Page:Muhammad and the Jews According to Ibn Ishaq.pdf/16

Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013) pigs…” In 2010, the current President of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, referred to Jews as “descendants of apes and pigs.”

CONCLUSION

Some authors, like Karen Armstrong, insist that Muhammad’s conflict with the Jews was purely political, not religious or theological. Armstrong makes two related (and equally erroneous) assertions, that “Muhammad never asked them [the Jews] to accept his religion of al-Llah unless they particularly wished to convert” and that “anti-Semitism is a vice of Western Christianity not of Islam.” Armstrong’s approach is to mine the sira selectively for anything that can be used to place Muhammad in a favorable light for a modern Western audience, while ignoring or downplaying the less flattering portions of the narrative, especially as regards Muhammad’s treatment of the Jews, but without explaining why the nicer parts of the sira should be considered more reliable than the less flattering ones. The same flawed approach can be found in recent apologetic works by high-profile Muslim authors like Omid Safi, Tariq Ramadan, and Reza Aslan.

Certainly Muhammad’s conflict with the Jews had political and military aspects. But Armstrong overlooks the evidence I have summarized here, which proves without a doubt that, according to the Islamic tradition, Muhammad’s conflict with the Jews was above all religious or ideological, and that it included both a systematic defamation of the Jews that can only be described as anti-Semitic and substantial pressure on the Jews to convert to Islam. Whether historically accurate or not, Ibn Ishaq’s narrative has a certain inner logic and plausibility to it. Muhammad claimed to be a prophet in the line of Abraham and Moses, ISSN: 2164-­6678