Two books look at the touchy subject of Muslim attitudes to Jews
Aug 12th 2010
- P : Studying the word, Tunisia, 1958
In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands. By Martin Gilbert. Yale University Press; 320 pages; £25 and $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. By Gilbert Achcar. Metropolitan Books; 400 pages; $30. Saqi; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
FROM 624 to 628AD, several Jewish clans in the Arabian peninsula joined forces with an Arab tribe, the Quraysh, to make war on a renegade Qurayshi named Muhammad who had had the chutzpah to claim he was a prophet of God. They lost. Piqued at the Jews for rejecting a creed that—with its dietary laws, ritual circumcision and daily prayers towards (at first) Jerusalem—was so closely modelled on their own, the Prophet Muhammad decreed that they, along with Christians, would henceforth be considered dhimmiyeen under Islam; “protected” as fellow monotheists, but subject to a heavy tax and various other indignities.
Dhimma status was later extended to other religions, then abolished by the Ottoman Turks in the 19th century. It is often still invoked by Islamophobes today as proof that Islam is inherently intolerant and, specifically, anti-Semitic. Martin Gilbert, a British Jew who was knighted in 1995, and Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese-French Christian, have both written books in which this question looms large. It would be hard to find two more different treatments.
For Sir Martin the dhimma restrictions form the conceptual framework, such as it is, of “In Ishmael’s House”, his history of Jewish life under Muslim rule. He relates how, although they often lived in peace and wealth and sometimes reached the very top posts in Muslim administrations, as dhimmiyeen the Jews remained second-class citizens who never knew when prosperity might give way to pogroms.
Sir Martin is no Islamophobe, and his is a solid and balanced, if unexciting, chronicle of both ups and downs in Jewish fortunes. But it is nothing more. Although he gives a clear-eyed account of the conflict that prompted Muhammad to impose dhimma status on the Jews, he offers virtually no political or social context for the actions of any Muslim leader thereafter. This makes for a monotonous and ahistorical narrative: under more tolerant caliphs the Jews prospered, yet still suffered isolated attacks; under crueller ones they were oppressed, yet individual Muslims still performed acts of kindness, and so on for 12 centuries. Moreover, Christians and other dhimmiyeen are absent from the tale, so there is no sense of whether Jews were being singled out.
Things improve a little in the 20th century, the second half of the book. Here Sir Martin, best known as Winston Churchill’s official biographer, is on home turf, and he writes about the obvious effects of world wars, colonialism and the rise of Israel on the decline of Jewish-Muslim relations. There are some gripping moments in the eyewitness accounts of anti-Jewish riots in Cairo or Baghdad, but here again he remains largely silent on Muslim thinking and perceptions.
It is not clear whether the author was trying to avoid controversy or is just uninterested in anything but what Jews experienced. Either way, the extraordinary result is that not once does this book about Jews under Islam tackle the question of Muslim anti-Semitism head-on. (The phrase does not even appear in the index.)
By contrast, Mr Achcar’s “The Arabs and the Holocaust” looks at it in considerable detail. The book is a study of the evolving attitudes of four different political streams in the 20th-century Arab world: liberal Westernisers, Marxists, nationalists and pan-Islamists. The picture that emerges, especially in the years before the state of Israel, is a complex and nuanced one that rewards careful reading.
For instance, Arab Marxists in the 1930s found common ground with the then significant groups of Jewish anti-Zionists. Some Arab nationalists admired Zionism as an example even though they opposed the end result, and the more liberal ones welcomed a Jewish national home in Palestine, just not a Jewish state. Only the more extreme thinkers embraced the Nazis as enemies of the Jews; most saw them as racist colonialists. Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who is the chief bogeyman of many pro-Israel histories, comes across as a weak leader with far less influence than is usually ascribed to him. Even the deep anti-Semitism common in today’s Islamist groups like Hamas and Hizbullah was not, he argues, as marked in the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. By contrast, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who broke the Arab taboo on peace with Israel and paid for it with his life in 1981, was “a notorious Jew-hater”.
Mr Achcar is no apologist for prejudice, and at times harshly criticises what he sees as a decline in Arab intellectualism and good sense. He also rebukes those Arabs who stoke anti-Semitism by blurring the distinction between Jews and Zionists (though, as he points out, Zionists tend to blur it themselves). Unlike Sir Martin, though, he dismisses the Jews' dhimma status—perhaps a little too hastily—as irrelevant compared with the Arab responses to colonialism, Israel and other geo- political forces.
“The Arabs and the Holocaust” may prove hard going for the casual reader. But it is a refreshing and original study, showing clearly that Muslim anti-Semitism is neither universal, nor inevitable, nor subject to pat explanations
Aug 12th 2010
- P : Studying the word, Tunisia, 1958
In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands. By Martin Gilbert. Yale University Press; 320 pages; £25 and $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. By Gilbert Achcar. Metropolitan Books; 400 pages; $30. Saqi; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
FROM 624 to 628AD, several Jewish clans in the Arabian peninsula joined forces with an Arab tribe, the Quraysh, to make war on a renegade Qurayshi named Muhammad who had had the chutzpah to claim he was a prophet of God. They lost. Piqued at the Jews for rejecting a creed that—with its dietary laws, ritual circumcision and daily prayers towards (at first) Jerusalem—was so closely modelled on their own, the Prophet Muhammad decreed that they, along with Christians, would henceforth be considered dhimmiyeen under Islam; “protected” as fellow monotheists, but subject to a heavy tax and various other indignities.
Dhimma status was later extended to other religions, then abolished by the Ottoman Turks in the 19th century. It is often still invoked by Islamophobes today as proof that Islam is inherently intolerant and, specifically, anti-Semitic. Martin Gilbert, a British Jew who was knighted in 1995, and Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese-French Christian, have both written books in which this question looms large. It would be hard to find two more different treatments.
For Sir Martin the dhimma restrictions form the conceptual framework, such as it is, of “In Ishmael’s House”, his history of Jewish life under Muslim rule. He relates how, although they often lived in peace and wealth and sometimes reached the very top posts in Muslim administrations, as dhimmiyeen the Jews remained second-class citizens who never knew when prosperity might give way to pogroms.
Sir Martin is no Islamophobe, and his is a solid and balanced, if unexciting, chronicle of both ups and downs in Jewish fortunes. But it is nothing more. Although he gives a clear-eyed account of the conflict that prompted Muhammad to impose dhimma status on the Jews, he offers virtually no political or social context for the actions of any Muslim leader thereafter. This makes for a monotonous and ahistorical narrative: under more tolerant caliphs the Jews prospered, yet still suffered isolated attacks; under crueller ones they were oppressed, yet individual Muslims still performed acts of kindness, and so on for 12 centuries. Moreover, Christians and other dhimmiyeen are absent from the tale, so there is no sense of whether Jews were being singled out.
Things improve a little in the 20th century, the second half of the book. Here Sir Martin, best known as Winston Churchill’s official biographer, is on home turf, and he writes about the obvious effects of world wars, colonialism and the rise of Israel on the decline of Jewish-Muslim relations. There are some gripping moments in the eyewitness accounts of anti-Jewish riots in Cairo or Baghdad, but here again he remains largely silent on Muslim thinking and perceptions.
It is not clear whether the author was trying to avoid controversy or is just uninterested in anything but what Jews experienced. Either way, the extraordinary result is that not once does this book about Jews under Islam tackle the question of Muslim anti-Semitism head-on. (The phrase does not even appear in the index.)
By contrast, Mr Achcar’s “The Arabs and the Holocaust” looks at it in considerable detail. The book is a study of the evolving attitudes of four different political streams in the 20th-century Arab world: liberal Westernisers, Marxists, nationalists and pan-Islamists. The picture that emerges, especially in the years before the state of Israel, is a complex and nuanced one that rewards careful reading.
For instance, Arab Marxists in the 1930s found common ground with the then significant groups of Jewish anti-Zionists. Some Arab nationalists admired Zionism as an example even though they opposed the end result, and the more liberal ones welcomed a Jewish national home in Palestine, just not a Jewish state. Only the more extreme thinkers embraced the Nazis as enemies of the Jews; most saw them as racist colonialists. Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, the pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who is the chief bogeyman of many pro-Israel histories, comes across as a weak leader with far less influence than is usually ascribed to him. Even the deep anti-Semitism common in today’s Islamist groups like Hamas and Hizbullah was not, he argues, as marked in the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. By contrast, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who broke the Arab taboo on peace with Israel and paid for it with his life in 1981, was “a notorious Jew-hater”.
Mr Achcar is no apologist for prejudice, and at times harshly criticises what he sees as a decline in Arab intellectualism and good sense. He also rebukes those Arabs who stoke anti-Semitism by blurring the distinction between Jews and Zionists (though, as he points out, Zionists tend to blur it themselves). Unlike Sir Martin, though, he dismisses the Jews' dhimma status—perhaps a little too hastily—as irrelevant compared with the Arab responses to colonialism, Israel and other geo- political forces.
“The Arabs and the Holocaust” may prove hard going for the casual reader. But it is a refreshing and original study, showing clearly that Muslim anti-Semitism is neither universal, nor inevitable, nor subject to pat explanations
*IN HIS book "The Arabs and the Holocaust", Gilbert Achcar makes two little-known points about the naming of the Nazi genocide that I didn't have space for in my review in this week's issue.
The first is that "holocaust", the usual English name for it, comes from a Greek word, holokaustos, meaning "totally consumed by fire":
More precisely, it comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 1:3) and... refers to the ancient Israelites' practice of burning sacrificed animals as an expiatory offering... the burnt offering, or olah, is a variant of qorban, which means "sacrifical offering". In the Bible, the word olah is used only to describe animals that were to be entirely consumed by fire, which is why it was translated as "holocaust".
There is, in other words, a clear and somewhat controversial theological subtext to calling the genocide a holocaust (or, as it soon became, "the Holocaust"): it suggests that the murdered Jews were a sacrifice to God. Mr Achcar produces evidence that Elie Wiesel, the writer who did the most to popularise the word, did so in full knowledge of this subtext.
The second point is that name used in Hebrew for the Nazi genocide, shoah—which carries no sacrificial overtones—and the Arabic name for the loss of Palestine and the refugee crisis, nakba, are essentially the same word: both can be translated as "catastrophe". Hebrew and Arabic don't have capital letters, but they add the definite article—ha-shoah, al-nakba—to signify the uniqueness of each event.
So, even though the two events, one a genocide, the other a mass displacement, are clearly not in the same league, there is a symmetry in their naming and narrative, and hence in their perception, by the people who use them. For both peoples "the Catastrophe" is the worst event to have occurred in their history.
What's more, each side relies on its level of suffering to establish the legitimacy of its claims in the conflict—the Jews on showing that their tragedy was unique and justifies their taking of the land, the Palestinians on showing that their tragedy was so great that nothing can justify it. Even though, as Mr Achcar establishes, the Palestinians did not adopt nakba in imitation of shoah (as some Israeli academics have claimed), the parallel between the words no doubt helps drive this constant struggle between the two peoples, a struggle as much for the recognition of pain as for the land itself
The first is that "holocaust", the usual English name for it, comes from a Greek word, holokaustos, meaning "totally consumed by fire":
More precisely, it comes from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 1:3) and... refers to the ancient Israelites' practice of burning sacrificed animals as an expiatory offering... the burnt offering, or olah, is a variant of qorban, which means "sacrifical offering". In the Bible, the word olah is used only to describe animals that were to be entirely consumed by fire, which is why it was translated as "holocaust".
There is, in other words, a clear and somewhat controversial theological subtext to calling the genocide a holocaust (or, as it soon became, "the Holocaust"): it suggests that the murdered Jews were a sacrifice to God. Mr Achcar produces evidence that Elie Wiesel, the writer who did the most to popularise the word, did so in full knowledge of this subtext.
The second point is that name used in Hebrew for the Nazi genocide, shoah—which carries no sacrificial overtones—and the Arabic name for the loss of Palestine and the refugee crisis, nakba, are essentially the same word: both can be translated as "catastrophe". Hebrew and Arabic don't have capital letters, but they add the definite article—ha-shoah, al-nakba—to signify the uniqueness of each event.
So, even though the two events, one a genocide, the other a mass displacement, are clearly not in the same league, there is a symmetry in their naming and narrative, and hence in their perception, by the people who use them. For both peoples "the Catastrophe" is the worst event to have occurred in their history.
What's more, each side relies on its level of suffering to establish the legitimacy of its claims in the conflict—the Jews on showing that their tragedy was unique and justifies their taking of the land, the Palestinians on showing that their tragedy was so great that nothing can justify it. Even though, as Mr Achcar establishes, the Palestinians did not adopt nakba in imitation of shoah (as some Israeli academics have claimed), the parallel between the words no doubt helps drive this constant struggle between the two peoples, a struggle as much for the recognition of pain as for the land itself
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