Antisemitism in Islam

This article is about the relationship between Islam and antisemitism. The nature and extent of antisemitism in Islam is a hotly-debated issue in contemporary Middle East politics.

Definition

Various definitions of Antisemitism in the context of Islam are given by the scholars. The extent of antisemitism among Muslims varies depending on the chosen definition:

• Scholars like Claude Cahen and Shelomo Dov Goitein defines it as the animosity specifically applied to Jews only and does not include discriminations practiced against Non-Muslims in general. For these scholars, antisemitism in Medieval Islam has been local and sporadic rather than general and endemic Shelomo Dov Goitein , not at all present Claude Cahen, or rarely present.

• According to Bernard Lewis, antisemitism is marked by two distinct features: Jews are judged according to a standard different from that applied to others, and they are accused of "cosmic evil." According to Lewis, the outstanding characteristic of the classical Islamic view of Jews is their unimportance. The religious, philosophical, and literary Islamic writings tended to ignore Jews and focused more on Christianity. Although, the Jews received little praise or even respect, and were sometimes blamed for various misdeed but there were no fears of Jewish conspiracy and domination, nor any charges of diabolic evil nor accusations of poisoning the wells nor spreading the plague nor were even accused of engaging in blood libels until Ottomans learned the concept from their Greek subjects in 15th century. For Lewis, from the late nineteenth century, movements appear among Muslims of which for the first time one can legitimately use the term anti-semitic.

• According to Frederick M. Schweitzer and Marvin Perry, there is an antisemitic infrastructure extant in Islam. They argue that there are negative description of Jews in the Qur'an and Hadith and that the regulation set for Jews under the Muslims rule were degrading. They however make comparisons between Muslim rule and Christendom, for example saying that Muslim polemics, persecutions and massacres existed but were far less than that in Christendom.

Qur'an

The Qur'an references Jews in a number of places; according to Frederick M. Schweitzer and Marvin Perry, these references are "mostly negative"; according to Tahir Abbas the general references to Jews are favorable but those addressed to a particular group of Jews contain harsh criticisms. According to Bernard Lewis, many of these passages reflect the struggles Muhammad had with the Jews of Medina, depicting negative pictures of the Jews. Other passages, however, speak more respectfully of them as the possessors of an earlier divine revelation and accord them with a degree of tolerance. According to Laqueur, conflicting statements about Jews in the Quran have defined Muslim attitudes towards Jews to this day, especially during periods of rising Islamic fundamentalism.

Attacks on Jews

Leon Poliakov, Walter Laqueur, and Jane Gerber, suggest that passages in the Qur'an contain attacks on Jews for their refusal to recognize Muhammad as a prophet of God.

Schwietzer and Perry argue that the Qur'an requires the Jews' "abasement and poverty", and states that "God has 'cursed' the Jews and will turn them into apes/monkeys and swine and idol worshipers because they are 'infidels'".

Bernard Lewis states that due to the hostility that emerged between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina in passages in which the Jews are depicted as "stubborn and perverse, rebelling against the commands of God and rejecting and killing, or trying to kill, his prophets." According to Lewis the words "humility" and "humiliation" occur frequently in the Qur'an and later Muslim literature in relation to Jews. He says this is considered a "punishment" for the Jews' "past rebelliousness", and is manifested in their "impotence". Lewis states that the standard Quranic reference to Jews is verse ^{[Quran 2:61]}.

"And remember ye said: "O Moses! we cannot endure one kind of food (always); so beseech thy Lord for us to produce for us of what the earth groweth, -its pot-herbs, and cucumbers, Its garlic, lentils, and onions." He said: "Will ye exchange the better for the worse? Go ye down to any town, and ye shall find what ye want!" They were covered with humiliation and misery; they drew on themselves the wrath of Allah. This because they went on rejecting the Signs of Allah and slaying His Messengers without just cause. This because they rebelled and went on transgressing."

According to Gerber, cowardice, greed, and chicanery are characteristics that the Qur'an ascribes to the Jews. Gerber further argues that the Qur'an of associates Jews with interconfessional strife and rivalry (Qur'an ^{[Quran 2:113]}), and states that the Quran says Jews believe that they alone are beloved of God (Qur'an ^{[Quran 5:18]}), and that only they will achieve salvation (^{[Quran 2:111]}). Gerber says that the Quran gives credence to the Christian claim of Jews scheming against Jesus, " ... but God also schemed, and God is the best of schemers."(Qur'an ^{[Quran 3:54]}) In the Muslim view, the crucifixion of Jesus was an illusion, and thus the Jewish plots against him ended in failure. In numerous verses, (^{[Quran 3:63]}; ^{[Quran 3:71]}; ^{[Quran 4:46]}; ^{[Quran 4:160-161]}; ^{[Quran 5:41-44]}, ^{[Quran 5:63-64]}, ^{[Quran 5:82]}; ^{[Quran 6:92]}) Gerber claims the Qur'an accuses Jews of altering the Scripture.

References to transformation of certain Jews into apes and pigs

The Qur'an refers to some Jews being punished by God and transformed into apes or pigs, in Suras ^{[Quran 5:60]},^{[Quran 2:65]}, and ^{[Quran 7:166]}:

And well ye knew those amongst you who transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath: We said to them: "Be ye apes, despised and rejected. Qur'an ^{[Quran 2:65]}
Say: "Shall I point out to you something much worse than this, (as judged) by the treatment it received from Allah? Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshiped evil;- these are (many times) worse in rank, and far more astray from the even path! Qur'an ^{[Quran 5:60]}
When in their insolence they transgressed (all) prohibitions, We said to them: "Be ye apes, despised and rejected. Qur'an ^{[Quran 7:166]}

Khaleel Mohammed suggests that these verses are a polemic, addressed to those who "who were making fun of Islamic beliefs". He further suggests that the source of these stories of transformation may be midrashic works (including the Talmud) and Jewish oral tradition. Further he argues that the verse does not sterotype all Jews but only those who violated Sabbath.

According to Lewis, the language of abuse was often quite strong among Muslims and the conventional epithets for Jews are apes, and for Christians are pigs. Johannes J. G. Jansen states that many modern preachers have applied this term to the Jews of twentieth century.

Interpretations of the attacks on Jews

Poliakov and Uri Rubin agree that the Qur'an differentiates between "good and bad" Jews. Rubin further states that the attacks deal mainly "with the sinners among the Jews and the attack on them is shaped according to models that one encounters in the New Testament."

Tahir Abbas states that the Qur'an speaks favourably of Jews. It also criticizes them for not being greatful of God's blessing on them. The harsh criticisms, Tahir says, were only addressed towards a particular group of Jews, as it is clear from the context of the Qur'anic verses, but the translations usually confuse this by using the general term "Jews". Abbas says that to judge Jews based on the deeds of some of their ancestors is an anti-Qur'anic idea.

Khaleel Mohammad suggests that the attacks on Jews should be considered in the context of the Quran. He says many of the attacks are due to the Quran's assumption that Jews are not observing Judaism. He claims that this is due to the fact that Judaism was not a monolithic construct during the time of Muhammad. Thus the Quran reflects arguments between different Jewish groups, says Mohammed. He argues that the attacks on Jews are not at all directed at all Jews but only towards those who committed certain transgressions.

Mohammed further claims that criticism of the Jews is not unique to the Quran. The Hebrew Bible and Jewish oral tradition, he says, make similar arguments, blaming the suffering of the Jews because they "transgressed against the covenant".

Tolerance for Jews

Khaleel Mohammed suggests that the Quran respects Judaism. He claims that the Quran refers to the Torah as a book of light, (^{[Quran 5:44]}) and tells the Jews that they are entitled to the kingdom of heaven. (^{[Quran 2:47]}, ^{[Quran 2:62]}, ^{[Quran 3:33]}, ^{[Quran 5:20]})

Ali S. Asani suggests that the Quran endorses the establishment of religiously and culturally plural societies and this endorsement has affected the treatment of religious minorities in Muslim lands throughout history. He cites the endorsement of pluralism to explain why violent forms of anti-Semitism generated in medieval and modern Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, never occurred in regions under Muslim rule.

Lacqueur also agrees, stating that some verses of the Quran, notably ^{[Quran 2:256]}, preach tolerance towards members of the Jewish faith.

Tahir Abbas states that the Qur'an speaks favourably of Jews.

Scholars like Lewis, Chanes, Rosenblatt and Pinson suggest that Muslims were not antisemitic for the most part due to certain aspects of Islamic theology. They argue that the Qur'an:

1. views the stories of Jewish deicide as a blasphemous absurdity, and other similar stories in the gospels are not part of the educational system in Muslim society;
2. did not present itself as a fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible but rather a restorer of its original message that had been distorted over time - thus no clash of interpretations between Judaism and Islam could arise;
3. views Muhammad as fully human, not a Son of God or Messiah, a claim less offensive to Jews;
4. lacks popular western traditions of "guilt and betrayal";
5. teaches the toleration of monthiestic faiths (including Judaism).

Muhammad and hadith

See also Muhammad and the Jews of Medina

During Muhammad's life, Jews lived in the Arabian Peninsula, especially in and around Medina. According to Koppel Pinson and Samuel Rosenblatt, although they initially swore friendship and peace with Muhammad, they later taunted and mocked him, charging him with ignorance. After each major battle, Muhammad accused one of the Jewish tribes of treachery and attacked it. Two Jewish tribes were expelled and the last one was wiped out. Pinson and Rosenblatt state that these incidents were not part of policies directed exclusively against Jews, and that Muhammad was more severe with his pagan Arab kinsmen than foreigner monotheists.

Muhammad is also known to have Jewish friends. In 629, Muhammad married a Jewish woman called Safiyya. Khaleel Muhammad claims that, because of this marriage, racist comments about Jews are unacceptable to Muslim sensibilities. According to Poliakov, "the degree to which Muhammad shows his respect for each religion [Jews and Christians] is remarkable".

Muhammad's struggle with the neighbor Jewish tribes left no marked traces on his immediate successors (known as Caliphs). The first Caliphs based their treatment upon the Qur'anic verses encouraging tolerance. Poliakov opines that Muhammad's actions and teachings gave rise to an open and more conciliatory society, where the Muslims were compelled to protect the lives and religion of the Jews.

Hadith

The hadith (recordings of deeds and sayings attributed to Muhammad) use both the terms Banu Israil and Yahud in relation to Jews, the latter term becoming ever more frequent and appearing mostly in negative context. According to Norman Stillman:

Jews in Medina are singled out as “men whose malice and enmity was aimed at the Apostle of God”. The Yahūd in this literature appear not only as malicious, but also deceitful, cowardly and totally lacking resolve. However, they have none of the demonic qualities attributed to them in mediaeval Christian literature, neither is there anything comparable to the overwhelming preoccupation with Jews and Judaism (except perhaps in the narratives on Muhammad’s encounters with Medinan Jewry) in Muslim traditional literature. Except for a few notable exceptions... the Jews in the Sira and the Maghazi are even heroic villains. Their ignominy stands in marked contrast to Muslim heroism, and in general, conforms to the Qura'nic image of “wretchedness and baseness stamped upon them”

Muhammad said, "He who wrongs a Jew or Christian will have myself as his indicter on the Day of Judgment."

In another hadith Muhammad says, "To do evil to a dhimmi (legal status accorded to Jews) is to do evil to me".

Another hadith says: "A Jew will not be found alone with a Muslim without plotting to kill him." According to another hadith, Muhammad said: "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'" . This hadith has been quoted countless times, and it has become a part of the charter of Hamas.

According to Schweitzer and Perry, the hadith are "even more scathing (than the Qur'an) in attacking the Jews":

They are debased, cursed, anathematized forever by God and so can never repent and be forgiven; they are cheats and traitors; defiant and stubborn; they killed the prophets; they are liars who falsify scripture and take bribes; as infidels they are ritually unclean, a foul odor emanating from them - such is the image of the Jew in classical Islam, degraded and malevolent.

Antisemitism in pre-modern Islam

Early Muslim rule

Schweitzer and Perry write that while Jews were better off under Islam than under Christian rule, "there is an antisemitic infrastructure extant in Islam". They give as examples of early Muslim antisemitism: Ninth century "persecution and outbreaks of violence"; enth and eleventh century antisemitic propaganda that "made Jews out to be untrustworthy, treacherous oppressors, and exploiters of Muslims". This propaganda "inspired outbreaks of violence and caused many casualties in Egypt". An eleventh century Moorish poem describes Jews as "a criminal people" and alleges that "society is nearing collapse on account of Jewish wealth and domination, their exploitation and betrayal of Muslims; that Jews worship the devil, physicians poison their patients, and Jews poison food and water as required by Judaism, and so on."

Later rule

Jews under the Muslim rule rarely faced martyrdom or exile, or forced compulsion to change their religion, and they were fairly free to choose their residence and profession. Thier freedom and economic condition varied from time to time and place to place. Forced conversions occurred mostly in the Maghreb, especially under the Almohads, a militant dynasty with messianic claims, as well as in Persia, where Shi'a Muslims were generally less tolerant than their Sunni counterparts. Notable examples of the cases where the choice of residence was taken away from them includes confining Jews to walled quarters (mellahs) in Morocco beginning from the 15th century and especially since the early 19th century.

Spain

With the Muslim conquest of Spain, Spanish Judaism flourished for several centuries. Thus, what some refer to as the "golden age" for Jews began. During this period Muslim tolerated other religions including Judaism and created a heterodox society.

Twelfth century saw pogroms in Spain; in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066. In the 1066 Granada massacre, a Muslim mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred about 4,000 Jews. The Muslim grievance was that some Jews had become wealthy, and others had advanced to positions of power.

Its successor and overthrower, the Almohad dynasty, offered Christians and Jews the choice of conversion or expulsion; in 1165, one of their rulers ordered that all Jews in the country convert on pain of death (forcing the Jewish rabbi, theologian, philosopher, and physician Maimonides to feign conversion to Islam before fleeing the country). In Egypt, Maimonides resumed practising Judaism openly only to be accused of apostasy. He was saved from death by Saladin's chief administrator, who held that conversion under coercion is invalid.

During his wanderings, Maimonides also wrote the The Yemen Epistle, a famous letter to the Jews of Yemen, who were then experiencing severe persecution at the hands of their Muslim rulers. In it, Maimonides describes his assessment of the treatment of the Jews at the hands of Muslims:

… on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael [that is, Muslims], who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us…. No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have…. We have borne their imposed degradation, their lies, their absurdities, which are beyond human power to bear…. We have done as our sages of blessed memory have instructed us, bearing the lies and absurdities of Ishmael…. In spite of all this, we are not spared from the ferocity of their wickedness and their outbursts at any time. On the contrary, the more we suffer and choose to conciliate them, the more they choose to act belligerently toward us.

Mark Cohen quotes Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, a specialist in medieval European Jewish history, who cautioned that Maimonides' condemnation of Islam should be understood "in the context of the harsh persections of the twelfth century and that furthermore one may say that he was insufficiently aware of the status of the Jews in Christian lands, or did not pay attention to this, when he wrote the letter." Cohen continues by quoting Ben-Sasson, who argues that Jews generally had a better legal and security situation in the Muslim countries than in Christendom.

Views

Mark Cohen, Norman Stillman, Uri Avnery, M. Klien and Bernard Lewis opine that antisemitism in pre-modern Islam is rare, and did not emerge until modern times. Lewis argues that there is little sign any deep-rooted emotional hostility directed against Jews, or any other group, that can be characterized as antisemitism. There were, however, clearly negative attitudes, which were in part the "normal" feelings of a dominant group towards subject groups (which exists in virtually any society). More specifically, the contempt consisted of Muslim contempt for disbelievers.

Lewis states that in contrast to Christian antisemitism, the attitude of Muslims toward non-Muslims is not one of hate, fear, or envy, but rather simply contempt. This contempt is expressed in various ways, such as abundance of polemic literature attacking the Christians and occasionally also the Jews. "The negative attributes ascribed to the subject religions and their followers are are usually expressed in religious and social terms, very rarely in ethnic or racial terms, though this does sometimes occur." The language of abuse is often quite strong. The conventional epithets are apes for Jews, and pigs for Christians. Lewis continues with several examples of regulations which were symbolizing the inferiority that non-Muslims living under Muslim rule had to live with, such as different formulae of greeting when addressing Jews and Christians than when addressing Muslims (both in conversations or correspondences), and forbidding Jews and Christians to choose names used by Muslims for their children by the Ottoman times.

Abdul Aziz Said writes that the Islamic concept of dhimmi, when applied, allowed other cultures to flourish and prevented the general rise of anti-Semitism.

Leon Poliakov writes that in general, the Jews as dhimmis were accorded a great degree of tolerance.

According to Schweitzer and Perry, in practice this humiliation was exacted through the poll tax and the humiliating way it was collected. According to Lewis, Muslim jurists did not sanction the humiliating way of collecting jizya. Humiliating procedures of collecting jizya could be found in the later commentaries of the Qur'an belonging to the period when Islam was under threat both at home and abroad. Claude Cahen rejects the correctness of such interpretations by later rigorists.

Jerome Chanes writes that during the first seven or eight centuries of Muslim history antisemitic activity was very rare. Pinson and Rosenblatt also suggests that antisemitism "of an all-embracing character" has been rare throughout the history of Islam.

Schweitzer and Perry argue that there are two general views of the status of Jews under Islam, the traditional "golden age" and the revisionist "persecution and pogrom" interpretations. The former was first promulgated by Jewish historians in the 19th century as a rebuke of the Christian treatment of Jews, and taken up by Arab Muslims after 1948 as "an Arab-Islamist weapon in what is primarily an ideological and political struggle against Israel". They argue that this idealized view ignores "a catalog of lesser-known hatred and massacres". Mark Cohen concurs with this view, arguing that the "myth of an interfaith utopia" went unchallenged until it was adopted by Arabs as a "propaganda weapon against Zionism", and that this "Arab polemical exploitation" was met with the "counter-myth" of the "neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history", which also "cannot be maintained in the light of historical reality".

Modern Muslim antisemitism

Most scholars agree that antisemitism emerged in the Muslim world during modern times. While Bernard Lewis and Uri Avnery date the rise of antisemitism to the establishment of Israel, M. Klein suggests the antisemitism could have been present in the mid-19th century.

Scholars point out European influence, including that of Nazis, and the establishment of Israel as the root causes for antisemitism. Norman Stillman explains that increased European commercial, missionary and imperialist activities during the 19th and 20th centuries brought anti-Semitic ideas to the Muslim world. Initially these prejudices only found a reception among Arab Christians and were too foreign for any widespread acceptance among Muslims. However, with the rise of the Arab-Israeli conflict, European anti-Semitism began to gain acceptance in modern literature.

Nineteenth century

According to Mark Cohen, Arab anti-Semitism in the modern world arose relatively recently, in the nineteenth century, against the backdrop of conflicting Jewish and Arab nationalism, and was imported into the Arab world primarily by nationalistically minded Christian Arabs (and only subsequently was it "Islamized").

British historian Martin Gilbert writes that in the 19th century the position of Jews worsened in Muslim countries.

There was a massacre of Jews in Baghdad in 1828. There was another massacre in Barfurush in 1867.

In 1839, in the eastern Persian city of Meshed, a mob burst into the Jewish Quarter, burned the synagogue, and destroyed the Torah scrolls. Known as the Allahdad incident. It was only by forcible conversion that a massacre was averted.

In 1840, the Jews of Damascus were falsely accused of having murdered a Christian monk and his Muslim servant and of having used their blood to bake Passover bread. A Jewish barber was tortured until he "confessed"; two other Jews who were arrested died under torture, while a third converted to Islam to save his life. This became known as the Damascus affair.

Throughout the 1860s, the Jews of Libya were subjected to what Gilbert calls punitive taxation. In 1864, around 500 Jews were killed in Marrakech and Fez in Morroco. In 1869, 18 Jews were killed in Tunis, and an Arab mob looted Jewish homes and stores, and burned synagogues, on Jerba Island.

In 1875, 20 Jews were killed by a mob in Denmat, Morocco. Elsewhere in Morocco, Jews were attacked and killed in the streets in broad daylight.

In 1891, the leading Muslims in Jerusalem asked the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople to prohibit the entry of Jews arriving from Russia. In 1897, synagogues were ransacked and Jews were murdered in Tripolitania.

In 1903, 40 Jews were murdered in Taza, Morocco.

In 1905, old laws were revived in Yemen forbidding Jews to raise their voices in front of Muslims, to build their houses higher than those of Muslims, and to engage in any traditional Muslim trade or occupation.

Twentieth Century

File:NYTimes 1948 Jews in Arab.jpg

Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands, article in The New York Times, May 16, 1948.

M. Klein suggests that Arab antisemitism differs from European antisemitism in that it "is not distinguished by personal animosity towards Jews, nor do publications stress Judaism as an internal threat, to the majority population. This is basically political, ideological, intellectual, and literary antisemitism that focuses on the external threat which the State of Israel represents for the Arab countries..."

Standard antisemitic themes have become commonplace in the propaganda of Arab Islamic movements such as Hizbullah and Hamas, in the pronouncements of various agencies of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and even in the newspapers and other publications of Refah Partisi, the Turkish Islamic party whose head served as prime minister in 1996-97."

The language of abuse is often quite strong. For example, the conventional epithets for Jews and Christians are apes and pigs, respectively.

Arab sermons

In 1944, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, mufti of Jersualem, said on Radio Berlin:

"Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you"

Palestinian preacher Ibrahim Mahdi said in a sermon: "Palestine will be, as it was in the past, a graveyard for the invaders - just as it was a graveyard for the Tatars and to the Crusader invaders, [and for the invaders] of the old and new colonialism… A reliable Hadith [tradition] says: 'The Jews will fight you, but you will be set to rule over them.' What could be more beautiful than this tradition? 'The Jews will fight you' - that is, the Jews have begun to fight us. 'You will be set to rule over them' - Who will set the Muslim to rule over the Jew? Allah… Until the Jew hides behind the rock and the tree. But the rock and tree will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, a Jew hides behind me, come and kill him.' Except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews. We believe in this Hadith. We are convinced also that this Hadith heralds the spread of Islam and its rule over all the land… Oh Allah, accept our martyrs in the highest heavens… Oh Allah, show the Jews a black day… Oh Allah, annihilate the Jews and their supporters… Oh Allah, raise the flag of Jihad across the land… Oh Allah, forgive our sins…"

File:2001 ed The International Jew by Henry Ford.jpg

The imagery revived on the cover of the 2001 Egyptian edition of The International Jew by Henry Ford.

In sermons, Jews are commonly referred to as the descendants of pigs and apes, and as calf-worshippers. As Ibrahim Madhi stated, "All spears should be directed at the Jews, at the enemies of Allah, the nation that was cursed in Allah's book. Allah has described them as apes and pigs, the calf-worshipers, idol-worshipers… Whoever can fight them with his weapons, should go out [to the battle]; whoever can fight them with a machinegun, should go out; whoever can fight them with a sword or a knife, should go out; whoever can fight them with his hands, should go out; This is our destiny… The Jews have exposed their fangs. Nothing will deter them, except the color of their filthy people's blood; nothing will deter them except for us voluntarily detonating ourselves in their midst. They have nuclear power, but we have the power of the belief in Allah… We blow them up in Hadera, we blow them up in Tel Aviv and in Netanya."

Hamas says:

Allah did not mete out the punishment of transformation on any nation except the Jews. The significance of it is actual change in the appearance of the Jew and perfect transformation from human to bestial condition... from human appearance to the form of genuine apes, pigs, mice, and lizards....

Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais is the leading imam of the Grand mosque located in the Islamic holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The BBC aired a Panorama episode, entitled A Question of Leadership, which reported that al-Sudais referred to Jews as "the scum of the human race" and "offspring of apes and pigs", and stated, "the worst ... of the enemies of Islam are those ... whom he ... made monkeys and pigs, the aggressive Jews and oppressive Zionists and those that follow them ... Monkeys and pigs and worshippers of false Gods who are the Jews and the Zionists."

In another sermon, on April 19, 2002, he declared:

Read history and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels, distorters of [others'] words, calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers... the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs...

According to Dr. Leah Kinberg, "Saudi Sheikh Ba'd bin Abdallah Al-Ajameh Al-Ghamidi, in a sermon in Taif, explained":

The current behavior of the brothers of apes and pigs, their treachery, violation of agreements, and defiling of holy places ... is connected with the deeds of their forefathers during the early period of Islam – which proves the great similarity between all the Jews living today and the Jews who lived at the dawn of Islam.

He also said Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.” In April 2002, Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque and Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University, and "perhaps the foremost Sunni Arab authority", described Jews in his weekly sermon as "the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs."

On May 7, 2002, in a Saudi state-controlled TV station talk show entitled “Modern Muslim Woman” on channel Iqraa, broadcast around the world, a three-and-a-half year old girl was interviewed. In the interview, she said she doesn't like Jews because they are apes and pigs, and it says so in the qur'an. According to Daniel Pipes, "[t]he little girl is wrong, but her words show that, contrary to Condoleezza Rice's analysis, Muslim antisemitism extends even to the youngest children."

In April 2002, Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque and Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar University, and "perhaps the foremost Sunni Arab authority", described Jews in his weekly sermon as "the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs."

On May 5, 2001, after Shimon Peres visited Egypt, the Egyptian al-Akhbar internet paper stated that: “lies and deceit are not foreign to Jews.... For this reason, Allah changed their shape and made them into monkeys and pigs.”

Erel Shalit writes:

We need to bear to listen to the accusations from the Arab world, however outrageous and anti-Semitic many of them are, for instance,

The Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring ... the cum of the human race 'whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs...' These are the Jews, an ongoing continuum of deceit, obstinacy, licentiousness, evil, and corruption... {The Imam of the Al-Haraam mosque in Mecca; the same words of incitement repeated time and again in the mosques of Gaza and Ramallah.)

On July 21, 2006 Syrian Deputy Minister of Religious Endowment Dr. Muhammad 'Abd Al-Sattar stated on Syrian TV.

The Koran used terms that are closer to animals than to humans only with regard to those people. Look at the bestiality they demonstrate in the destruction of the Arab, Lebanese, and Palestinian people. This is why the people who were given the Torah were likened to a donkey carrying books. They were also likened to apes and pigs, and they are, indeed, the descendants of apes and pigs, as the Koran teaches us.

This followed a broadcast on November 8, 2005 in which 'Abd Al-Sattar similarly referred to Jews as "those whom the Koran called the descendants of apes and pigs".

A May 2006 study of Saudi Arabia's revised schoolbook curriculum discovered that the eighth grade books included the following statements,

They are the people of the Sabbath, whose young people God turned into apes, and whose old people God turned into swine to punish them. As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the keepers of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christian infidels of the communion of Jesus.

Some of the people of the Sabbath were punished by being turned into apes and swine. Some of them were made to worship the devil, and not God, through consecration, sacrifice, prayer, appeals for help, and other types of worship. Some of the Jews worship the devil. Likewise, some members of this nation worship devil, and not God.

According to Khaleel Mohammed "many Muslim preachers use the verses in a manner that is totally wrong, demonizing all Jews."Johannes J. G. Jansen suggests that verse ^{[Quran 5:60]} was meant to apply to the Jews of Medina, and states that some modern writers have extended this term to the Jews of twentieth century.

On another occasion, Sheikh Madhi added: "Oh beloved of Allah… One of the Jews' evil deeds is what has come to be called 'the Holocaust,' that is, the slaughter of the Jews by Nazism. However, revisionist [historians] have proven that this crime, carried out against some of the Jews, was planned by the Jews' leaders, and was part of their policy… These are the Jews against whom we fight, oh beloved of Allah. On the other hand, [what is our belief] about the Jews? Allah has described them as donkeys."

Islamist groups

Many Islamic terrorist groups seeking to eliminate the State of Israel, which they regard as occupied Muslim land, have openly expressed anti-Semitic views. This is especially true of Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

Lashkar-e-Toiba's propaganda arm has declared the Jews to be "Enemies of Islam," and Israel to be the "Enemy of Pakistan".

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Shiite scholar and assistant professor at the Lebanese American University, indicates that Hezbollah is not Anti-Zionist, but rather Anti-Jewish. She quotes Hassan Nasrallah as saying: "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli." Regarding the official public stance of Hezbollah as a whole, she indicates that while Hezbollah, "tries to mask its anti-Judaism for public-relations reasons ... a study of its language, spoken and written, reveals an underlying truth." In her book, Hezbollah: Politics & Religion, she explores the anti-Jewish roots of Hezbollah ideology, arguing that Hezbollah "believes that Jews, by the nature of Judaism, possess fatal character flaws." Saad-Ghorayeb also indicates that "Hezbollah's Quranic reading of Jewish history has led its leaders to believe that Jewish theology is evil."

Statistics

According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project released on August 14, 2005, high percentages of the populations of six Muslim-majority countries have negative views of Jews. To a questionnaire asking respondents to give their views of members of various religions along a spectrum from "very favorable" to "very unfavorable," 60% of Turks, 74% of Pakistanis, 76% of Indonesians, 88% of Moroccans, 99% of Lebanese Muslims and 100% of Jordanians checked either "somewhat unfavorable" or "very unfavorable" for Jews.

See also

• Arabs and antisemitism
• Allahdad incident
• Christianity and antisemitism
• Holocaust denial in the Muslim world
• Islamism
• Jihad
• New antisemitism
• Red-green-brown alliance
• Religious intolerance
• Criticism of Islam
• Jewish exodus from Arab lands
• Zionism and racism allegations
• Islam and Judaism

References

• Abbas, Tahir. Islamic Political Radicalism: A European Perspective, p.178-179 (Chapter on Antisemitism among Muslims) Edinburgh University Press
• Arberry, Arthur J. (1955). The Koran Interpreted. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.
• Bodansky, Yossef (1999). Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument. Freeman Center For Strategic Studies
• Chanes, Jerome A (2004). Antisemitism. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Pages 41-5.
• Cohen, Mark (1995). Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01082-X
• Cohen, Mark (2002), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, Chapter 9, Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-199-28032-0
• Ernst, Carl (2004). Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-5577-4
• Gerber, Jane S. (1986). "Anti-Semitism and the Muslim World". In History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism, ed. David Berger. Jewish Publications Society. ISBN 0-8276-0267-7
• Laqueur, Walter. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times To The Present Day. Oxford University Press. 2006. ISBN 0-19-530429-2
• Lewis, Bernard (1984). The Jews of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00807-8
• Lewis, Bernard (1999). Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-31839-7
• Maududi, Sayyid Abul Ala (1967). The Meaning of the Quran. Lahore: Islamic Publications Limited.
• Pinson, Koppel S; Rosenblatt, Samuel (1946). Essays on Antisemitism. New York: The Comet Press.
• Poliakov, Leon (1974). The History of Anti-semitism. New York: The Vanguard Press.
• Poliakov, Leon (1997). "Anti-Semitism". Encyclopedia Judaica (CD-ROM Edition Version 1.0). Ed. Cecil Roth. Keter Publishing House. ISBN 965-07-0665-8
• Rodinson, Maxime (1971). Mohammed. Great Britain: Allen Lane the Penguin Press. Translated by Anne Carter.
• Stillman, Norman (1979). The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. ISBN 0-8276-0198-0
• Said, Abdul Aziz (1979). Precept and Practice of Human Rights in Islam. Universal Human Rights. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Schweitzer, Frederick M. & Perry, Marvin. Anti-Semitism: myth and hate from antiquity to the present, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, ISBN 0312165617.
• Stillman, N.A. (2006). "Yahud". Encyclopaedia of Islam. Eds.: P.J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Brill. Brill Online
• Viré, F. (2006) "Kird". Encyclopaedia of Islam. Eds.: P.J. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs. Brill. Brill Online
• Watt, Montgomery (1956). Muhammad at Medina. Oxford:University Press.

External links

• Middle East Research Institute Videos on Antisemitism in Muslim media
• "My fellow Muslims, we must fight anti-Semitism" 2002 interview with Tariq Ramadan in Haaretz
• Islamic Antisemitism And Its Nazi Roots
• The Anti-Semitic Disease - an analysis by Paul Johnson in Commentary
• A history of Muslim antisemitism and anti-Zionism
• Jews in the Koran and Early Islamic Traditions by Dr. Leah Kinberg