“Islam’s most respected and influential religious teaching centers openly promulgate canonical Islamic Jew-hatred with triumphal, unrelenting vigor,” writes Andrew Bostom in the new edition of his magnum opus. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, whose second edition appeared earlier this year after an initial 2008 publication, remains an essential research compendium on a vital, yet often ignored subject.
In a new preface to over 700 pages of detailed documentation, Bostom reviews 2014-2017 Anti-Defamation League global antisemitism surveys. “The world’s 16 most Antisemitic countries are all in the Muslim Middle East, where 74% to 93% of the overwhelmingly Muslim denizens of these nations exhibit extreme Antisemitism,” he soberly summarizes. This result is unsurprising, because for “Muslim masses, basic Islamic education in the Qur’an, hadith, and sira (earliest Muslim biographies of [Islam’s prophet] Muhammad) may create an immutable superstructure of Jew hatred.”
Bostom demolishes any ideological “false pillar” that Islamic antisemitism “is not related to any specific Islamic doctrine,” contrary to commonplace claims by leading Islam authorities such as Bernard Lewis. “By the twentieth century, the great tolerance of Islam toward the religious, cultural, and racial minorities within its midst had become the received wisdom,” the American Orientalist Norman A. Stillman noted in a 1978 essay in the book. This “tendency to idealize the history of the Jews under Islam generally” in places such as medieval Islamic Spain “began to no small extent as an apologetic response to some of the painful failures of Jewish emancipation in Europe” in the late 1800s.
“Many medieval Jewish writers commonly referred to Muhammad as ha-meshugga’” (“Madman”), noted the scholarly Muslim apostate Ibn Warraq in a forward. These included Maimonides (1135-1204) from Spain’s mythical “Golden Age of Islamic tolerance.” “Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much,” he wrote in 1172 about Muslims.
Sephardic Jewish history specialist Jane S. Gerber dismisses in an essay historians who have overemphasized prominent Jews in Islamic societies as an indication of Islamic pluralism. The “rise of a Jew to an important governmental post was symptomatic of the complete alienation of the dynasty from its subjects,” she noted. “The few Jewish courtiers who are known to us from the Muslim sources were, in fact, all put to death by the rulers they served,” Stillman similarly noted.
The prominence of Jewish viziers in both Granada, Spain, in 1066, and Fez, Morocco, in 1465 incited Muslim masses, incensed that Jews were not showing due deference to Islam, to pogroms. Fez’s vizier, for example, violated onerous sharia stipulations subjugating dhimmis including Jews by riding a horse. Bostom notes how the former pogrom cost the lives of 3-4,000 Jews, at least equal to the number of Jews reportedly killed by Crusaders pillaging the Rhineland in 1096 while traveling to the First Crusade.
The copious evidence in Bostom’s work of recurring templates of Jewish suffering in Islamic lands across centuries is simply mind-numbing. One Yemeni Jew who immigrated to Israel in 1949 recalled how Yemeni “Arabs forbade us to wear shoes, so that we hid them,” similar to oppression Jews also suffered in Morocco before the 1907 French conquest. “Until our departure from Yemen in 1949, it was forbidden for a Jew to write in Arabic, to possess arms, or to ride on a horse or camel. The Jews could only ride on donkeys,” he noted.
Laurence Loeb’s 1977 anthropological study of Iran indicates how almost all Persian Jews had no choice but to become Muslims under Shah Abbas II’s reign (1642-1666). The 17th-century Law of Apostasy gave a Jewish convert to Islam sole inheritance rights in his family. This law remained in effect officially until 1881, but unofficially until after Reza Shah came to power in 1925. Loeb also examined the extremes of the Shiite doctrine that Jews are najas (“unclean”), such that the “possibility that rainwater might splash off a Jew onto a Muslim led to the prohibition of Jews walking in public during the rain!”
Such damning facts made Ibn Warraq scoff at politically correct pieties that “hatred of Jews—is only a recent phenomenon learned from the Nazis during and after the 1940s.” The German Nazi propagandist Johannes von Leers and subsequent convert to Islam under Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, demonstrated as much in a 1942 essay in the book. The “Qur’an is full of warnings about the Jews, who are bluntly called ‘Satans,’” Leers wrote, slanders Bostom conclusively catalogues.
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) ideologue Sayyid Qutb concurred in a 1951 essay that “Jews, like the polytheists, are the worst enemies of the Muslims” since Islam’s founding in seventh-century Arabia. Drawing upon Islamic canons, he condemned that Jews here considered themselves God’s final revelators. They “were jealous of Muhammad because Allah chose him for this mission, which the Jews expected would be theirs.”
Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the late Grand Iman of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University or “Sunni Islam’s Vatican for religious education” according to Bostom, marveled that Jews could ever express such chutzpah towards Muhammad. “The Jews should have rushed to believe in this emissary, the unlettered Prophet who brought irrefragable proofs to believe in him,” he wrote in 1987. Yet the Orientalist Hartwig Hirschfeld wrote in the 1880s that for Muhammad’s Jewish skeptical questioners his “answers, filled with gross errors, provoked their laughter and mockery.”
Tantawi and his successor, the then Egyptian Grand Mufti Ahmad al-Tayyeb, both supported in 2002 during the Second Intifada suicide bombings in Israel, an example per Bostom of “Islamdom’s ongoing, relentless jihad against Israel.” In this “apotheosis of modern Muslim Jew-hatred,” Islamic doctrine demands that Jewish rule over a formerly Muslim territory must end, as his quotations from MB spiritual guide Yusuf Al-Qaradawi show. He stated in 2006 that “any invader who occupies even an inch of land of the Muslims, must face resistance” and thus Islam “makes this jihad an individual duty, in which the entire nation takes part.” As Egyptian dictator Anwar Sadat stated in 1972 in a Cairo mosque, the “Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against God. Therefore it must be destroyed.”
Sadat’s stark words are only a few of the unsettling revelations that make Bostom’s painstaking labors into such a landmark study. Beyond a significant contribution to any debate that is not just academic, he has provided indispensable insight to anyone concerned about public policies involving Islam. Any serious discussion of Islamic antisemitism must begin with Bostom.
Ray Jarman says
I would suggest that Andrew Bostom’s historical analysis of Islam be taught in public schools rather than the Islamic pandering of Anti-Semitism. Like Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom does not just make outlandish statements without proven historical evidence. Andrew Harrod very adeptly highlights significant facts so often overlooked by even well meaning writers and speakers.
The bottom line is that Islam is and has from the very moment of conception been evil with not one redeeming aspect.
carpediadem says
Agree. I read Bostom’s two fine works over a decade ago. Simply superb.
Must-reads for anyone who wants or needs to understand what Islam is and why Jews are targeted so often and in such ugly ways by many Muslims.
mortimer says
I recommend wholeheartedly Dr Bostom’s books on Islam which I own and have read and underlined and enthusiastically showed to others.
His approach and conclusions are very precise, referenced and well-documented. In the word’s of Inspector Friday: ‘Just the facts, ma’am.’
No discussion of Islam’s persecution of Jewry is complete with the famous conclusion of Judaism’s great codifier Maimonides (1135-1204) writing on Spain’s mythical “Golden Age of Islamic tolerance.
– “Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much … as the Sons of Ismael”. – Maimonides circa 1172.
The notorious Jew-hater (the late) Grand Mufti Ahmad al-Tayyeb wrote his doctoral thesis on Jew hatred in the Koran.
Dr Bostom presents the incontrovertible facts that Islam is deeply anti-Semitic. Any thinking person would observe Islam as a profound danger to Jews.
Hopefully, many Leftists and sleeping intellectuals in the Jewish community will be awakened to the inconvenient reality that denies any optimism for true Jewish-Muslim dialogue and interfaith harmony. Such harmony is a smoke-screen from one side. The hatred and hostility is coming from one side of the dialogue and Jews should stop being so blind to it. What happened to Orthodox Christians in the matter of Hagia Sophia is a not-very-subtle message that Erdogan made … he was clear about it … JEWS ARE NEXT in the mind of Turkey’s government!
And … I add urgently … all non-Jews as well should TAKE OFF THEIR ROSE-COLORED GLASSES. Islam is profoundly hostile to the ‘OTHER’.
-Imam Abdul-Latif ibn Abdur-Rahman Rahimullah said, “It is not possible for someone to realize Tawheed (Islamic faith) and act upon it, and yet not be HOSTILE against the mushrikeen (i.e. wrong worshippers). So anyone who isn’t HOSTILE against the mushrikeen, then it cannot be said that he acts upon Tawheed nor that he realizes it.” [ad-Durar as-Saniyyah 8/167]
-“The doctrine of al Walaa wal Baraa is the REAL IMAGE for the actual practice of this faith.” – source “Al Walaa wal Baraa According to the Aqeedah of the Salaf”, by Sheikh Muhammad Saeed al Qatani, authoritative Saudi Sharia lawyer and imam at the Abu Bakr and Al Furqan Mosques in Mecca.
– Dr. Muhammad Saeed Al-Qahtaani said: “Thus, it is clear that Al-Wala’ Wal-Bara calls on Muslims to “love” their fellow Muslims and hate the non-Muslim (or Kafir).”
http://westindanger.com/wb/walaa-baraa.html
mortimer says
correction: No discussion of Islam’s persecution of Jewry is complete WITHOUT the famous conclusion of Maimonides
Rarely says
Unfortunately antisemitism comes from all sides and is not the exclusive property of muslims.
gravenimage says
There are a small number of neo-nazis, but they are *nothing* in number like the hordes of Jew-hating Muslims.
Ray Jarman says
+1 Agreed GI, Also, there are no major politicians on the right/conservative side of the isle who tolerate Jew hatred while the left promotes anti-Semitism even from the leaders themselves who claim to be moderate.
gravenimage says
True, Ray–although, ludicrously, the Left has tried to paint President Trump as an antisemite. Given his staunch support for Israel and his reliance on his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, this is especially risible. The New York Times even pretended that an executive order against antisemitism was–somehow–something else:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-real-purpose-of-trumps-executive-order-on-anti-semitism
gravenimage says
Any Serious Discussion of Islamic Antisemitism Must Begin with Andrew Bostom
……………….
Yes–this is an important book.
Sukabumi Joe Joe says
I have problems understanding the following sentence:
‘The “Qur’an is full of warnings about the Jews, who are bluntly called ‘Satans,’” Leers wrote, slanders Bostom conclusively catalogues.’
Can anybody tell me what it says there?
Gamzu says
You may be reading “slanders” as a verb. It should read as a noun. Boston catalogues the Quran’s slanders of the Jews, including its warnings about them, such as that they are Satan’s.
gravenimage says
Joe, there are a lot of ugly slanders about Jews in the Qur’an. Here are a few:
[2.120] And the Jews will not be pleased with you, nor the Christians until you follow their religion. Say: Surely Allah’s guidance, that is the (true) guidance. And if you follow their desires after the knowledge that has come to you, you shall have no guardian from Allah, nor any helper.
[4.46] Of those who are Jews (there are those who) alter words from their places and say: We have heard and we disobey and: Hear, may you not be made to hear! and: Raina, distorting (the word) with their tongues and taunting about religion; and if they had said (instead): We have heard and we obey, and hearken, and unzurna it would have been better for them and more upright; but Allah has cursed them on account of their unbelief, so they do not believe but a little.
[4.47] O you who have been given the Book! believe that which We have revealed, verifying what you have, before We alter faces then turn them on their backs, or curse them as We cursed the violaters of the Sabbath, and the command of Allah shall be executed.
[4.50] See how they forge the lie against Allah, and this is sufficient as a manifest sin.
[4.160] Wherefore for the iniquity of those who are Jews did We disallow to them the good things which had been made lawful for them and for their hindering many (people) from Allah’s way.
There are many others here:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/references-to-jews-in-the-koran
Myron J. Poltroonian says
Again, if you want to know what life in a Caliphate and/or under Sharia Law would be like, ask an Armenian.