How Islam Loves the Jews

Courtesy of Tammy Swofford, who maintains an always entertaining and perceptive blog, I have gotten notice of Andrew G. Bostom's The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, a scholarly compendium of translations and much needed exegesis.

I'm not the scholar to review Bostom's work, but my blog category "LitStream" serves to pass along awareness of works, any medium, I feel may well have telling contemporary significance.

In addition, as regards this particular note, I strongly, albeit intuitively, believe that Islam's misery--its warfare with all and most of all itself--lays rooted in language poetics. 

Representing FrontPage.com [1], Jamie Glazov asks, "Tell us about the origins of Islamic Antisemitism"--Andrew Bostom answers:

Islamic Antisemitism has a heritage independent of Europe, arose as an entirely indigenous phenomenon that dates from the advent of Islam, and originates in Islam’s virulently Antisemitic foundational texts—the Koran, most importantly, and the gloss on its myriad Antisemitic verses by the greatest classical (and modern) Muslim exegetes of the Koran, the hadith (which include in addition to corporeal Antisemitic motifs, critical Antisemitic motifs in Islamic eschatology), and the further elaboration, or embodiment of many of these themes in the sira, the early pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad, particularly the works of Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Saad. [2]

One need not wonder why good professors beg young poets and scholars to write responsibly and truthfully, for here the effects of rhetoric--for example, this well disseminated statement from the Koran (5:82), “Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men to the believers are the Jews and the idolaters . . . ."--provide ample powder for baseless warfare across millenia.

Citing a 17th Century tract, Bostom relates, "In the midst of an anti-Hindu tract Sirhindi wrote, motivated by Akbar’s pro-Hindu reforms, Sirhindi observes, 'Whenever a Jew is killed, it is for the benefit of Islam.'”

How deeply has that remark been cherished, how widely spread, how passed through the mouth to sons who themselves become angry and calloused fathers, convinced of a generational cheat founded in a similarly transmitted transgenerational claim to great privilege?

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1. Glazov, Jamie.  "The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism".  Interview with Andrew G. Bostom, MD.  FrontPage Magazine.com, June 13, 2008.

2. Bostom, Andrew G.  The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.  Reviews.  June 13, 2008 (andrewbostom.org).

3. Swofford, Tammy.  http://www.tammyswofford.blogspot.com/. 

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Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim

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