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| The Kocerri family from Albania: Muslims who saved Jews in World War II. (Norman H. Gershman photo) |
Who are they?
Muslims: Ones who submit to God, the God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad
Islam: The religion of peace through submission to God
The Ummah: All Muslims see themselves as belonging to the Ummah of Muhammad, which is a universal family
Diversity: The Ummah consists of Schools of Thought. The Sunni Tradition consists of Shafi, Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki schools. Shia Islam , about 10% of the ummah, is usually described the Jaafari School, but there are many variations within that broad category.
Within all Schools of Thought there is diversity, based on regional culture and past traditions.
Beliefs: To be Muslim, one must believe and publically state that he or she believes in One God and that Muhammad is His Final Messenger.
This entails acceptance of the authority of the Quran and the five pillars of Islam: statement of belief, 5 times daily prayer, paying zakat, fasting in Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Makkah for those with the means.
Arabs and Islam: Arabs make up about 15% of the ummah. It ought to be a truism that
“the Arabs” do not exist-at least not as a homogeneous political or ideological subject. Yet such use of a general category known as
“the Arabs” is common in both journalism and the specialist literature. “The
Arabs” are supposed to think and act or react in unison. Of course, like “the
Jews” or “the Muslims”, “the Arabs” as a politically and intellectually uniform group exist only in fantasy, engendered by the distorting prism of either ordinary racism or polemical fanaticism.1
The ideological and political crosscurrents in the Muslim and Arab worlds make any reduction of them to a stereotypical mindset is a distortion of reality.
Attitudes to the British Empire, World War II Nazism
There was a huge diversity in attitudes to, World War II, the British Empire and Nazism amongst Muslims and Arabs in the 1930s and 1940s.
The shaping of public opinion in these areas must be understood against a background of catastrophe post-World War I. It resulted in the destruction of the Caliphate and of Islamic rule in some places where it had existed for nearly 1400 years.
The British and the French were regarded with considerable hostility by all those who sought independence from imperial rule, whether French or British, due to this experience. There were of course many who found opportunities in the situation.
Hostility towards the WWI Allies can be traced to a few major issues:
The Sykes-Picot Treaty, when it was published by the victorious Russian Bolsheviks after 1917, exposed the betrayal of all that had been offered by the Allies for the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. Instead of an Arab State free from imperial rule, Jordan, Syria and Iraq were allocated to French and British collaborators. Monarchies protected by the Europeans under a charade of self-government were the result.
Sharif Hussein, who had orchestrated the Arab revolt, was sidelined, and removed from power, to prevent even a shadow Caliphate under British rule from coming into existence. The Hejaz, the site of the Sacred Territories, was given to the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance, which remains in power today.
The British Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised imperial support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which was seen as a threat to the Holy City and to the Arab population, both Christian and Muslim, of the region. While a homeland for the Jews in Palestine was widely acceptable, a Jewish Homeland on Palestinian territory was not.
Achcar in The Arabs and the Holocaust describes four currents in the Arab anticolonial independence movement, none of which, he points out, enjoyed dominance. All of them had their particular take on Nazism and the outbreak and waging of WWII.
1. Liberal Westernizers
2. Marxists
3. Nationalists
4. Reactionary/fundamentalist Pan Islamists
Liberal Westernizers
Westernizers, according to Achcar, were not unconditional admirers of the west but were rather advocates for the adoption of the Enlightenment values that dominated Western Europe, along with the necessary industrial civilization which functioned with those values.
They were liberal in the sense that they favoured the remolding of society on the basis of an essentially secular conception of the state and rational-humanitarian values.
While opposing fascism and Nazism from the outset, they also opposed, on anti-colonial grounds, the premises of Zionism.
The popularity of this stream of thought suffered badly from the wide awareness of the Arab masses, and indeed Muslims all over the world, of the contradiction between Enlightenment values and European colonialism and its accompanying ideology of racial supremacy.
Israel Gershoni, a specialist in Egyptian intellectual history at the University of Tel Aviv , established that
“the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices – in the political arena, in intellectual circles, among the professional, educated urban middle classes and even in the literate popular culture
– rejected fascism and Nazism both as an ideology and a practice, and as ‘an enemy of the
enemy’.”2
Al Risala (The Message – alluding to the message of Islam) was the most respected forum for Egyptian-Arab and other Arab intellectuals of the period of the 1930s
It regularly devoted space to a methodical, highly critical review of internal developments in Nazi Germany and in fascist
Italy… Consistent support of liberal democracy and liberal values, attended by the rejection of fascist and Nazi totalitarianism, can also be found for example in the monthly Al-Hilal, in the daily Al-Ahram and in the illustrated weekly Ruz
al-Yusuf….3
The daily Filastin (Palestine) the main Arabic daily for Palestine, even during the period of the Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, from 1933 portrayed Nazism as reactionary, dictatorial while voicing the conviction that democracy would eventually triumph.
During the war, it supported the British, although the colonial overlord, on the basis of universal rather than local values and demonstrated through traditional Arab-Islamic values that siding with the Nazis was precluded.
That the western powers after the Holocaust, did not open their borders to Jews from Europe, but rather preferred to encourage their migration to Palestine, still rankles in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Once again Enlightenment values were ignored by those who loudly proclaimed them to the world.
The Marxists
The Communist movement in the 1930s was in a period of ultra-leftism, in Germany fighting against both the fascists and social democracy, designated as
“social fascism”. This was also applied to Zionism. RundschauI the German language review of the Executive Committee of the Communist International said of the 1933 Zionist Congress in Prague;
True, Hitler is the enemy of the Jews, but Hitler is a national German racist and the Zionists are national Jewish racists. At the bottom they speak the same language. And in fact it seems as though there might be some kind of understanding between Hitler and the Zionists.
It was in this context that Palestine’s Communists underscored the ‘remarkable
similarity’ between Nazism and Zionism and forged the label “Zionist-fascist” on the model of
social-fascist”. 4
This was less shocking in 1933 than post-Holocaust. Indeed Achcar points out that a 1934 book by Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist rabbi and future president of the World Jewish Congress, made clear his admiration for Nazism and its goal of racial
“purification”. 5
Prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Syrian and Lebanese Communists had founded a League for the struggle against fascism but for 2 years dropped activity until the Nazis invaded Poland.
Achcar mentions the case of Najati Sidqi a Palestinian Communist leader and 1931 delegate to the Congress of Red International Labor Unions. His anti-Nazi attitudes were strengthened by cross-German travel in 1936. Strongly rejecting the Soviet-German pact, in 1938 he published in Beirut a series of articles on the incompatibility of Nazism and Islam which were collected and published as a book. He was expelled from the Communist Party.
Once the Nazis attacked Poland the USSR, Fascism became the main enemy and Zionism was explicitly demoted. The Arab Secretary of the Palestinian Communist Party, Ridwan al-Hilu in a 1943 speech in Jaffa proclaimed:
Anti-Jewish terror in the fascist countries is in reality criminal act perpetrated by fascism that undermines the Arab cause and helps Zionism.
The Marxists generally interpreted Zionism as an attempt to deviate Jewish workers from the class struggle against capitalism. Achcar points out that the biggest flaw in the pro-Soviet Communists immigration arguments
lay in the absence of an international Communist campaign to open the gates of all countries in which Jews fleeing Nazism could have found refuge, and to which
‘displaced persons’ of the postwar period could go. The overwhelming majority of both groups wanted to immigrate to the United States, which, tragically,
…granted access to only a small minority.
Not even the American Communists mobilized behind the demand that Jews be granted refuge there. 6
Marxist organisations in the Arab world had many Jewish members and the main Egyptian Communist organization in 1947, post-Holocaust, founded a Jewish league for the Struggle against Zionism. Jewish members of the Iraqi Communist Party in May 1946 demanded that Stalin support the Palestinian cause in the UNO. The Palestinian Arab Communists pinned the blame for the UN move towards partition on the Arab national movement which
had paved the way for partition with its
‘negative’ and ‘racialist’ policy towards Palestine’s Jewish inhabitants. 7
The support of Moscow for Palestinian partition at the UN in 1947 and the provision of Czechoslovak arms for the creation of an Israeli state, put a brake on the expansion of Communist influence in the region and in the Muslim world generally. It never really recovered.
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Notes:
1. Achcar, Gilbert. The Arabs and the Holocaust. The
Arab-Israeli war of Narratives. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Coy. NY.2009
p. 33
2. Achcar p.37
3. Ibid p.39
4. Achcar p.51
5. Ibid p.52
6. Achcar p.59
7. Ibid p.61