In 2005, Karen Armstrong told Guardian readers what many would like to believe:
Sadly, we have passed our anti-Semitism to the Muslim world. Until the 20th century, anti-Semitism was not part of Islamic culture.
In the same article, she asked:
Why should [Muslims] be impressed by our liberal culture when we persistently cultivate an inaccurate image of Islam that has its roots in the medieval prejudice of the crusaders?
There’s a comical irony here and no small amount of chutzpah, as Armstrong’s own accounts are almost always sanitised, prejudicial and inaccurate, often egregiously so. I’ve highlighted some of her more fanciful distortions elsewhere, so I’ll merely note how eagerly this “provocative and inclusive thinker” steers her readers towards the customary hand-wringing and pretentious guilt.
A much more serious account of Islamic anti-Semitism and its theological roots can be found in Andrew Bostom’s excellent three-part essay linked below. Bostom positions the phenomenon within the broader context of jihad and refutes in detail a number of prevalent fictions – among them, the claim that Islamic anti-Jewish animus began with the creation of Israel and the importing of Nazi sentiment in the mid 20th century:
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan [modern Libya] Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of jihad piracy – murder, enslavement (with ransoming for redemption), and expropriation of valuable commercial assets – emanating from the Barbary states (modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya). During their discussions, they questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:
… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.
Thus an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power in the Middle East. Moreover, these jihad depredations targeting America antedated the earliest vestiges of the Zionist movement by a century, and the formal creation of Israel by 162 years – exploding the ahistorical canard that American support for the modern Jewish state is a prerequisite for jihadist attacks on the United States.
It is also worth noting these contemporaneous, early 19th century observations by William Shaler, American Consul General in Algiers (1816-1828), on the plight of the North African Jews of Algiers under the Islamic system of dhimmitude, influenced further by Islam’s own innate anti-Semitism – prior to French colonization, and more than a century before the advent of Nazism:
Independent of the legal disabilities of the Jews, they are in Algiers a most oppressed people; they are not permitted to resist any personal violence of whatever nature, from a [Muslim]; they are compelled to wear clothing of a black or dark color; they cannot ride on horseback, or wear arms of any sort, not even a cane; they are permitted only on Saturdays and Wednesdays to pass out of the gates of the city without permission; and on any unexpected call for hard labor, the Jews are turned out to execute it. In the summer of 1815, this country was visited by incredible swarms of locusts, which destroyed every green thing before them; …several hundred Jews were ordered out to protect the Bashaw’s [local ruler’s] gardens, where they were obliged to watch and toil day and night, as long as these insects continued to infest the country.
Shaler goes on to cite, in addition, violent outbreaks during which,
…the Jews have been indiscriminately plundered, and they lived in the perpetual fear of a renewal of such scenes; they are pelted in the streets even by children, and in short, the whole course of their existence here is a state of the most abject oppression and contumely. The children of Jacob… learn submission from infancy, and practice it throughout their lives, without ever daring to murmur at their hard lot.
Bostom then details the lineage and practice of dhimmitude and its origins in the annihilationist pronouncements of Muhammad. He concludes,
The uncomfortable examination of Islamic doctrines and history is required in order to understand the enduring phenomenon of Muslim Jew hatred, which dates back to the origins of Islam. Even if all non-Muslim Judeophobic themes were to disappear miraculously overnight from the Islamic world, the living legacy of anti-Jewish hatred, and violence rooted in Islam’s sacred texts – Koran, hadith, and sira – would remain intact. The assessment and understanding of Islamic anti-Semitism must begin with an unapologetic analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs contained in these foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer view Muslim Jew hatred… as a “borrowed phenomenon,” seen primarily, let alone exclusively, through the prism of Nazism and the Holocaust, the tragic legacy of Judeophobic Christian traditions, or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Czarist Russia. Moreover, the jihad against the Jews is but one aspect – albeit primal – of the jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony.
It’s long but well worth reading. Part 1, part 2, part 3.
Andrew Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism.
Adolf Hitler said in “Mein Kampf” that his anti-semitism was purely racial, and not religious. He hated ethnic Jews who had converted to Christianity or become secular every bit as much as devout followers of Judaism. If anything, he hated non-religious Jews more, because he feared miscegenation between Jews and Aryans.
Islamic hatred is not specifically racial. So it’s different from Nazism. Which doesn’t make it good.
V.S. Naipaul sees Islam as Arabian cultural imperialism. For Muslims who are not Arabs, it teaches them to despise their indigenous pre-Islamic culture, and pretend the cultural achievements of Arabs are their own. Some or other think tank said recently, that if the rest of us are taught more about the achievements of the Abbasids, that will make third generation British Pakistani males feel more respected. Logically, it would make more sense to teach us about the Indus Valley civilization.
What’s remarkable is the enthusiasm for a version of history in which the uglier aspects of Islam are seen as the result of contamination by the West. Armstrong would have us believe that the long and unedifying history of Islamic Jew hatred began in the 20th century, rather than with Muhammad, whose annihilationist pieties are still with us today.
“What’s remarkable is the enthusiasm for a version of history in which the uglier aspects of Islam are seen as the result of contamination by the West.”
That version of history usually continues with the “fact” that Europe has never been threatened, never mind invaded, by Islamic states.
It is a bizarro-world narrative, born of vapid emoting and a need for cosiness rather than any interest in actual history. It is colonialism with the value signs flipped.
Nice post.
I would like to add that the genocidally virulent wave of today’s Muslim Jew-hatred stems from Muslim outrage that Jews, who are supposed to be subservient to Muslims, have successfully defeated Muslims in war–and, to make the insult even worse, are infinitely more accomplished in the arts and sciences. It is very much what the KKK feels when it sees African American who are not only successful doctors and lawyers but who no longer need to abase themselves in order to avoid lynching.
“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth!”
“The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.” – Adolf Hitler from Mein Kampf
Please don’t rewrite history.
No one uses the term “Christian hatred” in regards to the Bible being misused as a justification for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of Africans, colonialism in the Congo, to enocide in Bosnia where Serbian priests blessed fighters before committing ethnic cleansing.
While Christians were persecuting Jews in Europe, Jews experienced their “Golden Age” under the governance of Muslims in Spain. Islamic civilization as been much kinder to the Jewish people than Christendom, but far from perfect.
Talking about re-writing history; my goodness!?!
Dawud,
I notice you don’t address any of the points in Andrew Bostom’s article. Perhaps you should read it, and the evidence he presents, before drawing false equivalences and sounding so exasperated. The article demonstrates why the term “Islamic anti-Semitism” is accurate given its theological basis, rooted in the words and deeds of Muhammad, and its subsequent propagation in overtly theological terms – terms which still persist throughout much of the Islamic world.
Remember Jefferson’s copy of the Koran, that a US Rep. used during his swearing-in ceremony a few years back? That conversation with the Tripolitan ambassador probably explains why Jefferson got it. He probably got it a few days after that discussion, given that he was in London and there would have been good bookstores with Korans around. He’d want to see the source of all the aggression expressed by the ambassador for himself.
So Dawud, all of the anti-Semitism and desire to exterminate the Jews only comes from Europe and from US support for Israel?
Sounds to me that Muslims aren’t adult enough to make decisions for themselves if that little bit caused them to abandon a rich history of live-and-let-live. That is what you are saying, correct?
How does this woman, pretend to be a scholar on Islam and forget Yathrib and Khaybar, the Jewish settlements in the Medina valley that were cleansed
by Mohammed.
Dawud, the “Golden Age” in Islamic Spain was certainly not typical of Islamic civilisation, and it would be helpful for Muslims to stop pretending that it was. It would be like a German trumpeting Frederick the Great’s tolerance of Jews as evidence of a “deep and abiding interfaith tolerance”.
Certainly, something that is often left out of the discussion is that the relative freedoms of Christians and Jews in Islamic Spain was almost identical to those of Muslims and Jews in Christian Outremer – not surprising, since both polities comprised a foreign minority ruling over majorities of a vastly different faith and culture. Nothing makes people willing to leave others alone than the fact that they outnumber you ten to one.
The fact that the modern government than medieval Islamic civilisation most resembles is apartheid South Africa is lost on many apologists.
Actually, now that I think about it, there’s an even better example: The Norman Kingdom of Sicily, which was even more tolerant than Islamic Spain (Roger had Muslim advisors, didn’t enforce a discriminatory tax, and allowed Muslims in his army).
Yet when condeming elements of Sicilian culture, no one brings up Norman Sicily and then claims all the negative elements of Sicily were somehow brought in only recently…
The “golden age” of Muslim rule in Spain was not nearly as “golden” as certain people would like to portray it.
David, have you seen this?
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023693.php
Carbon,
Yes, thanks, I saw it earlier today. Robert makes a point of responding to his critics clearly, in detail and with evidence – a courtesy that’s rarely reciprocated. And the clip above does address one of the fundamental problems, perhaps the most dangerous one – i.e. the prevalence of unrealism, denial and wishful thinking. As demonstrated, I think, by one of the previous commenters.