Bostom replies to Küntzel on Islamic antisemitism

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/2007/01/014746print.html

January 08, 2007

Bostom replies to Küntzel on Islamic antisemitism

In "Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East," Matthias Küntzel argues that contemporary Islamic antisemitism is largely attributable to Hitler's continuing influence in the Islamic world. He asserts:

Only in the legend of Jesus Christ did the Jews appear as a deadly and powerful force who allegedly went so far as to kill God's only son. Islam was quite a different story. Here it was not the Jews who murdered the Prophet, but the Prophet who in Medina murdered the Jews. As a result, the characteristic features of Christian antisemitism did not develop in the Muslim world. There were no fears of Jewish conspiracy and domination, no charges of diabolic evil.
Instead, the Jews were treated with contempt or condescending tolerance. This cultural inheritance made the idea that the Jews of all people could represent a permanent danger for the Muslims and the world seem absurd.

The Mufti therefore seized on the only instrument that really moved the Arab masses: Islam. He was the first to translate Christian antisemitism into Islamic language, thus creating an “Islamic antisemitism”. His first major manifesto bore the title “Islam-Judaism. Appeal of the Grand Mufti to the Islamic World in the Year 1937”.

This 31-page pamphlet reached the entire Arab world and there are indications that Nazi agents helped draw it up. Let me quote at least a short passage from it:

“The struggle between the Jews and Islam began when Muhammed fled from Mecca to Medina… The Jewish methods were, even in those days, the same as now. As always, their weapon was slander… They said that Muhammed was a swindler… they began to ask Muhammed senseless and insoluble questions… and they endeavoured to destroy the Muslims… If the Jews could betray Muhammed in this way, how will they betray Muslims today? The verses from the Koran and Hadith prove to you that the Jews were the fiercest opponents of Islam and are still trying to destroy it.”

What we have here is a new popularized form of Judeophobia, based on the oriental folk tale tradition, which moves constantly back and forth between the seventh and twentieth centuries.

Classical Islamic literature had as a rule treated Muhammed’s clash with the Jews of Medina as a minor episode in the Prophet’s life. The anti-Jewish passages in the Koran and Hadith had lain dormant or were considered of little significance during previous centuries.


Küntzel is saying that the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was innovating when he declared that "the verses from the Koran and Hadith prove to you that the Jews were the fiercest opponents of Islam and are still trying to destroy it." Küntzel says that these Qur'an and Hadith passages had long "lain dormant." However, Andrew Bostom's assessment differs. Here is his reply to Küntzel, exclusively for Jihad Watch:

With all due respect to Matthias Küntzel’s important ongoing efforts to inform us about the Nazi-Arab nexus, in the spirit in Lukasz Hirszowicz's "The Third Reich and the Arab East" (published 1966, in English translation), he consistently fails to examine readily available sources which demonstrate quite clearly that Islamic antisemitism, with Koranic and entirely non-Western motifs, was rampant throughout the 19th century in Egypt. These Islamic sources were and continue to be exploited, now, by Cairo’s Al Azhar University and its Grand Imam Sheikh Tantawi. Tantawi wrote the following in his 700 page treatise rationalizing Muslim Jew hatred, Banu Isra’il fi al-Qur’an wa al-Sunna [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in the 1970s, and then re-issued in 1986/87:
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.
Tantawi was apparently rewarded for this scholarly effort by being named Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in 1996, a position he still holds. These are the expressed, “carefully researched” views on Jews held by the nearest Muslim equivalent to a Pope—the head of the most prestigious center of Muslim learning in Sunni Islam, which represents 90% of the world’s Muslims. And Sheikh Tantawi has not mollified such hatemongering beliefs since becoming the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar as his statements on the Jews as “enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs”, the legitimacy of homicide bombing of Jews, or “dialogue” with Jews (just below), make clear.

…anyone who avoids meeting with the enemies in order to counter their dubious claims and stick fingers into their eyes, is a coward. My stance stems from Allah’s book [the Koran], more than one-third of which deals with the Jews…[I] wrote a dissertation dealing with them [the Jews], all their false claims and their punishment by Allah. I still believe in everything written in that dissertation.
Küntzel should also read DF Green's classic "Arab Theologians on the Jews and Israel", or better yet see the full 935 pp. hideous tome of Islamic Jew hatred presented at this "Conference" held in Cairo in 1968. "DF Green" is a compound pseudonym for David Littman and Yehoshafat Harkabi, who excerpted the Conference Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research, a toxic amalgam of Jihad and traditional Islamic Jew hatred, which could have been produced almost without reference to European sources of Jew hatred. Another important source overlooked by Küntzel is Yehudiya Masriya's (the first pseudonym for Bat Ye’or) "Le Juifs En Egypte", from 1971 and 1973, in Hebrew.

Indeed, what makes Nazi ideology resonate with the Muslim masses whose only education (certainly in the 19th and early 20th centuries) may be a traditional Islamic one, are the motifs of Koranic Jew hatred and Jew hatred in the hadith and sira which form a Islamic superstructure onto which European ideologies are easily grafted.

Küntzel fails to make clear that the early 20th century period he is lionizing in Egypt was one under British colonial rule, during which a short lived experiment in Western style secularism was underway. This proves nothing about “flexible interpretations of the Koran”, since Koran-inspired Sharia doctrines were precisely what were being sidelined. Finally, even during this “ecumenical” period, in 1910, when the Coptic Prime Minister Boutros Ghali was assassinated by a Muslim, the assassin (Wardani) became a national hero, acclaimed by hordes of students taking to the streets and proclaiming, “Wardani, Wardani, that slew the Nazarene”.


Below are some relevant excerpts from my forthcoming The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. These excerpts represent examples of how Koranic anti-Semitism, devoid of any attachment to European motifs, played out in 19th century Egypt, with reference to a remarkable general observation by the 9th century Arab polymath al-Jahiz, which provides some needed perspective on this ancient Koran-inspired form of Jew hatred. The verse that is being repeatedly invoked is Koran 5:82, which is linked to the eternal "curse" on the Jews in Koran 2:61 (and the related verse 3:112).
Excerpt:

Haggai Ben-Shammai, arguing for prolonged historical continuity, “As has been stated, this tradition (i.e., of more intense Muslim-Jewish hatred) has remained alive to this very day”, [1] refers to the travelogue accounts of Edward William Lane, which record Lane’s observations of Egyptian society, written in 1835. [2] But Ben-Shammai fails to discuss a remarkable essay by the polymath Arabic writer al-Jahiz (d. 869), [3] composed a millennium earlier, which bolsters his argument by illustrating the anti-Jewish attitudes prevalent within an important early Islamic society. Al-Jahiz’s essay—an anti-Christian polemic believed to have been commissioned by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 861), who inaugurated a literary campaign against the Christians [4]—explores the reasons why the Muslim masses prefer the Christians to the Jews. This empirical preference (although decried by the author) [5] is acknowledged by al-Jahiz from the outset: [6]

I shall begin to enumerate the causes which made the Christians more liked by the masses than the Magians [Zoroastrians], and made men consider them more sincere than the Jews, more endeared, less treacherous, less unbelieving, and less deserving of punishment. For all this there are manifold and evident causes.
Al-Jahiz offers two primary explanations for this abiding hostility of the Muslim rank and file towards the Jews. First was the “rancorous” relationship between the early Muslim community, exiles from Mecca, relocated among Jewish neighbors in Medina. [7]

When the [Muslim] Emigrants [from Mecca] became the neighbors of the Jews [in Medina]…the Jews began to envy the Muslims the blessings of their new faith, [8] and the union which resulted after dissension. They proceeded to undermine the belief of our [i.e., the Muslim] masses, and to lead them astray. They aided our enemies and those envious of us. From mere misleading speech and stinging words they plunged into an open declaration of enmity, so that the Muslims mobilized their forces, exerting themselves morally and materially to banish the Jews and destroy them. Their strife became long-drawn and widespread, so that it worked itself up into a rage, and created yet greater animosity and more intensified rancor. The Christians, however, because of their remoteness from Mecca and Medina, did not have to put up with religious controversies, and did not have occasion to stir up trouble, and be involved in war. That was the first cause of our dislike of the Jews, and our partiality toward the Christians.
However, al-Jahiz then identifies as “the most potent cause” of this particular animus towards the Jews, Qur’an 5:82, and its interpretation by the contemporary (i.e., mid-9th century) Muslim masses. [9]

One thousand years later, Lane’s testimony on the difference between the attitude of Egyptian Muslims toward the Jews and the Christians [10] again highlights the influence of Qur’an 5:82:

They [the Jews] are held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by the Muslims in general, and they are said to bear a more inveterate hatred than any other people to the Muslims and the Muslim religion. It is said, in the Koran [quoting 5:82] “Thou shalt surely find the most violent all men to those who have believed to be the Jews…”
Lane further notes, [11]

It is a common saying among the Muslims in this country, “Such one hates me with the hate of the Jews.” We cannot wonder, then, that the Jews are detested far more than are the Christians. Not long ago, they used often to be jostled in the streets of Cairo, and sometimes beaten for merely passing on the right hand of a Muslim. At present, they are less oppressed: but still they scarcely ever dare to utter a word of abuse when reviled or beaten unjustly by the meanest Arab or Turk; for many a Jew has been put to death upon a false and malicious accusation of uttering disrespectful words against the Koran or the Prophet. It is common to hear an Arab abuse his jaded ass, and, after applying to him various opprobrious epithets, end by calling the beast a Jew.
Ben-Shammai’s discussion also omits a series of subsequent 19th century accounts which validate and expand upon Lane’s narrative. For example, the French surgeon A.B. Clot who resided in Egypt from 1825 to1848, and served Muhammad Ali as a medical adviser, earning the honorific title, “Bey”, made these confirmatory observations written in 1840, five years after Lane’s travelogue first appeared in 1835: [12]
The Israelite race is the one that the Muslims hate the most. They think that the Jews hate Islam more than any other nation…Speaking of a fierce enemy, the Muslims say: “He hates me the way the Jews hate us.” During the past century, the Israelites were often put to death because they were accused rightly or wrongly to have something disrespectful about the Koran.

And three decades later, such hateful attitudes directed at the Jews specifically, persisted among Egyptian Muslims, as recorded in 1873 by Moritz Lüttke: [13]

The Muslim hates no other religion as he hates that of the Jews…even now that all forms of political oppression have ceased, at a time when such great tolerance is shown to the Christian population, the Arabs still bear the same contemptuous hatred of the Jews. It is a commonplace occurrence, for example, for two Arabs reviling each other to call each other Ibn Yahūdī (or “son of a Jew”) as the supreme insult…it should be mentioned that in these cases, they pronounce the word Yahūdī in a violent and contemptuous tone that would be hard to reproduce.
Jacob Landau’s modern analysis of Egyptian Jewry in the 19th century elucidates the predictable outcome of these bigoted archetypes “constantly repeated in various forms”—the escalation from rhetorical to physical violence against Jews: [14]

…it is interesting to note that even the fallāhīn, the Egyptian peasantry (almost all of them Muslim) certainly did not know many Jews at close quarters, but nevertheless would revile them. The enmity some Muslims felt for the Jews incited them to violence, persecution, and physical assault, as in 1882…Hostility was not necessarily the result of envy, for many Jews were poverty-stricken and even destitute and were sometimes forced to apply for financial assistance to their co- religionists abroad.
Notes 1. Ben-Shammai, “Jew-hatred in the Islamic tradition and Qur’anic exegesis”., in Shmuel Almog, Antisemitism Through the Ages, Pergamon, Oxford, 1988, p. 167.
2. Edward William Lane. An Account of the Customs of the Modern Egyptians. (Facsimile of the 1860 edition), Dover, New York, 1973. See pp. 553-556.

3. “A Risala of Al-Jahiz”. Translated by Joshua Finkel. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1927, Vol. 47, pp. 311-334.

4. Ibid., p. 319.

5. Indeed, Finkel (Ibid., p. 316) underscores the devastating nature of the trenchant anti-Christian arguments mustered by Al-Jahiz:

While there are other anti-Christian writings extant in Mohammedan literature, no work goes so directly to the vital features of the problem, no work is of so potential of deadly effect.

6. Ibid, p. 322-323.

7. Ibid., p. 323.

8. See Qur’an 2:105,

Neither those who disbelieve among the people of the Scripture nor the idolaters love that there should be sent down unto you any good thing from your Lord. But Allah chooseth for His mercy whom He will, and Allah is of Infinite Bounty.

9. “A Risala of Al-Jahiz”, p. 324.

10. Lane. An Account of the Customs of the Modern Egyptians, p.554

11. Ibid., pp. 554-555.

12. A.B. Clot. Apercu general sur l’Egypte, 1840, Vol. II, pp. 139-142. Excerpts translated by Martine Chauvet from, Jacob M. Landau. Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt. New York, 1969, Document XII, pp. 152-154.

13. Moritz Lüttke. Aegyptiens neue Zeit. Ein Beitrag zur Culturgeschichte des gegenwartigen Jahrhunderts sowie zur Charakteristik des Orients unde des Islam. Leipzig, 1873, Vol. 1, pp. 97-99. English translation in, Landau. Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt, pp. 18-19.

14. Landau. Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt, p. 19.


Posted at January 8, 2007 03:50 PM
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"May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't." -General George S. Patton

Psalm 82-8: Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You inherit all the nations.