Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013)
one whose coming was plainly foretold by the Torah, and it was clearly of vital importance to him that the Jews agree with his reading of the Torah. The rabbis of Medina asked embarrassing questions and pressed Muhammad on his theological claims. They denied that the Torah foretold his coming as a prophet, and they denied that an Arab could be a prophet in the Jewish tradition (pp. 239, 257). 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.[1] 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. Finally, he found reasons to crush them militarily and, at the end of his life, to order their expulsion (along with other non-Muslims) from the Arabian peninsula (pp. 523, 525, 689). Ibn Ishaq’s sira, echoing large portions of the Koran, leaves the reader with the distinct impression that any Jew who reads the Torah and refuses to convert to Islam is ipso facto a liar, and that the defining mark of Jews who refuse to convert to Islam is treachery, infidelity, and dishonesty. Surely this is one of the deepest roots of the anti-Jewish prejudice that persists to this day in Islamic societies.
After the Nazi Holocaust, many Christians began a serious effort to understand and overcome the awful legacy of Christian anti-Semitism. This effort included a re-examination and re-interpretation of the foundational documents of the Christian tradition, including the canonical Gospels themselves.[2] It is time for Muslims to subject their own tradition to
- ↑ Thus W. Montgomery Watt: “The most important aspect of the break with the Jews was the intellectual. The Jews were attacking the whole set of ideas on which Muhammad’s position was based. They declared that some of the things in the Qur’an contradicted the ancient scriptures in their hands, and must therefore be false; in that case they could not be a revelation and Muhammad could not be a prophet. This was very serious. If many of the Muslims thought that what the Jews were saying was true, the whole structure of the community so carefully built by Muhammad would crumble away… [Muhammad] needed the support of men who whole-heartedly believed in the religious aspect of his mission. The Jews were doing what they could to deprive him of such support, and as possessors of the scriptures they were able to act effectively.” W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman, pp. 114-115.
- ↑ See, for example, Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s 1995 Hebrew University lecture, “Antisemitism: The Historical Legacy and Challenge for Christians,” in Thomas A. Baima ed., A Legacy of Catholic-Jewish Dialogue: The Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Lectures (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2012), pp. 1-19. 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.
