Moses and the Muslims

Member ratings
  • Well argued: 83%
  • Interesting points: 89%
  • Agree with arguments: 76%
23 ratings - view all
Moses and the Muslims

The enmity that Israel faces from her neighbours is ineradicable, some say, because it has its roots in Islam. After all, antagonism towards Judaism has always been a core tenet of Islam. If for no other reason than that so few Muslims come forward to oppose this allegation, this claim gains traction. Mustafa Akyol confronts the thorny issue of Muslim/Jewish relations from their beginnings in The Islamic Moses . Akyol makes the case that present antagonisms must not wipe out the preceding one and a half millennia of Judaeo-Islamic symbiosis. 

As Akyol points out, Moses was for Muhammad an inspiration, not an anathema.

Before Islam, Arabia was a vast, sparsely populated, political no-man’s land. Byzantines and Persians, the superpowers of late antiquity, tried to bring Arabia into their sphere of influence, but did not have much to show for their efforts. The tribes inhabiting Arabia were as one in refusing to submit to an overlord, either from abroad or at home. A harbinger of change only took shape once there came forward a prophet who declared a new faith would unify all of Arabia. 

Muhammad was a keen student of Judaism. The Koran references Moses more often than any other figure from history: no fewer than 137 times. The impression that Moses made on Muhammad must have been deep, as the resemblances between their careers are uncanny. They both took a stand against established elites — Moses in Egypt and Muhammad in Mecca. They both led their followers into emigration — Moses to Canaan and Muhammad to Medina.  And they both issued ordinances that were religiously inspired, with some wordings identical even nearly to the letter. In Hebrew the proscription of usury is ribbit and in Arabic riba . In Hebrew the prescription of welfare is sadaka and in Arabic zakat

In spite of all these correspondences, frictions between Muslims and Jews broke out already in the earliest stage of Islamic history. The trigger was not religion, but politics.

The Muslims of Medina had survived an all-out attack launched by hostile Arabs in the Battle of the Trench (627), but there were rumours that their Jewish neighbours had been double-dealing with the enemy. The Jewish community of Medina was charged with treason, found guilty, and executed to a man. 

Memories of pre-Islamic times may have aggravated suspicions.  In pre-Islamic times it was not unknown for Arabic and Jewish communities to side with foreign powers, either with Byzantines or with Persians, and Muhammad’s hold on power in Medina was at this time not yet secure. However harsh, Muslim/Jewish friction was motivated by politics rather than by religion.

Jews and Muslims — and Christians, too — had different religions, but they shared best practices in civil society. Jews and Muslims had different names for commercial enterprises, iska or qirad , but the logic applied to splitting profits between investors and managers was the same. In architecture, Muslims and Christians likewise exported skill sets. Byzantine craftsmen designed the mosaics on the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, Fatimid architects built the roof of the Capella Palatina in Palermo. With the Islamic empire at its peak, a cosmopolitan intellectual milieu stretched across the Middle East and the Mediterranean. In all three Abrahamic religions, no sphere of intellectual activity was more dynamic than theology. 

Regardless of their religion, leading theologians from the 11th to the 13th centuries all strove to ground theology on reason rather than on revelation. This time span contained the lives of Moses Maimonides and Rashi; Ghazali and Averroes; Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura. In all three Abrahamic religions, the wealth of theological literature produced during this era has never been surpassed. 

But in this era, too, Judaic and Islamic theology took divergent paths. In Judaism, Moses Maimonides had no hesitation in adapting Islamic terms of discourse, mutazalism.   In Islam, on the other hand, mutazalism lost out to traditionalists who discouraged such discourse. From this time forward Islam’s cultural creativity subsided. 

Meanwhile in Europe, attitudes hardened toward ethnic minorities. Muslims in Italy and Jews in Spain were given a choice between conversion or exile. Islam by this time may have lost its edge in culture, but not yet in politics. On hearing that Jews were to be driven out of Spain, the caliph in Istanbul spotted an opportunity, and offered them the right of abode in Turkey. From its inception, the Ottoman empire tolerated ethnic diversity, and the caliph’s Jewish subjects were emancipated between 1839 and 1876. (For the sake of comparison, Britain’s Jews were awarded full civil rights between 1833 and 1890.)

Relations between Muslims and Jews were reset by the 18th-century Enlightenment, when the study of religion moved out of seminaries, yeshivas and madrasas and into universities. New methodologies were applied to the study of ancient religious literature. Correspondences between Judaism and Islam that had hitherto gone unremarked now became the subject of enquiry. Abraham Geiger, a rabbi in Germany, won a prize in 1833 for his study of traces of Judaism in Islam. Julius Wellhausen, who had made his reputation by uncovering the diversity of sources of the Books of Moses, in 1902 followed up with The Arab Kingdom and its Fall. By the end of the 19th century, the barriers between the study of the three Abrahamic religions had been lifted.

When the 20th century began, one might have expected the dawn of a new era of Muslim/Jewish symbiosis. Sadly, an historical constant asserted itself, namely that culture and politics sometimes pull in different directions, and moreover, that politics trumps culture. Not a few leading 20th-century orientalists were of Jewish extraction: Shlomo Goitein and Maxime Rodinson, to name but two. And, conversely, Abu Dhabi is home to an Abrahamic Family House

Mustafa Akyol is a public intellectual in his native Turkey and a fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington. In Middle Eastern politics, changes are abrupt and defy predictability. In keeping with this kaleidoscopic nature, Akyol finished writing The Islamic Moses on the very eve of the October 2023 Hamas massacre. One can only hope it circulates widely and so helps start a new chapter of mutual dialogue for Muslims and Jews.

 

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.


Member ratings
  • Well argued: 83%
  • Interesting points: 89%
  • Agree with arguments: 76%
23 ratings - view all

You may also like