MUHAMMED ADMIRED THE JEWS
Excerpted from "The Secret War Against the Jews"
by John Loftus and Mark Aarons
St. Martin's Press, New York, 1994, pages 19-21
NEW YORK, Yom Revii (Fourth Day - "Wednesday"), 10 Cheshvan, 5760 (October
20, 1999) Root & Branch:
Education was one of the principal reasons why
the early Christians hated the Jews and the early Muslims respected them.
In a purely social sense, Jews almost always came out better in comparison.
For instance, a Jewish farmer would constantly outproduce a nearby
Christian one simply because of the knowledge that literacy gives regarding
planting cycles, fertilization, and crop production. The early Christian
solution was to ban Jews from agrarian pursuits and force them into urban
occupations.
The Muslims were different. Muhammed admired the Jews so much that he
wanted to make Jerusalem the center of his religion. He recognized both
Jewish and Christian prophets, and added the literacy requirement for the
study of the Qur'an. Muhammed treated the Jews with a modicum of tolerance
that put the Christian attitude to shame.
During the Christian Dark Ages, the literate religions of Muslims and Jews
were having a Golden Age. The very words for algebra, magazines, and
medicine all came from Arab scholars who worked in close harmony with Jews,
particularly in Spain. To be sure, there was prejudice and discrimination,
such as forcing Jews to wear distinctive clothing, and sometimes more
serious abuse, but by and large the Muslim world treated its Jewish
neighbors fairly decently.
The flower of Judeo-Muslim cooperation was crushed in the aftermath of the
Crusades. In response to Western militarism, Arab leaders modified the
semipacifist Muslim religion and by the eighteenth century, had transformed
it into a warrior's code of domination over non-Muslim subjects and
discrimination against the Jews. The era of tolerance and respect for
education was over. The Muslim dark ages had begun. Harsh religious
interpretations became an instrument of tribal loyalty and unity.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the Saudi Arabian king Ibn Saud
used the extremist Wahhabi sect as the logical political extension of
religion to prop up a tribal dictatorship. It was natural that the
isolationist Wahhabi culture would feel threatened by the European Jews who
were then starting to move into Palestine. In a bit of revisionism, Ibn
Saud placed more emphasis on that part of the Qur'an that reflected
Muhammed's anger toward the Jews, not his respect.
The Muslim tradition was artificially rolled back to the ninth century.
The gentle Muslim religion was, and continues to be, perverted into an
instrument of war, hatred, xenophobia, and, above all, ignorance. Where
once, during the Christian Dark Ages, the Arab universities were the glory
of the world, today the literacy requirement is kept to a minimum for the
masses. Almost half of the population of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and
Iran cannot even read the Qur'an. The reason for this blasphemy is, we
submit, political. Too much public education might threaten dynastic control.
In comparison, the literacy rate in Israel, among Jews and Arabs alike, is
more than 92 percent. The Jewish immigrants were, and are, a persistent
threat to Arab backwardness and the luxurious lifestyle consequently
enjoyed by the Arab dictators and their kin. Among other faults, the Jews
who arrived in Palestine in the first decades of this century wanted to
build public universities open to all residents. A literate Palestinian
Arab community might taint the neighboring Arab population and spread the
contagion of education, democracy, and human rights to challenge the feudal
monarchs.
Education, democracy, and human rights, of course, are anathema to a
dictator. Whoever opposed Jewish plans for Palestine was the natural ally
of the Arab ruling classes. The Middle East was fertile ground for hatred.
The first third of the twentieth century marked the dawn of the Age of
Bigotry and the twilight of British influence in the Arab world.