JUDAISM AND ISLAM

Jewish-Muslim relations have been shaped by the interactions of the theological perspectives of both religions and the historical circumstances in which they are found. Both use sacred texts and history to form the basis of their perceptions of the other, with the result that there are often conflicting versions of the same events. This entry will show how historical circumstances, the place of Jews in Islamic religious text, and political ideology combine in varying degrees to shape Jewish-Muslim relations.

Historical Perspective

In each historical period, the definition of who was a Muslim or a Jew has shifted. Often only a religious identification, more frequently it signifies a particular social, economic, or political group. Ethnic categories and religious identities have been conflated by both insiders and outsiders alike, thus complicating the task of analyzing intergroup and intercommunal relations. In the first two centuries of the Islamic era, for example, we have evidence that some Jews who had converted to Islam still retained Jewish home practices, not from hypocritical motives, but because the development of Islamic practices for the home were somewhat underdeveloped.

Another important tool for Jewish-Muslim intergroup analysis is the placement of behaviors and ideas in specific temporal and geographic contexts. Visions and ideas of the past have a strong influence on both religions. Many Muslims have as keen an awareness of the events around the time of the Prophet as they do their own time. The Qur˒an and the sunna of the Prophet are guides for a Muslim's relations with Jews, as they are in all areas of behavior. A similar level of historical consciousness, albeit with different perspectives and details, helps shape Jewish attitudes toward Muslims. The historic interactions of Muslims and Jews have resulted in each being shaped and transformed by the other, and both by interactions with Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and others. It is hard to imagine how each religion would be as it is without the presence of the others.

When the prophet Muhammad was born in 570 c.e., Arabia, a central trade and military location, was caught in the Byzantine-Sassanian rivalry. Arabs, including Jewish Arabic-speakers, were in the armies of both sides, providing horse and camel cavalries, and each empire maintained Arab client states as buffers and bases of operation. Only around fifty years earlier, the last Jewish kingdom in southern Arabia, allied with the Persians, had been defeated, replaced by a Byzantine-supported Christian army from Abyssinia. According to early Muslim historians, this army, led by a general named Abraha, is referred to in Surat al-Fal in the Qur˒an.

The Hijaz had numerous Jewish settlements, most of long standing, dating to at least the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e.. According to some scholars, the earliest Jewish presence in the Hijaz was at the time of Nabonidus, circa 550 b.c.e. The Jews in these settlements were merchants, farmers, vintners, smiths, and, in the desert, members of Bedouin tribes. The most important Jewish dominated city was Yathrib, known later as Medina. The Jews of the Hijaz were semi-independent, but often allied with both Byzantium and the Persians. Some made the claim to be "kings" of the Hijaz, most probably meaning tax collectors for the Persians, and for a variety of reasons, more Jews were loyal to Persian interests against those of the Byzantine empire. Jews, as well as Christians, seem to have been engaged in attempting to convert the Arabian population to their religious and political views, often with some success. The loyalties of the Jews and Christians to one or the other of the two empires meant that choosing either Judaism or Christianity meant also choosing to ally with a superpower interested in dominating Arabia.

Arab sources report that at the time of Muhammad's birth, some Meccans had abandoned polytheism and had chosen monotheism (Ar. hanif ), in a Jewish, Christian, or nonsectarian form. From Qur˒anic and other evidence, it is clear that Meccans were conversant with the general principles of Judaism and Christianity and knew many details of worship, practice, and belief.

When Muhammad had his first revelation in 610 c.e., his wife, Khadija, tested the validity of his experience by seeking the advice of her cousin, Waraqa b. Nawfal, a hanif learned in Jewish and Christian scriptures. In declaring that Muhammad was a continuation of the prophetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity, he said that he had been foretold in Jewish and Christian scripture. A central doctrine of Islam places Muhammad at the end of a chain of prophets from God, starting with Adam and embracing all the prophetic figures of Judaism and Christianity, and holds that Muhammad's advent is announced in the Torah and Gospels. Denial of this central idea by Jews and Christians is said to be a result of the corruption of the sacred texts, either inadvertently or on purpose. This disparity of perspective underlies much of what Muslims believe about their Jewish and Christian forebears and conditions Islamic triumphalist views about the validity of Islam against the partial falsity of the other two traditions.

The Qur˒an and the Sira, the traditional biography of Muhammad, present ambivalent attitudes toward Jews and Christians, reflecting the varied experience of Muhammad and the early community with Jews and Christians in Arabia. Christians are said to be nearest to Muslims in "love" in Qur˒an 5:82, but Muslims are not to take Jews or Christians as awlilya˒, "close allies or leaders" in Qur˒an 5:51. The Qur˒an sometimes makes a distinction between the "Children of Israel," that is, Jews mentioned in the Bible, and "Jews," members of the Jewish tribes in Arabia during Muhammad's time. This distinction is also present in the Sira and other histories, and one sees some Jews as hostile to Muhammad and his mission, while others become allies with him. The socalled Constitution of Medina, which Muhammad negotiated with the Ansar, the Muhajirun, and the Jews of Medina, include Jews in the umma, allowing them freedom of association and religion in return for the payment of an annual tax, originally called the kharaj. This agreement and the subsequent treaties negotiated by Muhammad with the Jews of Khaybar, Tayma , and other cities in the Hijaz, establish the precedent of including "people of the book" (Ar. ahl al-kitab) in the umma. As the armies of conquest encountered communities of Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, the model of Muhammad's accommodating behavior extended the original notion to incorporate all these recipients of God's revelation as ahl al-dhimma, or dhimmi.

The death of Muhammad and the subsequent expansion of Islam out of Arabia brought about a break with the Jewish Arabian communities, so that subsequent relations are built on Jewish and Christian interactions with Muslims who knew the Prophet's actions only as idealized history. During the first Islamic century, the period of the most rapid expansion of Islam, social and religious structures were so fluid that it is hard to make generalizations. Jews and Christians were theoretically expelled from Arabia, or, at least, the Hijaz, but later evidence shows that Jews and Christians remained for centuries afterward. As late as the eighteenth century, for example, Jewish Bedouin roamed Northwestern Arabia, terrorizing pilgrims.

The era of the Umayyads was a time in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians negotiated the new power arrangements. The parameters of dhimmi status were developed, and both head and land taxes were paid to the Muslim rulers. Jews and Christians related to the Muslim caliphs through representatives and not individually. For the Jews, the Resh Geluta or exilarch was designated as a "prince" in the Muslim court, representing all the Jews. Because the exilarch was from the Rabbinic branch of Judaism, it became the dominant form, generally displacing other groups. Also, because Muslims expanded to include most of the world's Jews in their polity, Rabbinic Judaism was able to develop its institutions within the context of the Islamic umma. For the newly forming Islamic state, the loyalty of the exilarch, and, by extension, the Jews, added legitimacy to Muslim claims to legitimate rule over its various non-Muslim populations. The interaction between Jews and Muslims thus produced profound effects on both Judaism and Islam. The occasional uprisings against Muslim rule—as the Jewish uprisings of the early eighth century—were local, over specific grievances, and not anti-Islamic as such. In fact, the Jewish revolt against the Umayyads, driven, it seems, by messianic visions, was sympathetic to early Shi˓ite ideology while it unsuccessfully tried to overthrow the last Umayyad caliph.

The first two Islamic centuries were a time of translating Jewish and Christian scripture into Arabic, along with a vast body of commentary, particularly on biblical figures. Qur˒anic tafsir became the repository of much Jewish tradition about such figures as Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and others. It was during this period that Rabbinic Judaism met a strong challenge from Karaite Judaism and ultimately triumphed as the dominant form of Judaism in the world.

The period from the tenth through the eighteenth centuries of the common era witnessed a rise of Western military, technological, and economic power, ultimately eclipsing the great agrarian-based Islamic empires that had formed in the wake of the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate. In the western Islamic lands of the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, Jews, Christians, and Muslims combined in a society that is often described by later historians with the adjective "golden." The areas of poetry, music, art, architecture, theology, exegesis, law, philosophy, medicine, pharmacology, and mysticism were shared among all the inhabitants of the Islamic courts and city-states at the same time that Muslim armies were locked in a losing struggle with the Christian armies of the Reconquista. In the eastern Mediterranean, similar symbiotic societies could be found. Within the intellectual circles of the Islamic world, Jews become Hellenized through contact with Muslim philosophers and theologians, just as Muslims had from contact with Christians earlier. In the areas of commerce, world trade was dominated by trading associations made up of Muslims, Jews, and Christians from Islamic lands.

Political Ideology

The twin attacks on the Islamic world in the Middle Ages by the Crusaders from the West and the Mongols from the East transformed Muslim attitudes toward the dhimmi. In the resulting visions of society, the influence of Jews, Christians, and Shi˓ites was circumscribed and made more rigid, but not eliminated. Muslim religious scholars used depictions of Jews and Christians found in the foundation texts as cautionary models for Muslims, but actual communities of Jews and Christians were treated with strict adherence to Islamic legal precedent. Dhimmis had to wear distinctive clothing and badges to indicate their position in society, as did Muslims as part of a general "uniform" indicating rank and status. Certain occupations became common for Jews and Christians, such as tanning, which was regarded as imparting ritual impurity to Muslims, and it became less common in this period to find Jews and Christians in the highest ranks of advisors to the rulers. Jews and Christians usually lived in separate quarters of cities, and, while they were inferior to Muslims in public, barred from riding horses or blocking the public way with religious processions, they lived autonomously with respect to their communal affairs. This autonomy, while protective of the individuals, was to prove to have long-term consequences, however.

When Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain in 1492, the majority of Jews chose to move to Islamic lands, the area of the Ottoman Empire in particular. The Iberian Jews were so numerous, well educated, and prosperous that Iberian Jewish culture often supplanted that of the older Jewish communities so that Sephardic became the general term for Jews living in Islamic lands. The trading and manufacturing skills and the capital of these immigrants to the Ottoman empire provided much of the wealth for Ottoman expansion. Under the Ottomans, Jewish and Christian communities achieved the greatest degree of autonomy. Through the millet system, each community was distinct and responsible directly to the sultan.

In the Ottoman Empire, the British and French found Jews and Christians to be attractive agents for their commercial activities, and the Ottomans, in turn, were pleased to employ the dhimmi for these purposes as well. Many Jews sought to secure the benefits of Western societies for themselves and their offspring by asking for and getting Western protection, passports, and, in some instances, citizenship. The increasing identification of Jews and Christians with non-Muslim powers served only to isolate these non-Muslims from the rest of Islamic society. By the end of the nineteenth century, most Muslims were under Western political and legal influence. The secular legal systems devised in the West supplanted Muslim customary and religious law, seriously challenging or eliminating the category of dhimma in those countries. The result was often a complete separation of Jews from a relationship in law with Muslims and an increasing identification of Jews as "European." This was particularly the case in Western Islamic lands, where a knowledge of the growth of European forms of Judaism was greatest.

The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I resulting in the creation of a number of small nation-states brought about a further separation of non-Muslims from Muslims. The ideology of nationalism reduced religion to the status of only one of the components of a nation-state ideology. Education became Western, technological, and secular, further reducing religion to peripheral status. By the eve of World War II, most Islamic countries were prepared to overthrow colonialism and establish nation-states along Western secularist models. When this happened after World War II, constitutions were modeled after such countries as Switzerland, the United States, and France, usually guaranteeing freedom of religion, but providing no particular safeguards for religious expression. Other religious and ethnic groups also desired nation-states. Christian states were formed in the Balkans and the Jewish state of Israel was formed in the formerly British Mandate territory of Palestine. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 became a central focal point for Jewish-Muslim relations that had steadily deteriorated since before World War I. The worsening conflicts in Palestine increased Jewish-Muslim conflict in the Arab states, where Jews were seen as both foreign and instruments of Western colonial designs. Within twenty years after the formation of the state of Israel, the majority of Jews living in Arab lands migrated to Israel, thus crystallizing the conflict in Palestine into a Jewish-Muslim conflict. Rulers in predominantly Muslim countries no longer had a constituent Jewish population. Jews became an abstract and hostile Other, and Judaism, increasingly identified with Zionism by Jews and non-Jews alike, was revalorized as the ever-present opposition to Muslims in Islamic history. This last notion, while having its roots in the foundation texts of Islam, was now abstracted in a way unlike any time in the past, and Jewish-Muslim relations took a new direction.

Jews in Islamic History

A common thread among many Islamic intellectuals concerned with the role and direction of Muslims in the postcolonial world is the role of the Jews in Islamic history. As mentioned above, the historical circumstances of a strong Jewish presence in the Hijaz during Muhammad's time and the opposition of a few of the Jewish tribes to Muhammad's mission, embedded numerous seemingly anti-Jewish statements into the early literature. For a few, in a quest to use the Islamic historical past to explain the present, the negative accounts of Judaism and Christianity became abstracted so as to conflate the past with the present Arab-Israeli and East-West conflicts. Biblical descriptions of Jews rebelling against God's commands, Medinan Jewish opposition to the forming Muslim state, and Israeli actions against Palestinians were read together as an eternal Jewish character, a view sometimes informed by Western anti-Semitic literature. The article by Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, "Our Struggle with the Jews," is one example, as are the views expressed in America by leaders of the Nation of Islam.

Other Muslim intellectuals read the same foundation texts with an emphasis on the special relationship between God and people of the book. While deploring the problems in Palestine, they separate the Arab-Israeli conflict from discussions about Jews (and Christians). Some at Al-Azhar in Egypt cite Qur˒an and sunna to support peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, and Warith D. Muhammad, the son of Elijah Muhammad, has countered the anti-Jewish essentialist reading of the past with a Qur˒anic-based message of mutual cooperation among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

Discourse about Jewish-Muslim and Christian relations has been dominated in the last century by the problems of forming new group identities after the dissolution of colonialism. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities have all suffered from conflicts pitting one ethnic group against another. As with any conflict, this period has produced considerable polemic. It has also produced positive calls for mutual respect and cooperation. It remains to be seen if the positive richness of past Jewish-Muslim relations can over-come the current antipathies.

See alsoChristianity and Islam ; Islam and Other Religions ; Minorities: Dhimmis .

Gordon D. Newby