Post
by Mesob » 11 Nov 2023, 19:53
Iraqi TV host: “After 1,400 years of cursing the Jews and the Christians, Muslims are the ones left with no unity”
AUG 3, 2019
Most Muslim (and non-Muslim) spokesmen in the U.S. would indignantly deny that Muslims have been cursing Jews and Christians in their prayers for 1,400 years, but what Mahdi Jassem says here is true. The final two verses of the Fatiha, the first sura of the Qur’an and the most common prayer in Islam, ask Allah:
Guide us to the straight path, the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked [Your] anger or of those who are astray.
The traditional Islamic understanding of this is that the “straight path” is Islam — cf. Islamic apologist John Esposito’s book Islam: The Straight Path — while the path “of those who have evoked Allah’s anger” are the Jews, and those who have gone “astray” are the Christians.
The classic Qur’anic commentator Ibn Kathir explains that “the two paths He described here are both misguided,” and that those “two paths are the paths of the Christians and Jews, a fact that the believer should beware of so that he avoids them. The path of the believers is knowledge of the truth and abiding by it. In comparison, the Jews abandoned practicing the religion, while the Christians lost the true knowledge. This is why ‘anger’ descended upon the Jews, while being described as ‘led astray’ is more appropriate of the Christians.”
Ibn Kathir’s understanding of this passage is not a lone “extremist” interpretation. In fact, most Muslim commentators believe that the Jews are those who have earned Allah’s wrath and the Christians are those who have gone astray.
This is the view of Tabari, Zamakhshari, the Tafsir al-Jalalayn, the Tanwir al-Miqbas min Tafsir Ibn Abbas, and Ibn Arabi, as well as Ibn Kathir. One contrasting, but not majority view, is that of Nisaburi, who says that “those who have incurred Allah’s wrath are the people of negligence, and those who have gone astray are the people of immoderation.”
Wahhabis drew criticism a few years back for adding “such as the Jews” and “such as the Christians” into parenthetical glosses on this passage in Qur’ans printed in Saudi Arabia.
Some Western commentators imagined that the Saudis originated this interpretation, and indeed the whole idea of Qur’anic hostility toward Jews and Christians. They found it inconceivable that Muslims all over the world would learn as a matter of course that the central prayer of their faith anathematizes Jews and Christians.
But unfortunately, this interpretation is venerable and mainstream in Islamic theology. The printing of the interpretation in parenthetical glosses into a translation would be unlikely to affect Muslim attitudes, since the Arabic text is always and everywhere normative in any case, and since so many mainstream commentaries contain the idea that the Jews and Christians are being criticized here.
Seventeen times a day, by the pious.
“Iraqi TV Host Mahdi Jassem Reads Text by Syrian Poet: For 1,400 years We Have Been cursing the Jews and Christians, But We Are the Ones Left Without Unity,” MEMRI, August 21 [sic], 2019:
In a July 21, 2019 show on ANB TV (Iraq), Iraqi TV host Mahdi Jassem read a text from the late Syrian poet Muhammad Al-Maghut. The text was highly critical of Islam and Islamic scholars, and it questioned why Muslims are still expected to behave in the exact same way the progenitors of Islam behaved 1,400 years ago. Jassem read: “After 1,400 years of cursing the Jews and the Christians, [Muslims] are the ones left with no unity [and] it is only Muslim women who have been enslaved… Oh nation in slumber, the people you curse [have gone to] the Moon [and] split the atom… Meanwhile, for you, the only thing on the rise is your genitalia.” The text continued to criticize Muslims for studying outlandish things such as sexual Jihad, incest, breastfeeding of grown men, having “farewell sex” with one’s deceased wife, and how to properly have sex with animals. The text went on: “Don’t our minds have the right to be influenced by the knowledge, science, and technology that surround us? Must our minds be held captive after 1,400 years?”