A Letter to the Jewish People from a Muslim

We do not wish you harm.

And when Muslims fail that standard, they fail Islam before they fail you.

The Holocaust was not created by Islam.

Despite what your supposed “leaders” may tell you – Hitler, Goring , Himmler, Eichmann and Goebbels did not quote from the Quran or Hadith. 

The machinery of Auschwitz, the racial laws, the gas chambers and the Zyklon B were products of Nazi Germany and its collaborators. The Holocaust was the systematic murder of six million Jews by a European racial state.

That history should never be blurred.

One of Judaism’s greatest minds, Moses Maimonides, lived much of his adult life in the Muslim world and became a physician in Egypt under the Ayyubid Governorate associated with Saladin (Salahuddin Al Ayubi). Jewish intellectual life did not merely survive there; at important moments it participated in the scientific and philosophical culture of Islamic civilisation. What would Judaism be today without the contributions of Rambam? 

That does not mean Muslim-Jewish history was paradise.

It was not. Human life rarely is ever.

But neither should anyone erase the other history.

When Nazi persecution reached Muslim-majority Albania, Muslim families hid Jewish neighbours and refugees, fed them, sheltered them and accepted mortal danger for doing so. Yad Vashem records that Albania protected both its own Jews and Jewish refugees; remarkably, more Jews were inside Albania after the war than before it.

Families such as the Veselis did not ask whether the frightened person knocking on the door was politically useful.

They opened the door.

That is part of our history too.

Between Tefillin and the Kaaba

A Jew wraps tefillin around his arm and remembers God.

A Muslim circles the Kaaba declaring that there is no god except God.

The theological claims differ profoundly.

Shirk and Shituf we reject categorically.

But both traditions understand something modern politics repeatedly forgets:

Power does not determine truth.

I am going to give a slightly cartoonish example to drive the point home. 

Imagine going to a doctor because you are seriously ill. Instead of examining you, running tests, identifying the cause and prescribing treatment, the doctor stares out of the window and says: “Look at those pigeons. They are the problem. If we get rid of them, you will get better.”

It would sound absurd.

The same applies to politics.

If a country has failing schools, overcrowded hospitals, weak productivity, unaffordable housing, poor transport, slow courts or stagnant wages, the serious questions are structural:

How is the system funded?

Where is capacity failing?

What incentives are broken?

What has happened to productivity?

Where is money being wasted?

Which institutions are badly designed?

What evidence shows the proposed remedy will actually improve the problem?

Simply identifying an unpopular minority, immigrant population, religious group or external enemy does not answer any of those questions.

How, exactly, does removing the “pigeons” train more doctors?

How does it build hospitals?

How does it recruit teachers?

How does it increase productivity?

How does it repair railways?

How does it reduce court backlogs?

How does it grow the economy?

If those causal steps cannot be demonstrated, the diagnosis is probably political theatre.

This is how scapegoating works. A complicated institutional failure is converted into a simple human enemy. The public is given a target instead of an explanation.

I am also making a point here which may be slightly controversial – apart from Gordon Brown in the UK, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Angela Merkel in Germany and Manmohan Singh in India, I........

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