In a bid to check rising criticism of Israel in American campuses, a Pennsylvania Senator is proposing a law that will make anti-Israel campaigns in American universities illegal (Agencies, Berita Harian , April 26, 2003).

In the build-up to the US-led coalition's illegal invasion of Iraq, Israel was unwittingly cast under the same intense spotlight that examined America's widely perceived ulterior motive behind the war.

The level of public opinion against Israel was quite unprecedented. The world, not just cynical Europeans, took notice that Israel too has weapons of mass destruction courtesy of American taxpayers.

They demanded that Israel's illegal military occupation of Palestinian territories and oppression of the Palestinians must end, if there is to be lasting peace.

This is something that vitriolic ranting of militant fundamentalists against Jews and Christians was not able to achieve. It can perhaps be said that such hard-edged religious rhetoric has done more damage to the Palestinian cause.

Worldwide condemnation

The post-Sept 11 (2001) Osama (bin Laden) tapes were a PR disaster for Muslims and the Palestinians, something that Zionists and the Israel lobby would have probably relished in private.

But in today's world, where the conventional media no longer have full control over what news people should have, the realities of the Israel-Palestine conflict are beginning to alter public perception of Israel.

One incident was the death of American college student Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes in February.

The Zionist lobby was, for the first time, made to feel the heat of worldwide condemnation of Israel - that it resorted to a measure that runs counter to the notion of freedom of exchange, criticism and debate in academia.

It would be a shame if Muslims are unable to read this small, but significant, shift in public perception of Israel in the struggle for justice for the Palestinians.

We need to recognise that the struggle is not likely to succeed without the support and solidarity of people of all faiths and persuasions, who find Israel's oppression of the Palestinians immoral and an affront to humanity.

Imitating the oppressors by resorting to terrorism in the name of moral equivalency would only harden the resolve of a brutal regime armed and backed by the world's only superpower, and simultaneously undermine our moral cause.

The familiar crude inflammatory rhetoric couched in religious expressions that sees the conflict as a war between Islam and Judaism-Christianity needs to be re-examined.

Serious analysis absent

Apart from fiery sermons and lectures, there are books written by Muslims that seldom rise above the level of pamphleteering when dealing with the question of Palestine, Israel, Zionism and the west.

In confronting this major issue, we lean lazily on Jewish conspiracy theories, taking comfort in selectively relying on anti-semitic historical revisionism. That "the protocols of the elders of Zion" are widely read by university students and educated Muslims as the basis for arguments against Zionism reflects our inability to carry out serious analysis.

This makes it difficult for others who view Zionism as a perniciously racist and immoral ideology to sympathise with Muslims, when we ourselves practise this mirror-image racism.

A book that was highly recommended to me is Imran N. Hossein's 'Jerusalem in the Quran' (Dar Al Quran, Long Island, New York 2002). It has a rather long sub-heading - 'On Islamic view of the destiny of Jerusalem, including a Muslim response to the September 11 attack on America'.

The back cover describes the author , popularly known as Shaykh Imran, as having been a resident of New York until Sept 11. He used to deliver the Friday sermon at the mosque in the UN headquarters.

He studied philosophy at Karachi University and International Relations at the University of West Indies and at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva.

As I understand it, he is currently based in Malaysia. In the build up to the American invasion of Iraq, he was busy with lecture engagements in Malaysia's public universities, institutions and gatherings of well-heeled English-speaking Muslim professionals.

This was largely because his major themes strike a resonance with the way many Muslims interpret events in the Middle East, as well as due to his credentials as a former diplomat and a resident of New York.

March of history?

The central thesis of the book is premised on a sort of historical determinism, where history is largely an eternal battle between Islam and the western Jewish-Christian alliance, and Jerusalem (Palestine) is the eternal battleground.

The author supposedly built his thesis from his study of Islamic sacred texts on doomsday prophecies. In this thesis, events in the Middle East - from the destruction of the Caliphate to the birth of Israel and Arab nation-states and to the present conflicts - are supposedly part of a pre-ordained march of history that is about to reach its final phase.

The Jews, with the help of Euro-Christians finally succeeded in wresting Jerusalem from the Muslims to create the state of Israel, from which they will control the world for a period of about 80 years. The forces of Islam will finally triumph and reconquer Jerusalem, and this will be signalled when the Sea of Galilee runs dry.

The writer seems unperturbed by the difficulty of squaring this premise of historical determinism with Islam's basic principle of individual free will, rational agency and moral accountability.

As an extension of this premise, one is bound to ask wether historical players from Napoleon, and Hitler to Ataturk and current Israeli, Arab and western leaders are merely acting out their parts in a pre-written script.

Despite the author's background as a diplomat and student of philosophy and international relations, this book is not much different compared to others of this genre. The urgency of warning Muslims of Jewish-Christian machinations overrides the importance of critical scholarship, credible references and historical objectivity.

It is of note that this genre of Muslim writing only appeared in the modern era when Muslims are in our lowest political, economical and intellectual ebb. On reflection, it is striking that this peculiar sort of historical determinism was never a significant theme among classical Muslim scholars.

In that era , Jewish people in their midst were well tolerated and Jewish scholars, scientists and physicians made significant contributions to the flowering of Muslim intellectual culture.

It seems this genre owes a great deal to western anti-semitic literature, the most notorious being "the protocols of the learned elders of Zion". Supported with quotations from the sacred texts, this in turn generated the Muslims' peculiar version of anti-semitism.

'Anti-Muslim pundit'

In the introduction, Shaykh Imran says 'Jerusalem in the Quran' was written partly in response to a newspaper article by Daniel Pipes that was published in the Los Angeles Times in July 2000.

Pipes had attempted to dismiss any Islamic claim to Jerusalem by declaring that "it is not once mentioned in the Quran and the liturgy".

Perhaps readers of the learned Shaykh's book should first know something about Pipes. He is the director of Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia think-tank that openly declares its support for Israel and US interests in the Middle East.

Pipes is marketed on talk show circuits as author and expert on Arabs, Islam and the Middle East, given to frequently making blanket statements encouraging suspicion and sometimes outright hostility towards Arabs and Muslims in the US and the Arab world. He was one of those who immediately alleged that the Oklahoma bombing was the work of Muslim fundamentalists.

Columnist Edward Said has noted that Pipes was "one of several anti-Muslim pundits who seeks to make sure that the Islamic threat is kept before our eyes, the better to excoriate Islam for terror, despotism and violence, while assuring themselves profitable consultancies, frequent TV appearances and book contracts" ( The Nation , Aug 12, 1996).

Pipes' latest notoriety was the setting up of Campus Watch, a web site that builds dossiers on university professors critical of Israel and Zionism, denouncing them publicly as "terrorist Profs".

Such an effort to create an environment fear and intimidation in academia has led to about 100 professors from across the US to ask that their names be added to the list ( San Francisco Chronicle , Sept 28, 2002).

Universalism of Islam

Going back to 'Jerusalem in the Quran', it is perhaps unwise to fall into the trap of responding to Pipes on his terms.

The learned Shaykh quotes copiously from the Quran to "explain accurately the world and Jerusalem today", and says "we have sometimes interpreted a text (of the Quran) ourselves when such a text was not directly explained, either by Allah, Most Wise, or by His Messengers... When we did so, we exposed ourselves to the summary rejection of those who admit to no interpretation whatsoever of sacred texts other than its direct and literal meaning." (p. 15)

There would be quite a few who would not be persuaded by his thesis, not so much out of the fact that Jerusalem was not once mentioned in the Quran as Pipes correctly claimed, but by the extensive quotations from the Quran.

These are, however, largely so general in nature that one would have to be very careful to ascribe to these verses an accurate explanation of the geopolitical events taking place today, especially those pertaining to Palestine and Israel.

But even if Jerusalem is not in the Quran, it is in the hearts of Muslims. It is the land of the prophets and the birth place of Jesus. Part of Prophet Muhammad's night journey (Isra' and Miraj) was from Makkah to Jerusalem. The early Muslims prayed in the direction of Jerusalem (Qibla) but this was changed to Makkah in the second year of Hijra.

But even if Jerusalem had been part of Muslim territory from the time of Caliph Umar Al Khattab until 1948 (with an interlude of an 80-year rule by European Crusaders), Muslims have always recognised it as the holy city of the other Abrahamic monotheism - Judaism and Christianity.

That Jerusalem, despite its historical and symbolic importance for Muslims, is not once mentioned in the Quran nor alluded to exclusively as a Muslim possession can be explained by Islam's claim to universality.

Jerusalem as a geographical entity is accidental to revelation and prophethood. Islam has never claimed it to be a substance central to the religion, such that when the Muslims were ordered to change their Qibla from Jerusalem to Makkah, the following verse was revealed to remind them of the true essence of the faith :

"It is not righteousness that you turn your faces towards East or West, but it is righteousness to have faith in God, and the last Day, and the Angels, and the Book, and the Messengers, to spend of your wealth out of love for Him, for your relatives, for orphans, for the needy, for the traveller, for those who ask, and for the ransom of slaves, righteousness is to be steadfast in prayer, and practise regular charity, to fulfill contracts which you make, to be firm and patient, in pain and adversity, and throughout all periods of panic. Such are the people of Truth, the God-fearing".

- The Quran, II; 177

The notion of God's chosen race with an eternal, sacred real-estate isolated exclusively for them runs counter to Islam's universalism and its notion of individual free will and the moral accountability that follows.

It is unnecessary to reciprocate Zionism's corruption of a universal faith to a religious ethnocentrism by which God has bound Himself to favour His people and restricted Him to the physical and historical frontiers of Jerusalem.

In this sense an attempt to answer Pipes by heavily mining the Quran would be futile and unconvincing, as Zionist ethnocentrism and its religious attachment to a specific geographical entity has no Islamic scriptural parallel.

Indeed what Pipes said about Jerusalem could almost apply equally to Makkah, the latter being mentioned only once in passing (and in another verse it was referred to as 'Bakkah', the barren, desolate valley that Abraham was commanded to settle).

Exclusive perspective

Unfortunately, the Muslim response to the Palestinian problem over the past half-century has been couched largely in a religious populism, seeing it as a war between Islam and Judaism, a battle to be fought by Muslims against Jews and their western Christian allies.

This might be understandable given Jerusalem's great historical and spiritual significance to Muslims. As co-religionists, it is natural that we vicariously feel the sufferings of the people who have been dispossessed, oppressed and humiliated in this conflict (the fact that a small but significant number of them are Christians often escape our consideration).

But must we limit ourselves to this exclusive religious perspective? Have we adequately reflected that religious populism might have done a terrible disservice to the Palestinian cause and to Islam, given our penchant for brutish and coarse rhetoric that sweepingly puts the blame on Jews and Christians for everything that is wrong with the Muslim world today?

'Jerusalem in the Quran' seems another over-extended pamphlet that uses religious populism as a vehicle to counter the pernicious designs of Zionism, instead of historical objectivity and rigorous scholarship.

The book is to be credited for restraining itself from relying directly on "the protocols of the learned elders of Zion" and similar conspiracy texts. However, it is not free from making sweeping condemnations of European Christians and Jews as monolithic entities seeking to conspire to destroy Islam and Muslims.

One notable departure from European history as understood by most people is the author's obsession with the central idea that the European Christian Crusaders - who were defeated after ruling Jerusalem for nearly a century - nursed a deep, centuries-old grudge against Muslims.

According to the Shaykh the Euro-Christians, despite transforming themselves from "a mediaeval Christian civilisation to an essentially godless modern secular western civilisation, ... the new ostensibly Christian Europe displayed the same strange obsession for the Holy Land that was displayed by the old Christian Crusading Europe. It proceeded to join hands with the essentially godless ostensibly Jewish European Khazers in pursuing a continuing obsession with liberating the Holy Land. These two European peoples have remained locked together in a mystifying unholy embrace ever since". (p. 121)

We think that this is historically inaccurate.

After the final defeat of the Crusades, the "Euro-Christians" forgot about the holy land and busied themselves with the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the industrial revolution and colonialism. In medieval European Christendom, the Jews suffered discrimination, hatred and persecution.

The most extreme form of this religious persecution was the Spanish inquisition which led to forced conversions and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims. With the Enlightenment of the 17 th and 18 th centuries, the Jews - who had hitherto existed on sufferance - became equal citizens.

Birth of Zionism

The Jews found a new environment where all men were recognised as possessing a right to participate in and integrate with Christian societies under a universalism based on reason. They could enter universities, join the national army and serve in public office. They excelled in industry, trade, finance and the professions in the expanding, industrialising nation-states of Europe.

This assimilation in some way led to the corrosion of Jewish identity and to a reforming trend in Judaism. But the rationalism and universalism of the Enlightenment was not untainted by age-old traditions and strong human sentiments of national belonging by language and culture.

With scientific progress, industrialisation and the flowering of the arts, music and literature in a Europe that was increasingly politically organised into nation-states, there emerged nationalism based on romantic feelings of unity, of sharing in a mystical experience of common history, of communion with a particular mother earth.

The excesses of romantic nationalism among some European nation-states led to renewed persecution of Jews after the emancipation and assimilation brought about by the Enlightenment.

The realisation that they never really belonged to Christian Europe was the impetus that led the Jews to dream of their own romantic nationalism, and thus Zionism was born. It is essentially a political ideology that diabolically exploited Jewish sentiments of exile and ethnocentric religious notions of a Chosen People and a Promised Land.

The only problem was that the Promised Land has for millenia been inhabited by other people. They farmed the land and built towns and villages. The creation of that Jewish National Home would require ethnic cleansing - expulsion of Palestinians from their towns and villages, initially by political deceit and later by terror.

In this regard, the slim volume of the late Professor Ismail Faruqi's 'Islam and the problem of Israel' (republished this year in Malaysia) serves as a useful introduction.

Britain - as the colonial power that gained the mandate of Palestine after WWI and the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire after a series of British-inspired rebellions by ambitious, easily-duped Arab chiefs - was no doubt instrumental in the creation of the Zionist state.

The other factors were the rise of Hitler in Germany and the hundreds of thousands of Jews liberated from concentration camps at the end of WWII who had no homes to which to return. Palestine seemed a good idea for these Jews, as this would simultaneously absolve Europeans of their centuries-old burden of guilt.

It is well recognised that Christian Europe since the Crusades has always looked at Islam with prejudice, hostility and mistrust.

Bible-belt Baptists

However, Shaykh Imran's claims that the birth of Israel was a culmination of a grand, religiously inspired design of European Christians hatched after the Crusaders were driven from Jerusalem is a thesis not founded on sound historical arguments.

If there is anything to be said about Christians and Zionism, the writer should probably focus on Southern Baptists, the conservative fundamentalist Christians of America's Bible Belt who are virulently anti-Islam and strongly aligned to the Zionists.

They also happen to make up an important block of President George W Bush's constituency. It has to be recognised that among today's critiques of Israel are Christians offended by the immoral, racist ideology of Zionism.

Books of this nature often go beyond the scope that the title suggests, and 'Jerusalem in the Quran' is no exception, although it can be argued that the subject matter of the other themes are tenuously related to its main theme.

The learned Shaykh covers topics familiar to readers of Jewish conspiracy theories like the usurious economy based on paper-money controlled and manipulated by the Jews (which appears to borrow heavily from the English Maverick Shaykh Abdul Qadir As Sufi), the fall of the Islamic caliphate and the emergence of Arab nation-states, to end-of-the-world prophecies.

The subject of usurious economy and the domination of the western economies over the rest of the world in this era of globalisation certainly merits in-depth discussion by experts.

Absolute conviction

What I find disconcerting is the writer's dogged conviction about end-of-the-world prophecies that leave no room for doubt or the possibility of other interpretations.

For instance, the writer is utterly convinced that the end of the world has already begun, the anti-Christ (Dajjal) is already here, that Gog and Magog (Euro-Christians and Zionists?) powerful tribes who will wrest Jerusalem and control the whole world have already been released, "that is the precise moment in history in which the world is now located" (p. 126). This is printed in bold to emphasise the point.

The Shaykh does not doubt that the anti-Christ emerged in Britain not very long ago, but is now in the US, that he is one-eyed refers to British education, and "that Dajjal would ride on an ass which would travel as fast as the clouds and which would have its ears stretched out wide. This refers to the modern airplane and fighter aircraft". (p. 108)

Here Muslims perhaps would best stick with the well-known tradition from An-Nawawi's 'Forty Hadiths' that the Prophet himself was not privy as to the end of the world, and he could only offer general signs.

'Jerusalem in the Quran' appears at a time when Muslims really need a critical introspection as to why we are in such a pathetic state - humiliated, despised, sometimes hated by the rest of the world and utterly weak when we make up 20% of world's population and sit on the planet's biggest oil reserves.

We never tire of reminding ourselves that we once had a glorious civilisation that in no small measure richly contributed to human culture.

That the book and the author are very popular among Muslim professionals, given the current mood among Muslims with regard to the American invasion of Iraq, requires an open and honest evaluation of the ideas discussed.

Modern nation-states

One of this concerns modern nation-states and electoral politics. The modern post-colonial Muslim nation states whose boundaries are sometimes completely artificial have their shortcomings, and so do despotic Muslim governments that oppress their own people.

But the Shaykh's advice that Muslims completely abandon electoral politics and the "godless" nation-states, take up arms to liberate the holy land from the Jews, and rebuild the caliphate is a hopelessly romantic dream that ignores the realities of geopolitics today.

Post-colonial nation-states are accidents of history, but cannot be wished away. The first step for Muslims to restore our dignity and confidence would be to transform our despotism into functioning democracies at nation-state level.

It is time we re-think religious populism in dealing with the Israel-Palestinian conflict and the malaise that besets the Muslim world. In a community of nations, we should only stick to one standard of universal morality, shared by all people who believe in the goodness of man.

In the court of the world's public opinion, resorting to one's religious scriptures to argue one's case has little persuasion.

The Palestinian cause might have been better served had we approached it from the perspective of universal morality and international law rather than an exclusivist, inflammatory religious rhetoric.

The Zionist juggernaut will not likely be defeated by exhortations of armed struggle as the writer suggests. The only way is perhaps by educating the world about the true nature of Zionism and the unspeakable cruelty it has unleashed on Palestinians, and by appealing to humanity's innate sense of morality.

This requires deep and objective understanding of history, the forces that shaped the world's dominant civilisation and today's geopolitics.

There is perhaps some truth in people saying that American foreign policy is written in Tel Aviv, but taking comfort in religious populism and conspiracy theories that indict an entire race and creed will only cast Muslims as hopelessly irredeemable fascists.

In these trying times, 'Jerusalem in the Quran' seems to represent a hardening of Muslim religious populism and belief in the modern lore of Jewish conspiracy theory, with the Sept 11 attacks seen as providing additional proof.

It is but another fall into the trap of reciprocating Zionism. The appendix (in the book) that takes a swipe at Ibn Khaldun and Iqbal testifies to the anti-intellectual nature of this genre of modern Muslim writing.