The Jew is Not My Enemy by Tarek Fatah Read Free Book Online Page A

scholars would deny that notwithstanding the dhimmi, or second-class, status of Jews under all caliphates, life for Jews under Islam in the Arab world and North Africa was far better than in Christian Europe. At a time when Maimonides, the pre-eminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars of the Middle Ages, served Saladin as his physician in twelfth-century Cairo, such a relationship would have been impossible to imagine in the domain of the Catholic pope or the Orthodox patriarch. Imagine Maimonides gracing the court of Louis vii of France.
    For centuries, a virulent form of anti-Semitism afflicted Europe. That disease has now, unfortunately, become endemic in the Islamic world. Even while Jews were an integral part of Islamic life – as in eighth-century Baghdad, tenth-century Spain, twelfth-century Cairo, and sixteenth-century Turkey – the Christian world remained hostile towards them: they were the killers of Christ, and some Christians believed they re-enacted this ultimate evil by drinking Christian blood every Passover.
    Although the Quran has positive as well as numerous harsh verses about Jews, the caliphs – except for the odd aberration – were enlightened secularists for their time. For them, the bottom line was that as long as Jews accepted Islamic political authority and the social and political limitations this imposed upon them, they were fully protected under Islamic law.
    Islamist apologists of today may recoil at the thought, but for the many competing caliphates during the glory days of Islam, from the ninth through the twelfth centuries, good governance and the welfare of the population as well as stability were the key motivators, not jihad or sharia law.
    Let us not pretend that prejudice against Jews did not exist in medieval Islamdom. It did, and at times this prejudice turned violent, buteras of cooperation and relative peace were also often characteristic of Jewish life under Islam. It was during the time of Maimonides that the forced conversion of Jews to Islam was initiated in both Muslim Spain (under the jihadi Mohads) and Yemen (where the Iraqi Abbasids fought against the Egyptian Ayyubids for control). As hard-line Islamic extremists gained ground in Spain and Yemen, Jews were targeted quite viciously.
    According to Bernard Lewis, one of the foremost scholars of Islamic history, the anti-Semitic ideas of Christianity first entered the Muslim world because of Islam’s conquest of Europe, which resulted in many Christians converting to Islam. Later, when Europe hit back and colonised the Middle East, its anti-Jewish ideas infiltrated the Arab world. “European anti-Semitism, in both its theological and racist versions, was essentially alien to Islamic traditions, culture, and modes of thought,” writes Lewis. He notes that “prejudices existed in the Islamic world, as did occasional hostility, but not what could be called anti-Semitism, for there was no attribution of cosmic evil. And on the whole, Jews fared better under Muslim rule than Christians did.” 3
    According to Lewis, it was Christian converts to Islam who brought anti-Semitism into the Arab world. Later, Greek Orthodox Christians who found themselves living under Ottoman rule are said to have introduced the notion of the blood libel into the Middle East. * “The blood libel was endemic in these parts [Greece] and was broughtto the notice of Ottoman authorities through the usual disturbances it caused at Easter time. This was the first time this story became known in Muslim lands.” 4
    In the mid-1800s, with the rise of European maritime power and the decline of Ottoman Turkey, there was a natural alignment between Christian Arabs and Christian Europeans. This contact brought numerous blood-libel charges against Jews living in the Ottoman Empire. Very often, it was business interests, not religion, that were at the root of the conflict. Christian businesses saw Jews as their main competitors in