The Jew is Not My Enemy (7 page)

In Qutb’s viewpoint, God had promised punishment for the Jews for their evil-doing nature. God had inflicted such a punishment twice in destroying their Temples in Jerusalem and had promised punishments to the Jews throughout their history. Even Hitler, according to Qutb, was sent by Allah to rule over the Jews. He stressed that the only reason contemporary Muslims could not defeat the Jews was because they had not returned to the Quran for guidance.

This argument leaves some Muslims, like me, to wonder: If God made it possible for the Babylonians to destroy the first Temple, built by King Solomon (prophet Suleiman in the Quran), and defeat the Jews in 516
BC
, why have Muslims not been able to do the same? After all,
the Babylonians were not following the Quran, so why would Allah show this favour to polytheists and idol worshippers, but deny it to us Muslims? Have we not tried to emulate the Babylonians in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973? Yet each time we Muslims have ended up losing more territory than before. Is it possible Allah is sending us a message that we are ignoring?

In Sayyid Qutb’s mind, there is no mistake: Arab defeat at the hands of the Jews is evidence that we Muslims are not following the laws of Allah as written by mere mortals in the corpus of jurisprudence called sharia. According to Qutb, if only we embraced sharia, then lo and behold, Israel would simply melt away before our eyes. And those pesky Jews would be driven out of the Holy Land the way they were expelled by the Babylonians and, five centuries later, the Romans.

Qutb states in the essay that it is God himself who determines the results of all wars. However, he does not reflect at all on the possibility that if the Muslim-Jewish conflict in the Middle East is stage-managed by Allah himself, then perhaps the verdict of the Divine is written on the wall.

Qutb insists that if Muslims returned to “proper” Islam (as interpreted by him), the ummah, the Muslim community, would triumph. The problem with that argument is that Hamas has taken that route but has not succeeded any more than have the secular Palestinians of Fatah or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (
PFLP
). In fact, by following the guidelines of Qutb and his followers, such as the late Sheikh Yassin and the exiled Khaled Meshaal, the Muslims of Gaza are today worse off than their compatriots in the West Bank.

If a Muslim were to take Sayyid Qutb’s essay as a guide to understanding Jews (and many Islamists do), he or she would be hard pressed not to view world history as one endless battle that can be won only by completely annihilating the Jewish people. Repeatedly, Qutb depicts
Jews as the eternal enemy of Islam, with whom Muslims are locked in a divinely ordained battle to the end. The essay leads to four conclusions:

• The Jews have opposed Islam as enemies of the Prophet from the moment the “Islamic State” was established in Medina.
  
• It was the Jews who were instrumental in creating the Shia-Sunni divide in Islam.
  
• The Jews will only be satisfied once the religion of Islam has been destroyed.
  
• The war between Muslims and Jews has been raging for fourteen centuries and will continue in all corners of this earth.
  

Among Qutb’s many allegations against the Jews, the one that is most dangerous and that has done tremendous damage within Islam is the charge that the Shia-Sunni divide is the result of a Jewish conspiracy and that Shia Muslims are a product of Jewish machinations, and thus their fifth column inside Islamdom.

Qutb also writes about how the Jews conspired to sow dissension among the factions vying for power after the death of Prophet Muhammad, discord that led to the murder of the third caliph, Uthman bin Affan, by a rioting mob. He writes in the essay that the man who incited the people and set them loose to kill caliph Uthman was Jewish.

Sayyid Qutb is prone to lie with a sense of self-righteousness that is the hallmark of most Islamists. The person he accuses of being the Jew who incited the killing of Uthman and of fomenting the schism in Islam was a man named Abdullah ibn Safa. By all accounts he was a Yemeni Jew who had converted to Islam. So what? All the Muslims involved in this first civil war of Islam – the Muslims backing Uthman and those opposing him – were not born in Islam. Some, like Caliph Uthman, were former pagans, while others had come to Islam from Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism. To use the Jewish ancestry of Abdullah ibn Safa (who the Shias, besides, claim is a fictitious character) as a sign of Jewish deviousness, when other converted Jews
were supporting Uthman, is unadulterated Judeophobia that has gone unchallenged for centuries. Qutb’s essay epitomizes the Islamist tradition of passing the buck to the kuffar. No matter how badly we Muslims bungle our diplomacy, there is always the Jew to blame for the mess we create. One could argue that if a Jew can be blamed for the murder of Caliph Uthman, then a Jew can also be blamed for the Darfur genocide or the Muslim-on-Muslim slaughter in Pakistan.

Sayyid Qutb’s Jew-hatred has had dreadful consequences in the Muslim communities where Shia and Sunni Muslims peacefully coexisted for centuries on the Indian subcontinent, where the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad took refuge among Hindu kingdoms as they were hunted down by the Umayyad Arab caliphate in Damascus. Today, the anti-Semitism spread by Islamists like Qutb and their Saudi sponsors has mutated into hatred of the Shias, since it is hard to find a single Jew in all of Pakistan. Among the slanderous myths that have come from
The Protocols
and been tweaked to apply to Shia Muslims are the following:

• Shias slaughter young Sunni children and use their blood and meat during the feast offerings at the time of Ashura to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet.
  
• Shias inject their semen into food they serve to Sunnis.
  
• Shias disembowel their dead seniors, extract a clear liquid, and use it in the preparation of food to be served to other Muslims during the holy month of Muharram.
  
• During the celebration of Nawroz (when Shias in Pakistan and Iran gather to read Sufi prayers), Shia Muslims indulge in incestuous orgies.
  

These are some of the lies being propagated by Sunni Islamist groups, such as Sipah-e-Sahaba, that are allied to the Taliban and al Qaeda, where the teachings of Sayyid Qutb are introduced by the so-called Arab Afghans who come to Pakistan and Afghanistan armed with
The Protocols
, Milestones, and Qutb’s essay “Our Fight against the Jews.” When they can’t find any Jews to blame, the next best thing for them to target is Shia Muslims. It is not uncommon to hear Arabs from Sunni-dominated societies say that they are “free of the swines and the Shias.”

In sweeping statements that depict Jews as a monolithic organism stretching from seventh-century Medina to his own day, Qutb claims that this enemy of Islam is waging a two-pronged attack against Muslims – one physical and the other religious. Qutb accuses Jews of being both cowardly and conniving, and of creating confusion in the minds of Muslims about their new faith, Islam, by sowing doubt about their faith, and by hatching plots to make Muslim fight fellow Muslim.

There is no doubt that the debate about Islam and Judaism that took place in Medina in 622 between Prophet Muhammad and the Jewish rabbis of the city must have been intense. It is within the realm of possibility that the Jewish leadership of Medina resisted the emerging force of Islam, resulting in conflict and bitterness. However, Sayyid Qutb takes a ludicrous leap by suggesting that the war against Islam is one long continuous and continuing struggle, and he fails to acknowledge that by the eighth century, Jews had become an integral part of Muslim societies.

Even the rise of the Muslim intelligentsia in the twentieth century is attributed by Qutb to a Jewish conspiracy. He accuses the Jews of installing regimes in the Muslim world in order to conspire against the Muslim community. He writes that in addition to installing favourable governments in the Muslim world, the Jews have sent “a massive army of agents in the form of professors, philosophers, doctors and researchers – sometimes also writers, poets, scientists and journalists – carrying Muslim names, because they are of Muslim descent!!. And some of them are from the ranks of the Muslim religious authority.”
¹¹

Qutb is earnest in his belief that a secret Jewish hand is behind every Muslim who wishes to break free from the clutches of Islamism
and the authority of clerics. He accuses these traitorous, renegade Muslims, who supposedly dance to the tune of the Jews, of intending “to break the creed of the Muslims, in all ways – through research, learning, literature, science and journalism; by prying the principles of the creed and Sharia.”
¹²
Of Muslims who desire secularism, a separation of religion and state, an equality of men and women, Qutb says they are Muslims in name only.

It is little wonder that Islamist followers of Qutb today consider the founder of the Turkish republic, Kemal Atatürk, to be a Jew. Why? Because he modernized the country. Any Muslim who dares to dream of technological progress and material happiness is slapped with the same label, as if deprivation and stagnation were the necessities of Islam, not the belief in oneness of God and Muhammad as his Messenger. Consumed by his fundamentally ingrained hatred of Jews, Qutb blames them for everything that in his view is wrong with the world today. At the end of his notorious essay, he writes: “Behind the doctrine of atheistic materialism was a ‘Jew’; behind the doctrine of animalistic sexuality was a Jew; and behind the destruction of the family and the shattering of sacred relationships in society was also a Jew” – the three being Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Émile Durkheim.
¹³

Sayyid Qutb’s essay has had a lasting effect on the Islamist psyche. Here is a sampling of what passes for acceptable speech on Egyptian TV today. On Al-Rahma TV on October 31, 2009, Egyptian cleric Hazem Shuman said about Jews: “Your turn has come at last, you offspring of apes and pigs, you most accursed creatures created by Allah, you people who have harmed the Prophet again and again.…I have a message for every Jew on the face of the earth. The army of Muhammad will return. O offspring of apes and pigs, the day of vengeance is nearing. O most accursed creatures created by Allah, those who swore before the Prophet Muhammad to die, are returning.
Wait for us and you will see, you most accursed creatures.” And on Cairo’s Al-Nas TV, on December 29, 2009, Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaqub said, “The Jews are our enemies. Allah will annihilate them at our hands. This is something we know for certain. We know this for certain – not because I say so, but because Allah said so. ‘You shall find that the people strongest in enmity to the believers are the Jews and the polytheists.’ ”

Defenders of Qutb often gloss over his ideological war against the West and the Jews, claiming they follow the man because of his magnificent multivolume magnum opus, In the Shade of the Quran. Others say he cannot be blamed for what his followers do, but this is a weak excuse for someone whose terrorist tentacles reach from the past well into the future. Today’s jihadi terrorists, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, are not that far from the guru of world Islamism. One of Sayyid Qutb’s closest supporters was his brother Muhammad, who became a professor of Islamic studies in Saudi Arabia while editing and publishing his late brother’s writings. The notorious Ayman al-Zawahiri was one of his students before becoming a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and, later, mentor and deputy to Osama bin Laden and a leading member of al Qaeda. Bin Laden, too, was acquainted with Qutb’s brother. A friend of Osama’s claims that bin Laden regularly attended weekly public lectures by Muhammad Qutb at the university, and that both men “read Sayyid Qutb.”
¹⁴

Sayyid Qutb worked on his Islamist goals in the years after the Second World War, but his ideology was not born in isolation. Much of the anti-Semitism that even today weaves itself through the Islamic centres of North America and Europe has its origin in the period leading up to the war. Qutb was the inheritor of a fascist ideology nurtured in the 1930s by another character whose shadow looms long over the Middle East – the Grand Mufti of Palestine, an ally of Adolf Hitler. While tens of thousands of other Muslims were dying fighting the
Nazi war machine, the mufti and his allies, the Muslim Brotherhood, backed the Third Reich and eagerly waited for Rommel’s Afrika Korps to advance from Egypt into British Palestine and annihilate the Jewish population.

Hitler’s Third Reich was on its last legs
as the first units of the Soviet Red Army reached the Vistula River outside Warsaw on September 13, 1944. In August, Paris had been liberated by the Free French and the United States 4th Infantry Division. Nevertheless, the defeat of the once mighty Wehrmacht was of little solace to the prisoners in concentration camps awaiting execution by the SS, including four women nabbed by the Gestapo for aiding the French Resistance.

The same morning the Red Army reached the Vistula, a thousand kilometres to the west of Warsaw, as the sun rose over the concentration camp at Dachau, a shackled Nora Baker and three other women faced the firing squad. Friedrich Wilhelm Ruppert, the SS trooper in charge of executions, made the women kneel before he gave the orders to shoot. Eyewitness accounts say that one by one the troopers shot Madeleine Damerment, Eliane Plewman, and Yolande Beekman. However, when it came time to shoot Nora Baker, the SS had a special treat for the darker-skinned woman, who pretended to be French and was suspected by the Germans of being Creole. Ruppert stepped forward and hit Nora Baker with his gun butt. When she fell to the ground, he kicked her till she bled. After the thirty-year-old screamed one last word in defiance -
“Liberté” –
the SS trooper shot her in the back of the head. Nora Baker was not her real name and she was not Creole, but of Indian ancestry.