Joseph Spoerl

“ According to Ibn Ishaq, the Jews of Muhammad’s day had abandoned stoning for adultery. Their failure to stone adulterers is presented as yet another example of how they deny, ignore, and distort the contents of their own scriptures and violate their covenant. In one of the several versions of this story recounted by Ibn Ishaq, when presented with a man and woman caught in adultery, Muhammad asked for a Torah (to determine the divinely prescribed penalty for adultery) . A rabbi held out a Torah, but with his hand covering over the verse of stoning. ”

“ Abdullah kept his conversion a secret and went to Muhammad and said, “The Jews are a nation of liars and I wish you would take me into one of your houses and hide me from them. Then ask them about me so that they may tell you the position I hold among them before they know that I have become a Muslim.” Muhammad did just this, and the Jews confirmed that Abdullah was their respected leader and rabbi. Abdullah then jumped from his hiding place and exhorted the Jews as follows:
O Jews, fear God and accept what He has sent you. ”

“ A group of polytheists came to Muhammad and made this proposal: “Muhammad, come let us worship what you worship, and you worship what we worship. [....] If what you worship is better than what we worship we will take a share in it, and if what we worship is better than what you worship, you can take a share of that” (p. 165) . Ibn Ishaq makes it clear that Muhammad’s response was an emphatic rejection of any compromise between strict monotheism and the polytheism of the Quraysh. Sura 109 is not an endorsement of religious tolerance, then, but a rejection of syncretism. ”

“ In his radio broadcasts for Nazi Germany, the founding father of the Palestinian Arab national movement, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, drew heavily on the Islamic tradition to craft his vicious anti-Semitic propaganda, telling his audience “Every Moslem knows that Jewish animosity to the Arabs dates back to the dawn of Islam. Every Moslem knows they opposed and hurt the prophet [...] So that the Koran says ‘You shall find that the most hostile people are the Jews’ [cf. Koran 5:82] .” ”

“ After the move to Medina in 622, Muhammad was at war with the pagan Quraysh of Mecca. His authority as a political and military leader, and thus his survival, depended on his followers accepting him as a prophet receiving authentic divine revelations. The Jews, due to the moral weight of the Hebrew Bible and the literacy of their rabbis, thus posed the single-greatest ideological threat to Muhammad and the nascent Islamic state. [56] According to Ibn Ishaq, he worked to discredit them by repeatedly calling them liars whose claims about their own scriptures were not to be trusted. ”

“ An interesting aspect of Ibn Ishaq’s commentary on Sura 2 is his treatment of the famous verse 256, which says “there shall be no compulsion in religion.” According to Ibn Ishaq this verse was cited by Muhammad in a letter to the Jews of Khaybar as follows: “...Do you find in what He [God] has sent down to you that you should believe in Muhammad? If you do not find that in your scripture then there is no compulsion upon you. ‘The right path has become plainly distinguished from error’ [note omitted] so I call you to God and His prophet” (p. 256) . ”

“ A final detail in Ibn Ishaq’s discussion of Muhammad’s policies vis-à-vis the Jews has to do with the famous jizya verse in the Koran, 9:29:
Fight those who do not believe in God and the last day and forbid not that which God and His apostle have forbidden and follow not the religion of truth from among those who have been given the scripture until they pay the poll tax out of hand being humbled... ”

“ The moral of the story is that Christians (like Jews) who are faithful to their own scriptures will convert to Islam as soon as it is presented to them. ↑ Ibn Ishaq even asserts that the polytheists of Mecca knew that Muhammad was telling them the truth, “but envy prevented them from admitting his truth” (pp. 140-1) . So Jews, Christians, and polytheists alike are portrayed as dishonest when they reject Muhammad’s message: the only honest non-Muslims are the ones who convert to Islam. ”

“ A few years after the Second World War, one of the most important theoreticians of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, penned an essay entitled “Our Struggle Against the Jews” in which he traces the struggle back to the life of Muhammad: “Our community is concerned about Jewish deception and plotting: ‘O People of the Book, Why do you wittingly cover the truth with falsehood and thereby hide the truth?’ [cf. Koran 3:70-71] This is a characteristic of People of the Book, which Muslims must understand and take warning from: deception and plotting [...] ”

“ Here Ibn Ishaq stresses two things. The first is that the revenue to be raised from the poll tax imposed on the people of the book is to compensate the Muslims for the funds lost by the exclusion of the polytheists from the pilgrimage to the Kaba in Mecca (as per Koran 9:28: “The polytheists are nothing but unclean, so let them not approach the sacred mosque after this year [...] If you fear poverty God will enrich you from His bounty”) . ”

“ Ibn Ishaq also portrays Muhammad’s closest followers conveying the same message: Abu Bakr, upon entering a Jewish school, called upon the rabbi “to fear God and become a Muslim because he [the rabbi] knew that Muhammad was the apostle of God who had brought the truth from Him and that they would find it written in the Torah and the Gospel” (p. 263) .
Some verses in the Koran that seemingly strike a conciliatory and tolerant tone regarding the Jews take on a very different meaning in Ibn Ishaq’s gloss. ”

“ Ibn Ishaq mentions several specific accounts of Jews in Arabia right before the time of Muhammad predicting the coming of a prophet with Muhammad’s attributes, only to reject Muhammad out of “wickedness and envy” when they actually encountered him (pp. 93-95) . One of these accounts quotes the Koran 2:89: “And when a book from God came to them confirming what they already had [...,] when what they knew came to them, they disbelieved it. The curse of God is on the unbelievers” (p. 93) . ”

“ Moreover, recent polling data from the Pew Research Center shows very high levels of anti-­Jewish prejudice across the Muslim world. [15] Muslim anti-­Semites have certainly borrowed freely from Western anti-Semitic works such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, [16] but, as the aforementioned scholars show, they have also mined the Islamic tradition itself for raw materials with which to craft anti-­Semitic propaganda. A full understanding of Islamic anti-Semitism thus requires not only a survey of current events, but an understanding of the Islamic tradition and its treatment of Jews. ”

“ It is important to remind ourselves that in traditional Arab culture, honor is of central importance, and being forced “to buy protection from a more powerful tribe [...] seriously diminished one’s honor.” ”

“ A] ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not (Qur’an 3:113) .” [44] The leader of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini, in his 1970 “Program for the Establishment of an Islamic Government,” asserted: “We see that the Jews (may God curse them) have meddled with the text of the Koran and have made certain changes in the Korans they have printed in the occupied territories. It is our duty to prevent this treacherous interference [... T] he Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam...” ”

“ He that tampers with the gift of God after it is bestowed on him shall find that God is stern in retribution.”
3:70-71 “People of the Book! Why do you deny God’s revelations when you know that they are true? ”

“ Jews] is a war of religion and faith.” Far from distancing himself from this introduction, the Mufti went on to recite a hadith recounted by both Bukhari and Muslim in which Muhammad predicts the extermination of the Jews by the Muslims at the end of time. [47] The talk was broadcast by the official Palestinian Authority television station. On Aug. 27, 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood website published an article by an Al-Azhar University lecturer and Muslim Brotherhood member, Hussein Shehata, in which he called upon “those who fast [during Ramadan...] ”

“ Those are the righteous....” On Ibn Ishaq’s interpretation, these verses refer only to a small group of Jews who had converted to Islam: Abdullah bin Sallam, Thalaba bin Saya, and Usayd bin Saya (p. 262) . [32] In other words, the message is that the only good Jews are those who convert to Islam. Ibn Ishaq’s influence can be traced centuries later in one of the most respected commentaries on the Koran, the Tafsir of Ibn Kathir (1301-1373) . Ibn Kathir writes of verses 3:113ff:
Muhammad bin Ishaq and others...said ”

“ On the removal of anti-Semitic language from Roman Catholic religious education materials, see Robert D. McFadden, “Sister Rose Thering, Nun Dedicated to Bridging Gap with Judaism, Dies at 85,” The New York Times, May 8, 2006, p. A21. ↑ From The Koran, trans. N.J. Dawood (London: Penguin Books, 1999) . ”

“ Scribner, 1936) , p. 192. ↑ Koran verses that accuse Jews or “people of the book” of distorting or lying about their scriptures include the following: 2:59, 2:75, 2:79, 2:89, 2:101, 2:140, 2:146, 2:159, 2:160, 2:174, 2:211, 3:70-71, 3:78, 3:187, 5:12-15, 5:41, 6:91, 13:36. (See Appendix for text.) All of these but one (6:91) come from Medinan suras, consistent with Ibn Ishaq’s narrative, according to which Muhammad had relatively little contact with Jews in Mecca before the hijra. ↑ See Joseph S. Spoerl, “Islam and War: Tradition vs. Modernity” Comparative Islamic Studies 4 (2008) , pp. ”