One Muslim Begins to Know Judaism

By Sarmad Ali - Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, May 07, 2008 - Web Link
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May 6, 2008

A few weeks ago, I flew to Michigan to join my close friend’s family in celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover. It was my second time going to a Seder and it again stirred memories of how Jews were regarded in Iraq in my childhood.

The first night we had a fairly big table with a dozen people or more. My friend’s grandfather sat at the head of the table and led the readings, asking others, including me, to recite some passages from a Passover booklet. When a reference to the Euphrates River came up, I leaned over to point it out to my friend. “These are my people,” I whispered, chuckling. The reading was punctuated with jokes and questions as we went around the table telling the story of how the Jews were slaves and then left Egypt. I found that part interesting.

In Islam, it’s very unlikely for people to joke during religious ceremonies and readings. It’s considered inappropriate and forbidden. When I first came to the U.S., I heard many people, some even observant, making jokes about religious figures like Moses and Jesus. I found it at the time very inappropriate and offensive, and I remember asking them how they could speak so lightly of these “guys,” whom we Muslims revere and refer to as prophets of Allah. I remember how surprised my Jewish and Christian friends were to find out that there are whole suras, or chapters of verses in the Quran, devoted and, in some cases, named after, Mary, Joseph, Jonah, Noah, Moses and David, among others.

Before coming to New York in the summer of 2004, I had never heard of any Jewish holidays, nor had I met any Jewish people. By the time I was born, there were no Jews left in sight in Baghdad. The handful of elderly Iraqi Jews who surfaced in Baghdad after the U.S. invasion, whose stories were reported in Western media, seem to have survived in Iraq all those years either by hiding their identity or by being just too old or secular for Saddam’s government to worry about.

The only mental images of Jews that I could think of growing up in Baghdad came from Egyptian movies; for example, about an Egyptian-trained intelligence agent who infiltrated Israel during former Egyptian president Jamal Abdel Al-Nasser’s era, or a television series that showed a synagogue with black-clad rabbis that depicted prophet Mohammed’s era in the Arab peninsula surrounded by Jews hatching conspiracies against Islam.