My name is Ed Husain.
I am a Muslim and I've had the good fortune of living across the Muslim world. I'm a born
and raised Londoner and despite being born and raised in a free city in a free country,
I harbored attitudes of hatred and bigotry towards Jewish people and by extension Israel.
I don’t often talk about this but given the rise of extremism and antisemitism in
our midst here in the West but also in the Middle East I think it's absolutely necessary
in fact religiously obligatory on Muslims who have gone through that journey to talk
about it.
So why did I hate Israel?
I started to meet extremists radicals from a host of organizations in the Middle East,
most particularly Hizb ut-Tahrir and Hamas who taught us that Israel was in occupation
of Muslim land so all of Palestine belonged to Muslims.
I went to Hamas gatherings every Wednesday afternoon with professionals here.
They were not all angry extremists.
Many of them were accountants, lawyers and engineers.
And the message that we went away from those gatherings was to organize was to agitate
to protest against Israel's very existence.
For me there was a major turning point that made me question our attitude towards Israel.
I was driving along with a group of friends from a radical Islamist organization and they
saw Jewish people on a Saturday afternoon and in North London they turned around and
said, pulled down the window, and said to them 'go back to Israel.'
At that point the inconsistency the stupidity the flaws in their argument came to my mind
that how can you on the one hand say that Israel has no right to exist but when you
see Jewish people ask them to go back to Israel and that then took me on an entire journey
of questioning of wondering about our attitudes towards the Jewish people whom by the way
the Prophet Mohammed welcomed in Medina.
We forget that at our peril.
My view towards the Jewish people and by extension Israel changed when I lived in New York.
I encountered the warmth and hospitality of Jewish people.
I studied Jewish literature that influence Musa bin Maimun or Maimonides had on Islam
and Islam had on him, and more specifically when I traveled to Israel, I defied Muslim
group thinking and collectivist thought and went to Israel because I saw prominent Muslim
scholars Habib Ali al-Jifri, Egypt's then Mufti Ali Gomaa Jordan's Prince of Ghazi and
others inviting Muslims to come to Jerusalem, and during that journey to Jerusalem I met
with Jewish people as well as Arabs and Palestinians as well as Israelis and I realized that we
had been blinded by the extremism and bigotry and the hatred of Jewish people that continues
to nourish.
Angry Arab literalists who came to the West brought with them an attitude towards hadith
literature that caused us problems here and problems in the Middle East.
For example teaching us that the last battle this imagined apocalyptic battle that would
take place between Jews and Muslims and some tree would say to every Muslim oh there's,
yeah Abdullah there's a Jew behind me come and kill him and the last day wouldn't appear
before this imagined battle would happen.
What we miss in all of this as Muslims is that early Muslims rejected this kind of illogical
perverse hadith.
The focus on hadith always was 'was it in compliance with the Quran.'
Was it in compliance with the Prophet's character and did it make sense with the history and
the Ceara and the overriding compassion of rahmat al il alamin, the mercy to mankind
that the prophet is described by God in the Quran.
As I traveled across the Middle East and studied in Syria and Saudi Arabia I realized that
these were allegations against the prophet that don't stand up to modern scrutiny that
the prophet could not have married a Jewish lady, stood up for a Jewish funeral, called
on us to be circumcised like our Jewish cousins, allowed for us to marry Jewish women and then
said kill Jews wherever you find them.
So rather than placing them in their historical context and questioning their veracity, we
have become literalists and extremists and started to claim that Jerusalem does not belong
to the Jews.
How dare we when Sahabi Omar, the second caliph of Islam, invited Jewish people back after
500 years of banishment by the Romans.
What is this modern obsession that the Jewish people have no right to Jerusalem when Jewish
scriptures refer to Jerusalem more than six hundred times the Old Testament.
In the Quran there is no one direct reference to Masjid al-Aqsa al-Quds being here in this
world.
There's an indirect reference...and other Muslim scholars thought that was in the heavens.
Even for us our claim to Jerusalem is contested.
For the Jewish people, the claim to Jerusalem is completely verified and in keeping with
at least 38 centuries of their history.
As Muslims we have to remember in our scripture in Quran again and again Allah talks about
Bnei Yisrael.
As Muslims we honor the Ashraf or the Sadah, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, alahi
salatu wa salam.
What then of the descendants of hundreds of other prophets, the Jewish people today we
forget, Yachub or Jacob is another name for Israel or Yisrael.
So we should honor them and challenge the extremism and bigotry whenever it comes up
in our Masjid's in our mosques on our websites in our university campuses.
This hatred of Jewish people must end and we have other problems inside the house of
Islam and my next video on J-TV will talk about some of those problems.