July 2014
July
2014 Webcasting on the world’s first real-time Islamic service at www.virtualmosque.co.uk Editors: Shahid Aziz Mustaq Ali Contents: The Call of the Messiah
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So, What Did the Muslims Do for the Jews? by David J Wasserstein 3 The Teachings of Islam on Fasting
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ْ س مِباہللْالرَّ م ٰ ن ْحالرَّ ْ ی م حم ْ ْ
well-founded principles of natural science; that many of its claims are repugnant to what is indicated by reason and good sense; that its teaching inculcates ways and means of coercion and oppression, injustice and unfairness, and that many of its tenets are inconsistent with and contrary to the Divine attributes and the laws of nature. Very many of the Christian missionaries and Arya Samajists have most boldly and arrogantly denied the miracles of the Holy Prophet and the prophecies and signs of the Holy Quran, and have drawn such a dreadful
The Call of the Messiah by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the Promised Messiah and Mahdi The present age And so this prophecy, in every age and time, came to be fulfilled in one respect or another, and Almighty God’s safeguarding of His honour and Almighty God’s help have brought forth in every age a defender empowered to tackle and repulse an enemy onslaught of whatever kind and from wheresoever it may have been launched. But this age in which we are living has been one in which the enemy has launched a full -scale attack from all directions, and it has been a time of terrible tempest such as Islam has never witnessed since the introduction to the world of the Holy Quran. Visionless and vile people have also mounted an assault on the literal integrity of the Quranic text and written incorrect translations and commentaries, and many Christians and some materialists, as well as unintelligent Muslims, have, under the cover of translations and commentaries, sought to corrupt and contaminate the true meaning of the Divine Word. Many have been emphatic that the Holy Quran, in many places, stands opposed to rational, intellectual knowledge and to the
picture of the sacred Word of God, of Islam and of the Holy Prophet, fabricating vile and vicious falsehoods, that every seeker-after-truth would necessarily be repulsed and disgusted by them. The present age, then, was a time that naturally demanded that, just as a storm of opposition
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2 had arisen to mount an aggressive attack from all quarters, the defence should accordingly be conducted on every front. At the same time, it was the beginning of the 14th Century Hijra, so that God Most High, according to His promise held out in the verse ُاِنَّا نَحْ نُ نَ َّزلَنَا ال ِّذ ْک َرا َواِنَّا لَہ َلَ َحافِظُوْ ن, ‘Behold, We Ourselves have sent down the Reminder and We Ourselves shall be its Guardian’ (15:9), raised a mujaddid at the head of the 14th century to rectify and remedy this evil. Now, since every mujaddid has a particular name in God’s nomenclature, and just as an author gives a title to his book according to the subject matter discussed therein, in the same way, God Most High conferred upon this Mujaddid, in view of the duty to be assigned him, the appellation of Messiah, since it had been ordained that the Messiah would rectify and remedy the evils of the Cross typifying the final age. Accordingly, the man who had been entrusted with this mission would necessarily be given the name ‘Promised Messiah’, note it carefully, being one who had been raised to execute and accomplish the task of breaking the Cross. And is this, then, the selfsame age or not? Think it over very seriously, and may God Most High help and save you.
which is very much in the same way that God’s good and righteous people, just like the Children of Israel, suffered in Makkah, continuously for thirteen years, the severest persecution at the hands of the unbelievers, which was even more cruel and inhuman than that which Pharaoh had inflicted on the Israelites, so that these righteous and noble people, along with that noblest of the noble, and at his suggestion, fled from Makkah just as the Children of Israel had
The Promised Messiah in the Quran All this investigation points to the clear conclusion that people who think that no mention of the Promised Messiah has been made in the Holy Quran are greatly in error. The truth of the matter, rather, is that the Promised Messiah is extensively indicated in the Holy Quran. In the َک َما اَرْ َس ْلنَا اِ ٰلی فِرْ عَوْ ِن َرس ا, ‘As We sent a verse ُوًل Messenger to Pharaoh’ (73:15), the Holy Quran has indicated in clear terms that the Holy Prophet is the like of Moses, for the significance of the verse undoubtedly is: “We have sent this prophet in the likeness of that prophet who had been sent to Pharaoh”. The hard facts of history have borne out that this statement made by God Most High is correct and true, given that, just as God Most High, having sent Moses to Pharaoh, finally swept away and made an end of Pharaoh before the very eyes of the Israelites, and delivered them from Pharaoh’s tyranny and oppression, not in any fanciful or whimsical way, but actually, as a matter of fact and observation,
fled from Egypt. Now the Makkans ran after them and pursued them that they might put the fugitives to death, very much as Pharaoh had done with the aim and intention of killing the Children of Israel. The Makkans were at last done to death and annihilated at Badr in consequence of their homicidal pursuit in the same manner as Pharaoh and his hordes were annihilated in the river Nile, and it was to unravel this riddle that the Holy Prophet, when he saw Abu Jahl’s dead body among the slain at Badr, remarked that he (Abu Jahl) was the Pharaoh of this Ummah. In short, just as the drowning of Pharaoh and his army in the Nile was a matter
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3 of fact, a visible event which cannot be gainsaid or disputed, in the same way, the destruction of Abu Jahl and his army at Badr at the time of pursuit was an event that could be seen and felt, and to reject and deny it would be sheer folly or stupidity.
Jesus not the like of Moses Both these historical facts, then, in terms of all the events and occurrences that they involve, bear a close resemblance to each other just as if they are twin brothers, and the Christian claim that this like of Moses is none else but Jesus Christ is not only repugnant but shameful as well, because likeness must necessarily be in matters that are perceptible, clear and decisive, and not involve some vain and preposterous claim that is itself open to strong objection and denial. How baseless and empty is the argument that, just as Moses was the deliverer of the Children of Israel, in the same way Jesus was the deliverer of the Christians, in that these are merely the baseless conceptions of their own minds, which have no clear and explicit sign to support them! Had there been any sign of bringing salvation, the Jews would, in the same way, have accepted Jesus most gratefully, and acknowledged the fact of his being their saviour, and sung thanksgiving songs as they had done after the event at the Nile. But those noble men of God whom our master and lord, the Holy Prophet, had delivered from the tyranny and oppression of the Makkans sang songs of joy after the event of Badr in the same way as had the Children of Israel on the river Nile. Those Arabic songs, sung on the field of Badr, have come down to us, preserved in the pages of books.
So, What Did the Muslims Do for the Jews? THE JC ESSAY by David J Wasserstein Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth. The argument for it is double. First, in
570 CE, when the Prophet Mohammad was born, the Jews and Judaism were on the way to oblivion. And second, the coming of Islam saved them, providing a new context in which they not only survived, but flourished, laying foundations for subsequent Jewish cultural prosperity – also in Christendom – through the medieval period into the modern world. By the fourth century, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the Roman empire. One aspect of this success was opposition to rival faiths, including Judaism, along with massive conversion of members of such faiths, sometimes by force, to Christianity. Much of our testimony about Jewish existence in the Roman empire from this time on consists of accounts of conversions. Great and permanent reductions in numbers through conversion, between the fourth and the seventh centuries, brought with them a gradual but relentless whittling away of the status, rights, social and economic existence, and religious and cultural life of Jews all over the Roman empire. A long series of enactments deprived Jewish people of their rights as citizens, prevented them from fulfilling their religious obligations, and excluded them from the society of their fellows. Had Islam not come along, Jewry in the west would have declined to disappearance and Jewry in the east would have become just another oriental cult. This went along with the centuries-long military and political struggle with Persia. As a tiny element in the Christian world, the Jews should not have been affected much by this broad, political issue. Yet it affected them critically, because the Persian empire at this time included Babylon – now Iraq – at the time home to the world’s greatest concentration of Jews. Here also were the greatest centres of Jewish intellectual life. The most important single work of Jewish cultural creativity in over 3,000 years, apart from the Bible itself – the Talmud – came into being in Babylon. The struggle between Persia and
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4 Byzantium, in our period, led increasingly to a separation between Jews under Byzantine, Christian rule and Jews under Persian rule. Beyond all this, the Jews who lived under Christian rule seemed to have lost the knowledge of their own culturally specific languages – Hebrew and Aramaic – and to have taken on the use of Latin or Greek or other non-Jewish, local, languages. This in turn must have meant that they also lost access to the central literary works of Jewish culture – the Torah, Mishnah, poetry, midrash, even liturgy. The loss of the unifying force represented by language – and of the associated literature – was a major step towards assimilation and disappearance. In these circumstances, with contact with the one place where Jewish cultural life continued to prosper – Babylon – cut off by conflict with Persia, Jewish life in the Christian world of late antiquity was not simply a pale shadow of what it had been three or four centuries earlier. It was doomed. Had Islam not come along, the conflict with Persia would have continued. The separation between western Judaism, that of Christendom, and Babylonian Judaism, that of Mesopotamia, would have intensified. Jewry in the west would have declined to disappearance in many areas. And Jewry in the east would have become just another oriental cult. But this was all prevented by the rise of Islam. The Islamic conquests of the seventh century changed the world, and did so with dramatic, wide-ranging and permanent effect for the Jews. Within a century of the death of Mohammad, in 632, Muslim armies had conquered almost the whole of the world where Jews lived, from Spain eastward across North Africa and the Middle East as far as the eastern frontier of Iran and
beyond. Almost all the Jews in the world were now ruled by Islam. This new situation transformed Jewish existence. Their fortunes changed in legal, demographic, social, religious, political, geographical, economic, linguistic and cultural terms – all for the better. First, things improved politically. Almost everywhere in Christendom where Jews had lived now formed part of the same political space as Babylon – Cordoba and Basra lay in the same political world. The old frontier between the vital centre in Babylonia and the Jews of the Mediterranean basin was swept away, forever. Political change was partnered by change in the legal status of the Jewish population: although it is not always clear what happened during the Muslim conquests, one thing is certain. The result of the conquests was, by and large, to make the Jews second-class citizens. This should not be misunderstood: to be a second-class citizen was a far better thing to be than not to be a citizen at all. For most of these Jews, second-class citizenship represented a major advance. In Visigothic Spain, for example, shortly before the Muslim conquest in 711, the Jews had seen their children removed from them and forcibly converted to Christianity and had themselves been enslaved. In the developing Islamic societies of the classical and medieval periods, being a Jew meant belonging to a category defined under law, enjoying certain rights and protections, alongside various obligations. These rights and protections were not as extensive or as generous as those enjoyed by Muslims, and the obligations were greater but, for the first few centuries, the Muslims themselves were a minority, and the practical differences were not all that great. Along with legal near-equality came social
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5 and economic equality. Jews were not confined to ghettos, either literally or in terms of economic activity. The societies of Islam were, in effect, open societies. In religious terms, too, Jews enjoyed virtually full freedom. They might not build many new synagogues – in theory – and they might not make too public their profession of their faith, but there was no really significant restriction on the practice of their religion. Along with internal legal autonomy, they also enjoyed formal representation, through leaders of their own, before the authorities of the state. Imperfect and often not quite as rosy as this might sound, it was at least the broad norm. The political unity brought by the new Islamic world-empire did not last, but it created a vast Islamic world civilisation, similar to the older Christian civilisation that it replaced. Within this huge area, Jews lived and enjoyed broadly similar status and rights everywhere. They could move around, maintain contacts, and develop their identity as Jews. A great new expansion of trade from the ninth century onwards brought the Spanish Jews – like the Muslims – into touch with the Jews and the Muslims even of India. All this was encouraged by a further, critical development. Huge numbers of people in the new world of Islam adopted the language of the Muslim Arabs. Arabic gradually became the principal language of this vast area, excluding almost all the rest: Greek and Syriac, Aramaic and Coptic and Latin all died out, replaced by Arabic. Persian, too, went into a long retreat, to reappear later heavily influenced by Arabic. The Jews moved over to Arabic very rapidly. By the early 10th century, only 300 years after the conquests, Sa‘adya Gaon was translating the Bible into Arabic. Bible translation is a massive task – it is not undertaken unless there is a need for it. By about the year 900, the Jews had largely abandoned other languages and taken on Arabic. The change of language in its turn brought the Jews into direct contact with broader cultural developments. The result from the 10th
century on was a striking pairing of two cultures. The Jews of the Islamic world developed an entirely new culture, which differed from their culture before Islam in terms of language, cultural forms, influences, and uses. Instead of being concerned primarily with religion, the new Jewish culture of the Islamic world, like that of its neighbours, mixed the religious and the secular to a high degree. The contrast, both with the past and with medieval Christian Europe, was enormous. Like their neighbours, these Jews wrote in Arabic in part, and in a Jewish form of that language. The use of Arabic brought them close to the Arabs. But the use of a specific Jewish form of that language maintained the barriers between Jew and Muslim. The subjects that Jews wrote about, and the literary forms in which they wrote about them, were largely new ones, borrowed from the Muslims and developed in tandem with developments in Arabic Islam. Also at this time, Hebrew was revived as a language of high literature, parallel to the use among the Muslims of a high form of Arabic for similar purposes. Along with its use for poetry and artistic prose, secular writing of all forms in Hebrew and in (Judeo-) Arabic came into being, some of it of high quality. Much of the greatest poetry in Hebrew written since the Bible comes from this period. Sa‘adya Gaon, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Ibn Ezra (Moses and Abraham), Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi, Yehudah al-Harizi, Samuel ha-Nagid, and many more – all of these names, well known today, belong in the first rank of Jewish literary and cultural endeavour. Where did these Jews produce all this? When did they and their neighbours achieve this symbiosis, this mode of living together? The Jews did it in a number of centres of excellence. The most outstanding of these was Islamic Spain, where there was a true Jewish Golden Age, alongside a wave of cultural achievement among the Muslim population. The Spanish case illustrates a more general pattern, too. What happened in Islamic Spain – waves of
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6 Jewish cultural prosperity paralleling waves of cultural prosperity among the Muslims – exemplifies a larger pattern in Arab Islam. In Baghdad, between the ninth and the twelfth centuries; in Qayrawan (in north Africa), between the ninth and the 11th centuries; in Cairo, between the 10th and the 12th centuries, and elsewhere, the rise and fall of cultural centres of Islam tended to be reflected in the rise and fall of Jewish cultural activity in the same places.
(David J Wasserstein is the Eugene Greener Jr Professor of Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. This article is adapted from last week’s Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies.)
This was not coincidence, and nor was it the product of particularly enlightened liberal patronage by Muslim rulers. It was the product of a number of deeper features of these societies, social and cultural, legal and economic, linguistic and political, which together enabled and indeed encouraged the Jews of the Islamic world to create a novel sub-culture within the high civilisation of the time.
The Teachings of Islam on Fasting
This did not last for ever; the period of culturally successful symbiosis between Jew and Arab Muslim in the middle ages came to a close by about 1300. In reality, it had reached this point even earlier, with the overall relative decline in the importance and vitality of Arabic culture, both in relation to western European cultures and in relation to other cultural forms within Islam itself; Persian and Turkish. Jewish cultural prosperity in the middle ages operated in large part as a function of Muslim, Arabic cultural (and to some degree political) prosperity: when Muslim Arabic culture thrived, so did that of the Jews; when Muslim Arabic culture declined, so did that of the Jews. In the case of the Jews, however, the cultural capital thus created also served as the seed-bed of further growth elsewhere – in Christian Spain and in the Christian world more generally. The Islamic world was not the only source of inspiration for the Jewish cultural revival that came later in Christian Europe, but it certainly was a major contributor to that development. Its significance cannot be overestimated.
[Source: The Jewish Chronicle Online at http:// www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/ comment/68082/so-what-did-muslims-do-jews, May 24, 2012.]
The importance of self-reform and abstention from base desires 1. “O you who believe, fasting is prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you, so that you may guard against evil.” (The Holy Quran, 2:183.) 2. Allah says: “And when My servants ask you (O Prophet) about Me, surely I am near. I answer the prayer of the suppliant when he calls on Me, so they should hear My call and believe in Me that they may walk in the right way.” (2:186.) 3. “And swallow not up your property among yourselves by false means, nor seek to gain access thereby to the authorities so that you may swallow up other people’s property wrongfully while you know.” (2:188.) 4. “He who does not give up uttering falsehood and acting according to it, God has no need of his giving up his food and drink.” (The Holy Prophet Muhammad.) 5. Jesus fasted forty days and forty nights, and explained it by saying: “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:2–4). Moses also fasted forty days and forty nights (Exodus, 34:28).
The purpose of fasting in Islam 1. To develop and strengthen our powers of selfcontrol, so that we can resist wrongful desires and bad habits, and therefore “guard against evil” (see
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7 extract 1 above). In fasting, by refraining from the natural human urges to satisfy one’s appetite, we are exercising our ability of selfrestraint, so that we can then apply it in our everyday life to bring about self-improvement. 2. To attain nearness and closeness to God so that He becomes a reality in our lives. As we bear the rigours of fasting purely for the sake of following a Divine commandment, knowing and feeling that He can see all our actions, however secret, it intensifies the consciousness of God in our hearts, resulting in a higher spiritual experience (see extract 2 above). 3. To learn to refrain from usurping other’s rights and belongings. In fasting we voluntarily give up even what is rightfully ours; how can then we think of unlawfully taking what is not ours but belongs to someone else? (See extract 3 above.) 4. Charity and generosity are especially urged during Ramadan. We learn to give, and not to take. The deprivation of fasting makes us sympathise with the suffering of others, and want to try to alleviate it; and it makes us remember the blessings of life which we normally take for granted. Fasting in Islam does not just consist of refraining from eating and drinking, but from every kind of selfish desire and wrongdoing. The fast is not merely of the body, but essentially that of the spirit as well (see extract 4 above). The physical fast is a symbol and outward expression of the real, inner fast. Fasting is a spiritual practice to be found in all religions (see extracts 1 and 5 above). The great Founders of various faiths, such as Buddha, Moses and Jesus, practised quite rigorous fasting as a preliminary to attaining their first experience of spiritual enlightenment and communion with God. This kind of communion is indicated in extract 2 above.
Maulana Muhammad Ali on fasting “The real purpose of fasting is to attain righteousness. A person who undergoes hunger and thirst, but does not behave righteously, has done nothing. If someone is told the aim and object of doing a certain duty, and he does that duty but without attaining the required aim and object, it is as if he has not done that duty.”
Special spiritual exertions in the month of Ramadan Every year in the month of Ramadan, Maulana Muhammad Ali in his khutbas and writings used to exhort the Jama‘at to undertake a spiritual exertion (mujahida) in two forms. One was to fall in prayer before God and beseech Him tearfully in tahajjud prayers to enable us to carry out the work of the propagation of Islam and the Quran, and the other was to make financial sacrifices. In this connection he wrote many heart-felt, moving prayers and entreated every member of the Jama‘at that at least in the month of Ramadan they should treat the tahajjud prayer as obligatory for them. Once he suggested three types of supplications which were as follows: 1. Prayer for spiritual fostering by Allah: “All praise is for Allah, the Lord of the worlds.” – O God, Your providence comprehends every iota of the universe. You have provided the very best means for the physical development of human beings. Now provide for Your creation, who have moved far off from You and are lost in darkness racing towards destruction, spiritual nourishment through the Quran. Acquaint their hearts with the bliss that is attained by bowing at Your threshold. O God, Who granted the Holy Prophet Muhammad and his Companions unique success enabling them to transform the destinies of en-
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8 tire countries and nations, foster and nourish us and our Jama‘at today to make it reach the pinnacle of success in spreading the Quran and propagating Islam in the world. Let the foundations for the propagation of Your religion be laid by our hands, upon which an edifice continues to be raised till the Day of Judgment. 2. Prayer for triumph over unbelief: “Forgive us, grant us protection, have mercy on us. You are our Patron, grant us victory over the disbelieving people!” – O God, unbelief is dominant over the world. Love of worldly things and wealth have taken hold of human hearts. Human beings are being led astray by possession of physical power, material resources and outward adornments. But, O God, it is Your promise that You shall make Islam triumph in the world. It is Your promise that after falling into the greatest deviation and wrongdoing people will again turn to You. Fulfil this promise of Yours today and let the truth overcome falsehood and let Islam triumph over unbelief. O God, the armies of unbelief and misguidance are attacking with full force. Your strength in the past too has been manifested through weak human beings. Let it be manifest today through this small Jama‘at. We are weak, humble and sinners but we have a strong zeal to see Islam prevail over unbelief. Forgive us our faults, grant us protection, save us from stumbling, and be our helper and make this weak Jama‘at of Islam overcome the vast strength of unbelief. O God, make the Quran and Muhammad Rasulullah and Islam triumphant in the world, and wipe away the forces of unbelief and misguidance. 3. Prayer for help from Allah: “Thee do we serve and Thee do we beseech for help.”
– O God, we do as much as it is in our power to obey You and to spread Your name and Your Word in the world, but we are weak and cannot fully discharge our duty of obeying You. Help us and produce within us the greatest strength to obey You. O God, spreading Your name in the world is the exalted mission for which You had been appointing Your chosen ones, and it was only with Your help that they succeeded in achieving this magnificent goal. One such chosen man of Yours has entrusted us with this task, but we are small in numbers, weak, and lacking in means. We are opposed not only by outsiders but also by our own who hamper our way. Guide us through Your graciousness and infuse in us the same strength with which You have ever filled Your chosen ones, and create in our hearts the same light with which You have been illuminating the hearts of Your chosen ones. O God, spreading Your message in the world is the most difficult of tasks in the world. Whenever such a reformation came about, it was not because of the strength of any man or army but it was from Your aid and succour. So we seek from You that help and aid which You have been bestowing upon Your chosen ones. (Adapted from A Mighty Striving, pp. 314–315.)
Ahmadiyya Anjuman Isha‘at Islam Lahore (UK) The first Islamic Mission in the UK, established 1913 as the Woking Muslim Mission Dar-us-Salaam, 15 Stanley Avenue, Wembley, UK, HA0 4JQ Centre: 020 8903 2689 President: 07976 312618 Secretary: TBA Treasurer: TBA E-mail: aaiiLahore@gmail.com Websites: www.aaiil.org/uk | www.ahmadiyya.org | www.virtualmosque.co.uk Donations: www.virtualmosque.co.uk/donations