The Jew is Not My Enemy (21 page)

Muslims today have a choice. We can reject this story, since there is no historical evidence to support it, and because there is no requirement for us to cling to this sordid tale of mass murder. Or we can choose to cling to this medieval myth. If that is the case, then we will need to reconcile the contradiction that arises from our belief in this tale.

We will need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that while we claim our Prophet was an embodiment of mercy and compassion, we believe in a document that portrays him as someone who supervised and participated in the murder and collective punishment of an entire community for the supposed “crime” of one man.

Even if it were true that the leader of the Jewish tribe had committed an act of treachery – there is ample evidence to the contrary – should the rest of the tribe have been slaughtered or enslaved? Those who suggest that this punishment was justified because it was based on biblical laws add insult to injury. We cannot first claim that the Jews have corrupted the Torah, rendering it suspect, and then when it suits us, use the same “corrupted text” as a source of divine law to justify mass murder. If we claim that all Muslims need to emulate the life, work, and everyday actions and decisions of Prophet Muhammad, then are we willing to repeat the slaughter of the Jews of Banu Qurayza?

The
Sira
describes how, after the slaughter, Prophet Muhammad “divided the property of the Banu Qurayza along with their wives and their children among the Muslims.” As if this act of plunder ascribed to the name of the noble apostle were not enough, Ibn Hisham writes that the Prophet then sent “some of the female captives from the Banu Qurayza to Nejd, where he sold them for horses and arms.”

This is not some anti-Muslim Islamophobe in Denmark slandering the Prophet by saying Muhammad sold women for horses; it is we
Muslims who are saying it. Shamelessly and without guilt or hesitation, for generations we have attributed a serious act of mass murder to our very own leader, our role model, the one we refer to as the Last Messenger of God, the man who we say introduced the Religion of Peace on earth. If we ourselves say Muhammad was indulging in the selling of human beings, then why do we react in indignation when our “enemies” slander the Prophet?

Contemporary Islamists and clerics evoke the story of the slaughter at Medina to recruit young Muslims into the hatefest targeted at the Jew.

The Egyptian televangelist Amr Khaled is a leading Islamic preacher with a huge international following. The charismatic cleric is a regular feature on the European and North American “Islamic Fest” speaking circuit, with tens of thousands of young Islamist followers hanging on his every word. In his rendering of the Battle of the Trench, Amr Khaled goes into details that escaped the attention of even the ninth-century scribes. Extolling the virtues of the battle, the Egyptian firebrand uses the opportunity to take a swipe at every Islamist’s favourite whipping horse – the West.

“Let’s learn from this [battle] that our resources are valuable and that we must not sacrifice them easily. The West and imperialism wronged us greatly when they took our raw material and returned it as products. They became wealthy and our youth stayed unemployed. This right should return and there should be justice in production worldwide.”
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Using a battle that took place almost fifteen hundred years ago to attack the West reflects the intellectual bankruptcy that is so ubiquitous among Islam’s clergy. Amr Khaled, who champions himself as a moderate, could have said that the battle and its outcome do not apply in this day and age. He could have said that in the era of international law, disputes between peoples and states are resolved not through sieges
and mass slaughter, but through negotiations and the United Nations. Instead, Amr Khaled equates the seventh-century Banu Qurayza Jews with the “West and imperialism.”

He goes on: “Dear brothers, victory is not offered as a piece of cake for anybody. Victory is bestowed on those courageous faithful believers who exert all their effort to vindicate Allah.… In our Arab world, we are in a stage that says a new history is being written for us. There is the possibility of a revival, but people have to be positive, serious, and ready to sacrifice.”

With regard to the slaughter of the Jews, Amr Khaled dismisses the entire episode in a single paragraph. He writes that the Muslim army “reached Bani Qurayza and besieged them for fifteen days. Bani Qurayza offered to leave their weapons and get out of Medina, but the Prophet totally refused. He wanted them to obey his ruling, but they accepted the ruling of Saad ibn Moaz only. Saad said that they committed high treason, and accordingly all men should be killed, women captured, and money confiscated. The Prophet approved this judgment. Islam is a great mercy, but betrayal and corruption are not acceptable.”

If a latter-day Islamic televangelist like Amr Khaled is comfortable with a judgment that “all men should be killed” and “women captured,” then imagine what the hardcore jihadi Islamists have to say on the subject.

Another Islamist who presents himself as a reformist Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, refers to the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza Jews as a “twofold victory.” Defending the doctrine of collective punishment and mass executions, Ramadan writes, “The fate meted out to the Banu Quraiza men delivered a powerful message to all neighbouring tribes that betrayals and aggressions would henceforth be severely punished.”
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Both the Egyptian televangelist and the academic demonstrate the blind faith Islamists have in the written word of Ibn Hisham. They do
not stop to consider even for a moment the possibility that the entire story is a fabrication. There is not even a hint of doubt in their celebratory rationale of the
Sira
story. And they are far from alone. The root of the problem – how we Muslims have started accepting the commentaries of the Quran as the Quran itself – goes back to the fourteenth century, when the most popular commentary on the Quran was written. Damascene scholar Ibn Kathir wrote the
Tafsir al-Quran al-Azim
, popularly known as
Tafsir ibn Kathir
, and it has become a classic commentary, popular around the Muslim world as well as with Muslims living in the West. Ibn Kathir is said to be the first commentator of the Quran who started linking the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, the Hadith, and the ninth-century biography of the Prophet to his explanation and commentary on the holy book.

Ibn Kathir claims, for instance, that it was God, through the Archangel Gabriel, who asked Prophet Muhammad to attack the Jews of Banu Qurayza. Quoting from the Hadith, Ibn Kathir writes: “Then he [Gabriel] said, Allah, may He be blessed and exalted, commands you to get up and go to Banu Qurayza.’… So the Messenger of Allah got up immediately and commanded the people to march towards Banu Qurayza.”
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Ibn Kathir claims, too, that Saad bin Mu’adh was in fact appointed by God himself, not by Muhammad: “Allah … decreed that they [the Jews] would agree to be referred to him [Saad] for judgement, and this was their own free will.” And according to Ibn Kathir, God caused the Jews to be convinced that Saad would be fair or lenient in his judgment and thus they accepted him as a neutral arbiter. In other words, Muslims insist that the punishment of mass slaughter was made by someone chosen by the Jews themselves.

The mythology that Ibn Kathir introduced into the Quran in the fourteenth century persists to this day among contemporary Islamic scholars. Syed Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a
prolific writer, and a significant player in the political arena of South Asia, is considered one of the dons of the world jihadi movement. He is also respected as one of the most credible interpreters of the Quran. Yet Maududi too buys into the legend of the Banu Qurayza slaughter without any hesitation. In his multivolume commentary,
Tafheem al Quran
, The Meaning of the Quran, he repeats Ibn Kathir’s claim that it was God who ordered the attack, not Muhammad, and repeats the legend about how the Jews brought upon themselves their own slaughter.

My understanding of Islamic history and the Islamist teachings of Syed Qutb, Hasan al-Banna of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Syed Maududi of the Jamaat-e-Islami confirms that hatred of the Jew in Islamdom today is rooted in the narrative of this supposed slaughter of Jews by Prophet Muhammad, which makes it acceptable for a fanatic Muslim to kill a Jew. After all, he or she could argue, if it was okay for the Prophet to kill Jews on the instructions of the Archangel Gabriel, why not continue with that task in order to please Allah? Perhaps this is why otherwise intelligent Muslims, some in the corridors of academia, consider every Jewish citizen of Israel a legitimate military target. Perhaps this is why, in 2002, a student of the London School of Economics slaughtered American journalist Daniel Pearl like a goat, just because Pearl was a Jew.

Hatred of the Jew amongst us Muslims is not of the same nature as the more robust and violent Christian anti-Semitism of Europe. While medieval Christianity invoked the love of Jesus as the source of hating the Jew, Muslims were left with an uncorroborated fable outside the Quran as the source of this repugnant behaviour in so many of us.

In the almost fifteen-hundred-year checkered history of Islam, Muslims have seen themselves rise as the world’s premier superpower, from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, and then sink to a low where almost all of
us became subjects of Europe’s expansionist colonial powers. Through all of the upheavals of our rich history, we have faced adversaries.

And when we sank to the depths of impotence, we were defeated and conquered by the Mongols in 1258, expelled from Andalusia by Catholic Spanish monarchs in 1492, lost Muslim India to the British and Indonesia to the Dutch. Why, then, do we not harbour any hatred towards Britain or the Netherlands or Spain? Why no ill will against Catholics or Zoroastrians or Buddhists? Why do we save our most contemptible sentiments for the Jews?

If we can forgive the Dutch for occupying Indonesia for two hundred years, if we can embrace the language and culture of the British that toppled the last Muslim emperor of India, if we can befriend the French and make France our home despite the memories of the Algerian uprising, then why do we continue the centuries-old hatred of the Jews?

The story of the massacre of the Jews of Banu Qurayza feeds our hatred and gives us moral and religious validation for that hate. I have been to the battlefields of Medina and have seen for myself that the myth is not borne out by the reality on the ground. In the next chapter, I will scrutinize the story in the
Sira
against the evidence on the ground and demonstrate why we Muslims need to abandon the tale as one more medieval myth.

The city of Medina defies all the stereotypes
associated with the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Yathrib, as Medina was known in pre-Islamic times, lies at the heart of a fertile oasis surrounded by Mount Sala to the northwest and the wall-like Mount Ayre, which stretches east–west, cradling the valley of Aqeeq to the south, through which lay the historical caravan route to Mecca, five hundred kilometres farther on.

To the north, Medina is shielded by another east–west mountain called Jabal Ohud. This is where Muslims under Prophet Muhammad suffered a near-fatal defeat at the hands of their Meccan enemies, but lived to fight another day. Mount Ohud is also the site of the grave of Hamza, the Prophet’s uncle, who was killed in that battle and whose body is said to have been mutilated by the pagans.
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According to legend, the first inhabitants arrived in the area just after the Great Flood. Residents of Medina who trace their history through many generations even carry the name of the first Medinan – Gayna ibn Mahla ibn Obail – who, they claim, was a descendant of prophet Noah.

Ali Hafiz, the Saudi historian and founder of the newspaper
Al-Madina
, writes in his book
Chapters from the History of Madina
that the
city owes its existence to two historic events. He quotes medieval historians who claim that Moses passed through the area on a pilgrimage and that many of his followers remained in Medina, as they “found in it a resemblance to a city where a Prophet would emerge, as described in the Tawrat [Torah].”
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The other major movement of people to Medina occurred in the wake of the great flood in Yemen in 450, when the Ma’rib Dam is said to have burst, forcing about fifty thousand people to flee north. The tribes of Aws and Khazraj in the Medina of Muhammad’s time are said to be the descendants of these refugees, and are known collectively as the Ansar (literally, helpers).

Thus, at the time Prophet Muhammad sought refuge in the city to escape persecution at the hands of Meccan pagans, Medina was populated primarily by two groups – monotheistic Jews and pagan Arabs. The day the Prophet rode into town on his camel, the city had a population of ten thousand, equally divided between Jews and pagans, with fewer than a hundred Muslims. A decade later, Muhammad had changed the very character of Medina from a pagan-Jewish city to one that was overwhelmingly Muslim and Islam’s capital.

I first visited Medina, the City of Light – Medina al Munawarah – in the winter of 1978. Since my childhood, I had dreamed of being on the historic battlefields that proved so crucial to the birth of my faith and are the last resting place of its founder, the Prophet Muhammad.

My friend Rizwan Pasha drove me to Medina from Jeddah, a five-hour journey that was taking much longer because of the busloads of pilgrims headed in the same direction. The full moon glistened in the desert sky on that November night. As swirling sand from the dunes eddied across the precarious two-lane highway and performed a shimmering dance in the Honda Civic’s headlights, we raced towards Medina. I had just performed the pilgrimage of hajj in Mecca and wanted to complete the rites by paying my respects at the grave of the Prophet.