Lyn Julius
How Did the Qu’ran Impact Jews Living in Muslim Lands?
Lyn Julius and Rick Sopher - How Did the Qu'ran Impact Jews Living in Muslim Lands?
- So I think, you know what, we’re two minutes past the hour, so I just wanted to welcome everybody back, and I want to say very, very warm welcome to Sopher, an old friend. And I’m delighted that you’re here, that you’re going to be in conversation with Lyn Julius. And of course, Lyn is one of our oldies and our old presenters, not in age but just in terms of being a constant on Lockdown University. So I’m thrilled to have both Lyn and Rick here with us this evening. Rick Sopher has the financial background and is the CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Capital Holdings, which he joined in 1993. He is the chairman of the world’s longest established investment fund of its type. Prior to that he worked at BDO Stoy Hayward, where he was appointed the youngest ever partner. He has received various industry awards including the Outstanding Contribution Award from Hedge Fund Review and the Decade of Excellence Award by Financial News. Fabulous. Rick graduated from Cambridge University and has more recently worked in the area of interfaith relations with the Woolf Institute Cambridge as a member of their council.
During the lockdown period, Rick convened an online dialogue between professors of religion at the world’s leading universities to discuss the relationship between the Qur'an and the Bible and has himself dialogue with Muslim leaders on the subject. Rick was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in 2007 from President Chirac for his contribution to religious education in France and is the chairman or director of several educational charities in the UK. Rick, absolutely thrilled to have you with us tonight. I’m sorry that I stumble upon a few words but I think we got through it, and then we certainly looking forward to hearing from you. And Lyn, thank you very, very much. So the question will be how did the Qur'an impact Jews living in Muslim land? Now, over to you. Thank you.
Right, so I think we’ll start with Rick. We’re actually having a kind of part interview, part conversation about this subject, but Rick said he would like to start by putting on a short presentation, then we will start our discussion. So over to you, Rick.
Well, thank you very much, Wendy. As you know, I’m a terrific admirer of Lockdown University, so it’s a particular honour to be able to try and contribute a little bit to Lockdown University, and especially to do it with Lyn who’s been the dominant voice in our times about the exile of Jews from Arab lands. And I know she’s given already many presentations on the university, and she presented the many factors that influenced the positions of Jews in Muslim lands and they were political, social, and economic. And the gap that we want to fill in this evening is what about the religious dimension? What did the Qur'an say about Jews, the Torah, and how did Islam and Arab Muslim countries implement those messages? So what I am going to say now about the Qur'an may surprise many of you because through large parts of history, during attention to the deep connection between the Qur'an and the Torah was not customary or even taboo. So to introduce this subject in just a few minutes that I have, I’m going to share screen and present for six pages the subject. It’s going to have to be extremely brief in order to do that.
So you can see there one of the many verses about the Torah that’s contained in the Qur'an. It says, “We certainly did give Moses the Book, the Torah.” And if I tell you that there are 137 mentions of Moses, Musa, in the Qur'an, 72 mentions of Ibrahim, Abraham, and 111 verses in a chapter called Surah Yusuf, the Joseph story, it’ll become clear that the Qur'an generally assumes that you know the Bible. It assumes prior knowledge of the Bible stories and it doesn’t repeat them, but it gives its own adaptive lesson or message. And that’s how I think I can say that the Qur'an is, in large part, a commentary on the Torah. Well, I’m going to, I’m going to illustrate another verse from the Qur'an about its connection with the Torah, and I’ll play it for you. And when I play it, see if you can hear the word Torah in the Arabic, which is al Tawrat. I’ll play it for you now,
- Did you get it? Tawrat, the Torah. “ We sent down,” like the queen, magisterial, “We,” meaning God, Allah, “sent down the Torah, in which was , guidance and light.” Nice, nice statement about the Torah. The Qur'an is actually always respectful of the Torah and there are many verses like this in the 99 verses about the Torah and Jews. The ones about the Torah are always good, the ones about the Jews, sometimes good, sometimes not good, but let’s have a little bit more about what the Qur'an says about the Torah. It says it was a confirmation, the Qur'an was a confirmation, , of what came before it, meaning the previous scriptures, the Torah, the Injil, that’s the Christian gospels, and that would include with it the Psalms and the other books of the Tanakh, of the Hebrew Bible. And then it says, “And we’ve revealed the Book in truth. The Qur'an confirms the scriptures which came before it and stands as a guardian over them.” So there’s a kind of intimate relationship that the Qur'an is presenting between itself and the previous scriptures. Now obviously, the Qur'an is a different book to the Torah, to the Bible and there are many differences. The Qur'an presents things in a non chronological way. It jumps around quite a lot, emphasis on the lessons rather than repeating the substance of the story, some differences of emphasis. And one particular thing would be that, for example, it portrays prophets as near flawless under this principle of isma, infallibility.
So for example, Lot, who are in the Torah and the Bible, has incest relationships with his two daughters. That isn’t mentioned. The strife between Jacob and Esau isn’t mentioned. Joseph’s character is reformed into a more respectful character, one who doesn’t undermine his brothers or try and act as if he’s better or superior to his brothers, which is the way that the Bible perhaps presented. So now, one of the things Wendy mentioned that I had convened the world’s top religion professors over the last year, and at the end of the many sessions that we had, I insisted that they answered on a sort of multiple choice basis a few key questions about the Qur'an so that we could get some definitive answers that none of them have ever dared to write down before because they always like to hedge their bets and they love the nuances. But anyway, a conclusion that was unanimously agreed in the academic circles is that the Qur'an does not refute anything fundamental contained in the Torah. And I think that is a big statement. Well, you know today, most Muslims do not pick up the Torah and they have different views about the Torah, perhaps, than what was actually written in the Qur'an when it came out because over time, the Qur'an sought to become less dependent on the previous scriptures. And if you want to be a master of religion, you’d rather have your own books to focus on rather than having to keep going back to religions which became the precinct of other religions. And so many things happened.
The identity of the son who was to be sacrificed by Abraham is not mentioned in the Qur'an and the initial view was that Isaac was the son to be sacrificed, just as he is in the Hebrew Bible, and that was changed many hundreds of years later to Ishmael. We can talk about all these things later if you like, but how could you change from Isaac to Ishmael the son that was to be sacrificed if it actually said in the Hebrew Bible that it was Isaac? Well here, and this was in roughly the mid-1300s, the concept called tahrif, which initially was understood to be mean, misinterpreted, the Jews misinterpreted the Bible, came to be understood as falsified and in that way, the Muslims could claim that the Jews had brought a false Bible and that they’d inserted the word Isaac into the relevant sacrifice paragraphs. And in that way, they could say that it was Ishmael without contravening the Quranic statement that everything in the Bible was correct. And of course, over time, translations of the Qur'an reflected these trends. We had a good friend, Nessim Dawood. He translated the Qur'an in the 1950s for Penguin Books. It sold millions of copies. But when, after 9/11, various people found out that a Jew had translated the Qur'an in this famous edition, they preferred to have a more hardline Muslim, which is why Penguin Books found a second translator of the Qur'an.
So let me spend a moment, and these are complex subjects, so forgive me for abbreviating, but the Qur'an is not anti-Jewish. There are negative verses about Jews. There are negative verses about Jews mainly because the Qur'an claims that they were given a great book, the Torah, in which is guidance and light, but they didn’t follow it. They didn’t follow the own laws that they were given. That’s one area of negative verses. Another area of negative verses is that Muhammad, when he arrived in Medina, and he came across between 620 and 632, this group of Jews who were living in Medina, there was some kind of competition for leadership of the Jewish people. I would maintain that it wasn’t a new religion that Muhammad was trying to foist on the Jews of Medina, he was just trying to remind them of their own religion, the religion of Abraham and Moses. I will be mentioning that Jews and the People of the Book have their own special category and the way that the Qur'an looks at them is through this special category. And I should also mention that the final verses revealed of the Qur'an, because scholars have interpreted that the Qur'an isn’t revealed, isn’t written in a chronological order but they worked out which were the ones that were revealed through Muhammad first, when he was living up until 620 in Mecca and then from 620 to 632 in Medina, and they work out the order that they think it was revealed.
And anyway, the very final verses reveal what you could be called a recognition and respect phase of Jewish people. And it’s interesting here that they actually say, “Your food is lawful for us and our food is lawful for you.” They show a sign of respect of a different culture and religion. Now, when we speak with Lyn in a moment, because I’m nearly finished here, about the Jewish existence in Muslim lands, I said we were going to talk about what the Qur'an says about Jews in the Qur'an. And what it says is this, it says, “You fight them unless,” these are the People of the Scripture, Ahl al-kitab, Jews, Christians, Sabians actually, “You fight them unless they give the jizyah willingly while they’re humbled.” Now, the jizyah often translated as a tax, but actually if you look at the other references to jizyah in the Qur'an, it is something that’s given in exchange for something else. So it is possible that what was meant by that is that the Jews were able to pay money in return for being let off, let’s call it military service. They pay the jizyah and they are humbled, wahum, and I put it in bold in the Arabic, if any of you are Arabic speakers, . And the word saghira means small, , small boys, saghirun.
Well, I prefer the translation as well, they are belittled. The Jew had to be belittled in the environment of Muslims. And I know that Lyn has told you many examples of the treatment of Jews and how that reflected this word saghirun. The Jew had to bend down while he was paying his tax. He had to ride on an ass and not on a high horse. He had to generally be lower in status than the local Muslims. And actually even I think, and this is speculation, that the matzevah, the gravestone of Oriental Jews, I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed, but when you look at the Sephardi section of Jews who came from Arab countries, all their gravestones are flat on the ground, whereas the Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe gravestones are standing upright. And I think that may very well have been the result of this Sharia concept that Jews were not allowed even with their gravestones to have great, big, upright ornamented gravestones. So that verse is the one that defined Jewish existence in Muslim lands. And with Lyn, we’re going to explore whether that really had an impact, if it did have an impact, how great that impact was. And so I will stop sharing my screen and come back to a conversation with Lyn. Lyn.
- Well, thank you very much, Rick. I enjoyed that presentation. It was very succinct. And I admire you for having made it your job to learn about the Qur'an, to study it, to learn Arabic. I think that’s quite an achievement. And not only that, but you’ve brought together different faiths, you’ve done an awful lot of work building bridges. So, you know, I take my hat off to you. Before we get to questions, I’d like to give some context to our discussion. The Qur'an is the holy book of Islam, and Islam was a new religion founded by Muhammad in the 6th century, in 6th century Arabia. At the time, Jews and Christians lived there in large numbers. Muhammad was much influenced by Jews and collected their stories in the Qur'an, which is a mix of Torah and Talmud and Midrashim. In 622, Muhammad travels from Mecca to the oasis of Yathrib, later known as Medina. Now, correct me if I’m wrong about any of this, ‘cause I’m not a Quranic scholar, Rick. At this point, Muhammad is well disposed to the Jews. They form the majority of the inhabitants and he wants them to, well, you say, accept their religion but in fact it’s his version of their religion and he wants them to follow him and they refuse.
There were three Jewish tribes: the Qainuqa, the Nadir, and the Qurayza. Muhammad expels the Qainuqa, he kills the Nadir, and he exiles the Qurayza. At the final battle of Khaybar, the Jewish men, between 600 and 900 in number, are decapitated, their women raped or taken as slaves together with the children and converted to Islam. Their possessions are looted. Muhammad is bitterly disappointed with the Jews, as Bernard Lewis says, “Jews and Christians were people who were offered God’s truth in its final and perfect form and yet they willfully and foolishly rejected it.” So ultimately, the Qur'an tells a story of Jewish betrayal, which one can argue colours the relationship between Jews and Muslims for all time. Now here I’d like to put to you the thoughts of a man called Daniel Sibony, and Sibony is a Moroccan Jew born in Marrakech. He’s a psychoanalyst and the author of over 40 books. Alas, the vast majority only available in French, like this one here. He left Morocco at the age of 13 and he has read the Qur'an from cover to cover in Arabic.
Now, Sibony makes two important points: one is that Islam has never forgiven the Jews who, from the 7th century on, must submit as a vulnerable and defenceless minority under Muslim rule. Their lives are not forfeit, but they are forever cursed for failing to accept the ultimate revelation of Islam. So Islam is more than just a standalone religion, it’s intended to supersede what came before it. The Muslims have what Sibony calls an original grudge against the Jews for not accepting the new religion. They must be punished for all time by being humiliated, a reminder of their failure to convert., and the brutal treatment of the Jews at Khaybar becomes the ultimate extreme example for Muslims to follow. Despite the original grudge, Jews did survive and were allowed to practise their religion. There was a cultural symbiosis with the Muslims and Sibony writes that the original grudge is like a mood music, always in the background. Sometimes at times of great conviviality, the music can barely be heard to the extent that Jews and Muslims almost forget that it is there. At other times, the volume is turned up and tension between the two groups explodes into violence. Daniel Sibony makes a second important point, that is, Islam resents the Jews for having come out first with their Holy Book, and that’s why Islam turned Isaac into Ishmael. Any history before Islam is flattened out to make it look that Islam preceded Judaism. All the Hebrew prophets are Muslims. Sibony even says that the expression , usually translated as Allah is the greater, also means Allah is the more ancient. And this is another example of back to front chronology, designed to make it look that Islam preceded Judaism. So this brings me to the question of falsification.
And you say, Rick, that this was a gradual process, particularly in the 1300s, but I think there are certain verses in the Qur'an that actually do say that the Jews falsified God’s message. For instance, “Among the Jews are those who displaced the words of the scriptures.” Of course, this falsification process is still going on today. There’s a book that recently came to my attention, apparently it’s written by a Syrian called Nabil Khaled Al-Agha, and it’s called “The Nature of Jews in the Qur'an,” and this man says that the original copy of the Torah was actually burnt and the Jews found it appropriate to write the Torah again. They deformed the Torah of Moses and filled it with lies, et cetera, et cetera. This is obviously something we have to deal with. You know, we can’t just say, “Well, let’s go back to the Torah as described in the Hebrew Bible.” So I’ve finished my bit about Daniel Sibony and so I would like to ask you a few questions now, Rick. You say the Qur'an has positive things to say about the Torah, and you do say, but does it have positive things to say about the Jews? I think you did say that some of the verses in the Qur'an are anti-Jewish.
I’ve got a few examples here, “O you who believe! Do not take Jews and Christians as friends,” or “The Jews are hostile to the Muslims,” “They are mutually hateful towards each other,” “They have defiled the most sacred objects and slandered the Virgin Mary,” et cetera. So the big question is, do Muslims tell the difference between good and bad Jews? I mean, how do they apply these verses in the Qur'an? Do they apply them?
- So you’ve really thrown the kitchen sink, mainly at me, really using this, what’s probably a fairly jaundiced Moroccan man who recently probably had his family kicked out of Morocco and not surprising, he’s a bit vexed about his whole experience in Muslim lands. Let me try and unpack some of the core elements because there are many, many things that you threw at me there. First of all, I do maintain and all academics will maintain that the Qur'an venerates the Torah, never says anything against, anything fundamental in the Torah. That is really clear. It does, of course, criticise Jewish people that Muhammad came into contact with when he came into Medina. It criticises them quite harshly. So for example, the famous verse “Be apes,” which I’m surprised you didn’t mention when you were throwing the kitchen sink at me. Well, the “Be apes” verse, that comes out because Muhammad is talking about the people who break the Sabbath. He came to Medina, they’re the Jews, they’re supposed to keep the Sabbath, because that’s what it says in the book, and he sees them not keeping the Sabbath. So he says to them, “Be apes.” That’s where that verse comes from. But what I would say there. is if you look at the Torah account of what should happen to people who break the Sabbath, or indeed many of the other laws, they’re much more severe in the Torah than they are in the Qur'an.
As you probably know, Lyn, in the Torah, the Sabbath breaker was supposed to be stoned to death by his own community as the penalty for having picked up sticks on the Sabbath. It’s in the Bible, it’s in the Torah. So there is that kind of same kind of warning shots that the Qur'an gives to people who break their own books, not just the Jews but also the Christians. So that is definitely a running theme and that is typically where you find the angry verses about Jews. And it’s not even all Jews. Most of these verses say, “some Jews” or allude to it being not the comprehensive society of Jews but just some Jews. And in that connection, it also criticises the rabbis. Normally, when the Qur'an talks about the rabbis or the leading authorities, they are critical because the rabbis were the people who are deemed to be allowing their people to go astray. And then the second element was that there was a battle for authority which, after all, was a feature of society in those days, regardless of religion. There were tribes conquering tribes and regional battles and so on.
And of course, Muhammad, who wanted to establish the political dominion over the people of Medina, if they were not following him for whatever reason, he would take out the sword in pursuit of his desire for a kind of political dominance, if you like. And then the third main strand that you threw at me was about the falsification of the Torah and the criticism that Jews falsified the Torah. Let me talk in a bit more then, about the Isaac, Abraham thing. Now, famously, the Qur'an does not mention which son was to be sacrificed. So for the first, I would say, at least 300 years, all the Arab commentators, there was Ali Ibn Abu Talib, that was Muhammad’s own uncle, Ibn Abbas, al-Suddi, Ibn Hanbal, al-Tabari, the famous commentator. He died 923. All these people just wrote as if it had to be Isaac because it was obvious. I mean, if the Qur'an said you had to pick up the Torah and the Torah says it’s Isaac, it’s obviously Isaac. And then when tensions grew between Muslims and Jews, the emphasis started changing it. And in 1035, someone called Al-Thalabi, he said that it was Ishmael and not Isaac in a very light sort of way, well, in a very, not substantiated way.
All he said was, quote, “The Jews claim that it was Isaac, but the Jews lie.” So here you have the beginning of a kind of polemic, anti-Isaac polemic, but really it wasn’t until 1373 with Ibn Kathir, that a proper justification of how it could be Ishmael came about. And as I mentioned, in order to say that the son to be sacrificed was Ishmael and not Isaac, you have to refute in some way that passage in the Torah. And they did that by claiming falsification, which is one of the few cases where you can see them specifically saying that the Jew had inserted the word , your only son Isaac, into their Torah, and therefore they were falsifying it. The other verses you mentioned about, there’s one about mixing the ordering of the pages or the rabbis say things which they claim to be from the Torah but it’s not from the Torah, those I don’t regard as claims that the Jews falsified the Torah.
So the problem really is how does the average Muslim in the street differentiate between the good Jews in the Qur'an and the bad Jews? I mean, he doesn’t go up to a Jew and say, “You haven’t been observing the Sabbath, you know, therefore you will be punished.” So can you talk a little bit about the practical application of the Qur'an?
Well, let’s jump to the present day and it’ll be obvious to everybody that the actual Qur'an is not to the front of many Muslims mind when they go around criticising Jewish people or complaining or demonstrating as they did in many European and American cities earlier this year, at the time of the renewed problems between Israel and West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians. So let’s just have a look at a few of the things that we heard being shouted in the streets of London and elsewhere and analyse whether they were from the Qur'an or not at all. So there’s one, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” I heard that one myself as they were marching past our house. Okay, it’s a slogan. It has absolutely zero to come to the Qur'an, and if you want to, if we have time, we can talk about what the Qur'an says about the Holy Land in Jerusalem. Then, , which was the battle that you were referring to when Muhammad was trying to dominate the local population. And in Khaybar, he did kill Jewish people, and these people in the streets of London this year shouting about the army of Muhammad will return. Now these are, don’t forget, many of the people shouting these slogans when you talk about Muslims, I mean, many of them Asians, particularly in Europe, they’re not native Arabic speakers.
In fact, many of them actually mispronounced completely that verse and say, instead of and they just mix up the words 'cause they don’t even really know what they’re saying. It’s just a bit of a slogan chant. Now, if there were any group that would find something in the Qur'an and use it against the Jews or against Israel, it would surely be Hamas. And if you look in the charter of Hamas, it is amazing that there is no single Quranic quote against the Jews or Israel in that book, and that book is venomous against Jews and Israel. And all they’ve been able to do is to resort to a Hadith, which is a secondary group of Muslim writings. It’s about the sayings and some of them are verified and some of them are less verified, and they bring the saying, which you may have heard before, the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, “Oh Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.” And that was the best that Hamas could come up with. It couldn’t find anything in the Qur'an to denigrate Jews or Israel.
Well, now that you’ve mentioned Hamas, perhaps we should talk about Islamism and how you see the difference between Islam and Islamism, because surely the Islamists do claim to be following the Qur'an in their ideology, and certainly the Salafists do. What about the people behind Islamic State, which was on the rampage only a few years ago? They want to recreate the sort of atmosphere around Muhammad and his followers, don’t they? So what is your view of Islamism?
Well, I mean there’s religion and religionism. There’s what the religion was as it was written down in its core book and the way that it was used and interpreted later on, and it’s a big subject. And if one talks about the Islamic movements today or in the last hundred years, I sympathise very much with the people like Ed Husain, who you’ve had on Lockdown University, who say that the religion has been somewhat hijacked, Islam has been somewhat hijacked by a narrow interpretation of the religion which wasn’t, in their view, it wasn’t how the religion was intended to be initially. And I’m very sympathetic with that view that the religion somehow is either got distorted or only a narrow extreme slice of it is being used in what you call Islamism.
So if that’s the case, why don’t we hear more from, say, imams, you know, people who preach the Qur'an, why don’t we hear their voices more loudly?
I mean, that’s the terrific question, Lyn, and it’s hard to pinpoint an answer, but obviously when there was all that trouble with Christianity over more than a thousand years, eventually with Nostra Aetate, you could actually get the Catholic Church to write a decree which then had an impact through the Catholic church, because there was a man at the top, the Pope, and he was able to gather and then pronounce this situation. And unfortunately, for us facing the nasty versions of Islamism, it’s very, very difficult to find anyone who will stick their neck out to do that. I mean, it’s a very, how.. When you say just find an imam and have him speak up, I mean, Islam doesn’t really work like that in most places. I mean, I’ve just come back this afternoon, this evening from the UAE, where I didn’t know this before, but in the UAE, every imam in every mosque in the UAE is given his Friday sermon in writing and they all just stand there and read the same Friday sermon, which comes from basically a government department.
So perhaps this is what we should be doing in the UK, you know, to have more closer control over what goes on in the mosques and what is said in the mosques. I think that is similar to what happens in France where the government does have some control certainly over the training of imams and what goes on in the mosques.
Yes, I mean, you’ve had Ed Husain on Lockdown University. He’s very good at that kind of thing.
Okay, well let’s go on to another subject close to our hearts and that’s the dhimmi status. You gave slightly cursory, if I may say, account of the dhimmi status. Yes, they had the Jews and the Christians had to pay the jizyah tax. This was not because they… Well, this was not because they were exempt from military service, it is really because they subcontracted their right to self-defense to the ruler of the day. And that led to a kind of image of the Jew as being rather weak and cowardly, even, and like a woman. So I don’t know if you’ve come across this kind of impression that people might have. And of course, it’s all the more shocking in the last century that people who’ve always been thought of as weak and feminine in some way and defenceless should actually win wars. And of course, this might account for the inability of some Arabs coming, you know, being able to come to terms with the state of Israel and the fact that Jews can defend themselves. What would your view be of that?
Well, first, let me talk about the dhimmi status. I mean, I know a common perception is that the fact that the Jews in Muslim lands were the subordinate class, even I’ve heard people say that it was a humiliating situation. I think something needs to be said about that. I mean, you’ve documented very beautifully in your book “Uprooted” what happened in the last 100, 150 years, how the Jews were expelled and so on, but there was a period before that of about 1300 years where the Jews did live under Islam in certain conditions, continuously in most places, most of the time without too much trouble, and it’s worth just reflecting on their status. I mean, their status as a subordinate class was maybe not something you would accept today. I mean, American wouldn’t accept a subordinate class and so on. But by the standards of the time, being subordinate but protected, don’t forget that dhimmi, which is a Quranic term, means protected, that protection did actually work most of the time in most places, to a greater or lesser degree. It did protect the Jewish life, which is why they managed to stay for 1300 years in Ottoman lands. And if you just let me, I mean, I could give many examples but just let me give you one. When the Jewish situation was being questioned by the local population, very often, and I could give many examples, the ruler or whoever was in charge referred to that verse 9:29 that I showed earlier, the saghirun verse, and they actually used it to remind everybody how you are supposed to deal with the Jewish population.
And here is one with Sultan Mehmed III in 1602 who issued a Ferman, an edict, because the Ottoman Empire was receiving a lot of Jewish immigration from Christian Europe in the previous 100 years, and it all came to a head, and he was asked to, he thought he had to declare the Jewish position. And so he said, and I’m going to quote, “Since, in accordance with what Almighty God the Lord of the Universe commanded in His manifest book, the Qur'an, concerning the communities of Jews who are people of the dhimma, their protection is a perpetual and collective duty of the generality of Muslims. So it’s important that my exalted and religiously expired concern be directed to ensure that these communities pay the tax to me,” that’s the jizhya, “and that they should live in tranquillity and peace of mind and go about their business and no one shall prevent them,” and he goes on, “in contravention of the Holy Law of the Prophet.” So here we are, about 100 years after Muhammad, 100 years after that Quranic verse was supposed to have been written where a sultan is bringing out the book and saying, “That’s what it says in the book and that’s how we’re going to treat the Jews as a kind of protected class provided they pay this jizhya.”
So I think it did, I mean, of course, there were many factors that you’ve written about and that are well known, political, economic, social, but the Qur'an did help for those 1300 years to give the Jews a certain protection in Muslim lands.
Can I just throw this in that that is the Ottoman Empire possibly was more tolerant than other parts of the Muslim world? Of course, the Ottoman Empire did not control Morocco, for instance, or Yemen or Persia, and in those places, would you agree the lot of the Jews was actually far worse? I mean, Morocco, you did get forced conversions under the Almohads in the 11th century-
But they were, Lyn, they were Barabbas who were not Qur'an, they were not really adhering to the Qur'an, I would say, as much as other parts of Islam. And because they subordinated the Qur'an, they didn’t have that verse at the front of their mind. That is how I would explain the Almohad and there you did have bad treatment of Jews.
Well, perhaps Persia is another example-
Okay, I’ll give you one. Now in-
that were actually untouchable. In fact, if a Jew and a Muslim were walking in the rain and the rain splashed from the Jew onto the Muslim, the Jew could be executed, also it said. So you could say that, I mean, how can you actually say, “Well, this is according to the Qur'an and this is not”? You know, because obviously, Islam was practised in various parts of the Muslim world in a slightly different way, but they all said that they were true believers, didn’t they? I mean, how can you say that the fundamentalists actually, you know, did not practise that particular verse in the Qur'an? You know, they probably believed that they did. You know, maybe they did.
Well, maybe, since we’ve been going on a while, I can answer that by going right up to date and I would like to go right up to date to the Abrahamic Accords. And I’ve just spent a week in the United Arab Emirates, which were the first to sign the Abraham Accords, and I have been very sensitive to whether there was any theological or religious resistance to the Abrahamic Accords and there was absolutely none. On the contrary, it has been a kind of reawakening in certain parts that the Jewish position, theologically, is theologically aligned with Islam. And that is a distinction between the Jewish position under Christianity where the pogroms and the killing and the force conversions were much, much worse, I would maintain, in those first 1300 years of Islam. And the reason for that, I think, is that, I think you mentioned earlier on that you thought the Qur'an might be a supersessionist kind of a document replacing the Torah and that’s really not, not really the case.
I mean, I would argue that the New Testament was a more supersessionist document. The Qur'an was like a supplementary document, now that’s a personal view and one can debate it, but let me go back to the UAE because here, I think we have something absolutely historical and staggering and that is that there is what I could call a resettlement of Jewish life in Arabia. And what am I talking about? So last week, there were 600 people, Jews from Russia, who came to the UAE, celebrated a wedding. The week before, there had been a wedding in Bahrain, the first for 56 years, and the couple chose to go on their honeymoon in the UAE to prove that this Jewish life now in the UAE. There are even people who now have synagogues that they do go to and synagogues that they don’t go to. And if anything shows that there’s real Jewish life going on there, that’s it. And I’m not just talking about Jews in the UAE, because they’ve been Jews in the Middle East for a while, they keep a low profile, but I’m talking about Jewish life. There’s, you know, three kosher restaurants and all these synagogues and so on. So I think it is a major thing and I did take from that, that there was no religious objection anywhere heard about establishing the Abraham Accords.
But there is a sort of dichotomy between, I don’t know, pragmatic interests, the interests of the government and the interests of the people, if you like. I mean, if you look at Egypt, for instance, Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel and obviously it’s in the interests of the Egyptian government to have a peace with Israel. But if you ask the Egyptian people, they are extremely anti-Semitic.
Of course, I mean there’s so many factors. I’m not saying that suddenly someone in the UAE read verse 9:29 suddenly decided to do the Abraham Accords, and of course, in Egypt, it’s a different history. When you fought wars with Israel and you’ve lost relatives in those wars, of course there’s a much more deeper animosity that you have to get over and all the political, social, and economic factors too. Of course, there are different things in different countries and Egyptians would find it much harder to embrace Israel than the UAE, of course.
Oh, that’s interesting. And of course, the Palestinians don’t seem to be ready to recognise Israel as a Jewish state. Do you think that could be a throwback to dhimmitude, to the idea that non-Muslims should not rule over Muslims?
So let me start with the Qur'an before I try and talk about the whole plight of the Palestinians, which is a bigger subject than I’m capable of, but let me just say what the Qur'an says. The Qur'an says that the Israelites should go and inhabit and inherit the Holy Land. It’s very clear. It reminds them that when, and it’s an allusion to the spy story where there were 12 spies and 10 of them didn’t want to go. It tells them, don’t be like those 12 spies, be like the two spies and go into the land. And it says, “Don’t be among the losers,” meaning the people who were too afraid to take possession of the land. So the Qur'an is very, very clear on Israel and while we’re at it, the Qur'an does not mention Jerusalem by name. There is no counterclaim to the Holy Land or to Jerusalem in the whole of the Qur'an. I see the Palestinians as a completely non-religious, political, longstanding problem.
Right, so if you think the, I mean, do you think the Muslims really ought to be more religious rather than less in order to achieve any kind of peace?
Well, I would love to see them paying more attention to verse 9:29 and the other verses that recognise the Jewish people’s right to exist in peace and serenity, at the other verses that talk about these similarities between religions, and there is a verse that says that other religions should be able to coexist. It said, “God made you as different peoples.” So there are some very nice verses of the Qur'an that you never really hear about. And unfortunately, there is a kind of, on the internet you can go and find it very easily, some nasty verses, and there’s a sort of pseudo Qur'an that doesn’t even come from the Qur'an, which tries to make out that the Qur'an is very aggressive towards other religions, that it is towards the Jewish religion.
I think on that note, perhaps we should take a few questions. It’s been a fascinating discussion. Thank you, Rick. I don’t know if you want to start off.
Q&A and Comments:
- Oh, there’s a lovely question about Hagar, Hajar, Hagar and her biological son Ishmael.
Now, all I want to say about that is that if you are Muslim and you want to know story of Hagar and Ishmael, you can’t really find it in the Qur'an. Hagar is not mentioned in the Qur'an. You’ve got to go to the parts of the Torah that we’re reading now, which give a full account of Hagar. And in fact, if you want to know the whole of the Hajj, where they go to Mecca and perform seven rituals, several of those rituals are exactly out of the Torah and not mentioned at all in the Qur'an.
Q: “Into what religion, if any, was Muhammad born? What was his religious arc?”
A: I think he was born into no religion. He grew up in Mecca. There were not, the religion was, it was strange to call it religion, but there were many polytheists. Mecca was a trading venue where they came and worshipped and paid homage to all these stones. It was about as polytheist as you can get, not many Jews or Christians there actually. And when you went to Medina, which, because what he was preaching about the one God was rejected by the people of Mecca, he rise in Medina and there he meets communities of Jewish people who’ve been living there for a long time, and some Christians.
“It’s good comparisons with Martin Luther.” There’s so many questions. It’s hard to…
[Wendy] Well, you read them out please. For the questions that you are going to answer, you just read out the questions and then give the answer. And you don’t have to do them all, Rick, and then just you choose what you find… You know, I have five or six.
Okay, I’m going to read one. I haven’t read through it yet, but it is from an Islamic professor of religion.
Q: “Wonderful discussion. Thank you all very much. Question, a lot of the historical negativity against Jews is from Muslim tradition rather than the Qur'an, such as Muhammad had allegedly killed a Jewish tribe from Medina, exiled another, et cetera. Is it possible that some anti-Jewish stories are actually post Quranic Muslim sentiments rather than perhaps what had actually happened, and that such history was fabricated for political purposes in later centuries?”
A: Yes, Abdullah, it is very possible indeed, because as we all know, it’s the victor or the survivor that writes the history and there were no Jews left in Arabia after that time to really write the history properly. So I think the answer is yes.
Q: “Will you say more about attitudes towards the Holy Land?” Tamara Ashkenazi.
A: Yes, I said what the Qur'an says about the Holy Land. There’s no counterclaim in the Qur'an to the Holy Land and I think that is pretty much ignored. The attitude of most Muslims is to ignore those verses and not talk too much about them. You never hear that pointed out.
Q: - Yes, Jonathan Matthews says, “Was it not the case that after the expulsion from Iberia that the Ottomans actually invited the Jews to settle in the empire?”
A: Absolutely right. It was Sultan, was it Bayezid who invited the Jews to settle in Istanbul? But as I will be telling people tomorrow when I talk about the Jews of Tunisia, the Duke of Tuscany also welcomed Jews and he was a Christian, and of course, Jews did find refuge in Holland and eventually in England. So yeah, the Sultan was one of several enlightened rulers to welcomed in Jews after the Spanish Inquisition.
Q: Good question from Rachel, “Sopher, did Jews live better under Muslim or Christian rule?” Do you want to answer that, Rick?
No, you do that. I have a vested interest, referring to my sister.
Yes.
You do that, Lyn.
A: - We didn’t go into the dhimmi status too much, but I think it was a question of submission, 'cause of course Islam means submission and the Muslim submits to God, the woman Muslim, the woman submits to her husband, the non-Muslim submits to the Muslim and at the very bottom of the pecking order is the slave. And so this idea of submission is not one we would apply today. It’s got nothing to do with rights. So, you know, I mean, we’re using a completely different standard when you judge, I think, the way that Jews lived under Islam from what we expect today. And as for Christians, well, of course, yes, under Christianity, there was that terrible theological prejudice against Jews that Jews killed Jesus, which did not exist under Islam. But the Muslims did exploit Jews for their skills and Jews were equally dispensable, I think, that when they were no longer useful, some Jews rose to high office and then were done away with, you know, if they were considered arrogant or had outstepped their position as submissive or subordinates. And we have, you know, I know we didn’t have time to discuss this, Rick, but there was an example of a Jewish vizier, Joseph ibn Naghrela, who was considered to be too arrogant, and therefore he was massacred along with 3,000 other Jews in Granada.
[Rick] Lyn, I claim that that will prove my point about saghirun. Because if the Jew is supposed to be allowed to live provided he humbles himself, then to be the vizier, I think he was the vizier, his son had been assistant vizier, a vizier was just too much and consequently-
[Lyn] Vizier was too much, but there are other examples, there are other examples. Apparently in 1286, in the Maghrib, only one Jew ever rose to real power. His name was Khalifa ibn Ruqqasa, and he was superintendent of the palace. And this so offended Muslim nobles that the Sultan was forced to massacre Ibn Ruqqasa and his entire family. Another example?
[Rick] It’s an example of the situation because Jewish people were able to live for 1300 years in relative protection but weren’t able to become effectively or to maintain a position as the vizier, or in the UK to become the queen or in… That is really what we’re saying.
[Lyn] Yes, yeah. But there was always that kind of precariousness about their existence that, you know, they could never guarantee that they would still be alive at the end of the day.
But they stood a better chance in Muslim countries of being alive at the end of the day than much of the time in Christian countries because I think that that goes back to the theological differences that Christianity had with Judaism.
[Lyn] Yeah, I think it depends where in the Muslim world, 'cause I think in North Africa, it was much tougher than, say, in the centre of the Ottoman Empire. And there were frequent raids on the Jewish quarters, the mellahs, in Morocco, for instance, more frequent than were even recorded, you know. I mean, we don’t really even know about them 'cause they were so frequent. So shall we have one more question? What do you think?
[Rick] You find it. There’s so many questions, so many people on the call that it’s hard to…
[Wendy] “Can you do this session again?” Okay.
[Lyn] That’s a good question. Thank you very much.
[Wendy] So I’m going to jump in and say thank you to both of you for a really, truly excellent presentation. I was in the UAE just two weeks ago, and I have to say that I received a very, very warm welcome. And the Sheikh and Sheikh Mohammed, who’s the minister of culture, made a point of saying how warmly the UAE felt towards Israel and towards Jews and how they welcomed Jews and that the Jews again make such a huge contribution to the UAE. I also went to synagogue there, and there was no security outside the shop, which was extremely surprising. So-
Wendy, I want to make, Wendy, sorry to interrupt you.
Please.
But I really wanted to say, I don’t know if you’d agree with this, but I believe that the UAE today is the safest place in the world for a Jew.
[Wendy] You know, certainly I have travelled a lot and this is, you know, I tend to agree with you and I felt extremely welcome. You know, a very, very warm welcome and in fact, I have a friend by the name of Mona Golabek staying with me and she wrote “The Pianist of Willesden Green,” and we were just sitting around the kitchen table last night and she said, “Oh, you know what, the Sheikh Mohammed actually,” who’s the minister of culture who I’ve just referred to, “reached out to me about translating my book into Arabic and bringing it to the UAE.” So certainly there’s enormous, there’s enormous amount of goodwill to build the relationship between the Jews and the UAE and Israel and the UAE. And he made a point of saying that, as I said before earlier when we went to Israel, they were very warmly welcomed. And it’s very smart, because they’re going to get the best of Israel. So let’s hope that there is going to be a sea change and this is where it’s going to start. And I think we have to look for all the strengths and all the positives. We as a Jewish nation need to focus on the positives of everything that we are doing and take it and embrace it. So on that note, I want to thank you both for an outstanding presentation. And yes, I would be thrilled if you agree to do it again. And to all of you, all thousand of you who have tuned in tonight, I just want to say thank you for joining us and a very good night to you guys in England and enjoy the rest of your day to all of you in the United States. And of course, South Africa and Israel and Australia and all over the world, thank you for joining us. Night night, Rick. Bye, Lyn, night night.
[Lyn] Bye.