Monday, August 18, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
I covered Islamic Arab supersessionism (pretending that all Jewish prophets and holy places are really Muslim,) Palestinianism (the explicit desire to replace Israel with an Arab state) and Iranian annihilationism (the desire to utterly destroy Israel.)
Surprisingly, I never tackled Sunni Islamist antisemitism, which is at least as important, and which has become its own philosophy only relatively recently.
Before the mid-20th century, antisemitism among Arabs was imported. The 1840 Damascus Affair blood libel was eagerly pushed by French Catholic antisemites and was a precursor to other blood libels in the Arab world in later decades. It was profoundly influential in introducing European-style antisemitism to the Middle East.
Arab nationalism that grew in the late 19th century was in no small part a reaction to Zionism. It was followed by Arab socialism, as Marx' theories started to spread, mostly starting with Arab Christians.
But the first truly home-grown Muslim antisemitism was popularized by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and mostly through one man: Sayyid Qutb.
Qutb created an entirely new history of Islam that is centered around antisemitism and an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. He dates the beginnings of Islam itself to 622 CE, not the more normally accepted 610 CE, because 622 is when Mohammed started looking at Jews as rivals and no longer potential partners. In Qutb's telling, 622 is when Jews started to wage an existential war against Islam that has never ended and will never end until the Jews themselves are eliminated. In his words, "this is an enduring war that will never end, because the Jews want no more no less than to exterminate the religion of Islam ... Since Islam subdued them (in Medina) they are unforgiving and fight furiously through
conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates."
This cosmic war according to Qutb, has gone on century after century:
Who tried to undermine the nascent Islamic state in Medina and who incited Quraish in Mecca, as well as other tribes against the foundation of this state? It was a Jew! Who stood behind the fitna-war and the slaying of the third caliph Osman and all the tragedies that followed hereafter? It was a Jew! And who inflamed national divides against the last caliph and who stood behind the turmoil that ended the Islamic order with the abolition of shari'a? It was Ataturk, a Jew! The Jews always stood and continue to stand behind the war waged against Islam. Today, this war persists against the Islamic revival in all places on earth.
I often see mainstream Arabic media describing the "character" of the Jews, as murderers, cheaters, liars and aggressive. This all comes from Qutb (although some of his antisemitic theories seem to come from the Mufti of Jerusalem.)
The only Western antisemitic ideas that Qutb didn't try to Islamicize were the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he adopted in his theories. But everything else was his own home-grown antisemitic philosophy, which also regards America as a proxy for Jews.
This is the worldview of Al Qaeda, of ISIS, of Hamas. Qutb is considered a seminal thinker for them, who was followed by Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi.
Qutb’s innovation was not to borrow European antisemitism whole cloth as the previous versions did, but to rewrite Islam itself as a cosmic struggle with Jews. In doing so, he gave Islamists a philosophy that structurally requires Jewish disappearance. This is precisely what my larger thesis predicts: whenever a malign worldview senses Judaism as an existential check on its falsehood, antisemitism is not an accident but an organizing principle. Qutb shows how that principle was Islamicized, and why Islamism cannot make peace with Jewish existence.
(Thanks to this great 2010 paper by Bassam Tibi)
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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