Delegitimizing the claims of one religion in the house of another
Zachary Goelman reports on a lecture from Professor Mordechai Kedar, a Koranic scholar, who is quick to pick apart the Islamic faith on a rational level, but is unable to do it to with his own Judaism.
By Zachary Goelman on Saturday, February 7th, 2009 - 1,021 words.
Mordechai Kedar
Before Professor Mordechai Kedar stood to deliver a lecture about the importance of Jerusalem in Islam at the Ernest Manson Lubavitch Centre in Thornhill on Thursday, Rabbi Mendel Kaplan told a story about a painting
The rabbi related that a Jewish family once invited him to their home to examine a painting they’d purchased depicting the Western Wall. They like the painting, they explained, but felt that there was something missing.
“What was missing? It was a painting of the Cotel with no monstrosity behind it, no golden thing.”
The family, upon hearing this, was ashamed, Kaplan said.
“They said it wasn’t nice to remove someone else’s religious site. Can you believe it? We should respect someone who destroyed our beis hamikdosh and built something atop it?”
By way of this anecdote, Kaplan hoped to illustrate the problem that Jews need a connection to Israel in order to properly rebut the claims of others. Kaplan cited a line of Mishna Pirkei Avoth (2.19) enjoining the faithful to “know how to respond to an apikoros.”
Kaplan then took his seat alongside 40 congregants in the main chapel of the synagogue and Prof. Mordechai Kedar stood in front of the bima and the ark containing the Torah scrolls, beneath the flickering electric ner tamid, and critically deconstructed Islamic scripture to show that Muslim claims on the city of Jerusalem are clearly the manufactured insertions of politically-motivated editors over the course of several hundred years.
Kedar is certainly an authority on Islam, if not a sympathetic one. His familiarity with Qur’anic Arabic and insight into the Hadith allow him to extricate context from rhetoric. An Orientalist, a self-professed religious Zionist Jew, and 25-year veteran of Israel’s security services, Kedar uses his talents to publicly excoriate and repudiate claims made by Palestinians and their sympathizers.
Even when the issue isn’t strictly religious, Kedar treats it as monolithically so. Note this exchange on Al-Jazeera regarding the planned construction of some 800 new housing units in the controversial Israeli settlements of Har Homa and Pisgat Ze’ev in East Jerusalem in May 2008.
***
“There is no mention of Jerusalem, or al-Quds, in the Qur’an,” Kedar said Thursday night. Nor should we be surprised by this omission, he continued. The revelations attributed to the Prophet Muhammad in the Seventh Century took place in the Hejaz region of present-day Saudi Arabia, well removed from the capital of the former Roman province of Judea.
The root of the problem, said Kedar, lay in the following Qur’anic verse [17:1]:
Glory to God who did take His servant for a journey by night
from the sacred mosque to the farthest mosque,
whose surroundings are blessed.
Abdullah Muhammad Ibn ‘Omar Ibn Waqid, also referred to as Al-Waqidi (الواقدي) was a Seventh-Century historian of Islam, who stated in his work that while traveling from Mecca to Ta’if, Muhammed took shelter at night in the village of al-Gi’ranah.
The distinguishing feature of al-Gi’ranah was the dry wadi running alongside it. The town boasted two mosques – one on the near side of the valley, and one on the far side. Rather than offering prayers at the closer mosque (al-masjid al-adana) Muhammed prostrated himself at the farther mosque (al-masjid al-aqsa).
“To find a reference to Jerusalem, you have to turn to the Hadith,” Kedar said.
Fifty years after the death of the prophet, a dispute arose between the caliphate in Damascus and the Meccans. The Hejazis denied Damascene pilgrims access to the Ka’ba, prohibiting their fulfillment of the mandatory haj. Lacking the resources to retake Mecca by force, the Ummayad Caliphate sought an alternative pilgrimage site.
As such, they inserted into the Hadith a tale wherein Muhammad flies on a winged steed by night to the masjid al-aksa, now defined as the mosque in Jerusalem, and ascended through the heavens to receive the blessings of precedent prophets and god himself.
This fabrication is the root cause of conflict over the capital, which endures today. Kedar referred to Palestinian figures like Mufti al-Haj Ami al-Husseini and P.L.O. Chairman Yassir Arafat continuing to perpetuate falsified Islamic claims to the site.
“The fight over Jerusalem is not a fight over territory — it’s a fight over theology,” Kedar said.
The opposing side, as the learned Orientalist thus described it, is both fanatical and duplicitous, similar to the cunning, corrupt, and cryptically traditional antagonists of Leon Uris‘s imagination.
At one point the professor delineated the miracles Islam attributed to the belatedly sanctified city of Jerusalem. According to the Hadith, a blind man who falls asleep in Jerusalem will be the first to see the sunrise; a deaf man who beds down in Jerusalem will be the first to hear the call to prayer; a mute who slumbers in the city will be the first to climb the mu’zzin and proclaim the shehadah; and a cripple will walk. Kedar enumerated this list of phenomena with increasing incredulity. The congregants laughed at this list of inconceivables — while seated in a Chabad shul wherein the rabbi will teach that Moses parted waters, Elijah resurrected the dead, and that mundane acts like tying leather thongs around their arms please the lord.
There is nothing Islamophobic or objectionable in Kedar’s analysis. The so-called great religions of the world are best understood when they are subjected to patient and rational examination. Ultimately, they are all exposed as vestigial failures of human understanding. The theologies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, “the first explanation, and the worst explanation” for the world as we know it.
But the selective targeting of one faith’s claims, and the unquestionable fealty to another religion is dishonest. The absence of the Jerusalem in the Qur’an is no more incriminating than the absence of the ten commandments in the Book of Judges — both throw their respective religions’ narratives into question, exposing them to be, shockingly, little more than the subjective creations of political interests over hundreds of years.
At which point, Kedar’s argument against Islamic claims to Jerusalem becomes: “Our falsified fantasies and superstitions are older than yours.”
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The commentator is clearly a believer in moral relativism. Aren't Jews supposed to believe in the Torah?
We are all "believers in moral relativism", nobody follows any of the holy scriptures and its "absolute morality" and not at the least the ones of the Abrahamic faiths otherwise these people would be criminals in the modern day, or do they regularly put to death rape victims because they didnt scream loud enough, do they stone homosexuals to death or people that dont observe Sabbath and partake in slavery, if so they are criminals that desrerve to be imprisoned in a mental institution along with their greedy delusions of god, people who give themselves religious labels for the sake of some sort of entitlement or historical heritage are no better than the hardliners imo and these are most prevalent within Judaism.
The Professor is an absolute joke, one that sadly represents the majority of Jews and Zionists, they are the only ones that are fighting a religious war or one that they try to justify through theology, even Hamas is a nationalist movement and not rooted solely in religious dogma.
This kind of 3000 year old thinking truly belongs in the dark ages, Palestinians under international law have every right to defend their land from the ever expanding illegal occupation of Isreal.
Zionists repeatedly bite the hands that feed them, the Arab Legion did not try to wipe them of the map in 1949 but they persist in wiping Palestine off the map and the Islamic identity of modern Jerusalem with countless human rights violations, they do not heed the calls of their biggest aid donor the US to make peace, Israel is quickly becoming one of the most hated states in the world and Im afraid when the US can no long be their financial backbone they will quickly fall into oblivion as the pariah state that they are, that is unless they learn when their luck has been pushed and learn when to make a compromise. No sort of supremacism will be accepted in this day and age, no matter how much double think propaganda the corporatist and zionist media feeds us. Humanity and its hollistic ideals always win out in the end.