The Jew is Not My Enemy (25 page)

The lack of evidence to substantiate the legend of the Medina massacre leaves us Muslims with two options:

We can continue to believe in the story about the massacre of the Banu Qurayza Jews, as written in the man-made texts of Ibn Ishaq and the Hadith literature. If we do, then we will have to live with the fact that we endorse collective punishment, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing as the Sunnah of our own Prophet.

Or, given the lack of physical and textual evidence, we can reject this legend as nothing more than a myth that has tarnished the name of our Prophet and has sullied Muslim-Jewish relations for centuries.

However, if we come to the second conclusion – that Ibn Ishaq and subsequent Islamic writers right up to our own time have indulged in promoting an unsubstantiated legend that goes against the teachings of the Quran – then we must face an even bigger dilemma: What else in the Hadith literature is untrue? Are there more legends in the Hadith that are mere myths but have been imparted as the gospel truth to Muslim children for centuries?

We Muslims may find ourselves in an arabesque quandary. We may have to choose between believing a made-up legend that promotes hatred against Jews and questioning the validity of texts that, though written by ordinary men, have over the centuries acquired the status of divine truth.

If there is a place on earth today where identifying oneself as a Jew
means inviting serious danger to life and liberty, then the historic Pakistani city of Peshawar would easily win that honour.

The city that has its roots in Hindu Vedic mythology and the epic Ramyana and that was a major centre of Buddhist learning until the tenth century has undergone many transformations in its two-thousand-year history From Alexander the Great to Babur the Mughal, from the Sikh emperor Ranjit Singh to Rudyard Kipling, Peshawar has witnessed the rise and fall of many empires. In modern times, it is also the city Nikita Khrushchev threatened to obliterate after the Soviets shot down, in 1960, an American spy plane that had taken off from a nearby secret
CIA
airbase. Decades later, the
CIA
would return to Peshawar, from where it would wage its jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, just across the nearby border. By the time the Red Army was defeated, Peshawar had lost much of its accommodating character, indigenous to Pashtun culture. The city was transformed into a hotbed of Islamic jihad-ism introduced in the area by Osama bin Laden and the thousands of “Arab Afghans” who arrived to fight a jihad for the
CIA
. Today, it is a place where men are willing to slit the throat of a kuffar and confess to the crime with pride. Lately these jihadis have extended their killing spree to target Muslims who promote secular democracy as an antidote to Islam.

It is in this environment that Simcha Jacobovici, a Jewish-Canadian film producer, shot his documentary
The Lost Tribes
in 2004. He told me of the anxiety he felt while filming. “The fear was palpable. I had been advised to not disclose my Jewishness under any circumstances; the murder of Daniel Pearl still resonated in my mind.” The Jew, after all, was the ultimate enemy in the minds of the jihadis, the epitome of evil that needed to be crushed.

Yet this was not always the case. Until the early 1950s, Peshawar was home to a prosperous and thriving Jewish community with a synagogue that was open to the city’s Muslim majority. Col. Anwar Ahmed of Toronto, a former officer in the Pakistan army who hails from Peshawar, remembers as a boy seeing the arrival of Jews in the city. “It was in the late 1930s when we first noticed them. They said they feared persecution in the U.S.S.R. after Hitler and Stalin had signed a pact and decided to … escape before it was too late.” Like countless persecuted people before them, ranging from the family of the Prophet Muhammad to the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Jews of central Asian Soviet republics would choose to take refuge in India. Ironically, they would settle among the Muslim Pashtuns of India’s northwest, today the heartland of Taliban country where not a single Jew lives. “By the time I finished high school …, these central Asian Jews had become a common sight in Peshawar,” Colonel Anwar told me. Asked if there was any animosity towards the Jews of Peshawar at the time, he bristles. “Not even the slightest,” he says.

And what about now? I ask. “Today, the word ‘Jew’ is a slur not just in the city of Peshawar but perhaps the entire Muslim world,” sighs the doyen of the Pakistani-Canadian community in Toronto. “Times have changed. Today the deluge of petrodollars and the so-called jihad by bin Laden has destroyed the inherent decency and hospitality of the people of Peshawar and filled it with hate and suspicion of all non-Muslims.”

The Jews of Peshawar numbered no more than a few hundred in the 1940s. They were prominent in the textile trade and dominated the cloth market of the city. Interaction between Muslim and Jew was remarkably pleasant. “They bought a huge house in one of the nicer districts of the city and converted it into a synagogue,” says Colonel Anwar. “No one objected, not even the mullahs, and trust me, they were aplenty. This was also my first visit to a Jewish temple and I visited it frequently, always welcomed by the rabbi.… There was not even a hint that Muslims would have an issue with Jews. Today, people deny that Jews ever lived in Peshawar,” he adds.

Ten years later, Israel emerged as a Jewish state after the partition of British Palestine. The same year, Pakistan came into being as an Islamic state after the partition of British India. One partition was mourned by Muslims, the other celebrated. How could Muslims, enjoying their new state, then tell Jews they could not have one of their own?

In the early 1950s, Peshawar’s Jews and those domiciled in the capital, Karachi, started leaving for their new home in the Middle East, never to return. Pakistan lost a thread from its fabric that would be missed by no more than a handful. I asked Colonel Anwar if there was ever a backlash against the Jews considering the troubled events that were unfolding in British Palestine with the wars of 1936–39 and 1948. “None whatsoever,” he said. “Of course, we were on the side of the Arabs, but it did not cross our minds to target the Jews of Peshawar.”

Colonel Anwar reminds me that the chief instructor at the Pakistan Army Infantry School in Quetta in 1948 was a Jewish lieutenant-colonel. Being Jewish in Pakistan, officially called the world’s first Islamic republic, was not then an issue. “In 1966, my first son was born in Rawalpindi, and guess who was the gynecologist? A Jewish physician from Poland who had been seconded as an officer in the Pakistan army.”

Even the actions of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, showed there was no anti-Semitism among the Muslims of
Pakistan or even India. After the creation of Pakistan in August 1947, Jinnah invited a leading Jewish artist in Bombay to move to Pakistan and awarded him citizenship of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. His name was Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin, and he became one of the country’s leading figures in the arts. Even though an art gallery bearing his name still thrives in Karachi, the tolerance of Jews in the Pakistan of 1947 is a far cry from the visceral hatred directed towards them sixty years later.

Today, with the last Jewish Pakistanis having fled to Israel, where their children and grandchildren play cricket for the Israeli team, their Karachi cemetery remains, abandoned in one of the older neighbourhoods, on the banks of the Lyari River. A nondescript steel door bearing the Star of David marks the entrance to the last resting place of Jews who once lived in this city of my birth among Muslims, Catholics, Hindus, and Zoroastrians.

Through the tombstones one can learn about Karachi’s once organized Jewish community. One tombstone reads: “In loving memory of Sheelo, beloved wife of Mr. Solomon David, late municipal surveyor and president of the Jewish Community Karachi, who departed this life on April 27, 1903, aged 56 years.” Then there is the grave of the president of the Magain Shalome synagogue in Karachi, Gershone Solomon Oomerdaker (1861–1930).

Karachi’s Jewish cemetery is neglected, but considering that no Jews live in the city any more, its condition could be worse. That none of the graves has been vandalized gave me hope as I said an Islamic prayer for the departed and abandoned Jews of Karachi. As I left the cemetery, I wondered if Daniel Pearl knew about this place during his short stay in my native city.

It is not only in Pakistan where today’s Muslims believe their ill will towards Jews is deeply rooted and centuries old. Compared with the Arab world, the people of Pakistan could be considered moderate.
A 2010 report by the Pew Research Center on attitudes in the Muslim world makes for some disturbing reading.

The report is based on a survey carried out by the Washington-based think tank in 2009. Among other issues, the survey gauged the attitude of Muslims towards other religious groups, including Jews. The results confirm the anecdotal evidence. Ninety-five percent of Egyptians, 97 percent of Jordanians, 98 percent of Lebanese, and 97 percent of Palestinians had an unfavourable view of Jews. Among non-Arab Muslims, the rates were only slightly lower. The report said, “Negative views of Jews are also widespread in the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed in Asia: More than seven-in-ten in Pakistan (78 percent) and Indonesia (74 percent) express unfavourable opinions. A majority in Turkey (73 percent) also hold a critical view.”
¹

However, lost in the gloomy statistics was a single ray of hope. Bucking the trend of the entire Muslim world were the Muslims who know the Jews best; whose lives are intertwined with those of Jews on a daily basis; who work with and travel with and at times serve in the same armed forces as Jews: Muslim Israelis. If the Jews were the monsters they have been made out to be in Muslim narrative, then conventional wisdom would dictate that Muslim Israelis, living under the banner of the Star of David in cities like Nazareth, Haifa, Beersheba, and Tel Aviv, would have the most negative opinion about the Jews. Instead, the Pew survey found that the majority of Muslims living in Israel hold a favourable view of Jews. The report says, “Only 35 percent of Israeli Arabs express a negative opinion of Jews, while 56 percent voice a favorable opinion.”

How could Muslims who have no interaction with Jews – those living across the border in the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, or Egypt – hate them while Muslims who live among Jews have a favourable view? I asked the same question myself when I met with Israel’s Arab community during my visit there in 2008.

While dining in an Arab restaurant in Haifa, I asked the former Arab deputy mayor of the city, Elias Mtanes, the question I had asked every Arab Israeli I met on the trip: “Do you believe Israel is an apartheid state?” Mtanes shook his head in bewilderment. “What sort of a question is that!” he said. “Do you think I could be deputy mayor of Haifa if Israel was an apartheid state? I am not saying relations between Arabs and Jews inside Israel are perfect or even cordial, but our lives are intertwined by destiny and there is no escape … so we make the best of what we have.” He then talked about the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel conflict, during which Hezbollah fired missiles that killed Arab and Jew without discrimination. “Nasrallah gave fiery speeches asking the Arabs of Haifa and other towns in the Galilee to vacate the cities because his missiles were on the way.… My father reminded me of similar calls by Arab leaders in the 1948 war who asked us to leave our homes because the Arab armies were coming. Look what happened. We Israeli Arabs are Israelis, not the fifth column of some Arab leader who knows little about us nor cares for his own Arab population.”

Similar sentiments were expressed by a waiter at a wayside restaurant in Tel Aviv. I asked Muhammad if he would like his village to become part of a future Palestinian state.
“Ya Khee
[brother], I am Arab – that does not make me stupid,” he joked. “If my village is given over to the Palestinians, all of us will protest. I do not wish to live under the dictatorship of Hamas or Fatah.” Muhammad found it curious that a Pakistani Canadian was probing him so. He threw back a question at me. “Would you want to give up your Canadian citizenship and live under your General Musharraf in Pakistan?” There. He stumped me.

Back in Canada, I discussed my conversations with fellow Muslims, only to be told that the men I met must have been Mossad agents or that I had been set up and given a false image about an oppressive regime that kills and starves Arabs. “Ask Jews like Naomi Klein and Judy Rebick and they will tell you how Israel oppresses its Arab population,”
I was chided. When I explained that the people I met were people on the street whom I chose at random, they doubted me. When I showed them pictures of the sign reading
“Allahu Akbar”
at the gateway of a northern Israeli town, or the Circassian Muslim wedding in the Israeli city of Kfar Kama, or the imam in Haifa, I was met with a unanimous dismissal of the facts. I had been brainwashed by the Jews, they said.

To the same friends, I sent the Pew report showing the contrasting attitude towards Jews held by, say, Egyptians on the one hand and Arab Israelis on the other. Some said bluntly that the Israelis must have manipulated the survey, while others confided that they were shocked by the variance. One Muslim couple admitted that they had visited Jerusalem and had found Arab-Jewish relations far more amiable than they had been conditioned to believe by media reports. “Why hide the fact you visited Israel?” I asked. “You know why,” said the wife. “We have to live in our community and cannot be seen as not being anti-Israel.”

Many pundits argue that this dislike of Jews was triggered by the creation of the state of Israel. However, fifteen years later, in 1963, Jew-hatred had not yet entered the collective consciousness of Pakistan’s hundred million Muslims. That was the year cinemas across the country were showing the film
Yahudi ki Larki
, or The Jew’s Daughter, to packed houses.