Excerpt from Chanan Amior, in Perspectiva, 22.Dec.19:
… One of the prominent books of the renowned British historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, (who was also Winston Churchill’s official biographer), is the book ‘In Ishmael’s House- The History of the Jews in Muslim Lands’ . Over hundreds of pages, Gilbert unfolds a mask of shocking violence.. decrees, riots, humiliations and murders, were the daily and completely natural part of Jews who lived in Islamic countries for 1400 years. The following review is a little of what is presented in the book:
It all begins and ends with the Battle of Khaybar. A Muslim internal struggle in the seventh century AD, between the Muhammad and one of the leaders of Mecca, meant that the Jews of Qurayza were suspected by Muhammad of helping his enemies the people of Mecca. Muhammad’s forces besieged the citadel of the Jews for 25 days. The Jews asked Muhammad to let them go into exile without anything, according to previous precedents of the expulsion of the Jews and they were stripped of all their property by Muhammad and his men, provided that they were not forced to convert to Islam. They were taken prisoner and sentenced to death, in a verdict that from that time on was perceived by the Muslims as a supposed divine[sic]…
700 Jewish men from the Qurayza tribe were taken to the market of the city of Medina. Trenches were dug in the market square, the heads of all the men were beheaded and their headless bodies were rolled into the trenches. Muhammad watched what was happening. All the children and all the women were sold into slavery, or given as gifts to Muhammad’s friends. He took one of the murdered widows for himself. The “Battle of Khaybar”, as it has since been called in Muslim tradition, became a model for the Muslim rulers who came after Muhammad.
A hundred years later, the Jews’ status as “proteges” was legally regulated, and they were required to pay the jizya tax, the skull tax to the local Muslim ruler. The protégés cannot, to this day, serve as witnesses in a Muslim court, build gravestones taller than Muslims, enter bathhouses without a special identification mark around their necks, or carry weapons.
Two hundred years later, in the tenth century, local Muslims murdered about five thousand of the Jews of Granada in Muslim Spain. The background to the pogrom was the continued incitement of the Muslims against the Jews. “They (the Jews) used to wander around us worn out, covered in humiliation, mockery and contempt,” wrote a well-known Muslim poet and jurist of the period. “Don’t see killing them as treason.” By the way, the first Xstian crusade, which happened 30 years later, cost the lives of the same number of Jews, or even less.
Gilbert concludes:
The first four hundred years of Islam were all in the shadow of “a constant threat of discrimination and persecution.
The Crusader period was not more exciting. In the middle of the 12th century, the Maimonides, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon,.., was forced to flee from brutal persecution in Muslim Spain to Morocco. .. In a letter he sent to the Jews of Yemen, Rambam, who was well aware of Christian attacks on the Jews in Europe, wrote as follows:
There is no nation more hostile to Israel than her (the Muslim nation, CE). And no nation that is evil with the evil purpose of depleting us and reducing us and depressing us like it
Jews who refused to convert to Islam were murdered. Jews who converted to Islam throughout the areas of the Sultan’s influence were required to wear humiliating clothes, head coverings resembling donkey saddles and a piece of yellow cloth sewn over the outer garment. The descendants and descendants of the descendants of the Muslims did not enjoy the advantage of time either. Their situation, even after a hundred years since the conversion of their ancestors, has not improved at all. The Jewish philosopher Ibn Aknin, who witnessed the situation of the Jews in Muslim countries in the 12th century, wrote:
We become the target of the Inquisition. Great and small testify against us and our sentence is decisive, and legitimizes the shedding of our blood, the confiscation of our property, the shameful killing of our wives.
The following centuries were no different. Travelers who toured throughout Asia and North Africa, repeatedly wrote in their travel diaries about the persecution, humiliation, individual and mass murder and severe violence that were the lot of the Jewish communities throughout the Muslim world. About how, for example, they were
forbidden to ride horses, only donkeys, about the status of paying the jizya tax to the local ruler, accompanied by a humiliating slap in the face. About the normal and natural way in which the Jews were beaten like dogs and the “amazing submission” in which they “allowed themselves to be crushed by blows in the street”. Gilbert’s book is full of countless evidence and examples of this.
At the beginning of the 19th century, before the Zionist idea was born, the attacks on the Jewish communities in the Islamic countries and in particular in the Land of Israel intensified: in Hebron (1813), Arab sheikhs imprisoned the leaders of the local Jewish community and tortured them for about a year until a ransom was obtained for their release. In Morocco (1820) the Jewish quarter of Fes was attacked. The property was looted, the women and girls were taken to the Muslim quarter and raped, men who tried to protect their wives were murdered. A similar case occurred in Safed (1838). Women were raped, men were tortured to find out where the silver and gold were hidden, the community was destroyed.
In this atmosphere, and under the temporary inspiration of the “Battle of Khaybar”, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini spent his childhood. When he grew up a little, he found himself, as an officer in the Ottoman army, deeply impressed by the massacre of about one and a half million Armenians by the Turkish army. The establishment of a Zionist Jewish society throughout the country was a disgrace to him and the possibility of exterminating it as the Armenians were exterminated excited him.
At the end of the thirties of the 20th century, Hitler asked for the support of the Arabs and therefore proposed to remove from the Arabic translation of his book ‘Mein Kampf’ the part where he placed the Arab race at the bottom of the hierarchy of races, with only the Jewish race below him. In February 1941, the mufti, who had meanwhile fled from Jerusalem to Baghdad from the British, sent Hitler a draft statement of support for him, under three conditions: that Hitler agree to denounce the Zionist enterprise as illegal, that he recognize the right of the Arabs to solve the Jewish problem “as is customary in the Axis countries,” and that he prohibit Jewish immigration from The Nazi occupation of Israel. From Baghdad the Mufti wandered further, until he reached Berlin, where he met Hitler, convinced them not to allow the planned deportation of 4000 Jewish children to Israel and also offered personal help, in the form of the formation of an SS division. Missionary Muslim, whose job it is to murder about half a million Jews in the Land of Israel.
An illustration of how deep, fiery and independent of time and place is the hatred of the Jews in the Muslim world, was provided by one of the perpetrators of the infernal attacks on the island of Bali in 2002, an Indonesian Muslim named Amrozi Ben Nurhasin. It is likely that the same terrorist, who lived his life in Southeast Asia, had never met Jews. He was found guilty of the murder of over two hundred people, many of them Western tourists, none of them Jewish. During the reading of his sentence in court, with the eyes of the whole world on him, he shouted
Jews remembered Khaybar. Muhammad’s army returns again to defeat you.
____
Chaim Schloss in :2000 Years of Jewish History: From the Destruction of the Second Bais Hamikdash Until the Twentieth Century,” (Feldheim Publishers, 2002, chapter 6), details how the Jews were offered to convert to Islam, but the 700 courageoues Jews refused and died on sanctifying Gd’s name.