Moses Can Lead Israelis and Palestinians Out of Their Bloody Conflict
The prophet revered by Jews and Muslims can help them overcome their ‘darkest hour,’ Mustafa Akyol's historical account shows
Book Review
For the last century, the relationship between Judaism and Islam has seemed to offer little more than bloodshed and acrimony. This has perhaps never been more the case than in the year since Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Try to imagine a “Judeo-Islamic tradition” today, and all that comes to mind is an artifact, the kind of thing whose bones we might stare at in a museum.
But it is a living thing, contends Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute on Islam and modernity, in his hopeful history of that tradition, The Islamic Moses: How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World. Looking to what Judaism and Islam have shared in the past suggests that there are ways that competing Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms can coexist; the wider regional conflict, often couched in religious terms, need not continue indefinitely.
Akyol’s hope isn’t grounded in a particular theory or school of foreign policy, but in broadening the scope of historical knowledge. The longer story, spanning some 1,300 years, has rarely been ideal and often interspersed with violence. But it has also been one of cultural and intellectual exchange alongside experiments in pluralism and tolerance.
Searching for Moses
Early chapters offer an engaging comparative study of the foundational years of Islam and its textual reception of Moses. Readers without much knowledge of Islam or its history will learn much without feeling lost. Muslims too, Akyol suggests, will find plenty of interest—in particular, elements of and approaches to the religion’s texts and history that once were (and could be again) central.
In this account, the story of Islam’s founding is not just one of revelation, but also of narrative reception: how Moses moved beyond the Jewish imagination into that of the Arab world of late antiquity. The Quran’s structure means that it is difficult to see the full picture of Moses’s role simply by reading the text, even though he is the most-mentioned figure in it. “When you take a copy of the Quran and seek the story of Moses,” he writes, “you will not find one but many passages in different chapters. Their dispersion may make them seem disconnected, but in fact there is an important connection between these passages: almost all of them are Meccan, as opposed to Medinan.” (Its revelations have two phases: first in Mecca, where Muhammad and his followers did not attain political power, and in Medina, where they did. Keep this in mind later.) Akyol’s task is to help make the picture cohere. Who, in this composite, is Moses?
From a Jewish point of view, this process produces an encounter with Moses’s starring role in another religion’s midrash, so to speak. This discovery was fascinating, even delightful, because of its unexpectedness. There’s Moses, sparring with Pharaoh—but is that Haman beside him as an advisor, 800 years before his role in Persia in the Esther story? These villains come to serve a role in the Quran as timeless, recurring symbols of political oppression.
Moses, though treated as a more clearly historical figure, also holds an emblematic role. Islam’s Moses, like Judaism’s, is a liberatory figure—though there are important differences, rooted in the two religions’ respective missions. Judaism, Akyol summarizes, is Abrahamic monotheism for the Jewish people, while Islam is Abrahamic monotheism for the gentiles. Accordingly, where Judaism’s account of Moses might err toward particularity, Islam’s errs toward the universal. To put this in modern terms, the Moses Akyol finds in the Islamic tradition is an avatar of negative liberty, of freedom from—from slavery and political oppression especially. Judaism’s Moses, however, represents positive liberty, freedom for: “Let My people go,” he commands Pharaoh, transmitting God’s words, “that they might worship Me.” The rabbinic tradition goes on to describe “the yoke of the Torah,” not a burden, but a constraint that guides them in accordance with divine purpose. This distinction, perhaps, has its origins in the different roles Moses plays in each tradition. The Islamic Moses, no longer serving as chief lawgiver, finds narrative space to play the role of anti-tyrant above all else.
A Tale of Two Islamic Cities
While the Judeo-Islamic tradition is the book’s topic, its central themes are the historical experiences of liberalism and pluralism. The first examination of Jews, Muslims, and pluralism takes place in the second city of Islamic revelation, Medina. Here, the Quran’s relationship with Judaism changes. While Meccan verses idealize Moses and suggest a neighborly, tolerant relationship with Jews, those from Medina are harsher. Akyol’s goal across two chapters devoted to this city is to understand the historical and political, as opposed to simply textual, origins of this shift.
On one level, the answer is simply that pluralism is hard and even its successes are fragile. Within Mecca—where there was no Jewish community to coexist with—idealization and acceptance were easier. In Medina, things were trickier. While Muslims and Muhammad began by offering toleration and acceptance to Medinan Jews, whom they saw as legitimate monotheists, the Jewish community remained wary. Some reasons for this were religious: Muhammad did not meet the Jewish criteria for legitimate prophecy. Nor did he fulfill criteria for a legitimate messiah, who “would be a descendant of King David who would liberate his fellow Jews from exile—not a Moses-like prophet who would establish a new religion among the Arabs.” Shared monotheism and equal citizenship were good things—but this new religion seemed to be headed by a false prophet and false messiah. In other words, Islam appeared “alarmingly akin to Christianity”—a religion that sought not to coexist, but to supersede. A “Covenant of Medina” between the two communities cracked and then collapsed. In conflicts between Muslims and local polytheist tribes, many of Medina’s Jews came to side against Muhammad and his followers.
But pluralism does not just succeed or fail within localities. Those cities themselves exist in broader political and historical contexts. The most common explanations of what happened in Medina, Akyol writes, ignore these. Muslim sources blame “some quintessential Jewish arrogance and perfidy,” while Jewish and many Western accounts suggest that Muhammad used Jewish refusal to grant him religious as well as political recognition as a pretext “to expel or annihilate them.”
Rather, Akyol sees this failure—and the supersessionist stance Islam came to take toward Judaism—as the product of a broader political conflict. Jews, for the most part, sided or sympathized with the Zoroastrian Sassanid Empire, who were largely uninterested in (and therefore comparatively tolerant of) Judaism, against the Christian Byzantine Empire. For Jews in the 600s, this Empire “was a nightmare” but Muslims were amenable to it. Medina’s Jews, Akyol concludes, did not so much side against Muslims as they aligned themselves against a greater strategic threat to their safety. In Akyol’s hands, this allows the Quran’s negative depictions of Jews to be contained as depictions of 7th-century Medinan Jews, specifically, not claims about all Jews in all places and times. There is nothing theological about these depictions; they are political and this political moment has long past.
The Moseses Who Came After
The biblical Moses is only the first of three men of this name whose stories appear. Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) serves to illustrate what Islam has contributed to Judaism. Born in Córdoba to a family that had flourished under the Almoravid Caliphate, Maimonides fled after the Berber Almohads conquered the city and demanded Jewish conversion. He ultimately settled in Egypt, where he served as personal physician to Saladin and wrote works that established him as one of the towering figures of Jewish philosophy and theology shaping the religion for the last millennium. His life emblematizes something larger: the ability of Jews to thrive within Islam’s medieval empires; a Jewish preference for this security, even if it entailed a second-class civic standing; and Islam’s preservation and embrace of Greek philosophy. Medieval Islamic rationalists offered Maimonides two crucially important things: the works of Plato, Aristotle, and others (both in Greek and in Arabic translation) and, through Islamic rationalism, a model of their application to and through a monotheistic worldview. Indeed, this would be of value to more than just medieval Jews: the Judeo-Islamic encounter with Greek philosophy paved the way for Christian Europe’s rediscovery of the Classical tradition.
But where Jewish philosophy has survived, even thrived, in the years since Maimonides lived, Islam’s, in Akyol’s assessment, has not. He locates the reason for this, probably too simply, in the differences between Judaism’s diasporic history and Islam’s “imperial past”: “Jews did not have a state of their own that could define the true faith and eradicate its heresies.” That is, Islam’s political power often conflicted with intellectual pluralism, ultimately making its encounter with modernity fraught. “[T]he Jewish success in the modern world begs for more attention from us Muslims,” he concludes. This success, and Jewish modernity’s potential contribution to Islamic modernity, find embodiment in the third Moses, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the foundational figure of the Jewish Enlightenment, or haskala.
In Berlin, Mendelssohn initially trained for the rabbinate, but ultimately combined this with the study of European languages, mathematics, and philosophy. Although he never became a rabbi, Enlightenment philosophy complemented, rather than replaced his Judaism. This sets him apart from both his Dutch predecessor, Baruch Spinoza, and many figures of the following century’s haskala. His major work, Jerusalem, is a reconciliation of Judaism with Enlightenment liberalism. In Mendelssohn’s life and thought, Akyol finds two items of particular importance. First, given the ways Jewish and Islamic rationalist philosophy had been intertwined, he offers evidence that “Islam, in its own repository, has a rich heritage that may lead to an Islamic Enlightenment similar to the Haskalah.” This, in turn, might lead to the second, the ability to “redefine the Islamic Sharia in the same fashion that Moses Mendelssohn redefined the Jewish Halakha: a set of religious commandments to be voluntarily practiced—and not a set of public laws to be coercively enforced.”
Still, I have two quibbles with this account. One is that, while Akyol’s details of Judeo-Islamic relations in the deeper past are rich, his account of Judaism in early modernity is too simplified. For example, Maimonides comes across as nearly forgotten until Mendelssohn’s resurrection of Jewish rationalism; he was, in fact, among the dominant voices in the rabbinic tradition, a continual influence in Jewish thought. The other is that Akyol glosses many of the challenges of Judaism’s encounter with modernity—challenges which can be summarized in the Mendelssohn family line. While Mendelssohn remained a traditionally observant Jew, four of his six children abandoned Judaism altogether; his famous grandson, the composer Felix Mendelssohn, was baptized. “Berlin is well worth a mass,” the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine remarked upon his own conversion. While such a price would have been far too high for Mendelssohn to consider paying, a great many of those who followed in his wake agreed with Heine.
The Dignity of Difference
These remain minor complaints, though, because they do not detract from Akyol’s larger point: that Islam should embrace the challenges and possibilities of liberal modernity. Acclimation and accommodation risk complete assimilation—but the task is necessary and inevitable. To Akyol, Judaism’s encounters with liberalism and modernity offer models from which Islam can learn, emphasizing the modernizing changes made by Reform Judaism. These encounters and responses go beyond the religious to the political and cultural realms. Nor are they strictly intracommunal. When Akyol calls for a Reform Islam to give up “coercive power in the name of religion, so that all believers can practice their faith in the way they sincerely believe” and the need for “studying a religion other than one’s own,” he echoes the orthodox Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s case for major religions to recognize “the dignity of difference.”
There are models for this in the Judeo-Islamic past and present. The Covenant of Medina stands out as a brief glimmering of what could have been—a pluralist society that, if not anachronistically liberal, achieved a kind of pre-liberal equality of neighbors under the law. What followed, however much it involved frequent thriving-together of Jews and Muslims, was what we might call an illiberal pluralism. Dhimmi status afforded Jews not just toleration, but state protection and a level of communal autonomy. Still, it fell “quite short of the equal citizenship that we have in liberal democracies.” We can appreciate it without idealizing it.
Akyol avoids that trap. At times, however, he comes perilously close to another—the accidental idealization of Jewish diaspora, as in his attribution of Judaism’s philosophical tradition to statelessness. For example, he credits the success and toleration of Ottoman Jews with their disinterest in nationalist calls for autonomy. But another way to put this is to say that they didn’t cause headaches for their rulers, not like the Greeks, the Kurds, or the Armenians—to whom “The Ottoman Haven” (Akyol’s term) responded with violence. And when Jewish nationalism did emerge as a political reality, the regional reaction was similarly violent: the expulsion of nearly all Jews from Muslim nations in the Near East and North Africa, the willful destruction of the last of the Judeo-Islamic civilization The Islamic Moses explores and examines.
To Akyol, “The very fact that those Jewish minorities lived and mostly flourished till the mid-twentieth century ... was a testimony to the Judeo-Islamic tradition.” This is true. But so is the fragility it reveals. Jewish emancipation in Europe lasted a century before it began to collapse. That toleration for Jews could do so just as quickly in places where it had existed for nearly a millennium is a starker reminder of the vulnerability and risk that minorities take upon themselves.
Modernity has been double-edged for Jews. But liberal modernity has midwifed the greatest period of Jewish flourishing since the destruction of the Second Temple. Liberalism is not a theological requirement—although it is also not theologically barred. Ditto for a dogmatic religious nationalism. This is true for Judaism and Christianity as well as for Islam, however many well-meaning sermons may claim otherwise. The term “theocracy,” as Akyol notes, was first coined to describe the political structure of the pre-exilic Jewish state, after all.
Not divine revelation but history and politics—those messy “geostrategic facts”—necessitate liberalism. There’s nothing wrong or belittling in this. Indeed, it’s one of the lessons of Jewish history. However many successes came out of dhimmitude’s illiberal pluralism, however preferable many found it to live under Christian rule, its intermittent failures, even when the collapses were localized, demonstrated the extent to which such a pluralism always leaves the protected minority at the mercy—and whim—of the dominant. It is, to draw on a distinction Rabbi Sacks makes, contractual rather than covenantal; a compact of state, not society. Liberalism, then, is not a necessity of either religion, but—and this, I think, is Akyol’s insight too—history’s geostrategic facts make it a necessity for them.
But what of today—and tomorrow? Akyol calls the post-Oct. 7 moment “the darkest hour” of the Judeo-Islamic tradition. Writing from the other side of that hyphen, I agree. That makes it difficult to draw this review to a close. What, after all, is there to say that either won’t look on that tradition like a museum fossil or fall away into either a vapid, off-key recital of “Kumbaya” or a 5,000-word aside on Zionism as historical necessity? What I’m left with—all I can offer anyone else—is the bewildered hope of Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones: There are very many bones in this valley, and they are very dry. “Can these bones live?” “O Lord God, thou knowest.” Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones: “Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live.”
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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Fascinating. I knew some of this, but only a scant, superficial bit. On order.
A wonderful piece. Thanks for writing it and thanks to the UnPopulist for hosting it and giving it a bit more of an audience.
I've read Menocal and Lowney on the convivencia so those parts were familiar to me. But there was a lot of new (for me) and relevant material to ponder here.
Also, I hope Mr. Belvedere happens by - I gather that he follows developments in Indonesia, which has (sometimes, at least) been an example to the world of what a more moderate, liberal Islam might look like (and, since I've drifted over to Indonesia, I can't leave without saying: Hail VoB!)