The Jew is Not My Enemy (6 page)

Islamist apologists of today may recoil at the thought, but for the many competing caliphates during the glory days of Islam, from the ninth through the twelfth centuries, good governance and the welfare of the population as well as stability were the key motivators, not jihad or sharia law.

Let us not pretend that prejudice against Jews did not exist in medieval Islamdom. It did, and at times this prejudice turned violent, but
eras of cooperation and relative peace were also often characteristic of Jewish life under Islam. It was during the time of Maimonides that the forced conversion of Jews to Islam was initiated in both Muslim Spain (under the jihadi Mohads) and Yemen (where the Iraqi Abbasids fought against the Egyptian Ayyubids for control). As hard-line Islamic extremists gained ground in Spain and Yemen, Jews were targeted quite viciously.

According to Bernard Lewis, one of the foremost scholars of Islamic history, the anti-Semitic ideas of Christianity first entered the Muslim world because of Islam’s conquest of Europe, which resulted in many Christians converting to Islam. Later, when Europe hit back and colonised the Middle East, its anti-Jewish ideas infiltrated the Arab world. “European anti-Semitism, in both its theological and racist versions, was essentially alien to Islamic traditions, culture, and modes of thought,” writes Lewis. He notes that “prejudices existed in the Islamic world, as did occasional hostility, but not what could be called anti-Semitism, for there was no attribution of cosmic evil. And on the whole, Jews fared better under Muslim rule than Christians did.”
³

According to Lewis, it was Christian converts to Islam who brought anti-Semitism into the Arab world. Later, Greek Orthodox Christians who found themselves living under Ottoman rule are said to have introduced the notion of the blood libel into the Middle East.
^*
“The blood libel was endemic in these parts [Greece] and was brought
to the notice of Ottoman authorities through the usual disturbances it caused at Easter time. This was the first time this story became known in Muslim lands.”
⁴

In the mid-1800s, with the rise of European maritime power and the decline of Ottoman Turkey, there was a natural alignment between Christian Arabs and Christian Europeans. This contact brought numerous blood-libel charges against Jews living in the Ottoman Empire. Very often, it was business interests, not religion, that were at the root of the conflict. Christian businesses saw Jews as their main competitors in the Middle East, and it was easy to inflame Arab passions against the Jews. Lewis writes that anti-Semitism “was actively encouraged by Western emissaries of various kinds, including consular representatives on the one hand, and priests and missionaries on the other.”
⁵
A famous example was the 1840 Damascus blood-libel case, in which the French consul backed the Capuchin monks who had accused the Jews of blood libel.

By the end of the century, there were calls for Christian-Muslim solidarity against the Jews. Soon, the allegations against the Jews of blood libel were coming from Muslim quarters, not Christian.

In 1856, another event inside the Ottoman caliphate caused Islamic clerics to suspect the hidden hand of the kuffar. At the end of the Crimean War, Turkey implemented the Reform Act, which gave equal status to all Ottoman subjects, irrespective of religious background, and forbade discrimination against non-Muslims. This was a huge step forward in the Ottoman effort to modernize as a European power and not remain the “sick man of Europe,” as the Russians had referred to the six-hundred-year-old empire.

The old order, premised on the supremacy of Islam, yet providing protection to Jews and Christians as wards of the state, had stood for more than a millennium. Suddenly, however, Jewish citizens were deemed equal to Muslims, and the Islamist clergy as well as the
privileged classes resented this. Murmurs of a Jewish conspiracy began to circulate. A memorandum by an Ottoman official reflects the angst of the Muslim population: “Today we have lost our sacred national rights won by the blood of our fathers and forefathers. At a time when the Islamic community is the ruling community, it has been deprived of the sacred right. This is a day of weeping and mourning for the people of Islam. As for the non-Muslims, this day, when they gained equality with the ruling community, was a day of rejoicing.”
⁶

Decades later, when the “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid
II
in 1908, their opponents, in order to discredit the supporters of constitutional reform, accused the revolutionaries of being supported by Jews. Even today, the Islamic world is rife with rumours that the father of the modern Turkish republic, Kemal Atatürk, who abolished the caliphate in 1924, was secretly a Jew. While the Ottomans were adjusting to the reality of an awakened and industrialized Europe, and attempting to modernize their society, the doors were meanwhile opening to all sorts of European ideas and philosophies: nationalism, Marxism, and, yes, anti-Semitism.

The first modern anti-Semitic literature in Arabic appeared in 1869, in the form of the confessions of a Moldavian rabbi who had converted to Christianity. Members of the Christian Arab community in Beirut published the Arabic translation, which supposedly revealed “the horrors of the Jewish religion.” Later, in 1890, a Christian author, Habib Faris, published a book in Cairo called
The Talmudic Human Sacrifices
, accusing the Jews of ritual sacrifices, which were attributed to Talmudic teachings. Jews had lived among Muslims for nearly fourteen hundred years, yet it seems no one in Baghdad, Cordoba, or Cairo had heard of these “human sacrifices” until the Europeans came to enlighten us about our cousins. It must be added that the caliph was totally opposed to the distribution of these anti-Jewish texts; authorities closed down publishers and shuttered newspapers to prevent public disorder.

However, the publication that firmly established anti-Semitism in the Muslim consciousness was
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. The forgery was first translated into Arabic by an Arab Christian, and published in Jerusalem in 1926. From Jerusalem’s Christian quarters to the offices of the city’s Mufti (the spiritual and religious head of the city’s Muslim community) was not too far a distance, and soon this piece of fiction became the ideological tool that motivated opposition to the trickle of European Jews who were beginning to settle in British Palestine. The book from Europe gave additional credence to the existing classical tales in Islamic literature about the devious nature of the Jew.

However, it was only after the end of World War ii, when the rest of the world had dismissed
The Protocols
as a fake, that the tract found new life in the Middle East.
The Protocols
were reintroduced in Cairo in 1951, with a fresh Arabic translation. Defeat of the combined Arab armies in 1948 at the hands of Israel gave fresh impetus to Judeophobia. The baton of anti-Semitism was passed from Europe to the Arab world, and work began to blend the characterisation of Jews in
The Protocols
with their depiction in Islamic literature as untrustworthy sons of pigs and apes. The Jews were a secret society, it was said, a cabal that controlled the world. How else could we explain the inability of the combined armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria to defeat the infant state of Israel?

After all, the argument went, had it not been for the Jewish conspiracy and Jewish control of the
UN
, the U.S.A., and the U.S.S.R., surely the Arab armies would have won. When asked why God had not intervened to help the Muslims, theologians answered that Muslims were being put through a test by Allah and if we returned to the path of seventh-century Islam, we would see the Jews defeated the way they were in the battle of Khaybar. If proof was needed of the devious and conniving methods of world Jewry,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was produced as evidence.

It was in this climate of despair and failure in the Arab world of the late 1940s that the Islamist movement would discover its Lenin as well as its Trotsky in the same person – a man whose ideas still define the jihad launched on Western civilization by Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Sayyid Qutb (also spelled Syed Qutub), who was born in 1906 and executed by the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966, is best known in the Arab world for his magnum opus,
Fi zilal al-Qur’an
(In the Shade of the Quran), a thirty-volume commentary on the Quran. However, it is Qutb’s influence on the worldwide Islamist movement that is his claim to fame in the Muslim world and in the West. Even today, nearly fifty years after his death, Qutb’s impact can be seen in the actions of al Qaeda. Nasser may have jailed Qutb and in the end eliminated him, but in doing so, the dictator also immortalized the dead jihadi.

In 1948, Sayyid Qutb went to the United States on a scholarship. While in Colorado, instead of absorbing the workings of a democracy, he began writing his first major book,
Al-’adala al-Ijtima’iyya fi-l-Islam
(Social Justice in Islam). America, it turned out, was not a pleasant experience for the ultraconservative Islamist from Egypt. Qutb believed in the Quranic edict “Men are the managers of women’s affairs.” What he saw in America’s pre-feminist women of the 1940s challenged his manhood. On his return to Egypt, he had this to say: “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity … She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs, and she shows all this and does not hide it.”
⁷

Even after he returned to Egypt, Qutb was never able to find a woman of sufficient “moral purity and discretion” – essentially a desexualized woman chaste and religious enough to deserve his pious
company – and resigned himself to bachelorhood. (Decades later, another jihadi terrorist would also find it difficult to find female companionship – the Fort Hood, Texas, shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan. Like Qutb, Hasan “desired a virgin of Arabic descent – a woman in her 20s who wore the hijab, understood the Koran and prayed five times a day.” The Fort Hood jihadi would fail to find such a virgin, even after he hired an Islamic matchmaker who introduced him to 150 single women.)
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During Qutb’s long imprisonment in Egypt, during which he was regularly tortured by the Nasser regime, he wrote a manifesto of political Islam called “Maalim fil-Tareeq,” which has now been translated as
Milestones
. This work represents the full expression of his radical antisecular and anti-Western ideology, in which he expanded on his doctrine of armed jihad. He wrote:

Qutb was blunt about his expectations of Muslims who lived in the West but remained loyal to its enemies.

In 1951, Qutb wrote an essay that clearly defined his view of the Jewish world. Titled “Ma’rakatuna ma’a al-Yahud” (Our Fight against the Jews), the essay was later included in a collection published in Saudi Arabia in 1970. The Saudi booklet bore the same title as Qutb’s essay and was widely circulated in the Arab world, where it became the defining text on the Islamist view of Jews.

The 1970 Saudi version linked Qutb’s work with the discredited
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. Qutb’s essay is pockmarked with footnotes by the Saudi editor, who uses
The Protocols
to prove Qutb’s allegations against the Jews. For the editor, as for many contemporary Islamic authors,
The Protocols
were confirmation of anti-Jewish ideas rooted in Islamic tradition.

In his essay, Qutb not only dwelled on the nature of the Jew and the supposed Jewish goal of destroying Islam, he presented a simple answer
to this challenge: Muslims must defeat the Jews. He wrote, “The Jews will be satisfied only with the destruction of this religion (Islam).”
¹⁰
He depicted Jews as the inevitable enemies of Islam and the creation of the state of Israel as the manifestation of Jewish revenge against Muslims for their humiliation in Medina fourteen centuries earlier.

Writing in the aftermath of the 1948 war with Israel, Qutb suggested that the Arabs were defeated because they failed to understand the Quran and did not follow its directives to Muslims regarding their relations with Jews. He wrote that there is no hope for Muslims in their struggle against Jews unless they have a Quranic understanding of their enemy’s weakness. Qutb quoted from the Quran (Sura Al Hashr), which asks Muslims not to fear the Jews: