(The Conversation) – Algorithms have become integral to our lives. From social media apps to Netflix, algorithms learn your preferences and prioritise the content you are shown. Google Maps and artificial intelligence are nothing without algorithms.

So, we’ve all heard of them, but where does the word “algorithm” even come from?

Over 1,000 years before the internet and smartphone apps, Persian scientist and polymath Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī invented the concept of algorithms.

In fact, the word itself comes from the Latinised version of his name, “algorithmi”. And, as you might suspect, it’s also related to algebra.

Largely lost to time

Al-Khwārizmī lived from 780 to 850 CE, during the Islamic Golden Age. He is considered the “father of algebra”, and for some, the “grandfather of computer science”.

Yet, few details are known about his life. Many of his original works in Arabic have been lost to time.

It is believed al-Khwārizmī was born in the Khwarazm region south of the Aral Sea in present-day Uzbekistan. He lived during the Abbasid Caliphate, which was a time of remarkable scientific progress in the Islamic Empire.

Al-Khwārizmī made important contributions to mathematics, geography, astronomy and trigonometry. To help provide a more accurate world map, he corrected Alexandrian polymath Ptolemy’s classic cartography book, Geographia.

He produced calculations for tracking the movement of the Sun, Moon and planets. He also wrote about trigonometric functions and produced the first table of tangents.

Al-Khwārizmī was a scholar in the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmah) in Baghdad. At this intellectual hub, scholars were translating knowledge from around the world into Arabic, synthesising it to make meaningful progress in a range of disciplines. This included mathematics, a field deeply connected to Islam.

The ‘father of algebra’

Al-Khwārizmī was a polymath and a religious man. His scientific writings started with dedications to Allah and the Prophet Muhammad. And one of the major projects Islamic mathematicians undertook at the House of Wisdom was to develop algebra.

Around 830 CE, Caliph al-Ma’mun encouraged al-Khwārizmī to write a treatise on algebra, Al-Jabr (or The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing). This became his most important work.

At this point, “algebra” had been around for hundreds of years, but al-Khwārizmī was the first to write a definitive book on it. His work was meant to be a practical teaching tool. Its Latin translation was the basis for algebra textbooks in European universities until the 16th century.

In the first part, he introduced the concepts and rules of algebra, and methods for calculating the volumes and areas of shapes. In the second part he provided real-life problems and worked out solutions, such as inheritance cases, the partition of land and calculations for trade.

Al-Khwārizmī didn’t use modern-day mathematical notation with numbers and symbols. Instead, he wrote in simple prose and employed geometric diagrams:

Four roots are equal to twenty, then one root is equal to five, and the square to be formed of it is twenty-five.

In modern-day notation we’d write that like so:

4x = 20, x = 5, x² = 25

Grandfather of computer science

Al-Khwārizmī’s mathematical writings introduced the Hindu-Arabic numerals to Western mathematicians. These are the ten symbols we all use today: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0.

The Hindu-Arabic numerals are important to the history of computing because they use the number zero and a base-ten decimal system. Importantly, this is the numeral system that underpins modern computing technology.

Al-Khwārizmī’s art of calculating mathematical problems laid the foundation for the concept of algorithms. He provided the first detailed explanations for using decimal notation to perform the four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and computing fractions.

This was a more efficient computation method than using the abacus. To solve a mathematical equation, al-Khwārizmī systematically moved through a sequence of steps to find the answer. This is the underlying concept of an algorithm.

Algorism, a Medieval Latin term named after al-Khwārizmī, refers to the rules for performing arithmetic using the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. Translated to Latin, al-Khwārizmī’s book on Hindu numerals was titled Algorithmi de Numero Indorum.

In the early 20th century, the word algorithm came into its current definition and usage: “a procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps; a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem”.

Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī played a central role in the development of mathematics and computer science as we know them today.

The next time you use any digital technology – from your social media feed to your online bank account to your Spotify app – remember that none of it would be possible without the pioneering work of an ancient Persian polymath.

Correction: This article was amended to correct a quote from al-Khwārizmī’s work.

Debbie Passey, Digital Health Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The minister’s report – and this anecdote – were well-received at the court. The Ottoman authorities were impressed by the openness and tolerance of the European universities they visited and as a result took steps to introduce educational reforms into their own educational system.  

The Hungarian Jewish scholar referred to in this anecdote was Ignaz Goldziher, the savant who pioneered the scientific study of Islamic languages and texts in the West. During his long career he produced books and articles that are studied by Islamicists to this day. His work had a profound effect on Western scholarship in the areas of comparative philology, religious studies, and the emerging disciplines of Semitic languages and comparative religion. His vast oeuvre includes over eight hundred scholarly articles. The titles of his major books, six of which are studies of various aspects of Islam, are familiar to all students of the Middle East. His earliest work, Mythos bei den Hebräern (1876), was influenced by Max Müller’s work on solar mythology and addresses the relationship between theories of myth and the narratives of the Hebrew Bible. From scholarship on the Bible Goldziher moved to the study of Islam. He translated Islamic classical texts into German and Hungarian and synthesized this material into surveys of Islamic religion and philosophy. He rose to prominence in his native Hungary and then throughout the West as the preeminent non-Muslim authority on Islam. Islamic scholars in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world recognized the importance of Goldziher’s accomplishments and considered him a valued colleague. Goldziher understood the political and social implications of his scholarly work. Throughout his life he strived to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.  

Goldziher was not the only late nineteenth century Jewish scholar drawn to Islam. Many others were drawn to the study of what they deemed Judaism’s “sister religion.” As we shall see in the coming chapters, Islam held a strong appeal to European Jewish intellectuals in the nineteenth century, a period of intense ferment and change in Jewish life. This central European Jewish fascination with Islam was not limited to those engaged in the study of religion and philosophy. In the late nineteenth century, the anticipated full emancipation of the Jews was blocked by a resurgence of Christian anti-Semitism. Islam, as an abstraction, if not as a political reality, appealed to many Jews. The Golden Age of twelfth century Spain, the Convivencia in which the three monotheisms were imagined to have lived in mutual tolerance, was the model for a new era of religious tolerance and mutual respect. This aspiration was reflected in the Moorish architectural styles of German synagogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.   

Among those fascinated by Islam were the early rabbis of Reform Judaism. First and foremost among them was Abraham Geiger. Geiger’s doctoral dissertation, presented at age twenty-four, asked the question “What had Muhammad taken from the Jews?” Geiger demonstrated that many stories narrated in the Qur’an had close parallels to narratives in the Bible and the Midrash, and he speculated that the Jewish narratives directly influenced the Qur’an. His later work focused on the development of Judaism, which he saw as an evolving faith, one that could be brought into line with modern European thought and practice. With this modernizing project in mind, Geiger shaped the emergence of Reform Judaism in the mid-nineteenth century.  

These German Rabbis and scholars viewed Islam as a ‘rational’ religion, a religion unencumbered by the magical and ‘superstitious’ aspects of Christianity, and of Orthodox Judaism. For reformers of Judaism, Islam offered a model of a ‘religion of reason.’ And in emulation of Jewish life in the Convivencia of Spain’s ‘Golden Age,’ a period idealized and romanticized by many scholars, European Jews would flourish. Goldziher was affiliated with the Neolog (Reform) movement. 

At the University of Budapest Goldziher studied Arabic and Persian with Arminius Vambery. Vambery’s birth name was Chaim Wamburger; and he had become both a Muslim and a Christian in pursuit of ‘Oriental Knowledge’ and a university lectureship. In his autobiography Vambery noted that his Orthodox Jewish education and its emphasis on the mastery of texts and languages prepared him for mastering Islamic texts and languages. In his six-year sojourn in Istanbul, Vambery mastered Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. For Muslims, as for Jews, Vambery noted, text study is a form of devotion.

H/t Memorial Website of Ignaz Goldziher

Like his teacher, Goldziher was educated in Orthodox Jewish schools and brought to the study of the Qur’an the same attention to detail that Rabbinic scholars brought to the Torah. Thus many, but not all, of the era’s Jewish scholars of Islam had a Jewish religious education rich in text study and analysis. With these tools in hand, they took on the study of Arabic and Islam.  

Thus, from the outset of the liberalization of European Judaism, the study of Islam, or more precisely, an idealized vision of Islam as ‘rational religion,’ played a significant role. That vision was based on the recognition that the two sister religions had similar, though not identical, approaches to the study of scripture, the development of law, and the practice of rituals. 

In the first half century of this modern Jewish engagement with Islam, (1870-1920), contact with actual Muslims was limited. Some of Goldziher’s teachers, colleagues, and students spent time in the Arab world and in the wider Muslim world. And they met with European Muslims, of which there were many in Germany. Goldziher himself studied at Cairo’s Al-Azhar, the great center of Muslim learning. But these contracts did not lead any of these Jewish scholars to convert to Islam.  

In the next stage of this Jewish – Muslim encounter, roughly from Goldziher’s death in 1920 to the outbreak of war in 1939, a number of European Jews became Muslims.  

From Budapest, Goldziher went to study in Germany, then the center of both Jewish studies and Islamic studies. At the University of Leipzig he was mentored by Heinrich Fleischer, the preeminent European Arabist of the day. Fleischer, who began his academic training in a Christian seminary, was unusual in that he accepted Jewish students into his doctoral program. Eventually some forty percent of his one hundred and thirty advisees were Jews. In his eulogy for Fleischer, Goldziher said “He was one of the few learned men of our time whose academic influence was inseparable from the moral beauty that adorns a man’s character.”ⁱⁱⁱ 

Excerpted from:

From Jews to Muslims: Twentieth-Century Converts to Islam by Shalom Goldman. Click here to order.

Much of Goldziher’s inspiration for this life long-commitment to scholarship derived from his 1873-74 journey to the Middle East. He was then twenty-four years old and at the end of a five-year period in which he had travelled throughout Europe and studied with the most eminent European Arabists of his day. When he arrived in Damascus in 1873 and then proceeded to Cairo, he was already fluent in Arabic, and this eased his entry into Muslim religious and educational institutions. The bulk of his time in the Mideast was spent in Cairo, where his language skills, intellectual acumen, and persistence gained him an introduction to the Shaykh Al-Azhar, the administrative and spiritual head of Al-Azhar, Islam’s oldest center of religious learning.  

Goldziher was the first European non-Muslim to attend lectures at this prestigious academy. He was allowed to do so only after the Shaykh gave him a rigorous examination. Of the four months that he spent at Al-Azhar Goldziher later wrote “Both the students and the teachers treated me as if I were one of them, although I never posed as a Muslim. These were four glorious months of spirited learning.” In his travel journal Goldziher wrote movingly of his period of study at Al-Azhar: “In those weeks, I truly entered into the spirit of Islam to such an extent that ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim, and judiciously discovered that this was the only religion which, even in its doctrinal and official formulation, can satisfy philosophic minds. My ideal was to elevate Judaism to a similar rational level. Islam, as my experience taught me, is the only religion, in which superstitious and heathen ingredient are not frowned upon by rationalism, but by orthodox doctrine.”^iv 

Note that though he was fascinated by Islam, and driven to master its texts and traditions, Goldziher did not feel drawn to convert to Islam. He remained within the Jewish fold. This was in marked contract to his teacher Chaim Wamburger – Arminius Vambery, who, in the course of his life converted first to Islam and later to Christianity.  

Goldziher, as events towards the end of his life would indicate, was deeply loyal, attached to the Hungarian language and people, and to its Jewish community – and this despite his constant complaints about his job in that community’s Neolog (Reform) Synagogue.  

Goldziher’s teachers at Al-Azhar gave him an Arabic title, Shaykh Zarawi. The Arabic document which the head of Al-Azhar wrote on Goldziher’s admission to the theological school reflects a more relaxed period in interfaith relations, in which a non-Muslim scholar, fluent in Arabic, could gain permission to study at an institution usually closed to outsiders. The document read: “There appeared before us the Hungarian talib Ignaz, a man of the ahl al-kitab (peoples of the book) with the presentation of his desire to delve into the sciences of Islam under the eyes of the wise and learned shaykhs of the mosque. . . .  He declares himself far removed from all pursuit of mockery . . . Thus it is the decision of God that this youth become a neighbor of our flowering mosque, and one must not obstruct the decision of God.”^v In later years, Goldziher’s pride in this affiliation remained. He signed his books with the title Ignaz Goldziher, the Magyar (Hungarian) Azhari, student at Al-Azhar.  

In Islam in its earliest form (c. 7^th century A.D.) Goldziher found a model for religious tolerance, a model that he felt could serve modern societies and religions well. In his Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Goldziher wrote that “It is undeniable that, in this earliest phase of the development of Islamic Law, the spirit of tolerance permeated the instructions that Muslim conquerors were given for dealing with the subjugated adherents of other religions.” And speaking of the Islamic states of his own time, Goldziher noted that “What today resembles religious toleration in the constitutional practice of Islamic states goes back to the principle of the free practice of religion in the first half of the seventh century.”^vi 

But it was not only with the Egyptian religious establishment that Goldziher forged lasting ties during his sojourn in Egypt. He met with intellectuals, activists, and Sufis. Goldziher was also acutely aware of the political struggles then raging in Egypt and allied himself with progressive nationalist forces. He sympathized with the views of Egyptian nationalists opposed to both the Ottoman Turks and the European colonial powers. In Cairo Goldziher befriended the influential thinker Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani, (1838-1897) who called for Egyptian independence from all foreign powers. Al-Afghani, who lived in Egypt from 1871 to 1879, had a profound effect on Egyptian politics in particular and on Arabic political thought in general. The mid 1870s, when Goldziher was in Cairo, were a formative period in Al-Afghani’s political development. His charisma and oratorical ability had attracted many followers. Visiting European intellectuals were eager to meet with al-Afghani, and he with them. Among the Europeans, it was Goldziher with whom he formed the closest association. The friendship with Al-Afghani and the other social and intellectuals ties that Goldziher formed during this 1873-74 visit had a profound effect on his understanding of Islam as it is lived. As Lawrence Conrad noted in an important series of articles on Goldziher, the full import of this trip must be understood in the context of the times. For Goldziher arrived in the Near East in the heady early days of the nahda, the great revival of Arab political and cultural awareness that influenced the intellectual and social life in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Middle East. 

Among the aspects of Islam that Goldziher investigated and explained to a Western audience was Sufism, the mystical tendency and tradition within Islam. In Egypt, Goldziher met with Sufis and observed their rituals. He wrote extensively about Ibn Arabi, the great thirteenth century scholar who interpreted the Qur’an in a mystical manner. In his Lectures on Islam Goldziher dedicated a full lecture to Ibn Arabi and the Sufis. His essays about Sufism helped popularize its teachings in the West – and those teachings were the background for the resurgence of Western interest in Sufism in the early twentieth century. In this book’s accounts of Jewish interest in, and conversion to, Islam, an attraction in Sufism is a major factor in some individual’s decision to convert.^viii This was particularly true in the United States and Western Europe, where mystical forms of ‘Eastern’ religions held great appeal to the young and unaffiliated. 

Though the necessity for religious tolerance was a theme that emerges from Goldziher’s oeuvre, he himself was the victim of intolerance throughout his life. The breadth and depth of his scholarship on Islam was recognized by experts throughout the world, yet despite his international stature as a scholar, the state-controlled University of Budapest would not grant him a regular university appointment. A Jew, even one educated within Hungary’s own university system, was not a suitable candidate for a professorship. In predominantly Catholic Budapest, Protestant candidates too were often rejected. A contemporary of Goldziher’s, the Jewish linguist Bernard Munkacsi, in writing of his own travails at the hands of the university’s administrators, described the fate of Jewish scholars who aspired to university professorships in late-nineteenth century Hungary: “The honors degree, Ph.D. and academic achievements were all in vain! Where teacher’s posts were given, certificates of baptism were required. Teachers-to-be of Jewish origin had to settle their ‘religious status’ before being employed by the state. Many of my attempts to acquire a secular job have failed.”^ix  

Goldziher, while bitter at rejection by the system that educated him, did not vent his spleen at the Hungarian authorities. Rather, he reserved his most caustic remarks for his Jewish co-religionists. When Goldziher, in his mid-twenties, realized that admission to the regular university faculty would be denied him, he accepted an administrative job with the Neolog (Reform) Budapest Jewish community. As secretary of the Israelite Congregation, the Reform Synagogue with the largest membership in Europe, Goldziher was responsible for the religious, educational, and social activities of the congregation. As Raphael Patai noted, “A man without Goldziher’s intense scholarly drive, and more important, with a thicker skin, could have found at least some measure of satisfaction in occupying this influential position.”^x But Goldzhiher, though he served in an influential position for thirty years, did not. 

Goldziher found no satisfaction from his work as a community official. In his diary, and in his letters to friends, he complained bitterly about his fate as a synagogue administrator. Early on in his period of service he wrote “It was decided that I become a slave. The Jews wanted to have pity on me. This is the misfortune of my life.” Even though he expresses his feelings strongly, it is remarkable that Goldziher did not succumb to these bitter feelings and sink into inactivity. On the contrary, he persisted in his studies of Islam and developed a work ethic that enabled him to produce scores of books and articles over the thirty years he served the congregation. During the working year Goldziher would read Arabic texts at night, translating and taking notes, and this after working eight hours in the congregation’s office in which he supervised a staff of ten employees. On his six-week summer vacation he would take these books and notes (and later, when he married, his wife and son) to the mountains and write a complete monograph in one sustained effort. Among the magisterial works written in this manner were: Islam: Studies in the Religion of Mohammad (1881), a long German-language monograph on the Zahiris (1884), and the authoritative Introduction to Islam (1910).  

While engaged in mastering a vast corpus of Islamic texts, Goldziher did not neglect the study of Judaism. In many of his essays he compares Jewish and Islamic beliefs and practices. As Alexander Scheiber noted, “The Bible and the Talmud were Goldziher’s favorite studies in his youth. He remained a good Hebrew stylist and retained his interest in Jewish learning until the end of his life.”

It was only in 1905 that Goldziher, then aged 55, received a regular university appointment in Budapest. During his thirty-year tenure at that city’s Reform Jewish congregation, he had turned down job offers from the most important European and Middle Eastern centers of the study of religion and culture. Among the offers: In 1893 the University of Heidelberg, at the urging of the great Semitist Nöldeke, offered him a professorship. A year later Cambridge University invited him to occupy the chair left empty at the death of William Robertson Smith, the eminent philologist and historian of religion. In the first decade of the twentieth century Goldziher received offers from the Khedive of Egypt to teach in Cairo – and from Zionist leader Max Nordau (who was Goldziher’s childhood friend) to teach at the newly envisioned Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Surely he was the only person who received job offers from both Muslim and Jewish institutions. 

Senior Zionist leaders, including Max Nordau and Nahum Sokolow, sought Goldziher’s involvement with the Zionist cause, and Sokolow hoped to “entrust Goldziher with the mission of improving relations between Arabs and Jews.”^x Though Goldziher wrote that “he wished that persecuted Jews would find a home in the Holy Land and live peaceably together with Christians and Muslims,” he was not an active political Zionist and declined the invitation to teach at the planned, but not yet established, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which opened its doors in 1925. 

Goldziher remained within the Jewish community, he never was a committed Zionist. We noted earlier that his teacher Armin Vambery – who professed the Protestant faith after his youthful conversion to Islam – actively supported “the Return to Zion.” A decade before Zionist leaders asked Goldziher to take on “the mission of improving relations between Arabs and Jews,” Vambery met with Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, and agreed to arrange a meeting between Herzl and the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid.

To all of these offers of university professorships at foreign institutions, tied to Budapest and his family, friends, and regular employment, Goldziher said no. His refusal to consider teaching positions outside of Hungary – coupled with his continuing bitterness and anger at the Jewish community for “enslaving” him in his administrative position – are congruent with the general psychological picture we get from reading his correspondence. Despite his accomplishments and worldwide acclaim, he felt trapped in a work situation in which his worth as a scholar was not recognized. And from that trap he could see no way to free himself. Too, his loyalty to Hungary and its community of scholars made him reluctant to leave his native land. This was the way that Raphael Patai, the anthropologist whose father was a student of Goldziher’s, viewed Goldziher’s psychological makeup. A more recent study and analysis by Lawrence Conrad, sees Patai’s reading of the diary as flawed. For along with Goldziher’s stridency and occasional emotional outbursts, there is much in his correspondence with colleagues that is positive and affirming. To use Goldziher’s emotional outbursts as the basis for an interpretation of his life and work seems to Conrad, and to me, an unreasonable assumption.

Robert Simon, Goldziher’s biographer, noted that “he transformed correspondence into a veritable cult.” The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has preserved a good deal of correspondence, and as one observer put it, “the mere quantity of these letters is astounding: 45 boxes containing 13,700 letters from 1,650 people.” Goldziher clearly followed his own advice about staying in touch with colleagues. A letter from a valued colleague or student was joyfully received. He told A.S. Yahuda that “if I receive a letter from Nöldeke or Snouck I feel as if I were given a precious gift. A happy and solemn mood descends upon me immediately.” And these were not mere missives of politeness. Scholars who have studied his correspondence noted that these letters, and Goldziher’s detailed replies, could pass for scientific papers, in that they convey more ideas and scientific value than many other scholarly articles of the time. Joseph de Somogyi, a student of Goldziher’s who emigrated to the U.S. and taught Arabic at Brandeis University, quoted his teacher as exhorting him “to do two things if you want to prosper in life: answer every letter or card you receive, even if your answer be negative; and give lectures at the Orientalists’ congresses. This is as important as literary work.”

The outbreak of World War in 1914 was a great blow to Goldziher’s spirit, and to his hopes for world peace. His ability to travel, and to receive visiting scholars in his home, was severely curtailed by the hostilities. Hungary, one of the belligerents, was severely destabilized by the war, in which it was on the losing side. At times, Goldziher’s personal concerns about the war emerge in his correspondence, though for the most part his letters are concerned with matters philological and textual. Some of these letters served as drafts for his academic papers. Goldziher also kept a diary and in it he allowed himself greater freedom of expression. Portions of these diaries were published in the 1970s. William Montgomery Watt, in an essay on the diaries, noted that they contained a startling revelation about Goldzhiher: “His apparently effortless mastery of his subject and the even tenor of his scholarly expositions suggest a placid existence in the groves of academia. The publication of the diary shows such a suggestion to be completely erroneous. All these works of serene and profound scholarship came from one who was engaged for over thirty years in an intense spiritual struggle against forces which made his daily life almost unbearable and threatened to destroy all his confidence in himself.”This ‘spiritual struggle’ referred to here was Goldziher’s experience of his synagogue job as oppressive and his scholarly work as liberating, life-affirming.  

Goldziher’s literary legacy of books, articles, letters was vast. His other great contribution to scholarship was mentoring of students. He taught and inspired a generation of Islamicists, Comparative Semitists, and students of religion. These students, in turn, founded scholarly lineages of their own. During World War Two, many of his Jewish students were murdered by the Nazis. Others fled Europe and survived. They taught, wrote, and inspired a new generation of scholars in New York, Boston, London, Moscow and Jerusalem. As Noam Stillman wrote in an essay on “The Mindset of Jewish Scholars of Islamic Studies”: “Goldziher’s holistic approach to Islam as religion and civilization, to Hadith, law, theology to practice – both orthodox and heterodox, high and popular, historical and actual – and to belles lettres, shaped succeeding generations of scholars, Jews and Gentiles alike.”

 German-trained Jewish scholars of Arabic and Islam explored many facets of the historical relationship between Islam and Judaism. One of them, Jacob Goldenthat, explored “the influence of Islamic culture on medieval works in Jewish philosophy and Hebrew Grammar.” Another German-trained Jewish scholar of Arabic and Islam, Joseph Horovitz (1874-1931), continued and expanded on the legacy of Goldziher. Horowitz sought to forge ties between Jewish and Arab scholars of Islam. In 1928, in his argument for establishing a School of Oriental Studies at the recently established Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Horovitz wrote that, “The idea was to create a school for the study of the East, its languages and literatures, its history and its civilizations especially the Arabic and the Islamic worlds, were to be considered. It was hoped that the work to be undertaken would be such as to be appreciated by the learned world in general and more especially by savants of the Arabic speaking countries; and that in its own way, i.e. by showing that there was a ground of intellectual interest common to Jewish and Arabic scholars, the institute might also help to promote the good feelings between these two communities.”^xix But for many reasons, this institute was never established. Arab opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine, and to what the Arabs saw as British support for Zionism, broke out into violence in 1929 and to a full-scale rebellion in the Arab Revolt of 1936-9. Horovitz’s proposal that academic cooperation would lead to a lessening of tensions no longer seemed relevant to the faculty and directors of the Hebrew University. 

As some scholars have noted, Goldziher’s life and scholarship flatly contradicts the assertion of post-colonialist scholars that the study of Middle Eastern cultures is inextricably tied to imperial designs of power. For Goldziher’s work is itself a critique of Orientalism. It is an attempt to present Islam as it is understood and interpreted by its followers in its own textual tradition and not as it is presented by its antagonists. Goldziher sharply attacked Renan and other European scholars who denigrated Islam and repeatedly sought to disprove his negative view of Islam and Muslims. Goldziher’s Cairo friend al-Afghani also produced a trenchant critique of Renan’s Orientalist views. One might imagine the young Hungarian Jewish Orientalist and the older Muslim religious and political thinker critiquing Renan’s views as they walked through Cairo in the winter of 1874.^xx 

The reader will recall Goldzhiher’s youthful declaration, at age twenty-four, that “Islam was the only religion which can satisfy philosophic minds.” Goldziher and his colleagues saw early Islam as a ‘religion of reason’ and as a model of how Judaism might be integrated into European civilization, and in the decades after his death the appeal of contemporary Islam as an alternative to ‘Western’ faiths grew, especially among Jews. In the mid-1920s, a few years after Goldziher’s death, a small but significant number of German and Austrian Jews converted to Islam. Among them was Leopold Weiss of Berlin, who, as Muhammad Asad, (1900-1992), dedicated his life to presenting Islam as a religion of reason, and arguing against what he saw as extremist tendencies within the Islam of the late twentieth century. Similarly, twentieth century Western interest in Sufi teachings and rituals was informed by the scholarship of Goldziher and other late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars of Islamic mysticism.   

Excerpted from with the author’s permission from: From Jews to Muslims: Twentieth-Century Converts to Islam.

The Denis Villeneuve Dune films signal that the Fremen Bedouins of the desert planet Arrakis are “Muslim” in various ways, including casting Arab Muslims, shooting in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, and the use of Arabic vocabulary, drawing from the Herbert novels. The films have been charged with playing down the Muslim-ness of the Fremen, and perhaps there is somewhat less Arabic in their language and less reference to their religion (which in the novels is ZenSunni). But I think the visual vocabulary of the films makes pretty clear that the Fremen are some sort of descendants, at least, of old earth Muslims.

We are seeing the films in a different context than the one in which the 1965 novel appeared. It is a Cold War novel (as I will explain below). We are now watching it in the wake of the Bush “War on Terror” (against Muslims) to which the Republican Party and elements of the Democratic Party in the US are still committed. For this reason, the films do not use the term “jihad,” translating it inaccurately as “crusade” (ironic!) or “holy war,” in contrast to the Herbert novels. Jihad is a sacred word for Muslims, meaning to exert oneself or struggle for the faith in all sorts of ways– ethically, by donations to charities, by speaking out. It can also refer to taking up arms at the order of legitimate political authority to defend the country. Americans might call it “patriotism.”

We are also watching the second film in the the duology during Israel’s war on Gaza, and it is difficult not to see the Fremen as Palestinians. At least it was difficult for me not to see it in that context, though of course Villeneuve could not have predicted this moment when he and his team were shooting.

The massive firepower and awful destructiveness of the Harkonnen forces recall the intensive aerial bombardment pursued by the Israeli Air Force for five months. The Palestinians of Gaza are not Bedouin tribespeople, of course, but highly urbanized and literate. Still, the search for a religious and political deliverance from a brutal Israeli occupation led them to the fundamentalist Hamas, a dead end. In today’s political atmosphere in the United States, the only sort of resistance against occupation that can be lionized is fictional, in Dune and James Cameron’s Avatar films. Despite their own progenitors’ revolution against King George’s despotism, the majority of Americans nowadays, according to opinion polls, have a knee-jerk tendency to identify with the occupiers and not the freedom fighters.

Warner Bros. Video: “Dune: Part Two | Official Trailer 3”

For those who have not read the book or seen the film, I should give a brief plot summary. A set of planets, each ruled by a Siridar or planetary governor with a noble rank such as duke or baron, owe fealty to an emperor, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. They form of council of nobles, the Landsraad. Flying spaceships between these imperial planets requires pilots to ingest a psychedelic drug, melange or the “spice,” produced by fungus in the sands exposed to effluvia from young sandworms on the desert planet of Arrakis. The vocabulary here is Islamicate. Padishah is Persian for emperor. Shaddam has the morphology of an Arabic word and may be modeled on Saddam (though not the Iraqi one). Siridar is from the Persian sardar or governor.

Shaddam IV grows concerned about the growing influence on the Landsraad of Duke Leto Atreides of the lush planet of Caladan, and fears Leto may make a play for the throne. He therefore forces him off Caladan and orders him to rule the arid Arrakis instead. In this alien environment, Leto is vulnerable. The emperor puts Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the Siridar of Giedi Prime, up to attacking the House Atreides on Arrakis, and secretly provides imperial Sardaukar troops to help in the assault. Leto is killed but his concubine, Lady Jessica and his son, Paul, escape to the desert and find refuge with the Fremen, tribal desert dwellers. Jessica belongs to a religious order, the Bene Gesserit, who engage in genetic engineering, and Paul is a result of this experiment (though he was supposed to be a girl).

Among the Fremen, Paul is given the personal name Usul (Arabic for “principles,” “foundations”) and the title Muad’Dhib (Arabic mu’addib, one who teaches culture). Paul Atreides, by imbibing the liquid derived from killing and harvesting a young Sandworm, gains superpowers, including prescience, and becomes accepted by the Fremen as their messiah or Mahdi (Arabic for “guided one”). He initially resists the temptation to lead them, seeing visions of a vast murderous horde conquering the known universe if he takes that course. But the Harkonnen attacks back him and the Fremen into a corner, and ultimately he takes on the mantle of the Mahdi, the “tongue of the Unseen” (Arabic lisan al-ghayb). He leads the Fremen in a campaign to overthrow the Harkonnens, and to subordinate the emperor himself.

I first read the book, I think, in 1967 when I was an army brat on a base in Africa. It had won a Hugo award the year before. Like many adolescents of my era, I found the story mesmerizing. We all wanted to be Paul Atreides; Denis Villeneuve, 15 years my junior, admits that the same was true for him. I didn’t understand then that Paul Atreides is an anti-hero, who becomes a monster to fight monsters.

Herbert was deeply influenced by T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which a minor British intelligence official and amateur archeologist depicted himself as the true leader of the Arab Revolt during WW I, in which the Hashemite leaders of Mecca rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. In return for their opening of an internal front against the Ottomans in alliance with Britain, London promised the Hashemites an Arab kingdom that would have encompassed what are now Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, Syria and Iraq (the British may have excluded Christians in Mt. Lebanon from the deal). The sons of Sharif Hussain, Faisal and Abdullah, were of course the actual leaders of the revolt, and were joined by many other Arab chieftain, officers and intellectuals. The predecessors of MI6 and James Bond were embedded with them, but weren’t all that consequential. After the war, the British roundly screwed over their Arab allies, giving Palestine to the Zionists, greater Syria to the French, and colonized Iraq themselves. The British government (both major parties) are still dedicated to screwing over the Palestinians.

Herbert was also inspired by Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise (1960), which recounted the story of the rebellion by Caucasus Muslims against the Russian Empire after it conquered them in the nineteenth century. They were led by Shāmil of Daghestan, a Sufi.

Haris Durrani wonders why Herbert, a Republican, was so open to multi-culturalism and psychedelics, but this bewilderment is anachronistic. Herbert was a fierce environmentalist, as many Republicans were in the 1960s and 1970s. Nixon passed the Clean Air and Water acts. Herbert had Libertarian tendencies, like Libertarian science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who was also very interested in drugs for expanded consciousness. And Herbert hated bureaucracy and big government.

Here’s the thing. In the Cold War era, for Libertarians the ultimate symbol of big government was the Soviet Union. And in that era, conservatives saw Muslims as allies against international Communism. The Eisenhower administration was afraid Muslims would secularize and go Communist, so it actually appropriated funds to encourage pilgrimage to Mecca by improving rail links to the holy city.

Much later, Ronald Reagan (whom Herbert admired) allied with the Afghan Mujahidin, about half of whom were fundamentalists, against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

So Herbert’s symbolic deployment of Muslim Bedouins against the iron law of bureaucracy and Big Government (with the Soviets as the biggest of big governments) was actually entirely in character.

The wrinkle is that Herbert was at the same time very nervous about such alliances with religious groups against the Soviet Union, because he feared their irrational tendencies and their coercive power. One of the strengths of Dune is that there are not really any heroes. There are just bad choices. Shaddam IV tried to centralize power and reduce the power of the nobles, destroying Leto Atreides for his despotism. Paul Muad’Dhib Atreides could only fight back by enlisting the Fremen. But in so doing he distorted the Fremen ethic of a kind of humanist egalitarianism, turning them into fanatical zealots and unleashing interplanetary war. People who see the story as fascist don’t understand that it isn’t an endorsement of either of these two extremes but a critique of them, a sigh of despair by someone who believes in liberty and the individual and fears the arc of reality is going in bureaucratic and authoritarian directions instead. I have argued that it is a Libertarian critique of the 1950s, not a celebration of dictatorship.

Herbert clearly admired much in Islam and its history and culture. It was, in specific, Mahdist movements that aroused his simultaneous fascination and distrust. In this regard, Herbert’s Orientalism is distasteful, since of course many Muslims have waged political campaigns for liberty without surrendering to those impulses. Algerians freed themselves from France without becoming Mahdists, and their revolution looks like a lot of other decolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s, whether in Indonesia or largely Christian Kenya.

Ironically, the biggest force for a messianic fanaticism in today’s world is the US Republican Party, so it turns out that the contemporary face of the Fremen fundamentalists is Donald John Trump. Herbert would have been a never-Trumper. One only hopes that our American fanatics don’t pull us into their holy wars.

Verses 19:17-35:

And once remote from them, she hid behind a screen. Then we sent to her our spirit, who took the shape of a well-formed man.
She said, “I take refuge in the All-Merciful from you, if you are pious.”
He said, “I am but an angel of your lord, come to bestow on you a son without blemish.”
She said, “Will I have a son, when no mortal has touched me, and I was not rebellious?”
He said, “So it is.” He said, “Your Lord says, it is easy for me. We will make him a sign for the people and a mercy from us. The matter has already been decreed.”
So she bore him, and withdrew with him to a remote place.
And the pangs of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She said, “I wish I had died before now, and had been forgotten in oblivion.”
But he called to her from beneath her, saying, “Do not be sad. For your Lord has made a stream run beneath you.”
So shake the trunk of the palm tree toward you, and ripe, fresh dates will fall to you. So eat and drink and be comforted. If you see any human being, say, “I have taken a vow to the All-Merciful to fast, and will speak to no one today.”

Many of these details are from material circulating in the late antique Christian community that also reached the Prophet Muhammad. In the Qur’an Jesus is depicted as in a line of God’s prophets, including Moses, Solomon, David, and others, a line that went on to include the Prophet Muhammad as of the early 600s CE.

The tradition of Persian and Mughal miniature painting — of painting leaves intended to go into manuscript books for the libraries of kings or very wealthy notables — flowered in the 1200s and after, in Iran, Central Asia, India and what is now Turkey. It was influenced by Chinese techniques that came in through the Mongol conquests and the Silk Road and sometimes the people depicted look a little Chinese.

In 1519-1687, the Qutb-Shahi dynasty ruled the Kingdom of Golconda, named after their initial capital, a city near Hyderabad in South India. From 1591 Hyderabad itself became the capital. That city today is the capital of Telengana State and is the fourth-most-populous city in the Indian Republic. The dynasty was founded by an adventurer from Hamadan in Iran, who was a Shiite, and so the kingdom had Shiism for its state religion, even though most of its subjects were Hindus and most of its Muslim subjects were Sunnis. In its later decades it became a vassal of the Mughals based up north, and ultimately was absorbed into the Mughal Empire.

During the 1600s in particular there was a lot of contact with European maritime empires and merchants, who brought books and paintings from Europe, and so the Renaissance tradition of depicting the Nativity had an impact on court artists. But these paintings were commissioned by Muslim rulers for Muslim court purposes, as their own celebration of Jesus, whom they considered, as did all Muslims, one of their prophets.

The National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian has a spectacular miniature painting from Golconda, dated to about 1630, of the adoration of the baby Jesus.



Jesus and Mary are both shown with golden halos. Joseph is also there but without a halo.

One of the adorers is, (extremely) anachronistically, a 17th-century European merchant in boots, almost certainly Dutch. He also seems to have brought gold vessels, and he has in his hand what looks to me like fine cloth, dyed purple. Indigo dye was one of India’s trading major commodities. More on all that later.

There are three winged angels, two hovering above and one on the ground in front of the manger. One of the angels above is holding what looks to me like a crown. Since the Muslim tradition doesn’t know about the Gospel language regarding the messiah being the king of the Jews, my guess is that this motif was borrowed from a European artist. Also, gold was one of the gifts traditionally thought by Christians to be brought to the Christ child by one of the 3 magi.

The other angel has a bow. In South India, the crown and the bow were royal symbols. So I think the angels are depicted as exalting Jesus in the way royalty was exalted. These symbols raise the possibility that the royal treatment given here to baby Jesus is not Christian in origin but Hindu Indian. After all, the beloved god Ram was a king. For these Indian artists, who did not know the Bible, the symbols may not be an assertion that he was royalty, only that he deserved the sort of glorification that kings received.

Although in the West of the Muslim world Arab artists were reluctant to depict holy figures, this Indian artist has no problem with it. Most did not, and they painted Muhammad, as well. Mary is shown wearing hijab but with her face visible, and Joseph and Jesus also have their faces depicted.

Shiite Islam puts special emphasis on piety centering on the family of the Prophet, including Muhammad’s son-in-law and first cousin, Ali, Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, and the two sons of Ali and Fatimah, Hasan and Husayn. Although Sunni courts also produced nativity paintings, it could be that this form of Christian piety especially appealed to the Shiite rulers of Golconda.



As for the Dutch merchant or factor, Sanu Kainikara explains,

“In 1627, the Dutch had a disagreement with the Governor of Golconda, under whose jurisdiction the region fell, regarding the grant of a ‘farming’ permit for Masulipatam (Macchilipatanam). They withdrew to Pulicat and blockaded Masulipatam from the sea. The Qutb Shah dismissed his governor and invited the Dutch to return to Masulipatam. The reason for the Qutb Shahi sultan’s action was that the Dutch possessed a preponderance of naval strength that was able to threaten an adversary from the sea without exposing themselves to any significant danger—a capability that no other European power in India could lay claim to at that time.”

“The Dutch trade from Masulipatam amounted to Rupees 600,000 per year throughout most of the 17th century. In 1660, the Dutch opened a factory in Golconda, whose chief merchant also doubled as the ambassador to the Qutb Shahi king.”

One of the key commodities traded from Golconda to the Netherlands and later to Britain was diamonds.


Map of Hyderabad state, c. 1730, H/t Wikipedia, UM Clement Library .

So that Dutch merchant was almost certainly in Hyderabad seeking diamonds. But maybe also indigo dye and textiles, which he is shown in turn offering to baby Jesus.

And the court painter, having been commissioned by the king to do a nativity scene, obligingly incorporated the trader into the painting, a common practice. It is unlikely that the painting was commissioned by the foreigner– it stayed in India until a British officer purchased it. It just shows that the Prophet Jesus (`Isa in Arabic) had acquired another connotation in the Renaissance period, being associated with the expanding maritime trade empires of the Christian Europeans. The Dutch had just displaced the Portuguese, who can be seen in earlier miniatures.

The painting is a reminder that Christmas is not parochial — not northern European, as it is often conceived in the US, but a global commemoration of a global event. Not only do Muslims celebrate Jesus as a holy figure, but many Hindus also respect him (and more used to before the rise of Hindutva, Hindu nationalism). And Jews who live alongside Christians often have Christmas trees, even if they can’t go along with Christian beliefs about Jesus, who after all was born and bred a Jew. Christmas should be for celebrating rebirth and renewal and hope, in a world that desperately needs all three, for Christians and for everyone.

Exploring the Qur’an and the Bible with Gabriel Said Reynolds: “Juan Cole: Infidel or Pagan? Understanding Kufr (كفر) in the Qur’an | Muhammad the Prophet of Peace ”

Juan Cole, here. This is what I wrote on the subject at IC when my article first appeared:

My new article is out in The Journal of the American Oriental Society about the meaning of the root k-f-r in the Qur’an, the Muslim scripture. We’ve all grown up hearing about the Qur’an’s condemnation of “infidels” or “unbelievers,” but I think that this is for the most part a mistranslation. I argue that the root does not mean “infidel” but “pagan” or “polytheist” (and I think with the connotation of hostile, impious and morally corrupt pagan). In fact, I think the Arabic may be a translation of the Latin paganus. The latter had connotations of “hick” or “rustic” but also of “polytheist” and the same is true in Qur’anic Arabic.

Juan Cole, “Infidel or Paganus? The Polysemy of kafara in the Quran,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 140, 3:(2020): 615-635:

I also find that the noun kāfir is never applied in the Qur’an to Jews and Christians in an unmodified way. The noun implies “pagan” or “scoundrel” or “ingrate.”

The Qur’an considers Jews and Christians to be monotheists or submitters to the one God (muslimun). This is the antonym of “pagan.” In The Cow 2:62, the Qur’an promises paradise to righteous Jews, Christians and other monotheists alongside the followers of Muhammad.

I write in the article, “A key attribute of the [pagan] kāfir, as we have seen, is that such a person is damned to hell. Dominion 67:6 reads: “And for those who denied (kafarū bi-) their Lord, there awaits the torment of hell, and a wretched destination!” In contrast, in speaking of Jews and Christians we find in The Spider 29: “Debate the scriptural communities only in the best of ways, except for those who do wrong. Say ‘We believe in the revelation sent down to us, and the revelation sent down to you; our God and your God is one, and to him we have submitted’.””

It is common in the contemporary Muslim world to refer to all non-Muslims as kuffār or unbelievers, but I believe this is contrary to the usage of the Qur’an itself.

I think virtually all Qur’an translations err in consistently translating kafir as “infidel” or “unbeliever” or “disbeliever,” since this rendering implies a larger group than just pagans.

I made some of these arguments very briefly in my book on the Prophet Muhammad, but since it is a rip-roaring historical narrative I could not stop and do word philosophy at length:

In the article, I also explore how the verb kafara can be used of anybody. It means to commit impiety, blasphemy, immorality, etc. It is like the verb “to sin.” Monotheists can commit impiety as a one-off or occasional act, but that does not cause them to be characterized as among the group of pagans or kafirun. Even Muhammad’s own followers can commit this sin, as I explain:

“The verb kafara, however, is more fluid and is sometime applied to monotheists. The Family of Imran 3:167 complains about those of Muḥammad’s believers who declined to go out to defend the city (later commentators say the verse concerned the battle of Uḥud in 625): “They were told, ‘Come, fight in the path of God, or at least take a defensive position’. They replied, ‘If we knew how to fight, we would have followed you’. That day, they were closer to kufr than to faith, inasmuch as they said with their lips what was not in their hearts. God knows best what they are concealing.” The deverbal noun kufr here clearly means hypocrisy or dishonesty rather than disbelief.

Here are a few excerpts from the article, which I have modified slightly in an attempt to make them a bit more readable. The original is technical and written for specialists, but I think the findings are accessible and very important. Obviously, scholars should consult the full text for footnotes and for the larger argument about how the noun and verb could diverge from one another (and there really are two distinct verbs, only one of which means “to disbelieve” in a straightforward and consistent way).

—–
From Juan Cole, “Infidel or Paganus? The Polysemy of kafara in the Quran,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 140, 3:(2020): 615-635:

The active participle kāfir . . . cannot be assumed necessarily to mean “rejecter of something” or “infidel.” Rather, it has a wide range of meanings that can be discerned contextually. In Iron 57:20 the broken plural refers to rustic farmers: “Know that the life of this nether world is a game, a sport, a trinket, a mutual boast among yourselves and a multiplication of your wealth and children. It resembles rain whose resultant vegetation pleases the peasants (kuffār), but then it withers and you see it yellowing into chaff.” As al-Khalīl mentioned [in his early dictionary], kafr means village, reinforcing the rural connotation of the root. It may be that a secondary meaning of polytheist or adherent of traditional religion emerged because the population in the countryside was more likely than its urban counterpart to have clung to the old gods and resisted accepting monotheism.

The root is also clearly associated in the Quran with polytheism. Al-Kāfirūn 109:1–6 opens with: “Say: kāfirūna! I do not worship what you worship. Nor are you worshipping what I worship. Nor am I worshipping what you have worshipped. Nor are you worshipping what I worship. To you your religion and to me my religion.” There is an admission that the pagans have a religion, but it is simply castigated as a false one, which makes translating kāfir as “infidel” seem odd. That the dispute was over Muḥammad’s monotheism versus Arabian polytheism is demonstrated by Ṣād 38:4–5, which says . . . “They marvel that a warner came to them from among them, and the [pagans] kāfirūna said, ‘This is a lying sorcerer. Has he made the gods into only one God? That is an astonishing thing’.” This and many other verses demonstrate that the Quran came out at least in part of a milieu where there were adherents of traditional religion . . .

The sense of “to worship the gods” for k-f-r is underlined in The Cow 2:257: “God is the patron of those who believe, bringing them out of darkness into the light. And those who kafarū, their patrons are Ṭāghūt, who bring them out of the light into darkness.” Ṭāghūt is a loan from [Ethiopian] Geʿez that means “new or alien god” or “idol,” and, interestingly, is treated as a plural in this quranic verse, corresponding to numerous patrons. Belief in polytheistic religion is not, properly speaking, disbelief but the wrong sort of belief, from the point of view of the Quran. It is not a charge of atheism. Not only are such believers committed polytheists but they are also militant: “Those who believed fight in the path of God, and the pagans (al-ladhīna kafarū) fight in the path of Ṭāghūt, so fight the associates of Satan, for the guile of Satan is feeble” (al-Nisāʾ 4:76) . . .

Elsewhere, it is admitted that they [the pagans] are believers in their own tradition; when they question the eschatological opening or grand success, the verse reads: “Say: On the Day of the Opening, the faith (īmānuhum) of those who kafarū will not benefit them, nor will they be granted a respite” (al-Sajda 32:29). Since it is allowed that they have faith, they are not unbelievers strictly speaking and translating this phrase as “the faith of the infidels will not benefit them” would be self-contradictory. While they are not accused of disbelieving, they are, however, liars and wrongdoers, dishonest and workers of evil (cf. The Women 4:167–68). As well as labeling them “wrongdoers” (sing. ẓālim), they are “morally dissolute” (fāsiqūna) for responding incorrectly to God’s proverbs (The Cow 2:26). Along the same lines, it is said of Muḥammad’s monotheistic followers: “God has caused you to love faith, rendering it beautiful in your hearts, and he has caused you to abhor impiety (kufr) and ungodly behavior (fusūq) and rebellion” (al-Ḥujurāt 49:7).

“Rebel” is one meaning of the root k-f-r. In the story of how Lucifer fell (The Cow 2:34) it is reported: “And when we said to the angels, ‘Bow down to Adam’, they prostrated them- selves, save the Devil; he refused, and grew haughty, and so he became one of the rebellious (kāfirīna).” The active participle here does not involve disbelief but disobedience. The Devil (Iblīs, Gk diabolos) is not accused of rejecting the existence or oneness of God but of refusing the divine order to bow down to the first human being. Indeed, in 2:30 the angels are depicted as arguing with God that creating Adam would lead to turmoil, and the implication is that Satan parted ways with God not because he disbelieved but because he had a positive if misguided motive -— he differed with him on the wisdom of opening Pandora’s box . . .

kufr is equated with impiety, which Grecophone Christians in their polemics against the pagans called asebeia. Likewise, in Prohibition 66:10 God had made the wives of Noah and Lot an object lesson for those who kafarū because of these women’s preference for pagan society over their husbands. The reason given in 2 Pet 2:6 for the calamity that befell the people of Sodom and Gomorrah is that they lived impious lives (asebesin), which seems roughly the meaning of kufr in Q 66:10.

BLASPHEMY

A controversial passage in The Cow 2:102 provides a further sense of the verb. The Quran condemns those in the era of Solomon who followed demons… that taught magic. It goes out of its way to underline that Solomon himself did not commit kufr, even though in late antique folk tradition he was held to be able to control sprites and demons. The demons were guilty of putting otherwise inoffensive teachings to evil purposes, turning them into black magic, so that they kafarū (A. J. Arberry translates this as “disbelieved”). Of what, however, did this act consist? It does not appear to have been a denial of anything, but rather was a blasphemous activity. The humans were eager to have the teaching of the two angels of Babylon, Hārūt and Mārūt, which they then desecrated by turning it into dark arts so as to separate spouses from one another. The demons’ instruction harmed people rather than benefited them, and turning to the occult deprived these individuals of any portion of heaven.

Hārūt and Mārūt are two of the Zoroastrian celestial spirits, Haurvatāt and Ameretāt. These emanations of the supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, symbolize wholeness and immortality. For instance, in the Younger Avesta, Yasht 19.95–96, the last days during which the world will be renovated are described thus: “Evil thought will be overcome, good thought will overcome it . . . The celestial spirits Integrity (Haurvatāt) and Immortality (Ameretāt) will defeat the demons of Hunger (Shud) and Thirst (Tarshna).” The two celestial spirits associated with nemeses among the demons symbolizing bodily human cravings like hunger and thirst may have inspired the Quran’s motif that devils misused their teachings to satisfy lust. Moreover, Ameretāt is associated with plants, fertility, and the tree of life. The Quran could be projecting into the time of Solomon a contemporary set of Zoroastrian ideas. The retrofitting of this motif to the time of the Hebrew monarch may in turn have come about because of the association in late antiquity of Solomon with mastery of the sprites or demons, which is reflected in quranic passages.

In late antique Greek Christian authors, black magic was associated with blasphemy (which originally meant slandering [God]). In his “Homily 10 on 2 Timothy,” John Chrysostom (ca. 349–407 CE) wrote, “Let us then so live that the name of God be not blasphemed (blasphēmíesthai).” Among the many examples he gave of Christians blaspheming in failing to live up to their ideals were “your auguries, your omens, your superstitious observances . . . your incantations, your magic (mageías) arts.”

What if we translated The Cow 2:101 this way?

“They followed what the demons recited over the realm of Solomon. Solomon himself was not a blasphemer, but the demons were blasphemers, teaching the people magic and what was revealed to the two archangels of Babylon, Haurvatāt and Ameretāt. But these two had been careful not to teach anyone without warning them, ‘We are a potential disturbance of faith (fitna), so do not fall into blasphemy.’ From them they learned how they might divide a man and his wife [. . .].”

Here is a condemnation of warlocks and witches who engage in what is seen as necromancy, which apparently enables those who covet married persons to cast spells to separate them from their spouses. They are instructed by demons who pervert and misuse the teachings of divinely inspired Zoroastrian angels.
Later Muslim commentators on this text are divided over its meaning. Some saw the anecdote as concerning fallen angels. Others defended the angels as having been sinless, and held that while they performed licit miracles, the demons turned their teachings to the purposes of thaumaturgy. As I read the text, the teaching of the angels itself is not being condemned here. Solomon, the verse says, bore no blame for his mastery of the spirits. The Zoroastrian celestial spirits are spoken of with reverence, called angels rather than demons, and are depicted as having been given inspiration (unzila) by God. The angels act responsibly inasmuch as they give disciples an explicit warning that learning their esoteric teachings could tempt humans, if they are not careful, to the dark side. (Zoroastrianism is listed in Pilgrimage 22:17 with the monotheistic religions and distinguished from paganism.)

The Quran shows positive attitudes throughout to Christians and The Cow 2:62 admits Christians to heaven (“Those who believed, and the Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians, and whoever has believed in God and the Last Day and performed good works, they shall have their reward with their Lord”). To underline the difference, the Quran shows God pledging to Jesus regarding future Christians in The Family of Imran 3:55: “God said, ‘Jesus, I will take you to me and will raise you to me and I will purify you of those who kafarū and will render those who follow you superior to those who kafarū until the judgment day’.” Likely it is distinguishing between the old pagan Romans, who had persecuted Jesus and his faithful, and the Christians themselves. There will always be, the Quran vows, a difference between followers of Jesus and the kāfirūn. This and other passages suggest to me that the deverbal noun kāfir is never used tout court for Jews and Christians.

[Takeaway: kafir as a noun is never used in the Qur’an to refer to Christians and Jews, only to pagans or rebels or blasphemers or the morally dissolute.]

In the Medinan period, the Quran uses the verb kafara when it begins speaking of an antagonistic group from among the other monotheists: “Neither those who kafarū from among the people of the Book, nor the polytheists (mushrikūna) themselves, desire that good from your lord descend upon you” (The Cow 2:105). Some groups from among the biblical communities had allied politically with the militant pagans. A hypernym — for instance, “tree”—is lexically superordinate to hyponyms, another set of nouns or phrases under its rubric (e.g., “juniper” and “acacia”). Here the phrase “people of the Book” functions as a phrasal hypernym, which is lexically superordinate to the hyponym “Those who kafarū from among the people of the Book.” Logically speaking, the need to identify this subset of believers in the Bible as those who kafarū proves that kāfir does not ordinarily refer to Jews and Christians. That is, if all Jews and Christians were always kāfirūn, it would be redundant to identify this group “from among the people of the Book” as “those who kafarū.” Moreover, if all Jews and Christians were always kāfirūn, it would make nonsense of God’s pledge to Jesus (Āl ʿImrām 3:55) that he “will render those who follow you superior to those who kafarū until the judgment day.” Christians are not kāfirūn under ordinary circumstances, just as they are not doomed to hell under ordinary circumstances. Still, just as they can commit mortal sins and so depart from righteousness into perdition, so they can throw in with bellicose polytheists against Muḥammad and his cause, and likewise join the damned . . .

PAGANUS

It is suggestive that kāfir maps so closely onto the Latin paganus as it was used in late antiquity. Remus points to an imperial decree of 416 CE (16.10.21) that excludes from government service “those who are polluted by the profane error or crime of pagan rites, that is, gentiles (qui profano pagani ritus errore seu crimine polluntur, hoc est gentiles).” This principle was reaffirmed by Justinian (r. 527–565) in his Code (1.5.19), which body of law applied to Arabic speakers in the empire in Muḥammad’s own era. The Table 5:103 likewise denounces the pagan rites of sacrifice to idols practiced by those who kafarū and al-Jumʿa 62:2 speaks of “purifying” gentiles (ummiyūna) implying that paganism had polluted them.

The two words share a number of other meanings and connotations -— rural, polytheist, opponent, persecutor, enemy, blasphemer, potential convert, and interlocutor. K-f-r may at least in some instances be a loanshift from the Latin paganus. Whatever the etymology of the term paganus, by the late fourth century it had come to mean both “rustic” and “adherent of the old Roman religion.” It was often used satirically, to class the remaining pagan aristocracy with unlettered peasants.

Centuries of Roman rule had made Arabic speakers familiar with Latin vocabulary. The word for “path” in the phrase “straight path” of piety in the Quran, ṣirāṭ, is a loan from the Latin via strata or paved avenue.72 One route for Latin influence was the Arab mounted foederati who served as an auxiliary to the Roman army in Bostra and elsewhere, since Latin remained the language of the military. Another way Latin may have proved influential was through law, inasmuch as fourth- and fifth-century imperial decrees and even some of the sixth-century Code of Justinian were still issued in Latin as well as Greek in the sixth century.

I have argued that kāfir in the Quran for the most part does not mean “unbeliever” or “infidel.” In most of our examples, a lack of belief is not at stake. Rather, kāfir is a polysemous term that has a wide range of meanings, including “peasant,” “pagan,” “libertine,” “rebel,” and “blasphemer.” These are discernible if we look at the parallelisms, synonyms, and antonyms with which quranic verses surround this noun. I understand the impulse of translators to use “unbeliever” for kāfir, and, of course, the term sometimes does mean just that. Moreover, the condemnations of pagan belief and practice, while often made with other terms, could be seen to imply unbelief at some meta level. I argue, however, that limiting the meaning of the root so severely causes us to miss a rich set of other connotations that give us a rounder idea of the Quran’s intent…

I have suggested that the bilingual lives of many Arabic speakers in and on the fringes of the Roman empire over hundreds of years (Arabic-Aramaic and Arabic-Greek) contributed to this polysemy, through the phenomenon of the loanshift. The Latin paganus, which came to have the connotation both of “rustic” and “polytheist” in the fifth and sixth centuries, may well lie behind Iran 57:20, which refers to kuffār as peasants happy to see rain and greenery. At the same time, the quranic term is clearly also used to refer to polytheists. Ṣād 38:5 reports of the kāfirūn that they rejected the notion that the many gods could merge into only one, while The Cow 2:257 says that those who kafarū had taken the deity or idol Ṭāghūt for their patron instead of God. The Family of Imran 3:151 menaces these pagans with hellfire for having made God part of a pantheon (ashrakū). While it is not impossible that Arabic independently invented a connection between farmers and polytheists, Occam’s razor would suggest that we instead posit that Arabic was influenced by late antique Roman Christian usage, which was embedded in imperial laws applying to Arabophone citizens of the empire. In any case, far from being deniers or nihilists, the pagans are admitted to believe in their own religion (dīn) and to have faith (īmānuhum) in it. It is simply a false religion. Kafara thus has a positive valence that “to disbelieve” does not capture, even if the latter is not ultimately an incorrect characterization of the quranic view of the pagans.

Historically, and even theologically, Jews have always been closer to Muslims than they were to Christians. It was in Muslim lands, the late eminent historian Bernard Lewis told us, that Arabic “became the language of science and philosophy, of government and commerce, even the language of Jewish theology when such a discipline began to develop under Islamic influence.” The Moroccan-Israeli historian Michel Abitbol couldn’t have been clearer: “The transformation of Judaism following its encounter with Islam affected all aspects of Jewish life profoundly and irreversibly.”  The great scholar of Jewish thought Maimonides (whose face graces the Israeli sheqel as seen above), wrote his classic Guide to the Perplexed in Judeo-Arabic. It is common today to talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition to distance the West from Islam, but one can more appropriately talk about a Judeo-Muslim one.

Actually, similarities between Judaism and Islam made Jews targets in Christian Europe. “Why should we pursue the enemies of the Christian faith in far distant lands,” wrote Peter the Venerable of Cluny to Louis VII in 1146, “while vile blasphemers far worse than any Saracens, namely the Jews, who are not far away from us, but who live in our midst, blaspheme, abuse, and trample on Christ and the Christian sacraments so freely and insolently and with impunity!?”

After their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century, Jews were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim lands. A Frenchman by the name of Isaac Zarfati, deploring the treatment of Jews in Germany, encouraged his co-religionists to join him: “I proclaim to you,” he wrote, “that Turkey is a land wherein nothing is lacking, and where, if you will, all shall yet be well with you.”

Prominent nineteenth-century Jewish scholars from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire such as Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and Ignaz Goldziher who played a key role in developing what we now call Islamic Studies were convinced of the superiority of Islam to Christianity and felt a strong kinship with Muslims. The British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a descendant of Spanish Jews, was disdainful of European culture and proud of his Semitic ancestry. He called Jews the “Arabian tribe” and Arabs “Jews upon horseback.” In his novel Coningsby, or the New Generation, Disraeli wrote: “Why do these Saxon and Celtic societies persecute an Arabian race, from which they have adopted laws of sublime benevolence, and in the pages of whose literature they have found perpetual delight, instruction, and consolation?” For this reason, Jerusalem cannot be ruled by uncouth Europeans and “will ever remain,” he wrote in Tancred, or the New Crusade, “the appanage either of Israel or of Ishmael.”

Following their emancipation in Germany, Jews, eager to reclaim their Oriental heritage, used Moorish designs to build their synagogues because they offered the closest model they could imagine to the original Temple of Solomon. This led Orientalist scholar Paul de Lagarde to comment: “What is the sense of raising claims to be called an honorary German and yet building the holiest site that one possesses in Moorish style, so as to never ever let anyone forget that one is a Semite, an Asiatic, a foreigner?”

Still, Jews saw themselves as Orientals connected to Arabs and Muslims more so than they were to the alien traditions of their host European nations. As one writer put it in the monthly journal Jüdische Monatshefte: “Who is Ishmael to us?  What does the Islamic world mean to us?  The Muslim religious doctrine, customs and laws, the Muslim science and beautiful literature contain golden seeds which seem borrowed from us and the Jewish hereditary stock and thus seem familiar and related.” In fact, the association of Jews and Muslims persisted well into the Second World War when Nazis called the most degraded of their inmates in Auschwitz Muselmänner, or Muslims

The great Iraqi poet Ma’ruf al-Russafi wrote: “We are not, as our accusers say, enemies of the Children of Israel in secret or in public/How could we be, when they are our uncles, and the Arabs are kin to them of old through Ishmael?”

In 1948, King Abdullah of Transjordan told Golda Meir: “I believe with all my heart that divine providence has brought you back here [to Palestine and the Middle East], restoring you, a Semitic people who were exiled to Europe and shared in its progress, to the Semitic East which needs your knowledge and initiative. Only with your help and your guidance will the Semites be able to revive their ancient glory. We cannot expect genuine assistance from the Christian world, which looks down on Semitic people. We will progress only as the result of joint efforts.”

Just like Moroccan Jews in Israel and Muslim Moroccans are united by their love for their ancestral land, a better appreciation of the common heritage uniting Jews and Muslims could also help lessen tensions and establish a more durable foundation for peace.

Excerpted from Tingis with the author’s permission. Read the entire essay here .

The other bombing hit a mosque in Hangu in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Province. The mosque was known to be frequented by members of the local police. The suicide bombers had tried to hit the police station first and been repulsed, so they turned to a soft target. There have been 300 attacks in this province this year.

The insurgent movement in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP), denied involvement. The TTP is closely allied with the Taliban who now again rule Afghanistan, and there are frictions between the Taliban and the current Pakistani government.

That the attack in Mastung targeted worshipers commemorating the birthday of the Prophet suggests that the perpetrators were members of ISIL, the so-called “Islamic State” group. When ISIL was ruling northern Iraq and eastern Syria, they banned celebrating Muhammad’s birthday as a sinful “innovation.” Their views on the matter are in accord with the fundamentalist Wahhabi branch of Islam in Saudi Arabia, where jurists such as Abdel Aziz Bin Baz (d. 1999) also forbade honoring the Prophet’s birthday. Small ISIL cells have carried out terrorist attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and have occasionally hit targets in Pakistan itself. In Baluchistan, the so-called Islamic State- Pakistan Province is active, whereas in Khyber Pushtunkhwa the rival Islamic State – Khurasan carries out attacks. The latter was likely the perpetrator at Hangu.

Pakistan’s own security has declined because of infighting among the country’s political elite since Prime Minister Imran Khan was unseated in a vote of no confidence on April 10, 2022, in which 20 former supporters in the parliament defected. Khan has castigated the parliamentary maneuver as an illegitimate plot, and is now in jail on corruption charges that his followers say are trumped up.

I’d say 98% of the Muslims in the world approve of commemorating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, which is usually given as the twelfth day of the third month of the Islamic calendar, Rabi’ al-Awwal in 570 CE, nearly six centuries after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

I wrote a book about the Prophet Muhammad, in which I discuss the likely circumstances of his birth, but more importantly his teachings on peace and reconciliation.

Purchase

It is a great shame that some do things in his name at which he clearly would horrified.

Admittedly, historians do not think large public celebrations of this day began until about the 1100s CE, some 500 years after the Prophet. Since that time, poetry and hymns have been composed for the occasion, and people have developed customs like giving children toy horses or staging parades in the streets and putting up illuminated chandeliers and lanterns over city streets. That is why some scholars consider it an innovation. But most of those see it as a good innovation. The fundamentalist Wahhabi and Salafi tendencies, in contrast, tend to see all later innovations not present at the beginnings of Islam as illegitimate.

In Pakistan, most people celebrate the entire Muslim month of Rabi` al-Awwal as the birth month of the Prophet. Marching bands, rides on caparisoned camels, and other activities of public “fun” are popular.

It is widely celebrated among American Muslims.

The major Sunni religious authority, the al-Azhar seminary in Cairo, Egypt, has repeatedly upheld the legitimacy of such celebrations. The considered legal ruling or fatwa says, “It is not permissible according to Islamic law to challenge the legitimacy of celebrating the anniversary of the Prophet’s birthday due to the forbidden things that may occur during it. Rather, we denounce the evils that may surround it, and we warn those who commit it – with wisdom and leniency – that these evils contradict the basic purpose for which these honorable occasions were held.”

Sufis, Muslim mystics, have sometimes engaged in ecstatic rituals on this anniversary of which the more sober clerics disapprove. You could compare this difference to one between, say, mainstream Presbyterian clerics and Pentecostalists.

Still, there is a broad consensus in both Sunni and Shiite Islam that commemorating the birth of the Prophet is a good thing, a moment of joy and celebration.

The ISIL terrorist group, which has wrought a vast swathe of destruction through Muslim societies and has also committed terrorism in Europe and the US, has a policy of acting harshly, “like wild beasts” (tawahhush). By attempting to outlaw perfectly innocent and uplifting religious practices like the birth of the Prophet, they set themselves up as superior to other Muslims and can use such prohibitions as a means of asserting power over others. Hence the bombing of the procession outside a mosque in Mastung. The good news is that the Muslims themselves have waged a concerted and brave campaign to root out this wicked heresy that has created so many orphans.

Hate acts targeting minorities are not actually free speech, of course.*

The great exponent of mystical Islam, Sayyed Hossein Nasr, argued that if we want to understand the position of the Qur’an in Muslim societies, we should think of it as the way Christians venerate Christ. It is the very “Word of God,” which of course is what Christians call Jesus (John 1:1).

Nasr wrote, “What corresponds to Christ as the word of God in Christianity is not the Prophet Muhammad but the Koran in Islam.”

So burning the Qur’an is sort of like throwing a big wooden crucifix with the corpus of Christ on a bonfire.

Iraqis in several cities, led by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, held demonstrations for the past two days against the desecration of scripture. On Thursday they had tried to storm the Swedish embassy in Baghdad.

Ironically, the man who burned the Qur’an in Sweden is himself Iraqi, and he had served alongside the Shiite militias in a Chaldean Christian Popular Mobilization Force, fighting ISIL, which targeted Iraqi Christians. A lot of Iraqi Christians are angry about how Muslim fundamentalists in Iraq treated them after the American invasion. Since they are Christian they seem to have been unfairly tagged as somehow related to the American occupiers, but this allegation was untrue. Many Kurds and Shiite Muslims were close to the Americans, though.

It is interesting to me that there are indications in the Qur’an itself of how believers should respond to ridicule and harassment. In the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself, the Qur’an says, pagans in the city of Mecca subjected the early believers to a great deal of humiliation.

I wrote about these peace verses in my edited book,

Peace Movements in Islam, edited by Juan Cole. London: IB Tauris, 2021. Click here. .

Enwrapped 73:10-12 speak of how the believers were to respond to hostile comments: “Be patient with what they say and take your leave of them graciously. Leave to me the affluent who impugn your integrity, giving them a short reprieve, for we possess shackles and a searing abyss . . .”

The notion of leaving vengeance to God can be compared to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 12:19, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”

The Prophet was so far away from harboring any ill-will toward his opponents that in Ornaments 43:33-35, Muhammad appears to speak in his own voice with these sentiments: “If it would not have caused all people to observe a single communal path (an yakun ummatan wahida) we would have bestowed roofs of silver and staircases for their houses on those who reject the All-Merciful, and would have furnished their homes with fine doors and couches on which to recline, and gilded ornaments. But all that is merely for the enjoyment of the life of this world, whereas the hereafter is for the God-fearing.”

The Criterion 25:63 says, “The servants of the All-Merciful are those who walk humbly upon the earth — and when the unruly address them, they reply, “Peace!”

The word for “unruly” here literally means “ignorant,” but it was used in that era to refer to people who lacked self-control. They clearly were low-lifes, taunting the believers, who kept their dignity and replied by praying for peace and security for their tormentors.

The Table 5:45 in the Medina period paraphrases Deuteronomy 19:21. Arberry translates it this way: “And therein We prescribed for them: ‘A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation’; but whosoever forgoes it as a freewill offering (tasaddaqa bi), that shall be for him an expiation (kaffara). Whoso judges not according to what God has sent down – they are the evildoers.”

So, as in the Gospels it is urged that the faithful go beyond the principle of an eye for an eye to exercise forgivenes, so in the Qur’an believers are urged to forgo demanding this satisfaction for a wrong against them, and it is implied that exercising restraint in this regard will bring the blessings of divine forgiveness on the believer.

Distinguished 41:33-35 observes, “Whose discourse is more beautiful than one who calls others to God and performs good works and proclaims, ‘I am a monotheist? The good deed and the evil deed are not equal. Repel the latter with what is best and behold, it will be as though the one, with whom you have a mutual enmity, is a devoted patron. Yet to none is this granted save the patient (alladhina sabaru), and to none is it granted save the supremely fortunate.” This remarkable verse goes beyond counseling gracious withdrawal from and forgiveness of foes to urging doing good toward them and returning their evil deeds with good ones, which over time has the prospect of winning them over and making them patrons rather than enemies.

So that’s it. That’s how the Qur’an advises dealing with unruly and hostile harassers. Return good for evil. Win them over. Wish peace on them. If the harassment becomes too much, withdraw graciously.

It might be objected that there are verses in the Qur’an authorizing violence. There are, but they are clearly about permission for self-defense when being violently attacked by marauding enemy warriors. They aren’t talking about how you would behave in peacetime and in civil society. Christian thinkers also made a distinction between war-time ethics and peace-time ones.

The Christian monk Athanasios of Alexandria (d. 373) wrote, “For even in the case of the other actions in life we will find that there are differences based upon the circumstances in which they are done. For example, it is not permitted to commit murder, but in wars it is both lawful and praiseworthy to destroy one’s enemies, so much so that those who displayed valor in war are deemed worthy of the highest honors, and monuments to them are erected to proclaim their achievements. And so, the same action is not permitted in certain circumstance and at certain times, but is allowed and excused in different circumstances and at the right time.”

I also discussed the historical context for these verses in my biography of the Prophet Muhammad:

Juan Cole, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires (NY: Bold Type Books, 2018). Click here.

—–

*An earlier version of this posting linked to an article alleging that Sweden had banned the burning of the Hebrew Bible. Apparently the person threatening to do so actually withdrew the threat before the police could decide on the issue.

It is the second major festival for Muslims after Eid Al-Fitr, which is celebrated at the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting.

It takes place between the 10th and 13th day of the Islamic month of Dhul Hijjah, as Hajj – the sacred pilgrimage that is the fifth and final pillar of Islam – finishes in Saudi Arabia.

Dhul Hijjah, the 12th and last month of the Muslim lunar calendar, is itself considered one of the holiest in the Islamic year and Muslims often fast on its first nine days.

Eid Al-Adha celebrations begin in most countries this year on Wednesday and a day later in some places such as Pakistan and India.

Origins of Eid Al-Adha

Islamic narrative has it that Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham, the forefather of the monotheistic religions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, received through his dreams a commandment from God to sacrifice his son Ismail, or Ishmael.

Ibrahim and Ismail submitted to the will of God and were ready for the sacrifice as an act of faith and obedience.

The devil – known as “Iblis” in Islam – tried to dissuade Ibrahim from following the order and the Prophet threw stones at him to chase him away.

This act is commemorated by Muslims as a rite of Hajj, where they cast pebbles at symbolic pillars in the city of Mina.

Seeing Ibrahim and Ismail’s obedience, God sent down a lamb from the heavens for the sacrifice, according to Islamic tradition.

A similar version of the story is also mentioned in Christianity and Judaism.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Muslims around the world celebrate Eid Al-Adha to honour the devotion of Ibrahim and Ismail.

The symbolic sacrifice of livestock is part of the rituals associated with the festival, but is not an obligation in Islam, rather an act that is encouraged.

Significance of Eid Al-Adha

Eid Al-Adha, known as “Kurban Bayrami” in Turkish, has historically been a festival of giving.

There is heavy emphasis on charity in Islam, with Zakat, the Muslim practice of almsgiving, being one of the religion’s five pillars.

Eid Al-Adha gives Muslims another opportunity for charity.

The meat from any sacrificed animal is shared with the poor, along with family members and friends.

Individuals can sacrifice a sheep, goat or lamb on their own, while a cow or camel can be shared by seven people.

There are also strict rules when it comes to the animals, as it is forbidden to sacrifice sick, disabled or wounded animals.

Islam also requires that the slaughter be minimally painful for the animal.

Many Muslims also opt to pay the value of an animal to charities that distribute meat to people around the world, particularly in areas known to be in greater need.

Connection with Hajj

Eid Al-Adha and Hajj are also deeply intertwined.

The millions of Muslims performing the pilgrimage sacrifice an animal on the third day of Hajj.

After the sacrifice, they have their hair trimmed or head shaved and change out of the pilgrim’s “ihram”, the clothes worn specifically for Hajj to symbolise a state of purity and renunciation of materialism, and to nullify differences of wealth and status.

Over the following days, they perform the “tawaf,” when pilgrims circle the Kaaba, which Muslims consider the house of God built by Prophet Ibrahim and Ismail.

They also redo the ritual known as “sai,” walking or running seven times between the Safa and Marwa hills, before going back to stone the three pillars that represent the devil.

Finally, they do a farewell tawaf to complete their Hajj, before leaving Makkah for their homelands.

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