Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, and its mosque, founded in 972 A.D., have represented the authoritative, Vatican-like pinnacle of Sunni Islamic religious education since the beginning of the late 13th century Mamluk reign in Egypt. At a recent March, 2025 Ramadan event in front of Al-Azhar’s mosque, celebrating its founding, Muslims were reminded of the words of the famous 16th century Egyptian Muslim scholar al-Haytami (d. 1567), “There is no spot on the face of the earth that has gathered as many scholars and righteous people as Al-Azhar.”
An ugly, but equally important “reminder” to another gathering of Muslims in front of Al-Azhar—and Muslims worldwide—occurred recently on “the 7th night of the blessed month of Ramadan,” Thursday, March 6, 2025. Sheikh Reda Al-Sioufi chose not to recite any Qur’anic reference to Ramadan (see Qur’an 2:183; 2;184; 2:185). Instead, the good Sheikh intoned, gratuitously, a Ramadan-unrelated central Antisemitic verse from the Qur’an, 5:82, which opens by telling Muslims, “You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers [to be] the Jews.”
The insidious persuasive power of Qur’an 5:82 to animate Muslim hatred of Jews has been acknowledged by Muslim and non-Muslim observers, alike, across a millennium, since the mid-9th century A.D. This is unsurprising given how Muslims have been taught to understand 5:82 by Islam’s leading Qur’anic commentators, both classical and contemporary, including the major modern Qur’anic scholar, and late Al-Azhar University Grand Imam—Islam’s near “Papal equivalent”—Muhammad Tantawi (d. 2010).
Key extracts from Tantawi’s authoritative modern Qur’anic commentary on Quran 5:82, demonstrate his unambiguously hateful interpretation, confirming the views of classical commentators:
“The Almighty’s (Allah’s) words, ‘You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers to be the Jews’…is a statement that serves, in continuation, to reinforce other verses that preceded it, verses that documented the many despicable characteristics, and crooked and cunning ways of the Jews… Their enmity is rooted in envy, spite, stubbornness, and pride. Once these vices overcome the soul, it will not be able to find the way to the righteous path and the true religion (Islam).”
Tantawi’s immediate successor, and still current Al-Azhar Grand Imam, Ahmed al-Tayeb, offered his own timeless, similarly malevolent observations regarding Qur’an 5:82, during an interview on Egyptian national television, May 5, 2017:
“[T]hey (the Jews) professed animosity towards the Prophet Muhammad after his arrival…They did not merely profess their animosity. They took actual measures to thwart, kill, and bury the Islamic call in its infancy. The Qur’an says: ‘You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers to be the Jews’…. It is a historical fact that will never change… Even today… Look how we suffer at the hands of global Zionism and Judaism. The advent of Islam was 1,400 years ago, yet we still suffer from Jewish-Zionist interference in the affairs of the Muslims. This causes the Muslims great hardship.”
Far worse, both Tantawi (in 2002) and al-Tayeb (in 2007) independently sanctioned mass-murderous homicide bombing “martyrdom operations” against Israeli non-combatant civilians. Not surprisingly, during the combined 30-year tenures of these Grand Imams, including in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ 10/7/23 jihad carnage, till now, Al-Azhar has been an authoritative font of virulent Islamic Jew-hatred, and anti-Israel jihadism.
Former head of Al-Azhar’s religious fatwa (edict) committee, Sheikh Attiya Saqr, for example, in March, 2004, enumerated twenty groups of indelible, pejorative (and somewhat redundant) Qur’anic characteristics of Jews, replete with verse citations: [1] being liars, even concerning Allah, let alone non-Jews (3:75), sowers of war and corruption (5:64), and slayers of prophets (3:181), therefore consigned to hellfire (3:181); [2] enraptured listeners to lies, and distorters of the meaning of words, so they are disgraced in the corporeal world, and tormented in the afterworld (5:41); [3] disobeying Allah, breaking their covenant, and being hard-hearted and cursed (again; 5:13); [4] being disputatious and quarrelsome (2:247); [5] hiding the truth and supporting deception by “altering” the Qur’an (3:78); [6] rebelling against and rejecting prophetic guidance (2:55); [7] Satanic hypocrisy, directed at Muslims (2:14; 2:44); [8] denying prophethood and even killing other prophets (2:87); [9] misleading and wishing evil upon others (2:109); [10] despairing at others success, and rejoicing in their failure (3:120); [11] arrogantly proclaiming they are held in special favor by Allah (5:18); [12] being usurious and consuming others wealth (4:161); [13] being rude, vulgar, and disobedient in mocking Islam (4:46); [14] killing the innocent prophets unmercifully (and therefore having humiliation and poverty pitched upon them; 2:61); [15] hard-hearted, mercilessness (2:74); [16] never keeping oaths and being disbelievers (2:100); [17] rushing to commit sin and evil (5:79); [18] cowardice and obsessive love for the worldly (2:96; 59:13–14); [19] extreme miserliness (4:53); and [20] distorting the divine Qur’anic revelation (2:79).
The events of 10/7/23 did nothing to temper, even briefly, Al-Azhar’s attitudes towards Jews, or Israel. On 10/7/23, Al-Azhar celebrated the brutal jihad carnage of Hamas that day as “the resistance efforts of the proud Palestinian people.” Muhammad Omar Al-Qady, dean of Al-Azhar’s Faculty for Islamic & Arabic Studies, 10/17 and 10/18/23, on his Facebook account, praised the Hamas attackers and longed for the liquidation of the Jews, and their eternal perdition, referring to them as “the cursed descendants of apes and pigs (per Qur’an 5:60)… bring perdition upon the cursed (Qur’an 5:78) and treacherous (Jews), the murderers of prophets (Qur’an 2:61, 3:112.” Abbas Shuman, current inspector general of Al-Azhar’s Fatwa committees, at his Facebook account, 10/7/23, expressed support for Hamas’ terror attack earlier that day, and on October 18, 2023 “rejoiced” over “the demise of the descendants of apes and pigs (Qur’an 5:60).” By Oct 19, 2023, Al-Azhar issued a formal “fatwa,” declaring that “Zionist settlers,” i.e., all Israeli Jews in its parlance, were legitimate targets of jihad. Grand Imam al-Tayeb, following the collapse of Syria into a jihadist morass, denounced, on 12/10/24, “Zionists/Zionism” (whom he routinely conflates with all Jews/Judaism) as a “cancer” that must be prevented from “spread” into “the Arab Muslim body…limb by limb”
Al-Azhar trains Muslim clerics from across the world, who fan out and preach to local communities, including within the West. Predictably, analyses of Western European and U.S. mosque sermons, both before and since 10/7/23, demonstrate the extensive use of the same Antisemitic Qur’anic themes promulgated by Al-Azhar as a rationale for jihad terror against Israel, and Jews, generally.
This relentless—and ubiquitous—inculcation of “sacralized” Islamic Jew-hatred to Muslim communities has engendered a global pandemic of disproportionate Muslim Antisemitism captured, repeatedly, by Anti-Defamation League (ADL) surveys, for two decades, ongoing. ADL’s simple, elegant survey instrument defines “Extreme Antisemitism,” as agreement with at least 6/11 Antisemitic stereotypes, and determines its prevalence in nation states, or among religious groups within nations. As summarized in the tables, predominantly Muslim nations, and Muslim populations within Western societies, display a gross excess prevalence of Antisemitism. Currently, the world’s 19 most Antisemitic countries are Muslim predominant, where the prevalence of “Extreme Antisemitism” ranges from a “low” of 64% to a high of 97%–including 96% in the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, long ballyhooed for its alleged “tolerant” Islam! Moreover, the Muslim diaspora population prevalence of “Extreme Antisemitism” in Western European nations, and the U.S., is 2- to 4-fold higher relative to Christians, or non-Muslims in aggregate. Ominously, in France, which harbors Western Europe’s largest Muslim population, 2023 survey data indicated 62% of French Muslims were extremely Antisemitic.
These hard ADL data on the excess occurrence of Muslim Antisemitism, have been independently validated by other survey findings, and complemented by reams of evidence documenting authoritative Islamic religious Antisemitism preached globally. Yet tragically, without exception, these basic facts, so critical to understanding and combating modern Antisemitism, are scrupulously avoided at the endless procession of seminars, conferences, and even government hearings on Antisemitism, that presently clutter the post-10/7/23 landscape. Why is such obvious denial rampant? In a mendaciously recast, and now cynically exploited word, “Islamophobia.”
The late renowned Dutch scholar of Islam Hans Jansen, reminded us that the Qur’an, for example 8:60, the verse alluded to in the Muslim Brotherhood emblem (and other like verses, such as 8:12, and 3:151), commands Muslims to instill fear of Islam, “Islamophobia,” into the hearts of non-Muslims, by any means necessary, to force them to submit to Islam’s hegemony. Islam’s prophet Muhammad, in a canonical tradition, reiterated this directive, “I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy).” Deemed one of Islam’s pre-eminent intellectuals, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) was a jurist, philosopher, and historian and an alleged “inspiration” for modern sociology. In his monumental “Muqaddimah,” (“An Introduction to History”), Ibn Khaldun cites Muhammad’s canonical hadith, as a key explanation for the lightning, if brutal, early Muslim jihad conquests: “[O]ne understands Muhammad’s statement: ‘I was helped (been made victorious) through the terror (that befell the enemy).’ (The same fact explains) Muhammad’s victory with small numbers over the polytheists during his lifetime, and the victories of the Muslims during the Muslim conquests after (Muhammad’s death). Allah took care of His Prophet. He threw terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. (That terror,) eventually, seized control over their hearts, and they fled. (This, then, was) a miracle wrought by Allah’s Messenger. Terror in the hearts of their enemies was why there were so many routs during the Muslim conquests.” Contemporary validation of this principle of jihad as described by Ibn Khaldun, and rooted in the Qur’an, i.e., to terrorize the enemies of the Muslims as a prelude to their conquest, has been provided in the mainstream Pakistani text on jihad warfare by Brigadier S.K. Malik. Qur’anic jihad terror, Malik argues, “struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself.” He concludes, “ Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge.” Lastly, Al-Azhar Grand Imam Tantawi’s interpretation of Qur’an 8:60 cajoled modern Muslims for having “abandoned this noble verse,“ and “neglecting this obligation,” namely “to prepare to terrorize the enemy,” with “everything that makes the believers strong, such as preparing trained armies and various weapons that differ according to time and place.”
Alarmingly, Muslims were out in force amongst infidel Jews, fulfilling this “sacred” obligation to instill terror, in the orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park, Brooklyn, New York, during the evening of February 18, 2025. From the middle of a street, within this deliberately targeted iconic Jewish neighborhood, a Muslim “prayer” leader bellowed a supplication to Allah for a jihad genocide of Jews: “Oh Allah, annihilate the plundering Zionists. Oh Allah, annihilate the criminal Zionists. Oh Allah, kill them one by one, count them one by one, and do not leave a single one of them.”
Even such egregious incidents occur almost unnoticed, and certainly without swift and broad condemnation by ADL and similar “Jewish advocacy” organizations, because the true Islamic doctrinal and historical meaning of Islamophobia has undergone an Orwellian transformation. ADL, other similar Jewish organizations, and our media and political elites, cower in submission to the cultural jihadist dictates of the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood front groups (such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations) which dominate institutional American Islam, and now claim “Islamophobia” is an unwarranted, even discriminatory fear of Muslims and their creed. This self-imposed American (especially Jewish American) “omerta,” extends further to presentations on Antisemitism that axiomatically exclude the remarkably consistent global data—most prominently ADL’s—revealing our era’s pandemic of grossly disproportionate Muslim Antisemitism. As a corollary, these same presentations also ignore the ceaseless recitation of virulent Antisemitic themes from Islam’s major teaching institutions, like Al-Azhar, to local community mosques, that stoke this uniquely Muslim pandemic.
Interviewed for a 2019 documentary on American Muslim Jew-hatred, Middle East Media Research Institute director, and fluent Arabic linguist, Yigal Carmon, referred bluntly to the “jihadist conversations of the antisemitic Islam,” taking root, unopposed, in the U.S., and its Islamic textual basis: “A lot of the hatred against the Jews has turned into really violent threats, based on Islamic texts.” Carmon further warned that violent acts of Jew-hatred perpetrated by Muslims in the U.S. could reach a Western European scale, “If there isn’t an awakening, and resistance against this.” He also condemned the feckless inaction of a Jewish community unwilling to identify, and combat, the Islamic religious origins of this Jew-hatred, because it is paralyzed by fears the “Islamophobia” smear: “The Jewish community, which are direct victims and direct targets of these [Islamic religious] incitements are afraid to do something [i.e., about the religious incitement, specifically]. Not a protest, no public activity, nothing at all. They are afraid to be thought of as Islamophobic.”
Nearly a quarter century ago, my dear mentors, the historians David Littman, and Gisele Littman (pen name, Bat Ye’or) were set upon by cowardly Georgetown University Jewish students who had invited them to lecture about Islam’s impact on non-Muslim rights, when Muslim students objected to the Littmans’ evidence-based discussions. David Littman, in his mellifluous British-accented voice gave an apt warning to the Jewish students, unheeded then, and largely still unheeded by American Jews, and their “leadership,” now: “If you continue to behave this way, you’ll perish!”
