Hat tip to Investigative Project on Terrorism, MEMRI and Squid
There has been much recent controversy lately (though not much in the mainstream media) about Egyptian leader Mohammed Morsi's anti-Semitic statements. Now we learn through MEMRI and IPT that Morsi's statements go back even further than we thought. I urge you to read this report and also read the links. They are disturbing.
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3897/additional-morsi-muslim-brotherhood-anti-semitic
Disturbing, but we should not really be shocked. Mohammed Morsi is not unique. He is not the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Morsi is of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. In spite of our government's reassurances about the Brotherhood, it takes little research to see they are fundamentalists when it comes to implementing Islam. Mohammed Morsi did not coin these references to Jews being "apes" and pigs". Neither did the Brotherhood. These and other hateful references come from the Koran, the Sunna, and the Hadith, the holy Islamic texts.
Sura 5.60
"Say (to them): "Shall I point out something to you something much worse than this (judging) by the treatment it received from Allah? Those who received the curse from Allah and His anger, those (are the people) of whom some He transferred into apes and swine, those who worshiped Evil and false gods-These are much worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path."
-As translated into English by Dr Syed Vickar Ahamed
Book of Signs Foundation, 3rd printing 2007.
(A version given out to visitors including me free by the Islamic Center of Orange County during last year's Open Mosque Day)
http://www.islam-watch.org/Misr/Bahrain-king-trashes-the-Koran-and-Sunnah-Jewish-envoy.htm
But the above link is anti-Jihadist. Let's go to a Muslim site called Alminbar.com for their views.
http://www.alminbar.com/khutbaheng/9022.htm
(I don't know anything about that site; perhaps, one of our Muslim readers can provide more information. For all I know, Alminbar.com is considered a lunatic site by mainstream Muslims.)
It is a historical fact that the Prophet Mohammed waged wars against Jews. Muslims do not dispute that. There may be disagreements on who were the aggressors and all that, but history is history.
This is the dilemma that Muslims living in the West must deal with. We have a Jewish population here, and we demand (or should be demanding) that anti-Semitism has no place in our society. To be fair, most Muslim leaders in America-even ones I have criticized on this blog- are not engaging in anti-Semitic rhetoric. ("Zionists" is the magic word.) In the Middle East, however, there is little disincentive for people like Yusuf al Qaradawi and Morsi to engage in inflammatory rhetoric.
This is important to remember when we come to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It is not really about land and who individually it belongs to. It is about religion. To Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the entire Holy Land belongs to Muslims. The Palestinians are convenient pawns, and you will note that surrounding Arab nations have shown scant regard for assisting and assimilating these Palestinian refugees over the decades. In addition, not all Palestinians are Muslims; some are Christians, and some of them side with the other Palestinians against Israel-witness George S Rishmawi, a Christian Palestinian in the West Bank who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement. If Israel should fall, the Rishmawis of "Palestine", who are useful now, will see the same fate as their co-religionists in Egypt and elsewhere. The sad fact is that under these fundamentalist leaders like Morsi, Israel is unacceptable because it is Jewish.
The goal is clear; the entire Holy Land and any other land that can be conquered must be Islamic. Again, Morsi and his ilk are not following some mad vision of "Lebensraum" like Hitler.
It is in the texts.
But let's be fair; there are passages in Christian texts and Jewish texts that can be considered bad. When I read the entire First Testament a decade ago and read about Mose's trek across the desert and how God destroyed thousands of his enemies to clear the way for Moses and his people, I interpreted that to mean that there was a big battle and Moses won. I also reject that passage about how a father should stone a disobedient son to death. Similarly, my life is not influenced by the Crusades and what happened 700 years ago in a faraway land, who the good guys were and who the bad guys were.
Last year, I heard MPAC official Maher Hathout, a man now in his eighties, who devotes much of his writings to these issues, say at an event I attended that many (troubling) things in the Koran were appropriate to the time and situation in which they were stated. If so, could we say that they are not appropriate to this time? If we can look at the wars of Mohammed vs non-Muslims, the time of Moses, and the Crusades and say, "It was all ancient history and should not apply to our relations today", are we not all better off?
I guess it depends on how much we want to follow the texts and apply them to our present lives.
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2 comments:
Gee, I have the solution to all of Morsi's Anti-Israel, anti-Zion and Anti-Jew hatred. Give him more F-16 jets and M-1 battle tanks from the U.S. stock pile. I am sure Obama will find a way, as he ignores the existential threat to Israel from a nukified Iran.
Squid
The translation you cite is dubious. Try Marmaduke Pickthall's The Meaning of the Glorious Koran. It is written by a convert of English origin, so it is more attuned to the nuances of English, and does not purport to be a "translation," since full translation of religious text from the original is impossible. (That's the same reason the Tanach can only be fully understood in the original Hebrew).
It is clear from Pickthall's volums that Muhammed was speaking of Jews, more specifically, the Jewish tribes of the Arabian peninsula, which he had some political and military disputes with. Apparently he expected his Jewish neighbors to immediately recognize his message as the ultimate expression of their own, and understandably, they didn't. Martin Luther experienced a similar disappointment.
Jews are not described wholesale as apes and pigs, there is a rather vague reference to some who were turned into apes and pigs, which presumably would not apply to those who are clearly in the bodies of humans.
Modern Islamist political rhetoric, like the rhetoric of dominion theology Protestants, and some of the more fanatical Jewish settler communities, twists what is available to it for immediate ends not supported by the original text.
It would be most fruitful to call them on the obvious discrepancies, rather than to agree with them that they are indeed the true representatives of the meaning of their faith.
The cited verses from Surah V did not prevent the four rashidun caliphs from eagerly accepting Jewish help in the conquest of Jerusalem from the corrupt Byzantines, granting Jews restored rights to enter the city (denied by Roman Christians after Constantine even more assiduously than by Roman pagans after the revolts of the first and second centuries), or reverently gathering such fragments of the Second Temple as could be found, and incorporating them into the mosque on the Temple Mount.
That's one reason Jews were oppressed by the Visigothic rulers of Iberia: they were considered a fifth column for the Muslims, and indeed, they had good reason to be exactly that. There were still Jews serving as admirals in the Ottoman navy 1000 years later.
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