Produce your proof: Muslim exegesis, the Hadith, and the Jews

Judaism, Wntr-Spring, 2004 by Khaleel Mohammed

AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, MANY MUSLIMS REFUSED to believe that the nineteen hijackers were even Muslim. Instead, they blamed this criminal act on a Jewish or Christian conspiracy against Islam. (1) Egyptian sociologist, Professor Sa'ad al-din Ibrahim repeated this observation when he lectured at San Diego State University, pointing out that many Muslims could not accept that their own people were responsible for the satanic acts. (2) The story of the beheadings in Iraq have met the same response from Muslims too: some internet sites have analyzed the film of Nicholas Berg's kidnapping to allege that it was an American action intended to demonize the Muslims, and shift attention from the Abu Ghraib scandal.

It was this same pervasive denial that greeted statements I made while participating in the Global Conference on antisemitism in Montreal last March 15. In an interview with the Montreal Gazette, I remarked that antisemitism has become such an entrenched tenet of Muslim theology that it is taught to 95% of the religion's adherents. The big, bold headline on page A8 of that newspaper's March 16 issue read: MUSLIM SPEAKER DENOUNCED. A subtitle explained that Muslim community leaders stated that I do not speak for Islam. As far away as my native land, Guyana, South America, the Stabroek News reported the event as "Guyanese Scholar in Storm over Islam and Antisemitism." (3)

Despite the tendentious titles, the articles explained that what I had actually said was that antisemitism had become endemic in Islamic teachings, and that while it was not an overt part of instruction, the average Muslim is nonetheless exposed to such antisemitic ideas in normative religious instruction. I did not blame this problem on the Qur'an, but attributed it instead to the vast body of Muslim traditional literature, the Hadith, that has all but supplanted the Qur'an as the basis of Muslim belief.

The "leaders" who were interviewed by the Montreal Gazette had no time to examine the actual content of the statements that I had made, but were simply intent on damage control, even if it meant sacrificing the truth. The president of the Muslim Council of Montreal declared that, "There is not an iota of evidence that this is correct. What he is talking about is his own understanding, which carries a lot of baggage that he has come up with. Who knows what objectives he has?" (4) The National President of the Canadian Islamic Congress called my statements "outrageous" and totally denied that such teachings are part of the Qur'an or the Prophet. (5)

Three things were noteworthy about the entire episode. Firstly, despite having initiated the polemic, the Gazette refused to print my rebuttal, informing me that it would not allow itself to be a forum for debate between my coreligionists and me. Secondly, none of the "leaders" whose opinions were mentioned have any formal qualifications in Islamic sciences. Montreal is a city that has many scholars of Islam, both from within and without the faith, but for some inexplicable reason they were not interviewed or, if they were, their comments were not deemed newsworthy. Thirdly, denial of fact, rather than a knowledge of Islamic law and tradition, was obvious from the statement: "there is not an iota of evidence" for my claims. A qualified jurist would have resorted to the norm for such situations: he would have challenged me with the Qur'anic verse: "Produce your proof if you are truthful" or resorted to the Islamic law maxim that states: the onus of proof is on the claimant." (6)

In this paper, I choose to answer the charge that I do not have an iota of proof. My contention is that, in fact, the proofs that I have would fill several tomes, but I will restrict myself to that which is easily accessible, either in writing, or that which is taught to the average Muslim. I have therefore chosen to support my accusation by relying on proofs from (1) The interpretation of the last verse of the first chapter of the Qur'an, and (2) the Oral Tradition of Islam, more commonly known as the Hadith. I choose these sources since interpretation of the Qur'anic verses (rather than the Qur'an itself) and the Hadith are the two sources of contemporary Muslim belief.

I will present my evidence under self-explanatory subtitles. Since this journal does not specialize in Islamic theology, I will, for simplicity's sake, omit many of the diacritics used in the English transliteration of Arabic terms. As much as possible, I will use phraseology that is designed to be comprehensible to the non-Islamicist rather than adhering to specialist argot, using, for example, "verse" and "chapter" instead of "ayah" and "sura."

Since the term "antisemitism" is a coinage of the nineteenth century, I will use it interchangeably with "Judeophobia" so that I might not be accused of anachronism. I hold, however, that this is simply a semantic contortion: by any name, in any century, even if it recognized by a different appellation, the disease is still the same.