In Response to Timothy Furnish's "Anti-Semitism in Islam: Israel Didn't Start the Fire"

HNN is a valuable resource and provocative opinion pieces that it publishes are useful in classes and discussion groups I teach or facilitate. However, by repeatedly running articles by someone as tendentious as Timothy Furnish, HNN legitimates his position and at the same time advertises his book. This is unfair. The time and effort required to refute his observations precludes a response from anyone who is knowledgeable enough to counter his seemingly well-documented arguments. The puerile remarks dumped in the "Comments" string in response to his recent column (and his own puerile responses) are a case in point. Few people read them, and what can be gleaned from them is slim pickings. Furnish's other contributions to HNN gave me a similar impression to this essay. Using his detailed acquaintance with Islam he imposes an interpretation that does violence to the larger historical context and that promotes and rests on assumptions rooted in the "clash of civilizations" world view.

Furnish's argument about the "deep roots" of Muslim anti-semitism (a rhetorical absurdity, Furnish admits in his first footnote, unless we are talking about "self-hating Arabs") ignores the entire history of dhimmi status, protection for "people of the book" (although they were subject to additional taxes). And while he turns to the dajjal in medieval Islamic mytho-history and eschatology, he ignores a wealth of sources from Sufi and falaysuf traditions that allow for and encourage many paths to knowledge of the divine. The distortions in Furnish's perspective are compounded by his use of contemporary or post-1948 interpretations of haditha and then attributing these recent perspectives to the original sources.

The specific incident of the massacre of 700 men of the Qurayzah clan occurred in the midst of the Battle of the Trench 627 CE in which the Meccan pagans had besieged Medina and the Qurayzah, within the walls of Medina, sided with the Meccans and their allied pagan clans within Medina and in the surrounding area. The conflict with the three Jewish Arab clans, the Qaynuqah, the Nadir, and the Qurayzah, was in part no doubt based on the competition with a new revelation of monotheism. Nevertheless it was primarily a political and military struggle with those clans allied with the Meccan pagans in which the survival of the Muslim ummah or community was at stake.

Furnish asserts that the standard interpretation of historians of this incident is common knowledge and conventional wisdom. This assertion is doubtful since it conflates public opinion, news commentators, and politicians with the consensus of those who have done some reading, teaching, and writing in the field. Karen Armstrong certainly represents that informed consensus, but to say informed views such as hers hold sway over US or British or European public opinion ignores the widespread acceptance of propaganda promoting Muslim fanaticism. About the massacre of the Qurayzah, Armstrong writes in Islam: A Short History (Modern Library/ Random House, NY: 2000, 2002 p. 21) "Th[is] struggle did not indicate any hostility towards Jews in general, but only towards the three rebel tribes. The Quran continued to revere Jewish prophets and to urge Muslims to respect the People of the Book. Smaller Jewish groups continued to live in Medina, and later Jews, like Christians, enjoyed full religious liberty in the Islamic empires [i.e. the medieval caliphates]. Anti-semitism is a Christian vice. Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim world only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent loss of Arab Palestine. It is significant that Muslims were compelled to import anti-Jewish myths from Europe, and translate into Arabic such virulently anti-semitic texts as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, because they had no such traditions of their own."

Armstrong concludes by saying that nowadays the passages of the Quran referring to the struggle with the three Jewish "tribes" (clans would be a more accurate term) are used to justify anti-Jewish prejudices that are conflated with anti-Zionism. But what Furnish takes as common knowledge, or the dominant discourse, is far from it. Repeatedly the print and electronic media express the idea that fanaticism and "ancient tribal conflicts" are the source of the problems of the Middle East, and these are really the dominant views of a considerable portion of the US public. The Sunni vs. Shi'a conflicts in Iraq (only a segment of the multiple dimensions of what has happened to Iraqi society under the US occupation) are now being attributed to old "tribal" animosities, and are extrapolated into a world view, the "clash of civilizations." My own research traces the immediate ancestry of the clash of civilizations viewpoint to a trans-Atlantic counter-Enlightenment of the 1920s which nakedly described the future of humankind as race war. (I have looked at the writings of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, Henri Massis, Maurice Muret, Pierre Taittinger, Charles Josey. The first four were translated into French and English respectively and exercised influence over a broad spectrum of conservative to liberal opinion in France and the US.) These white, European supremacists used the term race whereas today's cultural essentialists have discarded the tarnished word in favor of "civilizations." But in my view the race war theorists are the intellectual forbears of Samuel Huntington, Timothy Furnish, or Daniel Pipes, who modifies the clash as one of civilization versus "ideological.barbarians" while ignoring that political Islam is as much a product of US proxy wars against the Soviet Union as an indigenous movement--but a challenge to Pipes' views require another essay.

It would be reasonable to compare the treatment of Jews in the Islamic world from 622 CE to 1948 CE with Christendom's treatment of the Jews, since Jewish settlement was concentrated in these two regions. There is no comparison in the Muslim world to the frequent expulsions, confiscations of Jewish property and wealth, confinement to ghettos, progroms and mass murders of Jews that besmirch European history. It was Catholic Spain which in 1492 expelled all Jews who refused to convert. They escaped to Islamic North Africa for the most part, although many also settled in Portugal and the Low Countries. Modern anti-semitism has its ideological roots in the poisonous writings of 19th century European public intellectuals such as Gobineau, Edouard Drumont, just to name its French purveyors, and anti-Jewish parties emerged in Vienna, Germany, along with terrorist groups such as the "Black Hundreds" in Russia. The 20th century opened in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair in France and mass emigration of Jews from the Pale of Settlement to escape the Tsarist Empire, and European anti-Jewish violence culminated in the Holocaust, in which tens of thousands of European anti-semites helped round up Jews for the Nazi extermination camps (see Theodore Hamerow's "The Hidden Holocaust" in Commentary [1978] as well as numerous other accounts from Raoul Hilberg et al).

Ignorance about Islam abounds in academic circles, not to mention the general public, and it behooves HNN to provide equal time and space in its forum for rebuttal of these seemingly (because they are footnoted) scholarly estimations of Furnish and others who are trying to prove the "clash of civilizations" world view. Historians who do world history, not to mention history of the Islamic world, have repeatedly demolished these notions only to have them rise up because there is powerful ideological aid and comfort and an important political stake in maintaining them (as was the case for anti-Judaism in 19th and 20th century Europe). If any analogy applies to "clash of civilizations" thinking, it is anti-Darwinism or refusal to accept human sources of global climate crisis. I am not asking that you stop publishing this stuff, but only to provide for a responsible rebuttal that addresses the specific arguments raised.

If you are interested in an article that I found thoughtful about anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim anti-semitisms, see Maleiha Malik's "Muslims are now getting the same treatment Jews had a century ago" (Guardian).

RESPONSE BY TIMOTHY FURNISH

Mr. Slavin’s “critique” of my article says more about him than about me, frankly. Nowhere do I mention the “clash of civilizations,” with which he seems obsessed. I simply use Islamic and Arabic sources and demonstrate that strife between Muslims and Jews did not begin in 1948. Mr. Slavin may not like that, but it hardly qualifies as “puerile.”

I’d be happy to talk about dhimmis, which Slavin whitewashes to mean only that “they were subject to additional taxes.” Well, that plus not being able to build new churches or synagoues; being forced to wear distinctive clothing; being prevented from certain jobs; being prevented from marrying Muslims; etc. If one were to take Slavin’s approach in discussing the oppression of black Americans prior to the 1960s one could say that they were subject to additional (poll) taxes and leave it at that. True, but not exactly an accurate portrayal of the second-class citizenship involved.

Slavin can, again, whitewash the slaughter and dissolution of the Banu Qurayzah, but facts are stubborn things, and the historical fact—again, related in the ISLAMIC sources—is that an entire Jewish tribe was liquidated.

Slavin’s ignorance comes to the fore by admitting that he relies on Karen Armstrong, a “scholar” who cannot even use Arabic sources. And Slavin is just flat-out wrong in several of his historical assertions, most notably that “hatred of Jews became marked in the Islamic world only after the creation of the state of Israel….” This is what happens when a European specialist wades into a field of which he is largely ignorant. The al-Muwahhids, who ruled the Maghrib and much of Iberia for over a century (1130-1269 CE), forcibly converted Jews to Islam (and, coincidentally, killed members of any Catholic religious order whom they could get their hands on). Slavin’s slavish devotion to this myth of Islamic tolerance is laughable. Perhaps if he read some Arabic Muslim sources, rather than the likes of Armstrong or the litany of 20th century Europeans he mentions, he’d know a bit more about Islamic history. As it is, he simply repeats outmoded argument from secondary sources and makes himself appear silly in the process.