Link to pdf version: Ed Husain – National Conservatism Conference Washington 2024 
Ed Husain is a former jihadist member of the Islamic Caliphate revival organization Hizb ut Tahrir , founded by the Al-Azhar University educated Palestinian Muslim sharia judge, Taqiuddin al-Nabhani. Husain disavowed Hizb ut Tahrir, “de-radicalized,” chronicled his experience, and then created the “anti-Islamist extremism” British organization, The Quilliam Society.
Perhaps the most basic question about Mr. Husain’s alleged metamorphosis, which was never addressed, let alone resolved, is why he chose to name his so-called “Muslim anti-Islamist extremism organization”—The Quilliam Society (since disbanded)—after a lunatic, late 19th century British convert to Islam. William “Abdullah” Quilliam, appointed “Sheikh ul-Islam of the British Isles” by Ottoman Caliph Abdul Hamid II, and namesake for Husain’s organization, championed the bloody Sudanese Mahdist state’s jihad against the “infidel” (including the infidel British), and the maintenance of a global Islamic Caliphate, with the application of Western liberty-abrogating Islamic Law, the “sharia.” Indeed, Quilliam admonished Muslims (in his March 24, 1896 “fatwa” or religious ruling) that any support whatsoever of “infidel” British soldiers fighting the Sudanese Mahdist state was “contrary to the Sharia.”
Mr. Husain is slated to speak on a panel entitled, “Islam, Israel, and the West,” at the July 8-10, 2024 National Conservativism Conference, “a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute founded in January 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.” A triumphal Husain crowed about this invitation at his twitter/X account, especially the opportunity, as he saw it, to hector (the potentially gullible enough) conservative audience with his divisive pet canards:
“Come and join the conversation on why Islam is not Islamism. Why the West and Islam should be allies. Why the far-right and far-left threaten civilization. Discussing Islam, Islamism, Israel and the West at @NatConTalk in Washington.”
Notwithstanding many other unresolved questions about his ideology, and related pursuits over the past ~17-years—to be addressed further, herein—Mr. Husain’s vicious, openly avowed Anti-Zionism makes him a grotesque ideological mismatch for this conference.
Yoram Hazony, Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, is a respected contemporary scholar of nationalism, broadly, and Zionism—Jewish nationalism—specifically. Mr. Hazony and his co-editors for the 2006 compendium, New Essays On Zionism, described the concrete manifestation of Zionism, Israel, in their Foreword, as follows:
“Though Jews have always lived in their historical homeland, it was not until the second half of the 20th century that a large part of the Jewish people returned to settle in the land of Israel. There they built major cities—Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheva, and Jerusalem—a social and economic infrastructure, national institutions of culture and education, and democratic system of government. They also built a sovereign state, the State of Israel, created in 1948 and subsequently recognized by most of the nations of the world. Today, Israel is home to the world’s largest Jewish community. It maintains a vibrant, free press, a diverse and dynamic culture, and a powerful citizen army. After two thousand years of statelessness, the Jewish people have achieved a vital national home.”
In juxtaposition, during June, 2007 Ed Husain’s The Guardian oped diatribe was punctuated by these nauseating immoral equivalences between Zionism and Jihadism (“Islamism”):
“Zionism and Islamism are both political perversions of ancient Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Islam…. Disregard for the sanctity of human life is a hallmark of both Zionism and Islamism…Just as Israel is an expansionist state which remains in occupation of the Golan Heights, Islamists plan for a state that would have an occupying army to support ever-expanding borders Just as Zionists claim territory based on notions of ‘Jewish land’ and God-given rights, Islamists wish to reconquer India and Spain as ‘Muslim land,’ once ruled by Muslim monarchs…Zionists have achieved their state; Islamists are busy trying out every conceivable option to bring their dream Zion to fruition. For centuries, Jewish people said ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ and for decades for now, Islamists have been repeating ‘Caliphate by next Ramadan.’ Behind every single world event, from the Holocaust to 9/11, Arab Islamists blamed a global Zionist conspiracy. Similarly, in Jewish circles, Zionists from Binyamin Netanyahu to Daniel Pipes have made careers out of lambasting Islamists. But are Islamists and Zionists really all that different, despite their blatant enmity? I think not.”
Now seventeen years later, Husain has never published a formal mea culpa, categorical renunciation of this vile commentary.
Within 8-months of founding the Quilliam Society (May, 2008) the organization issued an inflammatory, libelous press release, accompanied by Husain’s like-minded The Guardian oped. The press release accused Israel (which was responding to unprovoked Hamas jihad terrorism emanating from their recently founded Gaza Palestinian Muslim sharia statelet) of “murdering Palestinians en masse,” and committing “atrocities,” during “inhumane operations.” Husain’s oped regurgitated ahistorical pious Muslim tropes denying the living, nearly 14 century legacy of jihad in historical Palestine, conjoined to pure calumny, and the threat of “re-thinking” his alleged (grudging?) support of “Israel’s right to exist”:
“I’ve sat in homes of poor, hospitable Palestinians who still yearn to return to their homeland, taken by force from them in the turmoil after Britain hurriedly left Palestine in 1948…At schools across the Arab world children are taught about the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. Here in Britain, we might want to forget this imperial past, but ask any Arab and they will reel off these dates and confirm Britain’s involvement in creating Israel. As a country, we have a moral duty to right our historical wrongs. We helped create Israel. We must now help create a Palestine…I’ve spoken out in support of Israel’s right to exist But Israel’s cold, politically timed killing of more than 300 Palestinians makes me, and millions more, rethink our attitude towards Israel”
British Journalist Melanie Phillips, originally supportive of Husain’s “reformist” efforts, and even willing to overlook his earlier Anti-Zionist vitriol, at last took his measure, responding in The Spectator:
“If Ed Husain were really interested in de-radicalizing Britain’s Muslims, he would tell them that they have been fed a diet of incendiary lies and blood libels about Israel and the Jews, and that justice demands they are taught instead the truth. But instead, he has now adopted the very narrative and rhetoric that are driving Muslims to mass murder.”
Phillips’ blunt, succinct deconstruction of Ed Husain was preceded by the lengthy and detailed intellectual evisceration Husain experienced at the hands of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, during their November 20, 2007 formal public debate. The Ali-Husain series of exchanges are worth reading in full, but here is a pathognomonic sample:
[Ali]: “unless we start to scrutinize the principles and the morality that Muhammed left behind, then we cannot compete and consistently debate with someone like bin Laden. For me to remain a Muslim and to follow the moral guidance of the Prophet Muhammed, and to say ‘no’ to what bin Laden is inviting me to, is to create a cognitive dissonance that many, many Muslims have shown that they cannot live with. They’ve either gone mad, they have become very complacent and keep quiet and do not take part in the debate, or they get into a sense of contradiction, and I saw that contradiction within you… So I see no difference between Islam and Islamism – Islam defined as submission to the will of Allah. And then, where do you find that will of Allah? You find it in the Quran, it is called the Revelation, and with Muhammed as a moral guide to that in the hadith – that Islam, if it is practiced as it is written in the book, then that is Islam… I have not seen, I’ve not heard you actually say, that the Prophet Muhammed was wrong, for instance, in marrying a nine-year-old child.”
[Husain]: “…that the Prophet Muhammed married a girl who was nine years old – he didn’t.”
[Ali]: “…the Prophet did not marry a nine-year old: he married a six-year-old… According to the traditions (hadith; see below) – and there is consistency on that – she was six, and he consummated the marriage when she was nine years old.”
Canonical Islamic traditions of Muhammad from Islam’s two most exalted hadith collections, the “Two Sahihs,” (“Sahih”= “sound”) Muslim and Bukhari, validate what Ali maintained, despite Husain’s emphatic, if mendacious denial.
[Sahih al-Bukhari 5158]: “Narrated Ursa: The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death).”
[Sahih Muslim 1422c]: “Aisha (Allah be pleased with her) reported that Allah’s Apostle (May peace be upon him) married her when she was seven years old, and she was taken to his house as a bride when she was nine, and her dolls were with her; and when he (the Holy Prophet) died she was eighteen years old.”
For a decade after Ed Husain’s November, 2007 debate thrashing by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she remained Husain’s bête noire, as can be gleaned from his gratuitous, ad hominem attacks on her at his twitter/X-account:
Sep 17, 2012: “Keep it in the family. Niall Ferguson bashes Obama, and his wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali slams all Muslims.”
Mar 26, 2015: “Ayaan Hirsi Ali releases another vile book attacking Islam and Muslims.”
Mar 26, 2015: “Insulting the Prophet, calling for a ‘war on Islam’, denigrating all religions, what credibility @Ayaan for ‘reform’ of Islam? Opportunism.”
Mar 27, 2015: “.@Ayaan You are a gift to ISIS. The House of Islam is on fire, and you are actively helping it burn, not reform.”
Ed Husain also briefly lionized two Muslim theologians—one classical, al-Ghazali (d. 1111), and one contemporary, Ayatollah Sistani (b. 1930-)—in his 2007 debate with Ms. Ali.
“Imam Ghazali—who codified objectives of the sharia [Islamic law]. Sharia is there to honor life, honor religion, reason and property.”
“Someone like Ayatollah Sistani has a lot of clout and kudos among ground-level Shias throughout the Middle East, and is able to call back people from all sorts of horrible things, not least attacking American troops, simply because he is a mujtahid [authoritative cleric] who is respected.”
Both characterizations are typical of Husain’s completely bowdlerized approach to actual Islamic doctrine, and its major purveyors, past as prologue.
Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) was a renowned theologian, jurist, and “Sufi mystic.” His early training was as a Muslim jurist, and he continued to have an interest in jurisprudence throughout his career, writing a work, the Wajiz, dated 1101, i.e., in the last decade of his life. The eminent Islamic scholar W.M. Watt stresses Al-Ghazali’s Muslim orthodoxy. Watt maintains that Al-Ghazali was,
…acclaimed in both the East and West as the greatest Muslim after Muhammad, and he is by no means unworthy of that dignity…He brought orthodoxy and mysticism into closer contact…the theologians became more ready to accept the mystics as respectable, while the mystics were more careful to remain within the bounds of orthodoxy.
Al-Ghazali, a Sufi orthodox Muslim, and follower of the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, wrote this about jihad war, and the treatment of the vanquished non-Muslim dhimmi peoples, in the Wajiz:
[O]ne must go on jihad (i.e., warlike razzias or raids) at least once a year…one may use a catapult against them [non-Muslims] when they are in a fortress, even if among them are women and children. One may set fire to them and/or drown them…If a person of the Ahl al-Kitab [People of The Book — primarily Jews and Christians] is enslaved, his marriage is [automatically] revoked…One may cut down their trees…One must destroy their useless books. Jihadists may take as booty whatever they decide…they may steal as much food as they need…[T]he Dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle…Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the Jizyah [poll tax on non-Muslims]…on offering up the Jizyah, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the Dhimmi] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the mandible]… They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or church bells…their houses may not be higher than the Muslim’s, no matter how low that is. The Dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddle [-work] is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the Dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths…[Dhimmis] must hold their tongue…
Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Sistani (1930-) was, and remains, by non-Muslim standards, a fanatical, if traditionalist, Shi’ite cleric. Political scientist, and former University President John Agresto, wrote a poignant, and sympathetic, yet brutally honest memoir of the 9-months (September, 2003 to June, 2004) he spent in Iraq working as then Ambassador Paul Bremer’s senior advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. Agresto, who had direct dealings with Sistani, provided this hardboiled (and since proven correct) assessment of the Iraqi Grand Ayatollah:
“We insisted that the Ayatollah Sistani was surely a ‘moderate’ and a friend to civil and religious liberty despite all the hard evidence to the contrary. The Ayatollah Sistani is bent on establishing a theocracy not far removed from that found in Iran. He is an open antisemite and a not-too-subtle anti-Christian. He threw his support behind democratic elections because they were the handy vehicles for imposing religious authority all over Iraq.
Consistent with his “Shi’ite traditionalism,” Sistani is also a promoter of the Shi’ite doctrine of physical, but also spiritual impurity, or “najis.” From the pious Shi’ite perspective, the combined physical and spiritual impurity of non-Muslims required that bizarre and humiliating practices be directed at non-Muslims, historically, when they lived under the jurisdiction of Shi’ite Islamic law. From his own website, Sistani lists 10 things that are “intrinsically” impure. The 8th item, after, among other things, urine, feces, dogs, and pigs, is the “disbeliever,” i.e., “kafir,” or non-Muslim.
Although Ed Husain now intones a different tune, through at least 2014, he had no qualms about cajoling Israel into negotiating with the jihad terror organization Hamas, arguing for example August 5th, and 8th, 2014:
[8/5/2014]: “Hamas must be brought in. If we fail to bring in Hamas…then we must prepare for an enemy who is worse: Salafi Jihadis.”
[8/8/2014]: “Just did BBC World TV interview on Gaza. Flawed to dismiss Hamas as only a terrorist group. More complex. Israel needs Hamas for peace.”
Mr. Husain’s current Weltanschauung (here; here) perseverates on Hamas in an entirely pejorative manner. Husain reaches his broader “conclusions” about “Islam vs. Islamism,” however, through a toxic amalgam of doctrinal and historical negationism. His roseate fantasy versions of classical and modern authoritative, institutional Islam, and Muslim history, do not withstand the barest scrutiny. Nevertheless, sadly, as Husain’s invitation to speak at NATCON 4 demonstrates, even conservative “thought leaders” have an appetite for such glibly packaged, soothing, if counterfactual, drivel.
What follows is a critical analysis of Ed Husain’s 11/10/23 Wall Street Journal oped, “The Theology of Hamas”, since it elucidates his present views concisely. Particular attention is paid to what Husain states, or does not state about what he deems, uniquely, to be “Hamas’ theology,” or its alleged antithesis as embodied for Husain by Abdullah bin Bayyah. Ed Husain’s fervent, if dishonest effort to divorce the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas from classical and modern, authoritative Islam ignores serious scholarship on the Muslim Brotherhood, and the basic contents of Hamas’ foundational covenant, which is larded with appropriately contextualized citations from the Qur’an and hadith. Husain’s passing allusion to Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin attending Al Azhar University, the pinnacle of authoritative Sunni Islamic religious education since the late 12th century (and where Yassin allegedly joined the Muslim Brotherhood), is another significant thread Husain refuses to follow with intellectual honesty. In a similar vein, Husain’s hagiographic references to bin Bayyah, ignore his enduring affiliation with late Muslim Brotherhood “Spiritual Guide,” Yusuf al-Qaradawi (whom bin Bayyah fawned over in 2008, and as recently as October, 2011), and bin Bayyah’s “restraint” as current Head of the UAE Fatwa Council, following Hamas’ actions October 7, 2023. Whether out of deliberately selective omission (due to deceit and/or embarrassment), or willful ignorance, Husain negates all the authoritative, canonical roots of Hamas’ (and the Muslim Brotherhood’s) jihadism and Jew-hatred. He conjoins this doctrinal negationism (and the negation of its tragic accompanying nearly 14-century historical legacy), to a failure to even consider the ongoing global pandemic of virulent Muslim Jew-hatred documented repeatedly by independent, respected non-Muslim and Muslim pollsters, for the past two decades, till now.
These extensive extracts from Husain’s oped are provided since it is behind a pay wall:
[Husain]: “Hamas isn’t only a terrorist group, and it isn’t a Palestinian nationalist movement. It is a religious organization, incubated by the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, founded in 1928, departed from Islamic tradition and created Islamism, a totalitarian ideology to resist the pluralist West. Its worldview, as French political scientist Gilles Kepel has documented, arose in the same intellectual firmament as German Nazism and Italian fascism. The Brotherhood developed a new declaration of faith for its members: ‘God (Allah) is our objective. The Prophet is our political leader. The Quran is our constitution. Jihad is our method. Martyrdom is our aspiration.’ No Muslim before the 20th century would have belittled his faith’s sacred text by regarding it as a political manifesto… When Ahmed Yassin left Al-Azhar University in Cairo and founded Hamas in Gaza in 1987, the group’s members placed their hands on the Quran and declared: “I promise to be a good Muslim in defending Islam and the lost land of Palestine.” Theology is central to Hamas’s charter, which declares that “Islam will destroy Israel” and that because “Palestine is an Islamic land,” it is the “individual duty of every Muslim” to liberate it. Hamas calls “the land of Palestine” a waqf, an Islamic endowment. These teachings would have been alien to Muslims who coexisted with Jews for 12 centuries. Hamas envisages a future Palestine that is judenrein, or cleansed of Jews. Article 7 of its charter declares: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’… Hamas’s theology justifies its terrorism. “The so-called peace process is futile,” Hamas leader Khaled Mashal said in 2015. ‘There is no peace. Only the path of jihad, sacrifice and blood.’… Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, among the highest authorities in global Sunni Islam, has used scriptural arguments against suicide bombings and made religious arguments for including Jews and Christians in Muslim societies.”
Jihad terror and martyrdom during jihad campaigns are quintessential to Islam. They are not a modern “departure from Islamic tradition,” somehow concocted by the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas, under the thrall of the nefarious “intellectual firmament” created by “German Nazism and Italian Fascism.” Qur’an 8:60 states, “And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy and others besides them whom you do not know [but] whom Allah knows.” This motif—instilling terror in non-Muslims—is repeated in verses such as 3:151 and 8:12:
3:151 “We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve for what they have associated with Allah of which He had not sent down [any] authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers.”
8:12 “[Remember] when your Lord inspired to the angels, “I am with you, so strengthen those who have believed. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved, so strike [them] upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip.”
Islam’s prophet Muhammad is the idealized role model for Muslims (Qur’an 33:6). Muhammad was the prototype jihadist, whose Muslim forces attacked and subdued the Jews (and Christians) of northern Arabia, He extolled jihad terror and martyrdom during jihad campaigns. Muhammad reiterates the Qur’anic directive of instilling terror to facilitate Muslim conquest in the most important canonical hadith collection (Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220), stating, “I have been made victorious with terror.” Celebrating jihad martyrdom, Muhammad proclaimed (Sahih Bukhari Volume 4 Book 52 Number 54), “By Him in Whose Hands my life is! I would love to be martyred in Allah’s Cause and then get resurrected and then get martyred, and then get resurrected again and then get martyred and then get resurrected again and then get martyred.”
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) was a jurist, renowned philosopher, and historian who is also deemed one of Islam’s pre-eminent intellectuals and an alleged “inspiration” for modern sociology. In his monumental “Muqaddimah,” (“An Introduction to History”; translated by the great Islamologist, Franz Rosenthal) 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”
Incidentally despite Ed Husain’s unsupported claim in a November 2020 essay that Ibn Khaldun “rejected the notion of creating a caliphate,” here is what he stated candidly in Muqaddimah, about aggressive, offensive, open-ended jihad, “holy war,” as waged by—wait for it—the caliphate:
“In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the (Muslim) mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. Therefore, caliphate and royal authority are united in (Islam), so that the person in charge can devote the available strength to both of them at the same time. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defense.”
Contemporary validation of the principle of jihad terror rooted in the Qur’an—(for example, verses 3:151, 8:12,and 8:60), and described by Ibn Khaldun—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, originally published in Lahore, in 1979. Malik’s treatise was endorsed in a laudatory Foreword to the book by his patron, then Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq, as well as a more extended Preface by Allah Buksh K. Brohi, a former Advocate-General of Pakistan. This text—widely studied in Islamic countries, and available in English, Urdu, and Arabic—has been recovered from the bodies of slain jihadists in Kashmir. Brigadier Malik emphasizes how instilling terror is essential to waging successful jihad campaigns:
“Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. 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. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy (sic); it is the decision we wish to impose upon him… ‘Jihad,’ the Quranic concept of total strategy, demands the preparation and application of total national power and military instrument is one of its elements. As a component of the total strategy, the military strategy aims at striking terror into the hearts of the enemy from the preparatory stage of war”
Charles Wendell (d. 1982) an “erudite scholar” of Islamic culture, language, and intellectual developments in modern Egypt, in his translation of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna’s key treatises, described how the Muslim Brotherhood worldview was seamlessly connected to—and faithfully reflected—mainstream Islam:
“Hasan al-Banna’s fundamental conviction that Islam does not accept, or even tolerate, a separation of “church” and state, or of either from society, is as thoroughly Islamic as it can be. Any attempt to translate his movement into terms reducible to social, political, or religious factors exclusively simply misses the boat. The “totality” created by the Prophet Muhammad in the Medinese state, the first Islamic state, was Hasan’s unwavering ideal, and the ideal of all Muslim thinkers before him, including the idle dreamers in the mosque. His ideology then, before it was Egyptian or Arab or whatever, was Islamic to the core. Since it embraced all aspects of human life and thought, it was at least as much religious as anything else. Practically all of his arguments are shored up by frequent quotations from the Qur’an and the Traditions, quite in the style of his medieval forbears. If one considers the public to whom his writings were addressed, it becomes instantly apparent that such arguments must still be the most compelling for the vast bulk of the Muslim populations of today. The nagging feeling that Islam must, and very quickly at that, catch up with the West, had even by his time filtered down from above to the masses after having been the watchword of the modernizing intellectual for almost a century.” There was also the notion that all these Western sciences and techniques were originally adopted from Islamic culture, and were therefore merely “coming home”—a piece of self-conscious back-patting that was already a cliché of most Muslim political writing.
Ed Husain’s references to the Hamas covenant (or charter) ignore all its repeated Qur’anic citations. Moreover, although he quotes the covenant’s canonical hadith of Jew annihilation in article 7, Husain disingenuously fails to alert the reader that the words are not some malevolent “Hamas invention.” Despite the fact that the Hamas covenant states explicitly, “Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim”—language he omits—Husain refuses to provide the canonical hadith citations (i.e., from Bukhari and Muslim), and properly inform his audience.
Focus on Hamas’ covenant as a binding documentary record of the organization’s specific beliefs and goals is required because it expresses, unabashedly, as I will demonstrate, the same jihadism and Jew-hatred mainstream Islam inculcates. This indoctrination—sanctioned by Islam’s leading religious teaching institutions, and clerics—in turn animates, and unifies the global Muslim umma’s relentless efforts to destroy Israel as an autonomous state by jihad, and return Israel to Sharia jurisdiction.
The very first statement of Hamas’ foundational covenant, before the document’s pre-amble, features Qur’an 3:112. Here is the Sahih International translation of 3:112:
They have been put under humiliation [by Allah] wherever they are overtaken, except for a covenant from Allah and a rope from the Muslims. And they have drawn upon themselves anger from Allah and have been put under destitution. That is because they disbelieved in the verses of Allah and killed the prophets without right. That is because they disobeyed and [habitually] transgressed.
In classical and modern Qur’anic exegeses by seminal, authoritative Islamic theologians this central motif (repeated at Qur’an 2:61) is coupled to Qur’anic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). Muhammad himself repeats this Qur’anic curse in a canonical tradition or hadith, “He (Muhammad) then recited the verse (5:78): ‘…curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of Mary’”.
Annihilationist sentiments regarding Jews are also rooted in Islamic eschatology (end of times theology), and incorporated permanently into the foundational 1988 Hamas covenant. As characterized in the hadith (the words, deeds, and even unspoken gestures of Muhammad as ostensibly recorded by his earliest pious Muslim companions), Muslim eschatology highlights the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—or according to other traditions, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish. At his appearance, some traditions maintain that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered—everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharqad tree, as per the canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985) included in the 1988 Hamas covenant (in article 7). This hadith is cited in the covenant as a sacralized, obligatory call for a Muslim genocide of the Jews:
…the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to realize the promise of Allah, no matter how long it takes. The Prophet, Allah’s prayer and peace be upon him, says: “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985)
Apropos to its longstanding Islamic relevance, Ibn Kathir’s still widely used, authoritative 14th century Qur’anic commentary’s gloss on verses 4:155 through 4:159–which discusses Isa’s (the Muslim Jesus’) role in defeating the Dajjal, and his Jewish minions—also invokes this same apocalyptic canonical hadith of Jew annihilation. Such Judeo-centric Sunni eschatology has resonated, broadly, with an authoritative imprimatur, across Islamdom, for over a thousand years into the modern era, and even within the Muslim diaspora, before and since October 7, 2023. Hajj Amin El-Husseini, jihadist “Godfather” of the modern Palestinian Muslim movement, concluded his compendious 1937 discourse on Islam’s canonical Jew-hatred by reproducing Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985, and reiterating how the destruction of the Jews is requisite for ushering in the messianic times. The current Palestinian Authority Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hussein repeated this canonical tradition in a January 9, 2012 sermon. Subsequently, during a May 10, 2013 sermon at the mosque of Sunni Islam’s Vatican equivalent , Al-Azhar University, Muhammad Al-Mahdi, a senior scholar and head of the Sharia association at Al-Azhar also proclaimed the same end of times Jew-annihilating hadith. Such ignoble Jew-hating eschatological incitement by contemporary Palestinian and American clerics continued even in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Less than 2-weeks following the October 7th massacres, the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Religious Affairs posted guidelines for mosques Wednesday, October 18, 2023, at its Facebook page. Muslim preachers were instructed to include Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985 in their upcoming Friday sermons. Lastly, Colorado U.S. imam Karim Abu Zaid, is described as a “prolific author,” and “dynamic leader” within his suburban Denver community, with “a steadfast dedication to scholarly pursuits,” who is currently seeking a Ph.D. at The Islamic University of Minnesota. Imam Abu Zaid, in a November 10, 2023 Friday sermon streamed live on the Facebook page of the Colorado Muslims Community Center, extolled murderous jihad martyrdom operations, and “modernized” the canonical hadith of Jew-annihilation, as follows:
“Remember, one day Allah will give Muslims drones too – rocks. A rock, one day, will call upon the Muslim: ‘Come, behind me there is [a Jew].’ A drone, that is a drone. The rock will call a Muslim: ‘Come, he is behind me.’
Returning to the Hamas covenant, Article 28, which is free of any eschatological references, clearly “widens the circle of hate” towards Jews, as historian David Littman observed, targeting all contemporary Jews: “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Muslim people: ‘May the cowards never sleep.’” Articles 22 and 32 invoke modern conspiratorial themes reminiscent of European (secular) antisemitic motifs, especially the latter (article 32), which makes explicit mention of the Czarist Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. However, even these articles are peppered with Qur’anic citations, including references in both articles 22 and 32 to Qur’an 5:64, a sort of ancient antecedent of The Protocols. (Sahih International translation, Qur’an 5:64: And the Jews say, “The hand of Allah is chained.” Chained are their hands, and cursed are they for what they say. Rather, both His hands are extended; He spends however He wills. And that which has been revealed to you from your Lord will surely increase many of them in transgression and disbelief. And We have cast among them animosity and hatred until the Day of Resurrection. Every time they kindled the fire of war [against you], Allah extinguished it. And they strive throughout the land [causing] corruption, and Allah does not like corrupters.)
Jihad is the other pillar of Hamas’ foundational Jew-annihilationist ideology featured in the 1988 covenant. Once again, this is already suggested in the opening statement before the preamble which includes the following quote attributed to Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will exist, and will continue to exist, until Islam abolishes it, as it abolished that which was before it.” Hamas, it should be noted, claims to be a wing of the International Muslim Brotherhood. Article 2 of the Hamas covenant, for example, states: “The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times.”
The body of the Hamas Covenant includes unequivocal statements of Hamas’ eternal commitment to the annihilation of Israel via jihad. Jihad martyrdom is lauded in article 8 “the Hamas slogan,” which states, “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Qur’an its Constitution; Jihad is its path, and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” Article 13 makes plain that Hamas’ jihadism is completely incompatible with any meaningful Middle East peace settlement:
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that…There is no solution to the Palestinian question except by Jihad. All initiatives, proposals, and International Conferences are a waste of time and vain endeavors.
Finally, article 15 (subtitled, “Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine is a Personal Duty”) elucidates classical jihadist theory, including murder “martyrdom” operations (quoting the canonical hadith of Muhammad, cited earlier, Sahih Bukhari Volume 4 Book 52 Number 54), as well as their practical modern application to the destruction of Israel by jihad via a collective effort of the entire global Muslim umma:
The day the enemies conquer some part of the Muslim land, jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim. In the face of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, it is necessary to raise the banner of jihad. This requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally [in Palestine], in the Arab world and in the Islamic world. It is necessary to instill the spirit of jihad in the nation, engage the enemies and join the ranks of the jihad fighters. The indoctrination campaign must involve ulama, educators, teachers and information and media experts, as well as all intellectuals, especially the young people and the sheikhs of Islamic movements…It is necessary to establish in the minds of all the Muslim generations that the Palestinian issue is a religious issue, and that it must be dealt with as such, for [Palestine] contains Islamic holy places, [namely] the Al-Aqsa mosque, which is inseparably connected, for as long as heaven and earth shall endure, to the holy mosque of Mecca through the Prophet’s nocturnal journey [from the mosque of Mecca to the Al-Aqsa mosque] and through his ascension to heaven thence. “Being stationed on the frontier for the sake of Allah for one day is better than this [entire] world and everything in it; and the place taken up in paradise by the [horseman’s] whip of any one of you [jihad fighters] is better than this [entire] world and everything in it. Every evening [operation] and morning [operation] performed by Muslims for the sake of Allah is better than this [entire] world and everything in it.” (Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi and Ibn Maja). ‘By the name of Him who holds Muhammad’s soul in His hand, I wish to launch an attack for the sake of Allah and be killed and attack again and be killed and attack again and be killed.’ (Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim)
The religious teaching and pronouncements of Al-Azhar University provide some of the clearest evidence that Hamas’ jihad and Jew-hatred mirror authoritative, mainstream, institutional Islam’s jihad and Jew-hatred.
Beginning mere hours after the October 7, 2023 attacks, Al-Azhar University—its Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb, leading ancillary clerics, and formal “Fatwa (religious edict) Committee”—sanctioned and celebrated Hamas’ jihad carnage, on Al-Azhar’s social media platforms. (here; here; here; here) During October 7th itself, ignoring Hamas’ precipitating murderous atrocities, which were not mentioned at all, and well before the Israel Defense Forces’ counter-offensive in Gaza, Al-Azhar, with al-Tayeb’s imprimatur, declared officially:
“Al-Azhar salutes with utmost pride the resistance efforts of the proud Palestinian people…Al-Azhar supports the hearts and hands of the proud Palestinian people who have imbued us with spirit and faith and restored us to life, after we thought that would never happen, and prays that Allah grant them steadfastness, peace of mind and strength.”
Muhammad Omar Al-Qady, dean of the Faculty for Islamic and Arabic Studies at Al-Azhar University, addressed Hamas’ October 7th attacks in posts on his personal Facebook account October 17 and 18, 2023. He praised the Hamas attackers and longed for the liquidation of the Jews, whom he called “the descendants of apes and pigs (Qur’an 5:60).” Al-Qady’s October 17, 2023 post intoned:
“[When I say] resistance I mean the jihad fighters in Palestine, who defend their honor and land, those who fight against their enemy and ours, namely the Jews… I ask Allah to strengthen His soldiers and His camp and grant our brothers in Gaza, in Palestine and in the rest of the Muslim countries victory over their enemy and ours, the enemy of Allah and humanity, the cursed descendants of apes and pigs [i.e., the Jews].”
Referencing additional Qur’anic condemnations of Jews, Al-Qady wrote on October 18, 2023:
“Allah, 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, October 7, 2023, 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.”
October 18-19, 2023, Al-Azhar’s “Global Center for Online Fatwas” issued a formal religious ruling declaring that all Israelis, including non-combatants, were legitimate targets of jihad terror. Specifically, it claimed, “the term ‘civilians’ does not apply to the Zionist settlers of the occupied land.” This sentiment is entirely consistent with the Islamic legal logic of Al Azhar fatwas, or the resolutions of Al-Azhar Conference Proceedings, issued since immediately after the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, prior to the 1956 Sinai War, before the 1967 Six-Day War, and at The Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research, September, 1968. That “Islamic legal logic” has always been rooted in jihad, and sacralized Islamic Jew-hatred. Consider, briefly, complementary fatwas issued in January, 1956, by Egypt’s then Grand Mufti, and the heads of Al-Azhar’s four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, as well as the six key resolutions from Al-Azhar’s 1968 Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research.
The two 1956 fatwas were written January 5, 1956, by Egyptian Grand Mufti Sheikh Hasan Mamoun, and January 9, 1956, by the leading members of the Fatwa Committee of Al Azhar, representing all four Sunni Islamic schools of jurisprudence. These rulings elaborated the following key initial point: that all of historical Palestine—modern Jordan, Israel, and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza—having been conquered by jihad, was a permanent possession of the global Muslim umma (community)―“fay territory,” booty or spoils—to be governed eternally by Islamic law. Just as in the case of the Hamas covenant published 32-years afterward, this jihad ideology was conjoined to conspiratorial Muslim Jew-hatred:
“Muslims cannot conclude peace with those Jews who have usurped the territory of Palestine and attacked its people and their property in any manner which allows the Jews to continue as a state in that sacred Muslim territory. [As] Jews have taken a part of Palestine and there established their non-Islamic government and have also evacuated from that part most of its Muslim inhabitants. . . . Jihad . . . to restore the country to its people . . . is the duty of all Muslims, not just those who can undertake it. And since all Islamic countries constitute the abode of every Muslim, the Jihad is imperative for both the Muslims inhabiting the territory attacked, and Muslims everywhere else because even though some sections have not been attacked directly, the attack nevertheless took place on a part of the Muslim territory which is a legitimate residence for any Muslim… Everyone knows that from the early days of Islam to the present day the Jews have been plotting against Islam and Muslims and the Islamic homeland. They do not propose to be content with the attack they made on Palestine and Al Aqsa Mosque, but they plan for the possession of all Islamic territories from the Nile to the Euphrates.”
A year after Israel’s decisive victory during the 1967 war, Al-Azhar convened the 4th Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research in Cairo, which assembled prominent Muslim theologians not only from the Middle East, but Asia, Africa, and Europe. This seminal Conference, marked the formal abandonment of pseudo-secular “Arab Nationalism” as a guiding ideological rationale for the simmering conflict with Israel. Published in English as a 935pp. tome in 1970, the Conference Proceedings were the subject of historian David Littman’s pioneering analysis, in 1971. Littman summarized the Conference’s six key “recurring themes,” as follows:
1) “Jews are frequently denoted as the ‘Enemies of Allah’”
2) “Jews manifest in themselves an historical continuity of evil qualities…as described in the Qur’an”
3) “The Jews do not constitute a true people or nation”
4) “The State of Israel is the culmination of the historical and cultural depravity of the Jews…It has to be destroyed by a Jihad”
5) “The superiority of Islam over all other religions is brandished as a guarantee that the Arabs will ultimately triumph”
6) “It is outrageous for the Jews, traditionally kept by Arab Islam in a humiliated, inferior status, and characterized as cowardly, to defeat the Arabs, have their own State, and cause the contraction of the ‘abode of Islam’”
Littman concluded plaintively, over 50 years ago, Al Azhar was then promoting ideas which,
“…lead to the urge to liquidate Israel, politicide, and the Jews, genocide. If the evil of the Jews is immutable and permanent, transcending time and circumstances, and impervious to all hopes of reform, there is only one way to cleanse the world of them—by their complete annihilation.”
Current Al-Azhar Grand Imam Ahmed al-Tayyeb embodies that living legacy of annihilationist Jew-hatred. (here; here; here; here; here; here)
Each year, The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center (RISSC)—a pre-eminent avatar of interfaith dialogue, and mainstream, “moderate Islam,” issues its annual rankings of “The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims.” Al-Tayyeb, was the number 1 ranked Muslim figure for 2017 in “The Muslim 500”. His “The Muslim 500” profile stated,
“Influence: Highest scholarly authority for the majority of Sunni Muslims, runs the foremost and largest Sunni Islamic university. School of Thought: Traditional Sunni”
Notwithstanding his 2017 lionization by the RISSC, as Egypt’s Grand Mufti, and since 2010, till now, Al Azhar Grand Imam, Al-Tayyeb has sanctioned homicide bombing murder of Israeli Jews, including non-combatants, and twice (here; here) publicly condemned Jews, eternally, while invoking Qur’an 5:82—a central Antisemitic verse—for causing “Muslim distress…since the inception of Islam 1400 years ago.” He has also accused “Global Zionism” (Jews) of midwifing ISIS, and related jihad terror groups, to “destroy the Middle East,” and claimed the “Zionist entity,” i.e., Israel, was plotting to “march on the Kaaba (in Mecca) and on the Prophet’s Mosque (in Medina). This is on their minds and in their hearts.”
Al-Tayyeb’s immediate predecessor, late Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi (d. 2010), was one of the most revered modern authorities on Qur’anic exegesis having edited a magnum opus 15-volume modern Qur’anic commentary, and helped create the largest online website of such analyses. Here are key extracts from Tantawi gloss on Qur’an 5:82 from this authoritative work:
“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. The Almighty asserted—through linguistic devices—the content of the message entailed in the statement, and the addressee is the Prophet (Muhammad), and it can also be anyone who is entitled to preach to warn that their (the Jews) condition is no secret to anyone. 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)…The first object to His (Allah’s) saying ‘You will surely find,’ is ‘the most intense of the people.’ The second object is ‘the Jews.’ Al-Alusi said that it is apparently the Jews in general that are meant here. That is to say, those who were in the presence of the Apostle (Muhammad) from the Jews of Medina, and others. This view is supported by the Apostle who said, ‘Whenever a Jew is alone with a Muslim, he (the Jew) will strive to kill him (the Muslim).’…It was said that one of the doctrines of the Jews is to cause harm to those who disagree with them in matters of religion by any means possible. Mentioning Jews before those who associate others with Allah is a declaration that they are more intense and far surpass the other group in their animosity (toward Muslims).”
Tantawi’s earlier Ph.D. thesis, published originally in 1968 as “Banū Isrāʼīl fī al-Qurʼān wa-al-Sunnah” (“The Children of Israel (Jews) in the Qur’an and Traditions”), provided this summary gloss on the Qur’anic depiction of Jews, emphasizing its timeless relevance, and denouncing Jews who rejected Islam as “maleficent deniers,” even granting Muslims license to commit violence against them, to extirpate Jewish “evil”:
“(The) Qur’an describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah (2:61/ 3:112 ], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places (4:46) , consuming the people’s wealth frivolously (4:161), refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do (3:120; 5:79), and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted (lascivious) envy (2:109)…only a minority of the Jews keep their word…All Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims (3:113), the bad ones do not…[T]he Jews always remain maleficent deniers….they should desist from their negative denial…some Jews went way overboard in their denying hostility, so gentle persuasion can do no good with them, so use force with them and treat them in the way you see as effective in ridding them of their evil. One may go so far as to ban their religion, their persons, their wealth, and their villages.”
Some 30-years later, when he became Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University, Tantawi introduced the 1997 re-publication of his Ph.D. thesis by making plain his “updated” perspective was unchanged:
“We Muslims have been harmed a great deal by the Jews… It was the Jews who fought the Islamic call with every possible weapon. They were the ones who usurped—with the help of the countries of the infidels—part of our holy land—Palestine—and established a country for them there in 1948. Against this historical background, writers have written hundreds of books and articles and did a lot of research on the Jews and Palestine. However, most of what has been written concentrates on political, historical, economic, and military aspects. Religious aspects and perspectives are still in dire need of sound scientific writings that base their delineation of the Jews on the Book of Almighty Allah (the Qur’an) and the Sunna (sayings) of His Messenger…My main goal for choosing the topic of my dissertation “The Children of Israel in the Qur’an and the Traditions” is to reveal- to Moslem youth in particular and to the rational, reasonable, and fair-minded people in general the state of the Children of Israel, their history, ethics, lies, depravity, and immorality, relying on what has been mentioned about them in the Holy Qur’an, the Sunna, and the correct and unequivocal historical facts.”
Ed Husain conveniently ignores all the materials I adduced from Sunni Islam’s most authoritative teaching institution, Al Azhar University, given how they demolish his weak and deceptive “arguments.” Simultaneously, he demonizes those who don’t abide his cordon sanitaire between Islam and “Islamism” as somehow “threatening civilization.” To add insult to irony, Husain currently lionizes Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, ignoring the Sheikh’s longstanding association with jihad championing theologian, and pious Muslim Jew-hater par excellence, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. That relationship included Bin Bayyah serving as deputy head of Qaradawi’s International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a tenure which only ended, coincidentally, after a 2013 exposé by the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Bin Bayyah paid homage to al-Qaradawi’s scholarly stature in a 1996 encomium celebrating the Muslim Brotherhood Spiritual Guide’s 70th birthday. Bin Bayyah’s tribute dubbed Qaradawi an “oceanic scholar” who embodied “moderation (wasaṭiyya),” and addressed the concerns of modern Muslims beyond theoretical knowledge to practicalities of establishing “research centers, and organizations, and charitable trusts.” Subsequently, Bin Bayyah assisted Qaradawi in establishing two very important transnational institutions in 1997, and 2004, namely the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) and the IUMS, respectively. In 2008, Bin Bayyah referred to Qaradawi, fawningly, as “a mountain upon whose peak there is light,” and as “a great reformer” who “spreads knowledge and wisdom.” As recently as October, 2011, Bin Bayyah acknowledged Qaradawi as his “Sheikh.” An examination of Bin Bayyah’s own formal “fatwas,” and other pronouncements reveals:
—In a pronouncement on the jurisprudence of jihad, Bin Bayyah acknowledged (referencing Ibn Khaldun, whose aggressive, open-ended formulation I cited earlier): “As for the first meaning [of jihad]… [that] includes what is done by physical power… which is striving against people, this is the most widespread meaning. It is jihad against non-Muslims in the sense of fighting and engaging in war. There are many qur’anic verses and prophetic hadith concerning its merits, conditions, and regulations…. two kinds are just wars: one waged out of anger for the sake of Almighty Allah and His religion, which is the meaning of jihad, and the other waged against those who rebel against authorities, which is a war to safeguard the regime.”
—A 2011 fatwa condemning the West for associating Palestinian jihad terror, which he terms “resistance,” to “transnational” jihadism: “placing the Palestinian resistance that defends internationally recognized rights on an equal footing with transcontinental terrorist organizations that are not based on any moral principle would harm the cause of combating terrorism, confuse the cards, raise questions to the global conscience, and serve the terrorists.”
—A 2013 fatwa urging all the Palestinian Muslim factions to align their jihadist “resistance movements,” creating “one entity.” He added, “They have to join hands in the same name and under the same banner. And it is the duty of all Arabs to help them in the name of Islam, logic, pan-Arabism and humanity.” Bin Bayyah further exhorted “Muslim leaders” to assist this anti-Israel jihad, “through financial, military, and diplomatic support.”
—A 2012 pronouncement demanding the imposition of international “blasphemy law,” which called upon the United Nations, “to issue a resolution criminalizing the impingement of religious symbols. We request all religious and political authorities, as well as people of reason to join us in putting a stop to this (alleged blasphemous behavior)…”
—Support for the restoration of Islam’s transnational caliphate system the, “solidarity…known as the caliphate,” which he averred was, “the basic principle that the ummah ought to be under one banner and one ruler…the basic principle prescribed by Islam.”
Bin Bayyah has been lauded for his role in helping produce the 2016 Marrakesh Declaration, relying upon the so-called 7th century “Charter of Medina,” to ostensibly guarantee non-Muslim minority rights in modern Muslim societies. This historically failed Sharia-based paradigm for “human rights”—which begot instead the oppressive system of dhimmitude for non-Muslims—was championed decades earlier by Bin Bayyah’s former colleague (through 2013), Yusuf al-Qaradawi. A stinging critique of the Marrakesh Declaration called for the removal (point by point) of its inherent Sharia-based discriminations, annulled by modern Western human rights constructs (such as those rights enshrined in the U.S. Bill of Rights), declaring,
“Unless the Marrakech Declaration is interpreted in this spirit at the legislative level, this declaration is pure propaganda with no significance, and is a waste of time.”
Through early November 2023, as head of the United Arab Emirates Fatwa Council, Abdallah bin Bayyah issued no condemnation of Hamas October 7, 2023 jihad carnage against Israeli citizens, overwhelmingly, non-combatant Jews.
In segue to a significant corpus of polling data on Muslim Jew-hatred Ed Husain never discusses, given Bin Bayyah’s support for the restoring the caliphate, what follows are the results of a unique 2007 academic survey of Muslims on the caliphate question. Data released April 24, 2007 from a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 4384 Arab and non-Arab Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007—1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians—revealed that 65.2% of those interviewed, almost 2/3, hardly a “fringe minority”—desired this outcome, i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate.” The internal validity of these data about the longing for a Caliphate was strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition, “To require a strict [emphasis added] application of Sharia law in every Islamic country.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has developed and validated simple questionnaires to gauge Jew-hatred, broadly, in population-based samples. Two closely related examples, from 2004, and 2014 (the latter, repeated through 2022-23), are depicted below. ADL’s 2004 questionnaire, administered during 2004 in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, was modified, slightly, and employed globally during surveys whose results were reported between 2014, to 2022-23. Each iteration of the questionnaire was designed to capture the prevalence—occurrence, as a percentage—of extreme Antisemitism, defined as agreement with at least six of the eleven of the Antisemitic stereotypes queried.
[1.] Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind.
[2.] Jews are more willing than others to use shady practices to get what they want.
[3.] Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country.
[4.] Jews have too much power in the business world.
[5.] Jews have lots of irritating faults.
[6.] Jews stick together more than other citizens. (of respondent’s country of residence)
[7.] Jews always like to be at the head of things.
[8.] Jews have too much power in international financial markets.
[9.] Jews have too much power in our country today.
[10.] Jewish business people are so shrewd that others do not have a fair chance to compete.
[11.] Jews are just as honest as other business people.* (*frequency of respondents that disagreed with this)
2014-2022/23 version.
[1.] Jews are more loyal to Israel than to (this country/the countries they live in).
[2.] Jews have too much power in the business world.
[3.] Jews have too much power in international financial markets.
[4.] Jews don’t care about what happens to anyone but their own kind.
[5.] Jews have too much control over global affairs.
[6.] People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.
[7.] Jews think they are better than other people.
[8.] Jews have too much control over the United States government.
[9.] Jews have too much control over the global media.
[10.] Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.
[11.] Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.
Attempted removal of “confounding” factors (or “bias”) from the 2004 Western European survey data —specifically, age, country of residence, religion, income, sex, contact with Jews, commonality with other races/religions, and attitudes toward immigrants—was accomplished with the use of statistical modeling of the unadjusted raw data by multivariable logistic regression. This analysis demonstrated that relative to Christianity, as the “referent” religion, Islam conferred a nearly 8-fold increased risk (quantified as an “odds ratio”) for extreme Antisemitism!
By 2014, ADL was applying its slightly modified survey instrument, globally. These baleful findings, vis-à-vis, Muslim attitudes towards Jews, were reflected in the raw, unadjusted data:
—The world’s 16 most Antisemitic countries were all in the Muslim Middle East, where 74% to 93% of the overwhelmingly Muslim denizens of these nations exhibited extreme Antisemitism—Judea-Samaria/Gaza 93%; Iraq 92%; Yemen 88%; Algeria 87%; Libya 87%; Tunisia 86%; Kuwait 82%; Bahrain 81%; Jordan 81%; Morocco 80%; Qatar 80%; United Arab Emirates 80%; Lebanon 78%; Oman 76%; Egypt 75%; Saudi Arabia 74%.
—There was a 2 to 3-fold excess occurrence of extreme Muslim Antisemitism, globally, by religious affiliation—Muslim, 49%; Christian, 24%; No religion, 21%; Hindu, 19%; Buddhist, 17%.
A year later, in 2015, ADL published Western European data that included large Muslim population samples. The disproportionate occurrence of Muslim Jew-hatred was again apparent:
—There was 2 to 4.5-fold excess prevalence of extreme Muslim Antisemitism in Western Europe—Belgium, 68% of Muslims vs. 21% of non-Muslims; Spain, 62% of Muslims vs. 29% of non-Muslims; Germany, 56% of Muslims vs. 16% of non-Muslims; Italy, 56% of Muslims vs. 29% of non-Muslims; United Kingdom, 54% of Muslims vs. 12% of non-Muslims; France, 49% of Muslims vs. 17% of non-Muslims.
In 2017, ADL published its first U.S. survey that included Muslim American data on extreme Antisemitism, demonstrating a 2.4-fold excess rate of extreme Muslim Antisemitism among American Muslims, i.e., 34%, relative to 14% in American non-Muslims—consistent with global patterns ADL recorded during the prior decade. ADL released its 2019 survey data characterizing the prevalence of extreme Antisemitism within 18 countries assessed between April 15 and June 3, 2019. Six of these countries—Belgium, The United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy—again included a Muslim over-sample, allowing for a direct comparison of Muslims vs. Christians, those professing no religion, and the general populations. These findings confirmed the ongoing, disproportionate roughly 3-fold excess occurrence of extreme Antisemitism among Western Europe’s Muslims. Curiously, ADL’s 22pp. summary report of its most recent survey of 6 Western and 4 Eastern European countries (published May, 2023), makes no mention of extreme Muslim Antisemitism, whatsoever. Elsewhere, ADL’s own raw 2023 tabulations of extreme Antisemitism for the only two countries where Muslim data are provided, i.e., France and Belgium, reveal the same nearly 20-year, repeated phenomenon: 62% of French Muslims exhibited extreme Antisemitism, vs. 15% of French Christians; for Belgium those numbers were 52% Muslims, 21% Christians.
Independent validation of these ADL surveys was provided by European pollsters who reported their findings between 2005 and 2013. Data collected during the 2008 “Six Countries Study” (i.e., The Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, and Sweden) from ~9000 participants (3373 native Christians; 3344 Turkish Muslim immigrants; 2204 Moroccan Muslim immigrants) revealed that 45% of the Muslim immigrants, vs. 9% of native Christians, believed “Jews cannot be trusted.” While such hostility to Jews among “fundamentalist” Christians doubled to ~18%, over 70% of fundamentalist Muslims were hostile to Jews. “Antisemitism in Brussels’ Schools,” a 426-pp. study, included data on the views within the young Belgian Muslim community, primarily, 12–18-year-olds, during 2011. A 354-pp. follow-up study of Antwerp-Ghent youth was published in 2013. Thirty-two Dutch-speaking Brussels high schools were surveyed, including 2,837 students. Muslim respondents agreed with the following four statements—i.e., Antisemitic stereotypes—at disproportionate, 3.7-fold, to 7.0-fold, rates!: [I] “Jews want to dominate everything” (Muslims, 56.8%; non-Muslims, 10.5%); [II] “Most Jews think they’re better than others” (Muslims, 47.1%; non-Muslims, 12.9%); (III) “If you do business with Jews, you should be extra careful” (Muslims, 47.5%; non-Muslims, 12.9%); (IV) “Jews incite to war and blame others” (Muslims, 53.7%; non-Muslims, 7.7%). Antisemitic Muslim attitudes were unrelated to low educational level or social disadvantage. The 2013 study of 863 students from Ghent and Antwerp, including 346 Muslim students, confirmed these results. 45-50% of Muslim students evidenced Antisemitic attitudes, versus 10% of non-Muslims, consistent 4.5 to 5-fold excess rates. Gunther Jikeli’s earlier 2005 to 2007 study yielded concordant results. Jikeli, a Muslim convert, conducted 117 interviews with Muslims from Berlin, Paris, and London, whose mean age was 19 years old. Jikeli affirmed the centrality of Islam, “references to the Qur’an or the Hadith (traditions of Muhammad),” in shaping the Antisemitic views of young Muslim adults in Western Europe. Finally, a lone study of its kind, assessing non-lethal violence and violent threats targeting Jews, was conducted by FRA – European Union for Fundamental Rights, in 2012. Uniquely, it queried Jewish victims about the identity of those who attacked them, or threatened them with violence, asking them to recall their past 5-year experiences: “Thinking about the incident where somebody attacked or threatened you in a way that frightened you because you are Jewish–who did this to you?” There was a gross 2.2-fold excess occurrence of non-lethal violence, or violent threats against Western European Jews, by Muslims, relative to non-Muslims, collectively, who held designated, “right-wing”, “left-wing”, or “Christian” views.
Polling data obtained from Palestinian Muslims shortly before, and since (here; here) October 7, 2023, a massive survey of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) conducted after October 7, 2023, and a survey with an oversample of American Muslims following October 7, 2023, have all addressed sympathy with Hamas’ jihad carnage. The extensive MENA survey further gauged Muslim willingness to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign state in the aftermath of October 7, 2023.
Three months prior to October 7, 2023, Palestinian polling data obtained by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, (PCPSR) Bir Zeit University, Research from face-to-face interviews of 1270 adults, June 7th to 11th, 2023, confirmed the public preference for Hamas over Fatah: Hamas polled 10% higher than Fatah on the question of “deserving to represent the people,” while Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was preferred by 23% more Palestinians than Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, to be President.
A poll released Nov. 14, 2023 by the Arab World for Research & Development, surveyed 668 Palestinians polled (391 West Bank; 277 Gaza, asking: “How much do support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas?” Seventy-five percent were extremely or somewhat supportive, 59.3% extremely; 15.7% somewhat. The survey also reported Hamas’ favorability at 76%, but Palestinian Authority favorability was only 10%. Highest overall favorability occurred among designated military/jihad terror organizations: Al Qassam Brigades 89%; Islamic Jihad 84%; Al Aqsa Brigades 80%. A PCPSR poll released December 13, 2023, interviewed 1231 adults face to face, 750 in the West Bank, and 481 in the Gaza Strip. Seventy-two percent (82% in the West Bank/57% in Gaza) affirmed the October 7th jihadist attack was the “correct decision”. Satisfaction with the role of Hamas was the highest—72% (85% West Bank/ 52% Gaza) followed by the role played by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar 69% (81% West Bank/ 52% Gaza), vs. only 14% for the Palestinian Authority (10% West Bank/21% Gaza), and 11% for Palestinian Authority /Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas (7% West Bank/ 17% Gaza). Fifty-four percent believed that Hamas was the most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people, while 13% believed that Fatah under the leadership of Abbas was more deserving. For the Arab regional actors, the highest level of satisfaction went to Houthi-dominated Yemen 80% (89% West Bank/ 68% Gaza), followed by Qatar, 56%.
A population-based sample of 8000 MENA Muslims (from Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and the West Bank, Palestine [including Jerusalem]) were polled by the Doha, Qatar-based Arab Center for Research and Policy, between December 12, 2023, through January 5, 2024. The communities surveyed represented 95% of the population of MENA Muslims, including its far-flung regions, with 500 men and women sampled in each community. Eighty-nine percent of the respondents felt the October 7, 2023 jihad carnage by Hamas was “a legitimate resistance operation,” 67%, unequivocally, 19%, believing the attack was “somewhat flawed, but legitimate,” while 3% claimed the attack was “a legitimate resistance operation that involved criminal acts.” An equivalent 89% of the sample refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign state.
Additionally, 58% of a United States Muslim oversample (total sample, n=2020) polled October 16-18, 2023 agreed Hamas’ jihad carnage “was justified.”
Finally, July, 2011, American pollster Stanley Greenberg reported the results from what was described as an “intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” There were two salient, pathognomonic findings from this unique survey which directly queried the respondents about themes quoted from the Hamas covenant. One was that 73% of the Palestinian Muslims surveyed “agreed with a quote from the (Hamas) charter (covenant), (article 7) and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad, about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees,” i.e., the dictates of Islam’s prophet Muhammad’s canonical hadith of Jew-annihilation. Eighty percent further agreed with “a quote from the Hamas Charter about the need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews,” i.e., article 15 of the Hamas covenant calling for the jihad destruction of the State of Israel by the world’s Muslims. Per the covenant, this “jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim…[I]t is necessary to raise the banner of jihad. This requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally (in Palestine), in the Arab world and in the Islamic world”, the same public admonition then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad gave to the heads of all the nation states of the global Muslim umma at the 2003 Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting in Putrajaya.
Seventeen years ago, Ayaan Hirsi Ali identified the complete obstruction to real change posed by “ex-jihadist Muslim,” turned apologist for Islam, Ed Husain, whose replacement fanaticism is his angry denial of normative Islamic doctrine, and related history, past as prologue:
“…if we continue to deny, those of us who were brought up in Islam, that there is anything wrong with the faith, then there is no point in having a debate on reformation or renaissance or any sort of change. Because if it is perfect – as most Muslims want us to believe – then there’s nothing to change.”
