Islamic Jerusalem: “We Will Drive the Jews into the Sea” – 3 of 3
The following is the final instalment of a three-part series of posts on the subject of “Islamic Jerusalem”, written by our latest associate author, Dr J. Hashmi . Use the article index below to read the previous parts.
The following is the final instalment of a three-part series of posts on the subject of “Islamic Jerusalem”, written by our latest associate author, Dr J. Hashmi.
Use the article index below to read the previous parts.
Article Index
- Part 1: Jewish Rule of Jerusalem [Prehistory to A.D. 70]*
- Part 2: Christian Rule of Jerusalem [A.D. 70 – 630]*
- Part 3: Muslim Rule of Jerusalem [A.D. 630 – 1095]*
- Part 4: The Crusades [A.D. 1095 – 1250]*
- Part 5: The Turks [A.D. 1250 – 1914]*
- Part 6: The British Mandate, Israel, and the Rise of Anti-Semitism [A.D. 1914 – Present]
- Part 7: Clarifying our Thesis: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
- Part 8: Conclusion
* Link to previous instalment.
Parts 6, 7 and 8 are presented below.
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Part 6: The British Mandate, Zionism, and the Rise of Anti-Semitism [A.D. 1914 – 1947]
Part 6a: The British Betray the Arabs
The British conspired to topple the Ottoman Empire. They struck a deal with the Arabs under Ottoman rule: if the Arabs revolted against the Ottomans, the British promised to return the favor by creating an independent and united Arab nation. The Arabs did their part, but the British reneged on their promise after the war was over:
During World War I the British induced the Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman Turks and thus join the Allied war effort. In return, the British pledged to facilitate the independence of the Arab East after the war. The British commitments to the Arabs were contained in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, which included specifications concerning the boundaries of the area designated the independent Arab state and explicitly encompassed Palestine. The Arabs kept their part of the bargain, significantly aiding the Allied cause. But the British subsequently promised Jewish Zionists to help them establish a homeland in Palestine and, moreover, agreed with France to carve up the Arab East into “protectorates” under French and British rule. The promise to the Zionists was contained in the Balfour Declaration, while the accord with France was known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement. These agreements contradicted each other and the original British promise to the Arabs.
(Israel and the American National Interest, by Cheryl A. Rudenberg, p.25)
Part 6b: Zionism and the Rise of Anti-Semitism
The united Islamic empire lay in ruins, the Caliphate abolished, and the land of Palestine—including Jerusalem—fell under British control. The Zionists established the Jewish Colonization Agency. (Colonialism in the twentieth century was still in vogue.) It was during this time period that the Jewish-Muslim relationship in Jerusalem soured. The Muslims became increasingly aware of the Western and Zionist colonial ambitions, which stirred consternation towards Jewry in general.
The argument of this author, however, is that this attitude is something profoundly new in history, and a result of the political situation in the region and not due to some intrinsic Anti-Semitism present in Muslims or Islam (as the Zionist author of The Fight for Jerusalem argues). One merely needs to look at the historical record to appreciate this. Never before were there calls for “driving the Jews into the sea”, despite the fact that the Muslims ruled the region for hundreds of years. It seems then that Anti-Semitism is a reaction to Zionism.
To this effect, Israeli historian Nissim Rejwan writes:
Parfitt’s account [of the Islamic attitude towards Jews] ends with the early 1880s. In the course of the three decades that followed, the Arabs of Palestine were to be made aware of the political ambitions of the Zionists. As he explained in a concluding paragraph, “The fears that were thus generated were converted…into the highly complicated and violent hostility that marked the attitude of Arab to Jew in the years to come.”
(Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A Pluralistic Perspective, by Nissim Rejwan, p.42)
Part 6c: The Triple Irony
In fact, it is an irony—lost on both Islamic extremists and Zionists alike—that the legendary Islamic heroes who captured Jerusalem—including Caliph Umar and Sultan Saladin—far from calling to “driving the Jews into the sea”, actually issued a call for the right of return for Jews. Another historical irony is that the Jews were driven out of Jerusalem by the Romans—and denied the right of return for hundreds of years—but in the contemporary age the (Zionist) Jews have emulated the same behavior of the Romans, by driving the Palestinians out of their homes and denying them the right of return. And perhaps a triple irony is the fact that they denied the right of return to the one group of people (the Muslims) who historically safeguarded the Jewish right of return.
Part 7: Clarifying our Thesis: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Part 7a: Life under Islamic Rule Not Perfect
A clarification is in order: nowhere is the author claiming that life for Jews (and Christians) under Islam was idyllic. One cannot deny that there were (relatively brief) periods of intense persecution of Jews. Furthermore, even in Islamic Spain or Ottoman Palestine, one must admit that the Muslim treatment of minorities would not live up to today’s postmodern standards. It would be disingenuous to claim otherwise. But it would be highly sophomoric to judge a people of the past by contemporary standards, and no serious academic would do such a thing. To do so would create the absurd situation wherein not a single society in history would be considered tolerant, an ironically intolerant (and unusually obtuse) view of the people of the past.
The only thesis furthered by this author is that the Muslims were historically very tolerant for those times, especially in comparison to the Christian West. It is important to establish this fact not to hammer the Christians over the head with it, but rather to negate the commonly held misconception amongst many Westerners of the Judeo-Christian culture that Muslims have historically been an intolerant people. This is such an important point to address that it is worth the risk of stepping on a few toes; bigotry rears its ugly head when people start thinking that an entire peoples are savage barbarians, which is what unfortunately many nowadays think of Muslims.
Part 7b: A Realistic Assessment
Rejwan sums it up best:
By way of conclusion, a word of caution is in order…It must be pointed out that the picture has not been uniformly so rosy and that instances of religious intolerance toward and discriminatory treatment of Jews under Islam are by no means difficult to find. This point is of special relevance at a time in which, following a reawakening of interest in the history of Arab-Jewish relations among Jewish writers and intellectuals, certain interested circles have been trying to…[question the] Judeo-Arabic tradition or symbiosis by digging up scattered pieces of evidence to show that Islam is essentially intolerant…and that Muslims’ contempt for Jews was even greater and more deep-seated than that manifested by Christians…
Such caricatures of the history of Jews under Islam continue to be disseminated by scholars as well as by interested publicists and ideologues. Indeed, all discussion of relations between Jews and Muslims…is beset by the most burning emotions and by highly charged sensitivities. In their eagerness to repudiate the generally accepted version of these relations (a version which, it is worthwhile pointing out, originates not in Muslim books of history but with Jewish historians and Orientalists in nineteenth-century Europe), certain partisan students of the Middle East conflict today seem to go out of their way to show that, far from being the record of harmonious coexistence it is often claimed to be, the story of Jewish-Muslim relations since the time of Muhammad was “a sorry array of conquest, massacre, subjection, spoilation in goods and women and children, contempt, expulsion–[and] even the yellow badge…”
Informed by a fervor seldom encountered in scholarly discourse, some of these latter-day historians have gone so far as to question even the motives of those European-Jewish scholars of the past century who virtually founded modern Oriental and Arabic studies and managed to unearth the impressive legacy of Judeo-Arabic culture, a culture that was undeniably an outcome of a long and symbiotic encounter between Muslims and Jews.
…[But] by the standards then prevailing–and they are plainly the only ones by which a historian is entitled to pass judgment–Spanish Islamic tolerance was no myth but a reality of which present-day Muslim Arabs are fully justified in reminding their contemporaries…Tolerance, then, is a highly relative concept, and the only sensible way of gauging the extent of tolerance in a given society or culture in a given age is to compare it with that prevailing in other societies and cultures in the same period…
The only plausible conclusion one could draw from the whole debate is that, while Jewish life in Muslim Spain–and under Islam generally–was not exactly the idyllic paradise some would want us to believe, it was far from the veritable hell that was the Jews’ consistent lot under Christendom.
(Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A Pluralistic Perspective, by Nissim Rejwan, pp.42-47)
Part 7c: Our Thesis in Simple Talk
As Rejwan’s academic discourse may be too pedantic for some to follow, we shall reiterate the above points by citing the words of an introductory level text. Rabbi Ted Falcon says (emphasis is ours):
In general, Jews tended to be better off in Islamic lands than Christian lands during the Middle Ages. Jews and Christians were both considered “Peoples of the Book”–worshiping the same God as Muslims and using holy scriptures–and were therefore protected under Islamic law. The Jewish focus on scholarship gained them admiration, and the Jews, who quickly learned to speak Arabic, were allowed to be a part of the robust intellectual life of the Islamic Empire…to the Jews, Islamic rule was actually a relief from the humiliating treatment they had gotten from the Christians…
Granted, not all Islamic leaders were the same. Whilst most of them were tolerant and ensured the security of life and property, every now and again there were massive forced conversions to Islam, property confiscation, and so on. However, as a whole, these persecutions were shorter in duration and less ferocious than had occurred, and were later to occur, in Christian lands.
(Judaism for Dummies, by Rabbi Ted Falcon, p.162)
Part 8: Conclusion
Part 8a: A Summary
While it is true that the standards for religious tolerance of the past pale in comparison to those in place today, it is necessary for us to properly emphasize the level of relative tolerance of the Islamic rule in order that we may contextualize the matter. One way to word it is to say that the Jews flourished more under the banner of Islam than in any other time period in history. We read (emphasis is ours):
In Spain, where Jews had lived [under Christian rule] for centuries, their lot had been unhappy; the Christian Visigothic kings were harsh and merciless. When the Muslims came to the Iberian Peninsula early in the eighth century, not only did they bring the Jews of Spain relief from their oppressors but–in the words of Isidore Epstein–”also encouraged among them a culture which in richness and depth is comparable to the best by any people at any time.”
The majority of the Jewish people at that time came under Arab rule, and the long and brilliant period of Arab-Jewish symbiosis began–a period that has been described as the most flourishing in Jewish history, and whose significance for the Jews and for Judaism to this day cannot be exaggerated. In his book Judaism and Islam, the Cambridge historian and Orientalist Erwin Rosenthal states, “the Talmudic age apart, there is perhaps no more formative or positive period in our long and chequered history than that under the empire of Islam from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.“
(Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A Pluralistic Perspective, by Nissim Rejwan, pp.48)
Part 8b: The Importance of this Understanding
It is important for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to recognize this tolerant attitude of Islamic rule. For Jews and Christians this knowledge will prevent overly simplistic and bigoted assessments of the conflict in the Middle East, analyses which seek only to demonize territorial rivals. The historical record does not at all indicate that the Muslims have—as the former Israeli ambassador alleged—a historic desire to drive Jews and Christians into the sea. Jewish Zionists and Christian neoconservatives cannot at all use this line of attack with any semblance of academic integrity; it would be a case of throwing stones from a glass house.
For Muslims, knowledge of the historical tolerance of their predecessors sets a good precedent, one that would help to curb the unhelpful rhetoric of Islamic extremists who call for the “driving of the Jews into the sea.” The Muslims consider Palestine as occupied land; they have witnessed the plight of the Palestinian people for some sixty odd years. A feeling of intense emotionalism—and desire for vengeance—can naturally spiral out of control. Yet, these Muslims should remember their exemplar, Sultan Saladin, who—even though the Crusaders had persecuted the Muslims in Jerusalem for two hundred years—was merciful and kind in response.
Part 8c: A Possible Benefit to this Understanding
Rejwan explains how this Muslim awareness of the past could result in a very beneficial self-fulfilling prophecy:
William I. Thomas, one of the pioneers of American sociology, laid it down that if people “define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Paraphrasing this famous theorem, one could say about history and historiography that if a group or a people chooses to interpret its history in a certain manner, the result most likely would be that members of that group or people would behave in a manner consistent with that interpretation.
(Israel’s Place in the Middle East: A Pluralistic Perspective, by Nissim Rejwan, p.47)
If we educate Muslims on their tolerant past, it is more likely that they will act tolerantly in the present, as a way and means of not only living up to their respected forbearers, but also of emulating their own self-perception.