Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam
By David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann
(Random House, 227 pp., $26)
Scholars in the West have begun to devote time and space to anti-Western jihadism and Muslim anti-Semitism-and a good thing, too, as these are very much on the contemporary international and Middle Eastern political and military agendas and, I fear, will grow in significance during the coming decades, as the Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” widens. That such a “clash” is going on is all too apparent, from the riots in Nigerian streets, where hundreds died following the announcement of an impending beauty pageant on Nigerian soil, to the murder of an Italian priest in Turkey following the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in Denmark. Yet, Western liberals hesitate to tackle the subject of Muslim anti-Semitism, lest it seem anti-multicultural or provoke the hornet’s nest of Allah’s minions. Even the use of the word “jihad” has become taboo among appeasers of Islam-and even among some non-appeasers, such as George W. Bush, who, like other Western leaders, refuses to call the phenomenon by its precise name (and the name that its own practitioners use). People speak of “international terrorism” when they should be speaking of “international Muslim (or Islamist) terrorism.”
The compendium of anti-Semitic Muslim texts about Jews in Islamic Arab lands assembled by Andrew G. Bostom, a professor of medicine with a dark hobby, kicks off, unusually, with an explanation of the painting reproduced on the dust jacket. It is by Alfred Dehodencq, from 1860, and it portrays a group of Muslims, one of them brandishing a scimitar, handling roughly by her hair a kneeling dark-eyed damsel, her hands tied behind her back. The group, on a raised platform, is surrounded by an apparently enthusiastic mob. The scene is Fez, in Morocco, in 1834. The girl is named Sol Hachuel. She is seventeen years old, and she is about to be beheaded. She was accused of secretly adhering to her Jewish faith after converting to Islam-a charge tantamount to apostasy (still punishable by death in most Arab lands). Hachuel denied that she had ever converted. The governor of Tangier, Arbi Esudio, had accused her of “having provoked the anger of the Prophet.” The Sultan agreed and pronounced the death sentence. She went bravely, reiterating her Jewishness and refusing to recant, with “Shema Yisrael,” the Judaic profession of faith, on her lips.
The case was certainly unusual-but it typified, in Bostom’s view, the sorry lot of the Jews in the Muslim Arab world since the rise of Islam and its expansion around the Mediterranean basin in the seventh and eighth centuries. At the start of his book, Bostom provides a monograph-length background survey of the “theological-juridical origins” of Islamic anti-Semitism, illustrating his points with a brief review of its “historical manifestations.” At the level of principle, Muslim attitudes toward the Jews (and, less so, toward Christians) were-and are-informed by a basic ambivalence. Jews and Christians deserved, and received, a formal measure of respect as “People of the Book” and as the first to adopt monotheism; Islam had followed in their footsteps. But at the same time Jews and Christians were the “enemy,” the rival religion and, in certain times and places, the political and military foe.
It was this second attitude that dominated actual Arab practice during most of the fourteen centuries since the birth of Islam. In the lands stretching from Persia to Spain and Morocco, Jews (and Christians) were always second-class subjects, humiliated and discriminated against, often oppressed and persecuted, sometimes forcibly converted or slaughtered. There are almost no substantial Jewish or Christian minorities (the Copts of Egypt and the Christians/animists of southern Sudan are exceptions) left in the Arab world today; and the few remaining Christians in Iraq and Palestine are rapidly fleeing westward. (Note the recent murder of the Arab owner of a Christian bookshop in Gaza.)
The story peddled by latter-day Arab propagandists (and reinforced by some Jewish scholars, who tended in decades past, sometimes for apologetic reasons of their own, to highlight the medieval “Golden Age” of Islamic Spanish Jewry)-that the Jewish minorities in the Muslim Arab countries before the advent of Zionism enjoyed a pleasant fraternal existence among the majority populations-has often been trotted out for the benefit of ignorant Westerners, to illustrate Muslim Arab tolerance of minorities and, politically, to promote plans for a multi-ethnic, one-state solution for Israel/Palestine.
It also has taken hold among Western intellectuals. Thus as prominent a journalist as Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, writes that “until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely-although submissively-under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom,” until Christian missionaries, Nazi propaganda, and the rise of Israel twisted their minds and propelled them toward anti-Semitism. Or consider Esther Webman, of Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center, who has written that “antisemitism did not exist in the traditional Islamic world…. Antisemitism is, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world.” She attributed its rise to three factors: the nineteenth- and twentieth-century penetration of Western thought into that world; “the collapse of traditional political systems and of the loyalties” associated with modern nationalism; and, “most crucial, the development of the conflict [with Zionism] over the domination of Palestine.”
But this construct, in Bostom’s view (and in my own), is wholly false. It flies in the face of the evidence, much of it presented in Bostom’s tome. Certainly modern Christian influences, nationalist enthrallment, and Jewish nationalism (and its success) have added layers to traditional Islamic anti-Semitism. But they were building on firm foundations. From its inception, Islam and its adherents, beginning with Muhammad himself, saw Judaism (and Christianity) as rival parent religions that had to be fought and overcome for Islam to succeed.…
And so the Jews (and Christians) in the realms of expanding Islam were subjected to a regime based on an understanding or agreement-the dhimma -of subordination, marginalization, and discrimination. By the twelfth century, the great philosopher Maimonides, a successful Jew in the Islamic world, the doctor to sultans, was to lament: “God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us…. None has matched [them] in debasing, humiliating, and hating us.” And the situation was to remain more or less constant in most of the Islamic lands down to the twentieth century.…
How and why this condition of degradation came about, and why anti-Semitism persists and, indeed, is on the upsurge in the Islamic Arab world is what Bostom’s anthology sets out to explain.
It all begins with the Qur’an-or, rather, with the encounter, as described in the Qur’an, between Muhammad, the prophet of the new religion, and the Jewish tribes in Hijaz, the area of western Arabia that includes the towns of Mecca and Medina, where Islam arose around 620 C.E. The Jews, not surprisingly, rejected the new faith and its prophet; and if the Qur’an is to be believed, they were contemptuous and sarcastic. (Religions notoriously do not take well to humor at their expense.) Indeed, the Qur’an asserts that the Hijazi Jewish tribes were downright hostile, even at one point trying to poison the Prophet. Muhammad, for his part, had earlier ordered the assassination of prominent Jewish opponents, and forcibly converted tribesmen and expelled many others, and slaughtered hundreds and consigned many of their women and children to slavery. (He took one of the daughters, Safiya, as his wife, after first dispatching her father and husband, according to the Prophet’s first major biographer, Ibn Ishaq.)
Partly in consequence, the Qur’an designates the Jews a “base” people and “killers of prophets” (harking back to the Christian charge of Christ-killing). The full verse (2:61) reads: “Humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them, and they were visited with wrath from Allah. That was because they disbelieved in Allah’s revelations and slew the prophets wrongfully.” They are also said to be usurious.… Elsewhere (5:63-64) the Qur’an states, “They hasten to spread corruption throughout the earth, but Allah does not love corrupters!” and instructs (5:51): “Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends.” And it refers (5:60) to Allah’s punitive transformation of the Jews into “apes and pigs” (the distant theological basis for Hamas’s current designation of the Jews as “sons of apes and pigs”).
Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the current grand imam of Al Azhar University of Cairo, a supreme authority in Sunni Islam, published a book in the late 1960s called The Jews in the Qur’an and the Traditions ; it was re-issued in 1986. It summarized the Qur’an’s (and Tantawi’s own) attitude to the Jews in this way: “The Qur’an describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness… only a minority of Jews keep their word…. [But] not all Jews are the same. The good ones become Muslims.” Tantawi was later to describe contemporary Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs.” I add in fairness that he was later to condemn the September 11 attacks, and suicide bombings in general, as contrary to Islam, though he defended “jihad” against those violating Islamic soil.
The hadiths, or sayings of the Prophet, the subsequent exegeses of the Qur’an, and the early biographers of Muhammad built on and built up this anti-Semitic tradition. Ibn Ishaq (died 761), Muhammad’s first and major biographer, as transmitted by Ibn Hisham, wrote: “The Apostle of Allah-may Allah bless him and grant him peace-declared, ‘Kill any Jew who falls into your power.’ So Muhayyisa Ibn Mas’ud fell upon Ibn Sunayna, one of the Jewish merchants with whom his family had social and commercial relations, and killed him.” One of the more famous hadiths, quoted in Bostom, from Sahih Muslim, Book 41, no. 6985, reads: “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 [this], for it is the tree of the Jews.” This hadith appears in variants in different collections.
Major Muslim scholars followed this anti-Semitic tradition. Al Baydawi (1286-1316?), a Shafi’ite intellectual who was chief kadi of Shiraz, wrote of the Jews’ “intense obstinacy, multi-faceted disbelief, and their addiction to following their whims, their adherence to the blind following of their tradition, their distancing themselves from the truth, and their unrelenting denial of, and hostility toward, the prophets.” Ibn Kathir (1300-1373), a Basra-born historian, wrote of the Jews’ “rebellion, defiance, opposing the truth, belittling other people, and degrading the scholars. This is why the Jews-may Allah’s continued curses descend on them until the Day of Resurrection-killed many of their Prophets.” And in our own time-he is a full-fledged member of this odious tradition-Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the “spiritual mentor” of modern Islamist extremism, wrote: “No other nation has shown more intransigence and obstinacy than the Jews. They viciously and mercilessly killed and mutilated a number of prophets and messengers. They have over the centuries displayed the most extreme attitudes towards God…. They have always boasted of their virtue and made the implausible claims of being… the chosen people of God…. Such claims are totally refuted by the Qur’an…. Theirs is a wicked nature, which is full of hatred for Islam.”
It is little wonder, then, that such anti-Semitic motifs creep into the speeches of contemporary Muslim leaders. Bashar Al Assad, the president of Syria, welcomed Pope John Paul II to Damascus on May 5, 2001 by declaring that “we notice them [the Jews] aggressing against Muslim and Christian holy sites in Palestine…. They try to kill all the the principles of divine faiths with the same mentality of betraying Jesus Christ and torturing him, and in the same way that they tried to commit treachery against Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him).” Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, described the survivors of the Holocaust as “a bunch of hooligans who emigrated to Palestine,” while his protegé Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust took place at all. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, has written: “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…. If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
But contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism, as typified by such statements, is not all of Qur’anic derivation. It also owes a great deal to modern European hate-merchants. Without doubt, Christian missionaries, traders, and officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth century flooded the region with their religious-ideological wares. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example, was first translated into Arabic and published in Cairo in 1920. And more modern European anti-Semitic tenets penetrated the area during the following decades. They were perfectly embodied in the person and beliefs of Haj Muhammad Amin Al Husseini.…
Husseini, who died in 1974, had an eventful life in interesting times. His father, Taher Al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem from 1869 until 1908, led the Palestinian notables’ unsuccessful struggle against Jewish immigration and land purchases (while his cousin, Rabah Al Husseini, sold land, including his own house, to the Jews). Haj Amin seems to have been born in 1895 (he sometimes spoke of 1894 or 1896) and grew up in Jerusalem. When he was seventeen, he was sent to study in Cairo, where he caught the eye of Rashid Rida, the theologian who became the spiritual father figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, established in the late 1920s.…
Husseini apparently played an incendiary role in the Nabi Musa riots against the Jews in 1920, after which he fled the country. But he was pardoned, and he returned, and in a supreme gesture of appeasement, Herbert Samuel, the first British high commissioner, appointed him the “grand mufti” of Jerusalem. The following year Samuel appointed him the head of the Supreme Muslim Council, which supervised the country’s Muslim sites and institutions, thereby furnishing Hajj Amin with a powerful political base for his eventual accession to the leadership of the Palestinian Arab national movement.
He detested the British and all their works-he was especially angered, of course, by their support of Zionism-but he was an accomplished dissembler, and he played his double game to the hilt.… In the tumultuous years between 1936 and 1939, Husseini led the Palestine Arabs during the anti-British “Great Revolt.”… In October 1937, with a warrant out for his arrest, Husseini hid in Al Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount and then, dressed as a woman, he fled by boat to Lebanon. From then on, he lived out his life in exile, “returning” to Palestine only for one week in September 1948 before the Egyptian secret police shepherded him back to his villa in Heliopolis.…
When the Haganah, the Yishuv’s main militia, crushed the Palestinian irregulars [whose assault he had launched] in the spring of 1948, Husseini successfully prodded the neighboring Arab states to invade, and to attempt to destroy, the new Jewish state and to “save” the Palestinians. The Arab armies failed, but the Jordanians duly acquired the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as the Egyptians did the Gaza Strip-and pointedly avoided establishing a Palestine Arab state. So Husseini lived out the rest of his life in Lebanon and Egypt, an embittered and discarded figurehead, in exile among his Arab brothers, like the other 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the war that he had immorally and illogically launched, and for which his people, and the Arab peoples in general, had failed to prepare.
Strangely enough, Dalin and Rothmann devote little space to the chronicle of Husseini’s life. They prefer to dwell on Husseini’s anti-Semitism and his ideological and political links with the Nazis and the Third Reich. The problem is that, while putting their finger on important affinities, they decidedly over-reach, and, given the poverty of their scholarship, they often fail to persuade, leaving the reader with the bad taste of propaganda. They certainly add little to the story published in Joseph Schechtman’s The Mufti and the Fuhrer (1965), Zvi Elpeleg’s The Grand Mufti (1993), or Jennie Lebel’s Haj Amin and Berlin (1996).
To be sure, Haj Amin was an anti-Semite. He certainly imbibed the Judeophobia of the Qur’an. And this, as Dalin and Rothmann assert, may have been bolstered by a further dose of Jewhatred that he acquired at the feet of Rashid Rida (though they offer no proof of this). His anti-Semitism was certainly reinforced by what he picked up during his years in Germany, between 1941 and 1945, when he was employed by the Third Reich to broadcast jihadist antiAllied propaganda to the Arab world and to recruit Muslims for the Wehrmacht in Bosnia, while the Nazis, as they described it, were battling “international Jewry” and its agents in London, Washington, and Moscow.
Husseini seems to have accepted the Nazi view of the Jews’ world-embracing powers-something that is entirely lacking in Qur’anic and early Islamic anti-Semitism, which, if anything, belittled the Jew. Husseini’s anti-Semitism was not simply utilitarian and political, a means of raising the alarm about the Jews’ alleged aim of taking over the Temple Mount or Palestine. It was sincere and heartfelt.…
So Husseini’s support of the pro-Axis rebellion of Rashid Ali Al Kilani in Baghdad in April 1941 was unsurprising-as unsurprising, in fact, as his subsequent extended sojourn in Berlin. He became a friend of Himmler’s, and appears to have known the full extent of the Holocaust. Indeed, in various indirect ways he abetted the murder of European Jewry.…
After the war, evading prosecution as a war criminal, Husseini settled in Cairo. From there, as the dominant figure behind the resurrected Arab Higher Committee, he pulled, or tried to pull, the strings in Palestine and around it, in the hope of frustrating the implementation of the U.N. partition resolution and the establishment of the Jewish state. He failed, and led his people into the Nakba….
Bostom’s book is important and deeply discouraging, but it suffers from flaws of organization and analysis. It is eclectic and chaotic; much is missing, even as there is too much repetition. In some ways the historical picture is even worse than he portrays it as being.… There is no mention of the massacres of Jews in Aden in 1947 and Morocco in 1948, and there is almost no material (since he purports to cover the medieval centuries as well) on the vast pogroms that took place in Spain and North Africa during the Middle Ages.…
Dalin and Rothmann suffer not from pedantry but from overtly propagandistic aims. They are constantly beating an ideological drum. Their adjectives are a giveaway. Every anti-Semite or anti-Semitic text is “virulent” or “notorious.”… And the book abounds with errors of fact.… But if Dalin and Rothmann’s book is a bad book, much of what it says is soberingly truthful and to the point. We are no longer living in a world, if ever we did, in which these ugly realities can be explained away or ignored.
(Benny Morris’s book 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War
was recently published by Yale University Press.)
Andrew G. Bostom responds:
The conclusion to Benny Morris’s review of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism contains false claims about materials omitted from the book. Morris states: “…but there is no mention of the massacres of Jews in Aden in 1947 and Morocco in 1948.” The 1947 Aden pogrom is discussed on pages 158-159. On page 160 there is a mention of the murder of Jews in 1948 in northeastern Morocco.
Morris also states “there is almost no material (since he [Bostom] purports to cover the medieval centuries as well) on the vast pogroms that took place in Spain and North Africa during the Middle Ages.” These pogroms are discussed by the author on pages 46, 48-51, 54, and 97-105. Excerpts from other authors on the subject can be found on pages 335-354, 491-494, and 505-524.
Other than failing to read or even peruse large swaths of the book it is unclear how else Morris could have written such falsehoods. Let the record stand corrected.
Benny Morris adds:
Mea culpa. I somehow missed the references to the Aden and Moroccan massacres and the medieval pogroms and apologize for writing that they were not mentioned in the book.
