Coexistance: Jews, Christians & Muslims

Posted on April 9, 2007
Filed Under Jews, Religion, Israel, Islam, Intoxication |

Interesting post:

There is no denying that the world today is marked by a high level of violence in select parts of the Muslim world; it is equally true that there have been high levels of violence in Columbia and in multiple parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam is not present. Not to mention North Korea. Humans are perfectly capable of fighting for any number of reasons, and will use whatever creed or ideology is convenient to support them. But the close association of Islam with violence and terror is a triumph for a cabal of loosely connected groups who have managed to define a religion followed by as many as 1.2 billion people in a narrow, limited fashion. In the process, both Muslims and people in the West have forgotten a legacy that extends across fourteen centuries, which have seen conflict, for sure, but have also witnessed high levels of toleration and long periods of live-and-let-live. For centuries after the Arab conquests in the 7th century, for instance, a small Arab Muslim elite ruled over vast numbers of Christians and significant Jewish minorities. Those non-Muslims were largely left autonomous, save for taxes, and while their lot was not necessarily easy, no society in those centuries celebrated human rights or individual freedoms.

And there can be no question that until the 20th century, it was vastly preferable to be a Jew in Muslims society than under Christian rule. The degree to which that changed with the creation of Israel in 1948 and with the sad, tragic expulsion of Jewish communities who had been living Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Morocco for more than a thousand years, is hard to reconcile with the long legacy that preceeded it, but that is not an excuse for forgetting that the intense animosity between Muslims and Jews is a modern phenomenom and not woven into the fabric of either tradition (for those who then ask, what about the execution of one of the Jewish tribes of Medina by Muhammad or the occasional outbursts in medieval Baghdad, remember that violence against groups who fell out of favor was part of life in all parts of the world, and had more to do with power and who had it than religion and who didn’t).

Continue read it here.

Comments

14 Responses to “Coexistance: Jews, Christians & Muslims”

  1. Finnpundit on April 9th, 2007 6:32 pm

    I actually found the article this article was reacting to - The Wall Street Journal one written by a former member of a jihadist terror group - much more interesting and illuminating:

    http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009890

    Remember, “The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run America”.

    Huffington Post is basically run by people who think they ought to run America, and who can’t understand why they’re not.

  2. Roman Kalik on April 9th, 2007 6:36 pm

    It’s a good post, and I agree that learning from our past and keeping everything within context is important.

  3. Roman Kalik on April 9th, 2007 8:01 pm

    Hmm. I think Finnpundit has a point here as well, though.

  4. Andrew Brehm on April 9th, 2007 10:14 pm

    The author seems a bit uninformed in at least two aspects.

    For example, Jewish life in Europea and America in the 19th century was not really as bad as he seems to think. Many Jews founded business empires at the time, all were full citizens at least in the second half of the 19th century.

    The United Kingdom had a Jewish prime minister. Germany produced many now-famous Jewish authors and scientists.

    And Arab animosity against Jews started long before the founding of Israel, as did Arab animosity towards other ethnic and religious minorities, like the Kurds and Kopts.

    I’m afraid the article again deflects responsibility. Yes, Islam has a great past. But no, that past did not end in 1948. Islam as the great tolerant culture ended a long time ago. King Faisal was the last major representative. He could have turned things around. But Arab nationalism and the world wouldn’t let him.

    “And there can be no question that until the 20th century, it was vastly preferable to be a Jew in Muslims society than under Christian rule.”

    Of course can there be a question about that statement. It’s not true. How soon people forget.

    In the 19th century Jews were equal citizens in the British Empire and the United States, and since 1948 in Germany. In other countries (Catholic and Protestant) it was similar.

    (Ireland prides itself on the fact that it is the only country that never had any anti-Jewish laws whatsoever. And from the late 19th century the part of Dublin just north of where I live, Portobello, was often called “Little Jerusalem”.)

    Look at the history of South Africa in the 19th century to learn about the status of Jews in the British Empire in the 19th century. I doubt that the status of Jews in the Arab world was better!

  5. Andrew Brehm on April 9th, 2007 10:33 pm

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randlord

    Notice how the list of the British South African powerful includes many Jews. That was hardly a society were Jews were second-class citizens.

  6. tommy on April 9th, 2007 10:41 pm

    My thoughts are similar to Andrew Brehm. I would also like to point out that even though Muslims point to Andalusia as a model multireligious state in the Middle Ages, the truth is very different from the myth. Muslim Andalusia actually suffered from frequent internal strife and mass killings of Jews (and Christians) occurred periodically, just as they did in Europe. The Jewish scholar Maimonides, fled Andalusia for Egypt during one of these periods of severe persecution .

    Perhaps the simplest evidence for the fact that Andalusia was no paradise is that even though Jews were persecuted and frequently expelled in medieval Europe, they never flocked to Andalusia in any number. Only the native Sephardic Jewish population lived there.

  7. jonah84 on April 10th, 2007 7:41 am

    Drima. I think with a few exceptions, I think the Christian and Muslim population in Eritrea and Ethiopia had somewhat of a peaceful co-existence. Remember when Islam was in early phase and followers of Mohammad were getting persecuted, the Prophet sent his followers to Ethiopia/Eritrea where the Christian King gave them refuge..

    Tommy, I am not an expert on Andalusia but your statement above…

    “Perhaps the simplest evidence for the fact that Andalusia was no paradise is that even though Jews were persecuted and frequently expelled in medieval Europe, they never flocked to Andalusia in any number. Only the native Sephardic Jewish population lived there.”

    I believe the Spanish crown was gradually winning land from Islamic rulers over centuries until the completely removed the Islamic and Jewish populations.. As far as Spanish were concerned they were reclaiming their land from foreign rulers and people and they did this reclaiming over a long period.

    So, no one seeking security would be flocking to this type of land… I am not sure if it had anything to do with severe islamic intolerance?

  8. Roman Kalik on April 10th, 2007 10:33 am

    Andalusia was good by the standards of that period. And though it had periods of persecution, the Christian kingdoms of the time were a great deal less tolerant.

    As for flocking anywhere, Jews didn’t exactly flock to Khazar either, and that country was Jewish. Travel wasn’t as easy back then, and people tended to latch on to what little property they had today rather than seek potential wealth or death in a new and unknown country.

  9. Andrew Brehm on April 10th, 2007 10:49 am

    Would it tell us anything if we checked population numbers?

    I.e. how many non-Jews and Jews lived in Europe in 1900 vs how many non-Jews and Jews lived in a defined area of the Arab/Persian world in 1900?

    We could then compare which area was preferred by Jews and/or which area allowed Jews to survive and multiply more.

  10. howie on April 10th, 2007 1:14 pm

    I tend to agree with AB…e.g. Jews lived in the Americas for hundreds of years with mostly modest problems.

    Why did the author leave out a huge issue…dhimmi? I think because such a concept blows away his argument.

    I think, for the most part, the situation for Jews in much of the Muslim world was still a “Fiddler on the Roof” existence. When we could serve…we were tolerated…when it was more useful to rip us off…that too occurred.

    If we had it so good…how for example…did we end up with only 100,000 Jews in Iraq after being there for over 2,500 years? Arabs invented algebra, so I don’t know…does not add up to me.

  11. Roman Kalik on April 10th, 2007 3:04 pm

    Jews had it good in North America. The scattered communities of the Caribbeans had it great from what I could gather. But in the Spanish colonies life generally sucked for Jews.

    I guess the colonies of religious outcasts and specialist traders were more accepting, with the first being more tolerant to those of “odd” religion while the second were more open due to financial issues.

    And in both cases Jews had it better than in Arab countries. It was the European mainland where it truly sucked.

  12. Andrew Brehm on April 10th, 2007 4:15 pm

    “It was the European mainland where it truly sucked.”

    Ah well… In Poland and Lithuania there were several hundred good years. And Germany didn’t do too badly before the 20th century either.

    After all, Jewish and German culture are now forever intertwined.

  13. lirun on April 10th, 2007 5:11 pm

    what you dont know my friend.. is that while my mum’s mum is sudanese my dad’s dad came from medina roots.. apparently my great great grandad practised law in barcelona through the course of his career.. and our family’s family name was in fact medina..

  14. Roman Kalik on April 10th, 2007 6:16 pm

    *shrug* Germany was no different than the other European kingdoms mostly, in terms of minority persecution, up to, oh, 17th century? Or was it 18th? Mind’s a sieve sometimes. In any case, at that point the ruling monarch was very respected by the local Jews. They praised him even in the first pages of published books ofreligious commentary. They had a few good decades, then the monarch screwed them over.

    As for Poland, the 19th century was relatively good to mediocre.

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