The Jew is Not My Enemy Read Free Page B

comes from man-made texts known as the Hadith literature, the supposed sayings of Prophet Muhammad recorded two hundred years after his death and passed off as divine truths. (I will address these in more detail in chapter 5 .) Sheikh Yaqub is just one of countless clerics schooled by Saudi universities or Saudi-funded madrassahs in the Hadith literature. The clerics study Islamic history not as history per se, but as theology.
    By any rational standard, Muslims and Jews should have been, and could be, partners. Their faiths are very similar; the Jewish Torah, customs, rituals, and diet found their way into Islam to the extent that one Muslim has described Islam as “the Jewish faith planted on Arab pagan culture.” That may be an exaggeration, but the fact remains that far more unites the two people than divides them. We pray to the same God; Muslims honour Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon as our prophets; and we are free to marry among the Jews. There were times when Muslims and Jews even prayed together around the stone covered today by the Dome on the Rock.
    Prof. Moshe Sharon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University writes about an early Jewish Midrash – a commentary on Hebrew scripture – known as Nistarot Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai, which hailed Muslims as the initiators of Israel’s redemption and the Muslim caliph Abd al-Malik, who built the Dome on the Rock, as the builder of the House of the Lord. Sharon quotes one tradition that says, “The Jews used to light the lamps of Bayt al-Maqdis.” “Bayt al-Maqdis,” he writes, “is the exact Arabic rendering of the Hebrew Beit Hamikdash, and is reminiscent of the lighting of the Menorah in the Temple.” Other Islamic traditions mention Temple customs practised by Jews in the Dome, such as the use of incense and oil lamps, and prayer services conducted by
wuld Harun
, Arabic for “the sons of Aaron.” 5
    Where we Muslims differ from Jews is also significant. Jews consider themselves a specific monotheistic people, with roots going back to Abraham, his son Isaac, and the ancient Holy Land, whereas Muslims, while adhering to the same tradition of strict monotheism, define themselves not in geographic or ethnic terms, but rather as a community that transcends ethnicity and race, at least in principle. This makes it possible for anyone to embrace Islam, be they from China or Brazil. The Muslim is tied not to land, but rather to God and Muhammad’s message. The Jew, on the other hand, defines his identity with a return to Jerusalem and Eretz Israel as his eternal homeland.
    Over the centuries, the incessant Hadith-inspired attacks on the very nature (fitra) of the Jew have left Muslims indoctrinated to the belief that a Jew cannot be trusted to be straightforward or truthful. If this racist doctrine slowly corrupted the attitudes of generations of Muslims, the Israel-Palestine dispute was the catalyst that lent this hate respectability and credence. The myths and legends of seventh-century Arabia have been dusted off and rejuvenated to make Jew-hatred the norm, not the exception.
    I begin this book by describing the events that led to the slaughter in Mumbai, and in chapters 2 and 3 , 1 write about the effect of fascist and European anti-Semitic literature on twentieth-century Arab Islamists, long before the creation of the state of Israel, and describe how this cancer has destroyed us Muslims rather than our supposed enemy.
    Whereas anti-Semitism in Europe has its roots in Christian mythologies that depicted the Jews as a dark and demonic force, responsible for the murder of the Son of God, Judeophobia in the Arab world stems from a completely different legend. Modern-day Muslims hold anti-Jewish prejudices not because their Prophet Muhammad was a victim of the Jews, but because he vanquished them in a decisive battle in Medina. And so I will challenge the primary legend of Islamic history that has made the killing of Jews literally an act of Sunnah, the practice of the