Boris Havel. Journal of the Middle East & Africa. Volume 5, Issue 3, 2014.
This article follows the development of religious anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism within Arab Muslim society in the twentieth century. Using the method of historical examination, it starts from the view that Muslim religious antagonism toward the Jewish political enterprise in Palestine did not exist prior to World War I. Only after Haj Amin al-Husseini became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the early Islamic perception of Jews as religiously unfit for political rule introduced as a major issue in the Muslim-Jewish relations. This article expounds how the Mufti combined Islamic canonical anti-Judaism with Christian medieval folklore, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and European anti-Semitism. Thus was introduced the notion of the Jew despised and cursed by Allah, yet powerful enough to defy Allah’s will of making that curse evident through his political, social, and economic humiliation. The pamphlet Islam and Judaism published in 1943 for an unorthodox Bosnian Muslim community has been used to demonstrate the Mufti’s aberration from traditional Islamic views on Jews and the development of an eclectic anti-Judaism that today exists in many parts of the Muslim world.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that religion is one of the most important features of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is primarily noticeable within the Arab Muslim community. Arab attitudes to Israel are, of course, complex and should not be simplified and reduced to religion only. Israeli attitudes toward Arabs are even more multifaceted and impossible to narrow down to one aspect; different parts of Israeli society rest upon different political, ideological, and religious premises. Christian Arabs were historically active in their struggle against Zionists and later Israelis, but the religion of Christianity hardly played a crucial role in their activism. Christians who championed the Arab cause in Palestine, from George Antonius to George Habash and Edward Said, were mostly Arab nationalists and ideologues, who essentially disregarded any religion as irrelevant. Those famous Arab Christians were following or followed by countless other coreligionists. As Christians were in many parts of the Middle East a minority in a predominantly Islamic world, the common denominators, Arabism, and “anti-imperialism,” allowed them to merge into the majority of the population and—one may add, even without questioning their ideological, political, and nationalist sincerity—to at least temporarily avoid their centuries-long second-class citizen status.
However, European (mostly French) Christian anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism did influence Arab Christians of the Middle East. Modern persecution of Jews in the Middle East with religious undertones commenced in areas of the region with a strong Christian presence, notably Syria and Lebanon, in the first half of the 1800s. Some Christian anti-Jewish ideas, such as blood libel, were eventually adopted by some Arab Muslims, and the grotesque accusation at times still appears in TV shows and articles published in Syria, Egypt, Palestinian areas, and elsewhere in the Muslim world. In due course of time, however, many Arab Christians changed their view on Israel. The shift in their perception of the Jewish state became evident inter alia when Arab Christians from Nazareth started a movement and a political party called Bnei Brit HaHadasha (Children of the New Testament) whose program of full incorporation of Arab Christians into Israeli society includes even the recommendation that they serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Thus, when we speak of the contemporary role of religion and religious antagonism toward Jews and the Jewish state, we can assert that it almost exclusively rests in the Arab Islamic community. Radical Islamic groups unambiguously invoke religion as their prime reason for armed struggle with “the Zionists.” In my writing on the Arab-Israeli conflict I have often pointed to Ibn Ishak’s Sirat Rasul Allah and to the Charter of Hamas as specimen texts for anyone who aspires to understand the modern Middle East. Interestingly enough, what I found largely unknown to many of my European peers interested in Arab-Israeli relations and history was the role that early Islamic texts and tradition played in shaping the theoretical framework, ideological principles, political programs, and practical behavior of a significant part of the Middle Eastern Muslim community. At times it has astounded me how little even those intellectuals who are shaping the political future of Europe know about those texts. That a modern political group would sincerely invoke medieval concepts and make them a cornerstone of their politics, many in the West deem absurd and bizarre. It may indeed be absurd and bizarre, but the key issue is, Is it true? As the Charter of Hamas demonstrates, and many clerics, leaders, and members of Islamic groups tirelessly reaffirm, it often is. Many Western scholars, analysts, and activists often argue that, inasmuch as Muslims never persecuted Jews on religious grounds, as Christians did, contemporary Muslim animosity towards Jews is essentially political phenomenon which has been provoked by Zionism. This myth has been contested by authors such as Moshe Gil, Bernard Lewis, Moshe Sharon, Norrman Stillman, and Bat Ye’or, to name a few.
Nevertheless, as we focus our attention on the development of the early Yishuv, the Jewish communities in Palestine, and the first Arab-Zionist interactions, we will indeed find little outright religious Muslim antagonism toward Jewish settlement in their ancient homeland. At the turn of the twentieth century, Arab nationalism was taking shape, but it developed slowly, almost sluggishly, like most other creative processes under the dying Ottoman Empire. The beginning of World War I urged the more rapid development of this nationalism, and its growth became more vigorous and even brisk, mostly because of external factors. Probably the most important factor was increased British involvement in Middle Eastern affairs. The British solicited Arab support against the Turks, who were allies of Germany. They encouraged Arab nationalism as a counterweight to the Arab-Turkish common denominator of Islam. Caliph Mehmet V declared jihad against the Allies in 1914, just as the British had predicted and duly warded off by promising the ruler of Hejaz, Hussein ibn Ali (1854-1931), that they would grant independence to Arabs as soon as the Ottoman yoke was removed from Arab lands. Hussein forbade the call to jihad to be proclaimed in Mecca and Medina. For Hussein, who dreamed of a pan-Arab kingdom ruled by him, and for many other Arab Muslim political actors of the time, the vision of an independent Arab state proved far stronger than religious affiliation with their Ottoman coreligionists. The rise of the nationalist Young Turks and Atatürk added to the further marginalization of political religion throughout the Ottoman lands. Ottoman decline and Turkish nationalism provoked the growth of nationalist independence-seeking movements among other nations long ruled by the sultan. The empire soon disintegrated, and new nation-states emerged in its stead.
Many Britons who played important roles in the process of the rise of Arab nationalism, such as T. E. Lawrence, Arthur Balfour, Mark Sykes, and Winston Churchill, believed that Arab nationalists would recognize the advantages that the Jewish presence in Palestine offered to the development of their societies. Indeed, some Arab leaders, such as Hussein’s son Faisal ibn Hussein (1885-1933), welcomed Jewish immigration to Palestine. This is not to say that there were no conflicts between Arabs and the Jewish settlers. Changes in land ownership, particularly of the scarce arable soil, provoked local tensions and communal clashes. Still, most of those conflicts were comparable to conflicts elsewhere, where one ethnic group, tribe, or nation moves onto land adjoining that held by another, and they wrestle over territory, water, and other natural resources, as well as over employment, government, real estate, and the like. Conflict at this stage to a large degree rested upon what Raphael Israeli called “quantitable argument: measurable, negotiable and compromisable.” All that was apparently needed was fair settlement of tangible issues. Even if irrational and religious considerations cannot be dismissed altogether, they can be dismissed as decisive at this stage. Islamic attitudes toward Jews as religiously unfit for ownership of the Palestinian land did not exist as an articulated and mobilizing political force.
Even during the years after the Ottomans lost possession of Syria and Palestine, this trend continued. From today’s perspective, it seems as if a religious “vacuum” interrupted the sequence of events, a period devoid of the expected Islamic faith-based perception of non-Muslims in their midst. Kedourie used remarkable wording to describe Islam after World War I, a time in which the main Arab identity was Arabism. He called this religion “Islam without dogmas.” As Arab nationalist sentiment grew, it clashed not with Judaism, but with Jewish nationalism. An immediate cause behind the increasing tension between Arab and Jewish communities was the appearance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which reached Palestine by 1918. Indeed, it is only logical that such an aggressive Jewish political, economic, and ideological program as the Protocols outlined, if perceived as genuine, would make an Arab nationalist concerned.
While “Islam without dogmas” was the main framework within which Arab nationalist politics and ideologies were forged and formed, there was another stream of thought present in many Arab societies beneath the dominant ideology of nationalism, dormant but waking up, still hard to grasp or even to name. Like a giant slowly emerging out from under Arabian sand, long-buried Islamic notions began to reappear. Peel’s Report points out that Arab-Zionist “nationalist” conflict generated the antagonism of Arabs toward Jews in places where no plans for a Jewish national home existed, such as Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. “Quite obviously, then, the problem of Palestine is political,” the authors of the report confidently stated. The statement, however, is somewhat contradictory: Why would the Jews of Iraq be attacked over a political issue in another and distant land? It seems that the British were carefully circumventing the idea that by 1937 must have been apparent to the British intelligence, the same smart men who in 1914 understood well where the danger lay when British interests were at stake. To perceive back then that the old notion of jihad could reappear in the Muslim world was a sign of impressive analytical skill. Yet, in 1937, the Royal Commission casually concluded that “it is difficult to be an Arab patriot and not to hate Jews.” Linking patriotism with hatred of the Jews would demand more explanation than the Peel Report’s authors provide, since the same political powers just a few decades prior had assumed that patriotism (a term that was apparently used as synonymous with nationalism) would move Arabs to understand the benefits of the Jewish presence in their midst.
It would take years before political analysts (as opposed to members of the intelligence services) would start to distinguish patriotism from Islamism. Twenty years after the publication of Peel’s Report, the general perception of the course of affairs in the Middle East had not changed much. Even so, there were those who thought otherwise, such as S. D. Goitein and John Badeau. In an article published in 1959, Badeau pointed out that many analysts of the Middle East believed that modern ideas of nationalism had replaced the Islamic religion for good, and he warned against such a perception: “It is therefore understandable that many observers predict the rapid decay of Islamic influence in the Middle East. Yet, though the evidence of the practical impotency of traditional religion in many current affairs is unmistakable, this conclusion is unwarranted—at least as a generalization.” And indeed, by the early 1920s, a process of change of the nature of the Arab-Jewish conflict and of the forthcoming wider development in the Arab Middle East had begun to unfold. For how long and in which way the process advanced is not quite apparent; contemporary sources about the development of the Arab society in Palestine are limited and often unreliable. The eruption to the surface of religious hostility, however, was well recorded. On April 4, 1920, three holidays overlapped: the Jewish Passover, the Christian Easter, and the Muslim Nabi Musa. Arab rioters took to the streets and attacked the Jews of Jerusalem. The crowd shouted, “Muhammad’s religion was born with the sword!” Christian Arabs took part in the riots too. They displayed a sign on which was written, “Shall we give back the country to a people who crucified our Lord Jesus?” All the while the mob chanted, “Nashrab dam al-Yahud” and “Itbah al-Yahud.”
One of the leaders of the Arab mob, and probably a main inciter of the violence, even though there are some conflicting reports about his part in the events, was a young member of the prominent Jerusalem Arab al-Husseini family, Muhammad Amin. After the riots, he fled and was sentenced in absentia to ten years of prison by the British court martial but was soon pardoned by Sir Herbert Samuel, the newly appointed High Commissioner for Palestine. Liberal, well meaning, and—as history proved—lethally naïve, Samuel honored al-Husseini with the ad hoc title of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Amidst the political processes in the Middle East thus was introduced “the most influential Palestinian Arab leader of the twentieth century” and the “driving force behind [the] deterioration [of the political situation in Palestine and Arab-Jewish relations].”
Haj Amin’s Theological Anti-Judaism in Context
There is hardly a book on the history of modern Palestine in which the name of Muhammad Haj Amin al-Husseini (1893-1974) does not appear. He is usually described as a zealous anti-Zionist who opposed any compromise with the Jews and fought their presence in Palestine by all means. Some historians have noticed the peculiarity of a cleric leading a nationalist movement, which was an “unusual phenomenon in the third world.” One of the methods he adopted was collaboration with the Nazis as soon as they appeared on the scene of history. Al-Husseini helped the Germans restore the pro-Nazi former prime minister of Iraq Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in April 1941. The success of that project was fleeting, and by June, al-Gaylani had been deposed again and forced into exile. Husseini fled too, first to Italy and then to Germany. In Berlin, he befriended Himmler, associated with Hitler, and spent the war aiding the cause of Nazism. Those and other details from his career are not unknown to historians. However, there are still unresearched details of relevance for a better understanding of his role in the Holocaust. The German authors Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers have pointed out that until 2005, when their book Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina [Crescent Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs, and Palestine] was first published, there had not been any “comprehensive and scientific study” of Arab-German relations from the rise of Nazism in 1933 until its defeat twelve years later. One scholarly study of Haj Amin’s activities on behalf of the Nazis was done by a Jewish historian from the former Yugoslavia, Ženi Lebl. Lebl examined archives and primary sources previously not researched and published her findings in 2002 in the Serbian language. There are other historical books and articles written on the same topic that are, like Lebl’s book, rather unknown to the wider public, partly because they were written in the Croatian or the Serbian language. The particular interest about al-Husseini among historians from the former Yugoslavia is related to the fact that he organized Waffen-SS units in the provinces of Bosnia and Kosovo, the most notorious of which was the SS Handžar Division. This division’s somewhat atypical and intriguing history has emerged as an object of interest in the context of the breakup of Yugoslavia; the subsequent wars among Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims; and the polemics regarding events related to World War II. Historical research undertaken for the purpose of furthering such polemics have more often than not been charged with strong ideological and nationalist sentiment and should be approached with much caution. Furthermore, al-Husseini also played a role as a Nazi agitator in other contexts. Thus, during Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Dieter Wisliceny testified that the two were close friends and alleged that Husseini was the “initiator” of the Nazi policy of extermination of European Jews.
Even though al-Husseini’s activism has been an almost-indispensable part of historical studies of the Arab-Zionist conflict in Palestine and is increasingly becoming an object of attention in studies of the Arab role in World War II, there is one particular feature of his career that has passed rather unnoticed in most of those studies, namely, al-Husseini seems to have been the very first prominent Arab leader and cleric who based his anti-Jewish incitement not on Arab nationalism, political activism, or anti-imperialist ideology, but on the religion of Islam according to its earliest texts. That is not to say that he disregarded all those other arguments in his agitation against Jews. Quite on the contrary; he allegedly memorized the whole text of the Protocols. He also stressed that Arabs should aid the German cause because Germany had never been a colonial power in the Arab Middle East and was now at war with the imperialist Britain and France. In various speeches and writings, the Mufti combined the Protocol-ish, anti-imperialist, ideological, economic, pragmatic, political, and religious arguments, depending on the audience. However, the Mufti’s references to Islamic canonical texts and their historical portrayal of the Jews as the prime reason why contemporary Muslims should confront Jews constitute the defining moment of the shift in the Arab Muslim view of the conflict over Palestine from primarily quantitative to primarily qualitative.
The Mufti expounded his thought in essays, some of which have been translated by Zvi Elpeleg. Elpeleg focused on those political writings of the Mufti that primarily explored British colonialism as a vehicle of Zionism, the reasons for Arab defeat in the wars over Palestine, and his own role in those events. It is evident that the target readers were Arabs. Even though religion was not the main theme, the Mufti referred to religious texts to provide additional explanation for Jewish political activities. Thus he wrote that the Jews “have no mercy and they are known for their malice, their rivalry, and their great rigidity, as they are described by Allah in the Quran.” The Mufti presented a more systematic expression of his religious thought on the topic to Muslims who neither had a particular political interest in Palestine nor had developed anticolonialist resentment against Britain or France. Bosnian Muslims constituted just such an audience. The religious Muslim attitude toward non-Muslims in Bosnia since it was first conquered by the Turks in 1463 has never been the subject of a comprehensive scholarly examination. However, aspects of Muslim-Jewish relations relevant to understanding the Mufti’s pamphlet Islam and Judaism are fairly well known.
Bosnia and Its Jews: An Overview
As a land where civilizations meet—or collide—Bosnia was, and still is, in many aspects unique. Since the late fifteenth century its borders have separated Muslim and Christian territory. Croatia’s long border with Bosnia was for centuries the front line of European defense against Turkish incursions, whereupon Croatia was called antemurale christianitatis. A land of turmoil deep within Europe, Bosnia has also been a place whose state of affairs must be interpreted cautiously, with awareness that its development profoundly influenced the rest of the Old Continent more than most Europeans would want to acknowledge. Antagonisms that had accumulated in Bosnia during the more than four centuries of Ottoman rule and the subsequent decades of Austrian occupation reached their peak when a Bosnian Serb terrorist assassinated Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, an event that led to World War I. Soon after, in 1918, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia) was founded, and the main antagonists emerged—non-Muslims, notably Croats and Serbs, a development that to a degree explains the somewhat faded interest in the Muslim treatment of their dhimmis [Jewish and Christian citizens of an Islamic state] during the Ottoman era, particularly among Croats. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the past and present relations between the country’s Muslims and non-Muslims were cautiously styled by historians. The way these relations were presented in the most recent decades would easily lead one to believe that they were rather harmonious, were it not for the old Christian folk poems, legends, and novels, primarily of Serbian origin, that have been studied at schools and are commonly known to Bosnians of all nationalities. Of course, there are also sources written by contemporary chroniclers, available in archives and elsewhere, but they are mostly studied by professional historians only. And yet, at least one facet of Bosnian history seems to be fairly depicted in modern sources, notwithstanding its political correctness: the relations between Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Jewish population during their known common history.
A history of the Jews of Bosnia from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century was composed by the Bosnian Jewish historian Dr. Moritz Levy and published in 1911 in Sarajevo as Die Sephardim in Bosnien [The Sephardim in Bosnia]. These Jews were mostly of Sephardic origin, descendants of the Jews who settled the Ottoman lands after their expulsion from Spain. By 1565, there was a small Jewish community in Sarajevo. Not much is known about Jewish history in Bosnia until the early eighteenth century. The conditions under which they lived in Bosnia varied; undeniably, at times they were victims of Muslim abuse, as were other dhimmis. Levy explains that as the sultan’s favor toward the Jews declined, they were exposed to “various forms of violence” by the local pashas. More often than they encountered physical abuse were they objects of extortion. In 1819, Rushdi-Pasha threatened to kill ten prominent Jews of Sarajevo, including the rabbi, unless the community paid an enormous amount of money that it could not collect. However, on the Friday on which the Jews should have been executed, some 3,000 local Muslims took up arms, attacked the pasha’s compound, and liberated the Jews from the prison. In 1834, Wejhi-Pasha penalized the Jews for various offenses, extorting large amounts of money from the community. In both cases, local Muslims complained to the High Porte on behalf of the Jews, and both pashas were dismissed from their offices. Levy opens Chapter 9 of his history with the remark that “it is hard to say a positive statement about the civic and judicial situation of Jews in Bosnia i.e. in Turkey. There was no law to protect [the] rights of non-Muslims.” He proceeds to explain that the state’s legislation was limited to the sharia law. But in 1840, Sultan Abdul Mejid issued a decree that upheld Jewish autonomy in religious and judicial affairs, granted them more rights, and forbade Muslims to “persuade or force a Jew to convert to Islam.” It seems that from that time on, Jews increasingly enjoyed protection from the capriciousness of the local authorities. As the Ottoman Empire declined, the most significant animosity developed between the Muslims and those who challenged their rule, which were the Christians, mostly the Orthodox Serbs. During the Muslim-Christian wars of the 1870s, which ended the Ottoman rule and introduced the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bosnian Jews were not threatened by Muslims or other conflicting groups.
Other sources consulted for the purpose of this study include chronicles written by Bosnian Franciscans during the Ottoman rule and kept in the monasteries of Kraljeva Sutjeska, Kreševo, and Fojnica in Central Bosnia. Those chronicles were not intended for publication and wider dissemination but for “internal use,” and therefore present reliable accounts of events, written without fear of repressive governmental censorship. The chronicles contain numerous descriptions of Muslim ill treatment of the rayah, or the Bosnian Christian population. Muslim abuse of Bosnian Jews, however, is a rare topic in these chronicles. One of the chroniclers, the Franciscan Bono Benić (1708-1785) wrote a history of Bosnia from the year of the Turkish conquest until February 1785, a month before he died. Benić served as the superior of all three monasteries and was a leading figure of the Central Bosnian Croatian Catholic community. He had access to sources, knowledge of the events, and the skills of a historian. Thus, in his chronicles he at times referred to documents written by Turkish authorities, which adds to the historiographical value of his text. In his work Chronicles of the Sutjeska Monastery, Benić recorded several events connected to Jews. Thus, he noted how on April 26, 1747, the synagogue in Sarajevo burned down. There is no indication in the text that the burning of the synagogue was an act of arson. Jews were mentioned in several other places, such as in the story of a Franciscan who converted to Islam whom the author alleged to be a crypto-Jew. There is only one place in Benić’s chronicle in which Turkish violence against Jews is recorded. In 1751, Turks in Sarajevo hanged a Jew, but the reason was that he had uttered blasphemy cursing a Christian, probably an Orthodox Serb (Vlah).
Somewhat more references to Jews under Turkish rule can be found in the doctoral thesis of the Bosnian Croatian author and Nobel Prize laureate Ivo Andrić, Die Entwicklung des geistigen Lebens in Bosnien unter der Einwirkung der türkischen Herrschaft [The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the influence of Turkish Rule]. Before examining Christian and Jewish conditions under Muslim rule, Andrić quotes twenty-four points of the Pact of Omar, with the remark that those were applied in Turkish provinces in “somewhat changed and milder form.” Regarding the Jews, Andrić wrote that Jewish men and women were forbidden to wear certain clothes reserved for the ruling (Muslim) class; when they broke these rules—and they did so often—they were fined. In 1602, during the brutal rule of Dželali Hasan-Pasha, “all merchants, mostly Jews, fled to neighboring countries.” In 1794, the Jews of Sarajevo obtained an imperial edict to rebuild their burned synagogue. Andrić also wrote that Jews were subject to “blackmail” and at times exposed to violence by the pashas, and that they could rescue themselves from all their troubles by paying off Turkish officials. The Turks were prone to bribery, which was a “vice of their race” (“Rassenlaster”). Andrić’s history is generally focused on the abuse of the Christian population at the hands of the Turks, and the Jews are mentioned en passant, which again suggests that they were not singled out for ill treatment by Muslims. As Andrić researched both Bosnian Jewish chronicles and the works of historians (he quotes Levy on numerous occasions), it is with much certainty that we can conclude that he found no examples of particular Muslim animosity toward or abuse of Jews, because he would not shun to record them. The situation in which the Jewish community in Bosnia lived prior to the Holocaust has been summarized by Esther Gitman as follows: “Although the Jews of Sarajevo, with a shared memory of four centuries, had known some discrimination, they had never encountered life-threatening situations.” With much certainty it can be established that Bosnian Muslims, during their common history with the Jews, never adopted animosity toward Jews as a major political, social or religious theme.
The Bosnian Muslim Attitude Toward Jews, 1941-1945
During the 1930s and early 1940s, some 14,000 Jews associated with twenty-four Jewish communities lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Some anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish texts were published in the Muslim papers of the time, but Jews and Zionism were by no means a major concern of Bosnian Muslims. What is more, those texts were often translations of foreign authors’ articles. A newspaper called Islamski svijet (Islamic World) published an article titled “Activities of Zionism in the Century of Injustice” written by Ihsan bey El Džabiri and translated by Hidajet Kulenović. In the same paper, several months later, there was an article titled “Events in Palestine,” taken from a Croatian journal, and without the author’s name. Both articles’ main themes were criticism of British imperialism during the Wauchope’s mandate in Palestine and criticism of political Zionism. Muslim-Jewish animosity was related to the conflict over Palestine, with the explanation that such animosity did not exist before in the history of the two peoples. In 1941, the Bosnian Muslim paper Muslimanska svijest (Muslim Awareness) published in four issues translated portions of a biography of Muhammad in which the main theme was the Prophet’s conflict with the Jews. This text depicted Jews as religious enemies of Islam, using perhaps the harshest language to be seen in a Bosnian publication of the time, comparable only with the Mufti’s pamphlet Islam and Judaism. It may have moved some Bosnian Muslims to active participation in the ongoing persecution of the Jews within the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), but the message of Muslim-Jewish religious animosity attracted no wide attention. The beginning of the war brought political radicalization among most ethnic and ideological groups of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Muslims included. Individual Jews of Sarajevo were accused by Muslims of being subversive, accusations that the Jewish community denied, calling upon accusers to bring forward evidence. Since many Jews were prior to the war politically affiliated with the Serbs, they were now targeted by both Muslims and Croats. A consequence of Muslim sympathies toward Nazism was increased violence against Jews from early 1941 onwards. When German troops entered Sarajevo in April 1941, they were welcomed as liberators by a jolly Muslim crowd. The mob then plundered the synagogue, which had been damaged by bombardment, and even some Jewish stores. An observer noted that “Jews feared Muslims more than Germans.” Croatian troops from Zagreb entered Sarajevo some ten days after the Germans. Within two years most of the Jews of Sarajevo and Bosnia had perished or been sent to concentration camps. The Muslims took part in their persecution, as they did in their rescue. The vast majority of Jews fell victim to the Nazi policy of extermination perpetrated by Croat and Muslim supporters of Nazism, and not to Muslim religious hatred.
In 1943, when the Waffen-SS Handžar Division was formed, many if not most Bosnian Muslims who joined it did so for two main reasons: to fulfill the Muslim ambition to bring Bosnia under direct German rule and for the purpose of an organized defense against the Serbs. Serbian units, mostly Četniks, committed massacres of the Muslim population in Bosnia, particularly in its eastern territories bordering Serbia. Some massacres were committed only weeks before the Mufti arrived in Sarajevo. He found a Muslim religious community ready for enlistment but largely indifferent toward his main objective—destruction of the Jews. How disinterested Bosnian Muslims were regarding the issue of Jews was apparent from the official paper of the Handžar Division, which features very few anti-Semitic texts in its first eight issues. It seems that even enlistment of some of their coreligionists to the notorious Waffen-SS was not enough for anti-Semitism to attract Bosnian Muslims’ wider attention. Only after the Mufti delivered sermons in Bosnia in which he claimed that Jews were according to the Quran the greatest enemies of the Muslims did anti-Semitic texts appear in issues nine through eleven. Anti-Zionist texts also appeared in other Bosnian papers not related to the Islamic community, such as Sarajevski novi list (Sarajevo New Paper), in which Jews were accused of bringing injustice and terror to Palestine. In January 1945, in the same paper, the Zionists were accused of harboring the ambition not only to conquer Palestine, but also to achieve dominance “over all lands and all people.” In a somewhat confused statement, Zionism was defined as a political enterprise and its Jewish character was slightly neutralized, as if to say that not all Jews were Zionists. Zuckerman argues in his doctoral research that anti-Semitic propaganda in the NDH and in Serbia was “very similar,” with the main themes in both lands being race, the economy, politics, and ideology. Religion appears to be a rather rare theme. Zuckerman only briefly addresses the impact of the anti-Semitic propaganda on the religious feelings of non-Jews. Those non-Jews were apparently Croatian Catholics and Serbian Orthodox Christians, and the method of their incitement was the fabrication of Talmudic messages. Islam and Muslims are not even mentioned.
Zuckerman’s study indicates the absence of any significant Islamic anti-Jewish propaganda in Nazi-ruled Bosnia-Herzegovina. While the Mufti was highly esteemed by the Bosnian Muslims, the main reason for this esteem was the perception of him as an advocate of Bosnian-Muslim interests in Berlin, not his theological interpretation of Muslim-Jewish relations. The Bosnian Muslim historian Zija Sulejmanpašić asserts that Bosnian Muslims interpreted the Mufti’s anti-Jewish religious incitement as “nothing but ceremonial protocol phrases.” When the Mufti spoke about “World Jewry,” they believed that he actually meant the Zionists. This explanation is fairly acceptable. For the Mufti, there was an obvious reason to expound to the Bosnian Muslims why they should engage in a religious battle with the Jews, and not only in a political, economic, and ideological struggle with Zionism and imperialism. That Muslims were the prime target audience of his pamphlet Islam and Judaism is apparent from its content: the episodes from early Islamic history are retold as if to someone who has never heard them but who should be deeply concerned upon hearing them. The Mufti’s pamphlet made little difference, if for no other reason than that by the time the Handžar Division was established, most Bosnian Jews had already been killed or sent to concentration camps.
Conclusion: The Mufti’s Guide to a Perplexed Community
Kedourie’s “Islam without dogmas,” which existed in the Arab world for only a brief period of time, has long been the normal state of affairs among Bosnian Muslims, particularly regarding the dogmas relevant to this study, i.e., Islamic canonical perceptions of Jews. This was the prime obstacle to the Mufti’s religious incitement of Bosnian Muslims. As Hale observed:
Although Bosnian Muslims and Haj Amin el-Husseini had the faith of Islam in common, their political worlds did not overlap until the middle of the Second World War. If they looked outside their own homeland, the majority of Bosnian Muslims followed events in neutral Turkey but had little interest in the broader Islamic movement or noticed the protests of Palestinian Arabs against Jewish immigration. These matters naturally obsessed Haj Amin el-Husseini, however, and led him in due course to seek an alliance with the anti-Semitic German Reich.
The Mufti never really succeeded in Bosnia; not long after the Handžar Division was dismantled, Nazism was defeated and the war came to an end. Some soldiers of the Handžar Division moved to the Middle East for fear of returning to Communist-ruled Yugoslavia and later joined Arab armies in the war of 1948. In Bosnia, Muslims and Jews resumed their prewar relations. Anti-Zionism was an official position during most years of Tito’s Communist regime, but the Arab-Israeli conflict has never been an important issue in the Bosnian Muslim community. There have been some exceptions, such as Husein Efendi Đozo’s call for jihad against the Jews at the World Congress of ulemas in Cairo in 1968. The fact that one of the most prominent Israeli generals and the ninth Chief of Staff of the IDF, David Elazar (1925-1976), was born and raised in Sarajevo has never been discussed as an important topic; it certainly did not jeopardize the Bosnian Jewish community in any way. The Mufti’s pamphlet faded from memory. A few copies were buried in the archives. Muslim involvement in SS divisions was largely perceived as an embarrassment, and the point that the Handžar Division was the only SS unit to attempt to mutiny has been proudly emphasized. A primary school in the eastern Bosnian Muslim town of Goražde was recently named after Husein Efendi Đozo. Complaints by parents (most of whom were Muslims) and others were published in Bosnian papers, but the main body of the Muslim community in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Rijaset) has not condemned or justified the deed. Indeed, it is hard to find an instance in the post-1945 Bosnia-Herzegovina when a Jew has been mistreated by a Muslim because of his or her religion.
In the Arab Muslim world, however, the Mufti’s thought did take root. The canonical picture of the Jews has been retrieved from the medieval literature and tradition and made relevant in modernity. What is more, this picture has been modified in accordance with the pattern set by the Mufti. In the discourse he sought to impose on the Muslim community, the canonical Jew, vicious and mean but defeated by Allah and his Prophet, was transformed into a menace whose defeat demanded the rallying of the whole ummah. The medieval Christian perception of the Jew as a host for “cosmic evil” who was capable of hurting God, God’s messengers, and whole societies, entered into a tradition to which it never belonged. Whether the eclecticism of such a portrayal of the Jews and its incompatibility with the Islamic canon went unnoticed by the Mufti or was introduced by him on purpose to serve an immediate political cause, even at the expense of the religious tradition, makes no difference. Clerics who succeeded him would have probably objected, were it not for the stunning Israeli military successes particularly in the 1948/49 war of Independence, and 1967 Six Day War and the humiliating return of a part of dar al-islam (the Abode of Islam) back into dar al-harb (the Abode of War). Being “a society of unusually keen historical awareness,” the Muslim world seems to have allowed history to reinterpret parts of its canon. This would not be the first time in the religion’s complete history, but it would be the first time in its modern history that a major change has been introduced. The concept of an-nasikh wal-mansukh permits the introduction of new ideas that run opposite to the older ones, which when applied to the case of redefining Jewish menace would constitute a precedent inasmuch as the concept itself is primarily perceived as applicable only to the revelational era of Islam. Furthermore, scholars have noted that early Islamic history was not only interpreted, but often also forged to fulfill political need; as Moshe Sharon explained, “in most cases, the tradition represents the history not as it was, but rather as it should have been according to the motives and needs of whoever compiled the tradition.” Both of these phenomena, even though their origin was medieval, are basically political and pragmatic, and since Islam has no strict doctrines in the Christian meaning of the word, there is no reason why they should not reappear again in history, if circumstances demand it. The creation of the Jewish state is one of the greatest challenges that Islam has ever faced, and a response congruous with that made to the challenges that the Islamic community encountered in its early history should not be too surprising. Ironically, the most despised of its perceived adversaries prompted one of the most radical theological changes in the development of Islamic religious and political thought known to us. The alleged Jewish accomplishments listed in Article 22 of the Charter of Hamas are so impressive that it is hard to imagine any of the classic Islamic thinkers attributing even a portion of them to Jews, let alone the ability to “wipe out the Islamic Caliphate,” which the Jews were accused of attempting to do by starting World War I. The heterogeneous mixture of Islamic canonical understanding and Christian medieval mythology is perhaps best embodied by the charter’s Article 28, which states that “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.” This interpretation also epitomizes the core problem: Jews were not defeated by the early Muslim community because they were weak and the Muslims strong. To the contrary, even when the proportion of strength was to the advantage of the Jews and their polytheistic allies, Allah defeated them to expose their theological and religious flaws. On the other hand, the military success of the early Islamic community, from the Prophet’s hijra (flight from Mecca to Medina) through the Rashidun era (the time of the first four caliphs, 632-661), served as probably the most persuasive argument of the theological truth of Islam. What has changed? The theological premises of Islam and Judaism most certainly have not. So why would Allah deliver his community into the hands of its foulest adversary? The perplexed Muslim community demanded answers.
Within the course of a century, “Islam without dogmas” was challenged, confused, diluted, defied, and then reawakened to the call to restore its former glory by going back to its roots and its long-neglected dogmas. In the process of reviving the canonical view of the Jews, Islam has been penetrated by some “dogmas without Islam.” The merging of these two phenomena resulted in an eclectic political and religious ideology that probably poses the greatest menace to Israel in the foreseeable future. Haj Amin al-Husseini might not have been the most important protagonist of that complex, intricate, and lengthy process, but he heralded it. The question that yet remains to be answered is, Did he also initiate it? His pamphlet Islam and Judaism points toward an affirmative answer to that intriguing question.