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Jihad and Jew-Hatred
Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11
by Matthias Küntzel
Telos, 180 pp., $29.95
Army of Shadows
Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948
by Hillel Cohen
California, 352 pp., $29.95
Hitler's New Disorder
The Second World War in Yugoslavia
by Stevan K. Pavlowitch
Columbia, 256 pp., $34.50
The German historian Matthias Küntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred is an
important contribution to the analysis of radical Islam. Like Paul
Berman's Terror and Liberalism (2003), but with greater attention to
historical detail, Jihad and Jew-Hatred argues that present-day Islamist
extremism is, in great part, directly imitative of Nazism and other
European fascist movements. Also like Berman, Küntzel appears to have
crafted his discourse to appeal to Western liberals and leftists for
whom fascism was anathema.
Further, as with Terror and Liberalism, Jihad and Jew-Hatred is
concerned with the political aspects of Muslim radicalism rather than
its theological background, or alleged justifications, in Wahhabism and
other fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. Küntzel, echoing Berman,
correctly assumes that, in the longer scheme of Islamic history, radical
interpretations are newer rather than older, and modern rather than
ancient. Islamist extremism is also utopian rather than conservative,
and reformist or "purificationist," rather than traditional. All these
insights should be implicit in any serious discussion of Islamofascism.
Unlike Berman, however, Küntzel concentrates on that aspect of
radical Islamist ideology with the highest profile in the West: Muslim
Jew-baiting. Not all Muslim radicals have selected the Jews or Israel as
a single or even main enemy. Extremists claiming the legacy of Muhammad
find the greatest number of their victims among Muslims who do not
accept their interpretation--only then followed by the believers in
other faiths, including Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus, as well as
Jews and the nonreligious.
Still, Küntzel finds a rationale for his own focus on the Egyptian
Muslim -Brotherhood, or Ikhwan--as Berman did before him. Founded in
1928 by a then-obscure figure called Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim
Brotherhood proclaimed the revival of an imaginary original purity in
religion, asserting that a diluted and distorted Muslim devotion had
undermined Islamic resistance to European imperialism. Yet the Muslim
Brotherhood was modernistic in its reaction against modernity, adopting
the characteristics of competing leftist and rightist militias in
Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. It flourished as an aggressive,
paramilitary formation, and established a network in the Arab East,
India, Turkey, and Indonesia. While some of these branches were no more
than fantasies typical of radical conspiracies, the Muslim Brotherhood
did become an open ally of Hitler in seeking enhanced German influence
in the Islamic world.
Decades later, its Palestinian wing gave birth to Hamas, one of its
most successful offshoots, and it has grown very powerful in many Muslim
countries.
The Muslim Brotherhood introduced an innovation to the concept of
jihad in which civil/political organization assumed priority over
military action. While it has been common in Islam to distinguish
between a "lesser jihad" of armed combat and a "greater jihad" of
spiritual discipline, the Brotherhood looked toward an entirely novel
"third jihad." This entry into the world of ordinary politics was a
predictable development in an Egypt governed within the British Empire.
(The failure of the 1857 Indian mutiny against the British similarly
gave rise to the fundamentalist Deoband school of Islam, which
eventually produced the Taliban in Afghanistan.) The Muslim
Brotherhood's third jihad also found imitators in Iran.
Unfortunately, the political jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood,
replacing military means, has fooled some Western commentators into
support for the jihad of the ballot over the bullet, with arguments for
Western accommodation of the Brotherhood as well as the disastrous
welcome granted Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian general election. The
principle of a third, political jihad is also visible in radical
Islamist agitation in some Western countries, including the demand for
introduction of sharia law in Britain. While there are differences in
tactics between the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, and Iran's president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, their aim--a purificationist Islamic state--remains
identical.
Still, distinctions persist in the universe of radical Islam, and
should be neither ignored nor exaggerated. While the Muslim Brotherhood
doubtless embodies a nearly undiluted political Islam, Saudi Wahhabism
and Pakistani-Afghan Deobandism (mainly seeking influence in the
religious life of Muslims) also have recourse to politics through the
Saudi monarchy, the "emirate" of the Taliban, and in its most virulent
form, the terrorism of al Qaeda. In addition, the Khomeini regime in
Iran has long provided the quintessential realization of this third
jihad.
Küntzel has performed an exhaustive search through German sources to
establish the links between the Third Reich and the Muslim Brotherhood,
and the various forms of propaganda employed by each. He has emphasized
the appeal of Nazism to Arab subjects of the British, and the general
spread of political radicalism in the Middle East as seen in the
secularist Baath movement in Syria and Iraq. Finally, he has given
considerable attention to a prominent figure, Haj Amin al--Husseini
(1895-1974), who was appointed the grand mufti of Jerusalem by the
British but became a notorious German agent and anti-Jewish figure in
the Middle East.
Much of this material has been previously worked over by
historians, but Küntzel has rendered a service in presenting
this fresh summary. You have to wonder whether the
liberals/leftists to whom his work is addressed have not become
too compromised to pay serious attention to him, through their
alliance with isolationists, neofascists, and Islamists, and
their opposition to the global democratization of the Bush
administration--and, especially, the Iraq war. But Küntzel makes
several important points that will be unfamiliar to many Western
readers. One is that the Muslim Brotherhood's hostility to Jews
was novel in Egypt, which had a history of good relations among
Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Another point is that,
notwithstanding broad Palestinian Arab opposition to Zionism,
many village sheikhs in today's West Bank opposed anti-Jewish
campaigns in the 1920s and signed petitions favoring increasing
Jewish immigration.
In dealing with this issue Küntzel cites the important work
of Hillel Cohen in Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration
with Zionism, 1917-1948, which has just appeared in English.
Cohen's book is a treasury of data suggesting new approaches to
the history of Arab-Jewish relations. His work is epitomized by
one stunning disclosure: In 1947-48, while the Grand Mufti al-Husseini
and others called for Arab war against the new state of Israel,
Palestinian "Arabs were in no hurry" to join the battle: "Only a
minority of Arabs were involved in offensive activities," writes
Cohen. "This unwillingness to fight was frequently buttressed by
agreements with Jews in nearby settlements." The main Arab
leader in Baqa al-Gharbiya, for example, offered a peace
agreement to the Jewish settlements in his district--and Baqa
today is home to the Al-Qasemi Academy, a Muslim school and
college organized on the spiritual principles of Sufism.
Drawing, like Küntzel, on official sources, Cohen reveals a
substantial Muslim record of cooperation with Jewish immigrants
to Palestine. And his style is more precise, as well as less
polemical, than that of Küntzel, who occasionally falls into
minor factual or interpretative errors. (Küntzel recycles a
commonly accepted canard that Amin al-Husseini was a significant
figure in recruitment of a Waffen SS unit in Axis-occupied
Bosnia-Herzegovina during World War II.)
Stevan K. Pavlowitch, a leading historian of the Balkans, has
never been accused of understating the crimes of the Germans and
their collaborators in Yugoslavia. Hitler's New Disorder, like
Küntzel and Cohen, benefits from new access to archives.
Pavlowitch notes that Bosnians were exhorted by al-Husseini to
volunteer for the German armed forces, but those who did were
sent for training to southern France, where they mutinied, and
their distaste for Nazi mobilization was backed up by a series
of declarations by Bosnian Muslim clerics protesting German
atrocities.
The practical lesson of all three of these volumes is that
recent archival work will redefine many historical presumptions.
(In this way they join Robert Satloff's useful Among the
Righteous, which touches on opposition to Nazi anti-Jewish
crimes among Arab Muslims in North Africa during the Holocaust,
and which was reviewed by Roger Kaplan in the Jan. 1, 2007
WEEKLY STANDARD.) But the important consequence of this new
historiography is a recognition that Islam is neither monolithic
nor uniformly radical, providing hope that the "clash of
civilizations" may be avoided, and the "long war" against terror
shortened--and won.
Stephen Schwartz's latest book, The Other Islam: Sufism and
the Road to Global Harmony, will be published by Doubleday this
summer.
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