Page:Muhammad and the Jews According to Ibn Ishaq.pdf/2

Spoerl / The Levantine Review Volume 2 Number 1 (Spring 2013) Bernard Lewis, Yehoshafat Harkabi, David Patterson, Bat Ye’or, Mark Durie, Itamar Marcus, Neil J. Kressel, and Jeffrey Herf —tracing its roots further back in Islamic history. In addition, the media analysts of the Middle East Media Research Institute and Palestinian Media Watch have assembled a massive and growing body of anti-­Semitic material from Muslim sources. Moreover, recent polling data from the Pew Research Center shows very high levels of anti-­Jewish prejudice across the Muslim world. Muslim anti-­Semites have certainly borrowed freely from Western anti-Semitic works such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but, as the aforementioned scholars show, they have also mined the Islamic tradition itself for raw materials with which to craft anti-­Semitic propaganda. A full understanding of Islamic anti-Semitism thus requires not only a survey of current events, but an understanding of the Islamic tradition and its treatment of Jews.

This article will examine just one important component of the Islamic tradition in this regard, namely, the earliest extant biography or sira of Muhammad, the Sirat Rasul Allah or The Life of the Prophet of God by Muhammad Ibn Ishaq Ibn Yasar, generally known as Ibn ISSN: 2164-­6678