We see a similar misunderstanding by numerous Muslims of the Quran’s description of those whom it considers to be disbelievers from among the People of the Book (Jews and Christians are meant here) as the “worst of creatures” (Al-Bayyinah 6), something which many Muslims cite to justify their hostility to Jews and Christians. Muslim exegetes, however, have differed in their interpretation of that verse, with Ibn Katheer saying that the reference is made only to those Christians and Jews who disregarded their holy scriptures, while Al-Qurtubi suggests that the verse in question refers only to Jews and Christians of that era, not necessarily to all Jews and Christians. Another verse that has convinced countless Muslims that Jews are their sworn enemies tells Muhammad that the most hostile people to Muslims are Jews and polytheists, and that the friendliest people to Muslims are Christians (Al-Ma’idah 82). Here again, we find that the said reference seems to be only to people of that time and place. Muhammad and his Muslim followers had major military battles with Jews and Arabian (supposedly) polytheists. By contrast, Christians posed no military challenge to Muhammad, given their very small size as a community and the fact that most of them resided in places far away from Mecca and Madina where Muslims were centred. As a matter of fact, historically, Christians in centuries past were far more hostile to Muslims than Jews were, especially during the Middle Ages. While relations between Muslims and Jews back then (in the Middle Ages) were not ideal, they were far better than Muslims’ or Jews’ relations with Christians. In fact, a good number of prominent Jewish scholars, such as Ignac Goldziher, wrote about the Jewish “golden era” with Muslims, and those scholars were up until very recently in history staunch defenders of Islam and Muslims in Europe. Even today, and in spite of Israel’s bitter confrontations with Islamists, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, Muslims who are citizens of the state of Israel and those who have permanent residence in that country enjoy many more rights than Muslim residents ever did in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. It was only with the advent of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment that European acceptance of Muslims started to spread.
One of the most prevalent Muslim beliefs about Jews is that they are schemers and connivers. A salient example given in support of their view is related to an incident in which Muhammad was said to have been bewitched by a Jewish man. This is alluded to in the Quran (Al-Falaq 4). According to seera and Quranic exegesis, a Jewish man by the name of Labeed bin Al-A’sam, from the tribe of Banu Zuraiq, managed to obtain Muhammad’s comb, along with strands of his hair that were trapped between the comb’s teeth. Labeed reportedly took the comb and the strands of hair and tied eleven knots around them before depositing everything at the bottom of a well. Muhammad later claimed that two angels had told him that it was Labeed who had bewitched him, and they also told him where to find the said comb. Muhammad then sent Ali bin Abi Talib, Zubair ibn Al-Awwam, and Ammar bin Yasir to the well. There, at the bottom of it, they found the comb, hair, and eleven knots. Muhammad later said that he had received two short suras from God (Al-Falaq, 5 verses, and An-Nas, 6 verses). He then started to recite those verses, and each time he recited a verse, one of the knots came undone, until he recited all eleven verses, which caused all eleven knots to come undone, and the spell on him was finally lifted. Interestingly, Labeed does not seem to have been held to account over this episode. Still, even if we assumed that the above-mentioned events happened in the same way we have been told, it would mean that just one man, not all Jews, should have been denounced for trying to bewitch Muhammad.
Another, more serious accusation levelled by some Muslims at Jews is founded upon a belief- not accepted by all Muslims- that Jews had something to do with the death of Muhammad. That belief is derived from some conflicting accounts in seera concerning a Jewish woman who apparently tried to murder Muhammad. It is said that when the Muslims fought against the Jews of Khaybar and triumphed, a Jewish woman from Khaybar was ordered to cook a meal for Muhammad and some of his followers. When Muhammad ingested the first mouthful of meat, the rest of the meat allegedly told him that it was poisoned. Muhammad summoned the Jewish woman who then confessed to the misdeed. When asked why she had poisoned the meat, the woman replied that Muhammad and his followers were responsible for the deaths of her father, husband, and uncle in that battle, as well as for the suffering of the people of Khaybar as a result of that conflict. It is reported in seera that shortly before Muhammad died, he told his wife Aisha that the acute physical pain he was feeling must have been caused by the aforementioned poisoning in Khaybar. However, this story seems to be unconvincing for two reasons: Firstly, the Muslim invasion of Khaybar took place in 628 A.D. Muhammad died in 632 A.D. It is very unlikely that the poison in the little bit of meat that he had reportedly swallowed would have taken four years before killing him. More importantly, such an account contradicts the Quran’s promise to Muhammad that God would protect him from the evil deeds of people (Al-Ma’idah 67).
An oft-cited hadith (sayings by Muhammad) has convinced a good number of Muslims of how much God apparently loathes Jews. According to this hadith, “The end times will not come until Muslims fight Jews, and Muslims kill them, and a Jew will hide behind rocks and trees, and rocks or trees will say, ‘O Muslim! O Servant of God! There is a Jew behind me! Come and kill him!’, except for the gharqad (nitraria, nitre bushes) which is a Jewish tree.” (Sahih Muslim, Kitab Al-Fitan Wa Ashrat Assa’a, No.2922). Muslim interpreters of hadith have connected this hadith to another in which Muhammad says that at the end of times, 70,000 of the Jews of Isfahan will follow the false Messiah in his battle with Jesus when the latter comes back as the true Messiah (Sahih Muslim, Kitab Al-Fitan Wa Ashrat Assa’a, No.2944). However, the latter hadith here, and the former one which is apparently connected with it, seems to condemn only 70,000 Jews from the Persian (now Iranian) city of Isfahan; it does not in any way condemn all Jews everywhere, across the ages.
We have seen, then, that the Quran’s condemnation of Jews is generally targeted only at those who had disobeyed God and the Torah, not at all Jews. In fact, the Torah itself and other books of the Jewish scripture are full of condemnation of disobedient Israelites, and so there is nothing strange about the Quran doing something similar. When Muslims think negatively of Jews, they tend to forget that Islam regards Jews with favour in various ways: Jews are seen as People of the Book. Belief in Judaism as a divinely inspired religion is an essential part of being a Muslim. There are in fact two verses in the Quran which state that God forgives not that anything be associated with him, but he forgives other than that of sins to whomever he wills (An-Nissa’ 48, 116). That means that as long as people are monotheists- and believers in Judaism certainly are- they may go to heaven if God wills it. There are two other Quranic verses which state that as long as Muslims, Jews, Christians, an Sabians believe in the oneness of God and in the hereafter and do good deeds, they shall have no cause to fear or grieve, namely in the world to come (Al-Baqarah 62; Al-Ma’idah 69). Moreover, although a very high number of Muslims claim that only followers of Islam will go to paradise- based on a Quranic verse which says that he who chooses a religion other than Islam, it will not be accepted from him and in the hereafter he shall be among the losers (Aal ‘Imran 85)- Muslim exegetes, such as Ibn ‘Abbas and Mujahid, say that the verse in question was revealed in respect of certain Arabs who had renounced Islam and left Madina for Mecca, something which shows that the prevalent Muslim belief that only Muslims go to heaven is misguided. This view is lent further support by the fact that the Quran usually refers to Muslims as mu’minoon (believers) or alladheena amanu (those who believe) (passim), while it uses words such as muslimoon and Islam to refer to the doctrine of monotheism, irrespective of one’s religion, rather than to Islam as we know it. This can be seen in a good number of verses (e.g., Aal ‘Imran 52, 67; Al-Baqarah 132; Yunus 84, 90). In those verses, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, and the Egyptian pharaoh could not have been Muslims in the Muhammadan sense, given that they had preceded him by many centuries, according to the Abrahamic religious narrative. As a result, what the above-mentioned verse (Aal ‘Imran 85) actually says is that he who chooses a doctrine other than that of monotheism, it will not be accepted from him and in the hereafter he shall be among the losers.
Islam’s acceptance of and respect for Judaism extends to include married life. The Quran gives permission to Muslims to eat Jewish food, and it allows Muslim men to marry Jewish women without the need for those women to convert to Islam (Al-Ma’idah 5), unlike the case with polytheistic women who must convert to Islam first before Muslim men can marry them (Al-Baqarah 221). This is particularly significant in view of a hadith in which a Muslim man asks Muhammad, “Who of all people is most worthy of my good treatment?” Muhammad says, “Your mother.” The man asks, “Then who?” Muhammad replies, “Your mother.” The man asks again, “Then who?” Muhammad answers, “Your mother.” The man then asks one final time, “Then who?” Muhammad answers, “Your father.” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Bab Birr Al-Walidane Wa Annuhuma Ahaqu Bihi 2548b). This means that a child whose father is Muslim and whose mother is Jewish has to be three times as dutiful to his Jewish mother as he is to his Muslim father. This hadith would not make any sense if all Jews were seen by Islam as infidels, untrustworthy, or deserving of God’s wrath. Interestingly, seera recounts an incident in which a Jewish wife of Muhammad’s, Safiyya bint Huyay, once complained to him that two of his other wives, Aisha and Hafsa, would often say in her absence, “We are better than Safiyya because we are the cousins of the Messenger of God.” Muhammad was apparently unhappy about that and said, “Say to them ‘How can you be better than I when my father is Aaron and my uncle is Moses?’ ”
Like other human beings around the world and throughout history, Jews are far from perfect. However, that is a far cry from peremptorily lambasting a religious and ethnic nation in its entirety. Hatred of all Jews is not only morally repugnant and rationally untenable; as we have seen, it appears to be comprehensively unjustifiable from a Quranic point of view. It is worthy of note that when we look at the number of Nobel prizes won by Muslims and Jews in various fields of knowledge like physics, chemistry, medicine/ physiology, economics, and literature, we find that Muslims (about 2 billion people) have won only 7 such prizes, while Jews (only about 16 million people) have won 214 of them. We can only conclude from this that here is a nation with incalculably valuable contribution to human civilization for which it deserves the world’s respect.
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Husam Dughman is a Libyan Canadian political scientist, religious thinker, linguist, and an expert on immigrants and refugees. He received his formal education in Libya and the UK. Mr. Dughman later worked as a university professor of political science in Libya. Due to confrontations with the Qaddafi regime, he resigned from his university position and subsequently worked in legal translation. Mr. Dughman has been working with new immigrant and refugee services in both Canada and the US since 2006.
Husam Dughman has published a book entitled Tête-à-tête with Muhammad. He has also written numerous articles on politics and religion. He has just completed the full manuscript of a book which he hopes to have published in the near future. The new book is an in-depth examination of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and the non-religious school of thought.
