“O Allah! Destroy anyone who inflicts injustice on your slaves, O the Lord of the Worlds! O Allah! Count their number; slay them one by one and spare not one of them.”
And:
“O Allah! Destroy anyone who killed Muslims, O Allah! Destroy anyone who displaced the sons of the Muslims, O Allah! Count their number; slay them one by one and spare not one of them, O Allah! Purify Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews!”
The leader of the Jewish Defence League of Canada has filed a complaint against the imam of a Toronto mosque who called for the murder of Jews during a sermon.
http://www.cjnews.com/news/canada/jdl-leader-files-hate-complaint-imam-urged-killing-jews
“Neither I, Masjid Toronto or the congregation harbour any form of hatred toward Jews and so I wish to apologize unreservedly for misspeaking during prayer last Ramadan,”
In a statement Feb. 21, the MAC said a “a junior employee” at the mosque had added “inappropriate supplications, in Arabic without authorization, and in contravention [of] MAC’s code of conduct.”
This is pretty lame to put it mildly. What was said was said. Period. This is what is coming out of the mouths of too many imams around the world from the Middle East to Europe to Canada and yes, to the US as well.
And they are not making this up out of thin air. This comes from the Koran and the hadith.
It would be difficult to make a credible claim that the words were subject to various interpretations. They are rather specific. Not unlike the words in the Gospel of John which most Jewish scholars also describe as viciously anti-Semitic.
ReplyDeleteThe words are from hadith, not from the Qu'ran, and there is a difference. Hadith are not the words of the prophet, but the words of various later writers in various cultures and under various political leadership, trying to reinvent what the prophet should have said or meant according to the desires of the writer or their political patron.
History records that Jews cooperated avidly with the Rashidun Caliphs, and were allowed for the first time in centuries into Jerusalem, from which the Roman and Byzantine authorities, pagan and Christian, had banned them. The builders of the mosque on the Temple Mount reverently gathered all the fragments of the Temple they could find (from the destruction wrought by the Romans) in order to incorporate them prominently into the mosque.
The Fatamids, the Almohades, and Gary's bete noir, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, were anti-Jewish for various mystical or more prosaic reasons. A Sephardic Jewish refugee from Spain served as admiral of the Ottoman fleet.
The hadith are the quoted words and traditions of Mohammad as passed down from generation to generation. There are strong hadith and weak hadith according to the scholars depending on how reliable they judge them to be.
ReplyDeleteAnd depending on which scholar desires to classify this or that haddith as strong or weak. Its a bit like pointing out that John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas have significant differences. Or arguing about whether the words in the Gospel of John are or are not hostile to Jews as Jews. They are not the quoted words and traditions of Mohammed... those make up the Koran. Haddith are what someone later on thought to suggest or impute had been said by Mohammed, kind of like the crows plucking out the eyes of the thief on one side of Jesus who made fun of him rather than praying to him -- as depicted in Mel Gibson's movie.
ReplyDelete"They are not the quoted words and traditions of Mohammed... those make up the Koran."
ReplyDeleteSiarlys, what a profound statement you make. Muslims believe the Koran is the word of Allah as transmitted to Mohammed by the archangel Gabriel. Of course, most critics of Islam don't believe that. They think that the Koran is the words of Mohammad. Do we agree on that?
There is a close correlation between hadith and sunna, which I find a bit confusing.
Yes, I believe we do agree on that. And I'm agnostic on whether Mohammed did or did not get a visit from the angel Gabriel. No religious tradition can offer firm evidence on such claims.
ReplyDeleteIts worth noting that the Koran was pulled together after Mohammed died, from whatever notes or recollections people could come up with.
But the haddith are mythography tossed together in later centuries, ex post facto. They may be revered, but they are not particularly authoritative on What All Muslims Believe Because They Are Muslims.
To many of us there is very little authoritative in Islam, but that is another story. Over centuries, Islamic scholars have spent and continue to spend a lot of time researching the hadith to decide which are "strong" and which are "weak' based on many factors. We should pay more attention to what the leading schools of thought say like Buchari etc and the experts at Al Azhar University. If they think Mohammad talked about the trees and stones calling out to Muslims to kill the Jew hiding behind them on the Day of Atoneme, then I consider that part of Islamic teaching. It seems that that one has "passed muster".
ReplyDeleteHatred of Jews and Christians is deeply embedded in Islamic teaching. It cannot be denied. More importantly, it's not just dusty old texts that nobody cares about any more. It is being acted on today and preached in too many mosques.