Think-Israel

THINK-ISRAEL

HOME January-February 2007 Featured Stories Background Information News On The Web

ANTI-SEMITISM AND ISLAM

by Timothy R. Furnish

Conventional wisdom among many American citizens, as well as numerous journalists, politicians and media anchors, has it that anti-Semitism[1] in the Islamic world constitutes a not unreasonable reaction to the late 19th c. Zionist movement which led to the creation of the state of Israel right after World War II. In this view, were Israel to totally withdraw from the West Bank (and other disputed Arab territories), enact the "right of return" and compensate displaced Palestinians, anti-Semitism in the Islamic world would dissipate like a mirage.

Unfortunately, hatred of Jews runs much longer than a century or so into the past. In fact, it originates not only in the actions of the founder of Islam himself, but also in the eschatological belief-system of the world's second-largest religion.

In 622 CE the nascent Muslim community under Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, left Mecca in Arabia and headed north to the city of Yathrib. Part forced emigration, part prearranged political move, this hijrah not only marked the beginning of the Muslim calendar but the transition of the Muslims from oppressed minority to ruling majority. The newly-renamed Madinat al-Nabi, "city of the prophet," became -- in its shortened form, Madinah -- the capital of an expanding religious, political and military movement that would encompass the entire Arabian peninsula, including Mecca itself, within eight years and then, of course, after another century conquer lands from Iberia to the borders of India.

In the process of the Islamization of Arabia, and a few years before Mecca fell to the Muslims in 630, a paradigm of Muslim-Jewish conflict was established.[2] Several of the tribes of Madinah were Jewish, and refused to accept the prophethood of Muhammad. In fact the leaders of one tribe, the Banu Qurayzah, were reported to have been plotting to have Muhammad killed. After some negotiations and inter-tribal machinations -- which included, portentously, Muhammad branding the Qurayzah "brothers of monkeys"[3] -- Muhammad allowed "one of [their] own number," one Sa`d bin Mu'adh, to pronounce judgment on them. His verdict: "the men should be killed, the property divided, and the women and children taken as captives." The narrative continues:

Now, this was a brutal time and a brutal society, in many ways. And in his treatment of "unbelievers" Muhammad is not unlike some of the divinely-sanctioned rulers in the Hebrew Scriptures, such as Joshua or David. (He is, however, most unlike the Jesus of the New Testament.) Nonetheless, there is no getting around the fact that the man whom Muslims believe to have been God's last spokesman on Earth not only denigrated, but ordered the slaughter of, his fellow monotheists -- and this long before Theodore Herzl, David Ben-Gurion or Ariel Sharon ever existed.

This pattern set by God's prophet is particularly influential upon the jihadist wing of world Islam, for whom the example of the early Islamic community is supremely normative. However, there is a powerful eschatological motif in Islam which also contributes immensely to the acrimony that too many Muslims, even non-jihadist, feel towards the Jews: that of al-Dajjal.

The Dajjal, or "The Deceiver," is one of five major end times actors according to Islamic teachings, and the chief embodiment of evil.[5] In the anti-God camp with him will be the rapacious hordes of Yajuj and Majuj,[6] as well as al-Dabbah, the "Beast."[7] Opposing these will be the returned `Isa, or Jesus,[8] and al-Mahdi, the "rightly-guided one." Jesus, Yajaj and Majuj, and the Dabbah have both Qur'anic and hadith sourcing (hadiths are extra-Qur'anic sayings attributed to Muhammad); however, the Dajjal and the Mahdi appear nowhere in the Qur'an, but only in hadiths -- curious, considering that in many ways they are the two most important eschatological figures in Islam.[9]

What has this to do with anti-Semitism in Islam? The main role of the returned (Muslim) prophet Jesus and the Mahdi will be to defeat the evil forces of unbelief and usher in a global Islamic caliphate. And the forces that the Dajjal will lead forth to battle the Muslims will be...Jewish![10] The Dajjal himself is usually described, drawing upon relevant hadiths, as corpulent and/or tall, frizzy- (perhaps red-)haired, one-eyed, able to perform sham miracles, having the Arabic linguistic root for "unbelief" -- K-F-R -- tatooed on his forehead. And while he is actually not described as Jewish himself, the hadith accounts of his Jewish supporters have provided plenty of ammunition for Muslim exegetes to assume he, too, will be Jewish and -- of course -- linked to Israel. For example, the K-F-R on the Dajjal's brow is said to be the same symbol used on the tail fins of Israeli fighter jets.[11] But the Jewish component is not the only one of the "Dajjal system," for that system is truly the one of unbelief -- a rubric under which both science and Christianity should be subsumed.[12] While the hadiths suggesting that the Dajjal will be Jewish go back, in some cases, to the 9th century CE/3rd century AH, the recent upsurge in eschatological anti-Semitism probably dates to about 20 years ago, when the Egyptian writer Sayyid Ayyub began publishing works in Arabic claiming that the Dajjal was already active on Earth and that he was Jewish.[13] And this view is not active only in the Arab Muslim world, in the "front-line" states bordering Israel. A recent Indian Muslim writer[14] is convinced that "the Jews are waiting impatiently for the coming of Dajjal, their beloved king,"[15] for:

This writer goes on to repeat the hadith that the Jews will get their comeuppance before the end, when in the final battles "they will not be able to hide behind any stone, wall, or animal or tree without it saying 'O Muslim, servant of Allah, here is a Jew, come and kill him."[21] The Dajjal will actually be killed by Jesus, and the Dajjal's dispirited army of Jews, unbelievers and "Magians" will then be defeated by the Mahdi and his army of Muslims. Afterwards peace will reign under the global rule of the Mahdi and/or Jesus for some time (the hadiths are not harmonious on just who will be superior and who will live longer), before both great Muslim leaders die and unbelief again proliferates. Thereafter, at some point, will come the true end of time and the Judgment.

Islamic eschatology has seen a resurgence in recent years, owing to the turn of the (Christian) millennium, the inability of the Islamic world to deal effectively with modernity and the perception among many Muslims that the ummah, the Islamic "nation," is not only in dire straits but is under attack from the West in general and the U.S. in particular. A powerful yearning for the Mahdi to come and deliver the ummah has grown among both Sunni and Shi`i Muslims, and the eschatological play cannot be acted out until the Dajjal comes, as well. Hugo Chavez may see President Bush as "El Diablo," but for many in the Muslim world this figure of evil is "the Jew," particularly in his armed-and-dangerous incarnation as "the Zionist entity" -- Israel. If even a small percentage of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are influenced by such a belief, as well as by the undeniable anti-Semitic example of their own founder -- and all indications are that this is indeed the case -- then it's naïve at best and dangerous at worst to expect that any sort of political or territorial concessions on the part of the Israelis will enervate such rancor. Jimmy Carter and James Baker, among others, would do well to factor that into their future policy recommendations.

[1] While broadly-speaking "anti-Semitic" would refer to any ethnolinguistic group speaking a Semitic language -- amongst whom Arabs are, ironically, the vast majority -- I use the term here in its traditional, specific sense as meaning "anti-Jewish."
[2] See `Abd al-Malik Ibn Hisham, Life of Muhammad. A Translation of Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, Introduction and Notes by A. Guillaume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 459-466.
[3] Ibid., p. 461
[4] Ibid., p. 464, 466.
[5] See A. Abel, "al-Dadjdjal," Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, pp. 76-77.
[6] Surah al-Kahf:92ff; Surah al-Anbiya':96; and compare to the descriptions of Gog and Magog in the Bible at Ezekiel 38 and 39, as well as Revelation: 20.
[7] Surah al-Naml:82ff; also, compare this Beast to that of Christianity, Revelation 13 and 17
[8] Surah al-Ahzab:7ff; Surah al-Ma'idah:44ff, 75ff, 109ff; Surah al-Imran:46ff; Surah al-Nisa':156ff; Surah al-Saff:15ff.
[9] And in fact even there the Dajjal is more legitimately sourced than his counterpart the Mahdi, because the former is mentioned not only in dozens of hadiths but in the two most authoritative collections -- those of al-Bukhari and Muslim. The Mahdi -- about whom I have written extensively in my book Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden -- shows up only in lesser collections, such as those of Abu Da'ud, al-Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah, a fact which has done very little to diminish belief in the Mahdi in any phase of history, including our own.
[10] For a complete list of relevant hadith cites, as well as exegesis thereof, see Usamah Yusuf Rahmah, Iqtarabat al-Sa`ah [The Approach of the Hour] (Damascus/Beirut: Dar Qutayba, 2001), pp. 164-208.
[11] Ahmad Thompson, Dajjal: The King Who Had No Clothes (London: Ta-ha Publishers, Ltd., 1986), p. 3.
[12] Ibid., pp. 6, 9, 80, and infra.
[13] See David Cook, "Muslim Fears of the Year 2000," Middle East Quarterly, V, 2 (June 1998), pp. 51-62.
[14] Mohamad Yasin Owadally, Emergence of Dajjal. The Jewish King (Delhi: Rightway Publications, 2001).
[15] Ibid., p. 12.
[16] The former Alexandretta, on Turkey's southwestern Mediterranean coast, of Indiana Jones fame.
[17] The Hijaz is the western coastal region of the Arabian peninsula.
[18] The Najd is central Arabia.
[19] Owadally, p. 35.
[20] Ibid., p. 36.
[21] Ibid., p. 68. The actual hadith cite is found in the Sahih of al-Bukhari: Book 041, Number 6985: Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: "The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews."

Timothy R. Furnish, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of World and Middle East History at Georgia Perimeter College.

This appeared February 2, 2007 in the Front Page Magazine
(www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26708).