Nope, just been lazy and ill, however here is my recent work looking at anti-Semitism and the Muslim Brotherhood. Comments welcome
Introduction
‘
Many among the people of the Book (Jews and Christians) wish they could somehow
turn you back to unbelief, due to their selfish envy, after the truth has become quite
clear to them. Forgive them and bear with them until Allah brings about His decision;
rest assured that Allah has power over everything.’ The Qur’an, al-baqarah – the cow [109] 2:[109]
[1][The enemies of Allah]
do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: "We desire death like you desire life."’ Hamas MP Fathi Hammad
[2]In June 2007, after increasingly stringent complains from the last surviving child of Walt Disney and the corporation itself, it was announced that Farfour the Mouse, the co-host of the Hamas produced childrens program ‘Pioneers of Tomorrow’ had been martyred
[3]. A somewhat transparent copy of Mickey Mouse, Farfour’s death ‘
at the hands of the criminals, the murderers, the murderers of innocent children who killed Iman Hijo, Muhammad Al-Duro, and many others’ was solemnly conveyed by Saraa, the 11 year old ‘surviving’ presenter. His last onscreen appearance was being beaten to death by an actor playing an Israeli official seeking to buy Farfour’s land. In Farfour’s own words, ‘
Grandpa entrusted me with this great trust but I don't know how to liberate this land from the filth of the criminal plundering Jews who killed my Grandpa and everybody’[4]. To its audience of 9-13 year olds, it communicated a series of classic anti-Semitic tropes, the Jew as land grabber, despoiler, murderer of innocents, a existential plague upon the entire Muslim Ummah. Thus a narrative of hatred was be transmitted via a modern and innocent pedagogical technique
The Muslim Brotherhood
[5] was set up in 1928 in Egypt, the prime mover being Hassan Al-Banna, a language teacher. Growing in strength with the rise in Arab nationalism during the thirties, the movement was initially close to the ‘Free Officers’ who ceased power from the monarchy in 1952. Having proved under the old regime to be behind various acts of violence, it was not long before the Nationalist regime cracked down on the Brotherhood. Until the death of Gamel Nasser, the Brotherhood was to remain a suppressed party. However, the brotherhood had spread to other parts of the Sunni world, in particular, Lebanon, Syria and Transjordon. In Egypt itself, the Brotherhood has a network ‘
numbering over a million’[6] sympathisers by 1952. By the 60s, large franchises of the movement were found in Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Pakistan and south-east Asia and its doctrines had been transmitted across the intra-Muslim schism to Shia Islamism. Beginning with the relaxation of proscription in Sadat’s Egypt, the Brotherhood began to expand further. The teachings of it’s foremost thinker Sayyid Qutb were widely propagated, funded by the new Saudi led phenomena of Petro-Islam.
In 1987, building on a considerable network of existing charities and social service providers, the Brotherhood formed Hamas
[7] in Gaza. This was to be a political movement dedicated to both the brotherhood’s generic mission of re-Islamification and a particular mission of ‘resistance’ to the Israel state.
The Brotherhood’s motto is ‘
Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope’
[8]. Al-Banna, Qutb and Ahmed Yassin (the founder of Hamas) considered present society as corrupted by impiety and lacking the moral rectitude of early Islam. The seemly terminal decline of the Muslim world since the 17th century, culminating in the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 and the establishment of Israel in 1948 was taken as proof of this collective lack of faith. Qutb called this fallen state ‘Jahiliyyah’, recalling the environment of Arabia before the revelations of the Prophet, characterized by ‘
vices and corruption…nervous and mental diseases and sensula disorders’
[9]. By implementing Sharia, law divined from the Qur’an, the Sunnah and the Hadiths, the Brotherhood sought to ‘re-pristinate’ society. What was required ‘
a “return” to the early communities of believers’, given that ‘…
modernity had failed to deliver’[10]. Only by weaving together Muslim faith and the legal rules of the community could corruption be expelled. The path to this recreated utopia was to come through jihad, in particular outward worldly struggle. This struggle was a virtuous and necessary means to a glorious end.
The founding of Israel was taken as a standing insult to the Brothers faith. The movement had particularly taken off during the Arab revolt of 1936-39 against the British mandate and the Jewish communities within. After 1948, the Jewish state was perceived as both evidence of the moral fall of the Muslim world and as an existential threat to the future of Islam. The defeats of 1948 and 1967 were represented as systemic failures of the part of the traditional monarchies and the new nationalist regimes. It was to the Brothers, ‘
divine punishment for forgetting religion’
[11]. By the beginning of the 1st intifada (1987-93), the Muslim Brotherhood had placed the Israel/Palestine conflict at the centre of its discourse. Hamas would seek to take over leadership of the mass uprising, forming its own militia, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades
[12] in 1992. Taking up Islamic Jihad’s tactic of suicide bombing in 1994, it became the leading practitioner of Palestinian terrorism by and during the ongoing 2nd or Al-Aqsa intifada in 2000. After taking part in the Palestinian Authority’s legislative elections in 2006, Hamas emerged as the majority party with 74 of the 132 seats. Tensions between the PLO/Fatah and Hamas rose during the summer of 2006 until outright fighting broke out. By the end of the year, Hamas were left masters of the Gaza strip and the PLO held power in the west bank. Ongoing negotiations to reform a national unity government have yet to bear fruit.
With regards to anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, there exist a rough binary divide in historiography
[13]. Such analysts such as Daniel Pipes
[14], Ronald L.Nettler and Robert S. Wistrich
[15] have seen a continuity of ‘Judeophobia’ throughout Muslim history. From the Qur’an statements about the ‘treachery’ and ’deceit’ of the people of the book via the supposed golden age of medieval Islam to the bloody history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Islam has always been opposed to the Jews. It is ironic that this narrative is echoed exactly by the leading Islamists in recent years (including Qutb and Madi). These ‘Essentialists’ see anti-Semitism as a core part of both Muslim identity and perception, ‘
Islamic archetypes of the Jews…have, over the age, remained firmly rooted’[16]. While some such as Pipes are remarkable a-historic in their arguments
[17], Nettler sees at least some dynamics in Muslim perceptions of Jews. During periods of stability, the Jew is just another class of dhimmah, but in times of crisis, the early Islamo-Jewish conflict is re-imagined as a matter of life and death.
Such ideological isolation is challenged by what might be termed ‘Modernists’. To Bernard Lewis
[18], Gilles Kepel
[19], Gudrun Kramer
[20], Alexander Flores
[21] and Mattias Küntzel
[22], Islamic perceptions of the Jew are primarily shaped by the agency of modernity and European anti-Semitism. To these scholars, the intensifying conflict between Jews and Muslim during the modern period brought new elements into Islamic anti-Semitism. As Kramer notes, the blood libel was exported into Arab discourse ‘
by local Christians (often supported by European Consuls, teachers and missionaries)’
[23] starting with the Damascus affair of 1840
[24]. In particular, European notions of the Jews as a meta-physical entity and threat to rootedness were to redefine Muslim/Jewish relationship amongst Islamist thinkers and activists. By importing anti-Semitic tropes from the European nationalists of the late 19th/early to mid 20th centuries, Islamists such as Qutb and Mawludi could combine the Koranic sectarianism with modern anxieties over identity, nationality and modernism. Jews became ‘
harmful by their very character’[25]. While Küntzel directly ascribes this influx to Nazi propaganda, in particular the transmissions from the Zeesen aerial by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, the ‘cross-pollination’ is wider. In ‘
publications, posters, cartoons, caricatures, films or newsreels’[26], from the Protocols to ‘the International Jew’ of Henry Ford to Spengler, the whole range of European anti-Semitism became part of the Islamist synthesis.
When examining this ‘modernist’ anti-Semitic narrative, it may help to use the main thrusts of its most durable legacy, the forgeries that are the Protocols. The work of the Russian secret police, the Protocols has become the anti-Manifesto of anti-Semites. Not only does it pertain to carry an elicit truth of the Jews’ evil; it also draws the contours of the ‘enemy’. The Jews control ‘…
The despotism of Capital’[27] thus they are masters of new and disruptive economic patterns which they wield maliciously. They are arch-deceivers and would-be despots, practicing only ‘
Force and Make-believe’[28]. They are the source of all dissonant thought, attacking tradition and rootedness. From ‘
Darwinism’ to ‘Nietzsche-ism’ to godless communism, the Jews watched as these ‘
disintegrating’
[29] ideas weaken the Goyim. They seek the end of faith, they will ‘
tear out of the mind of the “Goyim” the very principle of God-head and the spirit’[30]. They will set nation against nation for their own gain using ‘
the guns of America or China or Japan’[31], regardless of the cost. They seek to poison the next generation, ‘
We have fooled, bemused and corrupted the youth of the “Goyim”’
[32] with false principles. Their entire relationship with Gentiles is parasitic, ‘
The Goyim are a flock of sheep and we are the wolves’[33]Thus the Jew in such anti-Semitic discourse is a world controlling entity
[34], holding absolute economic and political power. Such a totem seeks to destroy nomic certainties and spread corruption, materialism and decadence in the place of faith. This imagined monster is ruthless, without compunction about shedding blood and a master of deceit and conspiracy. Indeed the Jew in such a narrative is the cogs behind history, the motive power, always malicious, ethereal and meta-physical. This is, while not racial but essentially cultural bigotry, a paradigm shift from what even Netter calls a ‘
casual and descriptive’[35]religious hierarchy that existed before the perceived crisis of the Muslim Ummah. Before 1936, 'there
could be no talk of anti-Semitism in Egypt’[36] or in Palestine, as Flores points out (EDIT, actually that is untrue, I have since found out sectarian violence had plagued Palestine since the Balfour Decaration in 1917, particular in the 1929 pogrom). In this crisis, the Jews were transformed from a well-behaved yet stubborn ‘unenlightened’ minority to a vigorous competing identity, linked to both modern upheaval and outside interference.
The Jewish ‘threat’ was much changed from the Jewish tribes of seventh century Arabia as was the state of the Muslim world. The Jew was now international, the Jew was now the master of capitalism and explosive new ideas, the Jew had harness nationalism and a world system that did not count Sultans and Emirs and commanders of the faithful. These narratives stated ‘
the Jew is the source of all evil in the world….and the Shoah was therefore no crime’
[37]. In the imaginings of the Islamists, this demonic force could not be conceived via the Qur’an alone, just as in the thoughts of the Turkish CUP on the Armenians could not rely of the ideas of the Sublime Porte
[38]. European ‘modernist’ anti-Semitism allowed Islamists to frame this new contest within their ideological synthesis. It transformed that ‘
everything Jewish (was)
evil…’ into ‘…
everything evil was Jewish’[39]. It was to bridge the Qur’an message of Muslim triumph to the crisis of the present.
For the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, the nature of the Jew, of Zionism and of Israel continues to be immediate. The shocking reversal of the triumph of the Prophet over the Jews is taken as an affront at deep philosophical level. The frankly ‘modern’ aim to give their societies a binding and ‘magical’ meta-narrative of Allah’s wisdom and powers is based on the assumption of Islamic victory. In Hamas’ words, ‘
Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day’
[40], Israel was thus a suspension of Allah’s will. Making a political religion out of the Qur’an is fundamentally challenged by the existence of a successful and militarily strong Jewish state. The return of Al-Quds and Palestine from the sea to the river is a symbol of both Muslim revival via modernist Theocracy and an urgent matter of identity. It is the mythic core, worldly and indeed anti-spiritual, of a sanctified political system, inverted, it is the world turned upside down
[1] The Qur’an, trans. by F. Malik, http://www.mideastweb.org, 7/12/08 13pm
[2] http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1710.htm, 08/12/08, 13pm
[3] See http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1183053066461&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull 7/12/08 13pm
[4] http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP164207 7/12/08 13pm
[5] Full name - al-ikhwān al-muslimūn, or ‘The Society of the Muslim Brothers’
[6] G. Kepel, The Revenge of God, (Cambridge, Polity, 1994), pg. 18
[7] Full name - Harakat al-Muqāwama al-Islāmiyya or "Islamic Resistance Movement", the source of Hamas is disputed, its arabic translation is ‘zeal’ or ‘élan’, in hebrew, the cognate term means ‘to pillage’ or ‘to corrupt’
[8] H. Al-Banna, The Message of the Teachings in S. Qutb, Milestones, trans. A.B. al-Mehri, (Birmingham, Maktabah, 2006), pg. 270
[9] Qutb as quoted in H. Hansen & P. Kainz ‘Radical Islamism and Totalitarian Ideology: a Comparison of Sayyid Qutb’s Islamism with Marxism and National Socialism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 2007, 8/1, pg. 58
[10] M. Whine, ‘Islamism and Totalitarianism: Similarities and Differences’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 2001, 2/2, pg. 59
[11] G. Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, (London, I.B. Taurus, 2006), pg. 63
[12] al-Qassam was a Palestinian militant, in communication with Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of the Palestinians. He led a violent struggle against the British Mandate government and Jewish communities till his death in a gun fight in 1935. Hamas’ rockets are named after him.
[13] A third camp might be added who deny that there is such a phenomena as Islamist anti-Semitism. Some like the late Edward Said are scholars attached to the increasing threadbare model of the Islamic Golden Age. Other like Juan Cole for instance place such anti-Semitism as a purely reactive and minor detail, coming entirely from the Israel occupation of Palestine and with no life beyond this. Added to this is the quite audaciously insane agrument that as Arabs are Semites as well, anti-Semitism (a intense irrational animus towards Jews) cannot effect Arabs
[14]D. Pipes, In the Path of God, (New York, Transaction Publishers, 2002)
[15] R.S. Wistrich, Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger (New York, The American Jewish Committee, 2002)
[16] R. Nettler, ‘Islamic Archetypes of the Jews: Then and Now’ in R. Wistrich ed. Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary World, (New York, NYU press, 1990), pg. 63
[17] Indeed such is the iron determination of the Islamic dialectic to Pipes that he rivals Georgi Plekhanov in his humorless Hegelianism. One point should be noted. Such essentialist arguments could be transferred to Christian anti-Semitism. Thus, was there no change between the Judeophobia of Martin Luther and that CZ Codreanu for instance?
[18] B. Lewis, The Jews of Islam, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984)
[19]G. Kepel, 2006, ibid
[20] G. Kramer, ‘Anti-Semitism in the Islamic world: A Critical Review’, Die Welts Des Islam, 2006, 46/3, pg. 243-276
[21] A. Flores, ‘Judeophobia in Context: Anti-Semitism among Modern Palestinians’, Die Welts Des Islam, ibid, pg. 307-329
[22] M. Küntzel, ‘From Zeesen to Beirut: National Socialism and Islamic Anti-Semitism’, Telos, 2004, pg. 55-74
[23] G. Kramer, 2006, ibid, pg. 255
[24] See J. Frankel, The Damascus Affair: Ritual Murder, Politics and the Jews in 1840, (Cambridge, CUP, 1997)
[25] A. Flores, 2006, ibid, pg. 317
[26] G. Kramer, 2006, ibid, pg. 256
[27] Protocol 1, http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/przion1.htm#TABLE%20OF%20CONTENTS, 7/12/08 13pm
[28] ibid
[29] Protocol 2, ibid
[30] Protocol 4, ibid
[31] Protocol 7, ibid
[32] Protocol 9, ibid
[33] Protocol 11, ibid
[34] There is an old Jewish joke where one Jew sees another reading a deeply anti-Semitic paper. ‘My goodness, why would you read such stuff’, the other man replies ‘Well when I read Jewish journalists, its all woe is me, insecurity and angst, when I read this stuff, I’m told how incredibly powerful I am…’
[35] R.L. Nettler, Past Trial and Present Tribulations: A Muslim fundamentalist’s view of the Jews, (Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1989), pg. 11
[36] M. Küntzel, 2004, ibid, pg. 64
[37] M. Küntzel, 2004, ibid, pg. 67
[38] See the chapter on Turkey and the Armenian Genocide in M Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006)
[39] M. Küntzel, 2004, ibid, pg. 71
[40] Article 11, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp 23/10/08 4 am
