Wilders’ Political Propaganda

Geert Wilders has kept his word. He has circulated his film Fitna before April 1 and has, as he puts it, been ‘properly’ restrained. The film, which nevertheless appeared unexpectedly on the Internet on Thursday, is indeed not as shocking as expected during the hyped-up prelude to the premiere.

So the film seems like an anticlimax. It goes no further than making suggestive comments: the suggestion that the Koran is the source of all the violence in the world; the suggestion that Islam is a threat to everyone’s freedom, like Hitler and Stalin. But in Fitna, the Koran is not destroyed and the bomb in the prophet’s turban, drawn by the Danish cartoonist, doesn’t quite explode.

Has Wilders been successful in giving an example of his political and artistic skills with Fitna? Certainly not when it comes to his artistic capacity. Wilders doesn’t have enough creative talent and is sloppy in his approach.

This might still prove a problem and he will probably have to explain himself before the courts. For example he used material from the Danish cartoonist without asking permission and wrongly said a photograph of a rapper was the murderer of film-maker Theo van Gogh. And he has dragged others along with him – proof of a stunning lack of responsibility. The Dutch public prosecution department is also looking into whether Fitna incites hatred in the legal sense.

Freedom of expression, one of the fundamental concepts of every democratic state, can cope with this amateurish attack. This confidence is confirmed by the muted reactions to the film to date. Earlier prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende had almost precipitated a sort of emergency by using the word ‘crisis’. But when the hour of reckoning arrived, the prime minister limited himself to a declaration in which he said the government ‘regretted’ the film.

Representatives from Islamic organisations used a similar tone. Some reacted completely laconically. The question now is whether Fitna will be seen in the same way in less articulate circles in the Netherlands and abroad. After all, action and reaction belong together. Governments and individual agitators could use the film as an excuse to get even for other things. But the calm way the film has been received up to now gives hope.

Both left and right-wing politicians have dismissed the film as old hat. They saw ‘nothing new’ in the footage. But such comments show a misunderstanding of Wilders’ political goal. He doesn’t want to bring new insights or promote dialogue. Fitna is just a weapon in his propaganda war. His politics stand or fall with the concept of the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. In this sense Wilders hasn’t done himself or the citizens of the Netherlands a service. And that too must be said in public.

//spiegel online//

Is Islam Really Stuck in the 12th Century on Women’s Rights?

Apparently, they’re a couple of decades behind the “liberal” West, and not so stuck after all.

By Joshua Holland

Before 9/11/01, the media relegated stories about women in Islamic societies to page B27, below the fold. Ever since 9/12/01, those same stories have screamed from the front pages in 100-point type. The shift in discourse coincided with the launch of Bush’s global “War on Terror,” when various hawks began using the plight of women in Islam to illustrate the supposed perfidy of our “enemies,” and to justify a series of military “interventions” — invasions — by Western powers.

In the United States, there’s now an almost universally held belief that most women in Islamic societies face wretched persecution and that Islam itself is wholly to blame. But there’s scant empirical evidence to support the claim — mostly, we’re treated to detailed reports of horrific abuses in theocratic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite the fact that just six percent of the Muslim world live in those two countries. If you ask average Americans how they came to their beliefs about how badly women suffer in Islamic societies, most will reply that “everyone knows it.”

But I’ve seen no empirical data to suggest that an Islamic majority itself correlates with the subordination of women better than other co-variables like economic development, women’s ability to serve in government, a political culture that values the rule of law or access to higher education. In other words, you can use a comparison of women’s status in Saudi Arabia and Sweden to make an intellectually weak argument for Western superiority, but there’s little support for the notion that women living in “traditional” Islamic cultures enjoy a lower social status than those in orthodox Christian, Jewish or Hindu communities, to name a few examples. Think of the perfectly backwards Eastern Orthodox Church, the largest Christian communion in the world. Or consider the country where women may be brutalized more terribly than in any other, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is 70 percent Christian and 10 percent Muslim. Or go to Utah, where tens of thousands of Mormon fundamentalists believe that women are literally the property of their fathers or husbands. Of course, Mormon fundamentalists are the exception that proves the endless benevolence and equality of the West, while whatever despicable caricature of justice perpetrated on a woman by the House of Saud is breathlessly recounted as emblematic of Islamic culture as a whole.

Comparing the “Muslim world” to the rest of the world poses an intellectual problem — how does one even look at the role of Islam in a society, specifically, rather than dozens of other variables that might influence women’s outcomes?

I’d expect, for example, the structure of a country’s economy to play a far greater role in determining women’s status than the religion of its people. There’s quite a bit of research showing that in service and manufacturing economies — those of wealthier states — women enjoy a great deal of personal freedom and autonomy, civil and political rights and access to higher education. That’s because of the high value of their labor outside the home, in the workforce. Women earning their own bread out in the working world demand, and require, full political rights and legal protections. In poorer economies, most of which have large agricultural sectors and many of which rely on extractive enterprises — oil, mining, etc. — women tend to suffer a much lower social status, because their labor is more valuable coerced and sequestered close to home. That’s a structural, rather than a “Clash of Civilizations” explanation of women’s varying outcomes in different countries. It’s the latter view that I find little evidence to support.

None of this is a defense of Islam, or women’s place within it — I have little love for religion, any religion, and certainly no desire to defend any religious rites or customs. It’s about our loose definitions of the problem and tendency to idealize the “liberal” West.

March 8 is International Women’s Day, and a new global opinion poll was released to mark the occasion. The results will no doubt come as a surprise to many …

According to a new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 16 nations from around the world, there is a widespread consensus that it is important for “women to have full equality of rights,” and most say it is very important. This is true in Muslim countries as well as Western countries.

In nearly all countries, most people perceive that in their lifetime women have gained greater equality. Nonetheless, large majorities would like their government and the United Nations to take an active role in preventing discrimination.

Support for equal rights is robust in all Muslim countries. Large majorities say it is important in Iran (78%), Azerbaijan (85%), Egypt (90%), Indonesia (91%), Turkey (91%) and the Palestinian territories (93%).

That’s no surprise to me, but I wouldn’t have bought into the “Yellow Peril” or “Communist Menace” narratives of earlier generations either. The U.S. political class did not suddenly develop an abiding concern for women’s equality in a vacuum. Like the promotion of human rights during the Cold War, there is a geopolitical goal being served. The United States has been in a state of permanent war since the 1940s — when not in a “hot” (real) war, we are, as a society, still under a constant cloud of threat, and our political leaders are all too happy to advance that narrative as long as it plays well politically. But it’s not enough to simply be under some ill-defined “threat” from ordinary rivals — that would just be basic geopolitics — we’re in a permanent fight for our very existence from forces that are wholly pernicious and bent on nothing less than our total destruction.

That’s become a central aspect of American political culture. We had a seamless transition from World War II to Cold War to Drug War to War on Terror, and in every instance, the unadulterated evil of our opponents has been a consistent theme, as has been our ability to turn a blind eye to the same offenses when perpetrated by the United States or our allies.

And now our existential enemies are the spooky brown people of the Muslim world, with their frightening and alien habits and supposed tendency towards “Islamofascism.” The problem with that storyline is clear: the Western, predominantly Christian world has far more economic and political influence than the “Muslim world” — much of which escaped the yoke of colonialism just in the past 50-75 years — and, more significantly, it has hundreds of thousands of troops on the soil of several predominantly Muslim countries, whereas the reverse does not obtain. In other words, the “threat” of an Islamic takeover of the West is as realistic as the threat of my sweet grandmother beating the Hell out of Mike Tyson.

Enter the endless — and relatively recent — fascination with the plight of women in Islamic societies. The complete perfidy of Islam — its supposed backwardness, slavish fundamentalism, brutality against the weak and, especially, expansionist tendencies — is necessary for (and perfectly suited to) the global war-on-whatever narrative, and therefore, I suggest, worthy of special scrutiny.

Consider for a moment the “Islam is stuck in the 12th century” narrative so popular now in the mainstream discourse — a narrative for which women’s civic participation is deemed a vital benchmark. The problem isn’t that Islam is being described unfairly, the problem lies with the implication that the “West” made so much progress in the 13th century. The truth is that universal suffrage came to Iran in 1979, five years before women in Liechtenstein got the vote. It came to Bahrain in 2002, 12 years after the Swiss Supreme Court ordered the stubborn Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden to accept women’s suffrage. Portuguese women got the vote in 1976, Swiss women in 1971 — both in my lifetime — and in my baby-boomer mother’s lifetime, women in Italy, Belgium and Japan first got the franchise.

As far as women’s political participation goes, parts of the Muslim world — no, it’s not monolithic — are a few decades, not centuries, behind parts of the West. Is there evidence that the Islamic world is “stuck”? Not at all; in this young century, suffrage has been extended to women in Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE. Active women’s rights movements exist in every country on the planet; women were never given rights anywhere without a fight.

And when comparing apples and apples — among economically developed Western democracies — the United States has very little standing to criticize anyone else about the status of women. We rank 71st in the world in terms of the proportion of women serving in our legislature, with just 16 percent. That’s significantly worse not only than the European countries, it’s also a poorer showing than Sudan, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan.

According to the Wall Street Journal, women with similar experience and qualifications earn 16 percent less than their male counterparts worldwide; in the United States, the gender “earnings gap” is 22 percent. A study by researchers at the University of California found that women occupied only 11 percent of the seats on corporate boards in the oh-so-progressive state of California and held about one in 12 executive jobs. And, as I’ve written before, while the American economy has seen enormous benefits from large numbers of women entering the work force, our corporate culture has done far less than just about every other country — including supposedly “backward” states — to adapt to today’s work force:

According to Harvard’s Project on Global Working Families, the United States is one of only five countries out of 168 studied that doesn’t mandate some form of paid maternal leave. The only other advanced economy among those five was Australia’s, where women are guaranteed an entire year of unpaid leave. That puts the United States — the wealthiest nation on the planet — in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.

So you may have come a long way, Western Baby, but you’re not there yet, or even close.

The bottom line here is that increasing women’s civic, political and economic participation is a good fight, and an incredibly significant one. Focusing primarily on the status of women in Islamic countries to rid ourselves of the stigma of our own inequalities or to justify Western hegemony over the rest of the world is not.

//alternet//

Anti-Muslim sentiment surfaces in attacks on Obama

By Michael Conlon

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The controversy caused by a photograph of Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama dressed in turban-topped African garb points to deeper anti-Muslim sentiment in U.S. society, some observers believe.

Ever since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington Arabs generally and Muslims in particular have become the No. 1 villain in movies and television, according to Jack Shaheen, author of “Guilty – Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11.”

“There’s no balance. It makes as much sense as projecting Asian or African-Americans as terrorists,” he said.

One of the most disturbing trends, he said, is that what started in Hollywood movies spread to television, and has gone from Arabs to Muslims in general.

“It’s the fact that he’s black, let’s be blunt about it,” and that the Somali tribal garb in the picture taken when Obama was on a visit to Kenya, his father’s homeland, reminds people of Muslim dress, Shaheen said.

The Obama campaign accused the campaign of rival Democrat Hillary Clinton of “the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering” when the photograph of the Illinois senator, turned up on a Web site this week.

The Clinton campaign denied releasing the photo.

Obama, a Christian, has fought a whispering campaign from fringe elements that say he is a Muslim. The Democratic front-runner’s middle family name — Hussein — has been used by some to draw a link between him and late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“But it’s interesting,” Shaheen said, “no one has said so what? What if he were a Muslim?”

“PLAIN BIGOTED”

Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations, said the photograph incident sent a poor message to any Muslim growing up in the United States with hopes of running for president.

“It goes against all that I advocate that the mere rumor of a person being a Muslim — let alone actually being one — could be a tool to destroy political aspirations,” he said in a commentary in the Chicago Tribune.

“When it comes to Muslims, the divisive rhetoric coming out of this year’s election ranges from the exclusionary to the just plain bigoted,” he said, adding that neither Obama nor any other candidate had adequately addressed the anti-Muslim climate.

Rehab said the photograph of Obama will be discounted by a large chunk of the electorate. “What I’m seeing now is a sense of cynicism .. you’ve had seven years of this crap,” he said.

“It is a sign of America’s progress that Obama is not eliminated from the public’s consideration because of his race,” remarked Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page in a recent commentary in that newspaper.

“Yet he is vulnerable to other prejudices,” he added, and impressions can tip the balance among those who are undecided.

Further attacks focusing on religion and identity seem likely as Obama becomes the favorite to win the Democratic nomination and compete in the November general election.

The Tennessee Republican Party this week put out a news release featuring the Obama photo, headlined “Anti-Semites for Obama” and referring to the Democrat as “Sen. Barack Hussein Obama.”

via//Reuters

related//Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post,  IPS

[Video] Archbishop Calls for Some Sharia Law in Britain

he archbishop of Canterbury has called for a limited application of Sharia, or Islamic, law in Britain, winning immediate praise from British Muslims, but immediate rejection from Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s spokesman.

Obama’s not a Muslim, but why should it matter?

Barack Obama is not a Muslim.

We know this because he has told us so.

We know it because there is no credible evidence to suggest otherwise.

We know it despite a campaign of lies and whispers from various bloggers, pundits and head cases.

Barack Obama is not a Muslim. But, what if he were?

Same guy, same charisma, same inspirational idealism. But also, a Muslim. Not a crazy Muslim. Not a guy prone to strapping bombs to his chest in hopes of meeting virgins in heaven. A Kareem Abdul-Jabbar-type Muslim. A Dave Chappelle, Ahmad Rashad, Shaquille O’Neal-type Muslim. A guy you like and admire who just happened to be, you know … Muslim.

Would it matter? Should it?

The question bears answering because of the creepy, are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been attitude toward Islam that seems to be seeping into the public dialogue lately. As in that campaign of lies and whispers that keeps showing up in my inbox — claims that Obama won’t salute the flag, took his oath of office on a Quran, belongs to a terror cell and other assorted idiocy.

NBC News anchor Brian Williams has apparently been getting the same e-mails. In moderating a recent Democratic debate, he asked Obama about rumors “that you are trying to hide the fact that you’re a Muslim … “

The senator laughed a heard-that-a-few-times-before laugh. Then he replied that he is a Christian, that he is a victim of Internet rumor, and that he trusts the American people to “sort out the lies from the truth.”

What bothered me is that, by its phrasing, Williams’ question presupposed there is something wrong with being a Muslim. And Obama’s answer left the presupposition unaddressed.

What if he were a Muslim? What then?

A 2007 Pew Research Center survey found that 43 percent of us have a favorable opinion of Muslims (make it Muslim Americans and the number rises to 53 percent). Which may sound not so bad, except when you compare it with favorable ratings of other religious groups. Jews, for instance, are at 76 percent. Even evangelical Christians manage 60. And that ranking for Muslims represents a 5-point drop since 2004.

It’s no mystery why the nation’s opinion of Muslims is becoming less favorable. In a word, terrorism. And, frankly, Americans are right to fear Muslim fanatics who embrace violence as a means of getting what they want.

But see, the key word there is not Muslim. It’s fanatic. Yet some of us still think Muslim is the brand name for crazy. Me, I think the only difference between religious fanatics here and in the Middle East is that Middle Eastern nations tend to be theocratic (i.e., the word of the holy book has the force of law) and to be intolerant — sometimes, violently so — of dissent. So no one dares tell them no.

But if Pat Robertson, to name an American Christian fanatic not quite at random, had the force of law behind him and the ability to silence those who disagree, don’t you think he would be as scary as the scariest ayatollah in Iran?

I do. That’s why I would never want him to be president. Which is not quite the same as saying I’d never want a Christian to be president. I just prefer my presidents — regardless of their religion — reasonable. And sane. That seems a fair standard.

Yet it’s a standard some of us now discard. The ongoing whisper campaign against Barack Obama, against his very American-ness, is a shameful appeal to ignorance and fear. Against that, I offer a simple statement the world’s most famous and well-loved follower of Islam made just after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I am a Muslim,” said Muhammad Ali. “I am an American.”

That says it all. Or at least, it should.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.’s column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: lpitts@herald.com

via//Seattle Times

Would a world without Islam be peaceful?

Up until World War II most of the Third World and all the Muslim lands were colonized by the then superpowers of the west. These colonizing nations not only dominated the resources, labor and markets of the colonial territory, they also imposed socio-cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the conquered population claiming that these aggressive nations had superior morals and values than those of the colonized, but also demonized the indigenous cultures.After WWII, the colonies were granted political independence but not only they are still economically dominated but are also politically controlled through hand picked thugs and dictators who are ruling those unfortunate nations.

These days specially post 9/11 Islam is constantly being demonized and blamed for all the ills of the world. In an essay in the January 2008 edition of Foreign Policy, entitled: “A World Without Islam” Graham Fuller, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA in charge of long-range strategic forecasting and currently a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada), poses a question “is Islam the source of the problem or does it tend to lie with other less obvious and deeper factors?”

“What if Islam had never arisen in the Middle East? What if there had never been a Prophet Mohammed? Would there still be violent clashes between the West and that part of the world?” asks Fuller

And then Fuller ponders a litany of history’s major battles and events to drive home his message that while Islam might be a convenient scapegoat, but global strife, past and present, can’t be blamed on any one religion. Europeans would still have wanted the spoils of the Middle East and launched the Crusades albeit under a different banner.

After all, what were the Crusades if not a Western adventure driven primarily by political, social, and economic needs? The banner of Christianity was little more than a potent symbol, a rallying cry to bless the more secular urges of powerful Europeans. In fact, the particular religion of the natives never figured highly in the West’s imperial push across the globe. Europe may have spoken upliftingly about bringing “Christian values to the natives,” but the patent goal was to establish colonial outposts as sources of wealth for the metropole and bases for Western power projection.”

And so it’s unlikely that Christian inhabitants of the Middle East would have welcomed the stream of European fleets and their merchants backed by Western guns, he says adding that Imperialism would have prospered in the region’s complex ethnic mosaic – the raw materials for the old game of divide and rule. And Europeans still would have installed the same pliable local rulers to accommodate their needs. We doublespeak about promoting democracy in the Middle East as we back autocratic, despotic and undemocratic client regimes there.

On the U.S. occupation of Iraq, he says that it would not have been welcome by Iraqis even if they were Christian.

On blaming Islam for current violence and terrorism, Fuller echoes Robert Pape’s argument about the strategic, social and personal motivations work together to encourage suicide terrorism. Pape, in his book “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” argues that nationalism and religious difference between the rebels and a dominant democratic state are the main conditions under which the “alien” occupation of a community’s homeland is likely to lead to a campaign of suicide terrorism. He finds that religion plays a smaller part than thought.

Fuller reminds that the West’s memories are short when it focuses on terrorism in the name of Islam.

He recalls: “Jewish guerrillas used terrorism against the British in Palestine. Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil ‘Tigers’ invented the art of the suicide vest and for more than a decade led the world in the use of suicide bombings – including the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.”

Greek terrorists carried out assassination operations against U.S. officials in Athens. Organized Sikh terrorism killed Indira Gandhi, spread havoc in India, established an overseas base in Canada , and brought down an Air India flight over the Atlantic. Macedonian terrorists were widely feared all across the Balkans on the eve of World War I. Dozens of major assassinations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were carried out by European and American “anarchists,” sowing collective fear.

The Irish Republican Army employed brutally effective terrorism against the British for decades, as did communist guerrillas and terrorists in Vietnam against Americans, communist Malayans against British soldiers in the 1950s, Mau-Mau terrorists against British officers in Kenya – the list goes on. It doesn’t take a Muslim to commit terrorism.

Fuller points out that even the recent history of terrorist activity doesn’t look much different.

“According to Europol, 498 terrorist attacks took place in the European Union in 2006,” Fuller writes. “Of these, 424 were perpetrated by separatist groups, 55 by left-wing extremists, and 18 by various other terrorists. Only one was carried out by Islamists.”

He also reminds us that virtually every one of the principle horrors of the 20th century came almost exclusively from strictly secular regimes: Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. It was Europeans who visited their “world wars” twice upon the rest of the world-two devastating global conflicts with no remote parallels in Islamic history.

Some today might wish for a “world without Islam” in which these problems presumably had never come to be. But, in truth, the conflicts, rivalries, and crises of such a world might not look so vastly different than the ones we know today, Fuller concludes.

In short, Fuller has done a great job in spelling out the real root of the contemporary problems which lie in imperialism/colonialism, more than religion, although certainly religion is a part. His paradigm repudiates biased pundits and neoconservatives who condemn Islam as the root of all conflict.”

- Khalid Saeed is a resident of Woodland and currently national President of “American Muslim Voice.”

via//Daily Democrat

The new Muslim anti-Semitism

Mark Cohen

Jewish-Muslim relations are at a nadir today. But the mutual hatred and anti-Semitism on the Muslim side are relatively new phenomena, born of political, rather than religious factors. When the Islamic caliphs ruled large swaths of Asia and Africa, their Jewish subjects enjoyed a protected status their brethren in Christian Europe – victims of anti-Semitism – never thought possible.

Today, Muslim apologists have distorted this age of coexistence. They appropriate an old Jewish myth about an “interfaith utopia” in the Middle Ages and blame the Jews and Zionism for destroying the traditional harmony between the two peoples.

In response, there is a new Jewish “counter-myth” that claims that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins and that anti-Semitism is endemic in the religion. This counter-myth has been propagated by Jewish writers in the Diaspora especially since the 1970s. It parallels a similar conviction among some Oriental Jews in Israel. Seeking to find their place in a predominantly European Jewish world scarred by centuries of Christian persecutions culminating in the Holocaust, they claim that Islam has persecuted Jews from its origins. By implication, they have a past of suffering like the Ashkenazim, including dislocation from their ancient homelands, and are thus eligible for a larger piece of the Zionist pie than the mostly Ashkenazic founding fathers of Israel have granted them.

THE HISTORIC plight of Oriental Jewry falls somewhere between these two extremes. To discover it, one must move past the layers of propaganda and mutual recriminations that have obscured our view of history.

First of all, however, let us not make the mistake of thinking that Jews lived in the Middle Ages as the equals of Muslims. They were second class citizens, at best. They were classed along with other religious minorities as unbelievers who did not recognize the prophethood of Muhammad and the truth of the Koran. But this kind of unbelief was not as threatening to Islam as Jewish unbelief was to Christians, for unbelief in Christianity means rejection of Jesus as Messiah and as God, a greater affront to the dominant faith than Jewish unbelief was to Islam because it challenged the theological basis of the whole religion.

Moreover, restrictions on Jewish (and Christian) life – they were not to build new houses of worship and were required to wear distinctive garb, avoid Muslim honorific titles, and so forth – were intended not so much to exclude them from society as they were meant to reinforce the necessary hierarchical distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims within a single social order.

Non-Muslims were to remain “in their place,” avoiding any act, particularly any religious act, that might challenge the superior rank of Muslims or of Islam. Non-Muslims, however, occupied a definite rank in Islamic society – a low rank, but a rank nevertheless. They managed to co-exist more or less harmoniously with the higher-ranking dominant Muslim group because both sides recognized and accepted the place of the other – whether superior or inferior – and this facilitated interaction with a minimum of conflict.

THE FLIP SIDE of the discriminatory regulations imposed upon Jews is that they (as well as Christians) were a “protected people,” ahl al-dhimma or dhimmis in Arabic, who enjoyed security of life and property, religious freedom, freedom from forced conversion, communal autonomy, and equality in the marketplace. For all its religious exclusivity and hostility towards the Jews, expressed in the Koran and in other Islamic literature, Islam contains a nucleus of pluralism that gave the Jews in Muslim lands greater security than Jews had in Christian Europe. For other important reasons, too, Jews in the Islamic orbit were spared the damaging stigma of “otherness” and anti-Semitism suffered by Jews in Europe. They were indigenous to the Near East – not immigrants, as in many parts of the Christian West – and largely indistinguishable physically from their Arab-Muslim neighbors.

Moreover, Jews were one of two and in some place three non-Muslim minority religions, which also diffused the natural hostility towards the “other.” The contrast with the Christian West is revealing. Although for a few centuries in the early Middle Ages (up to the 11th century) Jews enjoyed a more or less secure place in the natural hierarchical order of Christian society, as well as substantial economic rights, a combination of factors led to the expulsion of most of western Jewry by the end of the 15th century. These factors include the loss of the pluralism that had marked the Germanic, “barbarian” early Middle Ages; the spread of Christianity to the masses by the 11th century; the commercial revolution that relegated Jews to a few, despised economic activities like money lending; the erosion of the old doctrine of St. Augustine that Jews must be allowed to live in Christian society as witnesses to the triumph of Christianity; and, finally, the gradual political unification of European countries, especially England, France, and Spain, which left the Jew even more of an outsider than in the past.

ISLAM AND Judaism had (and continue to have) much more in common than Judaism has with Christianity. This mutual recognition of religious similarities includes monotheism, which made Islam more tolerant of Jews than of Christians, whose Trinity smacked of polytheism, the greatest sin in Islam, and made Jews more tolerant of Islam for much the same reason. Another well known commonality are laws concerning animal ritual slaughter and other kashrut/halal practices. Partly because of shared religious beliefs, Islamic polemics against Judaism and the Jews in the Middle Ages were minimal and banal compared to the large body of anti-Jewish polemics in the Christian world. In the 13th century this led to the burning of the Talmud in France – an act of aggression against Judaism that had no parallel in the Muslim world and which was accompanied by other violent excesses like the blood libel that wrought the anti-Semitism whose tragic outcome in the 20th century is all too well known.

In the Muslim world, Jews retained for centuries their substantial security as well as their recognized place in the natural hierarchical social order. They did so by acknowledging, at least by their behavior in public, the superiority of Islam, by adhering to the prescribed restrictions of Islamic law, by paying an annual head tax called jizya, and by refraining from serving in government offices, where they might be in a position of superiority over Muslims. To be sure, there were periodic outbursts of violence, though they were almost always directed against dhimmis as a category, and not against Jews per se. These excesses occurred when the dhimmis were seen to be violating the terms of the dhimma arrangement; or when a particular ruler was pressured by Muslim clerics – the ulama – to crack down on the violators; or when Islam as a polity came under attack from the outside, as happened from the late 11th century on during the Crusades (the Crusade against the Muslims in the Holy Land and the Crusade to reconquer Spain from the Muslims) and during the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.

Jews were, however, rarely forced to convert to Islam (the Koran forbids compulsion in religion) and, with two major exceptions proving the rule, they were not expelled from Muslim lands. One expulsion took place in the Hijaz, the holy sanctuary of Arabia that includes Mecca and Medina, shortly after the death of the Prophet, and the other, in Yemen in the 17th century.

AGAIN, TO understand the relatively decent Jewish-Muslim relations in the medieval period, one needs to contrast them with the Christian world, where, from about the 12th century on, Jews were subject to a shaky adherence to an older commitment to protect the Jews and to guarantee their freedom of religion, as well as their liberty to practice any economic walk of life they wished – all of these things, of course, a function of time and place and the policies of particular secular rulers or the Church.

In Christian society, moreover, hostility was focused on one, “evil” non-Christian group, the Jews, paving the way for what was to become – beginning in the 12th century – anti-Semitism, understood as a religiously-based complex of irrational, mythical, and stereotypical beliefs about the diabolical, malevolent, and all-powerful Jew, later on infused, in its modern, secular form, with racism and the belief that there is a Jewish conspiracy against mankind.

This kind of anti-Semitism did not exist in the medieval Muslim world. It did not make its appearance there until the 19th century, when it was fostered by European Christian missionaries living in the Middle East.

ALL THIS adds up to one thing: Jews and Muslims got along better in the Middle Ages than they do today. But the co-existence of Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages could not easily be maintained in the modern era. Colonial disruption of Muslim society, conflicting nationalisms, Arab belief that Zionism is just another form of European colonialism robbing them of their own right to self-determination in a modern state, and Jewish fear that Arab and Muslim enmity – and more recently, terrorism – might lead to something akin to another Holocaust, have dramatically degraded Muslim-Jewish relations. This has manifested itself in a new Muslim anti-Semitism, which is not, however, indigenous. It represents an Islamized version of its Christian roots. Muslim anti-Semitism has also provoked amnesia in Jews from Arab countries.

They (or most of them) no longer remember the friendships with Muslims that Arab Jews knew in the “old country.” They no longer remember the substantial exemption from Muslim violence that the Jews of the Islamic world enjoyed in most places until the events of the 20th century. And they have forgotten that until the 20th century, in some cases right up until the 1940s, many in the Arabic-speaking Jewish middle class were deeply embedded in Arab society and culture, much like their ancestors in the medieval world, who wholeheartedly embraced Arabic and the Islamic culture of philosophy, science, medicine, scriptural study, and poetry in what was not an interfaith utopia, but an era of co-existence that can stand as a distant mirror of what might yet be possible in our own time.

The writer is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author, among other works, of Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, which has been translated into Hebrew.

via//Jerusalem Post