by Ed Husain
One honourable man in particular stepped forward amid all this political upheaval, anti-Semitism and supposed jihad, a Sufi scholar whose teachings are still thriving among Muslims in North Africa: Sidi Ahmad Zarruq. He opposed the revolution, stood up for the Jews, and was thrown out of the capital for his beliefs.
Zarruq graduated from the main Islamic college of Fez, the Madrasat al-Attarin, one of several built and maintained under the patronage of the Marinid dynasty. In its serene surroundings, he studied Islamic jurisprudence and Quranic exegesis, and took part in the rich cultural life of Islamic seminaries in the medieval period: poetry, calligraphy, and access to the royal courts.
I take comfort in the story of Sidi Ahmad Zarruq’s life: I too have been called a ‘Jew’ for supporting a Jewish homeland in Israel, a kafir (infidel) for rejecting calls for a rigid sharia-based state, and much else for opposing the ‘revolutionaries’ of our time, the Jew-haters of our age, the jihadis of our era.
I went to Fez in 2013 to walk in the footsteps of Sidi Ahmad Zarruq. As well as the Madrasat al-Attarin, the great University of al-Qarawiyyin, founded by a wealthy Muslim woman in 859, still stands nearby, suffused with the tranquillity and mysticism that produced Zarruq. But while in Fez I also followed in the path of the greatest of Jewish scholars, who had lived in Fez and prospered there 200 years before him.
The prodigious, great Rabbi Maimonides, or Musa (Moshe, or Moses) bin Maimun, known and held in high esteem by Jews today as Rambam, came to live in Fez after being expelled from Spain. His home is still marked out in Fez, and curious visitors like me can linger in the alley outside the house to soak up a sense of the surroundings that Maimonides saw, touched and walked upon. It was during his stay in Fez from 1166 to 1168 that Maimonides wrote his renowned commentary on the Mishnah. The highly respected scholar and philosopher later travelled to settle in Cairo, where he became a trusted physician to the Muslim leader Saladin. He was also the leader of Egypt’s thriving Jewish community.
Today, Jews continue to live in Morocco, but nowhere near the 300,000 who were Moroccan citizens in 1945, before the creation of modern-day Israel. In Egypt too, over the past ninety years the Jewish community that Maimonides once led has dwindled from 80,000 to fewer than forty. Only eleven Egyptian Jews remain in Cairo (all women, with the youngest in her sixties). In Yemen, a land where Jews have lived and traded since the times of King Solomon, a country where Jews settled before the arrival of Christianity or Islam, today there are fewer than seventy Jews remaining. In 1948, 45,000 of Yemen’s 50,000 Jews were airlifted to safety by Israel after the rise of pogroms in that country.
Unfortunately Jews are still not safe. Leaving their homelands and congregating in Israel has not created security for this ancient people amid their Muslim neighbours. In dress, appearance, customs, habits and even beliefs and rituals, Muslims resemble Jews more closely than any other faith community. Yet the rivalry, hatred even, that exists between the descendants of Abraham risks unleashing nuclear warfare in the Middle East. It also has the effect of destroying the West’s reputation in the Muslim world, viewed as biased backers of a brutal Israel.
In the twentieth century, anti-Semitism was a European cultural default position, resulting eventually in the unforgivable crime of the mass murder of Jews, the Holocaust. In this century, Jew-hatred is spreading again, but now across the Muslim world, and repeated talk of ‘wiping out Israel’, from multiple Arab and Muslim political and religious leaders, should not be taken lightly. This hatred is further envenomed by two other factors.
First, new migrants arriving in the West from the Middle East bring attitudes that blame Israel and the Jews for the world’s ills. European difficulties with integrating Muslim populations further complicate this problem, as migrants’ attitudes fester and generally go unchallenged. Second, in countries such as Great Britain, where young Muslims have integrated better than, say, in France or Germany, the virus of anti-Semitism finds a hospitable home on university campuses. In October 2015, professors from seventy-two British universities vowed to boycott Israel by refusing academic cooperation with the Jewish state. Their actions provided a boost to the widespread Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel common among students in many UK institutions of higher learning. Currently, very little is being done to reverse this ethos in which young Muslim activists are made to feel that anti-Semitism is perfectly acceptable. This combination of normalising anti-Semitism, mass migration, and the fragility of Arab–Israeli politics should make us worry about what lies ahead. Europe is no stranger to this hatred.
The Holocaust was the culmination of centuries of Christian and European anti-Semitism. In the eighteenth century the philosopher Voltaire called Jews ‘a totally ignorant nation’ and wrote that they behaved with ‘contemptible miserliness and the most revolting superstition, with a violent hatred of all the nations which have tolerated them’. Baron d’Holbach, a prominent European atheist of the same period, described Jews as ‘the enemies of the human race’. A century later Karl Marx, despite his own Jewish descent, claimed that Jews were responsible for capitalism, the source of the world’s evils.
In contrast to these modern European attitudes, seventh-century Arabia offered a more harmonious approach. It is recounted that the Prophet Mohamed was sitting with his companions when a funeral procession passed by, and he immediately stood up out of respect for the deceased. His disciples followed suit. The cortège moved on, and the Arabs said to the Prophet: ‘That was a Jewish person who had died.’ To which he responded: ‘Was this not also a human soul?’
Some of the Jews of Medina had plotted with the Prophet’s pagan enemies in Mecca to undermine and eradicate the new message of Islam, with its competing claim to a divine book, access to God and, unlike Judaism, a call to others to embrace the one God. When the Prophet migrated from Mecca and entered Medina, his first act after establishing a place of prayer, the mosque, was to send his companions to trade in the marketplace with Jews as equals in financial dealings, despite their earlier hostility. The pact that was agreed between the Muslims and other communities in the city included the Jews. When the Prophet spoke about the umma – the nation of believers – in Medina, he included Jews and Christians. The Quran even allows for Muslims to eat kosher food. In several chapters of the Quran, there is repeated praise of the Old Testament prophets. I find it hard to understand how contemporary Muslims can harbour hatred for the descendants of the prophets that are so venerated in the Quran. The Jews are the children of Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Rebekah, Joseph, Moses, Aaron and others.
The Prophet married a Jewish lady called Safiyya, who subsequently converted to Islam. When his other wives teased Safiyya for her Jewish ancestry, the Prophet taught her to make this riposte: ‘My father is the Prophet Haroun [Aaron], my uncle is Moses, and my husband is the Prophet Mohamed. What is your problem?’ To this day, Muslims honour and cherish Safiyya’s memory as the earliest Muslims did: as a ‘mother of the believers’, a designation for the wives of the Prophet. Despite her leading role among the Muslims after the Prophet passed away, she bequeathed her wealth to her Jewish nephews.
All schools of the sharia allow Muslim men to marry Jewish women. Some Muslim scholars have also ruled that as long as a Muslim woman is allowed to practise her faith, she may marry a Jewish man.
None of this history, none of these attitudes, indicates or advocates hatred for the Jews. When Sidi Ahmad Zarruq sided with the Jews of Fez, or Saladin trusted Maimonides with his life, or Muslims protected thousands of Jews fleeing from the Nazis during the Holocaust, this empathy and fellow-feeling grew out of a strong collective memory within Islam. In 1941, King Mohamed V of Morocco confidently protected 250,000 Jews from the occupying Vichy French forces who wished to pass legislation to discriminate against Jews. In France, Muslims hid and helped hundreds of Jews by sheltering them in the main mosque in Paris. Jewish presence in a mosque was not considered to be a problem. In 1965, King Has
an II of Morocco handed over vital intelligence on Arab plans to attack Israel that helped tip the balance toward an Israeli victory in the 1967 Six Day War.
There is, however, another historical memory: one of treachery and bitterness between Jews and the early Muslims. It serves as a rallying cry for radicals from al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other assorted Islamists who shout: ‘Khaibar, Khaibar, ya Yahud!’ – ‘Remember Khaibar, Jews!’ They are recalling the battle of Khaibar in 628, when the Prophet’s forces killed Jewish tribal leaders from the Banu Quraizah tribe by implementing Jewish laws of punishment for betrayal of an agreement that they had previously reached with Muslims.
In the Christian tradition, Judas’s betrayal of Jesus to the Romans and the alleged insistence of the High Priests of Judaism that Jesus be killed made Jews, for a long time, a focus and justification for Christian hatred of Jews. A passage, for example, in the New Testament refers to Jews as ‘snakes’, a ‘brood of vipers’, and destined to be ‘sentenced to hell’.4 Pope Leo the Great in the fifth century continued the hatred and referred to the Jewish disciple of Jesus, Judas, as ‘the wickedest man that ever lived’, and St John’s Gospel condemns Judas as ‘the son of perdition’. Something similar happened among Muslims, sadly. The word Yahud, or ‘Jews’, has become almost a profanity, bearing connotations of perennial enmity and plotting against Islam and Muslims.
None of this is helped by the existence of illogical hadiths that contradict the Quran and intensify the anti-Jewish animus. One hadith frequently cited among Islamist activists relates that before the Last Day stones and trees will say: ‘O slave of God, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.’5 Why are hadith scholars silent in the face of preaching in mosques based on such texts?
Another hadith allegedly claims: ‘Indeed, I will expel the Jews and the Christians from the peninsula of the Arabs so that I leave only Muslims.’ Literalists of the Salafi persuasion have adopted, and apply, this worldview. But the mainstream Muslim consensus is entirely different. Followers of the dominant Hanafi school allow unbelievers to live in the Hijaz, where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are found, and even to enter those cities, including the holy mosques, and stay there as visitors. The stricter Shafi’i school allocates periods of time each year for Jews and Christians to enter Medina, the city of the Prophet.
Anti-Semitism never has been, and cannot be allowed to become, the mainstream position of Muslims globally.
It is often confused, not always benignly, with anti-Zionism. The word ‘Zionist’ (Sahyouni in Arabic) comes from Mount Zion in Jerusalem, which symbolises the Holy Land for Jews. It should do so, too, for Muslims, but instead Zionism has become the subject of global opprobrium, except in Israel and the United States. Israel has come to be viewed as an American outpost in the Middle East in the eyes of its Arab neighbours, who obsessively link everything that happens in the region to the Jewish state. They conveniently lose sight of the fact that the people of Israel are honoured repeatedly in the Quran, which actually confirms that Jews have every right to settle in and around Jerusalem:
And [remember] when Moses said to his people: ‘O my people, call in remembrance the favour of God unto you, when he produced prophets among you, made you kings, and gave to you what He had not given to any other among the peoples. O my people, enter the Holy Land which God has assigned unto you, and do not turn back ignominiously, for then will ye be overthrown, to your own ruin.’ (5:20–1)
We [Allah] said to the Children of Israel: ‘Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd.’ (17:104)
Today, the global Jewish population is less than 20 million. For how much longer must this great people suffer and live in fear of annihilation? There will be 2 billion Muslims worldwide within three decades. We can and must accommodate Jews in our midst in a shared Middle East of coexistence. The Jews belong in the Middle East, and deserve a dignified and safe home, as do the Palestinians who have been languishing in refugee camps for three generations.
It is simply unacceptable, indeed deplorable, that, within just a few decades of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is once again on the rise – and in the Muslim world. Let us be honest: Jews in New York, Paris and London fear attacks from radicalised Muslims. Their schools and synagogues have armed guards and police patrols for fear of violence from extreme Muslims. The Charlie Hebdo murderers headed for synagogues and kosher grocers to kill Jews immediately after murdering journalists who had insulted the Prophet. And Israel is armed to the teeth and separated from the Palestinians by a wall because lowering its guard results in an immediate rise in terror attacks. This is no way to guarantee long-term security for Israelis – or dignity for Arabs.
Israel’s actions, policies, intentions and very name produce a global, instantaneous response from many Muslims. Israel conducts a military operation in Gaza against jihadists lobbing rockets at its population, and there are mass protests across the Muslim world. Meanwhile the Syrian government with Iranian support can kill over 400,000 Muslims and displace millions more, and we see not a single significant rally in the capitals of Muslim nations.
After the Arab uprisings, the Israeli embassy in Egypt was attacked and the ambassador had to be evacuated. Sadat’s peace deal with Israel had cost him his life in 1981, and Mubarak’s warm relations with Israel had not trickled down to the Egyptian masses either. Similarly, while Saudi clerics, for all their other extremism, have been quick to condemn suicide bombings inside Israel, the message has not percolated down to the grassroots. The kings of Jordan and Morocco have behaved with dignity toward Israel, and maintain cordial relations, but their populations have yet to be won over. On the other hand, Israeli citizens are able to travel freely and safely to Turkey.
I visited Israel and the West Bank for the first time in 2013, and have done so several times since then. For many Muslims around the world, to visit Israel is to support ‘the Zionist entity’ and therefore risk social isolation. But this view is not only outdated; it is also self-defeating.
I wanted to see Israel for myself, and to visit the famed Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. What I found was depressing. On the ancient walls hung old fans that blew noisily and rattled – there was no money for air-conditioning. The carpet for worshippers to pray on was old and ragged. Here I was, inside one of the world’s most beautiful and historically significant buildings, but scaffolding and general clutter prevented me from seeing the centre of the Dome of the Rock. Water leaks, rickety shoe shelves and uncleaned antique tiles all lent a sense of disharmony. And no, this was not the fault of the Jews, or of the West, but of us Muslims, we who claim to be fighting daily to ‘liberate Jerusalem’ and yet neglect the very heart of the city. This has to end. Old attitudes will have to change.
The Arab League began its boycott of ‘Zionist’ goods back in 1945, and later created a Central Boycott Office to ensure minimal Arab contact with Israel. These days the Gulf states and others have no problem circumventing this policy, but the Arab and Muslim masses have yet to break free from the burden of boycotting all things Israeli. The popular Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi continually rehearses his fatwas urging Muslims to avoid contact with Israel, from the platform of his regular slot on Al-Jazeera’s Arabic channel. Recent attempts by European Marxist academics to boycott Israel have lent support to this counterproductive strategy.
However, the main victims of the boycott are not Israelis but Palestinians. Israel’s economy is booming, while Palestinians languish in abject poverty. The decades-long Arab boycott has failed miserably. An estimated 70 per cent of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem live below the poverty line. Arabs from neighbouring countries may choose not to visit Jerusalem because of the boycott, but many Palestinians do not have that luxury: they have to take low-paid jobs as cleaners and porters in the city’s hotels, or with Jewish-owned businesses, or travel to the West Bank to find work.
Many people co
ndemn Israeli settlements and call for an economic boycott of their produce, but I saw that it was Arab builders, plumbers, taxi drivers and other workers who maintained the Israeli lifestyle. Separatism in the Holy Land has not worked, and it is time to end it. How much longer will we punish Palestinians in the name of creating a free Palestine?
I abandoned collective Muslim thinking and went to Israel because there is a new momentum building in the region. Egypt’s former grand mufti Ali Gomaa, and a prominent Sufi scholar from Yemen, Habib Ali al-Jifri, broke ranks with Qaradawi and went to Jerusalem in 2013. They justified their visit on scriptural grounds, citing the Prophet Mohamed’s encouragement for believers to visit the Holy Land. Their journey was facilitated by Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal of Jordan, the principal religious adviser to King Abdullah.
I understood why the Prophet encouraged us to visit Jerusalem. Standing beside the Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall, I could hear church bells and soon after that the Muslim muezzin’s call to prayer. All three Abrahamic faiths converge in Jerusalem and, despite the political difficulties, there exists a palpable serenity. Secular pluralism inside modern-day Israel has ensured this freedom of worship for Jews, Christians and Muslims.
It is vital that religious leaders are involved in the quest for accommodation, coexistence and a durable peace in the Middle East. To be credible in Muslim eyes, any peace agreement will require backing from the major Sunni powers, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt. The West cannot continue to ignore the religious dimension to the Arab–Israeli conflict.
By carrying Sunni Muslim opinion on the importance of a two-state solution, the West can help isolate Iran and its proxies in the region, most notably the terrorist organisation Hezbollah. While most Sunni countries are committed to finding a resolution through dialogue with Israel, Iran’s theocratic government has consistently called for the destruction of Israel. Iran’s long-standing Supreme Leader, Ali Khameini, declared in September 2015, ‘Nothing called the “Zionist regime” will exist 25 years from now.’6 This comes after years of the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinajad vowing to ‘wipe Israel off the map’.
