Earlier this week I was interviewed (6/14/16) by The Rebel’s Tiffany Gabbay on the ancient origins and modern manifestations of Islam’s canonical Jew-hatred as permanently embedded in Islam’s most sacred texts: the Koran itself, the hadith or “traditions” of Islam’s prophet Muhammad and the nascent Muslim community, and the “sira,” or earliest sacralized biographies of Muhammad.
A key segment of our discussion—captured in a ~ 4- minute clip—briefly rivets upon the central Jew-hating verse of the Koran, sura (chapter) 5, verse 82 (5:82), including: an ancient assessment of its relevance to Jew-hatred among the Muslim masses by the 9th century polymath Al-Jahiz (d. 869), through its modern “updated” significance in a 1937 fatwa (available here; free pdf here) against the Jews by Hajj Amin el-Husseini (1895-1974), jihadist founder of the so-called Palestinian Muslim movement; and most importantly, the contemporary pronouncement on Koran 5:82, made in October, 2013, re-affirming its conspiratorial, Jew-hating gloss, by Ahmed al-Tayeb, current Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University, and Sunni Islam’s Papal equivalent, who heads Sunni Islam’s de facto Vatican of religious education, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.
Below the embedded segment I have included additional background materials which elaborate the summarized discussion.