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The Mutual Enrichment of Judaism and Islam : the Testimony of History

Published on 2007-12-27 17:35:15

It is often thought that Jews and Moslems knew a perpetual antagonism. One could be tempted to assimilate the history of these two cultures and religions to the situation we know today in Israel-Palestine or elsewhere.

However, there are a lot of common points. Within the framework of the First World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace, the Elijah Interfaith Institute of Jerusalem, drew up us a short panorama of the mutual enrichment of Islam and Judaism during centuries. This week we will be interested more particularly in the historical shutter.

 

Contextual Preamble:

It is commonly perceived that Judaism and Islam are caught in hopeless, violent conflict. This perception is damaging to both religions and to their faithful, as well as to the role each religion should play in the world. Moreover, it is patently belied by the testimony of a rich history of mutual contact, enrichment and interdependence. This heritage is often lost sight of and its memory seems to have been all but eradicated. As a consequence, Muslims and Jews often lose sight of each others’ religious values and spiritual wealth. Loss of visibility leads to loss of validity and then to loss of dignity and respect, at times resulting in hate, enmity and violence. The purpose of the present congress of Imams and Rabbis is to recall this rich tradition, to counteract historical forces that have led to false perception of and between these two religions and to evoke the well-springs of a shared Judeo-Muslim
heritage as a resource for peace between our religious communities and a moral inspiration to humanity.

The profound historical relationship that existed between Judaism and Islam has been obscured by the political conflicts of the past century that have overshadowed the mutual perceptions of Judaism and Islam. There was indeed a instrumentalisation of the religious symbols in this conflict. During this time, the tension between Israel and its Arab neighbours, especially the Palestinians, has often been presented as conflict between two religions and as a result has had a negative impact on the relationship between them. Turmoil in the Middle East has thus drawn the religions themselves into a measure of conflict. National and political strife has been fired by religion, which has been cited and in some cases reshaped as support and justification for the conflict. It is crucial to halt this process and to disengage the image of the religions and their historical and theological relationship from the realm of politics and national discord and to redefine another relation of the religions to their texts.

The mutual understandings of Islam and Judaism and the perception of conflict between them are no longer a matter for only these two religions. To a significant degree they have become issues of global concern. Jews and Muslims live side by side not only in the Middle East but in many metropolitan centers. Relations between the two communities are often overshadowed by the utilisation of the specter of the Middle East, occasionally extending violence well beyond the confines of the Middle East. This situation is thus a significant concern for common life in most parts of the Western world.

In order to stem the tide of enmity and violence seeping into the faith traditions themselves and thereby advance the goals of peace, coexistence and understanding, it is imperative that religious leaders be heard and that they offer a counter testimony to prevailing perceptions. These conceptions rise directly or indirectly from a teaching based on the theologies built along the centuries of religion's development. Some of there dogmatic bases are obviously related with the policy and its ambitions. If religion is not to be utilized to further the conflict, it must play a constructive role in shaping, presenting and developing an alternative to it, namely more positive relations between the two communities.

For centuries Jewish-Muslim coexistence flourished in the context of personal relationships, created in communities living alongside each other.
Friendships and personal ties provide the soundest foundation for mutual recognition and the diffusion of peace.


The Mutual Enrichment of Judaism and Islam: the Testimony of History

In the turmoil of modern circumstances, sight is often lost of the mutual enrichment Judaism and Islam enjoyed during their common history. Even if, in its historical beginnings in Medina, Islam was built and deployed in Arabia on the eradication of any Jewish presence, there was then, nearly a millennium and a half ago, a continuous interaction of Islam with Judaism, initially in a receptive and later in a reciprocal mode. Three significant moments of this heritage can be evoked corresponding to institutional, cultural and spiritual influences. These characterize their mutual relationship respectively during Islam’s formative period, during the subsequent flowering of Muslim thought and literature in Andalusian Spain, and then at the height of Islamic spirituality in Medieval Egypt.
It is worthwhile recalling the geographical proximity of Arabia, Islam’s cradle, to the Land of Israel, which forms its northern border. This proximity nurtured spiritual ties from Biblical times, when Jews came to settle in Arabia(since the Babylonian time, the Jews were the first sedentaries of the peninsula), growing to sizable communities throughout the peninsula by the time of Muhammad in the 7th century. No doubt something of the “spirit of the land of prophecy” imbued the Arabian peninsula. Islam cannot be conceived without the heritage of the prophets of the Bible. It sees itself as grounded within this long ongoing tradition, characterized by the lineage of God-given prophets, who reveal a law, expressed in holy Scripture.
This spiritual connection was acknowledged by early Islam, which recognized Jerusalem both as its first qibla (prayer direction) and as the scene of the Last Judgment at the End of Days. Thus at the beginning of Islam, Jews and Muslims, united in the faith in the same God, prayed to Him while facing the same direction.
They held in common many other beliefs and rituals such as the monotheistic creed, the belief in revelation, prophecy, and the afterlife, the practice of circumcision, specific dietary laws, even sharing certain fast days, such as that of the ashura.
Interaction with Jews during the formative period of Islam contributed to the elaboration of the latter’s early scriptural, religious and ritual traditions through the medium of the Israiliyyat and Qisas al-anbiya’ (Jewish and prophetic legends). The including cultural imitation practised at the beginning of the prophet time in Medina brutally ended after the incident of Nakhla. Many of these features remain constitutive of the relations between Judaism and Islam, as shall be pointed out below.

No doubt in response to these common elements, Jews assimilated positively to the Arab culture much more rapidly and deeply than they had done to the pagan Greek one. So totally immersed were they in Arabic culture that they chose to express almost all aspects of Jewish tradition in the Arabic idiom, translating the Bible into Arabic, even writing that language in the sacred characters of the Hebrew
tongue.

In contrast to the cultural ostracism of the Jews in Medieval Europe, Jews in the Muslim context were well integrated into Muslim civilization as long as they enjoyed tolerance under the statute of protection and submission of the dhimmi. In times of openness and enlightenment, they contributed in no small measure to the furtherance of Muslim culture itself. This cultural symbiosis reached its peak in Andalusia in the second great period of their mutual enrichment, in the areas of religious and secular sciences, including theology, philosophy, ethics and medicine, and even poetry, which, though written in Hebrew, utilized nonetheless, Arabic metrics and literary devices. The Andalusian Jews meditated and commented on the Muslim philosophers, applied Muslim theological notions to the Torah and Talmud, and enriched Arabic science with their own compositions on astronomy, medicine and mathematics. As translators of Arabic works into Hebrew, Jews became the primal transmitters of Islamic civilization to the West. In certain cases, where the Arabic originals were lost in the passage of time, these Hebrew versions became the custodians of Muslim culture.

The third great encounter between Islam and Judaism took place in the spiritual realm in Medieval Egypt. Here the descendants of the foremost Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), who himself wrote most of his works in the Arabic language, adapted Muslim spirituality to their own religious and ritual traditions.
They were deeply impressed by the extraordinary flowering of Sufism around them and perceived in its religious fervour a continuation of the prophetic tradition of ancient Israel. It is possible that the spirit of the ensuing Jewish pietist movement in
Egypt was carried over to the Holy Land where, in the 14th century, it influenced the nascent Kabbalah and later Jewish mysticism, especially Lurianic Kabbalah that flowered during the Ottoman period.

In the intervening years and in subsequent generations, there was always to be a continuous exchange in daily life between Jews and their Muslim environment in such areas as music, art, poetry, folklore and architecture. Almost all stages of their respective life-cycles, in joy and grief, from the cradle to the grave, both in the home and their places of worship, were celebrated with similar melodies and customs. A particular indication of their common spiritual heritage is the fact that they venerated each others saints and shared common shrines. These became symbols of confluence between their respective religious traditions, as was the case in the country hosting the present conference. It is therefore important to preserve these shrines, which are part of this common heritage. But it is not only these shrines that are in danger of disappearing. Indeed, more generally, political tensions, patterns of emigration, and intolerance have brought about the virtual effacement of the history of the Judeo-Arab civilization alongside its wealth of spiritual and humanistic values.

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