Halal Certification, the Industry of Doubt

THE “Halalisation” of our consumer space continues unabated. In previous articles on this topic I’ve discussed Halal toothpicks and Halal water, both legal anomalies guaranteed to make classical Islamic scholars roll in their graves.

My recent discovery in a local supermarket that milk and yoghurt have now been certified Halal, or permissible, saw me whistling with amazement. The Prophet Muhammad, the Islamic exemplar, used to drink goat’s milk fresh from the udder.

Our contemporary Halal certification mafia, who’ve totally reversed the natural order of divine permissibility, have made legislative nit-picking a money grabbing art, rebuffing even the teaching of the Prophet.

This is because there are no known records of Prophet Muhammad ever asking the goat, the camel, the cow or the farmer whether their milk was Halal or not.

Halal certification in South Africa (and elsewhere in the Muslim world) has become a billion dollar industry. A recent international Halal conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, attended by hundreds of representatives, confirms this.

The sad truth is that the Halal industry preys mercilessly upon the ignorance of its subjects, and its fears. I have seen this in the Far East, the Middle East, the Indo-Pak, the US, Great Britain and now South Africa.

However, Islam’s legal schools of thought reveal that the understanding of Halal matters is based upon common sense. The corpus of Halal legislation was never designed for obscurantist scholarship, but practical application.

The tragedy here is that the Muslim – and non-Muslim – customer has to pay for this sometimes unnecessary service. The retailer simply passes on whatever costs he accrues in the accreditation process.

At the root of consumer Halal legislation is the procedure of slaughtering meat in a prescribed way and ensuring that no impurities – such as pork – come into contact with any foodstuffs.

When it comes to meat, for example, the conditions are easy to follow. The slaughterer has to be a believer who can pray, the animal has to be killed mercifully, the throat slit with a sharp knife and the blood – containing impurities – bled out of the animal.

Here again, Prophet Muhammad’s example is hugely illustrative. He used to dine with Christian and Jewish hosts, and it’s widely reported that his concern was always the meat. Yet if it was slaughtered by a believer – whether Christian or Jewish– he would not ask any further questions and eat.

And unlike some of today’s muftis, he would not rudely go into his host’s kitchen to peer into pots and to interrogate the make-up every single item in the pantry. Encountering products such as Halal certified spaghetti, coffee, peanut butter, dried fruit – and even nuts – is an affront to the Prophetic adage of “ease over difficulty”.

The Prophet operated on the principle that should be guiding our Halal bodies today – the inherent permissibility of things. One of the maxims of Fiqh (the application of Shari’ah or Sacred Law) is that Halal precedes Haram; that permissibility comes before impermissibility.

This is something that the Halal moguls have conveniently forgotten. A well-known verse in the Qur’an (36:38) says: “Be, and it is”. This command is an affirmation of the permissibility of existence, not its impermissibility.

It does not say, for example, “Be, and it is impermissible”.

Yet, in a frantic rush for money, our Halal certifying despots turn doubt into a lucrative industry. Everything is deemed impermissible by them until proved otherwise. Their inverting of the divine order of things is a serious breach of orthodox theology.

It’s the grave equivalent of turning to God and saying: “My Lord, I don’t trust you. Allow me to check your Creation first.”

Yet these same men, who read the same Qur’an as everyone else, seem to be unaware that its pages are resplendent with soaring verses extolling the virtues, graces and generosity of Creation.

They seem to forget that whilst the material world may be indeed regarded as transient, Muslims are enjoined to savour it with moderation. And to this effect, classical scholars such as Imam al-Ghazali will tell us that doubting the fruits of Creation has never been, and should not be, part of the Muslim psyche.

And yet, the doubts are allowed to fester, and cash-strapped South Africans of all ilk have to pay for Halal certificates on a host of products that don’t need certification.

This would have perhaps been a little more palatable had these Halal certifying bodies invested their millions back into the communities they obsequiously claim to serve. But this has not happened.

The Islamic credo that public interest must serve public interest, regardless of creed, has been betrayed.

The educational, artistic and cultural institutions that these monies should have funded simply don’t exist. There are no major university scholarships anywhere in South Africa offered in the names of any of these bodies.

Considering that it’s our money ultimately funding the Halal certification process, as South Africans we should be vociferously demanding some kind of social delivery in return for our investment. And until such time as one sees this, we can only conclude that self-interest and greed are at play here.

Arab Uprisings: The Clash of Civilisation Myth Falls

THE grand myth of the “Clash of Civilisations”, the clarion call of neo-cons and fundamentalists everywhere, has fallen.

It fell during the Arab uprisings earlier this year when tyrants such as Ben Ali and Mubarak were toppled, and the bloodthirsty rule of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi overturned.

The neo-con mantra that the Arab strongmen had to stay in power because Arabs weren’t mature enough to think about things such as freedom of speech, civic liberty and democracy has been blown away.

The real reason why the strongmen had to keep their jobs – oil interests and Israel – has been rudely exposed like bare buttocks at a black tie function. The overthrow of despotic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya was clearly never in the imperial script.

Even Israel’s intelligence service MOSSAD, everybody’s go-to agency in North Africa and the Middle East, could not predict that the Arab world was going to explode.

Bernard Lewis, the octogenarian academic and author – who coined the unfortunate cliché “The Clash of Civilisations” in a 1990 essay entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage” – must also be scratching his head in amazement.

Lewis’ simplistic view, obfuscated by academic suaveness, was that every Arab state was a Lebanon waiting to happen. Samuel Huntington, who plagiarised from Lewis three years later, wrote that if “central power” weakened, the Arab states would collapse.

For too long, I feel that Lewis’ deceptively genteel grammar has hidden the face of his Orientalism. For example, am I the only one to extrapolate from his writings the contention that “terrorism” is in our Muslim DNA because of the 13th century Hashishin (or Assassins)?

Lewis’ view – again never directly stated in such clear terms – is that Christendom and Islam are destined to be in a perpetual wrestling match for world power, the two opposite corners – east and west – stamping, clashing and flattening the grass like rival bull elephants.

But with Ibn Taimiyyah’s famous 12th century Mardin Declaration (or fatwa) being re-interpreted by modern scholars, it has become clear that Islam can’t be seen in terms of two different existents: Dar ul Islam (the abode of Islam) and Dar ul-Harb (the Abode of War).

Not even Ibn Taimiyyah, the watering hole of Salafi-Wahhabism and Islamic extremism, separated the world into territories of belief and hostility. Indeed, it was Ibn Taimiyyah who ruled that Muslims could live peacefully as minorities during the time of the Mongol invasions.

This is a critical point – one that often sticks in the throat of the Muslim extremist, Christian fundamentalist, Revisionist Zionist or political neo-con – a person who prefers his world to be in reflected as black-and-white, rather than sweeping technicolour.

Indeed, it was Cairo’s Tahrir Square that eloquently put the lie to Lewis’ idea of civilisational discord, a space where I’m sure he believed east would refuse to meet west. This was when Al-Jazeera showed Coptic Christians protecting Muslims at their Friday prayer, and on the following Sunday, Muslims doing the same for the Copts.

With no central power – the manufactured bogey of the neo-con political conservatives – it was evident for all to see that Egypt was moving to the centre, and not dissolving into sectarian chaos like Lebanon in the 1980’s

I was told by Anas al-Tikriti of Britain’s Cordoba Foundation (who visited Cairo in February) that during the uprising churches had been guarded by Muslims, and mosques by Christians. There was not one incident, he said.

These simple gestures in places such as Tahrir Square go way beyond their spontaneity or symbolism; they signify active tolerance and human togetherness. They provide a living example, a common Abrahamic principle as it were, of noble public conduct where east and west do not clash, but join hands – a juncture where Isaac embraces Ishmael.

Further evidence, if one is not yet convinced, can be found in the United States – ironically the wellspring of the “clash” theory – where Pastor Terry Jones, the celebrated Qur’anic pyromaniac, finally succeeded in torching a Qur’an earlier this month.

The be-whiskered Jones stole the international limelight last year when he threatened to have a mass bonfire of the Holy Book outside his parish. Whilst Muslim indignation boiled, it was the Christian community that openly condemned him, and strongly advised him, to desist from his southern-fried madness.

For Jones, at least, fate worked in reverse. Instead of people lighting bonfires around the country, several churches sponsored a “read a Qur’an day” and interest in the Holy Book itself spiralled, translations selling out at many US bookstores.

The Kairos Palestine document, penned by the Palestinian Christian community in late 2009, is yet another example of the “clash” myth being destroyed. With Hamas a central player, the dynamics of the Palestinian struggle have been frequently pigeonholed as “Islamic terror”. The falsehood of it aspiring for world domination, via the subjugation of Israel, has been an easy lie.

The Palestinian Kairos document, a Christian “word of faith, hope and love”, puts the Middle Eastern conflict into the universal light where it rightfully belongs. Originally written in Arabic, the lingua franca of the east, it is currently being introduced to the western church where the mother tongue is predominantly English.

Perhaps the problem with Bernard Lewis and his ilk is that whilst not intentionally ignoble, they have become entrapped by sub-conscious prejudice within their own culturally determined and colonial frames of reference.

Their single biggest failing has been their inability to understand that “isms” of any nature arise out of historical and political circumstances, inside and outside of their respective belief systems. I think the point is that good men of faith, east and west, have always seen “the other” unconditionally, and not through themselves.

Bethlehem

I HAVE NEVER visited Bethlehem during normal times. I have never seen the city crowded with tourists. In fact, I have probably seen more Israeli soldiers at its checkpoints than pilgrims in Manger Square.

My first visit was in 1997, just after Israel had sealed off the West Bank and Gaza in response to the Ben Yehuda mall bombing in Jerusalem. We had tried to enter the city, but concrete barriers and truculent soldiers had barred our way.

After driving around, we were directed to a track that bumped through a stony field. Our driver went a short way, but then turned back, saying he could not risk damaging the suspension of his commercial mini-bus.

Bethlehem is only 10 kilometres south of Jerusalem, so we returned to the Strand Hotel to wait to for nightfall. We would take a taxi as far as we could on a side road, and using the cover of darkness, sneak past the blockade.

After sunset, we drove from Jerusalem towards the city. Our driver had done this trip many times before. He turned off his headlights, and we nudged along a bumpy track until a hole and pile of rocks blocked our way.

“Be quiet,” said our driver, “don’t let the soldiers hear you!”

Waiting about 100 metres from us in the darkness was our ride into Bethlehem. We crept through a field and slipped into the awaiting vehicle. I was in the passenger seat and as we approached a Palestinian roadblock, found myself staring at the muzzle of a gun.

The rest of our journey into Manger Square was less heart stopping. There was little traffic and the Square itself was empty. In fact, there was nothing to see, as to our disappointment, the Church of the Nativity was closed.

Our visit did, however, invite curiosity. Postcard sellers emerged from the shadows. We were invited for tea at a souvenir shop, its owner opening his doors for us. It sold all the usual olive wood rosaries, chocolate box icons and silver bric à brac on its crowded shelves. I was impressed by a mother-of-pearl model of the Dome of the Rock, but even with bargaining, it was beyond my pocket.

Bethlehem, which is situated on the mountainous West Bank has been inhabited since the Stone Age. It was called Ephrath in the Book of Genesis. It was the birthplace of David and is where he was anointed king by Samuel.

Genesis3 also mentions the burial near Bethlehem of Rachel, wife of Jacob, mother of Benjamin. Her rock tomb has been renovated by the Mamluks, the Ottomans and Sir Moses Montefiore, who built a dome over it in 1841.

Revered by all faiths, its caretaker from 1948 until the 1980’s was the Islamic Waqf Authority. Today, Rachel’s tomb is under Israeli control.

Known in Arabic as Bait Lahm (the City of Meat) and in Hebrew as Bait Lehem (the City of Bread), Bethlehem is distinguished as being the birthplace of Jesus. It was Saint Helena who built the Church of the Nativity in 333 CE over the site of a Roman temple dedicated to Adonis.

The Church of the Nativity is Christianity’s oldest existing building, and has been a monastic centre for centuries. Saint Jerome translated the Bible into Latin from Greek in a nearby cave.

In 614 CE the Persians invaded Palestine, but spared the Church of the Holy Nativity due to a mosaic of the Magi, or the Three Wise Men. According to Scripture, these men had followed a star that had led them to the birthplace of Christ. The Church was saved because the Three Magi – called Kaspar, Melchior and Balthazar – were Zoroastrian priests held in the highest regard by the Persians.

When Caliph ‘Umar arrived in Bethlehem in about 638 CE he decreed that the Church of the Nativity be preserved for Christian worship. In 1099 the Greek Orthodox were removed from their Sees by the Crusaders. During the Ottoman era, custodianship of the church was disputed by the Catholic and Greek churches.

The United Nations Partition Decision of 1947 put Bethlehem under the ambit of Jerusalem’s corpus separatum. In other words, Bethlehem was part of Jerusalem’s international zone. Jordan held control of the city until it was occupied by Israel in 1967, and in 1995, Bethlehem fell under the control of the Palestinian Authority in compliance with the Oslo Accords.

Since 1948, Bethlehem has changed in character from being a Christian city to a Muslim one. Apart from emigration being the option of many Christian Palestinians, the conflict has seen the predominantly Muslim refugee camps of Bait Jibrin, A’ida and Deheisheh springing up outside the city.

My second visit to Bethlehem was in early June 2002, right after ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ and the 39-day siege of the Church. This was when Israeli forces had entered Manger Square in pursuit of gunmen. About 200 people were forced to take refuge in the Church, resulting in a standoff that attracted international headlines.

Much had changed since my visit five years previously, not least of all, the construction of the Gilo checkpoint, one of the 69 permanently staffed checkpoints amongst 500 or so Palestinian barriers dotting the West Bank.

Gilo opened at 5 am and closed at 7 pm. For the 2,000 Palestinians who had to cross it daily, it was a soul-destroying experience. What had been a ten-minute taxi ride into Jerusalem, now took more than two hours each way. For those fortunate enough to work in Israel, it meant queuing at 4 am to get to work by 7 am.

Due to the capriciousness of the young conscripts manning the checkpoint, this did not always happen. People we spoke to said crossing the Gilo checkpoint was more tiring, more stressful – and sometimes even more time consuming – than their job. Settlers on the West Bank used separate roads that bypassed the checkpoints.

We approached Gilo at about 10 am. Women in black hijab with shopping bags and an old man were waiting to be processed. As foreigners with passports, it took us about 20 minutes to get through the metal detectors and turnstiles. I saw the old man fidgeting for his identity papers as a soldier in a bulletproof glass booth barked out orders in Hebrew.

On the other side, we caught a taxi to town – or what was left of it. The main road into Bethlehem was like a set from Frank Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’. Israeli tanks had flattened pavements, wrecked vehicles, ripped out telephone lines, knocked over lampposts and left gaping potholes in the tar. Some buildings had been shelled, others flattened. Even trees had been destroyed.

We stopped at a house where two young boys were sweeping up the debris of their living room. A shell had punctured the front wall and smashed into the opposite one. Another family showed me bullet holes in their front door.

“We were just sitting at home and these soldiers started firing at us,” said a young man.

On a rise above me I saw a house covered with camouflage netting. It was flying the Star of David. “What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s an Israeli lookout point,” replied our taxi driver, who said that the family living there had been evicted.

We also visited Yasser ‘Arafat’s headquarters. F16 fighter jets had reduced it to a series of concrete pancakes, twisted steel and piles of rubble under which were flattened cars. Glass and porcelain crunched underfoot.

Israel, claiming that it was hitting back at suicide bombers during ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, had attacked civic infrastructure and private homes, as well as detaining – without charge – scores of people. Yet in Bethlehem there were no military targets as defined by the Geneva Convention. The city harboured no hostile forces – other than a few resistance fighters armed with aging Kalashnikovs.

Locals such as the 22-year-old Amjad Adnan Sa’ada, who bred birds for a living, could tell me that on 17 June 2001, during the height of the intifadah, an Apache helicopter had fired a missile at his house. He had escaped with severe shrapnel injuries, but two of his uncles and a cousin – all of them innocents – had died.

Muhammad Shehadeh, a local activist, could recount that on 26 May 2002, Apache helicopters had fired several missiles at his house, destroying it completely.

According to international law, military attacks on civilians were illegal. Collective punishment – à la Operation Defensive Shield – was a major breach of its statutes.

Our next stop was the house of a Palestinian martyr, the 32 year-old Musa Abdullah, who had passed away on 22 May. We parked outside his second-floor apartment. Sayyid Walid had been given money in South Africa to donate to a deserving family, and apparently after consultation, Musa Abdullah’s widow had been chosen.

I had visited martyrs’ families in southern Lebanon before, and was not relishing the encounter. Even though there was pride attached to martyrdom, my experience was that for those affected it never diminished the harsh realities of loss and grief. The shock of death, especially when unexpected, was hardly made less bearable by its elevated status.

On a wall outside the apartment was a poster of Abdullah, a thin young man with a moustache.

His wife, a woman in her late 20’s, opened the door with an infant on her hip. The sparsely decorated living room had a picture of the Dome of the Rock on the wall. A piece of tinsel and a red plastic Hibiscus were draped over the frame.

She told us that her husband had gone to the shop during a curfew break (Palestinians had been confined to their houses) to buy bread. On his way back, carrying bags of circular loaves, he had been confronted by an Israeli army patrol. They had told him to lift his shirt to see if he was wearing an explosive ‘suicide belt’. But as he did so, he had been shot dead.

While we chat, his 14-year-old son blusters in Arabic that he also wants to die a martyr. But all I see is his mother biting back her tears. She is close to collapse. Our visit to her has been more than she can bear, and it is with relief that I bid salam.

Our next stop is Manger Square and the Church of the Nativity with its lowered door, the Door of Humility. Apart from engendering a sense of reverence as one entered the church, I was told it had prevented excitable Mamluk horsemen from galloping into the nave.

As we approached the entrance, vendors selling trinkets, beads, rosaries, crucifixes and keffiyahs swarmed around us. Manger Square was empty and they were desperate for business. “Here’s a special present for you,” said one persistent salesman, as I tried to swat him off.

Us South Africans were definitely not going to transform the city’s economy in one short visit, and I felt sorry for these people. Their livelihoods had been destroyed through no fault of their own.

Inside the church it was dingy. There were no pews in the nave, its oak roof supported by a double row of veined columns with efflorescent capitals. I viewed the original mosaic floor through a trapdoor. At its Greek Orthodox altar, marked by a glittering iconostasis, I saw bearded priests.

The grotto of the Nativity, which was accessed by a flight of stairs to the right of the Greek altar, had a rock ceiling stained with soot. It was a syncretism of Orthodox and Catholic tastes. In the grotto’s rectangular space there were three altars.

The spot where it was believed Jesus had been born to Virgin Mary was marked by a fourteen-pointed silver star. ‘Hic se Virgine Maria Jesus natus est’ said an inscription. My high school Latin told me that it proclaimed Jesus had been born there.

Above the marble-encased star a thicket of lamps hung in a tangle of chains – six placed by the Greeks, five by the Armenians and four by the Catholics. To my right was an altar said to be where Jesus had been ‘adored’ by the Three Magi. Another altar, the Altar of the Manger, was used by the Catholics. The walls of the grotto were draped with red curtains.

We proceeded to the mosque of ‘Umar across the square for the post midday prayer. Bethlehem’s mosque was not as historic as it sounded. Although it commemorated the presence of the Caliph in Bethlehem, I was told that its current structure had been built in 1947. I was also informed that during the siege of the Church of the Nativity, Israeli forces had imprisoned and beaten its imam, accusing him of ‘encouraging Hamas’.

After the prayers we were invited to lunch. As we sat down to grilled chicken and salads, we heard a racket from a loud hailer outside. It was attached to the roof of a car that was driving slowly through the neighbourhood.

“Don’t worry, it’s just the announcement of a wedding,” laughed our host, Abu Ahmad, who said that Abu Ahmad’s son next door was getting married to the daughter of Abu Ahmad a block away. The room collapsed in a heap of mirth and giggles emanated from the kitchen when Isma’il asked how much a Palestinian wife would cost him.

The West Bank is one of the oldest inhabited areas on earth, and our hosts told us that frenetic settlement building was fast destroying its heritage. “So much has been destroyed or lost already,” sighed Abu Ahmad, who added that countless prophets had trodden its soils.

“The settlers are stealing our land, pilfering our water and chopping down our olive trees. They even colonise our history. But Bethlehem is our home,” he said, “it’s the only place in the world where you can celebrate Christmas on three separate days.”

The People of the Prophet

The poor will be the people of Paradise.

The Prophet Muhammad (SAW), who was born poverty-stricken – and who lived a life of poverty out of choice – made a prayer that he would be raised amongst the poor on Resurrection Day.

Of course, Islam has never scorned honourably earned wealth. The Prophet (SAW) did not see material poverty in its negative sense as a virtue. Zakah (alms tax) and sadaqah (charity) were institutions set up to redress the rich-poor divide.

And the Prophet (SAW) did exhort his Companions, in spite of his own invocation, to seek refuge from the “evils” of poverty.

However, poverty still does have a place of honour in the Islamic afterlife – especially for those placed lowest on the social ladder. The axiom is that their forbearance in the immediate realm will offer them riches in the next.

Scholars say there are two basic levels of poverty: the first is the poverty of the soul, a state of spiritual nihilism, which exists equally in the hearts of the rich and the poor. It can be the rich man pleasuring himself to death, or the poor man committing murder.

This poverty is a disconnecting of the soul from its Creator and His ethical values, and the adoption of an absolute, one-eyed materialism.

The second category is the material poverty of the body, where there is a struggle to survive or sustain oneself. This is something most of us fear. When someone in such a situation cries out for help we give. We give not only out of compassion, but because we pray that it won’t be us.

We instinctively know that stripped of the worldly comforts of shelter, clothing, food and sustenance, the faithful will have nothing but God to rely upon. And this is not a romantic notion. There can be nothing more devastating and more humbling than the loss of livelihood.

The ultimate state of the God-fearing poor, then, is that there is nothing except Allah, simply because there is nothing.

It’s for good reason, I think, that the Qur’an declares a loss of property, family or income as one of man’s greatest tests. Fortunately, through Ayyub (as), or Job, we are given hope that God, in his Infinite Mercy, will give us back what He takes away.

Over the years whilst covering a number of events such as famine, war, flood – and apartheid – I have thought a lot about the poor, because most times my stories have had to deal with the lot of the poor.

Whilst making me appreciative of what I have, it has also taught me that the human spirit is often more resilient than we think it is. That has been the most humbling lesson. My experiences – as harrowing as they’ve been – have not been about despair.

This is something that Dr Imtiaz Sooliman of Gift of the Givers aid organisation has discussed in interviews. Whilst dire circumstances can bring out the worst in human nature, it more often than not, brings out the best of human nature.

And predictably in a world where the majority of us are poor, it’s the poor who are tested the most. I’ve often thought about what I’ve seen others endure, because I don’t think I would ever be able to cope with their kind of adversity.

And perhaps that’s why I’m in the role of an observer, because Allah does promise in the Qur’an that He also won’t test us beyond our endurance. We all have our roles to play in the grand scheme of things.

But just think of the Jahalin Bedouin, chased off the land twice since the Nakba; or the 80 year old Palestinian woman, whose Jerusalem house was demolished by the Zionists. Her amazing response was that the Jews could do anything to her, but they weren’t going to shake her love for God.

I also remember the impoverished couple in a Lebanese refugee camp who’d lost their three sons in the civil war. I’d noticed their faded portraits on the wall. It was Allah’s will, they told me without bitterness when I asked them.

In the Sindh area of Pakistan – where Sufism oozes out of the soil – chivalry would come before the pangs of hunger. “Give water to my neighbour first, he’s more thirsty than me,” said one man, who himself had not eaten for days when an aid team approached him.

In the Sahel sub-Saharan country of Niger, villages had no running water and no electricity. Donkey carts were the predominant form of transport; women washed clothes in puddles and farmers placidly ploughed their fields with oxen.

The countryside was clean and unpolluted, not because of first-world environmental standards, but because the people couldn’t afford to buy goods to litter.

In one village the people were so poor the women used to share a dress to go to town. In spite of their lot, Niger’s women – like those of Pakistan and so many poor countries – are always proudly and colourfully attired.

But I think the biggest lesson I learnt from Niger was that there are people on this earth who have nothing between them and their grave except the clothes they are wearing.

In Sufistic terms these are the truly unveiled people – souls that have no other choice but to rely upon the mercy of God, and that if there is no immediate respite in the long term, it is God who knows best.

I have so many more examples: the mufti of Kosovo travelling to the United States with a plastic packet as his luggage; the sublime purity of the people of Banda Aceh; the light shining in Imam Dawud Lobi’s face in Langa; a turbaned Sudani going on pilgrimage telling me that his turban is his funeral shroud; the Pakistani mother in the Punjab with her child sheltering between her muddy legs.

In Cape Town I just have to think of the early Muslim slave runaways and the Sufi teachers such as Shaikh Nur ul-Mubeen and Tuan Sayyid Ja’far hiding in the mountains surrounding Cape Town. Thousands of kilometres from home, with no hope of ever going home, they kept their faith and left their pristine values behind when they passed on.

Nobody is poorer than a slave, but just look at their rich legacy today – a thriving Muslim community at the foot of Africa.

It is precisely this kind of scenario that drives my optimism, in spite of the pessimistic global-warming tableaus of the world crying out around us. The heedless rich may have messed up the earth, but the poor – the people of the Prophet – are those who’ve always kept it pure.

The Gentile Project

OUR BUS TURNED LEFT PAST HAIFA’S headland. A ship steamed towards its harbour, its decks weighed down with containers. Decades ago they would have been crammed with immigrants in search of a promised land.

But now, as I saw modern condominiums lining the shore, I could have been anywhere in the world. How had it come to this? How had a community, scattered across the world in a Diaspora, been able to colonise and create Israel, a modern state named after the prophet Jacob?

I remembered a book, Islam and its Discontents, written by the Franco-Arab scholar, Professor Abdelwahab Meddeb. Modern Zionism initially had nothing to do with Judaism, he said. The first notions of a Jewish homeland had originated in Protestant circles.

I remembered too the writings in Bitter Harvest by the Christian Palestinian historian, Sami Hadawi. He had argued that a Christian fundamentalist misinterpretation of the Old Testament was the source. He had questioned the premise that Abraham had been bequeathed a homeland exclusive to the sons of Isaac.

Hadawi had pointed out what he felt were its contradictions. God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis could never have been made to Jews alone. Ishmael was also the seed of Abraham, and God’s undertaking had to apply as equally to Christians and Muslims, as it did to Jews.

Had not the Hebrew Revelation said in Genesis?

…and in thee (Abraham) shall all families of the earth be blessed.

He had also argued that Israelite tenure of the Holy Land had never been unconditional. The covenant between God and the Israelites had been strictly dependent upon their obedience. Had Moses not warned the Israelites that if they did not obey Divine Law, a Diaspora would befall them?

There were no mentions in scripture anywhere of a third Israelite return to Judea. There was no basis in Old Testament or New Testament sources to justify a modern, ethnic Jewish state in Palestine, Hadawi had argued.

He had also added that Israel itself was a metaphor; there was an Israel ‘of the spirit’ and there was an Israel ‘of the flesh’.

I could not help but note that this view corresponded to voices within Orthodox Judaism, such as the Neturei Karta, a grouping that has largely been marginalised by the sweep of contemporary political Zionism.

These anti-Zionist Jews believe that their Creator, and not man, has the final say in the status of Israel: in other words, the present Jewish state has not come into being by fulfilling any injunctions of the Holy Books.

Three Oaths

I was told that the Haredim, the biggest Orthodox group within Israel, had had to do some nifty egg-dancing between the contradictions of classical Judaism and political Zionism. And this was best illustrated, I soon discovered, through the Three Talmudic Oaths located in the Tractate Ketuvot.

Derived from the angst and melancholy of the Babylonian exile in 587 BCE, and a message sent by Jeremiah to the elders, the Three Oaths were said to be the result of three divine vows between Heaven and Earth, and between the Creator and the Jew.

The first was that Jews should not descend upon the Holy Land by force; the second was that they should not rebel against host governments; and the third was that they should not prolong the coming of the Messiah by their sins.

When I researched the Three Oaths, I walked ingenuously into a theological firestorm.

In one reading I was informed that the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust had fully abrogated the Three Oaths. The modern state of Israel, I was hotly told, had not come into being by a Jewish betrayal of the Oaths, but rather, by a non-Jewish complicity.

On the other hand, Neturei Karta had said that the Three Oaths, and the Diaspora, were obligations intended to expiate Jews from the sins that had caused the Creator to exile them in the first place. Only when the Shekhina, the Divine Presence, descended upon Zion would the Diaspora end.

This view, of course, clashed with another one I encountered in the halls of Judaism. The Messiah would only come once Jews had lifted their own hands in the creation of a Jewish state, and the reconstruction of the Third Temple.

I retreated to the calmer realms of Professor Abdelwahab Meddeb where, according to him, the contemporary Jewish Zionist thesis had only gained momentum at the beginning of the 19th century after it had circulated in Protestant circles.

Shalom Goldman, professor of Hebrew and Middle Eastern Studies at Emory University, is a Jew who agrees with Meddeb. Zionism, he writes, is the Jewish implementation of an idea that had been developing in Christian quarters for over 300 years.

The Egyptian scholar, Professor Adelwahab Elmessiri, corroborates Meddeb’s findings. He identifies Lord Shaftesbury and Laurence Oliphant, both early British Zionists, as being pioneers of the modern discourse.

Country without a nation

Shaftesbury was an Evangelist who had actively promoted the idea of an ethnic Jewish homeland. In July 1853 he had declared: “There is a country without a nation; and now God in his wisdom and mercy directs us to a nation without a country.”

Laurence Oliphant, who supported Shaftesbury’s views, authored The Land of Gilead in 1880. His book, which encourages Jewish settlement, often reads like a blueprint for the Nakba.

Other 19th century British personalities to support a Jewish homeland were Lord Lindsay, Sir George Gawlor, John Derby, Alexander Keith, Charles Henry Churchill and the author, George Eliot.

My own research led me to the 12th century and to the cell of the Calabrian mystic, Joachim of Fiore. His reading of the Book of Revelation had him claiming that the earth would experience three epochs, or dispensations. The return of the Jews to Zion would set the table for the coming of the final dispensation, and the rule of the Messiah.

This would see Jews being peacefully converted to Christianity instead of being damned. His motif of Jewish ‘salvation’ – one that would come to characterise modern Evangelism – contradicted the mainstream church’s view that Jews had been condemned to eternal exile.

I also arrived at the door of Martin Luther, the 16th century Protestant reformer. Salvation was by faith – his faith – and when Jews had politely declined to fall at his feet, a disillusioned Luther had condemned them to hellfire.

His strident views are the first mass stirrings of modern evangelism, and an ominous harbinger of the Nazi Holocaust.

The 17th and 18th centuries had their voices for a Jewish homeland too. Amongst them was the British MP, Sir Henry Finch, who spoke about ‘the world’s greatest restoration’. Napoleon Bonaparte was another who supported the idea.

But behind all the apocalyptic verbiage of those rooting for the creation of a Jewish homeland, there lurked a world view that implied Jews did not belong in Europe.

It was a jingoistic kind of Orientalism derived from the Middle Ages. It was the same outlook that had perceived the Saracen, or the Arab, as much of an unwelcome resident of the Holy Land as the Jew was of Europe.

I might be accused of cynicism. But it has to be noted that historians such as Robert the Monk, Guibert of Nogent and Baldrick of Bourgeuil – who recorded events of the First Crusade – felt that Arabs were a ‘vile and abominable race’ fit only for ‘extermination’.

This European anti-Semitism, extending to Jewish communities as well, had been preceded by a band of Crusaders massacring Jews living along the Rhine.

Cannibalism

In the winter of 1097 famished Crusaders had roasted and eaten the flesh of the townsfolk of Mara’rat al-Numan on the Orontes River. They had reported that the children were particularly delicious. This group had believed that Arabs and Jews were the natural enemies of Jesus Christ.

Both Arabs and Jews were massacred in Jerusalem in 1099. Jerusalem was re-conquered by Saladin in 1187, and while Jews were sheltered by the Caliphs of the Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman dynasties, Diasporic communities living outside the Islamic realm were often persecuted.

Yet in spite of this, the Rabbis clung to their traditional beliefs. The Diaspora was by Divine Decree. It took the Dreyfus affair in France to inspire a secularist Theodore Herzl to write Der Judenstat in 1896, and to found the World Zionist Congress in 1897.

The British Balfour Declaration of 1917, supporting the idea of Jewish state in Palestine, and colonial opportunities afforded by the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1923, were to open the political door further.

The Ottoman Empire, which was regarded as the ‘sick old man of Europe’ at the start of the 20th century, had caught the attention of Britain, France and the Russian Czar. Turkey was at the juncture of Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

At stake were new colonies, lucrative trade routes, oil deals and control of the Suez Canal. To keep her Russian and French rivals at bay, the British had supported Istanbul. However, after the Ottomans had sided with Germany in the 1914-18 war and the Armenian genocide had reared its ugly head, the British Foreign Office had been forced to change tack.

Max Dimont, author of Jews, God and History, writes that this brief Ottoman dalliance with Germany had nearly derailed the Zionists. The Turks had declared Zionism illegal, had hung ‘allied (war) sympathizers’ for treason, and had deported 12, 000 Jews from Palestine for not being Turkish citizens.

Ironically, the Arab world was destined to be an unwitting tool of Zionism’s survival. The pan-Arabist camp had long hankered to topple the Turkish Caliphate. In 1917 a young British army officer, T.E. Lawrence, was directed to co-ordinate the Arab Revolt.

For putting the Turks to flight in Syria, Jordan and Palestine, the sponsor of the uprising, the Meccan-based descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, Sharif Hussein ibn ‘Ali, was promised a pan-Arab Caliphate from Palestine to Yemen. This was done via the McMahon-Hussain correspondence.

Arab goodwill

But Arab goodwill towards Britain had already been betrayed by the Sykes-Picot Accord between France, Britain and Russia. This pact had divided Bilad al-Sham, the greater Middle East region, into chunks of post-Ottoman colonial real estate such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

For the Arab world previously unused to nation-state boundaries, and more accustomed to the loosely autonomous Turkish vilayets, or provincial sanjaqs, Sykes-Picot was to prove a shattering blow. When the Meccan Sharif claimed his pan-Arab throne, the British simply hurrumphed and looked the other way.

The weakening Turkish Caliphate was five years from its demise, and there was now a leadership vacuum in the Arab realm. Who were the independent Arab leaders?

The Wahhabi Ibn Sa’ud in the untamed Najd signed an agreement with the British, but did not take part in the 1917 uprising. Ibn Rashid of the Shammar region was pro-Turkish, as was Imam Yahya in semi-autonomous Yemen. Greater Syria and Iraq, though, were rudderless.

The Meccan Sharifs found themselves losing influence. Towards the end of 1918, Sharif Faizel Husseini (the second son of the Sharifian patriarch) met with T. E. Lawrence and entered into an agreement with Chaim Weizmann.

The Weizmann-Husseini agreement, as it was briefly known, stated that ‘all necessary measures’ should be taken to ‘stimulate the immigration of Jews’ to Palestine. Attached to the document was a curious Arabic codicil – almost an afterthought – written by Faizel in his own hand and signed by Weizmann:

Provide the Arabs obtain their independence as demanded…I shall concur in the above articles. But if the slightest modification or departure be made, I shall then not be bound by a single word of the present agreement…

Peter Mansfield in The Arabs claims that the Sharifs were prepared to give the Balfour Declaration a try to ‘help the progress of the Arabs’. Dr ‘Azzam Tamimi of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought, accuses Sharif Faizel Husseini of self-interest.

The agreement – widely scorned in the Arab realm – was never tested, and was soon a worthless scrap of paper. After being granted the throne of Syria in 1920, Sharif Faizel was summarily unseated by the French. As a sop, he was sent to rule Iraq, it taking the deaths of 10, 000 restless Iraqis to get him into power.

Described by T. E. Lawrence as a ‘brave, weak, ignorant spirit’ trying to do the work for which only ‘a genius, a prophet or a great criminal was fitted’, Sharif Faizel died in 1933.

He was a Franco-British puppet that had been foisted upon a country of which he was not a native. It was an arrangement that could not last. In 1958 his son, Sharif Faizel II, was killed in a military coup. Army rule would in turn be toppled in 1963 by the Baathists, from whose ranks would emerge Iraqi strongmen such as Saddam Hussain.

Balfour

With Arab territories west of the Jordan falling under European dominion, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 merely compounded the humiliation. The dream of Arabs enjoying hegemony over the lands of the Prophet in the 20th century became as remote as the prospect of an Eskimo caliphate in Hawaii.

The memoirs of British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George mention that the Balfour Declaration was a gesture to Chaim Weizmann for his work on developing acetone, a chemical essential for manufacturing cordite. Cordite, used in fuses, had previously been produced by Germany – now at war with England.

Robert Fisk observes that both the Balfour Declaration and the McMahon-Hussain correspondence were instruments of British ‘political expediency’. The one was the result of the British needing Arabs to fight the Turks, and the other was the result of Britain needing Jewish patronage.

The Washington Report offers another take on how the Balfour Declaration came into being. It refers to the Zimmerman Note, a secret contingency brief dispatched from the German war cabinet to its Mexican ambassador in 1917.

According to The Washington Report, Germany had to keep the United States neutral at all costs, but failing that, a call had to be made for the restoration of Mexican sovereignty over New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.

This encrypted note was intercepted and sent by German Zionists to the British, who allegedly used it to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to declare war against Germany in 1917, and to tip the scales in favour of the allies.

Another view is that Sir Mark Sykes, co-architect of the Sykes-Picot Accord, had pushed long and hard for the Balfour Declaration. In this version, Chaim Weizmann was waiting outside cabinet for a decision when Sykes came out to tell him: “Chaim, it’s a boy!”

Whatever the instrument of the Balfour Declaration, the outcome by 1918 was that Arab leadership had been duped. The McMahon-Hussain correspondence promising a pan-Arab Caliphate, and described by the Israeli historian Tom Segev as ‘evasive and amateurish’, conflicted not only with the Sykes-Picot Accord, but now also the Balfour Declaration.

Spectre of Zionism

So for its support of Britain in unseating the Turkish Ottomans, the Arab world would not only be visited by yet another colonialist, but also the spectre of Zionism.

As Karen Armstrong has said: ‘The dispossessed, uprooted and wandering Jew’ would soon be replaced by ‘the homeless, uprooted and dispossessed Palestinian’.

For those living west of the Jordan, this would mean displacement and disruption at the hands of the Zionists on a massive scale; first after 1948 and then 1967, when Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and Syria’s Golan Heights and Egyptian-administered Gaza would be occupied by Israeli forces.

Today more than 5 million Palestinians are in what the late Professor Edward Said calls a ‘shattat’, or a scattering. More than half a million are exiled overseas in Europe and the United States; a million reside under sufferance in the 1948 territories, and about 3 million lives in Gaza and the West Bank.

Furthermore, over 50% of Jordanians (about 2 million) are of Palestinian descent. In Lebanon, half a million are still stateless refugees while the rest of the refugee population (another half million) is spread through Syria, Iraq and other Arab states.

We stopped at a traffic light. Everything seemed so reassuringly normal. Unlike in the old South Africa, I could see no signs of petty apartheid. ‘Jews only’ boards were not stenciled on to park benches. Our driver turned into a side road, and halted at the gates of a holiday resort. We were now at the site of Tantura village in the Haifa region, and as I was to discover, yet another hapless victim of the 1948Nakba.

Israel: Strange White Men

AS WE TRAVELLED ALONG THE BRIGHT Mediterranean coast, it belied the dark, cynical undertow of contemporary Israeli politics. Whilst most Israelis yearned for secure borders, Palestinians demanded liberation and national identity from within the same space.

There was definitely no evidence of the idealistic Herzlian vision of Israel being a walled-in refuge for Jews, as well as a liberal European island of tolerance and enlightenment. The lofty mirage of that idyllic homeland had long since disappeared.

Ever watchful of critical scrutiny – expediently seen to threaten Israel’s very existence – Zionist PR men had been obliged to make use of offshore pressure groups to hasbara, or obfuscate, Israel’s consistent human rights abuses, and cavalier disregard of international law.

The task of continually re-inventing Israel1 to evade its detractors had chiefly fallen on the shoulders of the United States, Israel’s most faithful ally since 1967. Zionist pressure groups representing less than 1% of the country’s 300 million people – and certainly not all its diverse five million Jews – had put up camp at Capitol Hill.

It is AIPAC (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) that spearheads Israel’s massive PR offensive. AIPAC is said to be influential way beyond its numbers. Former Republican congressman, Paul Findlay, says that AIPAC drummed him out of office in 1983 for not toeing the line on Israel.

Author and attorney Jeff Gates describes AIPAC as being a ‘foreign agent’ that dictates United States foreign policy.

Jeffrey Blankfort, former editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin and radio show host, told me it was AIPAC who persuaded Congress not to punish Israel for selling military technology to apartheid South Africa during the sanctions era.

Candidates in primary and general elections in the United States are vetted by AIPAC office bearers for their views on Israel. Those regarded as sufficiently pro-Israel by AIPAC are granted campaign funding via ‘bundlers’, which are designated groups of funders.

AIPAC is also the brains trust behind the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) which it founded in 1985. More ‘academic’ in outlook than AIPAC, it was set-up by Martin Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel.

It was Indyk who framed the policy of ‘dual containment’ for Iran and Iraq during the Clinton administration.

Indyk, a vice-president and director of the Brookings Institute, now serves on the board of the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy. Haim Saban, the centre’s funder, is an Egyptian-born Israeli. He is an avowed Zionist and media mogul who made his millions at Fox Media.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has been described by Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American Islamic relations (CAIR) as an institute that finds the worst possible quotes from the Arab world, which it translates into English.

On its board of directors is Steven Emerson (of Jihad in America fame). Its panel of advisors includes Professor Bernard Lewis (the original author of the term ‘clash of civilisations’), John Ashcroft, Ehud Barak and Paul Bremer.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA) was founded in 1982. It claims to monitor the American press. If it detects what it perceives as anything unbalanced, it calls the journalist or writes letters to the editor offering ‘factual’ information.

CAMERA’S claims of neutrality are compromised by messages of support from people such as Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, whose objectivity on Israel has been openly questioned. In his book The Case for Israel, he suggests that Israel has a good human rights record.

The Palestinian Media Watch, an Israel-based organisation, was established in 1996 by the American-born Itamar Marcus. He is described by Wikipedia as ‘an Israeli political activist’.

The PMW focuses on the demonisation of Israelis and Jews, especially in the Palestinian education system. The PMW website is totally devoid of any balance; it does not examine Arab anti-Semitism in the Israeli curriculae.

The Middle East Forum is headed by Daniel Pipes, regarded by scholars and commentators such as Tariq Ramadan and James Zogby as an Islamophobe. On its website the MEF claims to work ‘intellectually, operationally and philanthropically’.

Pipes, an avowed political conservative and campaigner against what he calls ‘radical Islam’, gained notoriety through Campus Watch. This organisation was accused of ‘McCarthyism’ when it tried to black-list academics whom it considered anti- Israel.

Daniel Pipes is said to maintain a close relationship with Steven Emerson of MEMRI and is an active blogger.

Another renowned Israeli lobby group is the Anti-Defamation League. The late Dr Alfred Lilienthal, author of the Zionist Connection, claims that the ADL is the ‘most influential organisation’ in the United States. He accuses it of working closely with the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, ‘and sometimes with the FBI or the CIA’.

One group – hardly in the lobbyist category one must add – enjoys the dubious distinction of being rated as violent and extremist by the FBI. It enjoys the sorry record of having committed six murders and 18 terrorist attacks on United States soil alone.

More successful and enduring than any Islamic jihadist group, the Jewish Defence League was the spiritual home of the Hebron killer, Dr. Barusch Goldstein, and Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose political party, Kach, was even banned in Israel.

Another grouping to play a role, particularly in security affairs, has been the neo-con influenced Jewish Institute for Security Affairs (JINSA). It has been directly linked to former United States vice-president, Dick Cheney, and former Deputy Under-Secretary of Defence, Douglas Feith.

But all the above pales into insignificance if we consider the measure of Christian Evangelical support in the United States for Israel. Sometimes dubbed the ‘Kosher Nostra’, this group has the clout to stop the President it votes for in his tracks.

When President George Bush11 criticised Israel for its 2002 incursion of the West Bank, he received 100, 000 e-mails from the Evangelical lobby reproaching him. And when he mooted the Road Map, 50, 000 postcards saw him retreating from fully endorsing a Palestinian state.

This same group sent President Barak Obama nearly 30, 000 e-mails in March 2010 just before his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Indeed, as the late Reverend Jerry Falwell told CBS in 2003:

There are 70 million (sic) of us. And if there’s one thing that brings us together quickly it’s whenever we begin to detect our government becoming a little anti-Israel.

Christian-Zionist author Paul Merkley explains further13. Christian-Zionists are not knocked off their perches when Israel is denounced for rough treatment of Palestinians. Nor is it their concern when a politician gets caught for corruption, or when Mossad pulls off a dirty trick.

No, the Christian Zionist does not have to re-work the ethical Arithmetic when bad news appears, says Merkley. For the Christian-Zionist it is a requirement of faith to ‘prefer the blessing of Israel above all passing things’.

Across the Atlantic, Great Britain – the home of the Balfour Declaration – has played a leading European role in the international Israeli lobby since the 19th century and the petitions of Lord Shaftesbury, the famous Anglo-Zionist.

The Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), the Conservative Friends of Israel and Liberal-Democrat Friends of Israel all serve Israeli interests. The LFI has done this since the 1950’s. There is also the All-Party Britain Israeli Parliamentary Group and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM) that focuses upon the media.

For decades now, Zionist spin doctors and bribed shills across the world have callously played upon Holocaust guilt and paranoia to elicit international support. This lobby knows full well that no public figure enjoys being labeled anti-Semitic. By spuriously linking anti-Semitism to any criticism of Israel, it can bully opinion makers into silence.

Or as James Zogby of the Arab American Institute observes: the Zionist adage is to give the impression of being everywhere, and to say the same the thing everywhere.

The Zionist ‘behind every bush’ conspiracy in the Muslim and Arab world is a direct, if not unfortunate consequence, of this ‘let’s be everywhere’ dogma. The contemporary flames of Jewish anti-Semitism are fanned by the very myth-making of the Zionist lobby.

Zionist influence in the corridors of the United States political establishment is pervasive. Gush Shalom’s Uri Avnery once quipped that if the Israeli government ever wanted an American law to annul the Ten Commandments, at least 95 Senators would rush to sign the bill.

Jews taking issue with the programmes of AIPAC, the ADL, the LFI and other groups are attacked by these lobbyists for being self-loathing. Or, as Abraham Weizfeld complains: the Zionist lobby forgets about other Jews.

Jews in the United States, Britain and Europe do not unquestioningly support Israeli policies. Yet this is the impression that organisations such as AIPAC, the ADL and the LFI have created.

The truth is that Jews in the Diaspora have their voice of concern about Israel played down. Jewish clamouring for peace between Israelis and Palestinians is completely ignored by the lobbyists. As Not in My Name founder Steven Feuerstein has declared:

We criticise Israel because of, not in spite of, our Jewish values.

Even though the Zionist administration may appear to wag the President’s tail (Lilienthal cites a Pentagon joke that memos always have to be typed in triplicate with a copy going to Tel Aviv) it cannot hide that today’s Israel is an extremely costly project for the American taxpayer.

The World Policy Institute reports that in a decade from 1996 to 2006, this small country of about six million received more than 17 billion dollars in direct military aid alone.

Israel’s aid benefaction is legend, and the country receives more aid dollars from Congress annually than all of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa combined. In fact, this tiny nation receives more aid from the United States and its Diasporic community than any other country in the world.

The late Yeshayahou Leibowitz, a renowned figure at the Hebrew University, and a former editor of the Hebrew Encyclopaedia, once fretted that Israel would collapse due to its reliance on Uncle Sam.

Yet this is what fuels the Zionist project. Those in the Diaspora must pay unconditionally for the protection of the nuclear-powered Zionist state – a David surrounded by a non nuclear-powered Arab Goliath, with Persian Iran now the bogey.

The former French Marxist Roger Garaudy, who turned Muslim and wrote The Founding Myths of the Israeli Policy, argues that the crux of the problem is the secular Zionist movement. It created a militaristic, nationalistic Jewish state at the expense of an Arab one in the very centre of the Arab world.

This was achieved, he says, purely through historical subterfuge, and not by fulfilling any Biblical prophecy. The truth of it – old-fashioned colonialism – was simply wished away by generating the founding fable that a wild, virgin soil was tamed by a superior civilisation.

Garaudy argues, with statistical proof, that before 1948 Palestine was a far cry from being an empty, barren land.

But this did not prevent Moshe Auman of the Israeli Academic Committee on the Middle East penning a 24-page essay entitled Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948. His document, in which author Mark Twain is prominently quoted, points to the savagery of the Arab natives and the bleakness of the country.

However, Mark Twain is about as reliable as Monty Python would be for writing a biography on the life of Christ. Twain’s accuracy of account in his 1867 Middle East travelogue, Innocents Abroad, is typified by his claims that he took a sword and tried it on a Muslim who ‘clove in twain like a doughnut’.

The Independent’s Robert Fisk in his Pity the Nation, comments that Auman’s real intent was to manufacture consent that Palestinian Arabs were backward, undeserving tenants of their land.

Auman is contradicted by one of the early Zionists, Asher Ginsberg, who toured Palestine in 1891 and observed that it was difficult to find uncultivated ground anywhere. The idea that a person could come and claim as much land as he wanted was not the case, he reported, using his Hebrew moniker, Ahad Ha’am.

No person epitomised the loftier ideals of Zionism more than Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and yet no person showed the rank disappointment of discovering that Palestine was an Arab homeland more than him.

Ben Yehuda, who revived ancient Hebrew as a modern language, could only describe his arrival on Palestinian soil in 1882 with feelings of dread. To him the Arabs were a fortified rampart that impinged upon his sacred dreams. He eventually left the Holy Land, saying that Jews should have a homeland, but not in Palestine.

Yet on the 15 June 1969, the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir still had the temerity to tell the British Sunday Times that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people. “It’s not as if we came and threw them out and took their country…they didn’t exist,” she proclaimed.

This contrived thesis of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’ has been indubitably, the most enduring Zionist myth. It does not warrant further comment – other than to observe that our apartheid-era history books, also worshipping the idol of nationalism, were imbued with exactly the same kind of doctrinal flatulence.

We had to believe that white men had tamed the wild, unpopulated southern African shores with their ships, ox wagons and blunderbusses. Only when the indigenous Nguni, Khoi or San tribes – boasting centuries of cultural tradition – met up with their European interlopers as naked, caterwauling savages did they enter the pages of history.

This separatism is fixed in a one-eyed worldview that automatically asserts the inherent supremacy of one culture over another. Its arrogance is often subliminal, the perpetrators peculiarly unaware of their insensitivity. This Orientalism is well exemplified by two 19th century English settlers who tried to walk across the Australian outback.

As they lay at death’s door choking in the sand, a group of well-fed and watered Aborigines shook their heads in amazement. Why had these strange white men refused their help?

People often comment that creed is at the centre of the impasse in Palestine. Religious zealotry is indeed a component of the conflict, but the real battle is about land. And despite the religious zealots, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is firmly in the political frame.

Moses Hess, regarded as the first Jewish intellectual to discuss political Zionism, was a contemporary of Karl Marx. He also predicted Germany’s intolerance of Jews. As a secular philosopher, his interest was neither the Torah nor the Talmud. He suggested that Jews should create a socialist commonwealth in Palestine. Hess’s work only gained currency after his death in 1875.

Theodore Herzl, author of the foundational political Zionist document, Der Judenstat, admitted quite happily in his diaries that he was agnostic and did not enjoy religious impulse. He even refused to circumcise his son.

Max Nordau, co-founder of the World Zionist Organisation with Herzl, went on to say that he found the Torah ‘rather repulsive’ and that Herzl’s book would replace it.

In the beginning the most determined opponents of political Zionism were not Arabs or Palestinians, but Jews. The Orthodox Rabbis of Europe’s ghettoes and rural shtetls fought tooth and nail against the idea from its birth.

Judaism’s greatest scholar, Maimonides, had listed 13 principles of Jewish faith in the 12th century; the 12th principle was that Jews had to wait for the promised Messiah. According to the Rabbis this had to occur before the ingathering of all Jews in the Holy Land.

What political Zionism did was to remove the concept of Messianic expectation from Judaism.

For the Rabbis it was a heresy of the highest order, and over 100 prominent Rabbis across the Jewish world condemned Zionism. In 1942 publications such as the New York Times were still arguing in their columns against the establishment of a Zionist state.

This led to fears expressed by people such as Hebrew University academic Professor Judah Magnes that Zionism would become the idol of the Jewish people. In other words, the proto-national identity of the modern Jew in Israel would see him worshipping not God, but the state.

Chicago University history professor, Bernard Wasserstein, writes that the greater part of Jewish immigration to Palestine was not motivated by Zionist conviction, but by circumstance.

Professor Wasserstein concludes that most arrivals re-invented themselves as Zionists only when they got to Palestine. And in the mould of nationalist myth-making, invested their own and their forefather’s presence in Israel with a retrospective meaning that was at odds with historical reality.

Even the ancient yeshivas, the religious institutions of Jerusalem, were not interested in Zionism, their focus more on the sacred stones of the city and their quasi-mediaeval lifestyle of prayer, reflection and waiting for the Messiah.

When Herzl visited Jerusalem in 1898 the chief Rabbi of the city, Rabbi Shmeul Salant, ordered that he be declared an unbeliever.

The shift from the sacred to the secular so condemned by the Orthodox Rabbis at the turn of the 20th century – and then, ironically, the Zionist use of the sacred to justify the secular – is precisely where Roger Garaudy believes today’s conflict has its roots.

He writes that with Zionism developing primarily as a nationalist-colonialist movement, its followers could so easily have settled in Uganda or anywhere else in the world. The Russian, Leon Pinsker, who penned Auto-Emancipation in 1882, was yet another who initially favoured territorialism.

The open question is whether an African or South American Zionist homeland would have created as much turmoil as Israel has done in the Middle East. Nonetheless, Palestine became the sentimental Zionist favourite.

As we have already mentioned, Christian fundamentalism has hugely bolstered this Zionist sentimentality. Its support of the Zionist cause, predicated by mediaeval Protestant writings, is based on the Book of Genesis where God is said to proclaim that those ‘who bless Israel’ will be ‘blessed’ themselves.

These fundamentalists, today known as Dispensationalists, claim that all Jews must return to Israel to build the Third Temple. This is so that the Messiah can appear.

The political mobilisation of this group began in 1973 in the United States. Ironically it was not the issue of the Messiah, but rather legalised abortion, that stirred it into action.

Menachim Begin, who signed the Camp David Accords with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, invited one of its figureheads, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, to Israel in 1978. In 1979 the Israeli government gifted him a million-dollar Lear Jet as a tribute for bringing Christian pilgrims – and donations – to the Holy Land.

In the same year Falwell founded the Moral Majority. With its pro-family, pro-life, pro-defence and pro-Israel policy, it helped Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. The Dispensationalist’s belief – that Jesus would only reappear when there was a Jewish state from the Nile to the Euphrates – suited the Israelis too.

But what was really important to Israel was Falwell’s constituency: millions of Evangelicals supporting West Bank expansionism as opposed to 100, 000 Zionist lobbyists. What was left out of the picture, though, was Falwell’s conviction that the anti-Christ would be Jewish, and that Jews would one day have to submit to Jesus Christ.

Living in Dar ul-Shahadah

IN a world filled with acronyms and post-modernist quests for self-identity, we have to ask ourselves: what exactly is Dar ul-Shahadah?

Dar ul-Shahadah – the safe abode of Islamic witness – is a term coined by contemporary thinkers such as Professor Tariq Ramadan and Ebrahim Rasool. Ramadan, a grand-son of the Islamic Brotherhood’s Hassan al-Banna, is the most recognised voice of Muslim Europe.

Rasool, a son of the Cape Town soil and South African ambassador in the US, is a former provincial premier, parliamentarian and presidential advisor. A product of the anti-apartheid movement, he was in a group that broke away from the Muslim Youth Movement to form the Call of Islam in the 1980’s.

Directed by activists such as Faried Esack and Imam Hasan Solomon, the Call of Islam believed that South African Muslims should join the anti apartheid movement. They felt that Muslims should openly identify themselves with the objectives of the Freedom Charter.

Not everybody agreed with the Call of Islam’s integrationist principles at the time, and judging by recent events when Rasool was accosted at Gatesville mosque, there are today a confused few who still appear to have problems. But before we tackle that issue, Dar ul-Shahadah needs a little more definition.

Both Ramadan and Rasool say that as Muslim minorities in non-Muslim societies, we should have no conflict with our hyphenated existence of being Muslim-European, or Muslim-South African.

Ramadan says that European Muslims have to develop a ‘European Islam’, and Rasool asserts that as South African Muslims with a three-hundred year legacy, we can already lay claim to a distinct community profile.

For not only is Dar ul-Shahadah a safe abode of Islamic witness, it’s a space that signifies public identity and civic accountability. It’s a space where a new application of Sacred Law, the Fiqh of Minorities, shows up the exciting dynamism of Islam as it marches into the 21st century.

It’s a space where if our Islam is not threatened, and if we have civic freedoms, our responsibility is to be an upright citizen. As John Donne writes, “no man is an island”.

But being an upright, participatory Muslim citizen doesn’t mean pseudo-patriotism, two-piece suits, or agreeing with the west or supporting Israel. Nor does it mean that we have to stifle critical political engagement, or that we have to apologise for our values. Far from it.

It means that as franchised members of a society we’re an integral part of its diverse and challenging whole. We have to embrace it and become part of it. In Dar ul-Shahadah we live in a benign, as opposed to a threatening, space.

Having travelled to the Muslim world and to Europe, I can say that in South Africa we have one of the most evolved models of Dar ul-Shahadah. Our access to government and civic freedoms are the envy of all I’ve met. We’re one of the few Muslim minority communities who can actually have our destiny in our own hands.

I can remember interviewing Merve Kavakci, a Turkish MP. She was taken by the irony she could wear her scarf in South Africa’s parliamentary assembly, but not her own. Then what about Switzerland, the so-called bastion of political neutrality? Are minarets banned in the suburbs of Cape Town like they are in Zurich? And the veil? Is it forbidden in South Africa?

These are just some of the serious questions that those who tried to shout Rasool down during a Friday talk at Gatesville need to consider. The former premier, who was addressing the topic of Mandela Day, was accused of being responsible for legalising shebeens and gambling in the Western Cape.

That the accusations were as spurious as Monty Python’s dead parrot merely being asleep, need no further comment. Nor does their disgraceful conduct in the mosque. But what does need further comment is the hackneyed innuendo of state illegitimacy emanating from this group, many of whom were once associated with PAGAD.

PAGAD was founded on the principle of reducing Cape Town’s pressing problem of gangsterism and drugs. But when the masses abandoned the organisation as its leadership imploded, PAGAD became waylaid by a messianic obscurantism from which it has never recovered.

With a reactionary leadership on the ground besieged by reactionaries from within, PAGAD retreated into a “them” and “us” laager. We were either for or against PAGAD. There were no grey areas in between.

And it didn’t take too long before the association of unbelief, of being kaafir, was made on those public figures who disagreed with PAGAD’s modus operandi – murder and chaos cloaked with religiosity.

The calling of people kaafir enabled the inference that their blood was now “halal”. It manufactured consent for the bombing of the homes of people such as Shaikh Nazeem Mohamed, then president of the Muslim Judicial Council, and UCT’s Professor Ebrahim Moosa.

PAGAD’s extreme polarisation of principles (there’s only room for those Muslims who agree with them) reflects, by default, the ideas of the Egyptian polemicist, Sayyid Qutb. He wrote that there could only be a Dar ul-Islam or Dar ul-Harb, the House of Islam or the House of Hostility.

With Qutb we can immediately see the pitfalls. Where is there a genuine Dar ul-Islam today? The last Caliphate, the Ottoman one, collapsed in 1923. For most reasoned commentators Dar ul-Islam is more a hypothetical concept, but in Qutb’s eyes it’s a revolutionary reality in which jihad and the overthrow of even secular Muslim leaders is compulsory for all Muslims.

Military jihad may be relevant in Islam, but it’s certainly not one of its pillars – something that Qutb and his ilk so strongly suggest. The greater jihad, as the Prophet (s) told his Companions on the way back from a battle, is the one of the human soul.

The obvious lack of a middle road here contradicts the Qur’anic ideal of “ummatan wasatan” (the way of moderation) and the Prophet’s (s) well-known exhortations against extremism.

The grouping that attacked Rasool seem to have lost the plot of what it means to live in Dar ul-Shahadah. Do they want to impose their dictatorial, ill-formulated “Dar ul-Islam” upon all of us, no questions asked? A “Dar ul-Islam” where the blood of those who disagree with you becomes permissible? An “Islamic” system where the ends can always be twisted to justify the means?

When I think back on the infamy and terror of the PAGAD era, the alternative becomes too horrifying to contemplate.