Page:Muhammad and the Jews According to Ibn Ishaq.pdf/17

Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013) one whose coming was plainly foretold by the Torah, and it was clearly of vital importance to him that the Jews agree with his reading of the Torah. The rabbis of Medina asked embarrassing questions and pressed Muhammad on his theological claims. They denied that the Torah foretold his coming as a prophet, and they denied that an Arab could be a prophet in the Jewish tradition (pp. 239, 257). After the move to Medina in 622, Muhammad was at war with the pagan Quraysh of Mecca. His authority as a political and military leader, and thus his survival, depended on his followers accepting him as a prophet receiving authentic divine revelations. The Jews, due to the moral weight of the Hebrew Bible and the literacy of their rabbis, thus posed the single-greatest ideological threat to Muhammad and the nascent Islamic state. According to Ibn Ishaq, he worked to discredit them by repeatedly calling them liars whose claims about their own scriptures were not to be trusted. Finally, he found reasons to crush them militarily and, at the end of his life, to order their expulsion (along with other non-Muslims) from the Arabian peninsula (pp. 523, 525, 689). Ibn Ishaq’s sira, echoing large portions of the Koran, leaves the reader with the distinct impression that any Jew who reads the Torah and refuses to convert to Islam is ipso facto a liar, and that the defining mark of Jews who refuse to convert to Islam is treachery, infidelity, and dishonesty. Surely this is one of the deepest roots of the anti-Jewish prejudice that persists to this day in Islamic societies.

After the Nazi Holocaust, many Christians began a serious effort to understand and overcome the awful legacy of Christian anti-Semitism. This effort included a re-examination and re-interpretation of the foundational documents of the Christian tradition, including the canonical Gospels themselves. It is time for Muslims to subject their own tradition to ISSN: 2164-­6678