson, Arizona. By the mid-1970s, he was objecting to the available English translations of the Quran and set about creating his own. At the same time, he announced his rejection of the traditional Hadith, calling it fabrications and lies attributed to Prophet Muhammad. Among the objections Khalifa raised about the Hadith was its references to Jews and Christians as apes and pigs. Because Khalifa rejected the Hadith – and because he claimed prophethood – he alienated the overwhelming majority of Muslims. His rejection of all Hadith as spurious was seen as a rejection of Islam, not a reformation of it. In 1990, Khalifa was murdered at the mosque in Tucson where he had regularly worshipped.