The Root of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Classic Islamic View of Jews, Part II

Hagai Mazuz
Hudson New York
01 September '10

In showing that the Arab-Israeli conflict is religious -- and not territorial -- based on texts from the book Kitāb al-Maghāzī ["The Book of Holy Raids"], which documents how the Muslim raids against the Jews in Medina and Khaybar in ancient Arabia were the source of inspiration for the Islamic terrorist organizations, questions arose as to whether we can generalize about Islam by examining just one book.

Kitāb al-Maghāzī, however, is just one of the many religious Islamic source books which contains anti-Jewish material. The most well known Muslim book is the Quran, which itself is filled with vehemently anti-Jewish material. Muslim sources explain that the Quran is a collection of revelations that Allah gave to Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel. When Muhammad encountered difficulties, Allah told him how to solve these problems via revelations; Uthman, the 3rd Caliph, collected all of them, and that is how the Quran was created.

The Quran is filled with a large amount of material regarding the Jews, most of which labels them as cold-hearted and evil. From this we learn that Muhammad had a lot of dealings with Jews, as Allah "provided" Muhammed with many verses which deal with them. There are also many verses which deal with biblical stories and the history of the Children of Israel (called Isrā'īlīyāt).

There is also a type of Islamic literature called "The Circumstances of Revelation" (in Arabic: Asbāb al-Nuzūl), that details the circumstances in which Allah revealed each and every verse in the Quran to Muhammad. It is clear from this literature that even in many of the verses in which the Jews and Christians are not mentioned, the Quranic scholars, in their explanation of these verses, tell us that this or that verse was "revealed" because of something the Jews or Christians did.

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