AUTHOR'S PREFACE

The following extracts from an interview* I gave to British journalist Alan Johnson in November 2008 provide context—personal and intellectual—for this essay collection. During the intervening three years, my focus shifted from a planned emphasis on Islam’s historical Caliphate to a more fundamental source of Islamic totalitarianism: the sharia, Islamic law.

Dr. Andrew Bostom is Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He is the author of The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2008). More of his work can be found at www.andrewbostom.org. The interview took place on November 14, 2008.

Alan Johnson: How does a medical doctor come to produce books on Islam, Jihad and antisemitism?

Andrew Bostom: It’s pretty straightforward. The stimulus was 9/11. Until then I was an average citizen trying to keep abreast of world events. I am not particularly religious as a Jew though I certainly support the state of Israel. But I grew up in New York, living in Queens most of my life, and I went to medical school in Brooklyn. My wife and I still have family in New York City, so the day of 9/11 itself was traumatic, trying to make sure everyone was OK. A colleague’s wife was in the second tower. She was very lucky, barely getting out before it collapsed. On the way home I grabbed a book by Karen Armstrong about Islam.¹ I was reading it and commenting to my wife that it just didn't seem to jibe. (I learnt later that Armstrong is a notorious apologist.) As I read it out loud my wife was just laughing. I didn't find it particularly funny. Nor the news reports over the next days that were transparently apologetic. And I was alarmed at stories that appeared in the New York Times (and other New York area newspapers) about an Egyptian imam who was preaching at a large Mosque in Manhattan, and spreading conspiracy theories about Jews leaving the world trade centre in advance of the attacks, due to their “prior knowledge.”² So I started reading independently.

Alan Johnson: Your new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, is a 766-page collection of primary and secondary sources, some translated into English for the first time, about the relationship of Islam and antisemitism. It is prefaced by a 200-page interpretive essay written by you. Let's begin with your controversial conclusion. Here it is:

A widely prevalent conception of Islam's doctrinal and historical treatment of Jews rests on two false pillars...(I) “In Islamic society hostility to the Jew is non-theological. It is not related to any specific Islamic doctrine, nor to any specific circumstance in Islamic history. For Muslims it is not part of the birth-pangs of their religion, as it is for Christians.” (II) “...‘dhimmi'-tude [derisively hyphenated] subservience and persecution and ill treatment of Jews.is a myth.”} (...) [This] sham castle of glib affirmationsmust be swept away if the enduring phenomenon of Islamic Antisemitism is to be properly understood.⁸

This claim is unusual. Yes, anyone paying attention knows antisemitism is widespread in the Arabic and Islamic world. Holocaust denial is rife, blaming ‘the Jews' for 9/11 is common, and as MEMRI⁹ has shown, annihilationist sentiments against Jews are routinely expressed in sermons, cartoons, and in the Arabic mass media (even if the mainstream western media is by and large uninterested and uncomprehending about all this).

For example, Esther Webman, of Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center, has written¹⁰ that “antisemitism did not exist in the traditional Islamic world....Antisemitism is, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world.” Lawrence Wright, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower, claimed¹¹ that “Until the end of World War II....lews lived safely—although submissively—under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda on Arabic-language short-wave radio, coupled with slanders by Christian missionaries in the region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice [antisemitism].” Matthias Kuntzel, talking to Democratiya,— stated that it was “[d]uring the Thirties and Forties [that] Islamist anti­modernism was poisoned by the Nazi antisemitic mind­set.”

But you reject all this. You claim contemporary antisemitism in the Muslim world is rooted in the foundational texts of Islam itself. Can you please set out your case?

Andrew Bostom: Well, you hit the nail on the head. I do think those conceptions are the heart of the problem. They are, how can I put this, factually-challenged conceptions. They are usually affirmed without substantive proofs being given. The actual data, I think, provides a negative proof. It reminds me of a scene in Woody Allen's film Sleeper.— Allen portrays Miles Monroe, the owner of a health food store in Greenwich Village who is cryogenically frozen and he wakes up 20 years in the future. In one scene he is confronted by two doctors, one of whom is very authoritative and claims to be possessed “of what we know to be true.” He offers Miles a cigarette saying “Here, smoke this, and be sure you get the smoke deep down into your lungs. Its tobacco, one of the healthiest things for your body.”

There are incontrovertible and overwhelming hard data—pathological and epidemiological—which demonstrate a major causative role for smoking in both the predominant form of lung cancer (i.e., adenocarcinoma),¹⁴ and premature coronary heart disease.¹⁵ I believe smoking is to these diseases as the Islam in Islamic Antisemitism is to this scourge of Jew- hatred, past and present.

Alan Johnson: And how did you come to write the book?

Andrew Bostom: I had not intended Islamic antisemitism to be the subject of my second book. After finishing my book on the Jihad, I wanted to do a book about all the subject peoples under Islam—what Bat Ye'or has accurately called the “civilization of dhimmitude.”— So I began analyzing writings about the condition of Hindus and Buddhists subjugated by Jihad on the Indian subcontinent. I looked at the relatively progressive period, under the Mughul ruler Akbar the Great.¹⁷ He began as a pious Jihadist and waged very bloody campaigns against the Hindus, but something changed in the course of his rule.¹⁸ He became much more tolerant of Hindus, abolished the jizya (the

Koranic poll-tax, as per Koran 9:29; jizya means, “the tax paid in lieu of being slain”¹⁹), appointed Hindus to administrative positions, and seems to have become a Muslim-Hindu syncretist in his personal religious beliefs.²⁰ This led to a brief flowering of Hindu society. His reforms were violently opposed by the Muslim ulema, and I was reading an anti-Hindu tract by an Indian Sufi Muslim theologian named Sirhindi who died in 1624.— The tract contained a line that just jumped out at me. “Whenever a Jew is killed it is for the benefit of Islam.”²² I tried to get whatever biographical materials I could on Sirhindi and I could find no evidence that he had had any physical contact with Jews. This astonished me.

I wanted to understand where the anti-Jewish animus came from, and that led me to the project on Islamic antisemitism. And as with the project on Jihad, I was led back to the sacred texts—the Koran, the hadith and the sira (the earliest pious Muslim biographies of the Prophet) —and to the juridical texts.

Alan Johnson: And you think that is not widely understood?

Andrew Bostom: Well, I discovered to just what extent this truth is still not understood when I sent round the anti-Jewish sections of a polemic written by Arabic writer al-Jahiz, who died in 869, to a range of writers, think tank denizens, activists and others. Here is the extract I sent round, with the questions,²³ “In your opinion would this quote reflect racial or at least ethnic antisemitism?” and “Would you please hazard a guess as to where and when it was written?”:

Our people [the Muslims] observing thus the occupations of the Jews and the Christians concluded that the religion of the Jews must compare unfavorably as do their professions, and that their unbelief must be the foulest of all, since they are the filthiest of all nations. Why the Christians, ugly as they are, are physically less repulsive than the Jews may be explained by the fact that the Jews, by not intermarrying, have intensified the offensiveness of their features. Exotic elements have not mingled with them; neither have males of alien races had intercourse with their women, nor have their men cohabited with females of a foreign stock. The Jewish race therefore has been denied high mental qualities, sound physique, and superior lactation. The same results obtain when horses, camels, donkeys, and pigeons are inbred.²⁴

The responses were remarkable, reflecting the power of the two false pillars (i.e., the belief that Islam is somehow devoid of theological antisemitism, and the belief that dhimmitude is a myth).²⁵ One said, ‘Of course it's antisemitism of the most vile racist stripe which leads me to think it dates from the 19th century at the earliest. It also sounds like the sort of thing one would read in the popular antisemitic literature of the Edwardian period, so my guess is c.

In fact the author, al-Jahiz, died in 869.27 The background to the passage is interesting. Al-Jahiz had been commissioned by a notoriously bigoted Caliph al- Mutawakkil (who crushed the Mutazilite experiment— itself wrought with brutal intolerance, and returned to a more traditional, ‘revelation-based' Islam) to write an anti-Christian polemic. Due to the presence of neighboring Christian kingdoms, most notably Byzantium, al-Mutawakkil saw the Christians as a potential threat, not the Jews. However, the Caliph noticed that the Muslim masses harbored much more hatred for the Jews than they did for the Christians. So he commissioned al-Jahiz to write a polemic against the Christians. But in the polemic al-Jahiz wrote about why the Christians were more liked than the Jews. He highlighted the Koranic verse 5:82, Muhammad's interactions with the Jews of Medina, and the anti- Jewish motifs of the sira, the early pious biographies of Muhammad. Verse 5:82, he thought, was the most important anti-Jewish Koranic motif—the idea that it is the Jews who harbour the greatest hatred for the Muslims. It is this, he thought, which was inspiring the Muslim masses to hate the Jews. I found corroboration of al-Jahiz's opinion from his Sufi contemporary al- Muhasibi, who died in 857. He also observed that the Jews were more hated by the Muslims than the Christians, but thought it was because of their stubborn denial of Muhammad's message.

All this occurred a millennium before serious colonial penetration of the region.²⁸ My correspondents —who were educated and respected people—were pathognomonic of this lack of understanding about the real roots of Islamic antisemitism.²⁹

Another piece of evidence comes from the greatest scholar of Muslim-Jewish relations in the high Middle Ages, S. D. Goitein.— He is our leading authority of the famous Geniza record, an important collection of letters, sacred texts, etc., stored in Cairo and first brought to scholarly and public attention by Solomon Schechter. The Geniza is a particularly detailed and important record of the period from 950-1250 CE.— Goitein's remarkable scholarship demonstrates that the Jews of this era had coined their own terms for hatred directed at them, specifically, by Muslims in the high Middle Ages. Goitein argues cogently that this is prima facie evidence that there was already a unique form of Islamic anti-Jewish hatred a millennium ago.³² I agree with him, and I link Goitein's work on what the Jews were experiencing then, including the unique terms they coined—sinuth for Muslim hatred of Jews, and sone for the Muslim hater—with what the Muslim masses themselves were expressing, consistent with al- Jahiz and al-Muhasibi.³³ These are independent, confirmatory pieces of evidence from Muslim and Jewish sources.

Alan Johnson: Let's talk about denial. You have argued denial of Islamic antisemitism runs wide and deep in both Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Why is denial so prevalent?

Andrew Bostom: The worst audiences to address about Islamic antisemitism, quite frankly, are Jewish audiences! One of the reasons for this, I believe is almost primal. As physicians we deal with denial as a strategy all the time. Denial is one of the most profound psychological mechanisms by which patients try to ignore their own disease status, because potentially fatal illnesses are terrifying. And who does not get a chill when they sit down and watch the sermons at the MEMRI website,³⁴ whether they come from the Palestinian Authority, or from Saudi Arabia, or are recorded surreptitiously in a mosque in the UK?³⁵ These are terrifying things, Alan, for a Jewish audience to hear. People are openly calling for their annihilation in a religious context. Who wouldn't want to pretend that ‘they can't really mean that'? Fear is a major factor.

It's also human to perseverate upon things we have already understood, and for which we have developed strategies of response. I am referring particularly to the deicide allegation, the Protocols, and the standard racist Nazi propaganda. We have agencies that are constantly vigilant for these familiar antisemitic themes, and rush to the fore whenever any real or imagined example of these hatreds emerges. But there are precious few groups, other than MEMRI, who are highlighting hate­mongering antisemitic sermons based on Islamic motifs. It's more comfortable dealing with familiar and, at this point, better tamed, enemies.

Alan Johnson: And how about the denial of intellectuals in the West?

Andrew Bostom: I think it has to do with the western left's sympathy for third world cultures, and its extreme tendency toward self-flagellation. The West has an imperialistic past and many wrongs were committed, yes, but that baggage has led many to ask “who are we to comment on this Islamic phenomenon?” What follows is the rationalization of Islamic jihadism and Jew-hatred etc., as coming from the “oppressed third world,” and therefore somehow (perversely) liberating, or at least understandable and acceptable.³⁶ Also, a vicious circular argument comes into play: Islamic antisemitism really derives from Europe, being nothing but the detritus of the western colonial enterprise. So responsibility is always laid at the doorstep of the West.³⁷

Alan Johnson: How hopeful are you of the Turkish Hadith Project which seeks to gather 10,000 hadith in one volume and present a more moderate face of Islam? Isn't it hopeful that we have voices like Hidayet Tuksal, a feminist theologian in Ankara saying, “I can't imagine a prophet who bullies women. The Hadiths that portray him so should be abandoned.”³⁸

Andrew Bostom: I have colleagues who were initially optimistic about the Turkish Hadith Project but it seems there was an immediate retreat by the Project designers. Now we hear the Project will not challenge any of the canonical hadithJ⁹ There is only discussion of the validation of hadith from the collections of lesser repute. But if a decision has been made not to deal with the very hateful motifs against Jews and others that are in the canonical hadith, or all the support therein for violent, aggressive Jihad, than this is a rather puny effort that offers no pathway toward the wrenching reforms needed.

*Moreover, these consistent observations from two respected scholars of Islam and the Muslim Near East, A. J. Wensinck in 1921,40 and over three decades later, regarding Turkey, specifically, by Howard A. Reed⁴¹ in 1954 (i.e., when the country was still very much under the enforced secular yoke of Kemalism), make plain the enormous obstacles modernists face in attempting to reform Islam's canonical hadith:

[Wensinck] It is not amazing that the canonical books of tradition—especially Bukhari and Muslim—in the eyes of the community have acquired a rank nearly as high as the Koran. Oaths are sworn on a copy of Bukhari; at times of public danger or calamity the book is read in order to repel them; people speak of Khatm al Bukhari (finishing the reading of Bukhari) just as they speak of Khatm al-Koran. Bukhari and the other collections live in the Moslem community and he who thoroughly knows Tradition will understand Islam and the Moslem more easily. Tradition is a staff and a weapon for the Moslems even to this day. So it is equally important for the student of historical Islam as it is for him that has to live in Moslem countries....|T|radition has been gathered and modeled by the Moslems themselves. Is this perhaps also an explanation of its having become so popular?

[Reed] If religiously inclined, these erudite villagers almost invariably boasted a collection of al-Bukhari's Sahih, which most know only by hearsay, and count it more sacred than the Qur’an so far as oaths are concerned.

Alan Johnson: Reviewing your book in The New Republic, Benny Morris called it “important and deeply discouraging.”⁴² You have no obligation to be encouraging of course; you only have an obligation to the truth. Still, it is deeply discouraging. Reading your work, one gains the impression that mainstream Islam is the problem not the solution, that the violent extremists have the sacred texts on their side, and that the very idea of a pluralist democratic mainstream Islam, while greatly to be desired, is something of a myth. Are you deeply discouraged?

Andrew Bostom: It may be that an accident of geology which enriched the Saudis has facilitated the mass dissemination of Wahhabi propaganda, some of the worst of the worst, in mass translations, often cheap or free, all over the world, usually accompanied by Wahhabi imams, grants, scholarships and mosques.⁴³ If the recipients of the Saudis’ largesse don’t have the benefit of a particularly enlightened imam to contextualize these texts in a pacific and tolerant way— and I’m sure such imams exist, although I remain dubious they are in plentiful supply at this point—then the people are left to interpret these texts on their own. But the present toxic environment has other aspects quite independent of any particular gloss, ‘Wahhabi,’ or other, on Islam’s foundational texts. Ibn Warraq is convinced that the phenomenon of extremism is so widespread today in good part because of the flood of straightforward, accurate translations of the foundational Islamic texts themselves, which Muslims in historically unprecedented numbers can now read in local languages they fully understand. Having carefully studied these texts over the past six years, as well as their classical, ‘non-Wahhabi’ exegeses by Islam's greatest pious Muslim luminaries, I agree with Ibn Warraq’s assessment.

On the other hand, there are some positive developments. The MEMRI site is seriously committed to reporting about voices of reform in Islamic societies, not just the hate speech. At MEMRI, I’ve seen Muslim reformers from Kuwait, Tunisia, and elsewhere— unbelievably courageous people often speaking out without the support of a formal movement. For example, MEMRI highlighted a Tunisian intellectual, Iqbal al-Garbi, a professed believing Muslim, not an agnostic such as Ibn Warraq, who recently wrote a remarkable mea culpa for the Jihad, Jihad slavery, and the imposition of dhimmitude, which appeared on an Italian website. It was exactly the kind of statement Muslims need to make to other Muslims.

[Al-Gharbi on jihad]: We still insist that we are always the victims, and that we are always innocent. Our history is angelic, our imperialism was a welcome conquest [futuhat], our invaders [ghuzah] were liberators, our violence was a holy Jihad, our murderers were Shahids [martyrs],..

[Al-Gharbi on jihad slavery]: We must assess Islamic history objectively, and issue an historic public apology to the Africans who were abducted, enslaved, and expelled from their homes....The Arabs and the Muslims played a sizeable role in this loathsome trade. They alone caused the uprooting of 20 million people..

[Al-Gharbi on dhimmitude]: We must renounce the dhimmi laws that fill the books of jurisprudence, and apologize to the Christian and the Jewish minorities [for the past]. We must put an end to our changing of the facts, and to the miserable fabrications that we created in an attempt to prove that these minorities enjoyed a high status in the Islamic state, based on specific historical events presented in a truncated fashion and not in full.. The best example of this is the famous Pact of Omar that we present as the supreme example of tolerance and coexistence when in fact it set restrictions on minorities.

[Al Gharbi suggesting this practical step for true reform]: The Islamic [world] must renounce, once and for all, the Islam...that divides the world into the camp of Islam and the camp of unbelief, the camp of war and the camp of peace. This division destroys any serious dialogue between religions and cultures.⁴⁴

Ibn Warraq recently persuaded me to read Jonathan Israel's book Radical Enlightenment⁴⁵ and I think Islam needs to undergo such a process. And we see its possibilities in a person like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.— A mass movement of enlightenment amongst Muslims is required. Ibn Warraq's book, Leaving Islam⁴¹ had a very interesting concise history of the real freethinkers within Islam. I don't mean the Mutazilites who were not really comparable to the Enlightenment thinkers. They introduced some elements of reason, yes, but they also waged their own inquisition and were very brutal (.see my earlier comments [in another segment of this interview I had stated that I disagree entirely with the oversimplified characterization of the Mutazilites as “rationalist freethinkers.” The Mutazilites were pious Muslims motivated by Islamic religious concerns, first and foremost. One of the pre-eminent scholars of Islam, Ignaz Goldziher, has demonstrated that the Mutazilites exhibited no real manifestation of liberated thinking, or any desire “.to throw off chafing shackles, to the detriment of the rigorously orthodox {Islamic} view of life.” Moreover, the Mutazilites' own orthodoxy was accompanied by fanatical intolerance—they orchestrated the “Minha,” the Muslim Inquisition under the Abbasids. Goldziher has shown how the Mutazilites advocated jihad in all realms where their doctrine was not ascendant, and were fully prepared to assassinate those who refused to abide their formulations.]⁴⁸). No, Warraq unearthed a series of genuine freethinkers who lived within Muslim communities, figures we would recognize as enlightened. But to this day such figures suffer from persecution.⁴⁹ This notion that you can't be born into an Islamic society and contribute to the society as a whole if you don't profess to be a believing Muslim, must change.

Alan Johnson: What are you working on now?

Andrew Bostom: I became fascinated (if alarmed) by some excellent polling done in the Spring of 2007 in collaboration between the University of Maryland, and World Opinion Dynamics (and wrote about it here⁵⁰). The survey sample was quite extensive (encompassing some 4,000 individuals) and comprised of face-to-face interviews in local languages of Muslims from Morocco, Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Data from two questions jumped out at me. The first asked about the strict implementation of sharia law in Islamic countries. 65% of Muslims were moderately or strongly in favour of this proposition. The second was about desire to establish / re-establish the Caliphate. Again, 65% of the Muslim sample was supportive of this goal. I began to ask myself a series of questions. How has the idea of the Caliphate been actualized in the past? Why has it survived to this day? Why is the notion of a Caliphate so popular among Muslims, and what are implications of its popularity, for Muslims, and non­Muslims?

Thus I have started to collect a tremendous amount of information for my next book project, which is entitled The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism [this proposed title became the subtitle of Sharia versus Freedom]. I suspect that if we take a larger historical perspective about the nexus between Islam and European totalitarianism, this dalliance will turn out to have been a mere epiphenomenon of a much longer-running historical narrative about the Caliphate. It seems to me, Alan—and maybe it's my medical training—that if we don't point out such unpleasant realities we cannot even begin to chart a course toward reform.