Islam versus Judaism and Zionism

1 Although virtually every Muslim today is keenly aware of the menace of Zionism, scarcely any among us, including even our most learned ulema, possesses a detailed knowledge of the Jewish religion. Even less understood are the reasons behind the striking similarities and departures of Judaism from Islam. This chapter has been written with the conviction that we cannot effectively combat our enemies until we first know who they are and specifically what motivates them to behave as they do. Any understanding of Zionism is impossible without some knowledge of Judaism and Jewish history. Zionism originated as a Jewish modernist movement under the impact of 19th-century European nationalism, imperialism and secularism and emerged bitterly hostile to traditional Judaism. It is crucial for our self-preservation to exploit the conflict between Judaism and Zionism to our best advantage. This we cannot accomplish until the widespread ignorance and popular misconceptions prevailing in Muslim lands about the Jews are swept away.

The Arabs and the Jews are both from the same Semitic stock. The Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be on him) was from the descendants of Ishmael, son of Abraham (peace be on him), and therefore from amongst the brethren of Israel. The early history of Israel is, in fact, the history of the early Muslims. Every follower of Muhammad (peace be on him) accepts the followers of Moses as Muslims; it is so established from the Holy Quran. The separation took place only when the Judaic Muslim generation rejected Christ and by dissociating themselves from the 2message of Christ, and not accepting him as God’s Prophet, they became, not only unbelievers but also established a separate identity known as Jews. Similarly, some of the earliest followers of Jesus (peace be upon him) were also Muslims. The Christians, too, acted exactly as the Jews since they also disbelieved in the Prophet who was to come (i.e. the Holy Prophet Muhammad, peace be on him) and whose coming was foretold in the Bible and in all the previous ancient scriptures as was of Christ’s in the Jewish scriptures. Thus the Christians ceased to be Muslims and became the followers of Christ When God addresses the Children of Israel of those days, He addresses the Jews and Christians as the “People of the Book,” and this is the reason why the history of the Jews and Christians is mentioned so exhaustively in the Holy Quran The Jews were destined to make mischief twice and twice they were to be driven off from the land of Palestine. From the records of history, we know that the Jews were driven from Jerusalem in 588 B.C., but God forgave them and they returned and also prospered. But they made mischief again. They mocked God’s prophets and persecuted Jesus (peace be on him). Thus the wrath of God fell on them more severely the second time in 70 A.D. They were completely routed by the Romans, their historical exodus took place and they settled in many parts of the world.

It may be that your Lord will have mercy upon you again but if ye revert to your sins, We shall repeat the punishment and We have appointed Hell a dungeon for the disbelievers. (XVII: 8).

In the above Ayat, God promises the Jews mercy yet, provided they give up their mischief and accept the Holy Quran as a book of guidance and thus be entitled to a “magnificent reward.” But the strange and unfortunate fact is that despite their severe punishment, the Jews still consider themselves the chosen people of God.

3The one unsurpassing beauty of Islam is that the God of our faith is a universal God and that no one, not even the Muslims, are a “chosen people.” Those alone are the chosen people who are true Momins (righteous, pious believers) who do not associate gods with God. Therefore the Muslims are as liable to punishment from God as the Jews and other nations. Consequently, we Muslims too have lost Jerusalem twice; once when lust and greed divided us into small and land-hungry states. Subsequently, however, we were united under the pious and inspiring leadership of Sultan Salah-ud-din Ayubi and drove out the Crusaders whose vast army comprised all the Christian states of those days. Now we are again divided and have degenerated to such an extent that many of our acts and deeds are not only repulsive and repugnant to Islam but are indeed flagrant violations of its basic tenets. We Muslims do deserve God’s punishment which came when the Arabs, under President Nasser, were recently defeated—a most shameful and devastating defeat ever suffered by the Muslims in all history. If even now they do not turn to God but rely on help from Moscow or Washington and continue their intrigues against one another, they will be inviting more shame and more crushing defeat. The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is not the defeat of Islam; it is the defeat of Arab socialism and Arab nationalism. But will the Arab nationalists and socialists return to Islam? Nay, in their shameful defeat they are blaming Islam as their scapegoat! They are deaf, dumb and blind who are bent upon destroying themselves, but in their pride and folly, they will not give up their mischief despite their shameful defeat.¹

Recently my aunt who lives in New York sent me the following newsclipping which in her letter she 4enthusiastically praised as a hopeful beginning of a reconciliation between the Muslims and Jews:

“A MUSLIM ADDRESSES JEWS AT A CATSKILL CONVENTION” “A Muslim joined a rabbi on the platform yesterday at the United Synagogue of America convention on Kismesha Lake in the Catskills. It was the first time the Conservative Jewish organization had extended such an invitation to a Muslim. Dr. Muhammad Abd-ur-Rauf, Director of the Islamic Centre of New York City, which serves 60,000 Muslims, told his Jewish audience: “There is no use being in isolation. When you come together, you realize you are human beings. There is a common core of understanding each other’s cause, religious values and aspirations as well as the extent of our differences. Dr. Rauf said Muslims mistakenly had been accused of being hostile to Jews. Rabbi Henry Siegman, executive vice-president of the Synagogue Council of America said: “The bitterness that has marked the modern encounter between Arab and Jew must not be allowed to obscure the fact that Judaism and Islam enjoy an affinity. If there is ever to occur a genuine reconciliation between Arab and Jew, as surely there must and will, then the basis of this reconciliation must be the shared religious values and the legacy of a cultural symbiosis unique in history.”²

Coming in the wake of the recent Zionist aggression against Egypt, Jordan and Syria (June 5–9, 1967) where the most brutal atrocities were committed upon the Arabs with napalm, large chunks of Arab territory illegally occupied with the forcible expulsion of thousands of starving refugees, crowned with the Jewish conquest of Jerusalem and the desecration of the Bait ul-Muqqadas and the threat of further aggression at any 5moment to occupy the Suez Canal combined with a claim to the right to hold Medina because Jews were dominant there before the victory of Islam—this event is most shocking! It further raises the question as to whether or not any basis exists for a reconciliation and peaceful co-existence between Muslim and Jew on the foundation of Islamic teachings.

Let us now examine what our Holy Quran has to say on this subject.

The second and much of the third Surahs of Holy Quran are explicitly addressed to the Jews where Allah has revealed that because they were the only people of antiquity who adhered to ethical monotheism, they were preferred by Him to all other nations and blessed with the greatest prophets and divine revelations in the Torah, the Psalms of David and the Gospel of Jesus (peace be upon him). However, God tells us in Holy Quran that for the sake of nationalism and racist pride, the Jews were guilty of the unpardonable sin of deliberately distorting their scriptures with interpolations and false interpretations and persecuting every prophet who was sent to redeem them. When the Jews of Medina rejected the mission of our Holy Prophet with an intense vehemence because they could not accept as their religious guide an unlettered Arab, the Holy Quran warns us that together with the idolaters, they will always be the fiercest and most treacherous of all our enemies. Holy Quran then curses them with exile, persecution and every kind of wretchedness until Resurrection Day when the disbelievers among them will be condemned to eternal punishment in Hell! Holy Quran furthermore warns (5:51) 6that Muslims must not take the Jews or Christians for friends; they are the friends of each other and that whoever takes them for a friend has become one of them! God has punished the Muslims today (particularly in Zionist-occupied Palestine) with one calamity after another for shamelessly flouting this crucial injunction!

It is also reported in the Mishkat (a collection of the most authentic Hadith) that the Apostle of Allah predicted prior to the Hour of the destruction of this world, the Muslims will fight so much with the Jews and kill them until the survivors seek protection behind stones and trees which will then proclaim: “Oh Muslim warrior, servant of Allah, this is the Jew hiding behind me so come and kill him!”

How does the subsequent history of Jewish-Muslim relationships confirm or deny any possibility for friendly co-existence?

It is a fact that although the Jews of Medina had foretold the coming of another Prophet and some of their more learned rabbis even recognized the truth of Muhammad’s (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) mission, despite repeated treaties of cooperation which at the first opportunity were broken, they proved to be the most treacherous of all the enemies of the Muslims, to such an extent that despite such close religious and racial affinities, the Jewish poets in Arabia went so far as to slander the honour of chaste Muslim women and praise the idolatry of the pagans as better than Islam! It was the wife of a slain Jewish warrior of Khaybar who put poison into the food of the Holy Prophet which caused the illness eventually 7resulting in his death. Although after the conquest by the Muslims of Arabia, the Jews were at first allowed to live as a protected minority, they proved so treacherous and disloyal that finally Hazarat Umar ordered their wholesale expulsion to Syria. Muslim historians have charged Jewish hypocrisy and treachery under Abdullah bin Saba as responsible for the disturbances during the rule of Hazrat Uthman which finally ended in his martyrdom and the downfall of the pious Khalifate after the assassination of Hazrat Ali five years later. Many Muslim scholars lay the responsibility for the development of Mutazilism and other equally futile scholastic controversies as a product of some sophisticated Jews who hypocritically embraced Islam and then tried their best to subvert the faith with all kinds of innovations and heresies.

As early as 720 A.D., a Syrian Jew, Serene, organized a campaign for the capture of Jerusalem. He was defeated and slain. Some thirty years later, Obaidiah Abu Isa ben Ishaq of Isfahan led a Jewish revolt which failed. During the first Crusade, the Jewish communities were dreaming of a Messianic revival and were disillusioned by being massacred in Jerusalem along with the Muslims by the Christian crusaders. About 1125, a Messiah appeared in southern Arabia; the impostor was exposed by Maimonides. The Jews turned against the Muslims when the Mongols attacked and it was the Mongols who almost exterminated the Jewish community of Iraq at the destruction of Baghdad in 1258 A.D. In Spain, the son of the petition-writer, Samuel, who had been raised by Muslim magnanimity to the office and status of Prime Minister and Prince, was appointed to succeed his father to his office and title in 1055. He so lost his head that he began to dress like royalty and ridicule the Quran. He 8was killed in an Arab revolt in 1066. The Ottoman Empire was the haven of persecuted Jews fleeing Europe. Here too, peace, protection and prosperity turned the heads of the Jews. In 1648, Sabbatai, a Spanish immigrant, declared that he was the Messiah. His fame spread among Jews of Venice, Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. He was received with frenzied enthusiasm in Smyrna in 1665. When, however, he was arrested and brought before the Sultan, he forgot all about his divine mission and embraced Islam. Strangely enough, Sabbatai’s followers transferred their allegiance to his brother-in-law, Jacob, who was revered as a Messiah, even as the incarnation of God. When, however, investigations commenced, he too embraced Islam and brought along most of his followers to form a new sect, half-Jewish half-Muslim called the Donmehs. The followers of this sect would visit mosques as well as the synagogues.³

This Jewish sect combined with the Freemasons to dominate the “Young Turk” movement which overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908 and, with the Ottoman defeat in World War I and the rise of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, finally resulted in the complete destruction of the dynasty, the empire it ruled and the Khalifate in 1924.

But generally, with only relatively few exceptions, Jewish-Muslim relations were tolerably friendly from the crushing defeat the Jews suffered at the hands of the armies of the Holy Prophet at Medina until the rise of the modern Zionist movement. The Abbassid dynasty in what is today Iraq, the Ummayyad dynasty in Spain and Ottoman Turkey were especially hospitable to the Jews where they prospered and flourished 9in large numbers. Today it is difficult for a Muslim to believe that the generation of his grandfather knew no enmity towards his Jewish neighbour. Here is a description of such friendly Muslim-Jewish relationships in Jerusalem at the turn of the century:

That Muslims should co-exist peacefully with Christians is to be expected since Islam embraces many of the tenets of Christianity and recognises the spirituality of Christ: but that they should have been equally tolerant of Jews may seem strange when one thinks of the bitter strife between the two communities which the land was to witness only twenty years later. But the Jews who lived in Jerusalem in those days were very different from the Zionists who came afterwards. A few of them were descendants of families who had clung on in the country after the Diaspora but the majority were Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had found refuge in it after being expelled from Spain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and most of them were still entitled to the protection of the Spanish or some other foreign Consul because they had never taken Ottoman nationality. Whatever their origins, all these Jews were Arabic-speaking, ate Arab food (except the meat as it was not Kosher), enjoyed Arabic music and apart from a few Ashkenazim from Central Europe who had come into the country in the 19th century, and for the most part wore black Kaftans and skull caps with their hair in long ringlets, dressed as the Arabs did.

With them the Muslims and the Christian Arabs associated on terms of virtual equality. On the Government level, non-discrimination had been a principle of Turkish policy ever since the Congress of Berlin a quarter of a century earlier and within the Ottoman Empire, Jews enjoyed as complete protection as anywhere in the world. They could aspire to the highest offices of State and indeed exercised great influence in Constantinople; under the regime of Capitulations still in force, those of them with foreign 10subjection could be sued only in the Consular Court of their nationality while under the parallel millet system even those who were Turkish citizens had the right to demand that any matter of personal status affecting them should be tried in their Rabbinical court—though many of them preferred voluntarily to refer such cases to the Muslim Shari’at Court. They were perfectly acceptable socially; Musa bey Alami recalls that a family of Jews originally from Aleppo were among the closest friends of his parents and were almost nightly at their house; and it was thought quite natural that not only he but several of his contemporaries, including at least two who subsequently became political leaders and violent opponents of Zionism, should have had “Jewish foster-brothers” at birth. Jews moreover filled a useful role in society. They were greatly in demand by Muslim notables and businessmen as secretaries and personal assistants, not only on account of their native intelligence but because many of them, having been educated at private schools where Arabic was better taught than in Government schools which the Muslims usually frequented, spoke and wrote better Arabic than many Muslims. In the countryside, most villages were dependent for their repairs and technical work generally, on itinerant Jewish artisans who worked a certain circuit, spending a night or two in each village and living entirely with the people by whom they were welcomed. Jewesses too, were prized in the towns by the better-class Muslim women who seldom ventured into the market to do the household shopping as they were trustworthy, and also hard bargainers and also as dressmakers for their contacts with co-religionists in Europe kept them abreast of the fashions. Musa bey Alami’s mother, Zulaikha, had one who spent days on end in her household.

Few of these Jews could have known and fewer cared that in 1897, the very year of Musa bey Alami’s birth, the First Annual Congress of the newly formed Zionist Organization held in Basle, had adopted as a goal “the establishment of Palestine as the National Home of the Jewish 11People.” It had no practical effect at the time; but it was the cloud no larger than a man’s hand which fifty years later, was to become a hurricane to tear the country asunder and destroy the way of life of the Arab inhabitants.⁴

The rise of the modern Zionist movement brought more than a thousand years of friendly Muslim-Jewish relationships to an abrupt end, with the result that since the days of the Holy Prophet never has Jewish hatred towards Muslims nor Muslim hatred for Jews been more bitter than at the present time.

The most destructive of all Jewish conspiracies in history against the Muslims is the rise of the modern Zionist movement. Until the proclamation of the Bolfour Declaration in 1917, the relation between Christendom and Jewry was one of unremitting hostility, blackened by interminable chronicles of persecutions, massacres, oppressive measures which segregated the Jew of medieval Europe into the squalid ghetto as a pariah and impoverished them by denying them the right to own land, all means of livelihood except small-scale trade and usury. The increasing secularization of European society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries broke down the ghetto and facilitated the cultural assimilation of the Jews into modern Western civilization, but the Dreyfus scandal in France and the intensified persecution of the Jews in Russia, Poland and other eastern European countries during the last days of the Czar, provoked the leading Jewish intellectuals of that time into the conviction that the Jews could never enjoy complete 12or genuine eqality with the gentiles unless they possessed a sovereign state of their own in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 marked a turning point in Jewish-Christian relations. Through the clever diplomacy of Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann (see his took, Trial and Error) and David Ben-Gurion (see his book, The Rebirth and Destiny of Israel), Zionism joined hands with British imperialism to crush the political, economic and cultural independence of the Muslim world. After World War II, the American Government under the Truman administration, succumbed to Zionist pressure (as related in detail in Alfred Lilienthal’s What Price Israel? Chicago, 1953) which resulted in the state of “Israel.” The aggressive consiracy of Zionism against the neighbouring Arab-Muslim countries was glaringly exposed when “Israel”, France and England made their combined attack upon Egypt in November 1956 to capture the newly-nationalized Suez Canal, and America’s and England’s enthusiastic support of “Israel” in her brutal invasion of Egypt, Jordan and Syria on June 5–9, 1967. The growing friendship of Christendom with Jewry was climaxed at the end of 1964, when Pope Paul dared reverse the most fundamental Christian dogma regarding the martyrdom of Christ (peace be upon him) and declared that the Jews must henceforth be absolved of all responsibility for the events leading to his alleged crucifixion.

“World Jewry has already conquered the Roman Catholic Church in the sense that Jewish thinking now dominates there and they are able to effect changes in the basic creed of Christianity. The most 13astounding example of this is the Jewish success in amending the Catholic belief about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ at the hands of the Jews. Indeed the Jews had been at pains since long to do something about that. They made a very long term plan and trained a large number of Jewish scholars and intellectuals in the beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. They rose higher and higher in the Catholic priestly hierarchy until their influence at the top levels grew so strong that they were able to achieve whatever they liked.” Thus during the Oecumenical Council which held from September 14th to November 21,1964, the Vatican decided to absolve the Jews of all responsibility for the alleged death of Jesus by crucifixion. The Jewish conspiracy in this regard is too obvious to need any more comment.⁵ The Text runs as follows:

As this Sacred Synod searches into the mystery of the Church, it remembers the bonds that ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham’s stock. With a grateful heart, the Church of Christ acknowledges that according to God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election were already among the patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ—Abraham’s sons according to faith—were included in the same patriarch’s call, likewise that her salvation is typically foreshadowed by the Chosen People’s exodus from the land of bondage. The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament from the people with whom God in His ineffable mercy concluded the former Covenant. Nor can she forget that she feeds 14upon the root of that cultivated olive tree onto which the wild shoots of the Gentiles have been grafted. Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross that Christ, our Peace reconciled the Jews and Gentiles, making both one. The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: “Theirs is the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs and of them is the Christ according to the flesh, the Son of Mary, the Virgin” (Romans 9:4–5). No less does she recall that the Apostles, the mainstay of the Church and her pillars as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ’s gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people. Even though a large part of the Jews did not accept the Gospel, they remain dear to God for the sake of the patriarchs. This is the witness of the Apostles as if the utterance that God’s gifts and call are irrevocable. In company with the prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits the day known to God alone on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and serve Him shoulder to shoulder. Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is of such magnitude, this Sacred Synod wants to support and recommend their mutual knowledge and respect, acknowledge and respect that are the fruit above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues. Moreover, this Synod in her rejection of injustice of whatever kind and wherever inflicted upon men, remains mindful of that common patrimony and so deplores, indeed condemns hatred and persecutions of Jews whether they arose in former or in our own days. May they never present the Jewish people as one rejected, cursed or guilty of deicide. All that happened to Christ in His passion cannot be attributed to the whole people then alive, much less to that of today. Besides, the Church has always held and holds now that Christ underwent His passion and death freely because of the sins of all men and out of infinite love. It is therefore the burden of Christian preaching to proclaim 15the Cross of Christ as the sign of God’s all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows.⁶

So destructive a role has Jewry played against the integrity of the Muslim world (particularly since the rise of the modern Zionist movement under the leadership of Theodor Herzl in 1896) that more than one Muslim thinker has made the sweeping charge that “Jews have always collaborated with the enemies of the Muslims and that whenever a calamity struck in Islamic history, Jews have been responsible, directly or indirectly, overtly or covertly.”⁷

The irreconcilability of the welfare of the Jews as opposed to the interests of the Muslims has prevailed throughout history but the significant exceptions must not be forgotten. However much the Quran may curse the Jews for their sins and transgressions, the revelation from Allah neverthless declares that not all of them were guilty and that some of the Bani Israil can be included as among the true believers. All the most important Prophets mentioned in Holy Quran before Muhammad (peace and blessing of Allah be upon him) were of the Bani Israil and it is a fact of history that the Jews were the only people of antiquity who not only professed ethical monotheism but whose very existence centered round this faith. Under Greek and Roman domination, they put up the most strenuous resistance against paganism. The Jewish rebellions 16against the Greeks and Romans were not motivated by secular patriotism but inspired with the passionate zeal to defend and preserve the faith in the unity of God and the necessity to obey the divine law in the Torah. There was Hannah who gladly sacrificed the lives of all seven of her sons as martyrs because they refused to forsake their faith in God and the Torah and would not under any circumstances bow down before the idols of their conquerors. There were Jews who preferred to be tortured to death rather than eat swine-flesh or any other forbidden food. Under the rule of the Greeks, there were many rabbis who condemned their pagan practices in the strongest and most vehement terms and who refused to tolerate their gymnasiums and stadiums where the participating athletes performed stark naked in honour of their gods. Before the advent of Christianity, the Jews put up the fiercest resistance against the sadism of the Roman “games” where gladiators fought each other to the death and thousands of animals were subjected to the cruelest mutilation and suffering, not to mention the tens of thousands of human victims who perished in the arena for the amusement of the Roman mobs. These are the Jews who may well be included as among the believers. (God knows best).

That the Jews of Arabia vehemently rejected the mission of our Holy Prophet, not on religious but racial grounds, is made clear by Holy Quran where it is stated (XXV: 197) the learned rabbis knew his message was true. It was their nationalist pride which made an unlettered Prophet from among the Arabs utterly unacceptable to them as their guide, even 17though the Arabs were their nearest kin. There were others among the Jews who embraced Islam hypocritically in order to subvert it from within. But there were still some Jews who became sincere Muslims such as Abdullah ibn Salam and Mukhairiq, both of whom had been learned rabbis in Medina and the latter a man of considerable property, all of which he gladly sacrificed for the Islamic cause. One of the earliest authentic biographies of the Holy Prophet by Ibn Ishaq tells us that Safiya, the wife of the Jewish chieftain of Khaybar, had recognized the truth of the Holy Prophet’s mission and wanted to embrace Islam long before the decisive battle of Khaybar took place when her husband was slain. After the battle, Safiya became one of the wives of the Holy Prophet and is held in esteem by all Muslims as among the Mothers of the Believers. In the Mishkat-ul-Masabih there is a Hadith where Anas reported that Hafsah (another of the Prophet’s wives, the daughter of Hazrat Umar and noted for quick temper and sharp tongue), taunted Safiya because of her Jewish origin. When Safiya came to the Prophet weeping, he comforted her by saying, “You are certainly the daughter of a Prophet and now you are the wife of a Prophet so what has she to boast over you?” The Prophet then rebuked Hafsah and reminded her to fear Allah. (Tirmidhi, Nisai) In modern times among exceptional sincere converts of Jewish origin were Kiamil Pasha, a Grand Vizier under Sultan Abdul Hamid II and even more recently, the Austrian-born (1901-) Muhammad Asad (formerly Leopold Weiss) who embraced Islam in 1927 and 18became a noted Arabic scholar and an authority on Islamic Law. While I saw still living in New York after my conversion in 1961, of all my Muslim acquaintances the most gentle, steadfastly devout and deeply pious was a young pharmacist with a long, full red beard named Ameer Rashid whose father was born a Jew in Vienna and embraced Islam in 1924 but whose mother remained Jewish. Fortunately this caused no domestic strife and his mother and father continued to be happily married despite their religious differences. In 1957 both father and son performed Haj and Umrah and on their journey home, Ameer Rashid had taken a beautiful Turkish wife. During my youth, my growing sympathy for Islam enraged the other Jews I knew who accused me of being a traitor to my own people. Repeatedly they warned me that even if tried to become a Muslim, because of their intense hatred for Jews, they would never accept me. Much Zionist propaganda was printed in New York at that time condemning the Muslims and particularly the Arab Muslims, as no different from the Nazis in their attempts to exterminate the Jews in Palestine. How happy I was to find that none of these charges contained any truth! I have never been stigmatized by any Muslim since my conversion because of my Jewish origin and as soon as I became a Muslim, I found myself at once welcomed most enthusiastically as one of them. This proves that whatever hostility exists between Jews and Muslims, is based upon ideological and not racial grounds.

Among the redeeming exceptions in the history of Jewish-Muslim relationships, have been a number of 19eminent Jews who, although may be lacking in any feeling of loyalty to Muslim rule or sympathy for the Islamic cause, still could not be considered as our avowed enemies either. Included in this category are the entire galaxy of Jewish scholars who lived under Muslim rule, such as Saadia ben Joseph, Gaon of the Jewish Academy of Sura (Iraq) in the 9th century who after Rashi is regarded by Jews as their greatest biblical commentator and who so zealously defended the Talmud against the Qaraite rationalist heresy, that Maimonides said were it not for him, the Torah would have disappeared; and such Jewish luminaries in eleventh-century Muslim Spain as the poet-philosopher, Solomon; Ibn Gabriol: the poet, Moses ben Ezra, the poet and biblical commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra; the Jewish mystic, Bahya Ibn Pakuda who wrote his religious treatise on Duties of the Heart and the greatest of all the Jewish poets in Muslim Spain, Yehuda Ha-Levi. Besides his poetry, Yehuda Ha-Levi also won fame for his essay entitled the Kuzari which is a dialogue between the King of the Khazars in Russia and a rabbi arguing why Judaism is supposedly superior to Christianity and Islam. Paradoxically, although this was intended for missionary endeavour, the Kuzari argued not only for the religious supremacy but also for the racial superiority of the Jews as well. In the eighth century, the Khazars had accepted Judaism only to have their kingdom crushed by the Slavic Russians two centuries afterwards. In contrast to the wretched conditions of the Jews in Christian-dominated medieval Europe, Ha-Levi felt no gratitude for the benefits he enjoyed under Muslim rule but described 20himself in his poetry as “enslaved in Arab chains.” Continually he lamented broken-hearted over the ruins of Zion until at last he went to Palestine where it was rumored that he was slain there by an Arab although this was never confirmed. All these Jews under Muslim rule wrote either in Arabic or Arabic using Hebrew script. Their devotional poetry is included as an integral part of the standard orthodox Jewish prayer-book recited by the pious Jew daily in the synagogue.

The greatest and most famous of all the eminent Jews under the rule of the Muslims was Musa ibn Maimun, better known as Maimonides. Born in Spain, he and his family were compelled to flee to Morocco due to the decline of Muslim power and the vicious anti-Jewish propaganda of the Dominican order. Maimonides received his higher education at the Qarawiyin University Mosque in Fez. When he fell among Berber fanatics, in order to save his life, he pretended to be a Muslim for some nine years. In search of better conditions, he finally migrated to Cairo where he spent the remainder of his life. On his reversion to Judaism in Egypt, he was charged by his enemies with apostasy. However, when brought before the Qadi, he declared that since Maimonides had never accepted Islam sincerely or voluntarily and the Holy Quran forbids forcible conversion, he was not guilty and therefore no punishment could be inflicted upon him. In defence of the Jewish faith, Maimonides wrote in Arabic his Guide to the Perplexed, where he tried to base all his arguments on rational grounds and harmonize Greek philosophy with Divine revelation. Maimonides also practiced medicine and was so highly 21esteemed in this field that Salah-ud-din Ayubi chose him for his personal physician. After his death, his medical works, which were strongly influenced by Ibn Sina and al-Razi, were completed by his sister’s son who was a Muslim. It is significant that Abraham, a son of Maimonides and also a leader of the Jewish community of Cairo, was eager to change the established synagogue service and make it more like the mosque, reintroducing prostrations into the Jewish prayers, making his congregation kneel upon the matted or carpeted floor instead of sitting upon cushioned benches and insisting upon the order and decorum which the long drawn-out ritual of the synagogue customarily lacks. His reforms, however, were not successful.

Moritz Steinschneider, an outstanding German-Jewish scholar, in his Introduction to the Arabic Literature of the Jews which he wrote at the age of ninety, compared the German-Jewish with the Arab-Jewish symbiosis, regarding the two as of equal importance. Here, however, I venture to disagree with the great master. Despite their relative importance, none of the creations of the Jewish authors writing in German or conceived under the impact of modern Western civilization has reached all parts of the Jewish people or has influenced the personal inner life of every Jew to the profound degree as did the great Jewish writers who belonged to the medieval civilization of Arab Islam. The reason for this differnce is self-evident. Modern Western civilization, like the ancient civilization of the Greeks, is essentially at variance with the religious culture of the Jewish people. Islam, however, is from the very flesh and bone of Judaism. It is, so to say, a recast, an enlargement of the latter just as Arabic is closely related to Hebrew. Therefore Judaism could draw freely 22and copiously from Muslim civilization and at the same time preserve its independence and integrity far more completely than it was able to in the modern world or in the Hellenistic society of Alexandria. It is very instructive to compare the utterances of Jewish authors of the Middle Ages about Islam and the Arabs with those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which deal with a surrounding culture, for instance, Germanism and Judaism by Hermann Cohen. In Cohen’s book, Judaism is “justified” because it is regarded (rightly or wrongly) as essentially identical with the highest attainments of German thinking. However, most of the Jewish authors of the Middle Ages who wrote in Arabic, never had the slightest doubt about the absolute superiority of Judaism. I emphasize this fact, not because I believe that such an attitude should be adopted in our times, but simply as an indication that Judaism inside Islam was an autonomous culture sure of itself, despite and possibly because of its intimate connection with its environment. Never has Judaism encountered such a close and fructitious symbiosis as that with the medieval civilizations of Arab Islam.⁸

However, the Jews could not be satisfied with their status as dhimmis under Muslim rule. Therefore this Jewish scholar in the same book qualifies his glowing tribute to the magnanimity of Muslim culture and after condemning the practice of the Shariah in modern Saudi Arabia and Yemen, he writes:

Far more serious is the professed aim of the Muslim Brotherhood, which boasts of the allegiance of the majority of the Egyptian people, to reinstate Islam as the law of the state. If the Muslim Brotherhood and their counterparts 23in other countries have their way, it would mean inexorably that Egypt and the other countries involved would relapse into the position of medieval states with local Christians and Jews reduced to the status of second-class citizens. The leaders of the military revolution in Egypt understood this issue only too well and fought the Brotherhood. For a religious law, a law professedly made by God Himself, can never be changed in such essentials as the position of the “unbelievers”; therefore, the only way to honor it under entirely changed conditions is not to use it. The introduction of modern civil codes in Egypt and Turkey has done no harm to Islam but rather saved it from becoming a target of justified criticism. The very idea that Egypt could give up attainments made eighty years ago when a modern civil code was first introduced, sounds really preposterous. This lapse into contemporary issues lends color to the exposition of Jewish-Arab relations under Islam. As we have seen, the position of the Jews inside Arab Muslim society was relatively better than enjoyed by them in Christian medieval Europe. But only relatively. In principle, they and the other non-Muslims were second-class citizens and consequently their position was always precarious and often actually dangerous. No discrimination on any grounds, religious or otherwise, can be the basis of a completely satisfactory symbiosis.⁹

This quotation is representative of modern Jewish scholarship as a whole and provides sufficient proof that the Jews are the most implacable enemies of an Islamic revival.

Now let us examine the beliefs and practices of Judaism, taking special note where they agree with Islam, where they differ and for what reasons.

24The creed of Judaism, known as the Shema runs as follows:

“Shema Yisroel! Adonoi elaheynu adonoi achud!”

which means, “Hear, Oh Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is One!”

The Shema is to Jews what the Kalimah is to Muslims and as every pious Muslim yearns to die reciting the Kalimah, the pious Jew dies with the Shema on his lips. The remainder of the Shema in detail reads:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and you shall speak of them when you are sitting at home and when you go on a journey, when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them for a sign on your hand and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. You shall inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4–9).

The ethics of Judaism is based upon “The Ten Commandments” (Exodus 10:1–17).

God spoke all these words saying:

1. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
2. You shall have no other gods beside Me! You shall not make for yourself any idols in the shape of anything that is in the heaven above or that is on the earth below or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor worship them for I, the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the sins of their fathers down to the third or fourth generation of those who hate Me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments.
   • 253. You shall not utter the name of the Lord, your God in vain for the Lord will not hold guiltless any one who utters His name in vain.
3. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work but on the seventh day, which is a day of rest in honor of the Lord your God, you shall not do any work, neither you nor your son nor your daughter nor your male or female servant nor your cattle nor the stranger who is within your gates, for in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth and all that they contain and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and sanctified it.
4. Honor your father and mother that you may live long in the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
5. You shall not murder.
6. You shall not commit adultery.
7. You shall not steal.
8. You shall not testify against your neighbor.
9. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his servant, male or female, nor his ox nor his ass or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

There is also the further commandment in Leviticus that:

“You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

Maimonides summarized the doctrines of Judaism in his Thirteen Principles of Faith which the pious Jew faithfully recites in the synagogue daily:

1. I firmly believe that the Creator, blessed be His name, is the Creator and Ruler of all created beings, and that He alone has made, does make and ever will make all things.
2. I firmly believe that the Creator, blessed be His name, is One; that there is no Oneness in any form like His; and that He alone was, is, and ever will be our God.
   • 263. I firmly believe that the Creator, blessed be His name, is not corporeal, that no bodily accidents apply to Him and that there exists nothing whatever that resembles Him.
3. I firmly believe that the Creator, blessed be His name, was the first and will be the last.
4. I firmly believe that the Creator, blessed be His name, is the only One to Whom it is proper to address our prayers and that we must not pray to anyone or anything else.
5. I firmly believe that all the words of the Prophets are true.
6. I firmly believe that the prophecy of Moses, our teacher (may he rest in peace), was true and that he was the chief of the prophets both of those who preceded and those who followed him.
7. I firmly believe that the whole Torah which we now possess is the same which was given to Moses, our teacher, (may he rest in peace)!
8. I firmly believe that this Torah will not be changed and that there will be no other Torah given by the Creator, blessed be His name.
9. I firmly believe that the Creator, blessed be His name, knows all the actions and thoughts of human beings, as it is said: “It is He who fashions the hearts of them all and He who notes all their deeds.” (Psalm 33:15).
10. I firmly believe that the Creator, blessed be His name, rewards those who keep His commandments and punishes those who transgress them.
11. I firmly believe in the coming of the Messiah and although he may tarry, I daily wait for his coming.
12. I firmly believe that there will be a resurrection of the dead at a time which will please the Creator, blessed and exalted be His name for ever and ever.

For Thy salvation I hope, Oh Lord! I hope Oh Lord, for Thy salvation! O Lord, Thy salvation I hope!

27Like Islam, Judaism is strictly monotheistic. No believing Jew doubts the unity of God. But from the Muslim point of view, the monotheism of Judaism is ruined by its nationalistic, exclusive overtones which are reflected even in the Shema, Although theoretically the Jew professes to believe in God as the Creator and Ruler of the universe and all mankind, in their scriptures He is mainly concerned with the Jews as His chosen people. True enough, the pious Jew will insist that God preferred the Bani Israil, not on racial grounds, but because they alone of all the nations in the world accepted the Covenant to obey His divine laws as revealed to Moses. However, it cannot be denied that Jews have always considered this Covenant as binding only upon themselves. Not only do Jews fail to preach their faith to others but they do not welcome converts. In all history I know of only two instances where non-Jews accepted Judaism en masse—in Yemen some centuries prior to the birth of our Holy Prophet and the tiny, short-lived kingdom of the Khazars, who were of Tartar origin, in Russia. Whenever a rare convert does enter the Jewish fold, (which is almost always due to marriage because Jewish law does not recognize the marriage of a Jew to a non-Jew), his motivations are suspect. Other Jews will question him as to why he wants to take upon himself the burden of their Law and endure all the persecution, discrimination, oppression and other troubles which have always been their fate? One of my acquaintances in New York, a beautiful young Christian girl, was intent upon marrying a Jew. She told me that in order to marry this man, 28it was mandatory for her to accept Judaism as her faith and for this purpose she went daily to the synagogue where she was carefully instructed by the rabbi. She further confided to me that if the rabbi so chose, he had the power to reject her as a Jew so that she could never marry him! One of my mother’s best friends during my childhood was a blonde German refugee who had married a Jew, but despite her fervent belief in the faith of Judaism, she was never accepted by the Jewish community on the same basis as a born Jew. Although there are exceptions to this rule of excluding converts (as illustrated in the moving story of Ruth in the Bible), the intolerance of nationalism permeates every aspect of Jewish life. Even the most deeply pious Jew who insists that the only raison d’etre of the Bani Israil is to uphold God’s holy Torah and obey His Divine laws, will in the same breath declare without hesitation that anyone born of Jewish parents is always a Jew even should he or she embrace atheism and renounce all the beliefs and practices of the Jewish religion! Most modern Jews today have done exactly that! In the orthodox Yeshiva University in New York, I was struck by the prominent place given to a portrait of Albert Einstein, the celebrated mathematician and scientist, hung on the wall in the office of the rabbi. Even though Einstein never adhered to any of the beliefs or practices of Judaism, his Jewish ancestry is sufficient to inspire even the most pious rabbis to point to him with the greatest pride and regard his scientific achievements as part of the cultural heritage of the Jews. Jews regard Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx in a similar fashion. Shortly 29after the establishment of the state of “Israel” in 1948, I remember listening to an interview over the radio where a Zionist leader asked a prominent rabbi of New York which the faith of Judaism regarded as more important—belief in God’s Torah and obedience to its laws or loyalty to the Jewish people? Without any hesitation, the rabbi replied that loyalty to the Jewish people was far more essential to Judaism than belief in God. How characteristic this is of Jews everywhere! The nationalism and racism of Judaism have reduced it to the narrow, parochial and moribund faith that it is today. It virtually nullifies their profession of God as the Creator and Ruler of the universe and mankind. It degrades their whole concept of monotheism.

Like the Christian New Testament, the Jewish Old Testament frequently portrays God in the colors of the crudest materialism: As the Bible tells us about Moses receiving the Covenant of the sacred Law on Mount Sinai:

And it came to pass as Moses entered into the taberncale, the cloudy pillar descended and stood at the door of the tabernacle and the Lord talked with Moses. And all the people saw the cloudy pillar stand at the tabernacle door and all the people rose up and worshipped, every man at his tent door. And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend…. And he (Moses) said, I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory, and He (God) said, Thou cannot see My face for there shall be no man to see Me and live….But I will take away Mine hand and thou shalt see My back parts¹⁰ but My face shall not be seen. (Exodus: Chapter 35).

30Here is how the Holy Quran corrects this blasphemous interpolation of the Jewish scriptures:

And when We did appoint for Moses thirty nights (of solitude on Mount Sinai) and added to them ten and he completed the whole time appointed by his Lord of forty nights and Moses said unto his brother (Aaron), Take my place among the people. Do right and follow not the way of mischief-makers. And when Moses came to Our appointed place and his Lord had spoken unto him, he said: My Lord! Show Me Thyself that I may gaze upon Thee. He (God) said: Thou wilt not see Me but gaze upon the mountain! If it stand still in its place, then thou wilt see Me. And when his Lord revealed His glory to the mountain, He sent it crashing down. And Moses fell down senseless. And when he woke, he said. Glory unto Thee! I turn unto Thee repentant and I am the first of true believers. He (God) said, O Moses! I have preferred thee above mankind by My messages and and by My speaking unto thee so obey that which I have given thee (the Covenant) and be among the thankful. (VII: 142–144).

Judaism confirms the belief in the prophets but what a contrast the prophets in the Bible display from our Holy Quran! Moses is regarded by Jews with the same supremacy as Muslims regarded Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), because it was to him that God revealed the Covenant of all the laws which are regarded as the sacred and only authoritative code of life that all Jews are obliged to follow. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David. Solomon and Job, although revered by the Jews as patriarchs and kings, are not regarded as prophets by the Bible. Lesser prophets of the later books of the 31Old Testament which command great respect among Jews and Christians, such as Isaiah, Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, Nathan and Daniel are not mentioned in our Quran. For Ismail (peace be upon him) who is given the dignity of a genuine Prophet in Quran, Jews have nothing but contempt and thus their scriptures condemn him as “a wild man of the desert whose hand shall be against every man and every man’s hand raised against him.” The Jewish contempt for Ismail as the ancestor of the Arabs is clearly based on racial grounds.

And Sarah saw the son of Hagar, the Egyptian, which she had borne unto Abraham, mocking. Wherefore she said unto Abraham, “Cast out this bondwoman and her son, Ishmael, for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, Isaac.” And the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight because of his son (Ishmael). And God said unto Abraham, “Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the lad and because of the bondwoman; in all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken to her voice, for in Isaac shall thy seed be called”….And Abraham rose up early in the morning and took bread and a bottle of water and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder and sent her and the child away and she departed and wandered into the wilderness of Beersheba …And the water was spent in the bottle and she cast the child under one of the shrubs….and she sat against him and lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the lad and the angel of God called to Hagar out of heaven and said unto her….“Arise, lift up the lad and hold him in thine hand for I will make him a great nation…..”. (Genesis 21:18).

For this reason, in the book of Genesis (chapter 22), it is Isaac whom God commands Abraham to sacrifice 32as a test for the steadfastness of his faith. The interpolation is very clear when God says to Abraham, “Take now thy son, thine only son, Isaac whom thou lovest and offer him to Me for a burnt offering….” Now it is a fact that Ismail was born before Isaac but the Jewish and Christian biblical commentators explain this away on the grounds that at Sarah’s demand, Ismail was disinherited because his mother, Hagar, was not his real wife but only a slave-concubine!

St. Paul’s Epsitles in the New Testament condemn Ismail and his descendants even more vehemently than the Old Testament.

Tell me ye that desire to be under the Law; do ye not hear the Law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, the one by the bondwoman, the other by the freewoman. But he (Ismail) who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh but he of the freewoman was by promise….Now we (Christian) brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. But since he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now. Nevertheless what saith the Scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman. So therefore we (Christians) brethren are not children of the bondwoman but of the free. (Gelatians 4:21–31)

Here the hostility of the Jews against the Arabs is evident even at this early date.

The Holy Quran corrects the Bible in making Ismail a genuine Prophet of God and his mother, Hagar, Abraham’s legitimate wife. Ismail was not disinherited nor cast out but together he and his father, Abraham, built the Kaaba in Mecca as the symbol of 33worship of the one true God and it was Ismail—not Isaac—whom God commands Abraham to sacrifice.

Even though they were Bani Israil by birth, the Jews furiously disowned John and Jesus Christ (peace be upon them) as heretics because the universal message they preached could not be reconciled with their fanatical racism and nationalism as the story of the Good Samaritan in the New Testament illustrates:

As if the people of Judea in the days of Jesus were not exasperated with “Jewish” political nationalism! They were soon going to be delivered from the opportunism of the Maccabee descendants who defiled pure Judaism and Jewishness through their political nationalism: greed on one hand and sycophantic imitation of Hellenism on the other. As I write these lines, I recall my long-forgotten childhood days, or rather nights, when my Heder and Yeshiva (elementary and higher Talmudical Hebrew schools) in Jerusalem called a complete halt to the study of the Torah and Talmud one night every winter. It must have been on Christmas eve, the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth. Our teacher then used to indulge in slighting traditional stories ridiculing Jesus Christ, the Acher (“Strange One”, “Other One”) or Yoshkeh Pandreh as we children were made to nickname Jesus.¹¹

Jews regard our Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) with the most intense hatred, condemn him as an impostor and our Holy Quran as a fraud! Not only were the Jews guilty of persecuting their prophets during their lifetimes but they have spared no effort to slander them after their deaths. For instance in the Book of Genesis, it is related that one day Noah became very drunk with wine and 34while he was lying uncovered inside his tent, one of his sons, Ham, entered and covered him. Because Ham accidentally saw his father’s nakedness, God turned his skin black and cursed all his descendants with slavery! As the Bani Israil gradually fell prey to pagan ideas, they portrayed their great prophets as criminals and sinners of the lowest order. Here are only a few examples of these vulgar and obscene stories to be found throughout the present versions of the Old Testament:

The Prophet Abraham is said to have administered an oath of loyalty to his servant when he was about to leave for Mesopotamia by putting his hand under his thigh in the pagan manner. (Genesis 24:2–7)

The Prophet Lot is alleged to have committed rape on his two daughters while staying at Segor after the destruction of Sodom and most shamelessly these girls are said to have given birth to the illegitimate children of their own father! (Genesis 9:29–36)

The Prophet Jacob is accused of cheating his father, Prophet Isaac (Ishaq) and then marrying two sisters at one time. (Genesis 29:15–18)

Then in the House of Jacob, his son is reported to have raped his daughter-in-law. (Samuel 13:172)

The Book of Kings in the Old Testament tells us that one day at dusk, while King David was gazing down from his palace roof, he saw a beautiful woman named Bethsabee bathing and immediately was stricken with unquenchable lust for her. David forcibly raped her and then treacherously slew her husband, Uriah so he could have her to himself. From this illicit union, Solomon was born! The Bible tells us 35that King Solomon “The Wise,” favoured pagan women for his wives and eventually turned to idol-worshipping. (II Samuel 2:1–17, 26–27)

Then Ammon, one of David’s sons, is alleged to have raped his sister. Although David was saddened, he did not punish him. At last David’s second son, Absalom killed Ammon and fled away. (II Samuel 13:11–14)

After that, Absalom became a rebel, fought against his father, David and defeated him. After capturing his father’s harem, he committed rape on all of his step-mothers in public in order to insult his father, the Prophet David. (II Samuel 16:21–22)

This is what the Jews have done to their Prophets! Even the most cursory comparison between the manner in which the Bible deals with the prophets in contrast to the Quran, which absolves them of all these crimes, reveals how the concept of prophecy has been degraded in the Jewish religion.

Islam literally means peace through submission to the will of God. The name “Judaism” is taken from one of the twelve tribes of Bani Israil. Therefore a Jew, literally speaking, belongs to the tribe of Judah. Thus the exclusive, nationalist character of this religion is reflected even in its name. Nevertheless, there were still some Jews who did attain peace through serene resignation to God’s will. For example, it is related in the Talmud:

It happened that while Rabbi Meir was lecturing in the House of Study on the afternoon of the Sabbath, his two sons died at home. Their mother laid them upon a bed and covered them with a sheet. At the termination of the 36Sabbath, the Rabbi returned to his home and asked where the children were. His wife said to him: “I want to ask you a question. Some time ago a person came here and entrusted a valuable article to my care and now he wants it back. Shall I restore it to him or not?” He answered, “Surely a pledge must be restored to its owner.” She then said, “Without asking for your consent I gave it back to Him.” Thereupon she removed the sheet from off the bodies. When he saw them, he wept bitterly and she said to her husband, “Did you not tell me that what has been entrusted to one’s keeping must be restored on demand? The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”¹²

This rabbi and his wife may have been true believers. (God knows best). Here is the Muslim counterpart with the identical morale:

Umm Sulaim (radhiallahu anha) was the mother of Anas (radhiallahu anha). After the death of her first husband, she was married to Abu Talhah Ansari and bore him a son named Abu Umair. Often the Holy Prophet visited the house to play with the child. One day Abu Umair fell ill while his father was fasting. While Abu Talhah was out at work, the child died. The mother washed and enshrouded the dead body and laid it on a cot. When her husband returned home and was partaking of his Iftar meal, he inquired about the child. The wife assured him that he was now in greater comfort than before. When they arose in the morning, the following conversation took place:

Umm Sulaim: “I have a question to ask you.”

Abu Talhah: “What is that?”

Umm Sulaim: “Suppose a person is entrusted with something. Should he restore on demand that which is entrusted to him or not?” 37Abu Talhah: “He must deliver up. He has no right to hold back.”

Umm Sulaim: “Abu Umair was entrusted to us by Allah. He has taken him back.”

When Abu Talhah began to weep, his wife said, “Then you must keep patience for your dead son!”¹³

Pious Jews sincerely believe that their holy books were divinely revealed. The first Five Books which contain the Mosaic Law are especially revered. In addition to the written Law recorded in the Khumesh or Five Books, Jews are taught to believe that the Prophet Moses (peace be upon him) received from God on Mount Sinai the oral Law as well. Both were intended to be complementary to each other. For centuries the oral Law of the Jews was kept alive in the memory of the priestly Levites and Cohens but after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D. and the wholesale dispersion of the Jews from Palestine, it was feared that the oral law would be lost forever unless also recorded in writing. Therefore the learned rabbis of that time lost no time codifying the oral Law into a book known as the Mishnah. Since the Mishnah was difficult for the average man to understand and obscure in parts, the rabbis compiled a voluminous commentary on it known as the Gamarah. The Mishnah and the Gamarah combined is the Talmud. Some parts of the Talmud were written in Palestine, but the Palestinian Talmud is regarded by the rabbis as an inferior work. The 38Talmud magnum opus was compiled by generations of rabbis in what is today Iraq between the 3rd and 5th centuries A.D. Until very recent times, this Iraqi Talmud was the supreme authority—the meat and drink of the entire Jewish diaspora, During this same period, in addition to the Talmud, a folk commentary upon the Bible was composed which is known as the Midrash. Although in exile, the Jews readily learned the local languages of the various lands of their dispersion, all their holy books were kept in the original Hebrew text. For this reason the Jews gave education top priority. Literacy in Hebrew was universal among Jewish men and boys. Girls received at best only an elementary schooling but from the age of four or five, boys were given the most rigorous training in learning the Hebrew language, the Bible and finally the Talmud which in its forty bulky volumes required a life-time of study. Like Arabic, Hebrew is written from right to left; also like Arabic, its alphabet includes only consonants with the vowels indicated by dashes and dots and above and below the letters. So similar is the vocabulary and grammatical structure of these closely-related Semitic languages, that one who knows Hebrew can very quickly and easily learn Arabic and vice versa. At first the concept of Torah was restricted to the first five books of Moses; later the entire Old Testament was included and finally the Talmud also became revered as divinely-inspired. The study of Torah was regarded by the pious Jews as the noblest of pursuits, encumbent upon all the males of the community. In the ghetto it was not wealth or social position that mattered but 39knowledge of Torah. Here are some excerpts from The Ethics of the Fathers which reveals the very essence of Talmud:

Moses received the Torah at Sinai and handed it down to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets and the prophets handed it down to the rabbis of the Great Assembly. The latter said three things: Be patient in the administration of justice, develop many students and make a fence for the Torah.

Simon the Just was one of the last survivors of the Great Assembly. He used to say: The world is based on three principles—Torah, worship and kindliness.

Yose ben Yo’ezer of Zeredah and Yose ben Yohanan of Jerusalem received the oral tradition from the preceding. Yose ben Yo’ezer of Zeredah said: Let your house be a meeting place for scholars; sit at their feet in the dust and drink in their words thirstingly.

Hillel said: Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace; be one who loves his fellow men and draws them near to the Torah.

He used to say: He who seeks greater reputation loses his reputation; he who does not increase his knowledge decreases it; he who does not study deserves death; he who makes unworthy use of the crown of learning shall perish.

He (Rabbi Hillel) used to say: If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I care for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?

Shammai said: Make your study of Torah a regular habit; say little but do much and receive all men cheerfully.

Rabbi Gamaliel, the son of Rabbi Judah Ha-Nisai, said: It is well to combine Torah study with some worldly occupation for the energy taken up by both of them keeps sin out of mind; all Torah study which is not combined with some trade must at length fail and cause sin. Let all who work in the community do so for the sake of God; then the merit of their fathers will sustain them and their righteousness will 40endure forever.

All Israel have a share in the world to become as it is said (in the Bible): “Your people shall all be righteous; they shall possess the land (of Palestine) forever; they are a plant of my own, the work of my hands wherein I may glory.”

Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasai said: Consider three things and you will not fall into sin. Know what is above you—a seeing eye, a hearing ear and a Book in which all your deeds are recorded.

Hillel said: Never say: When I shall have leisure I shall study (Torah) for you may (die) and never have leisure.

He used to say: The more flesh, the more worms in the grave; the more property, the more anxiety; the more wives, the more witchcraft; the more female servants, the more lewdness; the more male servants, the more thievery; but the more Torah study, the more life; the more schooling, the more wisdom; the more counsel, the more understanding; the more righteousness, the more peace. One who has acquired a good name has acquired it for himself but one who has acquired for himself Torah, has acquired the life of the world to come.

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai received the oral tradition from Hillel and Shammai. He used to say: If you have learnt much Torah, do not claim credit for yourself because God created you for this purpose.

Rabbi Joshua said: The evil eye of greed, the evil impulse and the hatred for mankind shorten a man’s life.

Rabbi Yose said: Let your friends’ property be as precious to you as your own; give yourself to studying Torah for it does not come to you by inheritance but through striving and let all your deeds be done in the name of God.

Rabbi Jacob said: This world is like a vestibule before the world to come. Prepare yourself in the vestibule so that you may enter the banquet hall.

41Ben Azzal said: Do not despise any man and do not consider anything as impossible for there is not a man who has not his Hour and there is not a thing that has not its place.

Everything is foreseen by God, yet freewill is granted to man; the world is ruled by Divine goodness yet all is according to the amount of a man’s work.

Rabbi Eleazar ben Azaryah said: Where there is no Torah, there is no proper conduct; where there is no proper conduct, there is no Torah. Where there is no wisdom, there is no reverence; where there is no reverence, there is no wisdom. Where there is no knowledge, there is no understanding; where there is no understanding, there is no knowledge. Where there is no bread, there is no Torah and where there is no Torah, there is no bread.

Rabbi Simeon said: If they have eaten at a table and have held no conversation on Torah, it is as though they had eaten of sacrifices offered to the dead idols, as it is said (in the Bible) that all their tables are full of filth without the presence of God. But if three have eaten at a table and have conversed on Torah, they are as though they have eaten from the table of God as it is said in the Bible that this is the table which is in the presence of the Lord.

Rabbi Eleazar said: Be eager to study the Torah; know what to answer an unbeliever; know before whom you toil, who your Employer is who will pay you the reward for your labour.

Rabbi Tarfon said: The day (life) is short; the task is great; the workmen (human beings) are lazy, the reward is great and the Master (God) is insistent. Your employer can be trusted to pay you for your work and know that the grant of reward to the righteous will be in the world to come.

Rabbi Hananyah be Akashyah said: The Holy One, blessed be He, desired to purify Israel; hence He gave them a Torah rich in rules of conduct. As is written in the Bible: 42The Lord was pleased for the sake of Israel’s righteousness to render the Torah great and glorious.¹⁴

These quotations from Talmud have been regarded for centuries by Jews as the summit of wisdom. Note the isnad and the striking similarity of the composition of this part of the Talmud to our Hadith literature. Since so much of the same material in the Torah, Talmud and Midrash is also found in our Holy Quran and Hadith, Jewish scholars contemptuously regard Islam as nothing but a distorted and defective version of Judaism mixed with the teachings of some heretical Christian sects and pagan Arab practices! When I was a student at New York University, one of my professors, who was also a rabbi, conducted a course in which I enrolled entitled “Judaism in Islam.” Our textbook, written by him, consisted of taking the second and third Surahs which traced in the footnotes each of these Quranic verses to its allegedly Jewish source.¹⁵

Although the factual material contained in these books cannot be denied, the conclusions which Jewish scholars draw from them are so abhorrent to us, that no Muslim could possibly accept them. What is the Muslim answer to the challenge? The Muslim scholar must fearlessly explain to the Jewish scholar that the portions of our Holy Quran and Hadith which are also found in the Jewish holy books does not mean that the former merely 43borrowed from the latter, but that originally both were Divine revelations. God revealed it first to the the Bani Israil but when they corrupted God’s word until the Divine could no longer be distinguished from its false human interpolations, God revealed this same material again to our Holy Prophet where only in the Quran and Hadith can it be found in its pristine purity.

Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) could not have received his knowledge about the earlier prophets in the previously revealed scriptures or from discussions and arguments with the rabbis of Medina. From the start, they most bitterly opposed his mission so that they never had the opportunity to assume the friendly role of teachers. Furthermore, the Torah and Talmud were not available in Arabic and our Holy Prophet knew no Hebrew. It was the Divine will that our Holy Prophet was unlettered as proof that he derived his wisdom direct from God and not from books.

It was Ezra’s firm conviction that what the Israelites needed most to preserve themselves as a religious entity and as a people was a body of scriptural writings which would best represent the Mosaic and prophetic works. In order not to allow later alteration and distortion of the sacred text, he wished to make it a final, closed canon. Accordingly, he surrounded himself with a learned company of priests and scribes or Soferim like himself. Among them were chroniclers, legal scholars, teachers of ethics and generally men who were familiar with all manner of Jewish sacred writings, traditions, religious rites and ceremonies. They helped Ezra compile and edit the Five Books of Moses. Collectively these compilers and editors 44went under the name of the Men of the Great Assembly. Yet Ezra was not completely satisfied. He wished to utilize the solemnity of the occasion of the consecration of the completely codified Torah for still another purpose—to preserve the purity of the stock. He made the Israelites swear “that we will not give our daughters unto the people of the land nor take their daughters for our sons.¹⁶

Note here that the first Five Books were not put into their final canonized form by Ezra until more than eight centuries after the death of Moses (peace be upon him)! Under these circumstances, corruption of the text was inevitable. Not also that the final edition was admittedly written by the learned scribes. In our Holy Quran, God always speaks in the first person, which conclusively proves its Divine source. All the books of the Jewish Bible were composed by their scribes in the third person which is sufficient to betray their human origin. The anxiety of Ezra to “preserve the racial purity of the stock”, which made him put a total ban on mixed marriages, must have temped him irresistibly to interpolate the sacred Text in order to serve the aims of Jewish nationalism. That is why Ezra ousted the Samaritans from the Jewish community as pariahs, though they professed implicit faith in the Torah, merely because they had been guilty of intermarriage with non-Jews. In the Talmud, we find the learned rabbis disputing over the uncertainty of the date, authorship and even at times doubting the authenticity of various books in the 45Bible. Today the majority of Jews no longer accept their Torah as Divine Revelation. In the Government schools in modern “Israel”, children are taught to regard it merely as history and literature.

Prayer is an essential a part of Jewish practice as in all other religions. Worship by prostration was well known to the Bani Israil as many passages of the Bible indicate. As late as the second century A.D., it must have been quite common among the Jews for it is written in the Talmud that Rabbi Akiba, one of the most esteemed sages of that time, at the beginning of his prayer was found in one corner of the synagogue and at the opposite at the end because of his incessant bowings and prostrations. Ablutions before prayers are also known to the Jews and the pious regard it as essential to have a ritual bath after intercourse, nocturnal emissions, menses and childbirth. It is written in the Bible that whenever Daniel prayed in his chamber, he always faced towards the direction of the Temple in Jerusalem This shows that the concept of the Qiblah was familiar to him. The dwindling band of Samaritan Jews, who now live in Nablus, worship in a very similar manner to the Muslims, always performing ablutions before praying three times daily; standing, kneeling and prostrating themselves on mats or carpets. They include some prayers in Arabic and such Muslim expressions a la ilaha illa llah, la sharik lahu, Allah wahadahu, inshallah and Allah alim, are common among them. Books written by Samaritans begin with Bismillah-i-rahman-i-rahim. However, the Samaritans who accept only the Mosaic Law as Divine revelation and reject all the other books of the Bible as well as the 46Talmud, have for more than two thousand years been cast outside the main stream of Judaism. Even though some Jews, like the son of Maimonides, lamented the abandonment of the prostration in prayer and praised it as a perfect expression of utter human servitude to God, they have never been successful in persuading their community to readopt it. The reason for this is that Jews were determined at any cost to preserve intact their separate entity as a people and never be confused with the Muslims. That is why Jews always pray sitting on a chair or bench. In Orthodox synagogues of Eastern European origin, each worshipper recites his prayers individually while some of the men stroll up and down the aisles chatting with their friends. My great-grandfather was one of the respected elders of the synagogue and my father told me that he dimly remembers when a very small boy during a Sabbath service being urged to go up to the platform and “kiss grandpa.” This gives an idea of the confusion and disorder which prevailed. Like Islam, the teachings of Judaism regard congregational prayer as far superior to prayers said individually. Like Islam, women are not obliged to attend owing to their household duties. Like Islam, the segregation of men and women in the Orthodox synagogue is strictly enforced for the same reasons. Also like the Muslim, the pious Jewish worshipper is enjoined to cover his head with a small black skull cap but shoes are not removed. Since the destruction of the Temple, priesthood has been abolished until such time as God wills that it be restored. The rabbi is not a priest in any sense of that term; he is a scholar 47learned in the sacred Law who occupies in the Jewish community the same position as the ulema among us. Like Muslims, a Jew can offer his prayers at any time in any place direct to God without an intermediary. Because of his superior learning and prestige, the rabbi customarily conducts the synagogue service but if no rabbi is available, any sane, adult male familiar with the liturgy can take over. A Jewish congregation requires at least eleven or more grown men which is known as a minyon. The husband of one of my cousins now living in New York who was born into an Orthodox family of Eastern European origin, told me that when he was a boy of twelve staying at a summer resort near Canada, his father died of a heart-attack. He was so grief-stricken that although no rabbi or synagogue was available there, throughout his summer vacation, he and seven other boys banded together and every day recited the mourner’s Kaddish for his father. When he returned to New York that autumn, he told the rabbi of his synagogue what he had done, expecting to receive high praise for his piety, but instead the rabbi harshly castigated him for doing such a thing before he had grown to mature manhood and since he did not have a minyon of eleven men, his prayers had been useless! So angry was the boy with the rabbi and disgusted with this rigid formalism, he told me, that he has never attended synagogue since!

After the destruction of the Temple, instrumental music was banned from the Orthodox synagogue service as pagan; the chazzan chants the Torah and the other liturgy very much like our Qaris recite 48Holy Quran, only in contrast to the latter, the Jewish chants are the most mournful laments of a people in despair. Although Jewish prayers are full of the praise and glorification of God, they provide the student with an eloquent illustration how nationalism and racism have corrupted an originally Divinely-revealed faith. The following are excerpts from typical Jewish prayers:

Guardian of Israel, preserve the remnant of Israel; let not Israel perish who say: “Hear Oh Israel!”…. Guardian of a unique people, preserve the remnant of a unique people; let not a unique people perish who proclaim Thy Oneness, saying “The Lord our God, the Lord is One.” Oh Thou Who art reconciled by supplications, be Thou reconciled to an afflicted generation, for there is none to help. Our Father, our King! Be gracious to us and answer us for we have no merits, deal charitably and kindly with us and save us. Oh mind not our former inquities; may Thy compassion hasten to our aid for we are brought very low. Take pity on us, Oh Lord, take pity on us for we are exceedingly sated with contempt. When in wrath, remember to be merciful….remembering that we are but dust. Help us, our saving God, for the sake of Thy glorious name; rescue us and pardon our sins for Thy name’s sake.

….And now, Lord our God, Who hast brought Thy people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and hast made for Thyself a name unto this day, we have sinned; we have acted wickedly. Oh Lord, in accordance with all Thy righteous deeds, pray, let Thy anger and Thy fury turn from Jerusalem, Thy city, Thy holy mountain (Zion) for through our sins and through the iniquities of our fathers, Thy people are held in disgrace by all who surround us. And now, our God, listen to Thy servant’s prayer and supplications and let Thy favour shine upon Thy 49desolate sanctuary for Thy own sake, Oh Lord! Lend Thy ear, our God and hear; open Thy eyes and see our ruins and the city which is called by Thy name. Our Father, our merciful Father, show us a sign for happiness and gather our dispersed from the four corners of the earth; let all the nations realize and know that Thou art the Lord, our God. Spare thy people, Oh Lord, and let not Thy heritage be an object of contempt, a by-word among the nations. Why should it be said among the peoples; “Where is their God? Oh gracious and merciful King, remember Thy Covenant with Abraham; let the attempted sacrifice of his only son, Isaac, appear before Thee for Israel’s sake….In Thy great goodness, have compassion on us for we have no other God besides Thee. Our Rock, forsake us not….for we are exhausted from war and captivity, pestilence and plague and from every trouble and sorrow. Rescue us and put us not to shame.

There is none gracious and merciful like thee, Lord our God, there is none like Thee, a God slow to anger and rich in kindness and truth. Remember Thy servants, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; consider not our stubbornness, our wickedness and sinfulness. Change Thy mind about doing evil to Thy people and remove from us the scourge of death for Thou showeth undeserved kindness in every generation. Spare thy people, Oh Lord, and deliver us from Thy wrath; remove from us the scourge of plague and cruel persecution for Thou art the Guardian of Israel. How can we complain? How can we justify ourselves? Let us search and examine our ways and return to Thee for Thy right hand is stretched out to receive those who repent. Our Father, our King, though we be without righteousness and good deeds, remember in our favour the Covenant of our fathers and our daily testimony, “The Lord is One!” Look at our plight for our pangs and miseries of heart are numerous. Oh God, look! Our glory has waned among the nations; they utterly detest us. How long shall Thy 50glory remain in captivity and Thy splendor in the hand of the foe? Arouse Thy might and Thy zeal against Thy enemies that they may be put to shame and crushed despite their power. Let not our sufferings seem trivial to Thee… Look down from heaven and see how we have become an object of contempt and derision among the nations; we are counted as sheep led to the slaughter-house to be slain and destroyed or to be beaten and disgraced. Strangers say to us, “There is no hope for you.” Be gracious to a people that yearn for Thy name. Pure One, hasten our salvation; we are worn out and no rest is granted us. Leave us not in the power of our enemies to blot out our name. Remember that Thou hast sworn to our fathers: “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky” and now we are left but a few out of many.

Through all generations we will declare Thy greatness; to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Thy praise, our God, shall never depart from our mouth and Thou art our great and holy God. Thou wilt set up a new altar in Zion; upon it we will offer new moon offerings and acceptable animal sacrifices. All of us will rejoice in the service of the sanctuary and in the psalms of Thy servant David which will be heard in Thy city and recited before Thy altar. Bring us to Zion, to Jerusalem, Thy sanctuary with everlasting joy….Be pleased, Lord our God with Thy people, Israel and with their prayer; restore the worship of Thy most holy sanctuary and accept Israel’s offering and prayer with gracious love. May the worship of Thy people, Israel, be for ever pleasing to Thee. May our eyes behold Thy return in mercy to Zion. Blessed art Thou, Oh Lord Who restoreth Thy Divine presence to Zion.

Oh our God and God of our Fathers, answer our entreaty….Rebuild Thy Temple as of yore and set up Thy sanctuary on its site. Grant that we may see it rebuilt, gladdened by its restoration. Restore the 51Kohanim (priests) to their service, the Levites to their song and music and the Israelites to their homeland. There we will go up to present ourselves and worship before Thee at our three pilgrim seasons as it is written in Thy Torah; “Three times a year shall all your males appear before the Lord, your God in the place He will choose; on the Feast of unleavened Bread, on the Feast of the Weeks and on the Feast of the Tabernacles and they shall not appear before the Lord empty-handed. Every man shall offer what he can afford as the Lord, your God has blessed….”

We hope, therefore, Lord our God, soon to behold Thy majestic glory, when the abominations shall be removed from the earth and the false gods exterminated; when the world shall be perfected under the reign of the Almighty and all mankind will call upon Thy name and the wicked of the earth will be turned to Thee. May all the inhabitants of the world realize and know that to Thee every knee must bend and every tongue must vow allegiance. May they bend the knee and prostrate themselves before Thee, Lord our God, and give honour to Thy glorious name; may they all accept the yoke of Thy kingdom and do Thou reign over them speedily for ever and ever….¹⁷

This is the essence of Judaism. The constant reference to Palestine as God’s gift to the Jews and particularly the supplication for the restoration of the Temple on the same site as the two previously destroyed, is tantamount to a declaration of war against Islam. On this very spot, stands our Masjid Aqsa which, after the Kaaba and the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, is our most sacred shrine. Not only that, but the very rock where our Holy Prophet’s Miraj (ascension 52to heaven) took place is claimed by Jewish tradition to be exactly where the Ark, their Holy of Holies, stood. Now that after two thousand years this is once again in Jewish hands, unless we can defeat them in Jihad, our Masjid Aqsa cannot be liberated as they would never relinquish it to us peacefully. Not only the Masjid Aqsa but the tombs of the other prophets and patriarchs in Palestine are as sacred to Muslims as to the Jews and Christians, and since all of these have fallen into Jewish hands since June 5–9, 1967, Muslims are not permitted access to them. This is intolerable. Under such circumstances, unless both Jews and Muslims become totally indifferent to their respective faiths, which is highly unlikely, sooner or later, violent conflict is inevitable.

Note especially in these Jewish prayers, how conspicuous is the Hereafter by its absence! In these lengthy, interminable supplications, one only occasionally comes across a vague reference to the “world to come.” In the prayer for the martyrs, we find a reference to their immortal souls but except in the burial service, the Day of Resurrection and Judgment Day rarely appear. In the daily prayer book, there is hardly any mention of Hell at all, although we do find it occasionally referred to in the Talmud. One searches the verbose narrations in the Old Testament in vain for any clear-cut, unambiguous reference to the Day of Judgment and reward or punishment in the Hereafter. The biblical prophets threaten Bani Israil because of their sins with divine punishment by defeat, destruction of their property, persecution and exile at the hands of their 53enemies, but no mention is ever made that they will be condemned by God on the Day of Judgment and be doomed to Hell-fire. The story of Job in the Bible is typical. God afflicts Job with the death of all his family, the destruction of his home and all his property and being struck down by painful and loathsome disease which was all intended to be a test for the steadfastness of his faith. Despite all these calamities and despite his complaints and lamentations, Job retains his faith intact in the goodness of God and as reward for this, his family, property and health are fully restored. But note that nothing whatever is mentioned concerning his reward in the Hereafter. Those portions of the Talmud already quoted, in contrast to the Old Testament, do testify to the fact that the concept of reward and punishment in the Hereafter was familiar to the Jews by that time, but its effectiveness as the sanction and only valid motive behind the moral law is completely nullified by the ever-recurring phrase: “All of Israel has a share in the world to come.” This implies that the Jew by birth will attain salvation, no matter what he believes or what he does. In all of the Jewish holy books, the Hereafter is subordinated to a relatively insignificant role, completely overshadowed by the prominence given to the necessity for the restoration of Palestine. The Jew prays only for the collective prosperity of his people in this world. Our Holy Quran says of the Jews that they are the greediest of all peoples for life and that each of them would like to live a thousand years but even if this were granted, it would not save them from the doom of Hell. The Jewish prayer for the sick man is sufficient proof of the truth of this statement.

54Oh Lord, punish me not in Thy anger; chastise me not with Thy wrath. Have pity on me, oh Lord, for I languish away; heal me, oh Lord, for my health is shaken. My soul is severely troubled; and oh Lord, how long? Oh Lord, deliver my life once again; save me because of Thy grace. For in death there is no thought of Thee; in the grave who gives thanks to Thee? I am worn out with my groaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I cause my couch to melt with my weeping. Mine eye is dimmed from grief; it grows old because of my foes. Depart from me, all ye evil-doers for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping. The Lord has heard my supplications; the Lord receives my prayer. All my foes shall be utterly terrified; they shall turn back; they shall be utterly ashamed….¹⁸

What evidence than this prayer could be more conclusive to show how the Jews have corrupted the message of the prophets and distorted their scriptures to serve the ends of Jewish nationalism? What could be a more glaring illustration of the spiritual impoverishment of Judaism? The man reciting this prayer may be on his death-bed, but still he can think only of his welfare and comfort in this world. It would never occur to him to keep patience and pray as the Muslim would certainly do in this place:

Our Lord! Grant us the good of this world and the good of the Hereafter and save us from the torment of Hell-fire! (Quran 2:201)

Mind it not! It (the sickness) is but a purger (of sins) if God, the most High wills. (Hadith)

Oh God! Suffer me to live as long as life is better for me and cause me to die when death is better for me. (Hadith)

In the name of God, the Greatest. I seek refuge from the evil of every spurting vein and from the evil of Hell-fire! (Hadith)

55The ceremonies of Orthodox Jews at death bear a striking similarity with the funeral rites of the Muslims.

Members of the most important society in the shtetl, the Khevreh Kadisha, take care of the last ritual. The dying person must repeat the final confession of (his faith) as it is read to him. If he is unable to speak for himself, a member of the burial society will recite it for him. This service will be performed for women by elderly matrons who belong to the Khevreh Kadisha and whose duty also is to sew the shroud in which the corpse will be wrapped. When death actually arrives, the first exclamation of those who are present or those who hear about it will be, “Blessed be the true Judge!” Even the ones most deeply bereaved will utter this acceptance of the decree they have striven so passionately to avert. The Jew knows that the Lord has decided to take the sick man’s soul. He mourns very deeply but he submits himself to the will of God. While the corpse is still in the house, it lies on the floor with a candle at the head and the feet toward the door. The corpse is prepared for the funeral by being washed, purified and wrapped in the shroud prepared by the members, of the Khevreh Kadisha. A man is dressed in his festive white Kittl and covered with his prayer shawl. Men may be washed and purified by either men or women; women only by members of their own sex. Just as finger nails or blood become unclean or dangerous once they have left the living body, so the body itself becomes evil once life has left it. Within twenty-four hours the corpse must be cleaned, purified and buried. The body is buried uncoffined but the walls of the grave are boxed with boards. After the grave has been covered with earth, the nearest male relative—son, brother or husband—says Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. One of the most important mitsvos is to accompany the dead. As many people accompany the dead body, so many angels will greet the soul. Therefore 56it is a duty to go to a funeral. Absence from a funeral is a sin and also a direct insult to the departed; an insult for which there will never be an opportunity to ask forgiveness.¹⁹

The attitude of Jews towards death, however, contrasts markedly with that of the pious Muslim. Even the most pious Jews are terrified by the thought of death which they will go to almost any lengths to avoid, while the Muslim strong in faith accepts death as an inevitable part of life that can only occur by God’s decree which is final and inescapable. In contrast to the Muslim who accepts his death and that of his loved ones with serene resignation, death is regarded by Jews as the greatest of all evils, even though Jews have contributed many martyrs in defence of their religious identity.

To the Jew God’s highest gift to man is life and to cling to this gift is a primary obligation. Man has been given life by God and he has to keep it. The Jews regard the worst life as better than the best death. Even the words for death or dying are avoided in everyday language by means of countless euphemisms, for one who mentions death is not sure of his life. As long as a person is alive, hope will not be abandoned and the community as well as the family is mobilized to fight death. Prayers, alms-giving, and changing of names are used in addition to medical treatments and drugs. When the end seems almost inevitable, extreme measures are taken; running to the graves of the ancestors, weeping and screaming in front of the Ark in shul (synagogue) to “cry out” the dying from death.²⁰

This morbid horror of death is proof that the concept of Hereafter is not a convincing reality to the Jewish community.

57In the second Surah of our Holy Quran, God revealed to our Prophet that fasting is prescribed for us as it was prescribed for those before us. Fasting is an established mode of worship among all the religions of the world and Judaism is no exception. The most solemn of all the days in the Jewish calendar is Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) which is characterized by a twenty-four hour fast lasting from the sundown of that day until the sunset of the next. Yom Kippur services in the synagogue last the entire day where the worshippers repent of their sins and beg God for forgiveness. Some pious Jews also fast on the 9th of the Jewish month of Ab which is the anniversary of the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D. and since then, this day has been observed as an occasion for mourning, fasting and supplication to God to restore the Temple and spare the Jews from extinction. Thus it can be seen that the Jewish concept of fasting is for penance and mourning. In Islam there is no fasting for mourning or penance except as an expiation for a few definitely named sins in the Quran like killing a believer by mistake or by divorcing a wife by likening her back to the back of her mother. The main purpose of the obligatory fast of Ramadan is to strengthen the character and will-power to resist evil temptations and also to subordinate the requirements of the body to the welfare of the soul in order that mankind may rise from an animal-like existence to realize his fullest potentialities as the vicegerent of God on earth. All of these precepts are completely lacking in the Jewish concept of fasting. Likewise, it is alien to Islamic 58teachings to set aside only one day for fasting and repentance which is very likely to be interpreted that one is free to commit sins all the other days of the year! Islam checks this evil by ordaining that one must seek repentance for one’s sins in every prayer five times daily and beg the forgiveness of God any time of the day or night. Most Jews consider it obligatory to fast only one day of the year—on Yom Kippur. Islamic teachings would deny that a single day of fasting could possibly be effective and thus the entire month of Ramadan is prescribed for us.

Like Islam charity is also enjoined by Judaism. The Hebrew word for almsgiving is Tzedakah (note the similarity to the corresponding term in Arabic) which literally means “righteousness.” Even the present version of the Mosaic law prescribes as obligatory for all Bani Israil who can afford it to offer as charity to the needy one-tenth of the value of the produce from the harvest and also enjoins that the corners of the fields remain unharvested as gleanings for the poor. The Talmud does teach that assisting the poor is not an act of grace on the part of the donor but a duty. By giving alms, he is merely practicing righteousness and performing a deed of justice. All of a man’s possessions, including even his own body, are but a loan from the Creator of the Universe and since all belongs to God, a man’s charity merely secures a more equitable distribution of God’s gifts. The Talmud records a most revealing conversation which took place between Rabbi Akiba and the Roman Governor of Palestine, Tineius Rufus. The latter asked the former: “If your God loves the poor, why does He not provide 59for them? Rabbi Akiba replied, “So that we may be delivered through them from the doom of Gehinnom (Hell).” But the Roman argued, “On the contrary, that should certainly incur God’s wrath and the penalty of Gehinnom. I will give you a parable. To what is charity to the poor like? To a human king who was angry with his slave, imprisoned him and ordered that he was not to be fed and then somebody goes and feeds him and gives him water. When the king hears, will he not be furious?” Akiba replied, “I will give you another parable. To what is charity to the poor like? To a human king who was angry with his son, imprisoned him and ordered that he was not to be provided with food or drink and then somebody goes and gives him food and water. When the king learns about this, will he not reward him and send him a present and forgive his son for, as the Bible says, ‘We are all the children of God.’ Rabbi Akiba would have been shocked and dismayed indeed by what took place on the part of the Jews of Medina centuries later. When after our Holy Prophet sent a letter to the Jewish tribe of Banu Qainuqa urging them to accept Islam, to establish regular worship and to pay their Zakat to the poor, one of them, Pinhas bin Azura, replied cynically to Hazrat Abu Bakr: “Then your God is certainly poor if He must beg for a loan from us!” How eloquently this illustrates the blasphemy of the Jews and their revolt against God’s teachings, even as they appear in their own holy books!

The Jews must be given their credit where it is due for they no doubt are the most generous philan60thropists the world has ever known. Even while they were segregated in the ghettos in Europe and the mellahs in the Arab world, the Jewish community was superbly organized to take care of its poor, sick and disabled. It must be admitted that the Jewish community takes charge of its helpless members while we Muslims, even though ordained by Islamic teachings to do so, have failed. Jewish communities, wherever they are to be found, can boast of a complete network of orphanages, old-age homes for those unfortunates who have outlived their families, hospitals, mental hospitals and sheltered workshops for the mentally and physically handicapped, where an attempt is made to rehabilitate them as far as possible for normal life and employment. The Federation of Jewish Philanthropies in New York City provides every kind of social service and helps non-Jews as well. To our shame, we must admit that nothing like this exists in the Muslim world today. Furthermore, in the Zionist fund-raising drives for “Israel”, almost every one of the five million Jews in America and many non-Jews enthusiastically pour out the contents of their purses and the money flows like water! During the recent Israeli invasion of June 5–9, 1967, the Zionists were able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in America within less than a week! If somebody here in Pakistan tried to organize a fund-raising drive for Jihad in Palestine, how many Muslims, even in oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, would contribute? The obvious answer to our shame and dishonour offers at least a partial explanation why Zionism has been so successful at our expense!

Jews who contribute to philanthropic causes do 61so either for humanitarian altruism or for worldly considerations. Our Holy Quran and Hadith teach us that charity or any other pious act must be done with the sole intention to please Almighty Allah and if motivated for the sake of fame or some worldly recompense, no reward shall be granted in the Hereafter. Islam places great stress on the doing of good to please Allah alone and for the expectation of His favours in the Hereafter. In Judaism, this vital precept is almost entirely absent. Thus in the eyes of God, their philanthropic generosity is devoid of any spiritual value.

The prohibition of Riba (interest on capital) is well-known to Judaism as one of the rabbis in the Talmud said: “He who lends money at interest denies God; he makes the Torah a laughing-stock and Moses (peace be upon him) a fool!” But the whole value of this prohibition is nullified when again in their delusion that Bani Israil was God’s special chosen people, the Mosaic Law was deliberately changed to allow Jews to charge interest in their transactions with non-Jews.

“Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy brother; interest of money, interest of victuals, interest of anything that is lent upon interest. Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon interest so that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all thou puttest thy hand unto in the land wither thou goest in to possess it. (Deuteronomy 23:20–21).

This makes the Jews free to prey upon non-Jews as they please with the alleged divine sanction of their Scripture! It implies a double-standard of morality—one for Jews and the other for non-Jews! As a result, 62the Jews became the most notorious moneylenders and merciless usurers of Europe down to modern times. Jews will immediately plead their innocence to this charge and argue that the tyranny of the Church was responsible which forbade them to engage in any other means of livelihood. The Godfearing Muslim (who knows that Quran forbids Riba to all, regardless of circumstances) would prefer to starve to death than indulge in such a degrading occupation. The permission Jews gave to themselves by interpolating their scriptures in order to allow them to take interest from non-Jews, makes a mockery of all their platitudes of benevolence.

Judaism has no counterpart to our annual Haj. Although Jews do go to Jerusalem to pray before the Wailing Wall and visit other sacred places in the Holy Land for their historical and religious associations, these pilgrimages are not an organized institution and are always undertaken individually. In antiquity, the Temple was their holy of holies to such an extent that any non-Jew found within its precincts was at once condemned to death. The Jewish scholar contemptuously regards Haj as our Holy Prophet’s concession to Arab paganism! However, the true significance of the transfer of the Qiblah from the site of the old Temple in Jerusalem to the Kauba in Mecca is given by a modern Quranic commentator as follows:

The change of qiblah from the Temple to the Kaaba was an indication that the Israelites had been deposed from leadership and the Muslims had been appointed instead. Therefore the change of qiblah from the Temple to the Kaaba was not merely a change of direction….but 65it was really the formal declaration of the change of leadership from the Israelites to the followers of Muhammad (God’s peace be upon him.)….The change of qiblah also served to separate the believers from the slaves of prejudice and racialism. On the one side, there were the Arabs who were not ready to give up their own Kaaba and to adopt the Temple at Jerusalem as qiblah. They were tried first. It was a hard test but the sincere believers passed successfully through this and the worshippers of the idol of nationalism failed. Now when the qiblah was changed from Jerusalem to the Kaaba, those Jews and Christians who had embraced Islam were put to the test. It was very difficult for them to accept any other qiblah than the one of their forefathers. Thus the worshippers of race were separated from the worshippers of God and finally only the worshippers of Allah remained with the Holy Prophet.²¹

Even though it was common knowledge among Jews, Christians and pagans alike in Arabia at the time that the Kaaba had been founded in Mecca by the Prophet Abraham (peace be upon him), this change of Qiblah, striking as it did at the root of Jewish nationalism, enraged the Bani Israil. Even the most hostile Jewish and Christian orientalists in their writings describe the Haj as the most powerful institution for international human brotherhood and solidarity ever known. The Haj is the universality of Islam in practice. What a contrast to the moribund, parochial racism of Judaism!

In the remote antiquity of Old Testament times after the death of Moses (peace be upon him), the Jews were an aggressive and warlike people. If I may not

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66itself. In glaring contrast to the Christians, the Jews have no missionaries to send out to Muslim lands. Although some Jews are known to have embraced Islam, I have never heard of a single case of a Muslim who has become a Jew! Thus it is clear that Judaism does not present the slightest ideological threat to the Muslims. Jews, therefore, make no attempt to convert the Muslim and Christian Arabs in occupied Palestine; they simply exterminate them. In this respect, Zionism is far worse than the former imperialism of England or France. The British and French imperialisms were content merely to rule over their possessions in Asia and Africa; colonization was limited and in most cases practically non-existent. As much as the British and French imperialists strived to impose Westernization upon their colonial possessions and destroy the indigenous cultures, at least the native populations were left intact so that eventually when political fortunes changed, they could regain their sovereignty. Zionism tells a very different story. As the Hindus of India will tolerate only Hindus, “Israel” is for Jews only. Wherever Zionism rules, all non-Jews—Christians and Muslims alike—are driven out en masse by force. Those Arabs in occupied Palestine, who have managed to escape massacre and exile, are suffering the most miserable plight, completely cut off from their brethren in neighboring lands and without any legal rights or protection whatsoever. The policy of Zionism demands unlimited Jewish immigration and colonization for the deliberate purpose of overwhelming the indigenous population, the massacre or exile of most 67of the non-Jews, the confiscation of all their lands and property and the total and permanent eradication of the Arab and Islamic character of Palestine. Zionism is not content, as are the other imperialisms, with the cultural extermination of the Muslims; it is embarked upon a campaign for our physical annihilation as well!

Since Talmudic times until the rise of modern Zionism, the Jews repudiated all their former warlike activities and became the champions of pacifism. The Ghetto Jews of medieval days abhorred any kind of violence, so much so that even when they were suffering the most severe persecution and attacked by Christian fanatics, they refused to defend themselves with weapons and would merely hide from their murderers cowering with fear. During this period, the concept of Kiddush Ha-Shem, which literally means, “The Sanctification of the Name of God” attained its most complete development. In its broadest sense, Kiddush Ha-Shem implies the utmost striving for a Jew in the cause of God which culmintates in martyrdom. Thus Kiddush Ha-Shem is roughly the Jewish equivalent of Jihad. However, the manifestations of the two are quite different. Under normal circumstances, Jewish teachings condemn the practice of suicide as does Christianity and Islam. But in time of dire calamity when the preservation of life would inevitably result in the forced repudiation of Judaism or some other grave sin, then suicide is praised by the pious Jew as the supreme virtue. Scholem Asch, the late Yiddish novelist, has given in his stories some of the most vivid examples of Kiddush Ha-Shem. One of his novels 68entitled Kiddush Ha-Shem, is a lurid description of the wholesale massacre of the Jews in Poland by the Cossacks in 1648. When one of the Jewish towns in Poland was threatened by the Cossacks, no violent resistance or even defence was attempted. Instead, when their day of doom arrived, the entire Jewish community—men, women and children—gathered together in an open field, where the women first slaughtered their children, then the husbands their beloved wives and finally the men, wrapped in their burial shrouds and their prayer shawls, ecstatically singing hymns and chanting prayers, let themselves be slain by the Cossack hordes and the land filled with their corpses. In his book, Tales of My People, (Putnam, New York, 1948) which deals with the persecution by the Nazis during World War II, Scholem Asch gives a typical example of Kiddush Ha-Shem in recent times. The setting of the story²² is a Jewish school for young girls in Warsaw under Nazi occupation. Some Nazi soldiers break into the school and demand the head-mistress to turn the place into a brothel and her students into prostitutes for their use or else face immediate death. The head-mistress, pretending to comply with this request, assures the Nazi soldiers that all would be ready for them within a few days. As soon as the soldiers leave, the head-mistress summons all the girls and tells them that since escape is impossible, it is their sacred duty to sanctify the Name of God by committing ritual suicide. She instructs the older pupils to help dress the younger ones 69in their burial shrouds and that night they all go into their classroom to find at each place on their desks, a portion of poisonous white powder. After reciting the appropriate prayers for Kiddush Ha-Shem, the head-mistress swallows the poison followed by all the students, and thus they die, as their forebearers have done, assured that this deed makes them God’s elect.

Thus it can be seen how different is the spirit of Kiddush Ha-Shem from the Islamic concept of Jihad. The former is passive while the latter is active. Had the characters in these stories been Muslims, suicide would be unthinkable. All would have fought to defend themselves to the death, however hopeless the odds. Non-violent means contain a strong element of self-destruction utterly abhorrent to Islamic teachings. Islam does not regard pacifism in itself as any virtue. In fact, non-resistance against evil and injustice is a great sin. Our Holy Quran exhorts the persecuted and oppressed to rise up and defend themselves so that the evil may be crushed. To fail to defend oneself when one is wronged, is incompatible with human dignity. With the rise of modern Zionism, the Jewish leaders began to recognize this truth. One of the foremost Hebrew poets of modern times, Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934), exhorts with all the fervor of his emotionalism, his fellow Jews to organize resistance to defend themselves against the pogroms in Russia and Poland and not hesitate to extract full revenge upon their enemies if they were to survive. In the spring of 1943 during World War II, when threatened with extermination by the Nazis, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto offered 70the most heroic resistance against hopeless odds. To give Zionism credit where it is due, there is no doubt that in “Israel,” the Jews have proved themselves first-class soldiers. Zionism has proved that Arab nationalism is no match for Jewish nationalism. Arab nationalism is but an artificial slogan, utterly meaningless to the overwhelming majority of the Arab people. Jews will readily fight to the death for nationalism and patriotism but Arabs will not. In Judaism, religion is so closely intertwined with nationalism, it is almost impossible to separate the two. The concept of nationalism is the very negation of the universality of Islam. If warfare is waged by Muslims under any other banner than Islam, their morale is destroyed. This is not so in the case of the Jews since nationalism has always been an integral part of their faith. In Bible times, the Bani Israil fought both for religion and for patriotism. Since the rise of modern Zionism, the religious motive has greatly weakened. Thus the modern Jew in “Israel”, who is often an atheist, fights for pure patriotism. Not until Jewish nationalism is pitted not against Arab nationalism but against a genuine Jihad can Zionism be permanently crushed. The practical value of Jihad is vividly illustrated in the following episode:

A great Arab officer whose acquaintance I made at the front during the first Palestine war (1948) and whose courage in battle I witnessed until treachery caused him to fall into the hands of the Jews, told me later of his conversation with the commander of the Jewish army who had invited him to his office shortly before his release from the prisoner-of-war camp.

71“Would you permit me to ask about a matter for which I as a soldier could find no satisfactory tactical explanation in the course of military operations?”

“Please do. Perhaps I will be able to answer you.”

“Why did you not attack the Arab village of Sur Bahir near Jerusalem?”

The Jewish commander thought for a while and then said: “A very good question. Do you want a frank answer?”

“Of course, if that is possible.”

“The Israeli army did not attack Sur Bahir because it contained a large force of volunteers from al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun.”

“The captive officer, visibly offended, thought that the Jewish commander meant to belittle the value of the regular army since he spoke of the volunteers in such high terms. So he asked sharply, almost angrily, “What difference does that make? You often attacked other Arab positions defended by much larger and better equipped forces under conditions far more difficult for you!”

“The fact is that the volunteers of al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun are entirely different from your regular troops. For them fighting is not a duty which they fulfil within the bonds of tactics and of formal orders received but a passion to which they devote themselves with wholehearted enthusiasm. In this respect they are similar to our own soldiers who are fighting for the sake of Israel. But the difference between us and them is that we are fighting to build a national state to live in whereas they want to die! To attack people who are not only unafraid of death but actually aspire to die, with an enthusiasm bordering on madness as if they were savage demons out to challenge our civilization and all it stands for, is like attacking a thicket full of wild beasts. It is a risk we prefer to avoid. We do not think it wise to arouse these fanatics lest their lunacy infects all the others so that they gain all they want while we lose everything.”

72“What do you think it is that has afflicted these people so that they are infatuated with death and have become transformed into a demonic force which defies all reason?”

The Jewish commander replied: “The magic effect of religion on the minds of these simple-minded people! Unlike you, they have not had the opportunity of a progressive and enlightened education to open their eyes to the facts of life and to liberate them from superstition and the tricks of the merchants of religion. The poor wretches are still prey to those fantastic delusions about a paradise awaiting them after death overflowing with milk and honey. They are the chief obstacle in the way of a constructive peace for the sake of which we must cooperate and the greatest danger for the success of efforts made in good-will for the prevention of war and the establishment of relations on an enlightened basis between persons such as you and myself. They represent a danger not only to us but also to you if you genuinely want stability in your countries and your governments to be free of those disorderly elements which are constantly crying out for Jihad and martyrdom which have no place in the twentieth century. This is the century of science, of the United Nations, of world public opinion and the rights of man! I am so delighted to have met you and to have had this honest talk with you and I do not doubt that we will both remember it until we meet again under happier circumstances and in a different atmosphere filled with mutual cooperation which we hope will be achieved by enlightened progressives like yourself, free of all irrational rancour and obstinacy.”

“As I left his office,” he told me, “I felt as if a volcano were erupting inside my soul, as if my breast were on fire. By God, I had been so preoccupied with the different types of weapons and tactics in battle that I had ignored the most effective weapon in the most dangerous kind of battle. Now I have realized that only the force of faith can repel this aggression! Those who equip themselves with modern weapons and the materialist ideologies of the twentieth 73century can be defeated only by those who hold fast to their faith in God and are determined to fight the enemies of God whatever disguise he may assume. They will induce awe and terror in the enemy so that he will fear them as he would fear a thicket of wild beasts. He will fear too that they will infect the rest of their people so that from them will burst forth volcanoes of faith which engulfed the treacherous ancestors of the present-day Jews—the Banu Qurayza, the Banu Nadir and the Banu Qaynuqa and then chastised them with implacable wrath at the Battle of Khaybar. Then I was overwhelmed by memories of the countenances of “these savage demons” in death, radiant with the smile of contentment, satisfaction and profound tranquillity.”²³

Judaism is in wholehearted agreement with Islam that God is not only the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, its living creatures and all mankind but the source of the moral law as well. Thus God does not only demand from His followers devout worship but implicit, unquestioning obedience to His Divine, unchangeable Law, which permeates every aspect of life from birth to death. As much as the devout Muslim, the pious Jew regards his faith as a complete way of life. As much as the Muslim, the Jew is convinced that love and devotion to God must be expressed by the strictest obedience to all His divine commandments and the utter submission to His will through the following of His Guidance as indispensable to attaining morality and spirituality in their highest sense. The striking similarities, as well as the differences, between Muslim and Jewish dietary laws are illustrated in the 74fact that the pious Jew, like the Muslim, makes a careful distinction between lawful and unlawful foods, convinced that what he eats will affect him morally and spiritually as well as physically:

Everyone in the Shtetl knows, of course, that one must eat only food that is kosher (meaning literally “clean” in Hebrew) or ritually fit and that food which is treyf or ritually unfit must be rejected. Men, women and children know that in order to be kosher, food must be of the right kind, be prepared in the right way and be uncontaminated by any substance or circumstance that could make it unfit. They are most commonly concerned with the laws of Kashrus in connection with animal foods although some vegetable foods are forbidden—for instance, untithed grain, cross-bred grain and the fruit of a tree that has been bearing for less than three years. Everyone is familiar with the foods that are permitted; quadrupeds that both ruminate and have cloven hoofs, birds that do not eat carrion and fish with scales. All other animals are ruled inedible as are their milk and eggs. This excludes carnivores, rodents, shellfish, birds of prey, eaters of carrion and reptiles. Probably the peasants know as well as the Jews that pork and its derivatives are forbidden for this prohibition is the most conspicuous one in Eastern Europe where the pig furnishes the major source of meat to the majority of those who are not Jewish. Any child knows that in order to be kosher, the “permitted” animals must be killed in a way that causes a minimum of pain and this is the explanation for the rules about slaughtering for food. Hunting is forbidden since it may inflict death in a cruel way. The shokhet’s blade must be so keen that there is no brutal tearing of flesh or skin but only one swift, almost painless stroke which must serve both trachea and jugular vein. The constant inspection of the rabbi that enforces this ruling serves as a reminder that although human welfare requires the killing of animals, it must be 75done with as little suffering as possible. In contrast to this picture of the slaughter as surgery, the shtetl views with horror the methods of the peasants. “How they slaughter pigs! I saw it once and wouldn’t want ever to see it again. It’s horrible. The man sits on the pig’s back and plunges the knife in again and again. And the pig yells. It was just horrible….” A little girl knows as well as her brother that an animal which has died a natural death or has not been slaughtered ritually is just as treyf as one of the wrong kind. The defects that can make an animal treyf even after it has been killed in the approved manner are academic knowledge to the boy but vivid experience for the girl who hears her mother bargain for the chicken, goes with her to have it killed by the shokhet and witnesses the final “koshering” at home with alternate soaking, salting and rinsing until all free blood has been drained off for blood that has left the living stream is abhorrent as well as forbidden. A humanitarian explanation is also given for the rule against mixing dairy foods with meat and poultry. The basis is said to be the Mosaic command that “Thou shalt not seethe the kid in the milk of its mother.” For the girl, however, the problem is so compelling that the rationale may sink into the background. It becomes a matter of constant vigilance to keep the separation of milk foods and meat foods absolute in time as well as in space. They must not touch each other; they must not even be stored in the same place; they must not be cooked at the same time and they must not be eaten with the same meal. They must not be eaten from the same dishes nor with the same tableware nor must the two categories of dishes or pots be allowed to touch each other. In a house where the main room is used for many purposes besides cooking, the separation in space demands ingenuity, energy and unremitting concentration. The boy also must remember to keep dairy and meat separate in time, Six hours must elapse after meat before milk, but less time is necessary 76following milk with meat. Even the poorest household must manage two separate sets of dishes, cutlery and cooking utensils—one for meat and the other for milk. There must be two additional sets for use during the eight days of Passover. The minimum need of the humblest housekeeper is four complete and separate sets of cooking and eating utensils. The wife of a rich man will have six sets of everything, including one pair for special Sabbath and holiday use. The problem of keeping kosher is many-faceted.

The economic stress in itself is considerable. Not only is kosher meat more costly than the other but after one has paid for a chicken with painfully earned coins, it may turn out to have a spotted liver or be otherwise unfit. One runs to the rabbi asking advice and, if possible, he will find it kosher. But it is not always possible and then there is no Sabbath—the joy is gone. A housewife buys very few eggs during the year and if she does invest in one, there is a special reason. But when she opens it, she may find a fleck of blood and then there is no help. Nothing can make that egg ritually fit to eat.²⁴ After provisions have been brought home, they still must be protected. If the baby is just beginning to run about and get into things, he may ruin the food for a whole day by splashing milk into the meat pot. And again one drops everything and runs to the rabbi wailing, “What shall I do? Must I throw it all away?” Whenever possible, the answer is no. Waste is wicked and to be avoided. There are innumerable methods of “re-koshering” food that has been contaminated by contact; rules for the amount of flesh-food necessary to dilute the ill-effects of a few drops of milk. But the methods are time-consuming and difficult and the strain is unending. The concept of kosher has broad application. Cloth can be kosher or not depending on whether it mixes linen or silk with wool. A woman on emerging from the mikva or ritual bath (after marital intercourse) is kosher and if she 77has not been purified, she is treyf. The menstruating bride is not kosher and intercourse with her is forbidden.²⁵ The terms are also used figuratively. A “kosher” person is one who is honest and dishonesty is described as treyf or non-kosher. “A thick-souled treyf-bone” is one way of referring to a mean, untrustworthy person. A treyfeh livelihood is a dishonest calling and a frequent prayer is for a “beautiful and koshereh” livelihood. Illegal, obscene and forbidden literature is treyf.²⁶

The Muslim explanation for the similarities and differences between Jewish laws and Islamic laws rest on three basic principles. In the Holy Quran, the Mosaic laws concerning the prohibition of swine-flesh, carnivores, carrion and blood and the necessity to slaughter animals for food by severing the jugular vein swiftly with a sharp knife so that all blood runs out with the benediction of God over the animal, have been revealed again for Muslims as mandatory for all times and all places. Muslims who find themselves isolated from their fellow-believers in New York and other Western cities with large concentrations of Jews will buy their meat only from Kosher butchershops and take refuge in Kosher restaurants, assured of Hallal meals. But Jews will not eat animals slaughtered by Muslims because their laws are so much stricter than ours. This explains an important source of the deviation of Jewish from Islamic laws. The prohibition of mixing meat with milk is an excellent illustration of that part of the ancient Mosaic law abrogated by our Holy Quran. In ancient Egypt, boiling a kid in its 78mother’s milk was not only abhorrent to the Prophet Moses (peace be upon him) from the humanitarian standpoint but much more: God forbade this practice to the Bani Israil because it symbolized idolatry and the pagan rites of their heathen neighbours. Since by the time of our Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), this cruel pagan practice had long fallen into oblivion, God deemed the prohibition of mixing meat with milk no longer essential for the protection of monotheism. There is another equally significant reason why such Mosaic laws were abrogated by our Holy Quran. Judaism is essentially a tribal and parochial faith while since Islam is universal, it must be realistic and practical for all peoples at every stage of civilization. Because many of the ancient Mosaic laws are not only obsolete but much too intricate and difficult to be observed by a world-wide faith, therefore God has allowed us to eat the flesh of the camel and drink its milk and permitted us to hunt animals and birds for food, though prohibited hunting merely for sport. The Holy Quran also tells us that much of the heavy “yoke of the law” of the Jews was God’s punishment for their disobedience and ingratitude. Such laws as the prohibition of shell-fish, sea-mammals and lizards have been silenced by Islamic revelation although many of our ulema still feel that these foods are abominable.²⁷ But for pious Jews, each and every detailed prescription of Mosaic law, no matter how antiquated it now appears or how difficult to observe, still stands intact.

79The most potent reason, however, for the differences between Jewish and Muslim laws is the distortion and interpolation of the scriptures of the former so that what they knew, had God originally declared to the prophets as unlawful, they permitted for themselves. Thus do we find the rabbis in the Talmud debating and wrangling with one another whether the use of wine is good or evil. That they were well aware of its evil effects, both on the individual and society, is evident in such passages of the Talmud where the rabbis are quoted to have declared: “When wine enters, sense goes out; when wine enters, the secret comes out! There is nothing which brings lamentation upon man so much as wine. Wine leads both men and women to unchastity.” Confesses another Talmudic rabbi: “Do not become intoxicated and you will not sin.”²⁸

However, the consensus of opinion in the Talmud is that while drunkenness is bad, drinking is good! Even the most learned rabbis fail altogether to connect the two.

“Before a man drinks wine,” declares another rabbi in the Talmud, “he is simple like a sheep and quiet like a lamb in front of its shearers. When he has drunk in moderation, he is strong like a lion and declares that there is none to equal him in the world. When he has drunk more than enough, he becomes like a pig wallowing in filth. When he becomes intoxicated, he becomes like a monkey dancing about, uttering obscenities before all and ignorant of what 80he is doing.” Still another rabbi says: “One cup of wine is good for a woman, two are degrading, three make her act like an immoral woman and four cause her to lose all self-respect and sense of shame”²⁹

As the spirit of Judaism opposes ascetic practices, wine is regarded by Jews as one of the good things of life to such an extent that one rabbi in the Talmud declares, “There is no gladness without wine. Why is it said for what he has sinned against his soul? Because he withheld himself from wine!” Therefore Judaism regards it as a sin for a person to abstain from the “legitimate” and “innocent” pleasures and enjoyments of this world. While Islamic teachings condemn any degree of indulgence in wine along with all liquors and other intoxicants as an unmitigated curse upon the individual and society deserving of the most severe punishments in this life and in the Hereafter, Judaism looks upon wine as a positive good, so much so that the consumption of wines and liquors is an integral part of all Jewish religious and social functions. Before a pious Jew takes a glass of wine, he recites the following benediction: “Blessed art Thou, oh Lord our God, Who has given us to drink of the fruit of the vine.” The encouragement of wine-drinking by the Jewish religion nullifies all the virtues of their other dietary laws.

Jewish religious observances revolve largely around the Sabbath. Every Saturday must be devoted entirely to worship, rest and good food and any manual work, even the lighting of a stove 81or the switching on of a light, absolutely prohibited! The Mosaic Law in the Old Testament decreed death as the penalty for anyone who dared transgress the prohibition against work on the Sabbath because God allegedly created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day! The need for God to rest implies that His limited energy has been exhausted! In Muslim eyes, this is nothing short of sheer blasphemy for an omnipotent God could never feel fatigue; a God Who could grow weary and worn out from His strenuous labours of creation, in Muslim eyes is no God at all! Furthermore, it utterly alien to the spirit of Islam to set aside one day of the week exclusively devoted to worship. The five daily prayers are obligatory upon all grown, sane men and women and our Holy Quran and Traditions ordain us to worship God round the clock, particularly during the night. Instead of one enforced weekly day of rest, Islam advises its followers to rest whenever they feel tired. Our Friday is no Sabbath as Jews and Christians understand it. It is merely a time for special congregational prayers at noontime which are short in duration. The remainder of the day, business and normal activities continue as usual. The pious Jew, however, does not apply any critical reasoning as to why his Sabbath should be observed. He accepts it unquestioningly as ordained by God in The Ten Commandments supposedly revealed to Moses (peace be upon him) in the Pentateuch. His strongest emotious are inseparably intertwined in all the intricate and complicated Sabbath ritual and ceremony which, however, burdensome may appear to 82the non-Jew, give him intense joy and emotional gratification.

Although regular services are held daily in the Orthodox synagogue, that of the Sabbath and holidays far outstrip them in importance. The equality of all believers, so rigorously enforced in the mosque where king and beggar pray side by side, is not to be found in the synagogue. In the traditional Ghetto community found in eastern Europe until World War II, the choicest seats in the synagogue were along the eastern wall near the holy Ark. Here were seated all the most respected, learned and wealthy men of the community. At the rear of the synagogue near the western well, were crowded the poor, illiterate and despised. Not only that, but the favoured seats in the front near the eastern wall were often bought and paid for with considerable sums of money, and whenever one was left vacant through death, it was auctioned off to the highest bidder! In one of his stories, Scholem Aleichem, a talented Yiddish novelist, relates the tale of twin brothers whose poverty-stricken but learned father had left them as sole inheritance his coveted seat in the synagogue close to the Ark. Twin brothers but only one seat and even their mother could not remember which had been born first! A terrible quarrel resulted between the two brothers until their long-suffering mother intervened and begged them to take the dispute to the rabbi. The rabbi told the young men to forfeit the seat entirely and give it to another man more worthy than they for the sake of family and community peace. He assured them that since all the congregation was created by 83the same God, they should not feel ashamed. The twin brothers obediently submitted to the rabbi’s decision, convinced that by voluntarily forfeiting the seat, God would reward them for their charitable deed! In America, the Jew must pay an annual membership fee to have the right to attend regularly the synagogue of his choice. On the High Holidays, every seat in the synagogue is reserved for a high sum! Nothing could be more abhorrent to the Muslim. Such practices, even in this decadent age, are inconceivable in the mosque.

In order to obey the detailed prescriptions of Divine Law, extensive knowledge is essential. Thus the traditional Ghetto community regarded the education of boys as more important than all else. To give the Jews credit where deserved, it must be admitted that they achieved their goal of universal literacy among the men, and to a limited extent even among their women, much more effectively than we Muslims have ever been able to do. This could partially be explained by the fact that the Jews formed compact, urban communities relatively small in numbers; therefore the task was easier. But much more significant was the tremendous social prestige attached to religious learning which made parents regard no sacrifice too great to enable their sons to attain the education necessary to become a Talmudic scholar.

The teaching methods of the Kheyder demand tremendous intellectual effort from a child who is almost a baby. The candies thrown on his first lesson sweeten only the first hour of learning. From then on, there is no attempt to sugar-coat the subject-matter. No text-books with pictures, no story-telling or educational games are used. The only guides to lead him into “the gates of Torah” 84are dingy, tattered prayer-books with incomprehensible letters and words and old Bibles used over and over again. The process of learning is the endless repetition of unfamiliar Hebrew words, memorizing each letter, each syllable, the rote meaning of each word translated separately without reference to grammar or derivation. Real understanding of the text is left for later. Swaying as one reads and chanting the words in a fixed melody (nign), are considered necessary for successful study. Like praying, reading a sacred text is accompanied always by incessant rocking forward and back, forward and back and the words are read aloud in a low-voiced chant that rises and falls. “It’s easier to remember what you study when you rock.”³⁰ The crowded room in the melamed’s house, where the children study from morning until nightfall, is filled always with a buzzing and humming above which rises the shrill voice of a child who is reciting or the sudden boom of the melamed as he pounces on some transgressor. The sound of study “as noisy as a market” can be heard in the street outside as one approaches the house. The swaying and the chanting become automatic. Later, the students will also acquire the appropriate gestures with the index finger and the thumb, sweeping the thumb through an upward arc of inquiry and nailing down the point of the answer with the trust of the index finger. Study is not passive but active, involving constant motor and vocal activity. Above all, the students are trained to be attentive to the words of the melamed and ready to repeat the reading or the translation of the word the moment he indicates it with his fateful pointer. Inattention or absent-mindedness is severely punished and very often sleeping interest is wakened by the lash. The melamed has great opportunity to descend on the inattentive since the pupils are at different points in their studies and each proceeds at his own pace. While one individual or group is reciting, the others are 85supposed to give their full attention to their assignments but the dignity of being “kheyder boys” does not prevent them from being little children. There are secret signals and messages; bursts of playing if the melamed leaves the room for a moment, usually paid for in full when he returns. Yet, little by little, the child does learn to read and to translate. In this small, ill-lit, ill-ventilated room, he lays the foundation for the next steps that may lead him at last into “the world of Torah.”

In this first and most elementary kheyder, the pupils learn the elements of reading and the prayers (pp. 92–93). After this the boy is now launched in the second kheyder and entitled to be known as a “Khumesh boy” The Khumesh boy does not begin his study of the Pentateuch with first book, Genesis, and its delightful stories, but with Leviticus, the dull and difficult theory of animal scarifices. The most popular commentator of the Torah and the Talmud and the one most studied in khumesh kheyder is Rashi who lived in the eleventh century A.D. From his study in the khumesh kheyder, the child becomes acquainted not only with direct explanation of direct statements but also with involved interpretation and the search for hidden meanings. Khumesh and Rashi represent merely the elementary phases of study in which puplis are taught directly by the melamed as befits small children and beginners. In the highest kheyder, the gemoreh kheyder, that sort of instruction is gradually replaced by the principle of independent study under the guidance of the teacher. This melamed is of a different order from the scorned teacher of the elementary kheyder. The intellectual caliber and the status of the teacher rise with the level of the school. The gemorah kheyder is devoted chiefly to the study of the Talmud, which covers an infinite variety of aspects and problems, ancient and contemporary, religious and secular. Talmudic studies consist of continuous discussion, commentary and interpretation with the help of innumerable commentators and interpreters. With equal concentration, the child of eight 86or nine must study the holiday ritual in the Temple of Solomon, the ethics of man-to-man dealings, the laws of divorce or the rules governing connubial behaviour during menstruation.

It is with the Talmudic studies that the true joy of learning is born. In the elementary kheyder, the work was routine, mechanical, boring, repetitious, depending on memory rather than on understanding. Talmudic studies open the way to the exercise of individual capacities and imagination. The gemorah kheyder where the boy of ten or eleven begins to study the main code of Jewish wisdom, is a crucial phase of his education. Here he begins to display the real quality of his memory and his power to spend long hours over a difficult problem, using countless commentaries and interpretations with aptness and insight. Here he shows whether he has the caliber of the true Talmudic scholar. His teacher’s opinion is not enough. The father may take him from time to time on a Sabbath to be examined by some member of the family who is especially erudite or to any famous scholar in the community and the verdict will be awaited anxiously. The whole family listens to the conversation, especially the mother because the opinion of a learned man means a great deal for the future of her son. The great question is: does he have the talent for a life of study or should he interrupt his education and go into trade or business? If the boy is judged capable of becoming a Talmudic scholar, he is sent from the gemorah kheyder to the highest institution of learning in the Ghetto, the Yeshiva. There, among hundreds of boys from different towns and provinces under the guidance of eminent scholars, he will devote all his days and a great part of his nights to study. A yeshiva boy customarily sleeps no more than four or five hours a night, rising at daybreak or earlier and sitting over his books until long past midnight. The general principle of the Yeshiva is independence and self-reliance. The program of study allows for infinite variation. The basic study is an exhaustive analysis of the Talmud 87and its commentators. In addition, each student is privileged to spend a large part of his time on that part of Jewish wisdom which appeals to him most. If he is attracted by mystical problems, he will study the Kabala; if philosophy is his field, he will delve into the works of the philosophers like Maimonides; if he is interested in legal qustions, he will concentrate on the Talumd and its commentators. In all cases, the approach is the same; commentary, interpretation, referring of the different texts to the appropriate biblical quotation that is their ultimate source. Talmudic study is often called pilpul, meaning “pepper” and it is as sharp, spicy and stimulating as its name implies. Penetration, scholarship, imagination, memory, logic, wit and subtlety all are called into play for solving a Talmudic question. The ideal solution is the khiddush, an original synthesis that has never been offered before. This mental activity is a delight both to the performer and his audience. When two accomplished scholars engage in pilpul, they will be surrounded by an admiring group that follows each sally in eager silence and later will discuss the fine points with each other, possibly working up a new argument about which the scholar carried the day.

In order to be able to devote his life to study, the Yeshiva student has to be assured of material subsistence Very few of the students have parents who can support them. The solution of this problem demonstrates once more the importance attached to the study of the sacred Law. The community takes over the burden of supporting, not only the Yeshvia itself, but each individual student.

Whether a man is a great savant or one who spells out his words syllable by syllable, in the ghetto, the amount of knowledge amassed by his study is not officially labelled. There is no degree marking the completion of a certain phase of study, for completion does not exist—“the Torah has no end.” The study of the Holy Books may be interrupted or may diminish in intensity but it never stops. No matter how long a man lives, he can continue to explore new wonders in the 88limitless intricacies and vistas of the Law. During middle age, unless he is one of the scholarly elite, he must spend at least a part of his time making a living. But after retirement, the very devout man will once more devote to study all his waking hours except those that are spent in prayer. And the waking hours will be many. He will rise before daybreak and study before his morning prayers, hurry to the synagogue, returning for breakfast before plunging again into study. His day of study will be broken by two more trips to the synagogue for prayers, by meals and by occasional learned discussions. Only after midnight will he stop for sleep in order to be up again in the early morning for the daily round of study and prayer. Of such a man it is said that “he is always over the Torah and over his prayer services.” (pp. 98–102).

The 613 commandments or mitsvos enumerate specific duties which relate to three major obligations. One is the obligation to constantly study the word of God in order to gain ever greater knowledge of the commandments and to approach the Truth that lies in the Holy Books. Equally important is the obligation to establish a family in order to preserve and increase the number of those dedicated to the service of the true God. The third major obligation is observance of the myriad of social, economic and ritual activities directed toward the fulfilment of the commandments that regulate the relationship between man and God, between man and his fellow man and himself, (pp. 105–106). This sacred literature provided the texts that the boy begins to study in the kheyder and continues to study until the end of his days. It is more than a code of law; for it is also a code of ethics and a handbook of daily behaviour. Every detail—social, religious, economic, moral—is examined and discussed and a definite rule is set for it, with exceptions and implications fully defined. It may be a primary prohibition forbidding him to eat pork, or a “fence” prohibition forbidding him to talk to women 89in order to avoid all possibility of adultery. It may be a primary command not to commit murder or a “fence” command not to study without wearing a girdle which will separate the upper or sacred part of the body from the lower or profane part. It may be an injunction to succour the orphan or against thinking about a business deal on the Sabbath. No subject is too large and none too small to be included in the all-embracing attention of the scholars. All of Jewish culture is the subject of Jewish learning. Each detail of life supplies an opportunity to fulfil God’s command and at the same time is loaded with the danger of violating some rule set down in the pact. The covenant which God concluded with Israel is a mutual welfare pact and is so interpreted. Its purpose is not only to insure to the Almighty recongnition and obedience but also to insure to mortal man enjoyment in this world and eternal happiness in the world to come. In return, people who devote themselves to fulfillment of the mitsvos count on three specific privileges based on the Covenant. It gives them the right to ask for health and livelihood with the hope that if the commandments are fulfilled, this request will be granted. Health and comfortable living, taken together, are called Ulam Hazen—this world. Moreover, they count on Ulam Habu—the world to come. Finally, they look forward to the coming of the Messiah and the return of the Jews to Palestine—the Promised Land. The coming of the Messiah will end the sufferings of the Diaspora, (the exile), inflicted as Divine punishment for past violations of the pact (p. 106).

There is a blanket dispensation that with three exceptions, one may do anything at all to preserve his life if there is mortal danger. The three things that are forbidden even on pain of death are conversion, bloodshed and immorality. On these three points the ethics of the shtetl are rigid. Aside from them, the Torah is viewed as a code that is absolutely binding yet at the same time subject to interpretation and adjustment. As the course of history introduces changes in 90social, economic and geographical conditions, the Law must be adapted to meet them so that man will not be put in the impossible position of having to choose between the Law and life itself.³¹ (pp. 112–113)

Moreover, problems that arise from the conditions of Jewish life in one country are debated by scholars in another. Historians have discovered a great deal about the economic and social life of Jews in medieval Europe from the Responsa of the masters who conducted Yeshivas in Persia. A rabbi in Germany will consult his colleague from Poland on a difficult question sent in by a student in France.

The unperturbed disregard of Western concepts of time and space limitations assumes that the unity of the tradition is stronger than any break in the physical or temporal continuity. This assumption helps to explain why the Talmudic scholar regards his discipline as practical and realistic while to the outsider it appears abstract and theoretical. Every discussion is geared to a concrete situation, one that may be imaginary but is never impossible. To the true Talmudic scholar, it must be remembered that such a problem as correct carving of the sacrificial lamb is no abstraction but a concrete situation that has occurred and may occur again when the Temple is rebuilt. Such a scholar classes his studies as applied science to the science of applying divine commandments to daily life. He has scant regard for pure science, pure literature or pure poetry. He can see in such studies no direct goal or purpose. There is no pure philosophy, pure esthetics or pure mathematics in the learning tradition of the shtetl. Mathematics is studied in connection with biblical problems in agriculture, or architecture; esthetics in connection with the decoration of the Temple; philosophy in conjunction with ethics or with understanding the nature of God. Similarly a piece of fiction must have a moral. It must be written in order to teach. Poetry 91is not just an esthetic arrangement of words and sentences but a beautifully phrased expression of praise for the Lord or some moral idea…. The sacred writings stem directly from Mount Sinai, from God and nothing can be learned which was not stated or implied long ago in the basic works or the commentaries of the sages. “It is a shame that so many modernist Jews study other subjects to find the answers to life’s questions when everything is in the Torah. The Holy Books cover every detail of life.” Since no aspect of life divorced from the Law embodied in the Holy Books, the shtetl draws no line between the religious and the secular. Strictly speaking, there are no secular elements, since all life is one fused whole and all truth is embodied in the sacred writings.³² For the shtetl, the opposition is not so much between secular and non-secular as between Jewish and non-Jewish.

Rigid distinctions of time are blurred and blended in the tradition of Jewish learning. The discussion between two Talmudists of the second century about which parts of a sacrificed lamb should go to the High Priest in the Temple, have not lost their actuality even though the Temple, the sacrifices and the priests no longer exist. A clever student from the shtetl will throw new light upon the problem, drawing from the brilliant interpretation of a medieval scholar. The zealous yeshiva boy participates in the discussions between Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai who both lived in the first century A.D., analyses the arguments of a seventeenth century rabbi which support one against the other and arrives at his own original conclusions…. Not only the past and the present but also the future are interwoven in the learning tradition. In the days to come when Messiah brings together all the Jews and rebuilds the Temple, the learned ones will study Torah together and the Lord will discuss the problems that could not be mastered and were left pending until the coming of the Messiah. This con92tinuity from Moses to Messiah links together Rabbi Akiba, the scholar tortured to death by Roman legionnaires, Don Isaac Abarbanel, who led the exiled Jews from Spain the year the New World was discovered, and the famished Yeshiva boy studying and starving under Nazi rule in Poland. There are no dates in Jewish learning…. A page of the Talmud looks the same now as two hundred years ago and the same in Vilna as in Shanghai. All over the world, students are poring over the same Torah, the same Talmud, the same commentary of Rashi. Through study, the Jew finds the joy of identification with his God, his tradition and his group, for Torah, God and Israel are one. (pp. 116–118)³³

In this intense reverence for the sacred law as a complete way of life and the scriptures and their interpretations as the supreme authority for Truth, Judaism and Islam meet on common ground. This accounts for the striking similarity between the kind of education imparted to the Jewish youth in the traditional ghetto communities in Eastern Europe and young Muslims when our civilization was at its height. The Jewish boy in the kheydar would not feel strange in a typical old-fashioned maktab in the mosque. The youth studying at the New York rabbinical academy would not feel out of place at the Jamiyah Ashrafiya Madrassah here in Lahore. The kind of religious training imparted at al-Azhar University in Cairo a century ago would seem quite familiar to the yeshiva student in the ghetto of Vilna and vice versa. Among a group of Orthodox rabbis discussing the sacred law, our ulema could make themselves quite at home and all would enjoy themselves immensely. The late Dr. Ahmad Amin, a 93notable literary figure in Egypt, relates in his autobiography that his father was a learned Shaikh, a lover of Arabic calligraphy and that his whole life revolved exclusively around mosque and school. The father of Shaikh Hassan al Banna, the founder of the banned Ikhwan al Muslimun, was no less immersed in a life of learning and piety. He was an expert at the watchmaking trade and worked at night. During the day, he served as Imam at the local mosque where he preached and taught. His leisure time was spent in his library. Islamic jurisprudence was his special joy and he was the author of a commentary on the Musnad of Ahmad Ibn Hanbal. Such men would find a congenial cultural atmosphere in the Shtetl.

A question which remains for consideration is the place of girls in the educational system of the Talmud. On this matter we find diametrically opposite views taken. One teacher declared: ‘A man is obliged to treach his daughter Torah’ but this statement is immediately followed by the opposing view. ‘Whoever teaches his daughter Torah is as though he taught her obscenity.’ The latter opinion, it must be admitted, was the one more generally held and practiced. For instance, notice was taken of ‘the fact that in the exhortation: ‘Ye shall teach your children’ (Deut. XI: 19) the Hebrew word more literally denotes ‘your sons’ and so excludes the daughters. One rabbi asserted: ‘Let the words of the Torah rather be destroyed by fire than imparted to women,’ and we are informed that when a woman put a question to a rabbi in connection with the Golden Calf, he rebuked her saying that a woman has no learning except in the use of the spindle. In the circumstances of that age, the woman’s only sphere was the home and the fear was that her care of the household woul suffer if she spent 94her time and energy in study. But other reasons may be suggested for the reluctance to permit women to pursue advanced learning. The religious leaders of Israel knew what happened in Greece and Rome where the education of women brought them into close intercourse with men and resulted in laxity of morals. Furthermore, the rabbis were doubtless aware of what was happening in Christendom where women, carried away by religious fervour, gave themselves up to a life of celibacy. Such a procedure could only have been contemplated with horror in the Jewish community where marriage was looked upon as the divinely ordained state. The Talmud denounces certain persons as being ‘destroyers of the world’, among them being ‘the female Pharisee’—the woman of excessive piety. It seems very probable that to counteract such tendencies as these, the rabbis adopted so antagonistic an attitude to women delving deeply into the lore of the Torah.³⁴

This quotation illustrates a profound difference between the status of the woman in Judaism and Islam. By Talmudic precept, Jewish women are barred in theory as well as in practice from acquiring advanced learning in Torah. Religious scholarship in Judaism is reserved exclusively for men. Although in practice, the majority of Jewish women in the traditional ghetto of Eastern Europe could read and write Yiddish and recite the Hebrew prayers without understanding them, their academic studies rarely progressed beyond the most elementary level. Although some of the wives, daughters and sisters of renowned scholars did acquire, simply through informal contact, considerable knowledge of Talmudic lore, even these exceptionally learned women had no status in 95the community, and were regarded as queer and abnormal because intellectual activity was only for men. It is significant that the few Jewish women who not only acquired learning but esteem for their scholarship³⁵ all lived under Muslim rule.

In contrast to Judaism, there is nothing in Islam to condemn the education of women; on the contrary, the Traditions of our Holy Prophet regard the striving after religious knowledge as obligatory for women as for men and all the authentic Hadith praise the father who educates his daughter and exhorts the master to educate his slave-girl and then free her and marry her as among the most virtuous deeds in the sight of Allah. It is a historical fact that many pious women had memorized the Holy Quran; that. women, particularly Hazrat Ayesha, took a very active role in the preservation and transmission of the Hadith.³⁶ Even in later times, the Islamic countries were by no means devoid of learned women as proved by Ibn Khallikan’s famed biographical dictionary. As late as the 13th century, we find a woman, as a most esteemed professor of Hadith at the University of Baghdad. Two learned sisters, Maryam and Fatimah, are renowned to this day throughout Morocco as the founders of the Qarawiyyin University Mosque. To cite modern examples, the first teacher of the founder of the Sanussi movement was none else than his aunt who was respected by all who knew her a woman of high intelligence and intellectual attainments. The mother of Maulana 96Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), a native of Mecca, was also an Arabic scholar. The women of my husband’s Pathan family are all literate in Urdu, including even the oldest women who throughout their lives have observed the strictest Purdah and were, in their childhood and youth, privately tutored by their parents at home. Then to cite my own case as a final example, although I have at times been rebuked for my shortcomings as housewife and mother, my literary endeavours for the Islamic cause have always won me praise and esteem. Those who differ with me, criticize my writings either because they disagree with my opinions or because they find some defect in the logic of my arguments and mode of expression, but in either case, my writings are always praised or criticised on their merits. Never have my books or essays been scorned by any Muslims merely because the author was a woman.

Although all these examples of esteemed educated Muslim women, past and present, are facts, to the delight of the enemies of Islam, it must be admitted that they are all exceptions. The overwhelming majority of the Muslim women, not only poverty-stricken peasants and nomads but even in prosperous urban families until the impact of the modern West, lived in ignorance and illiteracy. The interplay of various historical, social and economic factors unrelated to Islam are largely responsible.

In contrast to Judaism and Christianity, there is no emphasis in the theology of Islam on woman’s inferiority. Our Holy Quran tells us that men are superior to women because God has made the former 97to excel the latter and because they spend their property for the support of women. But this inferiority is not absolute but only relative. Our Holy Quran says that women have rights over men to be treated with kindness, consideration and compassion but men are a degree above them. This does not mean that all men are physically and mentally superior to all women. Women like Hazrat Khadijah and Hazrat Ayesha were superior to most men. It only means that if the strongest and most intelligent of women could be compared to the strongest and most intelligent man, the man would be a degree above her. This does not imply that the woman should be scorned. She would still be superbly endowed.³⁷ Contrast this concept of woman in Islam with the theology of the Jews:

The Shtetl sees it self through the eyes of men and talks about itself through the words of men. It is set up as a man’s culture with women officially subordinate and officially inferior. The man greets each day by offering thanks to God that ‘Thou has not made me a woman!’ and each day the woman in her early morning prayer offers praise to God ‘Who has made me according to Thy will.’ This view of woman is represented by the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible. Woman is inferior to the man because she was created after him and was made from his body. Moreover according to the legends of the Talmud and the practices of the shtetl, woman is by nature sinful. because Eve 98incited Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit.³⁸

This concept of “Original Sin”, for which Eve was allegedly responsible and which became fundamental dogma in Christianity, finds no place in our Holy Quran.

Nowhere in the Old Testament is polygamy condemned as all its most revered patriarchs freely practiced it with divine sanction. However, under Christian influence, polygamy began to fall into disfavour among the Jews. In the Talmud, divergent opinions are expressed on the subject. One rabbi says that a man should be allowed as many wives as he wants; another declares that the number of wives should be restricted to four (which was confirmed by the revelation in our Holy Quran) and still another rabbi says that a husband upon taking another wife, must grant divorce to the first wife if she wants it. (The latter is the stand taken by our Pakistan Family Laws Ordinance enacted in 1961). In Christian-dominated Europe, the leading rabbis forbade the practice of polygamy completely. However, in the Arab world, no such ban existed and, consequently, polygamy was, until very recently, as prevalent there among Jews as Muslims.

In many respects the position of women in the traditional Ghetto community and Islamic society are strikingly similar, particularly the functional division of labour between the sexes and the ideal of woman as devoted wife and mother. Since the formation of 99the family for the raising of worthy children is a sacred duty in Judaism, the Talmud condemns birth control in the strongest terms and allows contraception only in exceptional individual cases on medical grounds. To give the Jews their deserved credit, family ties among them are generally strong, characterized by faithfulness and steadfast loyalty between husband and wife; adultery and fornication are rare and lewdness almost unknown. Filial piety occupies an important place in this culture and although Jewish law allows divorce, it is not often practiced.

Amidst the social and moral disintegration in the West, Jews have been far better able than their Christian neighbours, to withstand the collapse of the family. Although my own family was not at all religiously observant, most of the marriages among my relatives have been happy and enduring; divorce is almost unknown; none of my blood relatives, not even my cousins or nieces have ever been involved in any sexual misbehaviour or delinquent activity; nobody in my family has ever been convicted of crime and sent to prison. Not once in all the years of my childhood or youth, did I ever hear my parents exchange harsh words; dirty language was never heard in our house. Ties of mutual responsibility and love between the generations last for life.

The ideal woman is a good wife and mother. In order to be a good Jew, whatever else she does or does not do, she must take hallah, light the Sabbath candles and purify herself in the ritual bath after menstruation, childbirth and marital intercourse. The good wife and mother helps her husband to fulfil his obligations. She is responsible for 100the observance of the dietary laws and for maintaining or implementing all the domestic ritual. She is not included in the religious ritual outside of the house and, in fact, is not expected to be familiar with it. Moreover, she does not have powers of discretion, even in household ceremonials. On any problem of observance, she must consult a man—her husband, the rabbi, a respected scholar and even if she knows the answer by experience, she has not the right to decide for herself. The formal demands upon woman are revealed repeatedly in comments on womanly virtues. ‘She was a perfect Jewish woman—clean, patient, hardworking, silent, submissive to God and to her husband and devoted to her children. Her own well-being was unimportant. I don’t remember my mother sitting at the table when we ate except for Friday night and Saturdays. Those days she even sat on the whole chair. Other times when she was sitting, it was always on the edge of her chair. I believe she never ate a whole meal, always some leftovers. When I was older, I asked her why she was like that and she said, “Friday night on Sabbath eve I am a queen like every Jewish woman. On weekdays I am just a woman!”

The woman’s informal status is more demanding and more rewarding than that formally assigned to her, for in actual living, the complementary character of her role is always to the fore. She is the wife who orders the functioning of the household and provides the setting in which each member performs his part. She is, above all, the Mother—key figure in the family constellation. She is the chief counselor, likely to have the power of veto in any matter outside the world of Torah. “What do you say?” is the husband’s familiar query and a common response is: “What can a silly woman say? I have only a womanish brain but if I were in your place….” Often enough, the opinion, so modestly prefaced, is decisive.

The earning of a livelihood is sexless and the large majority of women participate in some gainful occupation even if they do not carry the chief burden of support. The 101wife of a “perennial student” is very apt to be the sole support of the family. The problem of managing both a business and a home is so common that no one recognizes it as special. Of course, a woman sees that her house is clean, her children fed and all regulations observed even if she also runs a shop, has a stall at the market or merely helps her husband at his store.

Clearly, although the woman’s life is home centered, it is by no means home limited. She does the buying and often the selling. She is familiar with the market place and with the merchants who frequent it. As full participant in the burden of economic support, the woman escapes the burden of a sheltered life. If anyone is sheltered, it is the scholarly man. Women and girls move about freely. If business takes the woman to another town, she will stay with relatives, of course, for there are always relatives. But everyone assumes that she can take care of herself and even though an extremely high stake is set on womanly virtue, there is no overweening fear that she will not be able to preserve her own. The important point is that, unlike the synagogue which is dominated by men and the home which is dominated by women, the market place belongs to both and the consequences of this three-fold division permeate every aspect of shtetl life. To be a spinster is a dreadful fate which fortunately occurs far more in the anxious forebodings of girls and their parents than in fact. The shtetl does not provide any respectable place for the single woman. Up to a point, education enhances a girl’s value as a bride but that point is set by her functions as assistant to the learned man. Too much learning is unfeminine. Since study of divine law, the primary status criterion, is not for women, they are automatically excluded from top honors in the community. A woman’s status relates not to herself as an individual but to her position as wife and mother. The world to come is pictured traditionally in masculine terms as a glorified, eternalized Yeshiva. The dutiful wife sits at her husband’s feet and enjoys eternal bliss through him. All are confident that 102if the woman has been a good Jew, she will be made happy in the Hereafter. More important than the precise details is the basic assurance in the Talmud that every Jew has a share in the world to come.³⁹

In contrast, the Muslim woman leads a sheltered life. She is expected to spend her time at home and only go out when compelled by necessity. Whether married or single, the Muslim woman is not expected to earn her livelihood so long as she has a male relative to look after her. But although the Jewish woman is not so restricted in her movements as the Muslim woman and participates in some outdoor activities, there is little social mingling of the sexes. Here is the Jewish version of Purdah:

The monthly period with the additional seven-day interim means that for two weeks each month a man may not sleep with his wife. “Half the time she belongs to him; half the time to God.” During the half month when she belongs to her husband, they will scrupulously observe the regulations he learned so thoroughly as a student. A blessing must be said before the two lie together. They must be in the dark and nobody must witness their pleasure. There is a rule also that the body must be at least partly covered. The man wears his yarmelkeh or skull cap even in bed and also the fringed talis koton that marks him as a Jew. Any sexual indulgence except for procreation is sinful.⁴⁰ The popular stereotype of the groom is an innocent who is at a loss despite his academic acquaintance with all the rules in the sacred writings for connubial behaviour 103but he may need days or weeks in order to suit the act to the written word. The bride is expected to lack even verbal knowledge about this aspect marriage. Sex as a topic of discussion, even between husband and wife, is taboo. (pp. 286, 287). Because it is sinful to be distracted by thoughts of sex while studying the Law, boys are married early so that their needs will be satisfied and they will have no difficulty concentrating on their books. The more talented the student, the more effort is made to have him marry young, even at fourteen or fifteen. Purity in other words is sought through immunizing rather than through quarantine. “There is no such thing as a Jewish monastery,” says the proverb. The precautions taken are not against sex but against the intrusion of sex at the wrong time and in the wrong context. The precautions themselves are severe. The bride’s hair is cut off and for the rest of her life she wears a wig in order to reduce her dangerous charms. A woman is not supposed to wear short sleeves, short skirts or low-cut necklines⁴¹ and in any case, a man should not study in a room where a woman’s arms or legs are exposed. He should not listen to a woman singing lest she arouse his desire. The woman is considered so potent a source of attraction that a man must avert his eyes in order to protect them⁴² both. Some men will not even speak directly to a woman. Most would avoid passing between two of them. The burden of avoidance is more on the man than on the woman. She is expected to comply with sartorical regulations and refrain from obtruding herself but the responsibility for not looking at her, talking to her or touching her, is his. A division of sexes at social functions follows naturally from the division of interests and responsibilities as well as from the avoidance rule and the concept of feminine inferiority. At weddings the men and women stand in separate groups during the ceremony and sit at different tables for the feast. In the olden days it was 104unthinkable for men and girls to dance together but in later years this prohibition broke down among the “liberals” and the “advanced.” Separation of the sexes is obligatory and men precede women although the duty of strict observance lies more heavily on the educated and prosperous than on the ignorant and poor⁴³.

Thus though certain specific regulations concerning the segregation of the sexes may differ between Judaism and Islam, the purpose is the same. With the destruction of the traditional Ghetto community in Russia by the Communist revolution and Eastern Europe by Nazi occupation, these regulations swiftly fell into oblivion. Consequently, the contemporary Jewish woman, whether she lives in America, Russia or “Israel”, has whole-heartedly adopted modern customs until now scarcely anything distinguishes her from other Western women.

Jewish practices in conformity to Islamic ways include circumcision, which is performed on all newborn male babies, the wearing of beards, the covering of the head and the banning of pictures and statues, at least in the synagogue. Even today, ultra-orthodox Jews object to having their photographs taken unless compelled by necessity. Jews greet other Jews with “Scholem Aleichem” (peace be with you) just as Muslim greet each other with “Assalaam Alaikum” which means the same thing. The affinity between Jewish and Islamic culture is illustrated by the following quotation:

Many of the butchers who supply the Muslim inhabitants of the metropolis of Cairo with meat are Jews. A few years ago one of the principal ulema here complained of this 105fact to the Pasha and begged him to put a stop to it. Another of the ulema, hearing that this person had gone to make the complaint above mentioned, followed him and urged before the Pasha that the practice was not unlawful. “Adduce your proof,” said the former. “Here,” answered the other, “is my proof from the word of God, ‘Eat of that whereon the name of God hath been commemorated’.” (Quran VI: 118). The chief of the Jewish butchers was then summoned and asked whether he said anything previous to slaughtering an animal. He answered, “Yes, we always say as the Muslims, ‘In the name of God. God is most great,’ and we never kill an animal in any other way than by cutting its throat.” The complaint was consequently dismissed.⁴⁴

Also in conformity to the spirit of Islam, the pious Jew recites a prayer for every occasion. Besides the three ritual daily prayers, a devout Jew praises God as soon as he awakes in the morning, before and after meals, on seeing the wonders of nature, during an electrical storm, eclipse of the sun or moon, an earthquake, on seeking a rainbow, on hearing good and bad tidings, for departing on a journey, for undertaking a business venture, for sickness and for death. These prayers for every occasion are intended to have the believer engaged in constant remembrance of God in everything he does and make God a living reality in his daily life. The Jews even have a prayer for the Government which runs as follows:

He Who granted victory to kings and dominion to princes, His kingdom is a kingdom of all ages; He who delivered His servant David from the evil sword; He who opened a road through the sea, a path amid the mighty 106waters, may He bless and protect, help and exalt the President and the Vice-President and all the officers of this country. May the supreme King of Kings in His mercy, sustain them and deliver them from all distress and misfortune. May the supreme King of Kings in his mercy, inspire them and all their counselors and aides to deal kindly with us and with all Israel. In their days and in our days Judah shall be saved; Israel shall dwell in security and a redeemer shall come to Zion. May this be the will of God and let us say Amen.⁴⁵

This prayer implies the acceptance by Jews in the Diaspora of secularism. The modern Jew living in America, Russia or “Israel,” has whole-heartedly embraced secularism in theory as well as in practice. The traditional Ghetto communities in medieval Europe and in Russia and Poland until World War II, however, were so self-contained that until recent times, they comprised almost a state within a state. For all practical purposes, the Jews in the Ghetto ruled themselves; they lived according to their own laws; they had their own courts and judges with the rabbi occupying the most authoritative position in the community. Except for paying taxes and sometimes being subjected to military conscription, the Jews living in the Ghetto took little interest in the central Government. As the Talmudic law includes juridical, civil and penal matters as well as dealing with the intricacies of ritual, the Jews until modern times regarded their faith as a complete way of life. However, the sacred laws of the Jews are totally silent about one extremely important aspect of life—international relations. 107Because those rabbis who compiled the Talmud could not envision the Jews except as a small minority in a non-Jewish state, always on the defensive, they did not make provision for such crucial issues as relations between Jews and non-Jews, the conduct of State, intercourse with other nations or any laws regulating warfare. Consequently, when the Jews finally did achieve a State of their own, since Divine guidance was lacking in these aspects, even the most devout Jews did not feel accountable towards God for their dealings with the Arabs and based their behaviour purely on opportunism and expediency.

With the rise of secularism which proclaimed the equality of all citizens regardless of creed (at least on paper), the Jews repudiated their former aloofness from the gentile majority and began to participate enthusiastically in Western culture. In defending the position of the modern Jew on the subject, a “progressive” rabbi writes:

The Jews did not leave the Torah but the Torah in so far as civil and criminal laws are concerned, ceased to function in the life of modern Jews the moment they became full fledged citizens of the contemporary secular state. In Islam, not in Judasim, revelation is conceived as law. When modern Orthodox rabbis say that not a single law can be abrogated, they are more like the ulema of Islam than the teachers of Judaism, the rabbis. Although Islam taught a rational civilization to barbaric masses, it did this for a price. Nobody is allowed freedom. Islam is religious totalitarianism. And true Judaism cannot flourish without freedom!⁴⁶

108It is highly significant that this kind of Jewish modernism is so enthusiastically quoted by a Muslim modernist to back his own sophistries. The consensus view of the modern orthodox Jew towards Zionism is illustrated in the following prayer by the Chief Rabbinate of “Israel”.

Our Father Who art in heaven, Protector and Redeemer of Israel, bless Thou the state of Israel which marks the dawn of our deliverance. Shield it beneath the wings of Thy love; spread over it Thy canopy of peace; send thy light and Thy truth to its leaders, officers, and counselors and direct them with Thy good counsel. Oh God, strengthen the defenders our Holy Land; grant them salvation and crown them with victory. Establish peace in the land and everlasting joy for its inhabitants. Remember our brethren, the whole house of Israel, in all the lands of their dispersion. Speedily let them walk upright to Zion and Thy city, Jerusalem, Thy dwelling place as it is written in the Torah of Thy servant Moses: “Even if you are dispersed in the uttermost parts of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather and fetch you. The Lord your God will bring you into the land which your fathers possessed and you shall possess it.” (Deuteronomy 30:4). Unite our hearts to love Thy name and to observe all the precepts of Thy Torah. Shine forth in Thy glorious majesty over all the inhabitants of Thy world. Let everything that breathes proclaim: “Thy Lord God of Israel is King, His majesty rules over all.” Amen!⁴⁷

This prayer has not been fulfilled. Despite the fact that the Jews now have their state, its leaders are nearly all atheists imbued with socialism and secularism and determined to govern accordingly. Some of the orthodox 109Jews in “Israel” have organized religious parties which clamour for the implementation of the Torah as the supreme law of the land but they are contemptuously regarded as fanatics by those in power. Yet the ultra-orthodox have not given up hope and still strive to attain a theocratic state. Thus far they have not been successful. The very essence of modern Zionism is hostile to all the religious values of traditional Jewish culture. In order to understand the precise relationship between Judaism and Zionism, it is first necessary to discuss the rise of modern secularism, nationalism and materialism among the Jews of Europe and America in recent times.

After the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, one country after another in Western Europe declared its Government founded upon a completely secular basis with no distinction between its Jewish and Gentile citizens. It was at this time when the Jews in Western Europe gradually abandoned their distinctive religious culture and were determined wholeheartedly to participate in modern Western life. Most strongly affected by this wave of westernization were the Jews of Germany.

The most noted of the handful of Jewish apostles of elightenment was Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786). It was Moses Mendelssohn who organized the historic movement among Jews not only to break down the walls of their physical ghettos, symbols of their economic and social strangulation but also to destroy the equally imprisoning ghetto within—the backwardness, ignorance, cultural stagnation and hopelessness that had been depressing Jewish community life for so many centuries. By means of the printed word and of the establishment of liberal religious schools in which 110German was the language of instruction, the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment movement sought to draw reluctant fellow-Jews out of the ghetto and into the broad light of the modern Western world and general non-Jewish culture.

Mendelssohn had translated the Pentateuch into German and had published it parallel with the Hebrew text, thus making it possible for thousands of German Jews who knew Hebrew and Yiddish, to learn the German language. Oddly enough, although the Jewish enlightenment movement succeeded in secularizing many Jews and in leading them to more modern values, it ultimately defeated its own intention to bind Jews closer to their religious heritage. Many of its most vocal devotees were lured eventually by a hunger for social acceptance among Christians into expediently becoming Christians. In fact, there was a morbid movement to apostasy. It is estimated that at least half of Berlin’s Jewry was baptised during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The assimilation of German culture by Jews moved faster than the wearer of the proverbial seven-league boots, especially in wealthy and cultured circles. It is an ironic commentary on Moses Mendelssohn’s striving for a modernized Judaism that his own two daughters and his son, the father of the composer, Felix Mendelssohn, became converts to Christianity. His daughter, Dorothea, and two other converted women, Rahel von Ense and Henriette Herz, established elegant salons for famous men in which an elite of generals, princes, philosophers poets, scientists and beautiful women gathered for interminable and elevating discussions and also, of course, to see and be seen. How far this trend toward submersion of religious and group identity went on among cultured German Jews may be gathered from the remarkable proposal made to a Christian clergyman in 1799 by Mendelssohn’s principal lieutenant, David Friedlander. The latter announced that he was ready to accept baptism for himself and 111his entire circle provided the Church would not oblige them to accept all the “historical” dogmas and doctrines of Christianity such as the Holy Trinity and the Immaculate Conception. The clergyman berated Friedlander for being a hypocrite.⁴⁸

Let this serve as an object lesson and a warning to our would-be modernist Muslims! Moses Mendelssohn was to the Jews of 18th century Germany what Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, the founder of the Aligarh Movement, was to the Muslims of late 19th century of India, for both these men were engaged in the same task of westernizing as rapidly as possible, their respective communities. Surely Moses Mendelssohn would have found himself at home in Aligarh! Had these pioneers of Jewish and Muslim modernism lived at the same time and known each other, they could have been comrades-in arms for they had everything in common. The fate of the modernist movement of the Jews in Germany proves conclusively that no such watered-down, insipid, half-hearted faith which compromises with philosophies irreconcilable to it, can ever hope to maintain the allegiance, much less the loyalty of its adherents.

While some leading Jewish intellectuals became converts to Christianity to escape their pariah status, to pursue some cherished career or just chameleon-like, to blend with the rest of the world, others left the Jewish community because they found it too circumscribing. In the eighteenth century, contemporary with Moses Mendelossohn, were a handful of such free, inquiring minds. Solomon Maimon was one of the most eminent German philosophers of his day and the 112principal critic of Immanuel Kant. Maimon was a prodigy of erudition in the Talmud. While living in a small Lithuanian town, he became a rabbi at an extremely early age. But his love of learning and his questioning mind gave him no peace. He ran away to Germany from the ghetto which he hated and despite many hardships, within only ten years made an arresting debut in German philosophy. Excepting Goethe, there were no more illustrious figures in German literature during the first half of the nineteenth century than Karl Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich Heine. Heine, the greatest lyric poet Germany had produced, and Boerne, the ardent champion of an unfettered Germany, were men with a universal vision. Though both fought for Jewish rights, they conceived the fight only as part of the struggle for human rights. Bismarck seemed to have had an affinity for Jewish counselors. Undoubtedly the most able and the most reactionary of these statesmen was Friedrich Julius Stahl. An apostate from Judaism, he served as Bismarck’s political adviser. He coined the cynical battle cry of the Junkers; “Not majority but authority!” He has frequently been described by historians of his epoch as the intellectual father of the latter-day Prussianism.⁴⁹

Friedrich Julius Stahl could with equal justification claim to be a forerunner of the Nazi movement. Adolf Hitler, the most fanatic persecutor of Jews in all history, must certainly have been deeply indebted to him!

At the opposite political pole from Stahl stood Karl Marx whose wealthy father had him baptized at the age of six in the belief that Karl’s course through life would thereby be made smoother. It is generally held, even by his opponents, that no man in modern times has influenced the course of history so profoundly as did Karl Marx with his 113political and economic philosophy. His theories, based on a materialistic conception of history, were evolved in collaboration with Friedrich Engels, a non-Jew. Marxism as a world-force achieved its greatest importance when it became the cornerstone of the social system of the Soviet Union and in more recent years, of its communistically oriented allies in Europe and Asia.⁵⁰

This was the result of Mendelssohn’s modernist movement! These men may have been among my illustrious ancestors. I an not proud of them.

In their zeal to modernize Judaism, liberal Jews introduced into their houses of worship the organ and other musical instruments, mixed paid professional choirs of men and women (many of them Christians) and replaced the traditional chants of the Hebrew liturgy with the melodies of Christian hymns set to different words which would not offend a Jewish audience. Stain-glass windows bearing paintings of the prophets and patriarchs were another innovation by the reformed Jews to make their houses of worship more nearly resemble a Christian church. The segregation of men and women, so strictly enforced by the Orthodox, was removed and in reformed temples women were “emancipated” and sat in pews alongside the men. Portions of the traditional Hebrew prayers which conflict with modern Western liberalism were removed from the reformed prayer-book, including all reference to the Day of Judgment, Heaven and Hell. Hebrew was replaced by German in Germany and English in America. 114There is no such thing as “Orthodoxy”, they declared, because:

1. There is no authority to decide what is orthodox and what is not.
2. Our codes of law have never been recognized as official and authentic interpretations of Judaism;
3. Our Torah and Talmud contain superstitious views which are untenable;
4. Our Scriptures presuppose that the fundamental views of modern science are false;
5. Our ritual practices are impracticable in contemporary society;
6. In many instances, ritual provokes feelings by deceit and trickery;
7. Dogmas, like all human knowledge, must be revised and enlightened by enlarged experience.⁵¹

“The primary source of Reformist ideology is the declaration of principles adopted at the Pittsburg convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis held in 1885. Owing to the apathy of the laity to all questions concerning theological beliefs, these rabbis enjoy considerable freedom in expounding whatever views they choose so long as they draw large attendance and help increase the membership of their “temples.” All this however does not negate the fact that Reformed Judaism has definite norms and that these norms were clearly defined in the principles 115of the Pittsburg conference: We quote the complete text of the manifesto of Reformism as follows:

1. We recognize in every religion an attempt to grasp the Infinite and in every mode, source or book of revelation held sacred in any religious systems, the consciousness of the indwelling of God in man. We hold that Judaism presents the highest conception of the God-idea as taught in our Holy Scriptures and developed and spiritualized by the Jewish teachers in accordance with the moral and philosophical progress of their respective ages. We maintain that Judaism preserved and defended amidst continual struggles and trials and under enforced isolation, this God-idea as the central religious truth for human race.
2. We recognize in the Bible the record of the consecration of the Jewish people to its mission as the priest of the one God and value it as the most potent instrument of religious and moral instruction. We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific research in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism, the Bible reflecting the primitive ideas of its own age and at times clothing its conception of divine Providence and justice dealing with man in miraculous narratives.
3. We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life in Palestine and today we accept as binding only its moral law, and maintain only such ceremonies as elevate and sanctify our lives, but reject all such as are not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.
4. We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas, entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; 116their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.
5. We recognize in Judaism a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason. We are convinced of the utmost of preserving the historical identity with our great past. Christianity and Islam, being daughter religions of Judaism, we appreciate their providential mission to aid in the spreading of monotheistic and moral truth. We acknowledge that the spirit of broad humanity of our age is our ally in the fulfilment of our mission and therefore we extend the hand of fellowship to all who cooperate with us in the establishment of the reign of truth and righteousenss among men.
6. We assert the doctrine of Judaism that the soul is immortal, grounding this belief on the divine nature of the human spirit which forever finds bliss in righteousness and misery in wickedness. We reject as ideas not rooted in Judaism the beliefs both in bodily resurrection and in Hell and Paradise as abodes for everlasting punishment and reward.
7. We recognize in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.
8. In full accordance with the spirit of Mosaic legislation which strives to regulate the relations between rich and poor, we deem it our duty to participate in the great task mission of modern times—to solve on the basis of justice and righteousness, the problem presented by the economic contrasts and evils of the present organization of society.

117Says Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, a revered leader of American Jewry, in his classic, Judaism as a civilization, Macmillan, New York, 1934:

The success of the Reformist movement is qualified not only by its uncertain practical prospect but also by its present spiritual poverty. It is confined to one stratum of society—the so-called upper middle class. Since the prerequsites to the proper functioning of Reformist Judaism are magnificent temples, highly paid rabbis, and expensive choirs, the large mass of wage-earners stand outside its pale. To be sure, while nothing in its program makes this snobbery indispensable, nothing in its program suggests a fitting substitute. Traditional Judaism still, impels sweat-shop workers in the cities, poor farmers and bus drivers in farm villages to establish congregations and make provision for the religious upbringing of their children. Reformist Judaism, on the other hand, seems to be limited to those who are comfortably situated. By fostering congregational affiliation, it no doubt helps its aderents to live up to the conventional moral standards and to keep alive a sense of communal responsibility, however limited, without such affiliation to prevent the horizon of their interests from being limited to their own immediate family and friends, there is no telling how spiritually callous they might become. But beyond being the mainstay of respectability for a very limited class of Jews, Reformist Judaism has stimulated no intellectual or moral activity of a high order.⁵²

“In the last analysis, submission to Jewish law is the most essential requirement of traditional Judaism. Thus it is fair to inquire: how far is submission to Jewish law a reality in the practice of modern Orthodoxy? We are amazed to discover that the most important elements of Jewish law are as obsolete in modern 118Orthodoxy as they are in Reformism! Neo-Orthodoxy accepts with utter complacency the elimination of the whole civil code of Jewish law and is content to confine the scope of Jewish law to ritual observance. Neo-Orthodoxy’s acceptance of modern Western civilization has been no less glad-hearted than Reformism’s. Which is to say that Neo-Orthodoxy in effect has suffered no more qualms than has Reformism about the whole extirpation of the civil code from the law of God. When these laws cease to function, they cease to be studied. Once fundamental in the equipment of the rabbi, the entire code of civil law has practically fallen into neglect. It is truly amazing that the Neo-Orthodox constantly express inconsolable sorrow over the loss of the sanctuary of the Temple in Jerusalem and the disappearance of the sacrificial system yet there is never a word about the rejection of the civil code and no thought of how much the modern Jew has lost of his Jewishness by having it eliminated from his life. To quote the following foreword from the Vilna edition of the Shulhan Aruk printed just before World War I:

Everyone knows that many of the laws contained in these volumes are not actually observed in our time, such laws as pertain to buying and selling, larceny, lost articles, inheritance, oaths, testimony, corporal punishment, usury, fines, excommunication, collection of debts, etc. All those laws were in vogue in the past but are not at present. In all the aforementioned matters we conduct ourselves according to the laws of the various countries which afford us protection. We must bear in mind and obey the Talmudic decision that the law of the Government is law⁵³

119During the regime of Kemal Ataturk, the modernizers of Turkey attempted to imitate what the reformed Jews in America had done:

The new faculty of Divinity at Istanbul University was intended to serve as the centre of a new, modernized and scientific form of religious instruction more appropriate to a secular, westernized republic. In 1928 the faculty appointed a committee to examine the problems of reform and modernization in the Islamic religion and to make proposals through the University to the Ministry of Education. Its report, published in June 1928, begins with a clear assertion that religion is a social institution and like other social institutions, it must keep pace with change and development. The recommendations of the committee were grouped under four headings. The first, “the form of worship” speaks of the need for “clean and orderly mosques with pews and cloakrooms. People must be urged to enter into them with clean SHOES.” The second on the language of worship insists that this must be Turkish and that the prayers and sermons must never be in Arabic but in the national language. The third on the charecter of worship “seeks to make the mosque worship beautiful, inspiring and spiritual. For this the mosque needs trained musicians and also musical instrumments. The need is urgent for modern vocal and instrumental music in the mosque”. The fourth and last deals with the thought-side of worship. “Printed set sermons must be replaced by religious guidance which only preachers with the necessary philosophical training would be competent to give.”⁵⁴

It is equally significant that Bernard Lewis is a Jewish scholar who applauds these reforms. This deplorable hypocrisy deceived none of the Muslims in Turkey who, despite their tyrannical secularist regime, 120remained as devout and sincere as their brethren-in-faith elsewhere. Thus this half-hearted Government attempt to reform the mosque on the pattern of the modern Protestant Christian Church ended as a miserable failure. In contrast, the Jews succumbed to modernization much more swiftly and completely than anything known in the Muslim world where the common people want none of it and thus all measures for westernization must be forcibly imposed from above. As a result, the “reformed” Jews have their own “temples” where any remnant of traditional ritual is merely retained for sentimental reasons. The “conservative” Jews form another group and go to their separate synagogues which also part with much of the Tradition as valid only for ancient times, though not nearly so radically as the “liberals”. Only in the Orthodox “shul” is the complete law and ritual retained intact. Although the Jews will emphatically deny this, the reformed, conservative and orthodox Jews form three distinct sects, each possessing separate houses of worship and their own educational institutions for the training of future rabbis.

Just as Martin Luther broke down the barriers of dogma in Christianity and progressive Jewry has sought to bring a reformed Judaism to the Jews, so also liberal Islam must be recognized and given its place by the orthodox.⁵⁵

Thank God, this has not, cannot and inshallah will never happen to us! If Mr. Fyzee ever wants to say his Salat, he is compelled to worship side by side with his orthodox, “unenlightened” brother!

121Is orthodox Judaism and modern Western culture compatible? The answer to this question can be found in a very instructive little book entitled Two Worlds, published in 1956 in New York by David Daiches, now a prominent critic of English literature. The subject of this book is a biography of his father who as Chief Rabbi of Edinburgh (Scotland) devoted his entire life in the attempt to prove both to himself and to orthodox Jews throughout the Western world, that it is possible for the Jew to maintain his piety and strict observance of the sacred law intact while at the same time fully participating in modern life. Although he did manage with much difficulty to attain a small measure of success in this respect in his own life, he was unable to transmit his deep religious faith to his children who, educated in secular public schools, were irresistibly attracted to the surrounding environment and all grew up as atheists.

My father in his innocence took much for granted. Most of all, he took for granted that the deep unmentioned roots of his own faith would spread automatically down the generations. He, as an orthodox Jewish rabbi and a student of Hume and Kant, had finally solved the relation between Judaism and modern secular culture and showed how one could be a free and equal citizen of a Western democracy while keeping up all orthodox Jewish observances. There was nothing for Lionel and me to do but to follow in his footsteps. Though he never thought of us as becoming rabbis, I don’t think that it once crossed his mind that we would ever question his cultural synthesis. And throughout our childhood, the pattern of family loyalties and family affection was woven so closely and strongly that any such questioning was unthinkable. Even when as a child, I used to wonder about the existence of God, it never occurred to 122me to wonder about my father’s British-Jewish way of life. (pp. 178–179)……

The change which resulted in my life when I left school and entered Edinburgh University was enormous and had far-reaching consequences. As a schoolboy I had done my work and gone home, taking no part in sports or other extracurricular activities. But the university was different. There was a great variety of social and intellectual life outside the lecture room. The sense of liberation was intoxicating. I had not realized how narrow and lonely my life had previously been. But now I was free in a new and vastly richer world, and not only free in it but sought after by it.

To my father, it was inconceivable that I should take a non-Jewish girl for an outing. Indeed, it was inconceivable to him that Lionel or I should take ANY girl, even one of deep Jewish orthodoxy, out to tea or anywhere else. The Daiches boys didn’t do that. We were the sons of a prominent rabbi and we were not to be seen going about with a girl. When the time came, my father intended to introduce us to beautiful, intelligent and wealthy Jewish girls from cities which had larger Jewish populations than Edinburgh and he assumed we would then get married. If we did not like the first ones provided, there would be others. Here again, my father’s innocence was shattering. What would he have thought if he knew that I had been walking my girl home from the university every day? For the first time in my life I was exploring friendship and found the invisible barrier imposed by the policy of Jewish self-segregation not only phsyically impossible but a great strain psychologically. Oddly enough, my father never forbade me to go to university dances whatever his private misgivings might have been. But it was unthinkable that we should take a girl to a dance we attended. We should go as a member of a large party where the couples were not paired off. What my father thought we did at these dances, I cannot imagine. The difficulty, if not the sheer impossibility, 123of going to a dance alone never seems to have occurred to him. (pp. 180–182).

As far as Jewish matters went, I have the impression now that my youngest sister, Beryl, was from the beginning further away from the older tradition than the rest of us. Not that there was any visible difference in the Jewish atmosphere of our home when she was a child—the same rituals, the same festivals, the same observances. But though Beryl was naturally taught Hebrew, I don’t think she was drilled in Jewish matters the way we were and there were all sorts of little freedoms which Lionel, Sylvia and I had bit by bit wrested from our parents which she grew up to take completely for granted. She participated more fully in school life than the rest of us ever did and she relaxed her strict observance of the Sabbath at an earlier age and I should imagine, with less inward argument than the rest of us. I suppose it was World War II and the conditions of life in a uniformed service that helped Beryl to cast off all Jewish religious observance with such casual indifference that she did not even seem to take notice that she was doing it. When living with Mother, she made no attempt to conceal her utter indifference to Jewish observance which we were brought up to practice. The rest of us at least kept things up when we were at home in Edinburgh but Beryl had her older sister, Sylvia’s hatred of hypocrisy and refused on principle to observe customs that had no meaning for her. She had moved in the same direction as I for one had but much more quickly and with apparently no sentimental memories of Jewish life in the days of our childhood. In the light of her wartime experiences alone with her preoccupied parents in a grimly “utility” Edinburgh, she had come to associate all Jewish observance with restriction and dreariness. Am I blaming her for having put the past behind her too easily when I did so only after such mental agony? (pp. 147–149).

It may seem surprising that my father, who was so anxious to combine all that was best in modern thought with Jewish 124tradition and practice, should have been so opposed to liberal reformed Judaism whose aim is to concentrate on the finer ethical qualities of Judaism and prune away the element of tribal taboo and rabbinical elaboration of the minute prohibitions, and observances. But in fact, he was the implacable enemy of the movement. In his view, to tailor Judaism in that fashion meant to substitute human claims to know what was good and right and to be able to distinguish the ethically relevant from the archaic for a belief in the divine origin of Jewish ethics. (pp. 174–175). My father demonstrated the illogicality of the Reformed Jewish position for me conclusively. If the individual can pick and choose among the Biblical precepts saying that some sound rather attractive and worth keeping while others seem primitive and superstitious, then obviously he is creating God in accordance with his own ideas and the objective Truth of religion disappears. Any kind of “liberal” religion becomes a humane agnosticism using some of the forms of religion to find acceptance for its ethical views. I discuss this in some detail because it explains how my father unwittingly destroyed for me in advance any line of defence to which I might retreat when I came to doubt the literal Divine inspiration of the Bible and the Talmud. It is a sad irony of fate that made my father’s earnest and eloquent crusade against Reformed Judaism point the way to agnosticism for me but that is what happened. (pp. 174–178).

Yet the story of my father is tragic only if we read it too literally. True, his synthesis of Jewish orthodoxy with modern Western culture, however brilliantly illustrated in his own life, proved incapable of transmission to his children. His ultimate recognition of this was perhaps rueful rather than either complacent or tragic. But he went on with his mission to the end, pursuing his chosen way of life with heroic dignity. (p. 192).⁵⁶

125I heartily recommend the whole of this book as an eye-opener to all Muslim parents who must face the problem of raising their children in non-Muslim societies because the lesson it preaches is just as applicable to us.

How does the process of westernization/modernization proceed? What are the attractions of modern life so irresistible to the rising generations reared in traditional societies which result in rejection of “traditionalism” with such vehemence? It is the same story all over the world. Here is an illuminating excerpt from the autobiography of a Russian-Jewish girl who migrated with her family to America at the end of the last century.

One day I found myself in the middle of the schoolyard with a dozen of my Christian classmates interrupting each other to express their disapproval of me. For I had just cooly told them in answer to a question that I did not believe in God.

How had I arrived at such a conviction? How had I come from praying, fasting and Psalm-singing, to this extreme impiety? Alas! My backsliding had cost me no travail of spirit. Always weak in my faith, playing at piety as I played at soldiers, just as I was in the mood or not, I had neglected my books of devotion and given myself up to profane literature at the first opportunity in Vitebsk; and I never took up my prayer book again. On my return to my native Polotzk, America loomed so near that my imagination was fully occupied, and I did not revive the secret experiments with which I used to test the nature and intention of Diety. It meant more to me that I was going to America than I would not be going to Paradise. And when we joined my father there, and I saw that he did not wear the sacred fringes nor did he put on his phylacteries and pray, I was neither surprised nor shocked, remembering the 126Sabbath night when he had committed with no remorse or shame the grave sin of turning off the lamp with his own hand. When I saw him go out to work on Sabbath exactly as on a week-day, I understood why God had not annihilated me with his thunderbolt that time when I purposely carried something in my pocket in violation of the Sabbath; there was no God and there was no sin. And joyfully I ran out to play, delighted to find that I was free like all the non-Jewish children in the street, instead of being imprisoned with prohibitions, restrictions and obligations at every step.

The actual point of issue in the schoolyard was as little as ever to me but I perceived that a crowd of free American children were disputing the right of a fellow citizen to have kind of god she chose. I knew from my father’s teaching that this persecution was contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America and I held my ground as befitted the defender of a cause. George Washington would not have treated me as Kitty Maloney was doing! “This is a free country!” I reminded them in the middle of the argument. When the school bell rang and the children began to file into their classroom, my teacher, Miss Bland, listened patiently to my version of the story. She said she was sorry that the children had been rude to me but she thought they would not trouble me any more if I let the subject drop. She made me understand, as Miss Dillingham had done on the occasion of my making noise during prayers, that it was proper American conduct to avoid religious arguments on school territory. I felt honoured by this private initiation into the doctrine of Secularism—of the strict separation of Church and State and I went to my seat in the classroom with dignity, my conscience fully satisfied by my teacher’s calm explanation.

My father, in his ambition to make Americans of us, was headstrong and strenuous in his methods. To my mother, on the eve of departure from Russia to the New World, he wrote boldly that progressive American Jews did not spend their days in praying and he urged her to leave her 127wig in Polotzk as a first step of progress. The breath of revolt against Orthodox Traditionalism was at that time beginning to reach us ghetto Jews in Polotzk from the greater outside world, notably from America. Sons whose pious parents had impoverished themselves by paying the fine for non-appearance for military conscription in order to save their loved-ones from the inevitable sins of violated Jewish laws, while in the service, proudly sent home photographs of themselves in modern dress with their faces shaved and the grieved old fathers and mothers after offering up special prayers for the renegades and giving charity in their name, exhibited the significant portraits on their parlor tables. Bred to blind submission to her father and then to her husband, submit she must and when my mother perceived a conflict of authorities, she was prepared to accept the New Order under which her children’s future was to be formed without question; wherein she proved her adaptability, her readiness to fall into line, which is one of the most charming traits of her gentle, self-effacing nature. My father held it to be his wife’s duty to follow her husband in all things. Convinced that to adhere to Orthodox Judaism was to be hampered in the race for Americanization, he did not hesitate to order our family life on the new lines. There was no deliberate despotism in this; it was only making manly haste to realize the ideal, the nobility of which there was nobody to dispute. My father had always been a free-thinker and a non-conformist in his heart; my mother bore lovingly the yoke of prescribed Jewish conduct. Individual freedom to him was the only tolerable condition of life; to my mother it meant confusion. If my father’s loud bold denials of the existence of God influenced her to reconsider her creed, it was merely an incidental result of the freedom of expression we enjoyed in America which he was so eager to practice after a life-time of enforced hypocrisy in the ghetto. My father allowed my mother to believe and worship as she pleased up to the point where her orthodoxy began to interfere with the Americanization of the family. Although 128my father allowed my mother to keep a Kosher kitchen, he did not want us children to refuse invitations to the dining tables of our Gentile neighbors. He would have no bar to our social intercourse with the world around us for only by freely sharing the life of our non-Jewish neighbors could we come into our full inheritage of American freedom and opportunity. On the High Holy Days he brought my mother a ticket for the synagogue services but we children went to school. On Sabbath eve my mother might light the consecrated candles but my father kept his store open until Sunday morning. The price that all of us paid for this disorganization of our family life has been levied on every immigrant Jewish household where the first generation clings to Traditionalism while the new generation leads a modern life. Nothing more pitiful or pathetic than this Emancipation could be written in the history of the Jews yet nothing more hopeful. For Israel is not the only party that has put up a forfeit in this struggle between medievalism and modernism—the whole of humanity has a vital stake it! And I speak for thousands, if not millions!

My conscience was not troubled when I horrified my Christian classmates in the school yeard by denying the existence of God on the authority of my father and defended my right to atheism on the authority of the Constitution of the United States of America. I considered myself then as I do now, absolutely, eternally delightfully emancipated from the yoke of indefensible superstitions. I went wild with indignation and pity when I remembered how my poor brother had been cruelly beaten because he did not want to sit in the Cheder and accept the authority of the Talmud which was, after all, false and useless. I was intoxicated with my love for Enlightenment and eager for opportunities to prove it.

It was my teacher, Miss Dillingham who put me to an early test when she invited me to tea one day and I came in much trepidation. It was my first entrance into a genuine American household; my first meal at a Gentile—yes a 129Christian board. Would I know how to behave properly? I do not know whether I betrayed my anxiety; I am certain only that I was all eyes and ears, that nothing should escape me which might serve to guide me in the future. This, after all, was a normal state for me as a newly arrived immigrant. So I suppose I looked natural no matter how much I stared. America was not Polotzk, as my father repeatedly reminded me, so I proceeded very cautiously with my spoons, knives and forks at the table, trying to conceal my uncertainty by being just a bit slow. I did not get to any given spoon until the others at table had shown me which was the correct one. All went well until a platter was passed with a kind of meat which was strange to me. Some mischievous instinct told me that it was ham—forbidden food: and I, the athiest, the liberal, the Enlightened and the Free, was afraid to touch it. I had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, self-contempt but I helped myself to the slice of the forbidden swine-flesh nevertheless and hung my head over my plate to hide my confusion; I was furious with myself for my weakness; I to be afraid of a pink piece of pig’s flesh, who had defied at least two religions in defence of free thought. And then I boldly helped myself to a larger second portion, determined to eat more ham than anybody else at the table! Alas! I learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk. That Spartan boy who allowed the stolen fox hidden in his bosom to consume his vitals rather than be detected in the theft, showed no such miracle of self-control as did I sitting there at my friend’s tea-table eating un-Jewish meat! And to think that so ridiculous a thing as a scrap of meat should be the symbol and test of things so august! To think that in the mental life of a half-grown child should be reflected the struggles and triumphs of ages! (pp. 240–251).

Our initiation into American ways began with the first steps on the new soil. When I enumerate the long list of my American school teachers. I must begin with those who 130came to us on Wall Street and taught us our first steps. A fairy godmother to us children was she who led us to a wonderful country called “uptown” where in a dazzingly beautiful palace called a “department store” we exchanged our hateful home-made Russian-Jewish costumes which pointed us out as “greenhorns” to the children who ridiculed us on the street for the real beautiful American machine-made garments and issued forth glorified in each other’s eyes. With our despised foreign clothing, was also shed our impossible Hebrew names. A committee of our friends, several years ahead of us in American experience, put their heads together and concocted English names for us all. (pp. 187–188).

Perhaps I had spent my time in the city of Vitebsk to better advantage for when I returned to my native village I saw the narrowness, the stifling narrowness, the provincialism and poverty of my restricted life in Polotzk. My secular books, my walks, my visits as teacher to many homes had been so many doors opening on a wider world, so many horizons, one beyond the other. The boundaries of life had stretched and I filled my lungs with the thrilling air from the world Outside. Child though I was, Polotzk was too small for me. My spirit is not tied to the monumental past, any more than my feet are bound to my grandfather’s little house below the hill. The past was only my cradle; and now it cannot hold me because I am grown too big; just as my little house in Polotzk, once my home in which I was born, has now become a toy of memory; as I move without restraint in the wide open spaces of this splendid palace of America! Hark to the clamour of urban America, my new home which invites me to the glad new life! In that moment I had a vision of myself emerging from the dim places where the torch of civilization had never been, creeping slowly towards Enlightenment, pushing, then climbing more steadily forward to the broad plateau of modern life and then leaping at last, strong and 131confident to the intellectual heights of the twenteith century! (p. 364)⁵⁷

Muslim minorities in non-Muslim lands are rapidly losing their cultural and religious identity, so that the children know nothing about Islam except for the fact that they were born into Muslim families. The extent to which this assimilation has proceeded is illustrated in the following story:

The other day I was speaking to a Muslim child about eight years old and brought up in a reasonably good Muslim home in America. He was trying to draw something. I took his crayons and sketched a mosque—dome, minarets and all. I asked him what it was? “A birthday cake!” came the quick reply.⁵⁸

This is sufficient evidence that the Muslim parent has no more hope than the orthodox Jewish parent of raising his children to follow him in the irreligious atmosphere of the modern world. David Daiches’ biography of his father is a convincing proof that it is impossible to maintain sincere loyalty and full participation in two conflicting cultures at one and the same time. For centuries Jews faced this problem and solved it successfully by establishing their autonomous, self-sufficient communities which provided for their every need. So long as the Jew remained in the ghetto, he preserved his religious and cultural identity intact, but as soon as the ghetto disintegrated, the process of assimilation into the prevailing way of 132life of the majority ran its inevitable course until today most Jews are thus only nominally.

If Muslims living in a materialistic environment wish to preserve their faith for succeeding generations, they have no choice but to follow the example of the medieval Jews and organize their own communities. They must establish (as the Jews have done) their own schools for their children, their own philanthropic organizations, their own shops to make Halal foods easily available and also set up their own commercial enterprises to provide adequate employment opportunities.

In one crucial respect, however, these Muslim communities should differ from the Ghetto. The traditional Jewish community was always a closed society, saturated because of persecution and discrimination with pessimism and despair. In contrast, the atmosphere of the Muslim community should be filled with optimism. It should relentlessly carry on vigorous missionary activity to make Muslims strong in personal conviction and idealism rather than mere habit, custom and tradition and enthusiastically welcome outsiders to join, always with the hope that this dynamic, expanding group, maintaining strong contact with Muslims elsewhere, might some day become a majority in the land and eventually establish genuine Islamic state.

It was the secularist spirit of the nineteenth century, seeking social solutions in practical terms that saw the rise of the modern Zionist movement. The leaders of the Jewish enlightenment in Russia, for example, ever since the days of Tsar Alexander I, had the confident belief that if only Jews succeeded in becoming as Russian as the 133Russians, the Tsarist government would promptly grant them full equality, and the Jewish problem would be solved forever. Their advice was: “We must prepare ourselves for this golden future and take advantage of the opportunities offered us. We must come out of our shell, obtain a secular education and acquire Russian culture! Then all else will follow!” But when in May 1881 the Tsarist government decreed its harsh, anti-Jewish laws and initiated a series of shocking pogroms throughout the empire, the hopes of the assimilationist Haskalah evaporated overnight. The first concrete Zionist effort was made by Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1870) who wrote pamphlets in which he called for a return to the soil in Eretz Yisrael. The majority of religious Jews to whom Rabbi Kalisher addressed himself considered his plan blasphemous since they assumed that the return of Israel to Zion was within the province of the Messiah only. Rabbi Samuel Mohilever 1824–1889), a Talmudic scholar and one of the leading Orthodox rabbis of Eastern Europe, was so deeply stirred by the tragedies resulting from the pogroms which convulsed Russia and Poland in 1881, that he issued a call for a mass meeting in Warsaw where the first association of Hovevei Zion (The Lovers of Zion) was founded. This was the first Zionist body in history and preceded the World Zionist Organization founded by Theodor Herzl by sixteen years. Rabbi Mohilever is regarded as the real founder of the religious Zionist party, Mizrachi Hazair. Leo Pinsker, a leader of the Enlightenment and a believer in assimilation, after he had witnessed the pogrom in Odessa in 1811, came to the conclusion that the Jews could rely only on themselves for their emancipation. His pamphlet “Auto-Emancipation” became the fervent platform for the Hovevei Zion Organization His motto—quoting Rabbi Hillel, the sage of the Mishnah—“If I am not for myself, who is for me?” becmse the battle-cry of all the “Lovers of Zion.”⁵⁹

134Rabbi Hillel would have been enraged had he known how his famous saying had been torn out of its context to be abused for ends he certainly would not have sanctioned, for the rest of his saying runs as follows: “If I am for myself alone, who am I? If not now, when?”

The founder of World Zionism was Theodor Herzl. In January 1895 while covering the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (who was falsely accused of treason) in Paris as foreign correspondent of the Viennese Nue Frie Presse, he was present at that Jewish officer’s degradation on January 5, 1895. This proved the turning point in his life. An assimilationist until then, he experienced a painful emotional crisis when he heard he anti-Semitic mob hooting at the unfortunate Dreyfus, “Death to the Jews!” He gave much thought to the question: “Why should we not help one another and leave this unhappy exile and build for ourselves a free Jewish state?” He sat down in a mood of inner agitation to write his essay, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896 in which he presented his well-known program of political Zionism. Theodor Herzl never abandoned his conviction that the best way to achieve the Jewish state was by means of personal diplomacy. It was with an all-consuming passion that he set himself the task of reaching important people—the Pope, kings, ministers of state, bankers and philanthropists. He ruined his health and impoverished his family traveling from one capital to another, trying to win support for his plan among the influential. These efforts were directed to but one end—to obtain a legal charter for a Jewish State in Palestine from Sultan Abdul Hamid II, then the Turkish ruler of Palestine.⁶⁰

*Theodor Herzl offered Abdul Hamid II any amount of money he wanted if he would only relinquish Palestine to the Jews but the Sultan was perhaps the only 135Muslim ruler at that time who regarded the integrity of Islamic territory before his own personal gain and thus refused to be bribed. He correctly predicted that only after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire could the Jews have Palestine! For this steadfastness, the Jews and their sympathizers, especially in Britain, rewarded him with a violent campaign of slander and vilification which ultimately deposed him in 1908 with the triumph of the Freemason controlled party known as the “Young Turks”. It is not too far-fetched to assume a definite relationship between the machinations of this propaganda and the rise of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who abolished the Khalifate in 1924. Here in Theodor Herzl’s own words is the Zionist conspiracy against Islam:

Supposing His Majesty, the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should therefore form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia; an outpost of Western civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a natural State remain in contact with all Europe which would have to guarantee our existence.⁶¹

As one American Christian university Professor aptly describes the philosophical sources of Zionism:

Zionism is essentially a naturalistic movement. It developed first in Eastern Europe among the revolutionary Jewish intelligentsia who had abandoned the culture of the ghetto and taken up nihilism and Socialism. They idealized agricultural work as an emancipating way of life and believed that only in Palestine could the Jewish 136enlightenment establish real roots and a meaningful existence. In 1862 the ex-Marxist, Moses Hess, published the earliest Hegelian interpretation of Jewish history. The inspiration behind his Rome and Jerusalem was not Judaism but the dialectical determinism of German idealist philosophy. He envisioned the Jewish people as a historical type destined to provide the world with an example of social harmony which they could do once they had been re-established as a nation in Palestine. In a basic sense, it defined Israel very much as Hegel defined the German people; the main difference was in terminology and selection. And so, Hegel’s “synthesis” in which the modern Germans were primary catalyst was reconstucted by Hess as the “Sabbath of History” with the Jews as the agent of becoming. Later in the century, Theodor Herzl developed an even more profane approach to the Jewish question. As a non-religious and highly cosmopolitan Jew, he was concerned to open a door to the comprehensive “emancipation” of the Iews. For Herzl this door was “normalization.” He tried many keys, including a vague scheme of mass-conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. Ultimately, he settled on the idea of Jewish nationalism. In an age of intense nationalistic orientation, the building up of a Jewish nation seemed an appropriate means of normalizing the Jewish people and giving them a place in the world. From the very start, he saw himself as the leader of a Jewish avant-guarde whose mission was to transform a people. “I conduct the affairs of the Jews without their mandate,” he asserted in his diary. To achieve his aim, Herzl constructed a hierarchical organization. The upper echelon, “the family council” established in Jewish centres throughout the world would also be briefed on the general scheme after being sworn to secrecy. It would then be instructed to select a third echelon to which the plan of organized emigration from Europe to Palestine would be revealed without at first any mention of a state. The Jewish masses were to be manipulated by this elite organi137zation and once they had arrived in the territory of the projected state, they would be recruited into labour battalions along military lines, their training involving a nationalistic indoctrination buttressed by patriotic songs and heroic theatrical plays. As a secularist, Herzl did not have any particular attachment to Palestine as the site of the projected state; he considered parts of the Argentine, the Sinai peninsula and Cyprus more practicable. But at the crucial Basle congress in 1897 he became aware of the Eastern European contingent’s preference for Palestine. He recognized that Palestine would have an appeal for many Jews to whom the idea of a Jewish state was an alien and even a suspect concept. So he endorsed Palestine as the site of the future state.⁶²

An accurate insight into the nature of the Zionist movement can be achieved by a glimpse of the character of its founder, based on excerpts from his famous diary, which shows him to be a purely materialistically-minded opportunist guided by no moral precepts except expediency:

Of course Dr, Theodor Herzl badly wanted to secure Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people. But he made up his mind in spite of the stubborn and “benighted” Russian-Polish Jews that in case he could not possibly secure Palestine for them, they would simply have to accept, at least temporarily some sort of Jewish homeland, be it in Syria, Sinai, El Arish, Cyprus, Tripoli, Portuguese Mozambique, the Belgian Congo, Uganda, in any one of these territories for which he was always “negotiating.” To this end Herzl roamed about Europe from one capital to another, from one royal court to another, from one scheme to another. Sometimes he used his position as correspondent of the Vienna Neue Freie Presse, a position that opened 138most doors to him. Sometimes he used his position as head of the Zionist organization.

Herzl’s methods were simple. He explained it all thus in his diary on May 12, 1898: “Noise is everything! In truth, noise amounts to a great deal. A sustained noise is in itself a noteworthy pact. World history is nothing but noise; noise of arms and of advancing ideas. Men must put noise to use!”

A typically great political achievement, was a letter Theodor Herzl secured, or, may we say, extracted, from Plehve, Minister of Internal Affairs in the Czar’s Government. Phleve was the man directly answerable for and undoubtedly the sponsor of the Jewish massacres in Czarist Russia. Herzl craved an audience with the Czar. It was denied him. So, through his agents, he succeeded in securing an audience with the bloody Plehve. Plehve could not help being polite to the correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse. He was brutal enough to admit that he had no objection to getting rid of as many Jews as possible; in fact, he would become a “sympathetic” supporter of Zionism. Herzl then proposed that Plehve should write him a letter that he would present before the Zionist congress to the effect that the Zionist movement could count on the “Russian Government’s moral and material assistance.” Plehve’s letter became Herzl’s most cherished asset. He carried it around everywhere; he even showed it to the Pope. The murderer of his people had shaken hands with him and talked to him politely. Was that not wonderful?

Another example of the end justifies the means philosophy of Herzl is the story of Chaim Weizmann’s pointing out to Herzl that a certain very rich man he was associating with was a fool. To this Herzl answered; “But he opens the portals of royalty to me.”

Herzl felt himself observed on every side. He laid great weight on his appearance. Should it this time be gray or black clothes—what kind of gloves, shoes, hat to wear? 139Occasionally he carried along with him a clothes brush. The crease of his trousers, the shine of his shoes, the colour of his gloves, are repeatedly mentioned in his diary and the effect they had, in his estimation.

Herzl had great faith that his extortionist secret agent Nevlinsky, would arrange an audience with the Sultan in Constantinople. He went there to await results. Nevlinsky spent plenty of Herzl’s money on baksheesh all round. But the Sultan refused Herzl. Yet he managed to turn his journey into a political victory along other lines. En route back from Constantinople, it was arranged that he would be welcomed in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, by the Jewish community as befitting the man who had just returned from a secret visit to Constantinople. The synagogue in Sofia, was filled with hundreds who came to pay homage to “King Messiah” Herzl. Here is what Herzl entered in his diary on June 29, 1896: “I stood in the pulpit before the Holy Ark. When I hesitated for a moment as to how to face the congregation without turning my back to the Ark, someone exclaimed; “You may turn your back even to the Ark because you are holier than the Torah!”

Baron Rothschild did not think much of Dr. Herzl. He regarded him as a “demagogue.” Western European Jews laughed at Herzl’s premise that the Jews were a nation; some even thought that Herzl was mentally unbalanced. On the other hand, East European Jews responded enthusiastically to his call for a world Zionist Congress. Thus encouraged, he issued a call to the Jewish communities to send elected representatives to meet in Basel, Switzerland on a Sunday, August 29, 1897. Ben Ami, a Hebrew writer and Hovev Zion described the historic event in these words:

“Before us arose a marvellous and exalted figure, kingly in bearing and stature with deep eyes in which could be read quiet majesty and unuttered sorrow. It is no longer the elegant Dr. Herzl of Vienna; it is royal scion of the House of David risen from among the dead, clothed in legend, fantasy and beauty. Everyone sat breathless, as 140if in the presence of a miracle. And in truth was it not a miracle which we beheld? For fifteen minutes the delegates clapped, shouted and waved their handkerchiefs. The dream of two thousand years was on the point of realization; it was as if the Messiah, son of David confronted us; and I was seized by an overpowering desire in the midst of this storm of joy to cry out loudly for all to hear: Yechi Hamelech! (Hail to the King!)”

Said Theodor Herzl just before his death in 1904: “I believe that I shall be named in history as among the greatest benefactors of mankind or is this feeling of mine the beginning of delusions of grandeur?”⁶³

Until the rise of the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, the Zionist movement could not make much progress even among the Jews. Indeed, in the beginning, Zionism encountered stiff resistance. Those Jews who did not oppose Zionism, mostly regarded it as an impractical dream—a mere visionary, idealistic utopia which could never be realized. Those liberal-minded Jews who believed in assimilation were bitterly opposed to Zionism, because they feared it would jeopardize their status as citizens in the lands of their adoption. The anti-Zionist reformed Jews in America organized The American Council for Judaism which still functions at its headquarters in New York. The profoundly orthodox Jews opposed Zionism for entirely different reasons. According to traditional Judaism, only God could forgive the Jews for their sins Who had punished them by exile and persecution and bring His Messiah to gather all the Jews back to the Holy Land. The Zionists, who violently repudiated tradi141tional Jewish beliefs and practices to the point of atheism, proclaimed they had no more patience to wait for God’s Messiah, whom they doubted would ever come, and decided that the Jews must immediately take matters into their own hands and, entirely through their own efforts, without waiting for or depending upon Divine help, establish their nationalist state in Palestine through the ordinary means of power-politics. This to the pious orthodox Jew of some fifty years back appeared tantamount to sheer blasphemy! The association of Palestine, and specifically Jerusalem, in the mind of religious Jews was a very different thing from modern Zionism. A well-known convert to Islam of Jewish origin, whose scholarly services to the Islamic cause cannot be doubted, writes:

Not all Jews living in Palestine at the time (1922) were Zionists. Some of them had come there, not in pursuit of a political aim but out of a religious longing for the Holy Land and its Biblical associations. To this group belonged my Dutch friend, Jacob de Haan—a small, plump, blond-bearded man in his early forties who had formerly taught law at one of the leading universities in Holland and was now a special correspondent of the Amsterdam Handelstlad and the London Daily Express. A man of deep religious convictions, he did not approve of the idea of Zionism. “We Jews,” he said to me on more than one occasion, “were driven away from the Holy Land and scattered all over the world because we had fallen short of the task God had conferred upon us. We had been chosen by Him to preach His word but in our stubborn pride, we began to believe that he had made us a “chosen nation” for our own sake—and thus we betrayed Him. 142Now nothing remains for us but to repent and cleanse our hearts, and when we become worthy once again to be the hearers of His message, He will send a Messiah to lead His servants back to the Promised Land. Do you think that history is but a series of accidents? I don’t. It was not without a purpose that God made us lose our land and dispersed us, but the Zionists do not want to admit this to themselves. They suffer from the same spiritual blindness that caused our downfall. The two thousand years of Jewish exile and unhappiness have taught them nothing. Instead of making an attempt to understand the innermost causes of our unhappiness, they now try to circumvent it, as it were, by building a “National Home” on the foundations provided by Western power-politics. In the process of building a national home, they are committing the crime of depriving another people of their home.” Jacob de Haan’s political views naturally made him most unpopular with the Zionists. Indeed, a short time after I left Palestine, I was shocked to learn that he had been shot dead one night by the terrorists.⁶⁴

Almost from the outset, the Zionist movement spilt apart into two main factions—the extremists or “political Zionists” and the moderates or “cultural Zionists” who sought only the right for the Jews to settle in Palestine for cultural and spiritual reasons so that a uniquely Jewish culture might flourish. These “cultural Zionists” did not insist upon political sovereignty and repeatedly expressed their willingness to recognize the legal rights of the indigenous Arabs to their homeland. They wanted Palestine to become an independent bi-national state where both Jews and Arabs would participate in the Government on equal terms. They 143dreamed of Palestine being transformed into the Switzerland of Western Asia. Their declared policy was the promotion of peaceful cooperation, mutual respect and brotherly feelings with their Arab neighbours. The chief representatives of the “cultural Zionists” were the Russian Jewish philosopher, Achad Ha’am, Professor Martin Buber, the late Dr. Judah Magnus, formerly the Rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the renowed Jewish mathematician and scientist, Dr. Albert Einstein.

As far back as the 1920’s, Achad Ha’am sharply condemned the conduct of the Jewish colonists in the following words:

….Yet how do our brethren behave in Palestine? Persecuted as they were in exile, and suddenly finding themselves free to do as they please, this transformation has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and most outrageous, constantly boast of these crimes as virtues and nobody among us opposes these disgraceful actions.⁶⁵

In the autumn of 1946 at the opening of the academic year of the Hebrew University, Dr. Judah Magnus declared:

The new Jewish voice speaks from the mouth of guns. This is the new Torah from the land of Israel. But is this the true Torah of Judaism? Is this the essence of Jewish morality? The world has been shackled to the madness of physical force. Heaven forbid, that we now shackle Judaism and the people of Israel to this madness, This is pagan Judaism which has tragically conquered such large section of our people here and abroad. All the Jews in 144America share the guilt, even those not in accord with the activities of this pagan leadership but who sit at ease with folded hands. The sinister attempt to freeze all moral sense results in their atrophy.⁶⁶

In his book condemning the Zionist movement, Here Goes the Middle East, Alfred Lilienthal quoted Dr. Albert Einstein’s last public statement before his death concerning the State of Israel, spoken in an interview with Dorothy Schiff, pro-Zionist publisher of The New York Post. He said, “We had great hopes for Israel at first. We thought Israel might prove itself morally superior to other nations. But it is no better!” (p. 243)

Here is how Moshe Smilansky, himself an old-time Jewish settler in Palestine, criticized the extremists almost a quarter of a century ago.

The first in the Zionist camp to proclaim the necessity for Palestine as a sovereign Jewish state as fundamental policy were the Revisionists. Formerly only the Revisionist youth were raised in the spirit of chauvinism and militarism which crass ignorance and short-sightedness considered as “nationalism.” Today, however, most of our Jewish youth in Palestine are indoctrinated in this spirit. Our youth have learned to think mechanically. Some invisible “unknown,” some “instructor” or “head” pushes a secret button and, lo!—the immature youth’s brains begin to spin. The Haganah was a pure creation in the beginning, clean of purpose and pure of motive. But the promulgation of the sovereign Jewish State and the preparations that led to it have degraded that organization to the same class as the murderers of the Irgun 145Z’vai Leumi and the Stern Group. Within the Zionist movement, freedom of thought and speech have been banned. Scribes have turned into Shofars (horns) trumpeting the slogans dictated from above. Anybody who dares express an opinion of his own is maligned as a traitor and apostate. Writers of any independence have been forced to remain dumb.⁶⁷

The spokesman for “Cultural Zionism” which in 1942 organized The Ihud Association of Israel had this to say about the Palestinian refugees:

We in Israel have no moral right whatever to oppose the return of the Arab refugees to their land and that until we have rectified our sin against the Arab refugees, we have no right to encourage further Jewish immigration. We have no right to demand that American Jews leave their country to which they are happily settled to live on stolen property while the rightful owners of it remain homeless and destitute. We had no right to occupy the house of an Arab if we had not paid for it at its value. The same goes for fields, gardens, stores and workshops. We had no right to build our settlements to realize the dreams of Zionist ambitions on other people’s property. To do this is robbery. Political conquest cannot abolish the right of private property. We should bring in fewer Jewish immigrants and use our resources to help the Arab refugees. We here in Israel are faced with this choice: Listen to the voice of truth and morality for the sake of our own good and genuine peace or ignore our consciences and bring evil and misfortune upon us and future generations.⁶⁸

146Professor Martin Buber expressed his bitter disillusionment with the Zionist movement as follows:

What I felt sixty years ago when I joined the Zionist movement is essentially what I feel today. I prayed with all my soul that Zionism would never go the way of all other nationalisms—beginning with a great hope and intense idealism and then deteriorating, decaying, becoming collective egoism where the means were considered sufficient justification for the ends as if a collective egoism could be more sacred than the value of the individual. When we returned to Palestine the decisive question was: Do we Jews want to go there as an ally, as a friend, as a brother, as an integral part of the community of Near Eastern peoples or as the representatives of colonialism and imperialism? This discrepancy between aims and means, between the goal and the way to achieve it, divided the Zionists into opportunists who were determined to grab from the Great Powers as many political concessions as possible and us who simply wanted to be allowed to work in Palestine together wth our Arab neighbors on a plane of equality. It was Hitler who brought us mass immigration and the indispensable necessity to find political sanction for its security. The majority of Jews perferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us. Hitler showed that history does not go the way of the spirit but the way of power and if a people is powerful enough, it can kill with impunity. We made the wrong political entry into Palestine through Partition, followed by the war of the Arabs against Partition and against Israel. The question of Arab refugees is decisive for Israel yet so far as I can see, Israel does not recognize any Arab rights at all.⁶⁹

The extremists or “political Zionists” found their most important spokesman in Vladimir Jabotinsky, (1880–1940) who was convinced that the Jews could only win political sovereignty in Palestine 147through physical force. More than a half century ago he wrote: “Has it ever been known that any people would willingly surrender its soil? No more would the Palestine Arabs yield their right to political sovereignty without force!” Jabotinsky organised the Revisionist branch of Zionism after the pattern of the Fascist movement then in vogue under Mussolini. The Revisionist youth adopted the Fascist military uniform and the Fascist salute. Jabotinsky’s most faithful pupil was Menachem Begin who under the British mandate re-shaped his Revisionist movement into the terrorist Irgun Z’vai Leumi, and today is Israel’s Prime-Minister.

Here is the credo of Menachem Begin as quoted from his own book, The Revolt: The Story of the Irgun, New York, 1948:

We fight; therefore we are!

Out of blood, fire, tears and ashes, a new specimen of human being is born, a specimen completely unknown to the world for more than eighteen hundred years—the fighting Jew!

First and foremost we must take the offensive! We must attack our enemies without mercy!

With blood and sweat a young generation of Jews shall be reared, proud and strong!

In other words, Menachem Begin was in complete accord with the moto of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin that “MIGHT IS RIGHT!” A prominent American Rabbi, the leader of the Reformed Jews in America and one time aspirant to the presidency of “Israel”—Abba Hillel Silver of Cleveland declared: “The Irgun willgo down in Jewish history as the decisive factor without which the State of Israel would never have come into being.”

148In 1938, ten years before the state of Israel was established, David Ben-Gurion wrote:

We are not blind to the fact that Palestine is no void. More than a million Arabs inhabit both sides of the Jordan not since yesterday. There are a million Arabs in Palestine who legitimately regard themselves as its children whether we like it or not. The Arab war against us will be a long one. They do not need to buy land and bring in Arabs from abroad. Everything here is theirs except the Government and it is for the Government they are fighting. The Arabs already possess the land. They need neither laws nor administration to transfer it; only we do!⁷⁰

The extremist group faction is absolutely unscrupulous and will stoop to anything to achieve its ends. Ben-Gurion’s own daily Davar, the official organ of the Mapai (Socialist Labour Party) at Tel-Aviv quoted in the July 11, 1952 issue of the New York Yiddish daily, Kemper, suggested the following solution to the problem of motivating mass Jewish immigration to Israel from the West:

I shall not be ashamed to confess that if I had the power as I have the will, I would carefully select a score of efficient young men devoted to our ideal and burning with the determination to help redeem Jews and I would send them to the countries where Jews are content to remain permanently in sinful self-satisfaction. The task of these young men would be to disguise themselves as non-Jews acting upon the brutal Zionist, plague and continually harass these Jews with anti-Semitic slogans such as “Bloody Jew! Death to the Jews! Jew, go to Palestine!” and similar threats. I can assure you that the results in terms of mass-immigration to Israel from these countries would be ten 149thousand times larger than the results henceforth achieved by thousands of our emissaries who have been preaching in vain for decades to deaf ears.

Here David Ben-Gurion reveals himself to be a man of such low moral calibre that he would sanction the artificial persecution of his own Jewish brethren by his own countrymen in order to force them against their will to leave the land of their birth where they have been rooted for generations to provide “Israel” with its cannon-fodder.

In his autobiography, Trial and Error, Chaim Weizman who became the first present of Israel, tells how he confessed before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine: “Thou shalt not kill has been ingrained in us since Mount Sinai. It was inconceivable ten years ago (1938) that the Jews should break this commandant. Yet, unfortunately they are breaking it today (1948) and nobody deplores it more than the vast majority of Jews. I hang my head in shame when I must speak of this fact before you.” And at the conclusion of this same book, he writes: “I am certain that in the future, the world will judge the state of Israel by its treatment of the Arabs.” Yet in a discussion with James G. McDonald, the first American Ambassador to Israel as quoted in his book, My Mission to Israel, (New York, 1951, p. 145), he referred to the Palestinian exile as a “miraculous clearing of the land; the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task!”

Living in a state of constant war and permanent emergency, the most important institution in 150Israel today is the army. The manner in which the Israeli army operates is strikingly reminiscent of the Indian-fighters in early American history. Some Israeli soldiers, drilled in military training since childhood and attained the rank of national heroes, have exalted the cult of violence to a positive virtue. Here is the career of one of them as related by a well-known Israeli journalist:

Legendary and still revered by army regulars, youngsters and an important section of the popular press is the figure of Meir Har-Zion. In an army which is supplanting the Kibbutz as the most genuine Israeli institution, Har-Zion has become an Israeli hero, the living symbol of a “new” cold-blooded, fighting Jew with an armor-plated conscience. In the Israeli army, paratooper units, much like the Indian-fighting cavalry in the early history of America, perform the most arduous tasks and take the heaviest toll. Har-Zion is Israel’s most famous paratrooper. He acquired his fame in the mid 1950’s and continues as a hero even though severely crippled in action, he long ago returned to civilian life. General Moshe Dayan has written that “Har-Zion’s fighting instinct and courage set an example for the entire Israeli Defence Forces.”

Meir Har-Zion was born a third generation sabra in 1934 in the village of Herzlia, a few miles north of Tel-Aviv. He was a moody and restless teen-ager with an obsessive urge to prove his courage and physical prowess and often ran off on dangerous adventures. Har-Zion was eighteen when he joined the army in 1953. To his physical prowess and dare-devil courage, tested and refined on his private jaunts into Arab territory as a teen-ager, was now added a brutal ruthlessness that soon stamped him for a special unit of commando fighters. At that time Company 101 served to deter Arab terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians through the staging of retaliatory acts. The 151then Chief of Staff, General Moshe Dayan, explained the new doctrine of retaliatory strikes against Arab civilian targets across the border: Arab Governments would restrain their own irregulars only after it became clear that the “theft of one cow from the Jewish Settlement of Ramat Ha-Kovesh will hurt the Arab village of Kalkilya (across the nearby Jordinian border) and that the murder of one Jew at Ruhama will endanger the Palestinian refugee population in Gaza.”

It was not a very far-sighted policy and not at all effective; the difference between act and retaliation blurred quickly in the recurrent strike and counter-strike. But Har-Zion seemed born to his new task. As a young commando, he took part almost nightly in difficult reprisal actions. Unsparing of himself and of others, he was brutally indiscriminate in afflicting punishment upon his adversaries. He personified an Israeli version of the Indian-fighters in the American Wild West. Laconically killing Arab peasants and towns people, he remained cold-blooded and thoroughly efficient, simply doing a job and doing it well, twice or three times a week for months. Finally he was put out of action, critically wounded in a raid on a Jordanian police station. His life was saved by an emergency battlefield tracheotomy with a penknife but he suffered permanent injury to his hands and voice. Today, half-crippled, married, with four children, he lives on a lonely farm atop a windy mountain overlooking the Jordan Valley south of the Lake of Galilee, He published his private diaries in 1969—the laconic account of his youthful exploits:

“Halt! Rolling stones ahead of us. I notice a man roaming in the area. Now we can no longer try to withdraw quietly. He must be liquidated! I raise my pistol. My friend Jibli approaches crawling: “Har-Zion, for God’s sake, use your knife!” I lower my pistol and unsheath my commando knife. We crawl towards the Arab who is now singing an Arabic song to himself. In a moment his song will be a moan of agony. We creep closer and closer. Here he is, only a few meters away! We jump. My friend, 152Jibli gets hold of him, I push my knife into the striped robe covering his back. Blood spurts from the wound. Now there is no time for thinking. We stab… The Arab before us moans, fights for his life. Slowly resistance ceases……”

General Ariel Sharon, a former commander of the paratroopers contributed an enthusiastic introduction to this diary. He wrote that Meir Har-Zion was the fighting symbol not only of the paratroopers but of the entire Israel Defence Forces.

The life of Har-Zion characterizes a spreading cult of toughness in Israel. Teachers, parents, youth leaders, engage in a constant battle against the senseless emulation of military practices and needless rigors in the youth movements and schools.

The para-military youth organization—GADNA (“Regiments of Youth”) has been especially prone to this kind of regimentation. GADNA operates in conjunction with the educational authorities in nearly all of the high schools in the country. Senseless tests of endurance under excruciatingly difficult conditions of climate and terrain in the name of a spartan ideal of physical fitness have led to fatal accidents among teen-agers. Almost every summer a number of children die of sunstroke in the desert where they have been made to march for days or fall down into deep precipices while walking on narrow mountain paths in exercises designed to steel their nerves and train them to unflinching courage.

This spartan rigidity often spills over from the military into the civilian sphere. Foreigners are often more aware of such characteristics than some of the most critical Israelis. In 1969 a team of young Israeli long-distance walkers participated in an international walking contest in Holland. One of the Dutch organizers asked the Israelis why everything they did was done in military rhythm, “Singing, eating, resting—everything! Why are there never dropouts on the Israeli team! Why do you function like a well-oiled but 153inhuman machine. “Your teams,” said the Dutchman, “remind me of the Nazi youth groups during the 1930’s.” The Dutchman meant no insult. He simply wanted to indicate elements of the Israeli character. When some of the members of the Israeli team suddenly felt sick and wanted to drop out, the team captain announced: “It is better to die than stop walking and be a disgrace to Israel.”⁷¹

In Israel today, the extremist position has triumphed and enjoys complete domination over all aspects of its national life. But since the moral sense is a universal, innate human quality which can never be crushed completely, decent people with a sensitive conscience can be found everywhere, including Israel. This moral consciousness is increasingly evident among the intellectuals and has found its expression in serious contemporary Hebrew literature. Even among the young recruits in the army, there is growing protest against the concept of patriotism which forces them to torture and kill innocent human beings for the greater glory of the State:

Shortly after the June 1967 war a group of young kibbutzniks, headed by a former pupil of Martin Buber, went from Kibbutz to Kibbutz, asking ex-fighters a number of penetrating highly personal questions. They tape-recorded a long series of interviews with young soldiers which were then published under the title, “Fighter’s Talk.” None of the participants in these dialogues doubted the justice of the cause of Israel. They saw their struggle not in terms of ideology but of sheer survival. But none of them rejoiced in victory. Few could forget the scenes of suffering or overlook the price paid by both victors and vanquished.

One of the soldiers told his interviews: that in one of the battles after he had shot an Egyptian, he discovered that 154he had missed. “I had to shoot,” he said, “but I was glad that he got away…”

Equally important was the sudden opportunity for young Israelis to face the mass of vanquished Palestinians in the occupied towns and villages of Jordan’s West Bank and the dismal refugee camps of the Gaza strip. For young Israelis, this was the first opportunity of its kind. Although there has been no official change in the Israeli Government’s attitude towards the Palestinian refugees, at least some of the young Israeli soldiers were struck by the sudden confrontation with so much misery. Statistics and abstract slogans suddenly took on human forms. The wretchedness was too heartbreaking, in the eyes of this sensitive minority, to be dismissed by the accepted political cliches. Many Israeli soldiers were surprised, and some were deeply disturbed to discover among the refugees a form of “Arab Zionism:” the living memory of a lost homeland to which they were as passionately attached as the Jews had remained attached to Zion in the lands of the dispersion. The education of these young soldiers, mostly born after the establishment of Israel, little prepared them for such a discovery as this. Upon entering a refugee camp, one young soldier discovered that the inmates were still organized into and dwelled as small clans or neighbourhood units according to the village, town and even the street they had lived prior to their exile in 1948—villages, towns and cities that were now thoroughly Israeli—Beersheba, Ramleh, Jaffa, etc.

The effects of the traumatic impact of the Nazi holocaust upon the national psychology of the Israelis particularly in times of war, leads to the most strenuous exertion and resistance but also to pangs of conscience in victory and a potential of compassion and empathy for the wretched loser. The moving confession of another young soldier illustrates this point. In the early days of confusion following the 1967 war, masses of civilian Arabs fled the territories suddenly occupied by Israel. This soldier, remembering the terrible exodus, testified to his sense of 155personal identification. “I felt directly identified with the Palestinian refugees. When I saw those children carried in the parents’ arms, I almost saw myself carried by my father during the Nazi terror of World War II. My emotional identification was entirely with the other side—with our enemies…..” Still another soldier bitterly admitted that when he entered an Arab refugee camp in order to stamp out a revolt, “I felt like a Nazi, just like a member of the Gestapo. I thought of my home which was destroyed by the Nazies in Europe. I thought my parents were being led away……”⁷²

The most important anti-Semitic book written in modern times is, of course, Mein Kampf—the autobiography of Adolf Hitler. In order to understand the roots of European anti-Semitism, a brief analysis of this work is essential. Hitler was quite correct when he pointed out the danger of Jewish domination in the world in general and Germany in particular. Events in Germany were sufficient proof of the validity of this warning as prior to the ascendency of the Nazi regime in 1933, Jews held the key position in every area of national life. Hitler also stated the truth when he warned the people that Jews cannot attain this domination except at the expense of non-Jews. But Hitler’s fatal error was his analysis of the Jewish menace on the basis of race rather than ideology. Thus the reader finds expounded on page after page of Mein Kampf hysterical and irrational fears about the danger of the pure Nordic Ayrans being contaminated through “blood-poisoning” by intermarriage with Jews to produce a mixed breed of 156inferior humans. Hitler’s obcession with the racial purity of Germany was pathological in the extreme and lacks any scientific foundation for how can a people so small in numbers who can produce so many outstanding individuals in the arts and sciences be an “inferior race?” Surely a people who can boast of intellectual giants like Albert Einstein must be a “superior race” for to give the Devil his due, the Jews could not achieve supremacy without superior intelligence (though it may be diabolical intelligence), superior talents and abilities, a special cleverness for organizing themselves and hard work. But most disastrous of all were the methods Hitler advocated for the “Final Solution” of the Jewish problem. Not only were the Nazi atrocities aimed at the genocide of the Jews of Europe unsurpassed in their horror, cruelty and inhumanity but even from Hitler’s point of view, they completely defeated his own purpose. Nazi atrocities only succeeded in capturing for the Jews the undeserved sympathy of Western public opinion for any person with a shred of decency could not but react with revulsion at the thought of massacres, tortures, concentration camps and gas chambers where this indiscriminate slaughter continued unabated throughout the years of World War II. The Nazis did massacre six million Jews but what was the result? Wealthy Jews holding top positions found it easiest to bribe corrupt Nazi officialdom so they could quickly migrate unharmed to America with all their property. The Jews who suffered most from Nazi occupation were the poor in humble occupations, the comparatively innocent and innocuous folk who had no means of escape. After Hitler’s suicide and the defeat of Nazi 157Germany, the long-established captains of Jewish finance found no difficulty in re-establishing themselves. Consequently in Germany today, the Zionists enjoy as complete stranglehold over the mass-media as they do in America, to such an extent that any book daring to criticize the activities of the Jews has no chance of being published. After twelve years of Nazi persecution, the Jewish influence over Germany’s national life emerged more powerful than ever before.

Unfortunately the Nazi type of anti-Semitism did not vanish after the defeat of Germany in World War II. Directly as a result of the rise of the powerful Zionist movement and its remarkable success in attaining its territorial ambitions at the expense of the Arabs, anti-Semitism has been exported from Europe to the Muslim world. The moral and material support Israel has received from the West, (specifically America), only intensifies this bitterness.

Muslim-Jewish relations of course were far from ideal even before Zionism. But in the Muslim East there had never (or almost never) been a pogrom of Jews. There had not been hatred of Jews based on purely racial grounds. In this sense, the Arabs had never been “anti-Semitic.” They are now beginning to be. The Arab-Israeli conflict is now producing a new species of Arab anti-Semitism never seen before. (pp. 30–31)….

Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism is the result of the Arab-Israeli wars. Anti-Semitic literature in the Arab and Muslim countries abound with references to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The International Jew by Henry Ford and even Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Yehshofat Harkaby, an Israeli scholar and a student of the Arab-Israeli conflict estimated that in 1967 of the 160 recent books in Arabic dealing with Israel, some 50 are 158based either directly on the Protocols or quote them sympathetically. Viciously anti-Semitic tracts have been issued in recent years not only by state-owned publishing houses in Cairo and Damascus but in the relative freedom of Beirut as well. Some of them openly praise Hitler and laud the Nazi genocide of European Jewry and a few, following the example of medieval European literature, have even resurrected the ancient blood accusations about alleged human sacrifice on the Passover and slaughtering Gentile infants to suck their blood and mix it with the unleavened Passover bread. (pp. 283–284).

Even Muslim countries which are not Arab and geographically so remote that they have never been directly involved in the Palestine conflict are affected. (p. 31).⁷³

Here in Pakistan anti-Semitism has become very strong and Pakistanis become almost as emotional over the subject as the Arabs.

Zionism must be regarded by the Muslim scholar in its proper context in the historical development of 19th-century European nationalism, imperialism and colonialism. It merely represents the last and final stage of the Western “civilizing mission” to the East and “white supremacy.”

The real enemy of the Muslim is not so much the Jew as the Western materialistic way of life imposed upon us by an alien educational, political, economic and social systems and by the mass-media (radio, television and cinema). Although it cannot be denied that Jews have participated enthusiastically in this destructive activity against human civilization, religion and culture, Christians, Hindus, atheists agnostics, 159Communists and westernized “Muslims” are all equally involved. The Jew cannot be singled out as unique.

Jews are as human as any other people, consisting of both the good and the evil mingled together in varied proportions. Of course, during war-time, it is natural to hate the enemy, but this produces only negative results and fails to accomplish anything constructive or worthwhile. One can combat the enemy far more effectively though accurate knowledge and intelligent understanding than blind, wholesale, indiscriminate hatred on racial grounds as Hitler and the Nazi regime did in Germany. Even if a Muslim Hitler could successfully carry out the massacre of every Jew on earth, this would not promote the cultural, moral and spiritual regeneration of Muslims without which an Islamic renaissance is impossible.

What a paradox it is that Adolf Hitler proved to be the greatest benefactor of Zionism! Indeed, it is a fact that the leading Nazi intellectuals were well-versed in Zionist literature and quoted it freely in their anti-Semitic propaganda. A close study of Zionism and Nazism reveals to the scholar some striking similarities. Both Nazis and Zionism were in complete agreement on the following points:

1. That the emancipation of the Jews in Europe was a mistake;
2. That the Jews can function in the lands of Europe only as a disruptive influence;
3. That all Jews of the world are a homogeneous race despite their diverse political allegiances;
   • 1604. That the Jews, unlike the other peoples of Europe, are unique and resist assimilation.
4. That anti-Semitism is the natural expression of the nationalist feeling of the European nations and hence ineradicable.

Not only did the Zionist literature in Germany between 1920—1930 feed the anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda with all the material it needed, but the Zionist movement itself greatly facilitated the Nazi “Final Solution” of the Jewish problem.

The chief ideologists of German Zionism were Jacob Klatzkin and Nachum Goldman. They had tasted the first fruit of Herzl’s earlier effort. The Balfour Declaration had been issued in 1917 and German Zionists had persuaded the German Government, a recent mortal enemy of Britain to praise the British statement. German Zionists apparently felt that the day was at hand when most Jews would leave Europe for Palestine. Some Zionist writers were so confident of the building up of the homeland that they had no qualms concerning the tearing down of existing Jewish communities. The Kastner trial in Israel and the Hecht, Hilberg and Arendt books clearly documented how Jewish Agency leaders withheld from the mass of Jews in Eastern Europe the fact that they were marked for shipment to death camps. Both the trial and these books⁷⁴ clearly suggest that by maintaining the Nazi secret, the Zionist leadership inside and outside Hitler’s Europe, made impossible a mass uprising of the Jews and enabled the route to the gas chambers to remain unblocked by the des161perate rebellion of doomed men. In return, a few hundred Zionist leaders were permitted to escape to freedom.⁷⁵

The bonds of sympathy and common understanding between the Nazis and the Zionists can best be appreciated in this significant episode as related by none else than the architect of the Jewish massacre—Eichmann—shortly before his execution in Tel-Aviv:

Dr. Rudoph Kastner, authorized representative of the Zionist movement, was an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. Kastner agreed to help keep the Jews in the concentration camps from resisting deportation and even keep order in the collection camps before their extermination—if I would close my eyes and allow a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews in the Zionist movement emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the concentration camps, the price of 15,000 or 20,000—in the end there may have been more—was not too high for me. Kastner never came to me fearful of the Gestapo strong man. We negotiated entirely as equals. While we talked, he would smoke one aromatic cigarette after another, taking them from a silver case and lighting them from a silver lighter. With his great polish and reserve, I think he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself. Dr. Kastner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Palestine. I believe that Kastner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand to achieve his goal. As I told Kastner, “We Nazis too are idealists and we too had to shed our own blood before we came to power.”⁷⁶

162In order to achieve their political objectives, the Zionist leaders have been so ruthless that they did not hesitate even to murder their own people. One of the worst Zionist crimes against innocent Jews occurred in 1940 in the sinking of the Patria, a refugee cargo ship carrying Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine. Not until a decade after the tragic event did it became publically known that it was the Zionists themselves who had ordered the destruction of the ship with its 1,800 passengers within sight of land and was responsible for the drowning of more than 250 persons in order to arouse artificial anti-British sentiment. At the time of the incident, these deaths were attributed to the British and it was only in 1950 when it was discovered that the Haganah General Staff had been responsible for the disaster. Here is how David Finker, Israeli correspondent for the Yiddish-language Morning Journal of New York described what actually happened:

It was then that the Haganah General Staff took a decision at which their leaders shuddered. The decision was not to permit PATRIA to leave the port of Jaffa. The English must be given to understand that Jews could not be driven away from their rightful homeland. The PATRIA must be blown up. The decision was conveyed to Haganah members on the PATRIA and in the hush of night, preparations had begun for the execution of the tragic act. On Sunday, November 26, 1940, the passengers were informed by the English that they were being returned to sea. The Jews remained silent save for a whisper from man to man to “go up to the deck—all up on deck!” Apparently the signal did not reach everybody for many hundreds remained below—never to see light again. Suddenly an explosion was heard, and a panic ensued. It was a hellish scene; people jumped 163into the water, children were tossed into the waves; agonizing cries pierced the night. The number of victims was officially placed at 276. The survivors were permitted by the British High Commander to land.⁷⁷

Originally the overwhelming majority of these displaced people wanted new homes for themselves and what remained of their families in the U.S.A., Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Argentina but to their utter dismay, these countries with their rigid immigration quotas, barred at all but an insignificant few. What a paradox it is that the very nations which most vehemently opposed Jewish immigration to their own shores, were the most zealous supporters of unlimited Jewish mmigration to Palestine! The Zionist propaganda capitalized to the limit on the Nazi atrocities which it had been so much responsible for and with consummate skill, played on the emotions of the public in Europe and America.

The Zionist movement knew that Palestine would for many years to come, be a remittance society. They knew they could raise vast sums for the Zionist organization only by telling its donors that there is no other place these poor Jews could go. In other words, to permit the victims to go to America, England, Australia, South Africa and other countries would undermine the political necessity for a national Jewish “homeland.”⁷⁸

This dishonesty outraged the moral sense of some of America’s most respected Jews. Dr. 164Louis Finkelstein, America’s foremost Talmudic scholar and rector of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York stated in a press conference in 1951 that it had always been his feeling “if the American Jews had exerted as much effort into getting the displaced persons admitted to this country as they had given to Zionism, a good home could certainly have been found in the New World for all the Jewish refugees in Europe.” And the Jewish publisher of The New York Times, Hays Sulzberger declared in disgust: “Why should the fate of all those unhappy people be subordinated to the slogan of Jewish Statehood?”⁷⁹ Simultaneously, a vilification campaign was waged relentlessly on the press, radio, televison and films against the Arabs inside and outside Palestine to arouse violent hatred against them so that the monstrous injustice inherent in Zionist ambitions would appear to the public as justified. This Zionist propaganda won enormous success, so much so that it not only dominated all the mass-media in America so the Arab-Muslim view-point could not even receive a hearing, but American politics, both domestic and foreign, subordinated all other considerations to the welfare of Zionism. Moral and material support for the state of “Israel” is a fundamental plank of the platforms of both major political parties in America—the Republicans and the Democrats. During every presidential campaign in America the rival candidates spare no efforts to outdo each other in praise of Zionism before Zionist organizations which are all widely 165publicized over press, radio and television. No public figure would dare criticize “Israel” lest a campaign of slander be waged against him and his whole career ruined. In order to pander to the American Jewish vote in the forthcoming presidential elections, Franklin Delano Roosevelt hold on board his private yacht in the Bitter Lakes of the Suez Canal in 1942 a special conference with King Ibn Saud, offered to bribe him with a large sum if he would only permit Jews free settlement in al-Madina, as they had prospered there at the time of the Holy Prophet. Furiously angry, the King responded with a contemptuous “No!” His wife, the late Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was such a staunch Zionist that even the Jews could not match her zeal. She was the heart and soul of every Zionist fund-raising campaign from whence millions of American dollars flowed into “Israel.” The late Adlai Stevenson was second to none to Mrs. Roosevelt among Christian supporters of Zionism, so much so that his plea over television for America to join “Israel,” England and France in the their invasion of Egypt in November 1956, to capture the Suez Canal, was the major issue in the Presidential campaign of that year. President Eienshower had the rare moral courage steadfastly to oppose what he knew was against both justice and the true interest of his country and, although harshly criticized by the Zionist-dominated mass-media, he finally won out. In regard to this Zionist influence in America, I speak from my own experience. I was not quite fourteen years old when the state of “Israel” was proclaimed in May 1948. I remember so vividly seeing the multitude of “Israeli” blue and white flags with 166star of David flying in New York long before they were hoisted in Palestine. I will never forget the passionate speeches and equally passionate songs and the fund-raising drives that were so much a part of my adolescence. Even one like myself who always enraged my family and friends because of my sympathy for the Arabs, was so convinced by the propaganda that when I was eighteen years old, I joined the local chapter of the Mizrachi Hatzair, a religious Zionist youth organization. I was only an immature and unsophisticated girl who had been deceived by the illusion that Zionism was a very idealistic noble-minded movement. I thought the Jews were returning to Palestine to strengthen their close ties of kinship and culture with their Semitic cousins and that together the Jews and Arabs would cooperate and achieve another Golden Age of culture in the Western Asia! Within a few months, I discovered the truth and left the organization thoroughly disillusioned.

Why is the overwhelming majority of Christian Americans and Europeans so emotionally committed Zionism? Paradoxically, although the Jews were the victims of persecution in Europe for more than a thousand years, climaxed by the Nazi holocaust, Western support for Zionism has strong racial overtones. Zionist propaganda never fails to represent the Jews as white Europeans, the ambassadors of the “progress” and prosperity of Western civilization while the Arabs are condemned as subhuman Asiatics. Writes the late Bartley C. Crum, a Roman Catholic, chosen by President Truman to be a member of the 167Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine in December 1945:

Cairo was a revelation—and a long step forward in my education. Here for the first time I saw the Middle East stripped of the travel writer’s star dust. I began to feel its tempo, to begin in limited measure, to understand the world of Islam. Here in this hot, sun-baked city, I saw the Arab in his native habitat and native dress—incredible numbers wearing their long, single-piece nightgown—like robes, representing a degree of poverty and a level of subsistence I had seen nowhere in the Western world, I saw Arabs sprawled sleeping in doorways and in the shadow of buildings, Arab women crouched with their young, munching bread undisturbed while flies clustered in seething masses on the abscessed eyes of their infants and I was sickened. (pp. 146–147). In this gateway to the Middle East, I realized that I had plunged back through the centuries to an almost unbelievable way of life. The doctrine of human rights and personal liberty—the concept that man had dignity as a human being and the latent power to lift himself from the mire of animal existence—had not penetrated the citadels of Islamic authoritarianism. As the roll call of witnesses continued, it was evident that their antipathy was not towards Judaism but towards Westernism; that was the encroachment they fought. Was this not perhaps the basic tragedy of the Middle East? Westernism meant higher standards of living; it meant reduction in infant mortality, in disease, in poverty; it meant opening the door to some measure of freedom and happiness to the forgotten men and women of this area of the world. It was this, precisely, to which our witnesses objected. At no time did the witnesses in Cairo speak in terms of the masses and their improvement. One felt their ever-present sense of fatalism. A child born crippled limps through life; a child blind from trachoma is a victim of Allah’s will, not man’s. And who was to say that Allah chose wrongly in singling out this child? (pp. 152–153).

168During the train’s interminable pauses in Egypt, I had had my fill of its desert scenes—the mud hovels, the faceless children, for so they appeared, wrapped up in the same nondescript robes as their parents; the slow, painful, miserable existence. But once in Palestine, the tempo and colour of life changed sharply. Things seemed to quicken, to become more alive; children were suddenly no longer tiny bundles of rags but youngsters wearing shorts with sturdy arms and legs and open smiling faces and bright eyes—alert and human again (p. 159. As we drove through the country, I became aware of a remarkable physical phenomenon. Many of the Jewish children I saw were blonde and blue-eyed, a mass mutation that I was told, is yet to be adequately explained. One might almost assert that a new Jewish folk is being created in Palestine; the vast majority almost a head taller than their parents, a sturdy people, more a throwback to the farmers and fishermen of Jesus’ day than products of the sons and daughters of eastern and central Europe. (p. 192).

My gateway to Tel-Aviv was through Jaffa. An American soldier had told me of his pleasure at seeing the shadow of a tree outlined on a white side-walk and realized that this tableau meant civilization. Jaffa, in contrast, reminded me of Cairo. Vegetables and decayed fruit lay in the streets, whitewash scaled off the fronts of shops and buildings and the whole city had the atmosphere of an overgrown Arab village. Driving into Tel-Aviv, you saw the houses become more habitable, the streets grow wider and treelined; the green of grass and trees planted to beautify begin to replace the ever-present gray of mud and silt and you realized that the Jews had done this because they wanted wide streets; they wanted trees and green places for the children to play in. The Arabs had blighted the earth for centuries and now the Jews were the first people to remove that blight. In Tel-Aviv, they had built a thriving city of nearly 200,000—a thoroughly civilized community with tree-shaded boulevards, with opera and theatres and art galleries, with play grounds and modern 169schools, with buses and apartment houses. I had no idea that in Tel-Aviv you could stand on a street corner and say: This might be any modern American town.” But you could! And I thought to myself; “Here before my eyes is proof that Palestine Jewry is bringing civilization to the Middle East⁸⁰

As the self-appointed bearers of “progress” to a benighted Arab world, the Israeli Jew feels he has the unchallenged right to inflict upon the poor and backward the worst that can happen to them. In commenting on this attitude, Ben Shlome writing in Ner, observes:

South African Europeans have been speaking thus about the poverty of the slums where the black Africans live and South Americans comment about the poverty of the native Indians and this is precisely how we Jews were described in the Diaspora when foreign journalists saw the miserable dwellings of the “dirty Jews” in our little towns in Eastern Europe with the filth and starving children in the streets. And this is how we ourselves talk when we go through the slums inhabited by our own brethren, the Oriental Jews. It is nothing more than the attitude of the upper classes, sated and smug—the white man looking down with contempt upon the miserable and the oppressed. Such a man does not think of asking why.

In the Diaspora we used to find a thousand explanations for our miserable condition; we blamed non-Jewish society, Government and its officials, the policy of prejudice and discrimination against us, the wickedness of the non-Jewish rulers, the ghetto into which we were incarcerated and all the obstacles in the way of our economic and cultural development. How we knew how to shout, how to arouse pity about our wretched fate!

170And here we are, in the country that we have established, the state we have built, with nobody to stop us from organizing our life in it along all the principles of social and human justice which we have demanded for ourselves. Have we stood the test? Are we not following in the very same footsteps of these who oppressed and humiliated us? And what is worse, is it not terrible that our senses have become so dulled that we no longer feel guilt about the evil that is being done to others whether they be Jews or not? How can such observers describe the wretched conditions under which these Arabs live without accusing, without asking whence it comes and who is responsible?⁸¹

According to Westerners imbued with this variety of pure and naked materialism, poverty and backwardness are not misfortunes which entitle those afflicted with sympathetic assistance but rather constitute such unpardonable crimes that if the Arabs are condemned by the Zionists as guilty, they deserve no human rights at all! The late Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the most zealous of all Christian Zionists, justified the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine on this curious pretext:

Prejudice and feeling must be put aside and the whole refugee problem looked upon as an economic one. Israel must realize the benefit to her of establishing peaceful relations. She needs the resources of the Arab countries; she needs Arab oil, food and raw materials. Obviously the Arabs would gain immeasurably if such friendly arrangements were possible. The industry and energy of the Jews of Israel, the skills, the organizing ability and technical knowledge they brought with them from other countries if applied to the problems of the Arab economy, could do much to raise the standard of living in 171every country of the area. Instead, the Arabs talk hopefully of wiping out the people of Israel. Even if this were possible, such a war would be a grievous thing. Although the Arabs would gain some land and the refugees could return to what homes they had left, they would not put into the country the hard and intelligent work that the Jews have. And unless they did, all development would stop; the land would deteriorate, barren plains and dry deserts would appear where tree-planted fields and productive farms now flourish. The loss would be not only to the people of Israel but to the future development of the entire Middle East.⁸²

Zionist propaganda spares no efforts to degrade the Arabs in the eyes of Americans and Europeans as an innately inferior people. Zionist leadership believes as implicitly as did Hitler that you need only repeat a lie long enough before people will begin to believe it. Exactly like the racist propaganda of the Nazis, the Zionists feel certain that if their rivals can be convincingly portrayed as subhumans—a variety of vermin like rats and lice, that will be sufficient psychological pretest to justify their being treated like rats and lice. These considerations dictate the tactics of the anti-Arab propaganda with which the Zionists have bombarded Europe and America for more than a half century.

Let us proceed to examine this hate literature in detail. We will now quote a passage from Leon Uris’ best selling Zionist novel, Exodus (Bantam Books, New York, 1958) which sold millions of copies in America 172and abroad:

The next morning Ari and Kitty left Jerusalem and continued northward into the Galilee. They drove through the timeless Arab villages into the fertile carpet of the Jezreel valley which the Jews had turned from swamp into the finest farmland in the Middle East. As the road wound out of the Jezreel towards Nazareth, they moved backward in time. On one side of the hill, the lush lands of the Jewish kibbutzim and on the other, the sun-baked, dried-out, barren fields of the Arabs. Nazareth was much as Jesus must have found it in this youth.

Ari parked his car in the centre of town. He brushed off a group of Arab urchins but one child persisted;

“Guide?”

“No!”

“Souvenirs? I got wood from the Cross, cloth from the Robe.”

“Get out of here!”

“Dirty pictures?”

Ari tried to pass the boy but he clung on and grabbed Ari by the pants leg. Maybe you like my sister? She is a virgin.”

Ari flipped the boy a coin before he and Kitty ran, Nazareth stank. The streets were littered with dung and blind beggars made wretched noises and barefoot, ragged, filthy children were underfoot. Flies were everywhere. Kitty was baffled as they drove from Nazareth. It was a dreadful place. “At least the Arabs there are friendly,” Ari said. “They are Christians.” “They are Christians who need a bath, replied Kitty. (p. 334).

What an excellent illustration who this diabolic mentality works! Anybody who has the slightest familiarity with the traditional customs of the Arabs, knows how highly they regard a woman’s chastity, that the brother feels himself responsible for his 173sister’s honour so much so that he feels it is his right to take her life to preserve the family’s reputation if there is the slightest suspicion of immorality.

Here is another choice specimen of Zionist hate-propaganda. The author is not himself a Jew but a fanatically pro-Zionist Armenian Christian who with vivid childhood memories of the Turkish persecution, at the time of the first world war, extends his hatred for Turks to include Arabs and all other Muslim peoples. The incident takes place in Jerusalem during the 1948 Palestine war:

In charge of our arsenal was one of the most bloodthirsty Arabs I ever met. He was a thin, morbid fanatic with blazing black eyes named Ali. I won his friendship by photographing him repeatedly in the act of firing a Bren gun. Sitting on a box of bullets or grenades, I would gaze at Ali with the conviction that I was facing a dormant savage, a ruthless killer whose violent passions were suppressed. One day I started to converse with him telling a bare-faced lie:

“Ali, I have studied medicine, psychology and the science of the human mind. I can tell many things about a person by looking at him. You are a very strong and brave Arab but you are afraid to do what your heart dictates. Tell me what it is and perhaps we can do it together.”

Ali looked at me intently with a savage glint in his eyes which made me uncomfortable. We were alone; he was armed and I knew I was no match for a man whom I felt instinctively was a killer.

“I want revenge! I must clear myself of all my sins before Allah. I must kill Jews—many Jews! I must kill till my arm is tired. I must not stop killing Jews until their bodies are piled this high” The wild Arab brought one hand to his chin. “I must do one more thing. For this I need your help.”

174“Your wish is my command, Ali.”

“I want you to come with me the next time we fight. When I catch a Jew alive, I want you to be with me with your camera.”

“Why do you want me with my camera?” I asked innocently;”

“I want you to take one picture of me holding the living Jew by the throat. I want you to take another picture while I stab the Jew in the neck. Then I want pictures as I stab him again and again, in the face, in the heart, in his belly—with this knife!” Ali whipped out a vicious blade. “After I have killed the Jew, I want you to photograph me drinking his blood.”

“While it is still warm, I suppose.”

“Yes, while it is running warm from his body!” Ali affirmed⁸³.

Though Zionism has enjoyed a tremendous success in America in terms of propaganda, politics and finances, in one crucial aspect, it has been a complete failure. Ever since the main source of immigration to “Israel” in Europe as a result of World War II has been exhausted, Zionist zealots have been pleading in vain for American Jews to go and settle in Israel. “Family-planning” has no place in the policy of the “Israeli” government. The military leaders of this Zionist state consider a maximum population of Jews essential for its security, but since the birth-rate of the Jews of European origin living there is rather low, there is a great demand for more and more immigrants. “Israel’s” population policy is to encourage the land to become so crowded with Jews, that any return of 175the Arab refugees would be impossible! Immigrants are particularly wanted to settle in newly-built strategic settlements on formerly Arab land in order to make the Jewish colonization permanent. American Jews, always so generous with their money for Zionism, nevertheless have no desire to exchange their comfortable homes in New York for the hardships of living in one of the primitive, pioneer settlements in the desert wastes on “Israel’s” perilous frontiers!

An American Jewish anthropologist, who is a professor at the University of California, although thoroughly sympathetic to Zionism, confirms the prevelance of atheism and materialism in his study of child-rearing on an “Israeli” collective farm. The Kibbutz under study was run by the Communist Party. Pictures of Lenin and Stalin hang in the children’s dormitories and in their classrooms. Pravda is daily read by all those in the settlement who know Russian as are other Communist literature. The study of Marxist-Leninst philosophy and Jewish history interpreted by dialectial materialism is as a compulsory part of the school curriculum in the kibbutz as any collective farm in the Soviet Union or communist China!

To sum up, the sabras native-born Israeli Jews) support—and probably will continue to support—both the Communist Party and its policies. But this support will be increasingly motivated by loyalty, training or an impersonal sense of justice—not from that personal emotional involvement that transforms political activity into personal dedication and that transmutes political belief into a world-view. But if the sabras are not emotionally committed to a Marxist world-view, neither have they turned to a religious one. 176The kibbutz has been eminently successful in transmitting its anti-clericalism and philosophical naturalism to its children. In the primary school children receive an explicitly naturalistic worldview. The curriculum and its philosophy derive from a scientific view of man and the world and are explicitly opposed to supernaturalism in any form. The opposition to religion is based not only on intellectual conviction but on the belief, as an educational authority states, “that a generation educated without God will have its faith in man strengthened.” Since the Bible, however, is a basic literary and historical text-book in the school system, it is necessary that the term “God” be explained as soon as it is encountered. The teachers explain that belief in supernatural beings arose among early peoples before they had acquired scientific explanations for natural phenomena and that even today, some people who have not received a scientific education continue to use this belief for the explanation of matters which they do not understand. One of the first questions which the sixth-grade class would ask of strangers was whether or not they believed in God. If the answer were in the affirmative, the latter would be teased for their “superstitious” belief. Again, on the traditional religious New Year (Rosh Hashana) some of the refugee children who live in the kibbutz, attended religious sevices—as they do on other holidays—which are conducted by the orthodox parents. As they entered the synagogue, two of the second grade children stood at the door shouting, “But there is no God! We don’t believe in God here!”

The sabras accept one crucial plank in the Zionist platform—the Jewish State. Other planks, however, such as the importance of Jewish culture. the unity of the Jewish people and the “ingathering of the exiles” do not evoke unanimous agreement. Indeed, there is abundant evidence to suggest that the sabras do not share these Zionist values because they view Judaism and Jewish~ 177ness as inferior and would like to dissociate themselves from them. Almost any form of Jewish literature is viewed by the sabras as “boring” so they make no attempt to read it. Since the non-historical portions of the Bible are interpreted by them as a series of fairy tales, they can see no value in them. Only when a Biblical lesson contains material of archaeological or historical interest or when a place name or historical site is personally known to them or when the lesson is related to some political or scientific interest of theirs, do the high school students reveal any interest in the Bible. But it is not only Biblical literature that is “boring.” Much of the modern Jewish literature is characterized by the same term. And only under protest do they read Mendele or Scholem Aleichem, both of whose works are included in the Mosad curriculum. Since, however, they are fascinated by accounts of Chinese and Indian village life, the twelfth-grade teacher asked his students to approach Scholem Aleichem’s stories of the shtetl with the same attitude which they would approach the descriptions of the former villages. This they could not do. The latter, they argued, “holds no interest for us.” Jewish music is responded to in a similar fashion. Despite the efforts of the music teacher to stimulate their appreciation, the students “hate” the Jewish music of the Diaspora (exile). He once taught his tenth-grade class a Jewish song which, however, he labelled as Russian. They thought it was marvellous, and when he revealed to them that it was a Jewish song, they refused to believe him! Jewish history fares no better. The eleventh-grade class, in desperation, asked their teacher why they could not skip over most of Jewish history and begin, rather, with the history of modern Israel. Although general European history is one of their favourite subjects, Jewish history is “boring.” Writing on “What is a Jew?” only one of the ten essayists (all seventh-grade students) mentioned any positive contributions to civilization. All the other students stressed two characteristics: the Jews 178have always been persecuted, and everywhere they are despised. But modern Israelis (excluding the Yemenites and Jewish immigrants from other Arabic-speaking countries) are not at all like the “Jews” who were most often identified by such characteristics as beards and skull caps. On the contrary, writes one of the essayists: “……You will hear singing—songs of farmers, songs of rebuilding…. That is the song of the future and the rebirth of the Jewish nation….” Religious Jews—or more accurately, Orthodox Jews whose Jewish “visibility” is pronounced—are the objects of similar attitudes. A fourth-grade girl, after asking her father if he had prayed, proceeded to describe with much laughter “how the Jews in Europe had prayed.” Her description, accompanied by grotesque gestures, was in the tradition of anti-Semitic caricature. And from the other end of the age scale, came this comment from an adult sabra: “I hate orthodox Jews and whenever I see them, I can understand why people become anti-Semitic.” By the same token, the sabras both hate and fear the Oriental immigration of Jews from Arab countries. They fear these immigrants, perhaps because that ghetto culture of which they are so ashamed and which they believe to have been destroyed, is in danger of being revived by them. They hate them perhaps because the constant sight of these living representatives of the hated ghetto culture and mentality is a threat to their own self-image. Moreover the sabras fear that the presence in Israel of these Oriental Jews may result in their (the sabras’) being identified by others with them. This hatred and fear become even more understandable in view of the fact that the realization that the Oriental and Orthodox are Jews like themselves frequently comes as a shock to the sabras. This is illustrated by the following story recounted by a kibbutz father. Some years before our arrival in the kibbutz, he took his six-year-old daughter to Safed, the center of Orthodoxy, where for the first time she encountered bearded, orthodox Jews. She asked her father who these 179strange people were and when he told her they were Jews, she became terribly confused. For her and her peers to be forced to accept the fact that the bearded men of Safed and the Oriental immigrants from Arab lands are Jews must be a painful experience. Many sabras, ideologically in favour of immigration, are hostile to the immigrants from the Arab Middle East whom they view as inferiors—they call them shchorim—“black ones.” They are the constant butts of verbal aggression, taunting and teasing. The immigrant children feel like pariahs as a result of this treatment. Describing their year’s experience in an article in the kibbutz student annual, one of them wrote: “We do not feel part of the Mosad. The other children laugh at us and do not accept us as friends and comrades. We feel lonely and lost.” (pp. 319–310). It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the sabras—like some of their parents—are proud of the fact that many kibbutz children do not look “Jewish.” Holding a blond baby for me to photograph, one sabra proudly remarked, “In America, they will never guess that these children are Jews—they will think they are goyim.” (p. 388). Precisely what is the Zionist vision that is supposed to evoke the sabras’ loyalty? It is our thesis that the vision that the sabras have been taught to seek is incapable of providing an ideological basis for the willingness to make personal sacrifice.⁸⁴ The Zionist theory that the sabras have learned is not based on the notion—promulgated by Achad Ha’am, Martin Buber and others—that the perpetuation of historic Jewish values and ideals is a sacred task and that the raison d’etre of Zionism is the establishment of a spiritual homeland where a uniquely Jewish culture might flourish. On the contrary, the important Israeli values are, according to the Zionism of the kibbutz, universal. A teacher, one of the kibbutz intellectuals, reacted with great hostility when I 180asked him if he believed Jewish culture to be unique. Jewish culture, he insisted, is part of modern Western culture, and in the future, there will be but one world culture. The goal of the Zionist enterprise in Israel was the creation of a new and healthy culture out of an old, sick culture and the fewer connections with the old, the healthier it would be. Hence the paradox in Zionism: “Come to Israel to build a Jewish state,” entails, “Come to Israel to escape the Jewish past!” In effect, the sabras feel no tie, other than a negative one, with much of Jewish tradition or with distinctive Jewish values; they want little to do with the last 2,000 years of the Jewish past and they wish to dissociate themselves from those Jews who actually or symbolically represent those values and that past. Hence these aspects of Zionist ideology which stress the unity of the Jewish people, the glory of Jewish culture and the importance of Jewish values, they reject out of hand. To them, Zionism means Israeli patriotism.⁸⁵

If this is the attitude of the sabra towards his orthodox brethren, the treatment of the Arabs can well be imagined!

What is the viewpoint of the modern Jew towards “Israel’s” place in the Arab-Muslim world and the relationship between Zionism and the culture of the West? Let one of the most articulate of Zionists, formerly the chief representative of “Israel” to the United Nations and now “Israeli” Foreign Minister, speak for himself:

It has become fashionable to assert that Israel’s aspiration is for integration into the Middle East; that if it is not now a Middle Eastern state by every political and economic connection, then that lack of Middle Eastern 181citizenship derives not from its free-will but from the imposition of the neighbouring world and that sooner or later, it is its duty to become a part of the Middle East, flesh of its flesh and bone of its bone; to become organically embodied in the political, economic and cultural life of our region. Yet I suggest that if Israel is now separated from the Arab Middle East, we owe that separation not only to the hostility of our neighbours but also to the nature of our own national movement. In the sphere of culture, while paying all honor to the potentiality of the Arab tradition, we come to Israel with the purpose of reviving and maintaining the Hebrew tradition. Moreover, Israel possesses unique interests, the paramount one of which is the network of connections with the Jewish world in the countries of the Dispersion. This is something exclusive to the state of Israel; something which is entirely alien to the rest of the Near East. We should not, therefore, look upon the separateness of Israel as a transient phenomenon imposed by Arab boycott. It is imposed by desire and the aspiration of Israel itself. The idea should not be one of integration; Integration is rather something to be avoided. One of the great apprehensions which afflict us when we contemplate our cultural scene is the danger lest the predominance of immigrants of Oriental origin force Israel to equalize its cultural level with that of the neighbouring world. Far from regarding our immigrants from oriental countries as a bridge toward our integration with the Arabic-speaking world, our object should be to infuse them with the occidental spirit rather than to allow them to draw us into an unnatural orientalism.⁸⁶ The recent controversy on the place of Turkey in global defence is relevant to this point. It is interesting to record the vehemence with 182which Turkey demanded to be severed from its geographical background and to live, not in the family of Arabic-speaking states of Saudi Arabia, of Syria, Lebanon or Egypt, but to be regarded as the Eastern extremity of the Western world and to live in the same strategic, political and cultural universe as Greece, Italy and France. If Turkey by reason of the Occidental emphasis of its government is able to express that feeling, I consider that Israel has a much greater right. Israel has no part of that Muslim inheritance which would have argued in favor of Turkey being regarded as a Middle Eastern state. If we Jews have suffered the whips and scorpions of exile, let us at least compensate ourselves with the retention of those Western concepts we have acquired. Ancient Hebrew civilization, with all its depth and grandeur, was limited in its scope. Hebrew Israel did not flourish in the plastic arts or in the applied sciences; its genius was exercised in a supreme but constricted avenue of cultural experience. Our Hebrew and Jewish roots are not enough and Israel has every right to enrich both its Hebrew and Jewish traditions by the products of modern Western civilization. In our concern with recapturing Hebrew and Jewish roots, we must avoid the pitfalls of provincialism.⁸⁷

The proceeding quotation from one of Zionism’s chief representatives is sufficient to disprove any possibility of cultural affinity between Israel and the surrounding Arab Muslim world.

From its very inception, Zionism was and still is synonymous with the imperialism of Western civilization—both political and cultural. Writes one of the earliest champions of Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky:

The first World War was in its fifth month and for more than three months I had been wandering over the cheerless 183world as correspondent of Russkiya Vyedomosti (Russian Monitor). My mission was to report on the moods and sentiments produced by the war rather than on the war itself. By the time I reached France, “Paris” had already been transferred to Bordeaux as the government offices had been forced temporarily to move out of the threatened capital. I went to Bordeaux—and there one wet morning, I read in a poster pasted on a wall that Turkey had joined the Central Powers and begun military operations. I must confess until that morning, in Bordeaux as everywhere else, my desire was stalemate and peace as soon as possible. Turkey’s move transformed me in one short morning into a fanatical believer in war until victory. Turkey’s move made this war “my war”. In 1909 I had been chief editor of Constantionple’s four Zionist newspapers at the same time (the sort of thing that only occurs in one’s youth); the Young Turks then ruled the Sublime Porte and there and then I reached the steadfast conviction that where the Turk rules neither sun may shine nor grass may grow and that the only hope for the Jewish restoration of Palestine lay in the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. As I saw it, the matter was crystal clear: the fate of the Jews in Russia, Poland, Galicia, very important undoubtedly, was, if viewed in the historical perspective, only something temporary as compared to the revolution in Jewish national life which the dismemberment of Turkey would bring us.

I never doubted that once Turkey entered the war, she would be defeated and sliced to pieces; here again I am at a loss to understand how anyone could ever have had any doubts on this subject. It was no guesswork but a matter of cold, statistical calculation. That Germany would be beaten into unconditional surrender, of course not even a journalist could have foreseen at that time. But that Turkey, more than anyone else would have to pay for this war, I did not and could not doubt for one moment.

184Exactly at what moment I conceived the idea of Jewish fighting force—whether there in Bordeaux in front of that poster or later—I don’t remember now. But. I believe that it was always clear to me that if ever a war should occur between England and Turkey, the right thing for the Jews would be to form a regiment of their own and participate in the conquest of Palestine.

I asked Max Nordau; “If the English could be persuaded to form a Jewish army to fight on the Eastern front—in Palestine—what would be your attitude?”

He was skeptical. A sound idea, but where could such a unit get soldiers? English, French, Russian Jews were serving in their respective armies; in the neutral countries in Europe, there were few Jews; Amercia was far away and besides, Jews nourished some foolish sentimental predilection for the Turk, “our cousin, Ishmael.” True, no scholar on earth could tell what relation the Turks, a Turanian tribe could possibly be to Ishmael, The semite, but there it was and Nordeau himself had to face that music after his famous rebuke to the Young Turks at the Hamburg Congress.

“I remember that speech of yours,” said I “but Doctor, we cannot let idiots dictate our policy! Not only are the Turks no cousins of ours, even with the real Ishmael, the Arabs, we have nothing in common. We Jews belong to Europe, thank God, for two thousand years we helped to build European civilization. And here comes one more quotation from another of your speeches. “We Zionists are going to Palestine to extend the moral boundaries of Europe as far as the Euphrates!” Our worst enemy in this undertaking is the Turk. Now that the hour of his downfall has struck, we cannot possibly stand by and do nothing, can we?” (pp. 29–32).

Zionism, even more than British imperialism, stood from the beginning for the total westernization of the area: Vladimir Jabotinsky continues:

185Lawrence and Philby’s dream was “Greater Arabia.” England had administered countries where Arabic is spoken like Egypt and the Sudan for over forty years. There is a mountain of accumulated experience for dealing with such peoples. They would be “liberated,” they would be united and they would be called “Greater Arabia,” They would even be given Arab kings, picturesque sheikhs in green turbans, dear, grown up children who sit on divans with their legs crossed under them and who require English advisers in all matters of state. Such a dream—rather! The English bureaucracy in Egypt before World War I consisted almost entirely of such Arabophiles. Lawrence and Philby were thus only representatives of their class—which counted its scores, all of them born members of the ruling “caste”. What I wish to emphasize is the essential element of their common dream: the “greater Arabia” must unconditionally remain picturesque: camels, caravans, white burnouses, green turbans, veiled woman, harems—the full decoration of the Orient must be religiously retained. They shudder at the thougt that this beauty may be disturbed by an overdose of Western civilization.

The Balfour Declaration stabbed these Lawrences and Philby’s to the heart. They had seen enough Zionist Jews to realize that the idea of Jewish national homeland in Palestine had nothing to do with “picturesque” orthodox Jews with beards and earlocks (which they could certainly have “swallowed” for they are not Jew-haters) but with modern secular Jews wearing trousers on their legs, and hats on heads with modern Western ideas under those hats! And end to all local colour! Tramcars in Jerusalem! Instead of camels and date palm trees, red roofs of brand-new Jewish settlements where girls and young men would walk freely together just as in England. Horrors!”.

This is not a joke. It is the absolute truth. Lawrence published an article in a London newspaper at the time of 186the Balfour Declaration in which despite himself, one could hear the echo of gnashing teeth. He was for Zionsim, he wrote, but only on one condition: that the Jews must not go to Palestine as Europeans and Amercans. They must suit themselves to the Arab customs of living—“Orientalize” themselves. Otherwise, he insisted, they would ruin both themselves and the country.

None of this is anti-Semitism. But the consequences of these reactionary influences was an unprecedented epidemic of anti-Semitism.⁸⁸

What is the mentality of a master architect of Zionism on this question? As far back as the summer of 1937, Dr. Chaim Weizmann wrote to Sir John Shuckburgh, Permanent Under-Secretary for the British colonies as follows:

Nearly six months have elapsed since the Report of the Royal Commission and the White Paper restricting Jewish immigration were published. There is utter confusion as to the political intentions of His Majesty’s Government. The atmosphere of doubt and suspense provides an ideal soil for every schemer and intriguer, self-appointed or foreign-paid to try his hand at advertising “solutions” to the question of Palestine. All these schemes have one and the same object: the liquidation of the National Home for Jews and the virtual handing over of the country to the so-called Arab leaders who organized the disturbances of last year (1936) and from their hiding places are now running the terrorist campaign. The terms are always the same: liquidation of the Mandate and Jewish acceptance of minority status, the Jewish position to be protected by that invaluable instrument of “minority rights” of which we have had such instructive experience in Eastern Europe. Let there be no mistake about the 187action of the representative bodies of the Jewish people to any of these schemes. Jews are not going to Palestine to become in their ancient home, “Arabs of the Mosaic faith” or to exchange their German or Polish ghetto for an Arab one. Whoever knows what an Arab Government looks like, what “minority status” signifies nowadays and what a Jewish ghetto in an Arab state means—there are quite a number of precedents—will be able to form his own conclusions as to what would be in store for us Jews if we accepted the position allotted to us in these “solutions.” It is not for the purpose of subjecting the Jewish people who stand in the front rank of Western civilization, to the rule of a set of unscrupulous Levantine politicians that this supreme Zionist effort is being made in Palestine. All the labours and sacrifices here owe to our inspiration to one thing alone: to the belief that this at least is going to mean freedom and the end of the ghetto. Could there be a more appalling fraud on the hopes of a martyred people than to reduce them to ghetto status in the very land where it was promised by the Balfour Declaration, national freedom? Those who advance such schemes know perfectly. well that there is no prospect of their acceptance by the Jews. Their purpose is not to find a solution which would meet our ever more urgent need for a national home but on the contrary, to strangle our effort of national reconstruction.⁸⁹

This means that the Zionist movement is content with nothing less than complete political and economic domination over Palestine and if possible, the whole of Western Asia as well as the late King Ibn Saud once stated: Israel is a cancer and the welfare of the Muslims cannot be assured until this malignancy is competely destroyed!

188Who is a Jew? Although there has been much controversy and debate on this, the question has never been satisfactority resolved.

The nefarious effects of enthnocentricity upon the quality of Israeli life must not be underestimated. It comes to the head in the problem of religion. Since Israel is officially defined as a “Jewish State,” the issue revolves around the crucial question: “Who is a Jew?” No other issue has divided the Israelis so sharply and the controversy is still far from resolved.

What makes a man a Jew? Nationality? Race? Birth? Religion? Persecution by “others?” A combination of all or some of these factors? If Jewishness is a nationality, can there be Christian or Muslim Jews? If it is a community of race, then this cannot be decided by the individual to opt in or out of it. If it is free-will, is Jewishness a daily plebiscite? If it is a religion, does not preclude free thinkers who would thus be only incomplete Jews? Does it preclude Christians and Muslims who tie their fate to that of the Jews by marrying a Jew? If religion determines the Jew, which faction within the religion makes for the determination? For as a faith, Judaism is splintered and lacks central authority. Who then is a Jew?

Steeped in the liberal tradition of nineteenth century European nationalism, most of the early Zionists envisaged a thoroughly secularized state. Their behavior was often demonstratively and sometimes foolishly anti-rabbinical. In the early 1920’s a group of young atheistic pioneers marched to the Wailing Wall on The Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) eating pork sandwiches. Ben Gurion married his wife, Paula, in a civil ceremony in New York; he later refused, on principle, to undergo a religious ceremony as well. Histadrut-owned workers’ restaurants 189refused for long time to maintain kosher kitchens, again on principle. Many pioneers refused to be “Jewish” in any but a national sense. As late as 1948, the idea of God was still a source of considerable embarrassment. In the proposed Israeli Declaration of Independence, all explicit reference to God was deleted from the draft. Instead, the signers of the Declaration put their trust in “the Rock of Israel”. The vague reference is open to many ambiguous interpretations. Earlier Zionists had bluntly dismissed the possibility of a theocracy for as Theodor Herzl wrote in Der Judenstaat, “If faith keeps us united, science makes us free.” As in other fields, reality proved stronger than the dream.

The Israeli Declaration of Independence stipulated full equality for all citizens “irrespective of religion, race and sex.” It prescribed not only freedom of religion but also at the insistence of the liberals and secularists, freedom of conscience. This part of the Declaration of Independence, is no longer regarded by the Israeli courts as binding; but merely expressing the “credo and vision of the people” which carries no constitutional authority.

In the case of “mixed” marriages, simplified conversion procedures might have meant some relief from undue burden. But easy conversion to Judaism run counter to the age-old aversion to proselytising. Conversions merely to facilitate marriages between Jews and Gentiles are not approved by their rabbis; only after irrefutable proof of exceptional piety and meticulous ritual observance is a candidate accepted into Judaism. Hence the paradox that born Jews who are atheists, who never attend synagogue, who consistently violate the Sabbath, who eat pork and do not keep a Kosher home, have their marriages easily approved by the Rabbinate but Gentiles who would like to convert in order to become a Jewish marriage partner must first “prove” they never touch pork or smoke a cigarette on the Sabbath. Moreover the Tel-Aviv Rabbinate has in 190recent years performed conversions only after first checking the police for “security reasons,” the implication is that non-Jews, even if they be Israeli citizens, might be security risks.

In the aftermath of the 1967 war, a formal religious ruling was issued by the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yitzchak Nissim, prohibiting the evacuation of Arab areas occupied by Israel in that war. The prohibition was issued as a psak halacha which in Judaism is comparable to a papal bull or encyclical. The psak halacha enjoined all Jews as individuals from “even contemplating” the return to the Arabs of any territory that was included in “God’s promise to His people.” Fortunately, only a small minority of Israelis have recognized the Rabbis’ authority to make such an intervention.⁹⁰

Today the Jews pride themselves above every thing else in their successful survival as a people despite one persecution and massacre after another over the ages designed to exterminate them. They never tire of boasting how triumphantly they have survived while countless other nations much more powerful in wealth and in numbers have become extinct. What is the secret of this survival? In his pioneer work in sociology The Muqaddimah Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) declares that the survival of a people, culture or society is wholly dependent upon the cohesiveness and compactness of their “asabiyah” or feeling of group solidarity. When this “asabiyah” or group solidarity weakens, the eventual extinction of the people is inevitable. According to The Muqaddimah this group solidarity is most intense among tribal peoples like the bedu. The Jews who are 191essentially a tribal people adhering to a tribal faith and (Judaism being tribalism in perhaps its most highly developed and sophisticated form) have somehow been able to perpetuate this group solidarity to a degree unparalleled by any other people. Religion among the Jews has served to strengthen, re-enforce and most important of all, justify in their own eyes, their nationalism and racism. Even when a Jew abandons Judaism, he still remains a Jew by nationality, culture and inheritance. Throughout history, Jews have demonstrated their willingness to betray all else, but rare indeed is a Jew who betrays another Jew. In no other people can be found such intense group loyalty. This explains the reason why Jews are so seldom converted to other religions. If a Jew loses faith in Judaism, his fellow-Jews will not much mind if he becomes an unaffiliated atheist and materialist, but woe is then betide the Jew who sincerely embraces Christianity or Islam; he will be subjected to a campaign of the most malicious slander; his family will disown and disinherit him and he will for ever be despised as a traitor to his people. Among strict Orthodox Jews, it is the custom for a family to mourn a relative converted to another faith as if he were dead.

Had it not been for this fanatical nationalist solidarity, certainly all or at least most of the Jews would have embraced Christianity or Islam. The Holy Quran explicitly states that the rabbis of Madinah knew that Muhammad (peace and blessings of God be upon him) was a true Prophet of God yet they savagely turned against him as his bitterest 192enemy? Because Islam, claiming the identical prophetic inheritance, nullified and mercilessly exposed the whole fallacy of the Jews as God’s special Chosen People. And today for the same reason, few Jews are courageous enough to condemn openly the atrocities Zionism has committed against the Arabs for the slogan of the Jews now as always is—“My people right or wrong!”

What is the real reason for the persecution against the Jews in medieval and modern Europe? If you ask any Jew this question, he will automatically reply that anti-Semitism as an incurable disease is proof of the perversity of the Gentiles. The Jews have refused to face the hard fact that the motivations behind all these centuries of persecution can be explained in thoroughly rational and psychological terms. A people who insist against all objective evidence to the contrary in regarding themselves as the Chosen People of God, who consider themselves innately superior all other peoples; who owe their loyalty primarily to each other and never to the country of their birth; and who while they may practice the most exemplary morality among themselves, feel no such obligations to the despised “illiterate Gentiles” and do their best to corrupt others though their stranglehold over the liquor business, usury, etc. and while they fervently maintain that Judaism is the only true faith, rigorously exclude outsiders. One of the chief duties of the rabbi is to discourage any would-be converts. How can such conceit, pride and exclusiveness not fail to arouse against them the most bitter hatred? On top of all that, there is the exceptional intelligence, clever193ness and ability of the Jews to snatch the first opportunity to attain the maximum power and wealth at the expense of others which makes them feared as well as hated:

When we sink, we became a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; and at the same time when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse!⁹¹

In other words, the Jews have been feared throughout the ages because they are not content to participate with non-Jews on equal terms but must dominate everywhere!

The primary reason why Jews have never failed to arouse so much hatred against them is due to the fact that they have never outgrown their tribal mentality. According to this outlook, a man owes his loyalty only to his tribe and clan. All non-members of the tribe are outcasts and he is not held responsible or accountable for his conduct towards them. Within the tribe, his character and behaviour may appear most exemplary but once outside the tribe, he can turn to piracy, robbery and murder without suffering from the least qualms of conscience. Zionist propaganda never ceases to boast of the “progressiveness” of Israel in contrast to the “backwardness” of the Arab lands, never taking into account the fact that although from the economic, scientific and techno194logical standpoint, Israel may be as “advanced” as any European country, from the moral standpoint, “Israel is as primitve as the bedu of the Arabian desert. But while the bedu restrict their feuding to the wilderness and possess only the most rudimentary weapons to fight with Israel, with the most sophisticated, highly organized and efficient military machine in Western Asia is abundantly equipped for her imperialist ventures by America with Phantom jets and Hawk missiles. In a special interview with chief correspondent of Time Magazine, Israeli foreign Minister, Mrs. Golda Meir declared: “I oppose anyone who challenges Israel’s moral right to occupy the Arab territories captured during the June 1967 war as essential for her military security. The only morality which concerns us is the survival of the Jewish people in the Jewish state! (Never mind, Mrs. Meir, about the survival, much less the welfare of any other people!) This is how the Jewish mind works and why Zionism is such a serious threat not only to the Arabs and Muslims but the peace of the world and the survival of the human race.

If the Jews have been hated throughout the ages, it is only because their attitude and conduct towards non-Jews is positively hateful. Yet instead of facing this truth realistically as it is, the Jews prefer to wallow in sentimental self-pity, insist against all evidence to the contrary that they are innocent and that their sufferings are entirely caused by the faults of others.

Now the question arises: the Jews have indeed 195survived but survived for what purpose?⁹² None of the Jews I know inside or outside my family even think of that, least of all, answering it. Like modern Jews everywhere, they considered survival in the mere biological and secular political sense as entirely sufficient. What an irony of fate for this “nation of priests” whose sole mission as the “Chosen People” of God was to enlighten the world with the knowledge of His oneness and His divine commandments!

Even if the Jews had not succumbed to modern secularism and materialism and exchanged the faith of the Talmud for the most rabid brand of chauvinistic nationalism, what constructive purpose does this survival serve when we in Islam possess everything of value in the prophetic heritage of the Bani Israel without any of the corruption found in the Bible and an infinitely purer and nobler concept of monotheism unsullied by racist exclusiveness? I did not 196embrace Islam out of any hatred or shame for my ancestral heritage or my people. My conversion was not motivated out of the desire to reject so much as to fulfil. I am now a Muslim by faith but I will always remain a Jew by birth—a fact of which I am neither proud nor ashamed. To me, the conversion from Judaism to Islam meant the transition from a moribund and parochial to a dynamic and revolutionary faith content with nothing less than universal supremacy for Truth by its very nature must be universal and open for all to share.

In the Hadith, our Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) warns us that in the last days before Resurrection, the Muslims will be guilty of imitating the Jews and Christians. This prophecy has been fulfilled. The wicked Muslims, who are so in little else besides their names, have been guilty of persecuting the genuine believers among us to a far more intense degree than the Jews, Christians, Hindus or atheists. In our early days, who were the greater persecutors of believers than Yazid, Hajjaj bin Yusuf, or Mamun? It was no Jew or Christian who condemned our Imams like Ahmad Ibn Hanbal to be tortured in prison or Ibn Taimiya to breathe his last locked up in a dungeon. It was no Jew or Christian who was responsible for the martyrdom of Hazrat Uthman, Hazrat Ali or Hazrat Husain! Who could have been greater traitors to our people than Khedive Ismail who sold Egypt to the British and the modern Muslim quislings in India today? Who are greater enemies of the Shariah than the Kemalist regime in Turkey, Reza Shah of Iran, the Nasser regime in Egypt, the 197Ba’athist regime in Syria or Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia? Are they not guilty of committing the same crime of the distortion of the message of the Prophets, the scorning of the Divine revelation in attemping to dilute it with man-made changes, and “reforms,” to suit worldly ends and the unprecedented persecution of all the Mujjaddids and movements for the restoration of the Divine Law? Are those in charge of the destinies of the Muslims not guilty of all the crimes for which our Holy Quran has condemned Bani Israil before us? And will not the Divine wrath fall upon us as it has fallen upon the Jews unless we quickly repent and change our ways? We Muslims must learn from the Jews in order to escape their tragic fate. Let their destiny serve as a lesson and a warning for us never to follow in their footsteps.