The Jew is Not My Enemy (19 page)

Other critics of the traditional medieval understanding of Islam were equally emphatic about the doubtful nature of the Hadith. Prominent among them was Ghulam Ahmed Pervez of Pakistan and Turkey’s Edip Yuksel, who has recently partnered with others to publish the brilliant
Quran: A Reformist Translation
.

Pervez, who was born in British India and rose through the ranks of the civil service before migrating to Pakistan in 1947, has emerged as the country’s foremost reformist Muslim scholar. (He died in 1980.) After extensive study of Islam and Islamic history, Pervez came to the conclusion that the Hadith was spurious at best and had to be rejected if Muslims were to awaken from their centuries-old slumber. He claimed that Islam had been treacherously perverted by caliphs and the clergy who had created the Hadith literature for their own interests. He called Hadith literature a fabrication, arguing that it was not God who had vouchsafed their transmission as was the case with the Quran.

Pervez’s lectures were published as a series of “Letters to Saleem.” In one, titled “The Fundamental Principles of the Islamic System,” he critiques the Hadith in these words:

Like Rashad Khalifa, Pervez too was declared an apostate by traditional Muslim scholars, worthy of death for denying the authority and authenticity of the Hadith. However, such was the secular climate in the Pakistan of the 1960s and ’70s that the Islamists dared not muster the courage to assassinate the respected scholar. (In today’s Pakistan, Pervez would not have lasted a day.) The scholar of the Quran was adamant and spoke fearlessly every Friday in Karachi, drawing large crowds, including many of the young leftist activists of the city who found in his message a sense of reformation and renaissance.

Pervez claimed that “even Quranic orders were not safe” from the Hadith. “The Hadith (unrecited revelation) not only specified those things Allah left unspecified in the Quran, it even changed and abrogated those things Allah specified in the Quran! For example, the Quran gives the crime of zina [adultery] the punishment of 100 lashes. But according to Hadith, this punishment is only for fornicators (unmarried), whereas the punishment for adulterers (married but unfaithful) is stoning to death (a punishment which has no basis in the Quran)….
The scholars of Hadith are witnesses to the fact that fabricated Hadith number in the thousands.”
¹⁹

The debate about the authenticity and authority of the Hadith is not exclusive to our own time. We know that Muslims have been wrangling with the issue since long before the first Hadith collections were compiled in the ninth century. The second caliph of Islam, Umar bin Khattab, who is credited with laying the foundations of the Islamic empire, was a close companion of Prophet Muhammad. The fact that Umar is quoted as saying that he was against the writing and recording of the Prophet’s sayings in book form – what we now know as the Hadith – is significant. In the third century of Islam, the narrator Ibn Saad wrote how Umar called on the people to bring him all the Hadith they had collected, and then he ordered the entire lot to be burned. Afterwards, Umar is quoted by Ibn Saad as forbidding the writing of any more Hadith.

It was not only Umar who prohibited the Hadith. Hadith literature itself reports that Prophet Muhammad himself ordered his followers not to write down anything he said, other than the Quranic verses revealed to him. The concern was that people would use spurious quotations attributed to him and give those words the same weight as the divine Quran.

Today, Muslims have a chance to dwell once more on this subject. It is not necessary to reject the Hadith altogether. Rather, we can look at the medieval texts and employ twenty-first-century rationalism and reasoning to make sure we lift the prohibition against chess.

And while we are at it, can we Muslims not be brave enough to say that the hatred against Jews that permeates the texts be set aside as inapplicable in societies where the universality of human rights and the equality of races and religions is the cornerstone of civilization? Surely this will be the first step to bringing about an end to the systemic and institutional contempt for Jews that is embedded in the Hadith.

It is not just Hadith literature that nourishes Muslim anti-Semitism
. At the core of Jew hatred among the Arabs and Pakistanis (more than any other Muslim community) is a legend written in the ninth century that records how in 627, in the city of Medina, the Prophet of Islam participated in the slaughter of between six hundred and nine hundred Jews.

This dramatic account, which reads like a screenplay, vividly details the historic Battle of the Trench (Ghazwah al-Khandaq) – also known as the Battle of the Confederates (Ghazwah al-Ahzab) – where Prophet Muhammad and his Muslim followers in Medina successfully defended themselves against a much larger invading Meccan army. After the battle, we are told, the Muslim army laid siege to a Jewish fortress, culminating in the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of Jewish men who had remained neutral in the battle. This slaughter has weighed heavily on the Muslim mind ever since, and to this day it determines how we view our Jewish cousins.

Written two centuries after the massacre, the account has acquired the status of divine truth in the minds of Muslims. With each passing generation and century, blind belief in this myth has grown. As the Muslim world declined in all aspects of human development, our failures could always be blamed on the “treacherous and untrustworthy” nature of the Jew.

Even though the Quran makes no mention of such a mass murder, Muslims have been conditioned to believe that this fiction is historical truth, and that it should define our attitude and behaviour towards the Jew of today The present-day Jew-hater in the Muslim world finds solace in the belief that he or she is not going against the teachings of Prophet Muhammad, but rather is following his example.

One would expect Muslims to denounce the depiction of their Prophet as a mass murderer. On the contrary, any Muslim who questions or denies the reliability of this legend is labelled anti-Islamic and a traitor to the faith. In the absence of any physical evidence, one would expect Muslim historians, archaeologists, and academics to question this fable. However, in a reflection of the sorry state of Muslim wisdom today, most clerics and scholars not only insist this legend is true but cite it as a source of pride. Islamists, who riot at any negative portrayal of the Prophet in cartoons, are apparently quite comfortable with the apostle’s depiction as a mass murderer. (I will discuss the lack of evidence to support this mass murder in
chapter 7
.)

Thus, believing that Prophet Muhammad was involved in the murder of hundreds of Jews, the Muslim Jew-hater feels no guilt as he or she boasts about the glory we once enjoyed, and transmits this hatred to the next generation. For both medieval and contemporary Islamists, the Quran’s silence on this murder is dismissed as irrelevant. We are told simply that if the story exists in the Hadith literature and the
Sira
– the biography of the Prophet – then it must be true.

Medieval fiction cannot withstand the scrutiny of analysis, but why let facts get in the way of a juicy mass-murder chronicle – even when it brings shame on the very man Muslims believe to be our leader and the favoured Messenger of God? With friends like these, do Muslims need enemies?

—

In 622, Prophet Muhammad and the small band of companions who had answered his call to Islam escaped from Mecca to seek refuge in Yathrib, the city we know today as Medina. Within two years, Muhammad had gained the trust of the various tribes in the city, including several Jewish and pagan groups, and led them in a coalition bound by the Compact of Medina, a treaty that outlined the responsibilities of each group. After consolidating his position in Medina, Muhammad led the Muslims into a decisive victory over his Meccan enemies at the Battle of Badr, only to lose the next encounter, at the Battle of Uhud, in 625.

By 627, Muhammad had gained considerable strength in Medina. His ranks had grown from fewer than a hundred men into an army of thousands. The tribes of Mecca, worried by his growing influence, which threatened their trade monopolies as well as their pagan gods, regrouped in an alliance with other Arabs in the hinterland. The alliance included two Jewish tribes that the Muslims had expelled from Medina for what they claimed was a breach of the treaty they had signed with Muhammad. An army marched out of Mecca to strike a final blow against Muhammad.

However, the Prophet’s spies in Mecca alerted him to this new alliance and the advancing army. Instead of adopting the Arab tradition of meeting his enemy in an open field, Muhammad ordered a trench to be dug to block the northern entrance to the city. This tactic rendered the enemy cavalry ineffective, forcing the Meccans to camp out in the open desert for a siege they had least expected.

The siege lasted twenty days. Historians estimate that around ten thousand men with six hundred horses and some camels besieged Medina, while the defending Muslims numbered barely three thousand fighters.

While two of the more than a dozen Jewish tribes in Medina openly aligned with the Meccan forces, other Jews, both inside and outside the city, remained neutral. The pagan Meccans tried to persuade
the neutral Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza to join them in attacking the Muslims from the rear, but the Jews refused. In the end, the well-organized defence line behind the trench and a severe sandstorm forced the attackers to break camp, lift the siege, and return to Mecca.

The massacre of the Banu Qurayza Jews does not figure in the Muslim narrative until after the eighth century, when Muhammad’s first biography,
Sirat Rasul Allah
, or just the
Sira
, The Life of God’s Messenger, is penned by Ibn Ishaq almost a hundred years after the Prophet’s death in 632. No copy of Ibn Ishaq’s original
Sira
survives, although we do have one recreated by the ninth-century historian Ibn Hisham.
¹

The copious biography is based partly on the stories of many wars fought by Muhammad and later his companions and the caliphs. In introducing the alleged massacre of the Jews, Ibn Ishaq sets the scene by taking us to the fifth year of Muhammad’s stay in Medina. By now the Muslims have consolidated their presence in the city, but their opponents in Mecca are building an alliance, known as the confederacy, with the intention of delivering a final blow to the rise of Islam. Right up front, the narrator accuses the Jews of scheming, of manipulating the Meccan pagans and being responsible for this anti-Islamic coalition.

What is interesting in this rendering is how the sworn enemies of the Prophet are depicted as victims of Jewish manipulation and not as the primary adversaries. This is significant because at the time the
Sira
was being pieced together, the great-grandsons of the pagan Meccans who had fought Muhammad had by now taken over the reins of Islam and were the ruling caliphs. It was in their interest to show their own forefathers as having been victims of Jewish scheming and conspiracy, thus allowing the Umayyads to assuage some of the guilt associated with their reputation as kings who had stolen Islam from under the very noses of the Prophet’s family.