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dragoneyes618 · 7 months ago

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"Islam was the second religion to emanate from Judaism, but as its founder was not a Jew and as it was not originally a Jewish sect, Islam's encounter with Judaism was significantly less bitter than Christianity's. As Salo Baron notes: "It was, therefore, from the beginning, a struggle between strangers, rather than an internecine strife among brethren." Largely because of this factor, Jews in the Islamic world were rarely persecuted as violently as their brethren in the Christian world. S. D. Goitein, perhaps the twentieth century's leading historian of Jewish life in the Arab world, concludes: "when the known facts are weighed, I believe it correct to say that as a whole the position of the non-Muslims [Christians and Jews under medieval Islamic rule] was far better than that of the Jews in medieval Christian Europe."

Goitein's assessment is valid, but it tells us much more about the Jews' condition under Christians than about their treatment by Muslims. For while the Jews of the Muslim world may have rarely experienced the tortures, pogroms, and expulsions that typified Jewish life under medieval Christian rule, their life under Islam was usually a life of degradation and insecurity. At the whim of a Muslim leader, a synagogue would be destroyed, Jewish orphans would be forcibly converted to Islam, or Jews would be forced to pay even more excessive taxes than usual.

Like Christianity's, Islam's anti-Judaism is deeply rooted. Islam too was born from the womb of Judaism; it too was rejected by the Jews whose validation was sought; and it too suffered an identity crisis vis-a-vis Judaism.

When Islam was born in the seventh century, there was a substantial Jewish population in Medina, where the first Muslim community arose. The Jews of pre-Islamic Arabia were active advocates of their religion, to such an extent that several kings of Himyar, now Yemen, converted to Judaism. Contemporary inscriptions described Dhu Nuwas As'ar, the last Jewish king of Himyar, as a believer in one deity whom the king called Rahman, the Merciful One, as called in Judaism and later in Islam.

During his early years, Muhammad related well to the Jews of Arabia, and their religious practices and ideas deeply influenced him. As Goitein noted: "The intrinsic values of the belief in one God, the creator of the world, the God of Justice and mercy, before whom everyone high and low bears responsibility came to Muhammad, as he never ceased to emphasized, from Israel."

The profound influence of the Jews, their Bible, and their laws on Muhammad is clearly expressed in the Koran, the Muslim bible, and in Muhammad's early religious legislation. Indeed, Muhammad saw himself as another Moses. In the Koran, he writes of his message (Sura 46, verse 12), "Before it the book of Moses was revealed....This Book confirms it. It is revealed in the Arabic tongue." Moses is a dominant figure on the Koran, in which he is mentioned over one hundred times.The Jewish doctrine that most deeply influenced Muhammad was monotheism: "There is no God but God." Muhammad's monotheism was so attuned to the uncompromising nature of Judaism's monotheism that though he had also been influenced by Christian teachers, he rejected the Christian trinity and the divinity of Jesus as not monotheistic: "Unbelievers are those that say, 'Allah is one of three.' There is but one God. If they do not desist from so saying, those of them that disbelieve shall be sternly punished" (5:71-73).

Jewish law also deeply influenced Muhammad. In the early days of Islam, Muslims prayed in the direction of the Jews' holy city, Jerusalem, and observed the most solemn Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Only later, when Muhammad reluctantly concluded that the Jews would not embrace him as their prophet and convert to Islam, did he substitute Mecca for Jerusalem, and the fast of Ramadan for Yom Kippur. Similarly, Muhammad based Muslim dietary laws upon Judaism's laws of Kashrut: "You are forbidden carrion, blood, and the flesh of swine; also any flesh...of animals sacrificed to idols." The five daily prayers of Islam are likewise modeled on the three daily services of the Jews.

Second in importance only to his adoption of the Jews' God was Muhammad's adoption of the Jews' founding father, Abraham, as Islam's founder. In Sura 2, verse 125, Muhammad writes how Abraham and his son Ishmael converted the Kaaba, the holy rock of Arabian paganism, into the holy shrine of Islam.

Believing himself to be the final and greatest prophet of Mosaic monotheism, and having adopted so much of Jewish thought and practice, Muhammad appealed to the Jews of Arabia to recognize his role and to adopt Islam as the culmination of Judaism. "Even Luther," the late renowned philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote, "expected the Jews to be converted by his version of Christianity, although he placed faith in Christ at the center of his teaching and firmly believed in the trinity. If even Luther...could expect that, how much more Muhammad, whose early revelations were so much closer to Judaism?" Muhammad's deep desire for Jewish recognition reflected the similar needs of Jesus and his followers. No group could validate Muhammad's religious claims as could the Jews, nor could any so seriously threaten to undermine them.

The Jews rejected Muhammad's claims as they had Jesus', holding in both cases that what was true in their messages was not new, and that what was new was not true. Islam may have served as a religious advance for Arabian pagans, but for the Jews it was merely another offshoot of Judaism.

One major factor that rendered Muhammad's prophetic claims untenable to Jews was his ignorance of the Bible. In large part because Muhammad never read the Bible, but only heard Bible stories, his references to the Jews' holy text were often erroneous. In Sura 28:38, for instance, he had Pharaoh (from Exodus) ask Haman (of the Book of Esther) to erect the Tower of Babel (which appears at the beginning of Genesis).

Another obstacle to Jewish acceptance of Muhammad was the moral quality of some of his teachings. They did not strike the Jews, or the Arabian Christians, as equaling, let alone superceding, the prophetic teachings of Judaism or Christianity. In 33:50, for example, Muhammad exempts himself from his own law limiting a man to four wives, and in 4:34 he instructs men to beat disobedient wives. Walter Kaufmann notes that "there is much more like this, especially in the 33rd Sura," and that "it must have struck the Jews as being a far cry from Amos and Jeremiah, and the Christians as rendering absurd the prophet's claim that he was superseding Jesus."

Finally, Muhammad's suspension of many Torah Laws invalidated him in the Jews' eyes.

For these and other reasons, the Jews rejected Muhammad's prophetic claims and refused to become Muslims. This alone infuriated Muhammad. But it was even more infuriating that the Jews publicly noted the errors in Muhammad's biblical teachings and may have even ridiculed his claims to prophecy. Goitein concludes, "it is only natural that Muhammad could not tolerate as a neighbor a large monotheistic community which categorically denied his claim as a prophet, and probably also ridiculed his inevitable blunders."

As a result Muhammad turned against the Jews and their religion, and never forgave them for not becoming his followers. And just as early Christian hostility to the Jews was canonized in the New Testament, so Muhammad's angry reactions to the Jews were recorded in the Koran. these writings gave Muslims throughout history a seemingly divinely-sanctioned antipathy to the Jews.

In the Koran, Muhammad attacked the Jews and attempted to invalidate Judaism in several ways. First, and most significantly, he changed Abraham from a Jew to a Muslim: "Abraham was neither Jew nor Christian. [He] surrendered himself to Allah....Surely the men who are nearest to Abraham are those who follow him, this Prophet" (3:67-68).

Second, he condemned the Jews and delegitimized their law by advancing a thesis similar to Paul's, that the many Torah laws had been given to the Jews as punishment for their sins: "Because of their iniquity we forbade the Jews good things which were formerly allowed them" (4:160).

Third, Muhammad charged the Jews with falsifying their Bible by deliberately omitting prophecies of his coming. For example, in the Koran (2:129), Muhammad has Abraham mouth a prophecy of his (Muhammad's) coming. Muhammad charged that the Jews "extinguish the light of Allah" (9:32) by having removed such prophecies from their Bible.

Fourth, Muhammad asserted that Jews, like Christians, were not true monotheists, a charge he substantiated by claiming that the Jews believed the prophet Ezra to be the Son of God. "And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah...Allah fights against them. How perverse are they." (9:30).

These anti-Jewish fabrications, articulated by Muhammad as reactions to the Jews' rejection of him, have ever since been regarded by Muslims as God's word. Though originally directed against specific Jews of a specific time, these statements often have been understood by succeeding generations as referring to all Jews at all times, and thus form the basis of Islamic antisemitism.

One common example is 2:61: "And humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them and they were visited with wrath from Allah. That was because they disbelieved in Allah's revelations and slew the prophets wrongfully.j That was for their disobedience and transgression." This Koranic description of the Jews of seventh-century Arabia has often been cited by Muslims to describe Jews to this day. *

(* In a speech before his army officers on April 25, 1972, the late Egyptian President Anwar as-Sadat cited this Koranic verse, and then added: "The most splendid thing our prophet Muhammad, God's peace and blessing on him, did was to evict them [the Jews] from the entire Arabian peninsula...I pledge to you that we will celebrate on the next anniversary, God willing and on this place with God's help, not only the liberation of our land but also the defeat of the Israeli conceit and arrogance so that they must once again return to the condition decreed in our holy book: 'humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them'...We will not renounce this.")

Muhammad and the Koran thus laid the basis for subsequent antisemitism just as the early Christians had - and for basically the same reason: Jews remaining Jewish constituted a living refutation of Islamic beliefs. Thus, under Islam, just as under Christianity, Jew-hatred was ultimately Judaism-hatred. Any Jew who converted to Islam was accepted as an equal.

Christians under Muslim rule fared little better. Muslims and their laws generally dealt harshly with both Christians and Jews.

As long as Christian communities survived in the Muslim world, discriminatory legislation also applied to them as well. However, whereas Jewish communities often flourished as vibrant Jewish communities, Christian communities for the most part did not survive the intense Muslim hostility. Under the yoke of MUslim laws against Jews and Christians, hundreds of thousands of people in some of the oldest and strongest Christian communities in the world converted to Islam.

No fact better underscores the intensity of Muslim persecution of dhimmis (non-Muslim monotheists) than this disappearance of so many Christian communities under Islam. The fact that under similar conditions many Jewish communities flourished bears witness to the Jews' tenacious commitment to Judaism, not to Muslim benevolence toward them. This is often lost sight of when favorably comparing Muslim antisemitism with Christian antisemitism. Yet the conversion to Islam of nearly every pre-Islamic Christian community in the Muslim world (the Copts of Egypt constituting the most notable exception) eloquently testifies to what Jews had to endure in their long sojourn through the Muslim world.

The two guiding principles of Islam's treatment of Jews and Christians are that Islam dominates and is not dominated, and that Jews and Christians are to be subservient and degraded. Nonmonotheists were usually given the choice of conversion to Islam or death.

The Muslim legal code that prescribed the treatment of Jews and Christians, or dhimmis as they are both referred to in Islam, was the Pact of Umar, attributed to Muhammad's second successor, but assumed to date from about 720. Its key characteristic was the requirement that dhimmis always acknowledge their subservient position to Muslims. Jews and Christians had to pledge, for example, "We shall not manifest our religion publicly nor convert anyone to it. We shall not prevent any of our kin from entering Islam if they wish it." The subservience that dhimmis were required to show publicly to Muslims is analogous to the behavior once expected of Blacks in the Jim Crow American South: "We shall show respect...and we shall rise from our seats when they [Muslims] wish to sit." They also had to pledge "not to mount saddles," since riding a horse, or, according to some Muslims, any animal, was considered incompatible with the low status of a dhimmi. The dhimmis also had to vow "We shall not display our crosses or our books in the roads or markets of the Muslims nor shall we raise our voices when following our dead."

Anti-dhimmi legislation did not end with the Pact of Umar. In the Koran, Muhammad had urged Muslims, "Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture...and follow not the religion of truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low" (9:29). Accordingly, Muslim officials often insisted that when paying tribute, dhimmis must be "brought low," that is, humiliated.

An early Muslim regulation precisely prescribed how to humiliate Jews and Christians when they pay tribute: "The dhimmi, Christian or Jew, goes on a fixed day in person to the emir, appointed to receive the poll tax, who occupies a high throne-like seat. The dhimmi stands before him, offering the poll tax on his open palm. The emir takes it so that his hand is on top and the dhimmi's underneath. Then the emir gives him a blow on the neck, and a guard, standing upright before the emir, drives him roughly away The same procedure is followed with the second, third, and the following taxpayers. The public is admitted to enjoy this show." The public was not merely "admitted" to this humiliating spectacle, but as Baron observes, "Public participation was, indeed, essential for the purpose of demonstrating, according to the Shafi'ite school, the political superiority of Islam."

In the course of time Muslim rulers developed additional ways to humiliate dhimmis. Baron describes one of them: "Equally vexatious was the tax receipt, which in accordance with an old Babylonian custom, was sometimes stamped upon the neck of the 'unbelieving' taxpayer. This ancient mark of slavery...expressly prohibited in the Talmud under the sanction of the slave's forcible emancipation, occasionally reappeared here as a degrading stamp of 'infidelity.'"

These humiliating and painful procedures had a terrible effect on the Jews: "An Arab poet rightly spoke of entering the door with bent heads 'as if we were Jews.'"

Another law designed to humiliate dhimmis required them to wear different clothing. The purposes of this law were to enable Muslims to recognize Jews and Christians at all times, and to make them appear foolish. In 807, the Abbasid Caliph Haroun al-Raschid, legislated that Jews must wear a yellow belt and a tall conical cap. This Muslim decree provided the model for the yellow badge associated with the degradation of Jews in Christian Europe and most recently imposed by the Nazis.

A Jew living in Baghdad in the days of Al-Muqtadir (1075-96) described additional measures passed by the vizier, Abu Shuja, to humiliate Jews: "each Jew had to have a stamp of lead...hang from his neck, on which the word dhimmi was inscribed. On women he likewise imposed two distinguishing marks: the shoes worn by each woman had to be one red and one black. She also had to carry on her neck or attached to her shoe a small brass bell...And the Gentiles used to ridicule Jews, the mob and children often assaulting Jews in all the streets of Baghdad.

During the same century in Egypt, the Fatimid Caliph Hakim ordered Christians to wear a cross with arms two feet long, while Jews were ordered to wear around their necks balls weighing five pounds, to commemorate the calf's head that their ancestors had once worshiped.

These clothing regulations were not only enforced in the Middle Ages. Until their departure from Yemen in 1948, all Jews, men and women alike, were compelled to dress like beggars.

In fact, Yemen offers us a unique opportunity to understand Muslim attitudes toward the Jews. For it was the one Muslim country with a non-Muslim minority (Jews) that was never ruled by a European power. It was therefore able to treat its Jews in the "purest" Muslim manner, uninfluenced by non-Muslim domination.

In 1679, Jews in most of Yemen were expelled from their cities and villages. When allowed to come back a year later, they were not allowed to return to their homes, but were forced to settle in Jewish settlements outside of the cities. During their expulsion the synagogue of San'a, the capital, was converted into a mosque, which still exists under the name Masjid al-Jala (the Mosque of the Expulsion).

Among the many indignities to which the Jews of Yemen were constantly subjected was the throwing of stones at them by Muslim children, a practice that was religiously sanctioned. When Turkish officials (the Turks occupied Yemen in 1872) asked an assembly of Muslim leaders to see that this practice be stopped, an elderly Muslim scholar responded that throwing rocks at Jews was an Ada, an old religious custom, and thus it was unlawful to forbid it.

The greatest recurrent suffering that Yemenite Jews experienced was th e forced conversion to Islam of Jewish children whose fathers had died. This was practiced until the Jews fled Yemen in 1948, and was also based upon Islamic doctrine. Muhammad was believed to have said, "Everyone is born in a state of natural religion [Islam]. It is only his parents who make a Jew or Christian out of him." Accordingly, a person should grow up in the "natural religion" of Islam.

When a Jewish father died, there was often a "race" between Jewish communal leaders who sought to place the man's children with Jewish parents and the Muslim authorities who wanted to convert the children to Islam and place them in Muslim homes (in the Yemenite Islamic culture it would appear that the surviving mother was regarded as irrelevant). The Jews often lost. Goitein reports that "many families arrived in Israel with one or more of their children lost to them, and I have heard of some widows who have been bereaved in this way of all their offspring."

Yet as persecuted as the Yemenite Jews were, they were also denied the right to leave the country.

By the nineteenth century, the Jews' situation under Islam went from degradation to being recurrent victims of violence - as these examples from Jewish life in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine illustrate.

Egypt

In his authoritative book, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyyptisns, Edward Lane wrote that, at the time of his study (1833-35), the Jews were living "under a less oppressive government in Egypt than in any other country of the Turkish Empire." He added, however, that the Jews "are held in the utmost contempt and abhorrence by the Muslims in general." Lane explained: "Not long ago, they used often to be jostled in the streets of Cairo, and sometimes beaten merely for passing on the right hand of a Muslim. At present, they are less oppressed; but still they scarcely ever dare to utter a word of abuse when reviled or beaten unjustly by the meanest Arab or Turk; for many a Jew has been put to death upon a false and malicious accusation of uttering idsrespectful words against the Kuran (sic] or the Prophet. It is common to hear an Arab abuse his jaded ass, and after applying to him various opprobrious epithets, end by calling the beast a Jew.

That this was the Jewish situation in Egypt, "a less oppressive government" than elsewhere in the Muslim Arab world, tells us a great deal about Muslim antisemitism in the nineteenth century - prior to the Zionist movement.

Syria

In 1840, some French Catholics introduced the blood libel into the Arab world. After a Capuchin monk in Damascus vanished, Ratti-Mention, the local French consul, told police authorities that the Jews probably had murdered him to procure his blood for a religious ritual. Several Damascus Jews were then arrested, and under torture, oneo f them "confessed" that leaders of the Jewish community had planned the monk's murder. Many other Jews were then arrested, and under torture more such confessions were obtained. French officials pressured Syria'sruler, Muhammad Ali, to try the arrested men, and it was only after an international protest organized by Jewish communities throughout the world that the Jews who survived their tortures were released.

The blood libel immediately became popular among Muslims, who attacked Jews as drinkers of Muslim blood in Aleppo, Syria, in 1853, Damascus again, in 1848 and 1890, Cairo in 1844 and 1901-2, and Alexandria in 1870 and 1881.

The blood libel played a decisive role in unsettling the lives of nineteenth-century Syrian Jews, and since then it has been repeatedly utilized in Arab anti-Jewish writings.

Palestine

Jews have lived continuously as a community in Palestine since approximately 1200 BCE. The only independent states ever to exist in Palestine have been Jewish. After the destruction of the second Jewish state in 70 CE and the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, Jews always maintained a presence in Palestine, awaiting the reestablishment of the Jewish state. But these Jews often had to live under degrading conditions.

In nineteenth-century Palestine, which was under Ottoman Muslim rule, Jews had to walk past Muslims on their left, as the left is identified with Satan, and they always had to yield the right of way to a Muslim, by "stepping into the street and letting him pass." Failure to abide by these degrading customs often provoked a violent response.

In Palestine as elsewhere, Jews had to avoid anything that could remind Arabs of Judaism; therefore, synagogues could be located only in hidden, remote areas, and Jews could pray only in muted voices. In addition, despite the widespread poverty among Palestinian Jews, they had to pay a host of special protection taxes (in actuality, a form of extortion). For example, Jews paid one hundred pounds a year to the Muslim villagers of Siloam (just outside Jerusalem) not to disturb the graves at the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, and fifty pounds a year to the Ta'amra Arabs not to deface the Tomb of Rachel on the road to Bethlehem. They also had to pay ten pounds annually to Sheik Abu Gosh to to molest Jewish travelers on the road to Jerusalem, even though the Turkish authorities were already paying him to maintain order on that road.

These anti-Jewish laws, taxes, and practices had a rather intimidating effect on the Jews. The British consul James Finn, who lived in Jerusalem in the 1850s, described in his book Stirring Times how "Arab merchants would dump their unsold wares on their Jewish neighbors and bill them, safe in the knowledge that the Jews so feared them that they would not dare return the items or deny their purchase."

Muslim antisemitism continued to be brutally expressed through the twentieth century. Albert Memmi, the noted French-Jewish novelist, who grew up in North Africa, cites a few examples:

"In Morocco in 1907, a huge massacre of Jews took place in Casablanca, along with the usual embellishments - rape, women carried away into the mountains, hundreds of homes and shops burned, etc....In 1912 a big massacre in Fez...In Algeria in 1934, massacre in Constantine, twenty-four people killed, dozens and dozens of others seriously wounded....In Aden in 1946...over one hundred people dead and seventy-six wounded, and two-thirds of the stores sacked and burned....In June, 1941, in Iraq, six hundred people killed, one thousand seriously wounded, looting, rapes, arson, one thousand houses destroyed, six hundred stores looted....[In Libya]: November 4th and 5th, 1945, massacre in Tripoli; November 6th and 7th in Zanzour, Zaouia, Foussaber, Ziltain, etc: girls and women raped in front of their families, the stomachs of pregnant women slashed open, the infants ripped out of them, children smashed with crowbars....All this can be found in the newspapers of the time, including the local Arab papers."

Memmi summarizes the Jewish status under Islam in the twentieth century: "Roughly speaking and in the best of cases, the Jew is protected like a dog which is part of man's property, but if he raises his head or acts like a man, then he must be beaten so that he will always remember his status."

It is the Jews' refusal to accept an unequal, inferior status that lies at the heart of the Arab-Muslim hatred for Israel. (It is this, not the Palestinian refugee issue, that has been the basis of Muslim antisemitism. Without minimizing the personal difficulties of the Palestinians, as Memmi notes [on page 35 of his book Jews and Arabs]: "The Palestinian Arabs' misfortune is having been moved about thirty miles within one vast Arab nation.") As Yehoshafat Harkabi, a leading scholar of the Arab world's attitude toward Israel, put it: "The existence of the Jews was not a provocation to Islam...as long as Jews were subordinate or degraded. But a Jewish state is incompatible with the view of Jews as humiliated or wretched." The call for a Palestinian Arab state in place of Israel is for a state in which once again 'Islam dominates and is not dominated."

This hatred of Jewish nationalism was so intense that during World War II, most Arab leaders were pro-Nazi. Among them was the head of the Muslims in Palestine, the mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini (who in 1929 had helped organize the large-scale murders of the ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist Jews of Hebron).

An ardent supporter of Hitler, the mufti spent much of the war in Nazi Germany; on November 2, 1943, at a time when the Nazis were murdering thousands of Jews daily, the mufti declared in a speech: "The overwhelming egoism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God's chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other peoples are animals...[makes them] in capable of being trusted. They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals....The divine anger and curse that the Holy Koran mentions with reference to the Jews is because of this unique character of the Jews."

Though many Arab nations formally declared war against Germany in 1945, when German defeat was imminent, in order to be eligible for entry into the United Nations, extensive Arab sympathy with the Nazis continued even after Germany's surrender. The Egyptians and Syrians long welcomed Nazis to their countries, offering them the opportunity to further implement the "Final Solution," by assisting in their efforts to destroy Israel and wipe out the Jewish community living there.

Among many Arabs the Holocaust has come to be regarded with nostalgia. On August 17, 1956, the French newspaper Le Mongde quoted the government-controlled Damascus daily Al-Manar as observing, "One should not forget that, in contrast to Europe, Hitler occupied an honored place in the Arab world....[Journalists} are mistaken if they think that by calling Nasser Hitler, they are hurting us. On the contrary, his name makes us proud. Long live Hitler, the Nazi who struck at the heart of our enemies. Long live the Hitler [i.e., Nasser] of the Arab world."

On June 9, 1960, after Israeli agents captured Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who had supervised the murder of six million Jews, the Beirut daily Al-Anwar carried a cartoon depicting Eichmann speaking with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Said Ben-Gurion: "You deserve the death penalty because you killed six million Jews." Responded Eichmann: "There are many who say I deserve the death penalty because I didn't manage to kill the rest."

On April 24, 1961, the Jordanian English-language daily Jerusalem Times published an "Open Letter to Eichmann," which concluded, "But be brave, Eichmann, find solace in the fact that this trial will one day culminate in the liquidation of the remaining six million to avenge your blood." At the UN sponsored "Conference Against Racism" in September 2001, an Arab pamphlet displayed at the Durban Exhibition Center featured a picture of Adolf Hitler with the caption, "If I had won the war there would be no...Palestinian blood lost."

Arab Jew-hatred also has brought about the resurrection of the blood libel. In 1962, the Egyptian Ministry of Education reissued Talmudic Sacrifices by Habib Faris, a book originally published in Cairo in 1890. The editor notes in his introduction that the book constitutes "an explicit documentation of indictment, based upon clear-cut evidence that the Jewish people permitted the shedding of blood as a religious duty enjoined in the Talmud."

On April 24, 1970, Fatah radio, under the leadership of Yasir Arafat, broadcast, "Reports from the captured homeland tell that the Zionist enemy has begun to kidnap small children from the streets. Afterwards the occupying forces take the blood of the children and throw away their empty bodies. The inhabitants of Gaza have seen this with their own eyes."

Even more disturbing, the blood libel accusations have been made by the most prominent figures within the Arab world. In November 1973, the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia said that it was necessary to understand the Jewish religious obligation to obtain non-Jewish blood in order to comprehend the crimes of Zionism. A decade later, in 1984, the Saudi Arabian delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission Conference on religious tolerance, Marouf al-Dawalibi, told the commission, "The Talmud says that if a Jew does not drink every year the blood of a non-Jewish man, he will be damned for eternity." In The Matzah of Zion, a book that has remained in print since its publication in 1983, Mustafa Tlas, the Syrian Defense Minister since 1972, wrote, "The Jew can kill you and take your blood in order to make his Zionist bread." A 2000 article about Tlas's book in Al-Ahram, Egypt's largest, and government-controlled, newspaper, reported, "The Bestial drive to knead Passover matzahs with the blood of non-Jews is [confirmed] in the records of the Palestinian police where there are many recorded cases of the bodies of Arab children who had disappeared without being found, torn to pieces, without a single drop of blood. The most reasonable explanation is that the blood was taken to be used in matzahs to be devoured during Passover." As one American journalist commented: "If this is 'the most reasonable explanation," can you imagine an unreasonable one?" The Al-Ahram article went on to report that an Egyptian movie company is planning to shoot a multimillion dollar film version of The Matzah of Zion, which will retell, as truth, the story of the Damascus blood libel.

And still the blood libel goes on. A 2001 cartoon in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Dustour depicts an Israeli soldier presenting his mother with a Mother's Day gift of a bottle containing the blood of a Palestinian child. At about the same time (November 2001), Abu Dhabi Television depicted a caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preparing to drink a cup of blood taken from a Palestinian. A March 10, 2002, article in Saudi Arabia's Al-Riyadh, the government-controlled newspaper, by Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faisal University, creates a new twist to this ancient libel, claiming that Jews use blood for Purim pastry and not just for Passover matzo: "Let us now examine how the victims' blood is spilled. For this, a needle-studded barrel is used; this is a kind of barrel, about the size of the human body, with extremely sharp needles set in it on all sides. [These needles] pierce the victim's body, from the moment he is placed in the barrel. These needles do the job, and the victim's blood drips from him very slowly. Thus, the victim suffers dreadful torment - torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure and love that are difficult to comprehend."

Arab Muslims have also reached back to classical themes of Islamic antisemitism to attack the Jews and Israel. Many Arab speakers and publications echo Muhammad's charge in the Koran (5:82) that the Jews are the greatest enemies of humankind. For example, an Egyptian textbook, published in 1966 for use in teachers' seminars, taught that Jews (not only Israelis) are the "monsters of mankind [and] a nation of beasts."

Perhaps the favorite antisemitic publication in the Arab world for over fifty years has been The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.. In an interview with the editor of the Indian magazine Blitz, on October 4, 1958, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt praised the Protocols: "I wonder if you have read a book called 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.' It is very important that you should read it. I will give you an English copy. It proves clearly, to quote from the Protocols, that 'three hundred Zionists, each of whom knows all the others, govern the fate of the European continents and they elect their successors from their entourage."

The late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia gave copies of the Protocols to the guests of his regime. When he presented the Protocols, along with an anthology of antisemitic writings, to French journalists who accompanied French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert on his visit to Saudi Arabia in January 1974, "Saudi officials noted that these were the king's favorite books."

Article 32 of the 1988 Palestinian Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) Covenant claims that the Zionist "scheme" foe takeover of the Arab world "has been laid out in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there." Hamas literature repeatedly accuses Jews of controlling the world's wealth and its most important media, and using them to promote Jewish and Zionist interests, even of having established the League of Nations in the 1920s "in order to rule the world."

Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority (and therefore supposedly less extreme than Hamas), regularly contains references to the Protocols. Thus, even during the height of the Oslo peace process the paper published the following: "It is important to conduct the conflict according to the foundations which both are leaning on...particularly the Jews...such as the Torah, the Talmud, and the Protocols...This conflict resembles the conflict between men and Satan." At about the same time in Egypt, Al-Ahram, the country's largest newspaper, reported, "A compilation of the investigative' work of four reporters on Jewish control of the world states that Jews have become the political decision-makers and control the media in most capitals of the world (Washington, Paris, London, Berlin, Athens, Ankara)." As the journalist Andrew Sullivan comments, "It is worth noting that every word Al Ahram prints is vetted and approved by the Egyptian government, a regime to which the United States - i.e., you and I - contributed $2 billion a year."

It is perhaps no surprise that, as of 2002, over sixty editions of the Protocols are being sold throughout the Arab world, and this libelous "warrant for genocide" is probably more widely distributed today than at any other time in its history. In 2002, the New York Times, in a front-page story, reported that a major Egyptian television station was about to launch a forty-one-episode TV series based on the Protocols (complete with Jewish villains dressed in black hats, side curls, and beards) to run before and during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

The Islamic world today has combined antisemitic motifs from Nazism and medieval Christendom, as well as from its own tradition. This potent combination has made the Arabs the major source of antisemitic publications in the world today. And as in other forms of antisemitism, in the words of Yehoshafat Harkabi, "the evil in the Jews is ascribed not to race or blood, but to their spiritual character and religion." Thus, when Pakistani Islamic terrorists kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in January 2002, they forced Pearl to say, "I am a Jew," (and videotaped him doing so) before slitting his throat.

Only through an understanding of the deep theological roots of Muslim antisemitism and an awareness of its continuous history can present-day Muslim hatred of Israel be understood. Only then does one recognize how false are the claims of Israel's enemies that prior to Zionism, Jews and Muslims lived in harmony and that neither Islam nor Muslims have ever harbored Jew-hatred. The creation of the Jewish state in no way created Muslim Jew-hatred; it merely intensified it and gave it a new focus.

So long as the Jews acknowledged their inferior status among Muslims, they were humiliated but allowed to exist. But once the Jews decided to reject their inferior status, to become sovereign after centuries of servitude, and worst of all, to now govern some Muslims in a land where the Jews had so long been governed, their existence was no longer tolerable. Hence the passionate Arab Muslim hatred of Israel and Zionism, a hatred that entirely transcends political antagonisms. Hence the widespread Muslim call not merely for a military defeat of Israel, but for its annihilation.

As so often in Jewish history, it is the Jewish nation's existence that arouses hatred and needs to be ended. Despite peace treaties between Israel and Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), for most Muslims the source of their hatred remains the Jewish sate's existence, not its policies, nor even its borders.

The Muslim and Arab claim that the issue is anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism really means that so long as the Jews adhere to their dhimmi status in Arab Muslim nations, their existence as individuals is acceptable. But for a Jew to aspire to equality among Muslims, for a Jew to aspire to a status higher than "humiliation and wretchedness," is to aspire too high."

- Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, chapter nine

#joseph telushkin #rabbit joseph telushkin #dennis prager #antisemitism #history #jewish history #jumblr #why the jews the reason for antisemitism

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whencyclopedia · 3 months ago

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Yazidism

Yazidism is a syncretic, monotheistic religion practiced by the Yazidis, an ethnoreligious group which resides primarily in northern Iraq, northern Syria, and southeastern Turkey. Yazidism is considered by its adherents to be the oldest religion in the world and the first truly monotheistic faith. The Yazidi calendar states that the religion, as well as the universe, is almost 7,000 years old, which is 5,000 years older than the Gregorian Calendar and 1,000 years older than the Jewish calendar. Yazidism has had a rich history of syncretic development. For thousands of years, Yazidism incorporated elements of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which coalesced from 1162 CE to the 15th century CE. Ultimately, this process created Yazidi culture and ethnic identity. However, to understand Yazidism, its history must first be explained.

The Origins of Yazidism

Almost nothing is recorded about the history of the first Yazidis. The etymology of the word 'Yazidi' is uncertain. Scholars debate whether or not it comes from the Middle Persian and Kurdish Yazad, which means 'God.' Other scholars believe that the Yazidis originated in the Zoroastrian city of Yazd in Iran. Another theory is that the Yazidis are descended from the Umayyad caliph Yazid ibn Mu'awiya, who reigned from 680 to 683 CE and killed the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Hussein ibn 'Ali. After the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate in 750 CE, descendants of the royal family and other Umayyad sympathizers fled into the Kurdish mountains from the rival Abbasid Caliphate. There, they were welcomed by the Kurds, who remained loyal to them. The theory concludes that the Umayyad refugees intermarried with the Yazidis, passing along their admiration for Yazid ibn Mua'wiyah, their ancestor and former ruler. This theory is popular among Western scholars, as in Yazidism, the historical figure of Yazid appears as one of the three manifestations of God, Sultan Êzî.

The Yazidis call themselves Ezid, Ezi, or Izid, as well as Dasini or Dasin, which is linked with the Nestorian Christian dioceses of Daseni or Dasaniyat. There is substantial evidence for the emergence of aspects of Yazidism from Christianity, as certain Yazidi rituals are derived from Christian traditions, such as baptism and the consumption of alcohol.

The Yazidis were first recorded historically by Muslim historian 'Abd al-Karim al-Sam'ani (d. 1167 CE) as a community in Iraq during the 12th century CE. He wrote of a community called al-Yazidiyya in the region of Hulwan in northern Mosul, Iraq. He said that they lived an ascetic lifestyle and rarely associated with outsiders. He also stated that al-Yazidiyya revered the caliph Yazid ibn Mu'awiya, which is consistent with modern Yazidi beliefs. The Christian scholar Gregorius bar Hebraeus (d. 1286 CE) and Shafi'i scholar Ibn Kathir (1301-1373 CE) mentioned that there were many Kurds in northern Iraq who still practiced pre-Islamic faiths, such as the Zoroastrian Taïrahites and the Tirhiye, who practiced an ancient religion called Magism. Another related people known as the Shamsani practiced Manichaeism. However, in the early 12th century CE, the arrival of one man in the Kurdish Mountains would change the fate of the Kurds forever, the man who is credited by scholars and Yazidis as the founder of Yazidism itself: Sheikh 'Adi.

Sheikh 'Adi was a 12th-century CE Sufi mystic who studied in Baghdad with other scholars of Islamic mysticism. Amongst these were the sheikhs 'Uqayl al-Manbiji and Abdu'l-Wafa al-Hulwani, who came from the Kurdish mountains and established a Sufi presence there. This inspired 'Adi to travel to northern Iraq to lead an ascetic life, free of all desires and the self.

Sheikh 'Adi left Baghdad in the early 12th century CE to found a convent of Dervishes, or Sufi Muslim ascetics, in the valley of Lalish. He found a group of peasant Kurds in the area, whose belief system was a mixture of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, ancient Iranian religions, and the veneration of the Umayyad caliph Yazid ibn Mu'awiya. Sheikh 'Adi performed miracles and led an ascetic lifestyle, which moved the Kurdish peasants so much that they became his followers. 'Adi taught them his mystical form of Islam until he died in Lalish in 1162 CE. His tomb became a site of pilgrimage for his followers. Eventually, 'Adi's followers turned the qibla, the direction in which a Muslim prays, away from Mecca and towards Lalish. This was the first step in the development of the Yazidi religion away from Islam, and Sheikh 'Adi's followers began calling themselves 'Yazidis.'

Years later, Sheikh Hasan, the grandson of Sheikh 'Adi's nephew, expanded Yazidi influence throughout the Muslim world during the 13th century CE. According to Yazidi oral tradition, Hasan wrote the religious text Kitab al-Jilwa li-Arbab al-Khalwa, which put Sheikh 'Adi's ideas into written form. During Hasan's reign, Yazidis served as soldiers in Saladin's Muslim army during the Crusades and served as ambassadors to the Ayyubid Sultanate. Yazidism itself spread throughout the Kurdish community, and many converted. The Yazidis emigrated to large swathes of the Muslim world.

The increased power of the Yazidis under Sheikh Hasan frightened many Muslims, especially Badr al-Din Lu'lu, the provincial governor of Mosul. The Yazidis and the majority of other Kurdish groups did not support his rule; they rebelled and refused to pay taxes. Lu'lu feared a large Kurdish revolt under the leadership of Hasan, so he sent his army to kill and imprison the Kurds. His soldiers did so and burned Sheikh 'Adi's bones in Lalish. Sheikh Hasan was captured and decapitated in Mosul in 1253 CE. The execution of Sheikh Hasan marked the beginning of centuries of persecution faced by Yazidis, which has continued into the 21st century CE. By the 14th century CE, Yazidism spanned from the city of Sulaimaniya in the Kurdish Mountains to Antioch in Turkey. However, Yazidis have lived in tribal societies from the 15th century CE onwards as a result of continued persecution and a lack of centralized leadership.

#History #Adam #Allah #God #WHE #[#]

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i-cant-sing · 10 months ago

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I'm not trying to be rude or anything genuinely, but doesn't Islam support pedophilia and child marriage? As well as oppression of women? It's a beautiful religion, but when you sit and read these old laws that are still practiced today and never abolished....

*sigh* what laws? what proof do you have for all your claims?

I'm gonna assume about the child marriage and pd thing that you're referring to Prophet Muhammad's marriage to Aisha, and if u do a little google research you'll find many answers refuting the claim of him marrying him when she was a child, that she was married at this age and consummated the marriage at another, that she was actually a teen and the scribes just didnt write her age right or things got lost in translation, that a person is considered mature when they can be held responsible for their actions, or when women start menses, or that Aisha was actually a highly intelligent woman and she was far more mature for her age. The more you research, the more you'll find out about this claim. Its better in their words than mine, especially since youre not the first person in 1400 years to raise this accusation.

What I will say is that at the end of the day, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had MANY enemies, so if such claims were true, I think they would've used every opportunity they could bring him down. They would've used it against him. They could've used it when he passes away.

AND that medieval times and european countries did marry off their royal kids for years, even if the kids did not consent. But i feel like no one accuses them of pd and child marriages, no no- everything is bad when Islam is involved, hm?

You say that Islam oppresses women. I think no other religion is as protective and progressive as Islam when it comes to women, all u have to do is to not CONFUSE religion with culture.

Imma give you a few examples of just how Islam treats women, and feel free to tell me any other religion or culture that gives as many rights to women as Islam:

Considering the fact that before the advent of Islam the pagan Arabs used to bury their female children alive, make women dance naked in the vicinity of the Ka'ba during their annual fairs, and treat women as mere chattels and objects of sexual pleasure possessing no rights or position whatsoever, these teachings of the Noble Qur'an were revolutionary. Unlike other religions, which regarded women as being possessed of inherent sin and wickedness and men as being possessed of inherent virtue and nobility, Islam regards men and women as being of the same essence created from a single soul. The Qur'an declares:

O mankind! Reverence your Guardian-Lord, who created you from a single person, created, of like nature, his mate, and from this pair scattered (like seeds) countless men and women. Reverence Allah, through Whom you demand your mutual (rights), and reverence the wombs (that bore you); for Allah ever watches over you. (4:1)

"Women are considered inferior to men." No. This is so wrong. The Shari'ah regards women as the spiritual and intellectual equals of men. The main distinction it makes between them is in the physical realm based on the equitable principle of fair division of labor. It allots the more strenuous work to the man and makes him responsible for the maintenance of the family. It allots the work of managing the home and the upbringing and training of children to the woman, work which has the greatest importance in the task of building a healthy and prosperous society.

The pagan society of pre-Islamic Arabia had an irrational prejudice against their female children whom they used to bury alive. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) was totally opposed to this practice. He showed them that supporting their female children would act as a screen for them against the fire of Hell:

It is narrated by the Prophet's wife, 'A'isha, that a woman entered her house with two of her daughters. She asked for charity but 'A'isha could not find anything except a date, which was given to her. The woman divided it between her two daughters and did not eat any herself. Then she got up and left. When the Prophet (peace be upon him) came to the house, 'A'isha told him about what had happened and he declared that when the woman was brought to account (on the Day of Judgment) about her two daughters they would act as a screen for her from the fires of Hell.

You know how in the west, there's like so many divorce stories about how the wife didnt change her surname to her husbands? YEah, Islam does not do that. It allows women to keep their name even after marriage.

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said this in his farewell pilgrimmage:

"Fear Allah regarding women. Verily you have married them with the trust of Allah, and made their bodies lawful with the word of Allah. You have got (rights) over them, and they have got (rights) over you in respect of their food and clothing according to your means."

Woman as mother commands great respect in Islam. The Noble Qur'an speaks of the rights of the mother in a number of verses. It enjoins Muslims to show respect to their mothers and serve them well even if they are still unbelievers. The Prophet states emphatically that the rights of the mother are paramount. Abu Hurairah reported that a man came to the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) and asked: "O Messenger of Allah, who is the person who has the greatest right on me with regards to kindness and attention?" He replied, "Your mother." "Then who?" He replied, "Your mother." "Then who?" He replied, "Your mother." "Then who?" He replied, "Your father."

How many of you can say that my religion/culture says that "Paradise is under my mother's feet" (which means that as long as you serve your mom well, you could enter heaven). In another tradition, the Prophet advised a believer not to join the war against the Quraish in defense of Islam, but to look after his mother, saying that his service to his mother would be a cause of his salvation. Mu'awiyah, the son of Jahimah, reported that Jahimah came to the Prophet (peace be upon him) and said, " Messenger of Allah! I want to join the fighting (in the path of Allah) and I have come to seek your advice." He said, "Then remain in your mother's service, because Paradise is under her feet."

Some of you will claim that oooh women are oppressed because they have to wear hijab or cover up- girls, listen. If you've ever listened to locker room talk, if you ever KNEW just how most boys think about the female body, you would actually wish to wear an iron armour and hide away forever. I've seen men GAWK, and CATCALL women that were covered from head-to-toe... I used to think that you know, maybe its fine to have a niqaab that shows your eyes, surely no man could ever be into that. No. Nope. If you havent realised it yet, then you will experience it first hand one day that eyes are literally "the windows to the soul"- like you know how writers often mention getting lost in their lover's eyes, or how beautiful someones's eyes are- yeah... theres a reason for it.Look around you, look at your friends's or family memebers eyes and you'll know just how much the eyes talk, how much they convey.

When Islam was introduced, for the first time women could have share in their inheritance.

But Islam tells women to stay at homes- NO IT DOES NOT (please read any context)! 'A'isha reported that Saudah bint Zam'ah went out one night. 'Umar saw her and recognized her and said, "By God, O Saudah, why do you not hide yourself from us?" She went back to the Prophet (peace be upon him) and told him about it while he was having supper in her room, and he said, "It is permitted by Allah for you to go out for your needs." The predominant idea in the teachings of Islam with regard to men and women is that a husband and wife should be full-fledged partners in making their home a happy and prosperous place, that they should be loyal and faithful to one another, and genuinely interested in each other's welfare and the welfare of their children. A woman is expected to exercise a humanizing influence over her husband and to soften the sternness inherent in his nature. A man is enjoined to educate the women in his care so that they cultivate the qualities in which they, by their very nature, excel.

Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) has on many accounts, many times advised men to be gentle, to be kind to women. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) has said: "The best of you are those who are best to their women."

These are just a few examples but I think that if you were to open your eyes and look at it with a broader mind, you'll see Islam is not what you were taught to believe. I dont believe in coincidences that much, so I think that the very fact that you sent me this ask may be a sign that something deeper inside you is telling you to do your own research, that even you dont believe that Islam is this "oppressive and backward" religion.

Hope this helped <3

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herald-divine-hell · 13 days ago

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Regarding your posts about qunari and how they're based off middle eastern cultures, is there any specific headcanon u have for your qunari ocs?? 👀

Gosh, this is a really good question. Unfortunately, a lot of my Qunari ocs are very underbaked, and most of them I haven't really explored as characters.

At the same time, I did utilized Amayian (and his Trevelyan family) as a sort of stand-in for Islamic/Middle Eastern Cultures - particularly elements of Iranic (Persian, but particularly Afghan (Pashtun)) culture.

For example, most of Amayian's paternal family members dress in the attire of the 15th-16th centuries Ottoman/Safavid imperial/noble elite.

Though I do admit, the fabrics likely used by the Trevelyans may be of a more thicker material than the ones used in the Ottoman, and certainly the Safavid and, say, Durrani (the 18th century Afghan dynasty that established the percussor state to Afghanistan) imperial courts, the type of of dress they wore are certainly what I imagine Amayian's family are in. Though, I also take elements of - though with a wide stretch of truth giving that most depictions come from 19th century western depictions of Afghans, so there may certainly be elements of Orientalism in their own depictions - of certain notable Afghan dress found in the 19th century, such as the fur-lined jacket/coat found in James Rattray's Afghan Foot Soldiers (1841). In Amayian's family, however, it is a floor-length coat rather than it ending at the waist.

Beyond that (because I can talk endlessly about clothing and architecture, and how that is symbolization of cultural practices and thinking, align with theological belief and environmental circumstances), I also like to imagine that elements of ritualistic faith within Andrastianism are displayed differently, depending on the region. For Amayian's family (and such the Ostwick in his universe), their method of worship is similar to the salat form of prayer Muslims preformed, though I still debate rather they preform the form of salah before a statue of Andraste, given the development of Islam as a more aniconistic faith - that I would also remind anyone interested that the Quran makes no direct banning of images, and even notable prophets such as Prophet Solomon had statues, and God does not critique him for such.

His family also preforms the Pashun attan, particularly in times of celebration or moments of warfare (for example, Amayian's birth was celebrated with an attan by the Trevelyans).

One of the strongest struggles for the Qunari for me, especially as they are related to be the Islamic/Middle Eastern/North African world and its relationship with Andrastian Thedas (Christian Europe), is that, well, in a historical level, Islam was not some foreign, unknowable, incomprehensible religion. Muhammad, his followers, and the Arab people in general were as much the inheritors to the complicated, broad Near Eastern traditions in which the Jewish and Christians faith share from. The Quran utilizes words that were loaned from numerous other languages outside of Arabic - (the word sirat (path) comes from the Latin strata; the word qalam (pen) derives from the Greek kalamos (reed pen); the 'dark-eyed maidens" of Paradise (in which the faulty claim of matyred Muslim men would receive 75 virgin's in Heaven derives from), the hur, can possibly be traced back to the Middle Persian hurust (tentatively translated to "well-grown"), relating to the pre-Avestan reward in which righteous men was given a 'well-grown" women in the afterlife for their good deeds (Hadoxt naxt 2:11); and the Quranic word for "religion" din traces back to the Middle Persian or Parthain word den, which comes from the Avestan daena - 'vision, faith'; whereas the Semitic dīn (judgement, debt) is also used as the Quran, but not as meaning related to faith or a religion.

Meanwhile the Qunari are meant to be culturally, philosophically, and racially distinct from the rest of the races of Thedas (which my problem with BioWare sinks into, because that is clearly just pure racism at that point; regardless if they meant to or not.) For me, I have an easier time to, I suppose, negotiate the Andrastian faith to incorporate that more Islamic characteristics compared to the Qun, because while they are meant to be the Islamic world and faith throughout its histories, it shares so little with it as a theology, its born philosophies, or the greater Near Eastern ancient customs of pluralistic interactions across religious, ethnic, and cultural barriers that I struggle to really incorporate those elements into the Qun.

With the Qun, it's in such an odd place of "This is clearly inspired by Islamic history...but within the context of Christian Europe's perceptive of Islam and its faith throughout the years" and less of an actual inspiration from Islam as a faith, its historical placement in the greater world and its origins, and its relationships and adaptability, as well as conforming within its own theological and legalistic understanding, of the cultures they inherited, interacted, and conquered with. To even headcanon my Qunari ocs, I would need to tear down the whole of the Qun as a philosophical and cultural perspective (and perhaps to an extent racial group), which seems a very daunting task, LMAO.

Ugh. I'm sorry I rambled. Let me think. I hope my rambling about Amayian is a fair compensation!

#thank you for the ask!#I really should expand my qunari ocs #dragon age #da #velnat004 #the qun #qunari critical #qun critical #bioware critical #dragon age trevelyan #amayian trevelyan #dragon age ocs #dai #dragon age inquisition #my ocs #male trevelyan #male inquisitor

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thecupidwitch · 9 months ago

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Anzar (ⴰⵏⵥⴰⵕ): Amazigh God’s Of Rain

Introduction:

Like in Greece or Egypt, pre-Islamic Amazigh people across North Africa also had their own mythology, gods, rituals and sacrifices. Anzar was god of the sky, waters, rivers, seas, streams and springs and rain. "Anzar" is an amazigh world that mean "rain", he also has others names such as Agellid n Ugeffur (King of the Rain) Agellid n Waman (King of the Water) and Agellid Anzar (King Anzar) among others.

The God Anzar is with no doubt of particular importance in the beliefs of the Amazigh people since antiquity, as he is the personification of rain itself. Ambivalent in nature, tyrannical, ruthless yet vital and essential just like rainfall, his tradition has came down to us thanks to the ancient fertility rites of "Tislit n Anzar" still practiced today in some Amazigh regions and villages. Sadly over the decades these ancient festivals receded and came to disappear almost completely due to religious zealotry and fanatism denouncing native pre-islamic traditions as despicable pagan rites.

The Myth:

According to oral folklore and poems:

There was once a time where gods took human forms, a powerful Sky God named Anzar; Master of the rain, water, seas, clouds and thunder fell madly in love with a beautiful peasant girl of marvellous beauty. She shone like a full moon on the water. Her face was resplendent and luminescent, her clothing of gittering silk. She was accustomed to bathe in a river of silver reflection every night. Transforming into a giant eagle he came to contemplate her everytime ; one day he spoke to her and asked her to marry him. But the frightened girl refused his request and fled, she would shy way from fear everytime the Master of rain approached her.

This rejection made Anzar so furious and angry that lands and crops started to be turned into piles of dust, famine was imminent as it would have ended up affecting the herds, cattle, the rivers, lakes and all the essential resources for the survival of the tribes. But Anzar didn't give up hope of seducing the woman he wanted most. And he threatened her;

- "Like the thunder I have split the immensity of the sky, O You, Star brighter than the sun itself, lend me your treasures, or otherwise I will deprive you from this water!"

The beautiful woman, frightened and in complete shock responded to him;

- "I beg you, Master of the skies, of coral crowned head. I know we were made for each other... but I fear the wrath of my people and what they will say..."

With these words the rain God abruptly disappeared once again and turned the ring he wore on his finger to make the entire river she bathed in suddenly dry up.

Out of desperation and fear for her people, the girl fell to the ground in sadness, and began to call out for Anzar as she bursted into tears. She remained naked as she stripped off her silk dress, and then cried to the sky:

- "O Anzar, O Anzar! O You, blossoming of the meadows! Let the rivers flow again, and come take your revenge!"

The latter suddenly appeared in the shape of an immense lightning, he took her and hugged the young girl tightly against him. After that they flew across the sky and all the rivers across the country began to flow again as the whole earth was covered with lush greenery.

With this romantic and supernatural ending, this myth comes to an end, which gave rise to an ancient ritual. Berber tribes began to symbolically sacrifice a virgin girl by offering her in a nuptial ceremony during any time of drought to summon Anzar, ask for his help and call for rain. Since then, every time after it rains, the legend says that Tarenza appears in the sky, in the form of a rainbow. She sacrificed herself for the greater good of humanity and left her people to become an immortal entity who spreads her iridescent colours across the sky after the fertilizing rainfall. Nowadays in the Amazigh language, 'Tislit n Anzar' simply means 'rainbow'.

The ancient ritual was based on five main steps:

In early autumn during the plowing period, take the most beautiful girl in the city, prepare her and addorn her of the most expensive and luxurious bridal jewelries and clothings.

Villagers have to organize processions and accompany her to the doors of the sanctuary or temple with an escort of women standing on the threshold to spray holy water on her.

Offer the ritual sacrifices (food, candles etc) in the sanctuary.

After having undressed the bride, go around the sanctuary 7 times begging and praising Anzar, and as the women sing, dance and praise Anzar, the young girls all have to play a game before dusk named Zerzari in which the ball is supposed to fall into a hole undergound prepared for the ritual.

Make a somptuous meal (generally chicken couscous) to share with the all the people in the village. One can be sure that a few days after the celebration of Anzar, the rain will begin to fall again.

This sacred ritual has survived to some extent and has taken different forms all across North Africa. The ritualistic ladle which now bears the common name of Tarenza, Ronja or Tarundja depending on the region, is always dressed as a bride and is worn by women in a parade all across the village or a nearby sacred mountain, while all singing for the God of rain to bring good harvests.

Several observations and accounts suggest that the current ladle doll is only a simulacrum and parody intended to replace the real original bride offered to Anzar. As it is stated that originally women were supposed to offer themselves completely naked to the Sky God. With the arrival of Islam in the 7th century, such traditions couldn't be tolerated and by then the practice changed and adapted to better suit the new religion. Since then the wooden ladle or spoon now called 'Tarenza' represents the coming of holy waters.

*Sources: [x] [x] [x]

Tip Jar

#thecupidwitch #amazigh mythology #witchcraft #witchblr #witch community #witches #witchcore #witch #grimoire #mythology #myths and legends #myths #deity work #deity worship #deities

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wolfiicubb · 3 months ago

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hey, I saw your picrew post and I was wondering if you could talk a little more about the head scarf :0 I always liked the idea of wearing one but in was worried itd be seen as cultural appropriation, tbh I kinda thought you had to be Muslim to wear one. I understand if you don't wanna talk about it though im just curious

Hihi !!!

Its hard to explain but i ca tell u for sure that wearing a scarf is not cultural appropriation !!! Unless u are wearing it to mock hijabis/muslims (like wearing it for a halloween costume, or purposefully being immodest with it to be offensive) it is ok! Headscarves have been worn by many cultures since before islam existed !! In modern (often western) cultures, people assume only muslims where headscarves, but thats not true. I for one am Jewish, and Jewish people have worn head coverings for a long long time (Judaism is pre-islam and christianity), and both men and women wear them !!

Pagans also where headscarves sometimes, and so do some christians/catholics. I believe Sikh people and some Hindus may where them as well, but i do not know a lot about that!

People (especially women) have also historically worn head scarves as an accessory, seen especially in the 50s !!

People wear scarves for many reasons, and it's not just muslims!!

There are certain ways of styling scarves that may be considered a part of a certain faith, but most are not considered closed practices and shouldn't be gatekept! Just be aware that people will make assumptions and you should always be respectful (ie. if someone asks if you are muslim, be polite and explain that you aren't, dont be offended by the assumption)

I hope this explanation is good! I can also give u some sources to read more in the replies if you would like :333

#not using my agere tags since this isnt related at all lol #head covering #religion #head scarf #hijab #tichel #veiling #asked and answered #information

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sethshead · 1 year ago

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To free Palestine from Israel, first we must free Palestine from Hamas. Hamas is a force that abuses and oppresses Palestinians. It murders, tortures, and disappears dissenters, opponents, LGBTQ, civil rights and peace activists, and anyone who resists its power, including respected Islamic clerics. It allows women few rights save to be the brood mares for more shuhada. It steals food donations and resells them at inflated prices to the rich, provokes Israel only to then hide behind civilians, and denies civilians anyplace to hide. Hamas is a death cult. A Palestine under its rule, whether within the pre-‘67 borders or from the river to the sea, would be a violent, criminal, gangster failed state.

Yes, Israeli leadership must also change. Likud has never been willing to part with “Judea and Samaria”, no matter how much grief that causes Israelis within the pre-‘67 borders. Netanyahu has been a consummate bad-faith actor, and even the country’s more dovish leaders have still wanted to manipulate the “facts on the ground” to make final negotiations more advantageous to Israel. It is certainly past time for Israel to stop playing games with the futures of two peoples. But Likud can be and has been voted out. The same is not true of Hamas.

I accept that Hamza Howidy is not necessarily representative of the Palestinian electorate. I do not tokenize him; I simply agree with is observations and conclusions. Though most Palestinians do still demand a river-to-sea state or “right of return” (which in practical terms amount to the same thing), Howidy recognizes the obvious. Israel is going nowhere, nor are the Palestinians. Jews and Palestinian Arabs have connections to the land. Each possesses a kind of indigeneity and a right to self-determination in the land of their national origin, whenever that was. Neither wishes to live under the rule of the other.

Any one-state solution is foolhardy, an invitation to further conflict and bloodshed. None who desire that can legitimately be called a friend to Palestinians or Israelis. Recognizing the legitimacy of both of our national aspirations and finding a way to bring us together as neighboring states in respectful peace is the only thing that could remotely be called a victory for either side. If you and all your chants, slogans, rhetoric, and demands do not amount to that, you are doing more harm than good to both peoples.

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moneeb0930 · 1 year ago

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AFRICA, a continent rich in history and culture, was a diverse and vibrant place 100 years before the colonial era began. The period prior to European colonization of Africa was characterized by the existence of powerful and sophisticated civilizations, trade networks, and diverse societies. During this time, Africa was home to thriving kingdoms and empires, such as the Kingdom of Ghana, the Mali Empire, the Benin Empire,and the Great Zimbabwe Empire.

One of the remarkable aspects of Africa before colonialism was the economic prosperity and trade networks that existed across the continent. The Trans-Saharan trade routes connected the North African coast with the interior of the continent, facilitating the exchange of goods, ideas, and cultures. The trade in gold, salt, ivory, and other resources contributed to the wealth of African societies and enabled the development of urban centers and marketplaces.

In addition to trade, agriculture played a significant role in the pre-colonial African societies. Many regions practiced advanced farming techniques, growing crops such as grains, yams, and millet. Livestock farming was also a common practice, with cattle, sheep, and goats being raised for food, milk, and trade. The agricultural surplus generated by these practices supported the growth of populations and the development of complex societies.

Socially and culturally, pre-colonial Africa was characterized by a rich tapestry of traditions, languages, and belief systems. The continent was home to a diverse array of ethnic groups, each with its own customs, art forms, and social structures. Oral traditions, storytelling, and music played a vital role in communicating histories and values within African societies. Religious practices were also diverse, ranging from indigenous animist beliefs to Islam and Christianity, which were introduced through trade and migration.

The political landscape of Africa before colonialism was marked by the presence of powerful kingdoms and empires that governed vast territories. These political entities were often organized hierarchically, with rulers holding significant authority over their subjects. The Kingdom of Ghana, for example, controlled trade routes and amassed wealth through taxation and tribute. The Mali Empire under Mansa Musa was renowned for its wealth, power, and intellectual pursuits.

In conclusion, Africa 100 years before colonialism was a continent teeming with cultural diversity, economic prosperity, and political sophistication. The continent's vibrant civilizations and societies thrived through trade, agriculture, and social structures that sustained their way of life. The legacy of pre-colonial Africa continues to influence the continent's present-day cultures, identities, and aspirations, reminding us of the resilience and vitality of Africa's past.

📸 A lady from today Ghana 🇬🇭 adorned in gold jewelry #africa

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molkolsdal · 4 months ago

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Cup with a Poem on Wine

Poet: Ibn Sukkara al-Hashimi

Attributed to Iran, second half 10th–11th century

Medium: Silver; fire-gilded, hammered, chased

Drink! For this day has a special boon, which if you had known about it / You would have hurried up with entertainment and hastened with rapture! // [Rosy cheeks, garden roses cut / Smiles are misty and the sun is veiled] // Don’t hold the cup back, but drink it diluted, until you die from it (dead) without reason.

"These sophisticated vessels, inscribed with verses inviting one to drink, echo the close connection between wine drinking and literature in upper-class social practice of the medieval Islamic period. Drinking parties of the cultured elite were accompanied by the recitation of poems, music, and, sometimes, dancing, a tradition carried on uninterrupted from the pre-Islamic period and practiced by the Seljuq sultans and their entourages, as well as by the urban elite. Although these activities were conceived of in the Seljuq period as predominantly leisurely, albeit recalling the intellectual and feasting abilities expected of the ruling classes, they can also be seen as the legacy of ceremonies associated with kingship and investiture in pre-Islamic Central Asia and Zoroastrian Iran.

The verses inscribed on the silver cup start with an exhortation to drink and end with an urging to surrender to the excesses of drunkenness. They are drawn from the diwan, or collection of poems, of Ibn Sukkara al-Hashimi, a satirical poet who lived in Baghdad in the second half of the tenth century (d. 995). He was an exponent of mujun, a genre of poetry developed in Basra and Baghdad at the end of the ninth century that celebrated a lustful and licentious way of life. The inscription is closely connected to the peculiar aesthetic of this earlier poetic genre, which was no longer practiced in the eleventh century but still well known, owing to the fact that it was included in a famous anthology compiled by al-Tha‘alibi (d. 1038)."

#poetry #wine #artifacts #Ibn Sukkara al-Hashimi #iran #10th century #11th century #silver #history

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whencyclopedia · 4 months ago

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Persian Rose-and-Nightingale Paintings

Rose-and-nightingale paintings and patterns (gul-u-bulbul) are a subtheme of the bird-flower (gul-u-morḡ) genre in Persian art. Bird-and-flower paintings are of Chinese origin and include pictorial elements such as flowers and plants, birds, and occasionally butterflies. This motif was then appropriated by the Persians and throughout the centuries evolved from being a decorative element within the art of books to an independent genre of painting.

Both the rose and the nightingale have important status within Persian art and literature, with roses also having a conspicuous role in Persian traditions, ceremonies, and economics. From the pre-Islamic era and Zoroastrian rituals to the Islamic period, roses have enjoyed a significant position both symbolically and practically. Roses have been associated with the prophets of Islam, especially Prophet Muhammad (570-632 CE), and they were one of the main Persian exports during the Safavid era (c. 1501-1739), which also contributed to their more abundant presence in art. The importance and presence of this motif increased so much during the Qajar Dynasty (1794-1925) that it even came to symbolize the country itself. The word 'rose' (gul) also became a generic term for all flowers. As Layla S. Diba notes:

The bird and flower decorative theme was one of the most prominent in Persian art, originating in manuscript illustration and evolving as a decorative motif and independent painting genre. This theme enjoyed such popularity due to its universal appeal and range of both earthly and divine floral meanings which it conveys. (12)

Origin

The bird-and-flower subject was popular in China from the early Tang Dynasty (618-907) and was one of the major types of Chinese painting which included birds, flowers, insects, and pets. Chinese artist-scholars depicted this motif using different stylistic and technical approaches ranging from realistic to overtly expressionistic. Regardless of the method of painting, the bird-and-flower motif had a symbolic meaning and reflected the ideas of the artist-scholar. Although the bird-and-flower theme (especially roses) had been used in Persian literature and poetry since the 11th century and throughout its golden age, it only appeared within the art of books during the Ilkhanid period in the 14th century due to Chinese influence.

#History #14thcentury #16thcentury #17thcentury #WHE #[#]

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tanadrin · 1 year ago

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Shoemaker on literacy, memory, oral tradition, and the Quran:

Studies of literacy in pre-Islamic Arabia have been severely overlooked in recent Quran scholarship; in fact, literacy in the 7th century Hijaz was "almost completely unknown" and "writing was hardly practiced at all in the time of Muhammad." "[T]here seems to be a widespread agreement among experts on the early history of the Arabic language 'that, before and immediately after the rise of Islam, Arab culture was in all important respects fundamentally oral.'" Ancient graffiti in the region seems to have been a bit like early runic writing in Scandinavia--not central to the culture, mostly decorative and incidental, and certainly not used for long, important texts. "There is, in effect, a lot of 'Kilroy was here' scattered across the Arabian desert." Indeed, most of these graffiti are personal names or private in nature--we're not talking monumental inscriptions here, we're talking bored herders scratching stuff onto rocks to pass the time.

Southern Arabia and the larger oases to the north had more in the way of literate elites (and thus things like monumental inscriptions), but these places were far from the central inland Hijaz. If someone in this region did want to become literate, they would probably have learned to read and write in Greek or Aramaic, which were useful and important linguae francae.

As in very early Christianity, writing occupied a controversial position vis a vis orality--oral tradition was primary for the production and transmission of culturally important things like religious texts, poetry, literary prose, genealogy, and history. The shift to a literate culture came only with the expansion of Muhammad's polity into a wealthy, multicultural empire rather than a tribal state. Indeed, much of the early Caliphate's administration used Greek and other languages--Arabic entered administration only slowly, since a lot of early bureaucrats were drawn from the Roman and Sasanian bureaucracy.

And like early Christianity, another reason not to feel any urgency to write down Muhammad's teachings was that early Muslims expected the end of the world to come very soon, maybe initially even before Muhammad's own death.

The dialect of the Quran is distinctive and unusual; it is very difficult to locate where this dialect might have originated. Ahmad Al-Jallad tentatively identifies an Old Hijazi dialect, but the evidence for this dialect (besides the Quran itself) is limited and mostly much more recent, and he assumes the Quran was produced in the Hijaz.

The Arabic of the Quran can probably be identified with the prestige dialect of Levantine Arabic in the Ummayad period, but the origin of that dialect, and what Arabic dialects were brought together there in that time, is hard to ascertain with certainty.

Shoemaker thinks the Quran started as short collections drawn from individual memories following the conquest and encounters with widespread literacy; these collections would have been considered open, and subject to influence from oral tradition. They were combined into increasingly larger collections, with additional traditions and revisions, emergin as something like divergent versions of the Quran (though still not fully static and closed). Finally, the traditions of these regional versions, with other written and oral traditions, were fashioned into their canonical form under Abd al-Malik, and this version was progressively enforced across the empire.

Shoemaker brings in memory science and the anthropology of oral cultures: memory is highly frangible and fallible. Even though it functions well for day to day tasks, it's important not to overlook how common misremembering and re-remembering alters information in both personal and collective memory when talking about a text that even Islamic tradition agrees was not written down within Muhammad's lifetime.

Most forgetting occurs shortly after an event in question; a small core of memories we develop about an event will persist for a significant time after. These findings have been corroborated both in the lab and in the circumstances of everyday life.

Memory is not primarily reproductive; literal recall is, in evolutionary terms, pretty unimportant, and brains omit needless detail. Remembering thus involves a lot of reconstruction more than it does reproduction; memories are storied piecewise in different parts of the brain, and are assembled on recall, with the gaps being filled in using similar memory fragments drawn from comparable experiences.

Note Bartlett's experiments using a short Native American folktale; when asked to recall this story, even after only fifteen minutes participants introduced major and minor changes. Subsequent recall didn't improve accuracy, though the basic structure of the memory developed pretty quickly in each individual. But this structure was not especially accurate, and significant details vanished or were replaced with new information. Most often this information was drawn from the subject's culture (in this case, Edwardian England), forming a memory that made more sense to them and had more relevance in their context. The overall style was quickly lost, and replaced by new formations, and there was a persistent tendency to abbreviate. After a few months, narrative recall consisted mostly of false memory reports, a finding verified by subsequent replications of his experiments.

Experiential and textual memory in particular degrades very rapidly; this degredation is much faster when information is transmitted from one person to another. Epithets change into their opposites, incidents and events are transposed, names and numbers rarely survive intact more than a few reproductions, opinions and conclusions are reversed, etc. Figures like Jesus or Muhammad will hardly be remembered accurately even by people who knew them.

The style of the Quran (e.g., prose, and often terse, elliptic, and occasionally downright nonsensical prose at that) does not lend itself to memorization; Shoemaker argues it is only possible for people to memorize the Quran now because it has become a written document they can consult in the process.

Eyewitness testimony is of course also notoriously unreliable, despite what apologists (in particular Christian apologists) have argued. Cf. Franz von Liszt's experiment in 1902, where a staged argument in a lecture escalates to one student pulling a gun on another--after revealing this event was scripted and staged, and asking different students to recall the details of the event at different intervals afterward, literally none of them got it right--the best reports, taken immediately, got things about one quarter correct. Even repeatedly imagining a scenario vividly enough can eventually lead to a false memory of it occurring (a phenomenon which may explain some alien abduction reports). People mistake post-even hearsay or visualization for firsthand knowledge, especially in the case of dramatic events.

What memory excels at is remembering broad strokes--we are adapted to retain the information which is most likely to be needed, i.e., the gist (or, more likely, the broad themes) of events and information, and not its exact form.

There's a long digression here about John Dean's testimony on the Watergate conspiracy--this may be the first book in early Islamic studies to have Richard Nixon in the index.

Even competitive memory champions train for short-term recall of large amounts of information; they, and other people with preternaturally good memories, are of course exceedingly rare. It's very unlikely that someone could remember, several decades after the fact, precisely (or even mostly) what was told to them by their friend whose brother's wife's cousin was really there. So even within the traditional account of the Quran's composition, it makes no sense to claim it is in fact the verbatim word of Muhammad.

As in the case of Solomon Shereshevski, when you do have preternaturally good recall even for (say) lists of nonsense syllables, the result is actually kind of debilitating--you have so many useless details to sort through, it makes it quite hard to function at an abstract level. And hyperthymesiacs, though they exhibit a high level of recall about their past, still often remember things incorrectly, at about the same rate as people with normal memories--they are no less susceptible to false or distorted memories.

Nevertheless most modern scholars treat the Quran as a verbatim transcript of Muhammad's words. This is exceedingly unlikely! Especially given that "group" or "collaborative" memory--memories as reconstructed by individuals working together--appears to be even less accurate than individual memory. You get better results having people try to recall events by themselves.

Since during the age of conquests the majority of converts were not closely preoccurpied with the interpretation of the Quran, it would have had to have been rediscovered and hermeneutically reinvented later; the memory of Muhammad's words were being shaped by the nature of the community he founded, as its members collective and individual needs continued to evolve along with the context of transmission.

Many people, both scholars and the general public, seem to believe that people in oral cultures have remarkable capacities for memory not possessed by those of written cultures. Study of oral cultures has shown this is demonstrably false; literacy in fact strengthens verbal and visual memory, while illiteracy impairs these abilities. People in literate cultures have better memories!

Oral transmission is not rote replication; it is a process of recomposition as the tradition is recreated very time it is transmitted. Oral cultures can effectively preserve the gist of events over time, but each time the details are reconstituted, and the tradition can radically diverge from its first repetition, with the stories of the past being reshaped to make them relevant to the present and present concerns.

The collective memory of Muhammad and the origins of Islam as preserved in the Sunni tradition would have forgotten many details as a matter of course, many others because they were no longer relevant to the later Sunni community, and they would have been reshaped in ways that made them particularly suited to the life and community of their contemporary circumstances, exemplifying and validating their religious beliefs--ones very different from those of Muhammad's earliest followers.

The early Muslim conquests put a comparatively small number of soldiers, scattered across a huge territory, in a wildly different cultural and social context, especially in close contact with different Christian and Jewish communities, esp. in the Levant, which rapidly became the cultural center of the new empire. Jews and Christians may have joined the new religious community in large numbers in this time also; their faith and identity would have continued to evolve in this period, as we would expect from comparative episodes in the history of other religions. By the time that Muhammad's teachings were formally inscribed, the memories of his few hundred initial companions would have been transmitted and dispersed to a large number of people in a totally different set of circumstances, with consequences for how those memories exactly were recalled.

Jack Goody, researcher on oral traditions: "It is rather in literate societies that verbatim memory flourishes. Partly because the existence of a fixed original makes it much easier; partly because of the elaboration of spatially oriented memory techniques; partly because of the school situation which has to encourage "decontextualized" memory tasks since it has removed learning from doing and has redefined the corpus of knowledge. Verbatim memorizing is the equivalent of exact copying, which is intrinsic to the transmission of scribal culture, indeed manuscript cultures generally."

Techniques like the ars memoriae belong to literate cultures and were invented by literate people; they are unknown in oral cultures. Oral and literate cultures in fact have a radically different idea of what it means for a text to be "the same"--in the former, word-for-word reproduction is not necessary. A poem can be "the same poem" even if every time it is performed it is largely unique.

Case of the Bagre, the sacred text of the LoDagaa people of Ghana, an extended religious poem used in a liturgical context. Variations in its recitation aren't just variations in wording; changes in recitation can be radical, and the last version is always the starting point. Nevertheless (as in other oral cultures) it is considered "the same," functionally identical with each recitation. These differences appeared even among different performances by the same reciter, or multiple times in the same ceremony. Even the most formulaic parts have great variability. Similar variability in oral texts in other oral cultures has been documented by other anthropologists, including for historical events.

Shoemaker notes that the tradition that the Vedas were transmitted without variation from the time of their composition remains an article of faith in some quarters of South Asian studies; this flies in the face of all available evidence. In fact we have no idea what the state of the Vedic texts was prior to the earliest manuscripts; they may have been written all along.

Collective memory is shaped by contemporary cultural imperatives--examples of Abe Lincoln, a white supremacist considered nothing special by his peers; Christopher Columbus, once revered; the last stand at Masada, considered a minor event of little importance to broader Jewish history until the founding of Israel.

There doesn't have to be any conspiracy or coordinated effort for false narratives about the past to take root.

The hard horizon of communicative memory is around eighty years; so historical consciousness basically only has two modes: the mythic past of collective memory, and the recent past less than eighty or so years ago.

Lack of a clear "generic" monotheism in the Hijaz around the time of Muhammad's birth means the expectations and memory of Muhammad would have been profoundly shaped by Christian and Jewish beliefs.

Early Islam, like early Christianity, wasn't old enough to have a clear distinction between historical/origins memory and recent/communicative memory.

"For most of the seventh century, then, Muhammad’s followers had a memory that was still immersed in the social and cultural milieux of the late ancient Near East, from which they had yet to clearly differentiate themselves. They eventually would do this in large part by developing a distinctive collective memory for their group, different from those inherited from Judaism and Christianity, a process that was no doubt delayed by their fervent belief that the world would soon come to an end, making such an endeavor rather pointless for a time. Only as the end continued to remain in abeyance, and the community’s living memory grew ever distant from the time of origins did they develop a collective memory of their own. Yet, as Islamic collective memory began to evolve, one imagines that it initially took different shapes within the various pockets of Believers that were scattered across their empire. The basic elements of this nascent collective memory were, as Halbwachs says of the early Christians, “still dispersed among a multitude of spatially separated small communities. These communities were neither astonished, anxious, nor scandalized that the beliefs of one community differed from those of another and that the community of today was not exactly the same as that of yesterday.” Thus, we should expect to find a significant degree of diversity in religious faith and memory among the different early communities of the Believers, scattered and outnumbered as they were among the Jews and Christians of their burgeoning empire. Only with ʿAbd al-Malik’s program of Arabization and Islamicization was a new, distinctively Islamic collective memory and identity concretized and established for this new religious community. It was a collective identity that was formed from the top down and imposed, at the expense of any other alternative collective memories, with the full power and backing of the imperial state."

The limits of oral tradition apply even more strongly to the hadith and biographies.

#stephen shoemaker #Creating the Quran #islamic studies

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