1. transparency at the jewish leadership council

ok, we know who the board of deputies are. we know what it’s for. we know how it’s funded. we know how you get to be on it. we know who it represents. now, we have this new organisation called the “jewish leadership council”. on it, you have various movers and shakers, you’ve got the vc/banking/property tycoons, you’ve got the charity/safety/israel activists, you’ve got synagogue movement machers, you’ve got access, you’ve got international connections, you’ve got lords, baronesses, knights and the chair of ujs – you’ve got two women and no rabbis, for some reason. you’ve got no haredim, for some other reason. you’ve got leaders from the most broad-based and influential organisations in the community – but what are they for? clearly, this is an influential bunch of people, but who chooses them? who decided that there should be a jewish leadership council in the first place? how are they accountable? what is their strategy? what is their relationship with the board? how is it funded? i for one would like to know.

2. promote jewish (especially sephardic) cultural literacy

we are not short, for good or ill, of jewish education organisations, from the controversial chabad to the inestimable limmud and all points beyond. however, for the most part, systematic approaches aimed at enhancing jewish identity are without exception entirely religious-based. more worryingly, they seem to be ignoring the question of cultural literacy. whilst there are instances of successful specific initiatives, like the yiddish summer school run by the jewish music institute, or the various ulpanim run by israel-focused organisations, there is a distinct lack of provision for the sephardic and oriental communities to promote the learning of ladino and judeo-arabic – essentially, globalisation is being driven by majority tastes, hence the largest groups attract the most funding and if one didn’t learn it at one’s mother’s knee, one might struggle to gain familiarity with anything from cookery to piyyutim, history to dress. there are organisations, including musical groups and individual tutors, who are promoting and disseminating the results of their knowledge and expertise in specific areas, normally as a result of academic research, but there is no-one who can teach you about the culture of, say, an “indian iraqi”, everything from how to make sambusak and sehug to singing shbahoth pronounced correctly – in other words, the customs, the language, the music, the food, the history. and the same goes for the different ashkenazi traditions, with the possible exception of chabad, who integrate their cultural traditions such as “farbrengen” as part of their outreach programmes. it is possible that this may be the result of a hundred years of zionist shelilat ha-galut (“negation of diaspora behaviours”) or an enlightenment/modernist hangover against the backward ways of “ghetto culture”, or simply the influence of organisations whose sole concern is increasing religious observance, but surely one can no longer argue that diaspora jewish is simply something to be outgrown. yet we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater on this one – and forgotten much of what made being jewish interesting. this is something i believe where we can learn something from how other diasporas have preserved their cultures, the various south asian communities being a case in point.

3. take a lead on environmental frumness

something was said about making Shabbat the “greenest day of the week” – now, i am the first to expound on the benefits of one day with no driving, tv or communications, but i worry about the effects on the planet of copious use of tinfoil, urns, hot-plates, leaving lights on and most of all the use of disposable plates, cutlery, glasses and so on for ease of clear-up at synagogue kiddushim or on other communal occasions. i was less than underwhelmed at chiefy’s “green shabbat” damp squib and am regularly appalled at the environmental disaster area that most community functions seem to be. there is an opportunity for the community to change this – it is 100% wrong that correct religious observance should be in breach of Torah prohibitions on wastefulness and the destruction of natural resources. i would be delighted if religious organisations could take a lead in this department – the progressive movements have already made steps in this direction and organisations like limmud have made concrete moves to make policy into reality on its conferences. there are organisations such as hazon that are focused specifically on doing this in a jewish way – it is about time that the religious establishment, particularly within the traditional communities, does the same. a set of guidelines would be a start.

4. break the stranglehold of fiftysomething personal fiefdoms

i lose count at the number of community organisations in this country whose leadership and patronage is controlled by middle-aged people who run them as if they were their own personal kingdoms. sometimes, these people have some claim to expertise, or have built the organisations up, but more often than not, they have simply prevented the organisations from developing by hanging on to all the levers of power, dispensing patronage with the help of compliant boards of part-time trustees, picked for their names, contact books, relations and fat wallets. how many of these organisations have executive scrutiny from anyone under 35, let alone under 30? how many of these boards provide an effective check on the power of the chief executive or director? more worryingly, what happens when an organisation which has no competition begins to stifle innovation in its key area of focus and actively prevent other organisations challenging its dominance, or even block activities in its area which are not under its control? i propose that all community organisations adopt a code of practice which includes a commitment to the future planning of the organisation, specifically to succession planning and provides for some kind of non-executive checks and balances. not being an expert in charity law, i’m not sure what the actual rules are, but enough charity scandals have made it into the papers (and i know of some which haven’t even got that far) to suggest that there is something to address here, perhaps through the board?

5. shul and mosque twinning

although there are a plethora of opportunities for the ceremonial activities associated with interfaith dialogue (i’m thinking here of the likes of the indefatigable and admirable sir sigmund sternberg) and quite a few effective practical collaborations amongst communal professionals and academics (i’m thinking here of the leo baeck college jewish-christian-muslim conferences in germany and the tireless liaison work done by the cst) there are still far too few grass-roots initiatives (here, i’m thinking of the likes of radio salaam-shalom or the alif-aleph student dialogue activities) in the mainstream synagogue movements. i would propose a simple solution – a programme of twinning between synagogues and mosques, perhaps trilaterally including churches if it helps. by the same token, i think jewish-sikh dialogue has long been neglected and, particularly in view of our similarities as religions with a partly ethnic element, it would be extremely helpful to bring gurdwaras into the mix. a programme of working together on uncontroversial and useful community projects such as litter collection or redecorating local facilities would enable the building of links which would contribute strongly to community cohesion.

6. transparency in the tzedakah industry

every day, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds are donated by religious jews to the needy. the giving of “tzedakah” (not exactly the same thing as charity) is a religious obligation that is taken extremely seriously by both observant and non-observant jews. however, this system lacks transparency. every traditional morning service includes a point at which money is ceremonially donated, usually into a collection box. usually this money is given as coins or even notes, but there are a number of schemes, widely used in the strictly orthodox community, whereby tzedakah vouchers are purchased en masse, donated by the purchasers and then redeemed by the recipients. however, these cashflows, which are then collected and redistributed by either communal officials or charitable networks, undeniably place significant amounts of patronage in the hands of synagogues, rabbis and charities. there is little transparency about these donations, how they are used or what strings may or may not be attached.

on the other side of the transaction, a huge industry has built up around getting money donated for tzedakah to “the needy” or “for Torah study” – however, a sizeable (though who knows how much?) amount is directed towards ultra-orthodox institutions both here and in israel. similarly, the communities for whom “Torah is their profession” (in other words, they don’t work for a living, but live off these donations whilst studying full-time) are disproportionately benefited. i’m not saying they live in the lap of luxury, but they certainly have a lot of children, don’t pay a lot of tax (or, in israel, serve in the army) and don’t seem to pay much attention to the talmudic maxim, which is part of the normative halakhah of the shulhan arukh, that “he who does not teach his son a trade, teaches him to be a thief” (BT qiddushin 29a). moreover, if you spend any time in the strictly orthodox community, you will become aware of the number of people who come asking directly for money from the community during prayers, in most cases waving a laminated note under your nose about the operation they need to pay for, the medication they need to take, the institution of Torah learning that they are supporting or even the wedding they need to make for one of their 12 children. all of them seem to be able to afford plane tickets and most of them seem to think if you are collecting in the UK, you have no obligation to ask in english or provide any kind of english explanation of what you’re asking for, which is just plain rude.

now, i don’t deny that some of these are worthy causes, but some of them definitely aren’t. the money isn’t audited at either end. the tax authorities certainly aren’t consulted. money often goes missing, is diverted, is used to gain undue influence or ends up funding things of which i certainly do not approve (like illegal settlements) and we are all aware of the recent scandals in america over money-laundering. there is a secondary industry (well known in stamford hill) whereby you can hire a driver for a couple of days who has a list of addresses where people live who give to good causes live and the amount they are likely to give and he will shuttle you round from door to door in return for a cut. one person of my acquaintance used to keep a wodge of five pound notes by the door for when anyone rang – and, apparently, a lot of them complained about how little he gave! now it is all very praiseworthy that the jewish obligation for charitable giving is so powerful, but it is currently driving a lot of very, very questionable behaviours and practices.

the authorities have long been interested in the hawala system by which muslims raise money for good (and some not so good) causes and a focus on this is part of most anti-money-laundering computer systems. it is only a matter of time before the tzedakah system comes under scrutiny as a racketeering practice. in fact, it probably already is. my advice, particularly to the strictly-orthodox communities is this: clean house. do something about the lack of transparency. get audit trails and control systems in place – or you will live to regret it when this augean stable is eventually cleaned. there is an opportunity for, among other things, a cashless system to be introduced whereby people seeking donations can be issued a portable card reading device. similarly, if we can issue hechshers (stamps of kashrut) for food, there is no reason why we cannot do the same at the UK end for reputable collectors of funds – that way, we who wish to fulfil our obligation to donate can be assured that our funds are going to someone or a cause who really deserves it and not to anywhere else.

7. call the kiruv industry to account and combat the influence of artscroll

regular readers of the spittoon will be aware of my opinions on the kiruv or “outreach” industry and the organisations that are engaged in it. many of these organisations worry me. not because i object to bagels and speed-dating, but because i object to the hidden agendas of these organisations and the power they are increasingly gaining within the communal mainstream. at least one major united synagogue has outsourced its jewish education to a kiruv organisation in the past, which has been a source of some controversy. the ideology that drives these people comes straight from the haredi world. that is not to say that it is necessarily such a bad thing, but it’s simply not healthy that it is allowed to infiltrate and take over the mainstream of jewish education. the stalking-horse of this entryism is the powerful “mesorah publications” publishing house, home of the artscroll series of books. now i don’t know of one jewish house that doesn’t have at least one of their books, including mine, but i for one worry about allowing the hashkafah (“worldview”) of this part of the community to become dominant. both artscroll and the kiruv movements push a monolithic, heavily edited, selective, prudish, intolerant and above all doctrinaire view of judaism which flies in the face both of our history and the jaw-dropping complexity of jewish thought, theology, law and culture. people like simplicity and for things to be set out for them to understand – that’s fine. but what goes with this, both in the publications and the programmes, is an ideology – and it’s not an ideology that we should be comfortable or complacent about. the traditionalist mainstream has been supine in the face of this onslaught, in many cases sympathising with its negation of non-orthodox communities and streams of thought and, in many cases, actively encouraged by the power players in the religious leadership. it is time we fully understood what these organisations stand for, what their political aims are, what links they have to israeli political parties on the [ultra]religious right and what influence they have over the community in this country. they have been able to buy silence so far with what is in many places entirely praiseworthy community work, but it is time we had some transparent scrutiny of these organisations.

all suggestions are welcome!

king messiah, or ex-parrot?

of course, the official chabad line on this is that they’re not in fact messianic and that messianic chabadniks are a small minority. some would beg to disagree. in fact, the jc offers a piece of analysis from my very favourite mainstream wiseacre, the egregious rabbi yitzhak “marry a jew” shochet, to show why the precise formulation of the affirmation demanded by the rca offers ample opportunity for a bit of hasidic taqqiyah. r. shochet, of course, is the  best friend of every parent in the matilda marks primary school catchment area, whose appallingly smug and arrogant “ask the rabbi” column in the jewish news, the cause of much friday night swearing in the bananabrain household, was memorably and accurately caricatured on the satirical jewdas website (not something i generally endorse, however).

the amusing thing is, of course, that r. shochet’s analysis appears to rest not upon the fidgy-widginess of whether chabad can sign up to the non-messianic affirmation required in good conscience, or not, but upon the contention that:

“Allegiance to the “Thirteen Principles of the Faith” does not matter, and all the serious problems afflicting Jews and Judaism are not of primary concern. They are not as important, and will not provide the headlines, as inventing and prosecuting alleged heresies. This is certainly an intriguing agenda for a rabbinical organisation.”

can we now expect r. shochet to drop his long-standing objection to the non-orthodox communities, whose non-adherence to the thirteen principles is generally considered as indicative of their heretical status? in fact, can we now look forward to a proper debate on the misappropriation of maimonidean dogmatic theology by the guardians of “Torah judaism”? is he prepared to have an honest look at whether maimonides actually meant what modern orthodoxies of every stripe say he meant, given that his positions aroused astonishing controversy at the time and were themselves condemned numerous times for heresy? can we now expect the united synagogue to cease prosecuting the non-orthodox movements for their “alleged heresies”?

i doubt it – but we shouldn’t let our antipathy to chabad stand in the way of hypocrisy, should we?

the latest halachic ruling banning the use of elevators on the Sabbath shocked residents of the Tovei Ha’Ir retirement home in Jerusalem.

Most residents at this institution, which caters to the religious and ultra-Orthodox, received news of the rabbinical edict with indifference.

Tovei Ha’Ir residents have been using elevators on the Sabbath for years – this is the only way they can get from their rooms on the upper floors to the dining hall and synagogue. 
  
One of the retirees, a Haredi man, barely concealed his sarcasm when he responded, “What changed suddenly? What was kosher until now is suddenly treyf?”

if you’re not familiar with the concept of a shabbat elevator, it’s basically a way of using a lift without pressing buttons. this, according to many people, both jewish and non-jewish, is what is known as “cheating”. personally, i disagree with that position, as i believe G!D Wants us to use our brains and work within the system that was Revealed to us at sinai and if this means our ingenuity allows us to exploit loopholes, then as it says in the famous story of the “oven of achnai“, i believe G!D Laughs: “My children have defeated Me“. anyway, as far as i’m concerned, if you start making the sabbath into a total pain in the arse, then that can only lead to contempt for Torah and halakhah – and rabbinical teaching. when will these people learn to deal with those of us that don’t live in their box? what on earth are they thinking? do they want us to end up like the kara’ites, sitting in the dark on shabbat because we can’t use timeswitches?

AAARRGHH. what a way to start the new year. the only glimmer of light is that what passes in the haredi world for rumblings of plausible deniability and discontent may yet have begun…

the only true followers of Moses [pbuh], are the Muslims, for it is part of moses religion [and the religion of all other prophets] to accept the latest Messenger and revelation; that is why Muslims are considered to be the followers of all the Prophets.

it also appears that the last piece upset some of our local islamist trolls.

good.

anyway, what i’m going to take a look at now is the assumption i noted in the previous piece, namely that “the jews” possess a “corrupt” verion of the Torah and that, as a result, we have drifted away from the “original religion” of every prophet from adam to abraham – which was, of course, “islam”. there are four components to this idea, namely:

1. that the jews changed the actual Text of the Revelation from G!D (whatever that was)
2. that the *original* Text would of course have confirmed that muhammad would ultimately be along with the Qur’an as the final Revelation and, incidentally, that jesus was the messiah.
3. that the jews “permitted what was forbidden and forbade what was permitted”
4. that the jews thereby ended up committing “shirk” by putting our rabbis on a par with G!D.

there are several sorts of evidence adduced for this putative corruption, namely:

1. accusations made in the Qur’an itself and therefore, by definition, true.
2. accusations of perfidy amongst the jewish people made in the Torah and other jewish texts themselves, including prophetic writings foreseeing “unfaithfulness” and sin anticipated at a future date.
4. the conclusions of biblical scholarship, which assumes of course that the Torah is a [composite] human document in all particulars and therefore, by definition, corrupt.
5. polemics made by jewish converts to islam and therefore, by definition, people who are familiar with every detail of the lies but have now embraced the Truth.

in this way, we are shown to be condemned out of our own mouth, by independent, scientifically impartial scholars and, most damning of all, by G!D. it’s an open-and-shut case, really.

except, of course, it isn’t.

in dealing with the first sort of evidence, the first thing that has to be understood is terminological. when jews speak of “Torah” we may mean any number of things. *the* Torah is, of course, the text of the pentateuch itself. this is not the same as “the bible”, a fact which is lost on most of the adherents of this particular line of reasoning. the “hebrew bible” is known as the TaNa”Kh, an acrostic comprising the Torah, the nebi’im (“prophets”) and qetubim (“writings”) – for more about the structure of Tanakh, see here:

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

however, the important thing here is that when jews refer to “torah”, it may be the general word for “teaching”. the salient point here is that “torah” may involve multiple interpretations, contradictions and opinions, whereas THE Torah itself as a text is fixed. the relevant verses in the Qur’an do not appear (not being any kind of expert in Qur’an, and i apologise in advance for any shortcomings in quotes i obtained from islamicity.com ) to make it clear what precisely is being referred to:

And unto thee have We revealed the Scripture with the truth, confirming whatever Scripture was before it, and a watcher over it. So judge between them by that which Allah hath revealed, and follow not their desires away from the truth which hath come unto thee.

- Qur’an 5:48 (Pickthall)

this “them”, apparently, is taken to refer to the recipients of the former Revelations, namely jews and christians. as you can see, there is rather a lot of wiggle-room for interpretation there, the “consensus of the scholars” notwithstanding. and every verse i’ve been shown purporting to show the corruption of the Torah from the Qur’an has a similar amount of wiggle-room. here’s a particular favourite:

They have taken as lords beside Allah their rabbis and their monks and the Messiah son of Mary, when they were bidden to worship only One G!D. There is no god save Him. Be He glorified from all that they ascribe as partner (unto Him)!

- Qur’an 9:31 (Pickthall)

this is then supported by the hadith:

“…and I said to him: “We don’t worship them”. He [the Messenger [sm]] said: “Do they not forbid what Allah has permitted you and do you not then forbid it [to yourselves]?, and do they not make permissable for you what Allah has forbidden and do you not then make it permissable [to yourselves]“?, I replied “certainly!”. He [sm] said: “That is worshipping them” [Narrated by At-Tirmidhi who graded it as well-authentic [hasan]]

now, obviously we would be extremely horrified if it were to be suggested that we were in any way “worshipping” rabbis – this would be just as great “shirk” to us as it would be to muslims. what i would like to believe is that muhammad knew better than these scholars and was referring strictly to a certain group of jews he knew locally, NOT to jews IN GENERAL. from the way the Qur’an and muslim sources describes how these local arabian jews behaved, they were either very ignorant or just plain wrong and the fact that they are described as jews may have little or nothing to do with what normative mainstream judaism actually says. in other words, these words should not be taken as applying to all jews.

there are, therefore, the following possibilities:

1. the Qur’an is not referring to all jews at this point
2. there is some difference in the way jews and muslims treat scholarly interpretation
3. this is incorrect reporting of what muhammad said
4. this is incorrect reporting of what jews actually do
5. this is slander

in respect of point 2, however, there is an extremely important talmudic story known as the “oven of achnai” (BT bava metzia 59b) which describes how the principle of authority for human interpretation occurred, over a trivial argument about whether the aforementioned oven was kosher or not. the vote was unanimous save for one rabbi who dissented. the majority quoted the Torah verse that “after the majority shall you incline” to try and get him to concede the point, at one point appealing to a Divine Voice (“bat qol”) which supports them. however, the dissenting rabbi refuted them all by appealing to the verse in the Torah which states “it is not in Heaven”, (deut. 30:11) which was taken to mean that we can’t wait for G!D to provide answers in every situation, but must do our own interpretation in the here and now. it was subsequently reported by another rabbi who had had mystical communication with the prophet elijah (khidr) that G!D had been extremely pleased that “My children have defeated Me” – kind of like when you’re pleased when your kid makes a logical argument for the first time in order to get his own way. however the authority for this is couched, it remains pretty clear that no matter how multifarious and intertextual a sacred text like the Torah is, you still need human interpretation in an every-day situation, whether one’s own or that of experts and scholars.

so, what we have here is quite the conundrum. apparently, it’s all right for *muslim* scholars to make what is very clearly an interpretation and to pass this down as correct but, apparently, when rabbis do it they are “forbidding what G!D has permitted and permitting what G!D has forbidden”. i would suggest that for muslims to suggest that the experts and scholars of other faiths are thereby introducing “manmade” laws and causing themselves to be worshipped, whilst of course their own are “rightly-guided” and infallible, stretches credibility to the point where one would surely be forgiven for considering that such a position makes them look like a bunch of hypocritical beardy bigots. we lied about abraham, did we? deary me. and, what’s more, we left the evidence for our own guilt right there in the text! look at deuteronomy 12:32 and 4:2! perhaps if islamists could supply the undistorted past scriptures that they are talking about here:

Therefore woe be unto those who write the Scripture with their hands and then say, “This is from Allah,” that they may purchase a small gain therewith. Woe unto them for that their hands have written, and woe unto them for that they earn thereby.

- Qur’an 2:79 (Pickthall)

this would look like a bit less of a fit-up. the verse of Tanakh (it’s in Nevi’im rather than Torah itself) most commonly adduced in support of this is the famous one about the “lying pen of the scribes” in jeremiah 8:8. but can one be certain that the “lying pen” referred to by jeremiah in means only that there was a text and it was altered by “the scribes”? how can one know for sure that this doesn’t refer to incorrect decisions in practical circumstances? there are *many* ways that this verse could be interpreted. furthermore, reading the text one realises that the prophets are pretty darn ticked off at the behaviour of the people for precisely this reason. it is not unreasonable in these circumstances to conclude that it was the prophets themselves who preserved the originally revealed Torah, which was why they were “on-message”, so to speak, as opposed to the ‘lying pen of the scribes’, which might imply, for the sake of argument, that the prophets were aware that there were people circulating miscopied, altered or falsified texts – which could very well be the very texts that academics have discovered and have used to support the conclusion that the text was an unstable or composite document as per the “documentary hypothesis”.

it becomes clear, in conclusion, that it is not hugely difficult to find an interpretation of that text which actually provides support for the *opposite* PoV – and that is ignoring the point i made above about the lying scribes being so inefficient as to leave the sentence about their guilt in the final text!

the final point i want to make here is really about logic. if the Torah has been changed/deleted/added, as suggested, it isn’t the Revelation any more, so you are respecting a changed/deleted/added text, not the Divine Word. one cannot have it both ways. either the Torah is as it was at Revelation/Sinai and one must respect it as the Divine Word, or it has been changed/deleted/added and is no longer the Divine Word that one must respect at the risk of committing shirk.

this doctrine represents an attack on jewish identity which cannot be tolerated. the suggestion is that we are in error and that our errors can only be rectified by embracing the “final revelation” and the “truth”. as readers of this blog will no doubt be aware that many cultures, not least christianity and islam, have our conversion a priority over the last few millennia, but we’re still here, just as we were thousands of years ago, the only surviving culture of the ancient world. you can say what you want about us, but it don’t make it true. this doctrine is underpinned by nothing but “because we say so” writ large. one remains of course at liberty to believe what one wishes – there is, as it says, “no compulsion in religion” – but if islam expects to coexist with the rest of the planet, this supercessionist triumphalism will have to go.

b’shalom

bananabrain

one of the things i like about the spittoon is that there is a more scholarly tone and more depth to the discussion here than a simple reflection on current events. i particularly like the idea that we don’t have to shy away from matters theological or stick to the politics. and, needless to say, i like talking to muslims about judaism and islam – and sticking it to the likes of HBT and the rest of the islamist peanut gallery, some of whom appear to have been ill-advised enough to show their inbred beardy little faces around thes parts.

i do like clarifying matters which are obscured by weasel words, in which extremists of all stripes display considerable expertise and i’d like to look at one of those in my first post, namely, the most intractable issue between islamists and jews. in my opinion at least, this is (perhaps surprisingly) not actually the middle east. it’s the way that judaism is misrepresented to muslims, specifically with regard to the idea of the “ahl-e-kitab” or “people of the book”. it all hinges on the oft-repeated idea which i have unfortunately heard repeated by many otherwise moderate muslims, that “the jews” possess a “corrupt” verion of the Torah and that, as a result, we have drifted away from the “original religion” of every prophet from adam to abraham – which was, of course, “islam”. that’s an assumption i will question in subsequent posts, but the interesting consequence, of course, is that it allows our friendly islamists to then go on to apply the Qur’anic verses that speak positively of the “ahl-e-kitab” and the jews selectively. and here’s the rub, in the words of the first islamist i was ever able to pin down on this issue:

If there was any Jew who followed the original Torah, he would have accepted Jesus [pbuh] as a Messenger and Muhammad [saw] too and thereby converted to a Muslim.

let me spell this one out for you, in case you missed it: any jews who didn’t accept jesus and then didn’t accept muhammad as a prophet are *by definition* “not following the original Torah”. working from this premise, therefore, one must necessarily conclude that it is logically impossible to be a jew unless one is, in fact, a muslim. logically, in fact, this also means there are no “real” jews left any more, because all the “real” jews are by definition muslims and all the “apparent” jews are therefore by definition a bunch of shirk-committing, idolatrous kuffar.

certainly these criteria apply to me: i do not accept that jesus was a) a jewish prophet or b) the messiah. nor do i accept muhammad’s prophecy as applicable to jews nor indeed as prophecy according to the halakhic (halakhah being jewish law) criteria. does that make me a kaafir? a more reasonable muslim once taught me a a subtlety of the words “islam” and “muslim” by pointing out the difference between “a conservative” and “a Conservative”; clearly, the latter is a card-carrying member of a specific group and the former merely holds certain values. clearly, if you define “muslim” this way, that makes me one. certainly i “submit to G!D”. not only that, i would agree that our patriarchs and prophets did the same. but if you mean they all anticipated the Qur’an and the sunnah and accepted the five pillars and so on, then i’m sorry, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without adducing this alleged “jewish distortion of the text”. presumably noah, who is an islamic prophet, was being islamic when he got drunk? or was that too a jewish “distortion”?

so where does this leave the ahl-e-kitab? clearly, according to the point of view we’re looking at, there’s not really any such thing since the arrival of “proper” islam with muhammad and that you’re either a muslim with a capital M (shahada and all) or you’re kuffar. needless to say, this is, as far as i am aware, in contradiction to what is maintained by many other moderate (i.e. non-takfiri) authorities. so, if i can say, as i do, “there is no G!D but G!D”, i can be a “muslim with a lowercase m” without continuing to say “and muhammad is the messenger of G!D” which would make me a “muslim with a capital M”. so who do all the positive statements about ahl-e-kitab in the Qur’an apply to, if there ceased to be “real jews” with its arrival?

the logical answer to this and, indeed, this is the route hardliners go down is this: the ahl-e-kitab are the people descended from those who once were jews and christians, but, obviously these are, as we’ve already seen, those who are also muslims with a capital M as well. so, actually, the only *real* ahl-e-kitab are actually muslims. since there are a very small group of identifiable people who count as this, effectively it becomes an category with no real members, which suits takfiris down to the ground, because they’re effectively seeking to condemn anyone who still calls themselves a jew or a christian. also, interestingly, it restricts the idea of judaism to an ethnic, “tribal” category – and we all know what sort of people like that sort of categorisation.

to sum up then, according to hardliners like this, anyone who calls themselves jewish nowadays (unless they are a muslim with jewish antecedents) is not of the ahl-e-kitab. for these people, the only good jew is a muslim!

was-salaam

bananabrain