The Jew is Not My Enemy by Tarek Fatah

Author:Tarek Fatah [Fatah, Tarek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4785-5
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2010-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

Although references to Jews in Hadith literature can be seen as hostile to Jews as a people, a study of the Quran reveals a much more positive image. In fact, the Quran, when read without being filtered through the prism of Hadith, is unlikely to trigger any of the virulent anti-Semitism that is so endemic in the Muslim world. Take, for instance, verses 5:20 and 5:21. The two are rarely discussed, but if read on their own merit, they would shock Muslims in how they authenticate the Jewish claim to their rightful presence in Palestine and Jerusalem.

5:20: Call to mind when Moses said to his people: “O my people! Remember the favour which Allah bestowed upon you; He raised up prophets from among you and made you rulers and gave you that which had not been given to anyone in the world.

5:21: “O my people. Enter the Holy Land, that Allah has destined for you, and do not turn your backs or you will turn about losers.”

The Hadith, on the other hand, delivers the opposite message – all of the land of Israel is Muslim territory, and it needs to be wrested from the evil Jews in a bloody battle to end all battles.

Until the twentieth century, most Islamic scholars read these verses as benign words about a people whom they had vanquished more than a millennium ago and who posed no threat to the Muslim world. Before the Zionist enterprise, the two verses in which Allah himself says the Holy Land has been “destined” for the Jews were interpreted as little more than a symbolic gesture. After all, Jerusalem and the Holy Land were under the governance of the Ottoman caliphate that ruled from Istanbul. Jerusalem was a sleepy backwater, where Muslim Arabs were the dominant population, living in relative peace alongside enclaves of Jews, Armenians, and other Christian groups. So what if God had promised the land to Jews under Moses? we Muslims could argue. Most Muslims viewed these verses with a historical detachment that is today conspicuous by its absence. In fact we argued that the sorry state of Jews before the twentieth century was because they had “turned their backs” on the Holy Land against the wishes of Allah even though he had “destined” the land to them.

However, the centuries-old status quo was about to change. After the First Zionist Congress met in Switzerland in 1897 with the aim of establishing a Jewish state – and the resulting Balfour Declaration made such a state possible – the same verses of the Quran would take on a whole new meaning. Was the Jewish state of Israel a reflection of Allah’s promise in the Quran? And if that was the case, what about the Muslims who had lived for centuries on that land, ever since the Arabs sprang out of the deserts of Arabia to conquer what were then Byzantine Christian lands?

The two verses were hotly debated by Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, the founder of the Islamic Movement

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