The Jew is Not My Enemy (29 page)

“How often does a Jew get a chance to get photographed with a Muslim at Auschwitz?”

Today, the picture of Max and me, with the “work makes you free” iron sign in the background, graces the wall in my office, a constant reminder that yes, a Jew and a Muslim can come together, even in Auschwitz.

Max Eisen and I were part of a group of academics, parliamentarians, authors, educators, and police chiefs, all guests on this visit of the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. As the only Muslim in the group, I was conscious of the fact that some Muslim leaders not only deny the Holocaust, but also consider the tragedy just another example of Jews manipulating history. This made me a brother of such anti-Semites as Ayman Zawaheri, Hassan Nasrallah, and Osama bin Laden. However, I also knew that there were countless Muslims who had died fighting the Nazis. Unfortunately, while the world knew a lot about the Jew-hating Muslim Holocaust deniers, they knew next to nothing about the Muslims who too had died in the Nazi death camps of Poland.

When Max Eisen joked about the odds of a Jew and a Muslim being together in Auschwitz, I asked him if he knew of any Muslims among the many non-Jews – the Poles, the gypsies, the communists – while he was interned at the camp. He said he was unaware that there were any, but was intrigued by my suggestion. I felt too embarrassed to share with Max the fact that among the Nazi troops that crushed the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 was a Muslim division of the Wehrmacht, the East Turkestan Armed Formation. Muslims may have died fighting the Nazis, but many of my co-religionists had also aided Hitler’s war machine.

A day earlier, while visiting the death camp known as Majdanek near the city of Lublin, I had come across a memorial for the many non-Jewish national groups who had died alongside the millions of Jews who were systematically gassed to death. In a large room next to the
crematorium and the gas chambers, I saw black tombstones in memory of the many non-Jewish victims of the Nazis. The tombstones were marked, “Turk,” “Tadjik,” “Uzbek,” “Albanian,” “Bashkir,” “Kirghiz,” “Turcoman,” and other Muslim peoples. Sadly, today neither Muslim nor Jew is aware that Muslims also died alongside the six million Jews killed by the Nazis. Overwhelmed, I felt the need to read a silent Muslim prayer – the verse of the Quran known as Surah al-Fatiha, primarily for the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, but also for the thousands of Muslims who gave their lives too.

Majdanek was unique among the German Nazi concentration camps in many ways. Unlike other camps it was built near a large city, not in a rural area. In addition, because it was in eastern Poland, there was not enough time for the Nazis to destroy the evidence before the Red Army arrived, and so it is the best preserved of all the Nazi concentration camps.

However, for me as a Muslim, Majdanek had another uniqueness that is rarely discussed or even mentioned. The camp was known as Majdanek because it was built near a Muslim district of Lublin known as Majdan Tatarski or the “Tatar Maidan.” (The word Maidan is rooted in the Persian language, introduced in Poland by the Tatars.)
^*
While walking through the camp, I thought of the irony in Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad casting doubt on the Holocaust, not realizing that the best-preserved Nazi concentration camp has a name with Persian roots.

There is almost nothing written about the Muslims of Auschwitz. In a rare mention of this subject, Prof. Gil Anidjar of Columbia University wrote a poignant column for the left-wing Israeli newspaper
Ha’aretz
.

“We reside in this moment, and the ‘image of our time,’ which Primo Levi placed before our eyes as recapitulating the course of our history, is that of Muslims in Auschwitz.… And in this moment of danger, the image that flashes still is the image Primo Levi figured as the ‘image of our time.’ It is the name of our collective blindness enduring. There were Muslims in Auschwitz.”
²

Muslim presence in Auschwitz is also mentioned by the late Egyptian scholar Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri (d. 2008). In his book,
Arabs, Muslims and the Nazi Genocide of Jews, Judaism and Zionism
, I was surprised how frequently the word “Muselmann” (Muslim) appeared in the Auschwitz concentration camp lists.
³
However, he adds a new twist. According to Elmessiri, the word “Muselmann” was also used by the Nazis as a slur to describe Jews who were close to death by starvation. If the Nazis hated Jews, their choice of language shows they had no less contempt for the Muslim.

Muslims and Jews are locked in a unique animosity, with few parallels in history. While Islamist Muslims show disdain for Jews, not Judaism, extremist Jews show contempt for Islam and the Quran, not necessarily Muslims. While the former hates a people, the latter mocks a religion and its holy book.

This makes the mistrust difficult to understand, let alone resolve. When one side hates a faith and the other the faith’s followers, the path to peace is seriously complicated.

What is required by good men and women on both sides is for

• Jews to show some respect to Islam, and
  
• Muslims to show some respect for Jews.
  

There is, however, a significant difference. If one tried hard enough, one can always find the odd Jew who insults Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. One can even run into a rabbi who mocks Arabs. When
the former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, says, “God regrets creating the Arabs,” his acerbic and hateful comment is the exception to the rule. On the other hand, to find an Islamic cleric or politician spouting hatred towards Jews, one wouldn’t have to look too far. From Jakarta to Jerusalem one only needs to attend a Friday congregation at any mosque to hear the imam berating the Yahood while praying for the victory of Islam and the defeat of the Jews.

It is no wonder that well-meaning people who have indulged in “interfaith” exercises among Jews and Muslims have met with little or no success. The reason, I believe, is that they have not grasped the significance of what Professor Ronald Nettler of Oxford calls the “emotional hatred which [is] uniquely modern as part of Muslim thinking on the Jews.”
⁴

Nettler blames this modern Muslim hatred of the Jew on the politicization of Islam by such figures as the Islamist Sayyid Qutb.

In taking the first step to show my respect for the Jewish people, I salute their enormous contribution to human civilization that far outstrips their tiny population. They deserve our admiration, not our envy.

In exchange, I hope my Jewish counterpart – if there is one – would show respect for my faith, Islam, and recognize the enormous contributions Islam has made to human civilization. We need to be given credit where credit is due. Muslims are a people who are a billion and a half strong and who are spread from the Philippines to Peru, bound by their love for their Prophet and their belief in the Quran. In addition, Muslims who recognize the Jewish national aspirations manifested in the State of Israel, who criticize Israel any time the Jewish State errs, or who ask it to vacate the occupied Palestinian Territories, should not be labelled anti-Semitic.

While I was in Poland I learned of the planned Museum of the History of Polish Jews that will be dedicated to the famous Jewish traveller, diplomat, and merchant, Ibrahim ibn Yakub. Ibn Yakub is
considered to be the first Jew in Poland; he authored the first extensive account of Poland. While visiting Poland in
AD
965 or 966, Ibn Yakub made mention of the city of Krakow in his travelogues. Here too emerges a Muslim-Jewish connection. Ibn Yakub was in the diplomatic service of the Caliph in Spain. In the tenth century, Muslim power in Iberia was at its pinnacle, where Jews and Muslims together created what author Erna Paris describes as “a remarkable era of science, philosophy, philology, biblical commentary and literature.”
⁵

In addition to his Arabised name, Ibn Yakub wrote his memoirs in the Arabic language, evidence of a time Muslims demonstrated little of the hatred they do towards Jews today.

As I left Poland to return to Canada, my thoughts wandered from Ibrahim Ibn Yakub in medieval times to that early morning in 1944 in the Dachau concentration camp when a Muslim princess, Noor Inayat Khan from India, faced a Nazi firing squad. She did not have to die, but she did, as did countless other Muslims in the fight to destroy Hitler and his Third Reich. Both Jew and Muslim must recognize these unsung heroes, for they provide us some solace on the lonely path towards peace among the Israelite and the Ishmaelite. This is why this book is dedicated to the memory of Princess Noor Inayat Khan.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own
.

  
1.
http://filthyjewishterrorists.com/the-attempted-false-flagging-in-toronto-canada-on-9-11-2006/
.

  
2.
“A Case Study in Hate,” editorial,
National Post
, March 6, 2010,
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=2648640
.

  
3.
Tun Mahathir, “If U.S. Could Create ‘Avatar,’ It Could Fake 9/11 Attacks,”
Jakarta Globe
, January 21, 2010.

  
4.
“Özdemir Worried by Muslim Anti-Semitism,” The Local: Germany’s News in English, February 23, 2009,
http://www.thelocal.de/society/20090223-17609.html
.

  
5.
Alex Sorin, “The Shape of the Holy,”
Jerusalem Post
, July 14, 2009.

  
1.
“New York Terror Plot Foiled,”
New York Post
, May 20, 2009,
http://www.nypost.com/seven/05202009/news/
regionalnews/bronx/ny_terror_plot_foiled_170221.htm
.

  
2.
Charles Lewis, “Address on niqab not meant to be offensive: Imam,”
National Post
, October 23, 2009.
http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/holy-post/archive/2009/10/23/address-on-hijab-not-meant-to-be-offensive-imam.aspx#ixzz0riVLKPPc
.

  
3.
“Are we allowed to call a Christian person kafir?” Muhammad Al-Mukhtar Al-Shinqiti, director of the Islamic Center of South Plains, Lubbock, Texas,
http://www.islamonline.net/livefatwa/english/Browse.asp?hGuestID=8zOFOr
.

  
4.
“Saudi Cleric Says Don’t Pray for ‘Infidel’ Downfall,” September 6, 2009,
http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/
idINIndia-42256820090906
.

  
1.
Susan Sachs, “Anti-Semitism Is Deepening among Muslims,”
New York Times
, April 27, 2002.

  
2.
Rick Westhead, “Public Schools Not Always Tolerant in Pakistan,”
Toronto Star
, February 21, 2010,
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/pakistan/article/768976–public-schools-not-always-tolerant-in-pakistan
.

  
3.
Bernard Lewis, “Muslim Anti-Semitism,”
Middle East Quarterly
, 1998; “The New Anti-Semitism,”
American Scholar
75, no. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 25–36,
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/21832.html
.

  
4.
Bernard Lewis,
Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), p. 132.

  
5.
Ibid.

  
6.
Ibid., pp. 136–37.

  
7.
David Von Drehle, “A Lesson in Hate,”
Smithsonian Magazine
, February 2006.

  
8.
“Unnoticed Clues Haunt Fort Hood: Nidal Hasan Left a Trail of Suspicious Actions,” NBC News, December 31, 2009,
http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/
breaking/Unnoticed_clues_haunt
_Fort_Hood-80401817.html
.

  
9.
Sayyid Qutb,
Milestones
, Dar al-Ilm, Damascus, Syria p. 62.

10.
Sayyid Qutb, “Ma’rakatuna ma’a al-Yahud” [Our Fight against the Jews] (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1989), English translation by Ronald L. Nettler in
The Legacy of Islamic AntiSemitism
, edited by Andrew G. Bostom (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008), p. 361.

11.
Ibid., p. 357.

12.
Ibid., p. 357.

13.
Ibid., p. 360.

14.
Lawrence Wright,
Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
(New York: Knopf, 2006), p. 79.

  
1.
Norman H. Gershman,
Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), p. 2. Besa is a code of honour deeply rooted among Albanian Muslims. It dictates that one take responsibility
for the lives of others in their time of need. A similar code is found among Pashtun Muslims, which they call Pukhtoonwali.

  
2.
Ian Johnson,
A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Risk of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), pp. 9–11.

  
3.
Mathias Küntzel,
Jihad and Jew-Hatred
(New York: Telos Press, 2007), p. 45,

  
4.
Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, eds.,
The Israel-Arab Reader
(New York: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 51–55.

  
5.
Küntzel,
Jihad and Jew-Hatred
, p. 35.

  
6.
Ibid.

  
7.
Sahar Huneidi,
A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians
. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 35.

  
8.
Lewis,
Semites and Anti-Semites
, p. 136.

  
9.
Said K. Aburish,
A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 153.

10.
Rashid Khalidi,
The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), p. 41.