The Jew is Not My Enemy (28 page)
Read The Jew is Not My Enemy Online
Authors: Tarek Fatah
Another major disseminator of Islamic education among the Muslim youth of the English-speaking world is the IslamQ&A website, run out of Saudi Arabia. In a 2009 exchange, a questioner asked
Sheikh Muhammad al-Munajjid whether it is true that the Prophet said, “By hating the Arabs you would hate me.” In his answer, the Saudi cleric said that although the said Hadith is weak, “the weakness of this hadeeth does not mean that there is no virtue in the Arabs.” Quoting Ibn Taymiyya, the cleric said, “The Prophet (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) described hating the Arabs as being a cause of leaving Islam, and he stated that hating them implies hating him.”
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These are not isolated questions or the rants of crazy clerics; this doctrine of Arab supremacy and judging people by their race and religion is at the heart of Muslim malaise in the modern world. Societies where race and religion do not affect a citizen’s rights and obligations are progressing socially, culturally, and economically, whereas the Islamic nations are mired in race- and religion-based citizenship. Today, India, Brazil, and South Africa have emerged as leaders of the developing world, while Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan have little to show in the way of accomplishments in the last half century other than sabre rattling and the oppressing their own people while blaming the Jews for the plight they are in.
Once hatred against the Jew becomes acceptable – and it has – there is every likelihood that such hate will also engulf the self. With the absence of Jews among them, many Muslims can only turn on each other. Dozens die every week, not at the hands of some foreign enemy, but by our own so-called brothers in Islam. The violence is rooted in the hate speech that is permitted in the mosques of the ummah.
Take, for example, a Friday sermon given in January 2010 at a mosque in Riyadh by the imam assigned to the Saudi Armed Forces, Sheikh Mohammad al-Ureifi. Al-Ureifi lashed out against Iraqi Shia Muslims, accusing them of, among other things, being
“majousiya”
– Zoroastrian occultists – and called Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani an “atheist and debauched sinner.” Ayatollah al-Sistani, it must be said, is one of those rare Islamic clerics today who refrains from inflaming passions
and instead calls for restraint and peace, and he is respected by both Sunni and Shia Muslims as a voice of reason. On January 26, 2010, as outrage spread among Shia Muslims worldwide, forty-one Saudi Wahhabi clerics, instead of condemning al-Ureifi’s hateful language, issued a strongly worded statement supporting him. On the Islamic website
Almoslim.net
, they described Shias as “rejectionists” and “infidels” and called on them to repent.
How long can we afford to sit silently by while men with hate-filled hearts govern our spiritual affairs?
In an era when information is just a few keystrokes away, words of hate and racism can seldom be hidden. What was once the private domain of the mosque pulpit, from where Jews, Hindus, and Christians would be derided as kuffar, is today accessible to the entire world. Yet our sheikhs continue to make hurtful comments about other races and religions with impunity.
On the popular Islamic website IslamOnLine, on March 22, 2004, a user named Heba asked about the status of Jews in the Quran: “Dear Sheikh! As-Salam Alaykum. Jews have played a considerable role throughout history, before and after the advent of Islam. The Qur’an referred to them in many places. What, according to the Qur’an, are the main characteristics and qualities of Jews?”
IslamOnLine referred Heba to a fatwa by Mufti Atiyyah Saqr, former head of the Fatwa Committee of Al-Azhar University, in which he states: “The Quran has specified a considerable deal of its verses to talking about Jews, their personal qualities and characteristics. The Quranic description of Jews is quite impartial; praising them in some occasions where they deserve praise and condemning them in other occasions where they practice blameworthy acts. Yet, the latter occasions outnumbered the former, due to their bad qualities and the heinous acts they used to commit.”
Among the “bad qualities” of the Jews, the mufti lists the following:
• They feel pain to see others in happiness and are gleeful when others are afflicted with a calamity. This is clear in the verse that reads: “If a lucky chance befall you, it is evil unto them, and if disaster strike you they rejoice thereat.” (Al-’Imran:120)
• They are known of their arrogance and haughtiness. They claimed to be the sons of Allah and His beloved ones. Allah tells us about this in the verse that reads: “The Jews and Christians say: We are sons of Allah and His loved ones.” (Al-Ma’idah:18)
• Utilitarianism and opportunism are among their innate traits. This is clear in the verse that reads: “And of their taking usury when they were forbidden it, and of their devouring people’s wealth by false pretences.” (An-Nisa’:161)
• It is easy for them to slay people and kill innocents. Nothing in the world is [more] dear to their hearts than shedding blood and murdering human beings. They never give up this trait even with the Messengers and the Prophets. Allah says: “… and slew the prophets wrongfully.” (Al-Baqarah:61)
• They are merciless and heartless. In this meaning, the Qur’anic verse explains: “Then, even after that, your hearts were hardened and became as rocks, or worse than rocks, for hardness.” (Al-Baqarah:74)
• They never keep their promises or fulfil their words. Almighty Allah says: “Is it ever so that when ye make a covenant a party of you set it aside? The truth is, most of them believe not.” (Al-Baqarah:100)
• They rush hurriedly to sins and compete in transgression. Allah says: “They restrained not one another from the wickedness they did. Verily evil was that they used to do!” (Al-Ma’idah:79)
• Cowardice and their love for this worldly life are their indisputable traits. To this, the Qur’an refers when saying: “Ye
are more awful as a fear in their bosoms than Allah. That is because they are a folk who understand not. They will not fight against you in a body save in fortified villages or from behind walls. Their adversity among themselves is very great. Ye think of them as a whole whereas their hearts are diverse.” (Al-Hashr:13–14) Allah Almighty also says: “And thou wilt find them greediest of mankind for life and (greedier) than the idolaters.” (Al-Baqarah:96)
• Miserliness runs deep in their hearts. Describing this, the Qur’an states: “Or have they even a share in the Sovereignty? Then in that case, they would not give mankind even the speck on a date stone.” (An-Nisa’:53)
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As I read this fatwa from the Al-Azhar scholar, what struck me was that in not one of the verses he quotes from the Quran does the word
Jew
appear. How, then, can this mufti and his coterie of clerics claim that these passages of the Quran are aimed at Jews? Have they considered the possibility that these texts refer to us Muslims, not Jews?
The mufti goes further. In his response to Heba he blames Jews for the pogroms they suffered and then predicts “the coming victory of Muslims over them”:
After this clear explanation, we would like to note that these are but some of the most famous traits of the Jews as described in the Qur’an. They have revolted against the Divine ordinances, distorted what has been revealed to them and invented new teachings which, they claimed, were much more better than what has been recorded in the Torah. It was for these traits that they found no warm reception in all countries where they tried to reside. Rather, they would either be driven out or live in isolation. It was Almighty Allah who placed on them His
Wrath and made them den of humiliation due to their transgression. Almighty Allah told us that He’d send to them people who’d pour on them rain of severe punishment that would last till the Day of Resurrection. All this gives us glad tidings of the coming victory of Muslims over them once Muslims stick to strong faith and belief in Allah and adopt the modern means of technology.
In case his prophecy of impending Muslim victory doesn’t come true, he ends by saying, “Almighty Allah knows best.”
It is incredible that Islamist clerics today would be so oblivious to Muslim history. If Islam had such a harsh view of Jews, then why was it that in 657, Ali ibn Abu Talib, the Prophet’s closest companion, the son-in-law who became the fourth caliph of Islam, embraced the Jewish community with open arms when he extended the Muslim conquest into Iraq? Ezra Chwat, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writes that Ali “was greeted wholeheartedly by the Jews there [Iraq], then the most important of the world’s Jewish communities. Ali saw the Jews of Iraq as a natural ally and granted them autonomy. This was the dawn of a new era of Jewish cultural creativity, one that lasted almost 600 years and was central in the development of Judaism.”
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Today, Muslims need to educate their clerics and inform them that the days of caliphates and kingdoms are long gone. Never again will any Jew be willing to live as “dhimmis” under Muslim protection. In medieval times, this arrangement may have worked and was much more progressive than the harsh treatment the Jews received in Christendom, but the world has evolved into a place where neither race nor religion, gender nor sexual orientation, can be invoked to legislate a hierarchy of citizenship rights, be it in Saudi Arabia today or South Africa under apartheid.
We Muslims need to reflect on our predicament. We need to understand that our hatred of the Jew or the West is an admission of our own
sense of failure. We need to recognize that blaming the other for our dismal contribution to contemporary civilization is a sedative, not the cure for the disease that afflicts us all. To join the nations and peoples of this world, as brothers and sisters of a common humanity, we need to wean ourselves from our addiction to victimhood and hate. Without rejecting our heritage, we need to recognize that in the modern nation state as it exists in the United States, Europe, and the West; in countries like India, Brazil, and South Africa, the doctrines of jihad and sharia law cannot apply, will not be accepted, and should not be preached. We need to stand up to members of our community who spread hate against the Jew, the atheist, the apostate, the Hindu, and the Christian and then hide behind the Quran. We should not hesitate to say they are hate-mongers and cowards.
Muslim history and heritage allow us to enter the modern era without the baggage of anti-Semitism. Many Muslims and Jews in the past have worked together and befriended each other. If Averroes and Maimonides could do it in the twelfth century, surely we can do it in the twenty-first. Together, we can build a New Jerusalem. But to arrive there, we Muslims will have to remember that the Jew is not the enemy. It is us.
The author with Holocaust survivor Max Eisen, at Auschwitz in March 2010
The infamous Nazi slogan
Arbeit macht frei
(“work makes you free”)
stared at me as I stood at the entrance of Auschwitz. Beyond the arched iron gate was the camp where sixty years ago, hate had triumphed over humanity during Hitler’s Third Reich.
The slight chill of the Polish morning air in March 2010 was not the reason I felt a shiver run up my spine. The prospect of walking through the corridors of a death camp, where more than a million people had been brought to die, left an uneasy feeling. A strange sense of fear touched me, a fear of the unknown. Would I feel the spirits of those who were gassed to death as part of Hitler’s Final Solution? As a Muslim, I also felt the burden of guilt knowing how the moral
crime of Holocaust denial was today the almost exclusive preserve of my community.
In 2006, my daughter Natasha Fatah had come to Auschwitz to pay her respects to the victims of the Holocaust; she was so shaken by her experience that it was two years before she penned her thoughts. In an article for CBC News, she talked of the “conflicting emotions” that overcame her as she walked towards Auschwitz. She wrote:
“Was I coming to pay tribute to the millions killed by the Nazis or was I a tourist coming to check off one more world historic site? I decided this was to be a private sojourn and I would not talk or write about it. And so I didn’t, until now — when I’ve begun to realize that Holocaust deniers continue to insist that the event never happened; that it is a Jewish conspiracy. In denying the Holocaust, we fall prey to the same evil that almost wiped out one of humanity’s most ancient people.”
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Her words echoed in my mind as I prepared to enter Auschwitz in the company of a Holocaust survivor who had lived in the camp. Standing next to eighty-five-year-old Max Eisen made the moment a bit surreal, as if the present and the past had merged. As a young man, Max had survived not just Auschwitz, but also the death march that followed. As the Red Army advanced towards the camp in 1945, Nazi guards would take him and a large number of starving prisoners on a march towards German-controlled areas to the south.
I wanted a photograph with Max, standing in front of the iron gates of Auschwitz, but felt terrible guilt. Would I be desecrating the sacredness of the place? I wondered. After all, a concentration camp where more than a million people were put to death deserved not to be treated as a run-of-the mill tourist spot. Max noticed my hesitation as I fidgeted with the camera. Recognizing my trepidation, he said, “Come, Tarek, let me have a picture with you.” As he gave my camera to a mutual friend to take a snap, he chuckled: