The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

2. Judaism and Islam: Fourteen Hundred Years of Intertwined Destiny? An Overview

2 Judaism and Islam Fourteen Hundred Years of Intertwined Destiny? An Overview Norman A. Stillman One does not have to be a specialist in Comparative Religion, Islamic, Jewish, or Middle Eastern Studies to know that Muslim-Jewish relations are not—on the whole—ideal at this moment in time. Usāma bin Lādin has on numerous occasions over the past few years called for a jihād against “the Jews and the Crusaders.”1 The tropes and themes of both European medieval and modern post-Enlightenment anti-Semitism are to be found among the principal tenets of virtually all contemporary Islamist groups. This is irrespective of whether they are Sunni, such as the Ikhwān al-Muslimūn, al-Qā῾ida, al-Jamā῾a al-Islāmiyya, and H amas, all in the Middle East, or Jamī῾at al-῾Adl wa’l-Ih sān and an-Nahd ā in the Maghreb, or H izb ut-Tah rīr in Europe, or for that matter whether they are Shī῾ī, as in the case of Khomeinism or H izbollāh.2 But it is not only among the Islamists who, after all, represent a small minority among Muslims, that such ideas have currency, but alas, among many members of the broader Muslim population as well. When the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohammed, said in a speech before the Organization of the Islamic Conference in October 2004 that “today the Jews rule the world by proxy” (an allusion to the topos of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), he not only received unanimous applause from the kings, presidents, amirs, and ministers in attendance, but was praised even by such a widely respected and generally enlightened figure as the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.3 Judaism and Islam: Fourteen Hundred Years of Intertwined Destiny? r 11 There can be no doubt that the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism across the broad spectrum of contemporary discourse is a concomitant of the Muslim world’s emotional and political engagement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, such ubiquitous fantasies as the Blood Libel or the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world are without any precedence in the longue durée of Islamic thought. Like so many aspects of modernity in Asia and Africa, these ideas are Western imports, historically un-Islamic, and have been branded as such by a few bold and enlightened Muslims.4 This lamentable hostility has, regrettably, been reciprocated within certain quarters of Jewry as well. Visceral anti-Islamic sentiments can be found among extreme religious-nationalist quarters both in Israel and the Diaspora. For decades, popular, generally nonacademic, historians have been producing revisionist accounts of the Judeo-Islamic historical encounter which emphasize a “persecution and pogrom” approach that is the very antithesis of the Wissenschaft des Judentum’s “golden age” vision, but like the latter, this is a polemical distortion of the past and, indeed, a more seriously distorted one. Fortunately, this anti-Islamism is even more of a minority fringe phenomenon in the Jewish world than is its homologue in Muslim society.5 The widespread contemporary animus obscures the fact—in the public mind, at least—that the historical relations between Muslims and Jews, and between Islam and Judaism, have been far different in the course of the 1,400 years since the birth of Islam. And while never idyllic—nothing in human history has ever been so—the cultural interaction was for long periods mutually beneficial, and interpersonal relations were often good, at times even cordial, and certainly far more nuanced than the contemporary state of affairs would suggest. There is also a tragic irony in all of this, since Islam and Judaism have so much in common and have contributed so much to each other’s development. As to the issue of “Intertwined Destiny” as posed by the title of this chapter, it should be emphasized that one does not mean to imply the element of Divine Providence or preordination—something best left to the theologians—but rather, whether or not these two religious civilizations, Judaism and Islam, have been intertwined in what the arbiter dictum of English usage, the Oxford English Dictionary, calls the “weakened sense” of the word destiny, namely, “What in the course of events will become or has become . . . ultimate condition.”6 When suggesting the title of this 12 r Norman A. Stillman chapter to the editors of this volume, it was debated...