Islam and the problem of Israel

In a world teeming with superficial political analyses that merely scratch the surface, the book “Islam and the Problem of Israel” by the late thinker Ismail Raji al-Faruqi emerges as a foundational intellectual document that delves into the historical, religious, and ideological depths of the modern era’s most complex conflicts. Penned by one of the most prominent Palestinian and global thinkers in the field of comparative religion and Islamic thought, this book does not merely recount events; rather, it dismantles the infrastructure of Zionism, its relationship with the West, and the Islamic stance toward it, presenting a comprehensive discourse that transcends traditional perspectives. It is worth noting that al-Faruqi paid for his intellectual positions with his life, as he and his wife, Dr. Lois Lamya al-Faruqi, were assassinated in their home in the United States in 1986.

The Three-Dimensional Dilemma: Islam, Western Christianity, and the Jews

Al-Faruqi opens his book with a bold proposition that corrects prevailing misconceptions in the Islamic world. It has been customary to view the problem of Israel merely as another model of modern colonialism, or at best, a repetition of the advancing Crusades. However, the truth, as the author sees it, is that Israel is not merely either of these; rather, it is both together, and much more.

Al-Faruqi frames the conflict within a “three-party problem” comprising the Islamic world, Western Christianity, and the Jews. To understand the roots of this conflict, the book takes us back to the dawn of Islamic history, highlighting the early clash between the nascent Islamic state in Medina and the Byzantine Empire. Since then, the relationship between the Islamic world and Western Christianity has been characterized by continuous conflict and confrontation, interspersed with temporary periods of calm due to the exhaustion of both parties.

With the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, the Christian West greeted the event with overwhelming jubilation, considering it the end of Islamic hegemony and the beginning of the fragmentation of Islamic identity and culture, and the subjugation of its peoples. In this charged geopolitical context, al-Faruqi argues that the Israeli problem is inextricably linked to this historical struggle that has spanned fourteen centuries.

When Balfour issued his ominous declaration in 1918, he was not inventing a new policy, but rather continuing a deep-rooted Western tradition aimed at “divide and conquer,” implanting a foreign body in the heart of the region to be in perpetual conflict with its surroundings. Western and specifically American interests manifested themselves after World War II in the creation of Israel to serve supreme strategic goals. These included: providing a friendly military base whose survival depends on Western protection, creating a focal point to drain the region’s energies and prevent any national renaissance, protecting newly discovered oil resources, and, most importantly, alleviating the burden of guilt harbored by the Western Christian conscience regarding the crimes committed against the Jews over two millennia, which culminated in Hitler’s Holocaust. Furthermore, Israel aimed to divide the Islamic world and separate its Asian and African halves with an insurmountable barrier.

Al-Faruqi categorically asserts that even if there were no Jewish problem in the West, and even if Zionism never existed, the Christian West would have invented a “Zionism” and an “Israel” to serve its historical animosity toward the Islamic world.

Jewish History in the Christian West: The Roots of Suffering and Persecution

To understand how Zionism emerged, al-Faruqi takes us on a deep analytical journey into Jewish history within Christian Europe prior to the Enlightenment and civil emancipation. The book explains how Christians reinterpreted the entirety of Jewish history to be merely a preparatory tool for the event of the crucifixion of Christ. While it would have been logical, according to their claims, to thank the Jews for their role as an instrument in realizing this divine drama, the Christian conscience did not forgive them; instead, it leveled against them the ultimate charge: “Deicide” (killing God).

This animosity was not superficial; rather, hatred and malice boiled in the hearts of Christians every time they remembered the passion of Christ. What made matters worse was the continued survival of the Jews, their rejection of Christian claims, and even their view of Jesus as an “imposter.” This living Jewish presence served as a glaring challenge and a constant reminder to Christians.

Al-Faruqi delves into the theological roots of this animosity, pointing to the principle of “vicarious guilt” in Christian doctrine (such as inherited original sin), which led the Christian mind to the conclusion that the contemporary Jewish neighbor is personally guilty of the crime of crucifixion and the rejection of Christ, simply by belonging to this race. This reached the point where the Papacy itself assumed official responsibility for presenting the Jew as a living model of evil and malice, establishing a special neighborhood (ghetto) in Rome to display them as examples of “infidelity” to educate the Christian community.

The book lists a long and horrifying catalog of legal and social restrictions imposed on Jews over two millennia. They were forbidden from employing Christians, holding public office, or practicing medicine; special taxes were imposed on them; and during the reign of Emperor Justinian, they were even forced to listen to Christian teachings and banned from reading the Torah in Hebrew. Under these harsh conditions, along with expulsions from Spain, Portugal, and Britain, and the massacres that accompanied the Crusades, the Jews found no safe haven except the Islamic world. There, they were welcomed and integrated as equal citizens alongside Muslims fleeing Andalusia, and Islamic states from Morocco to Egypt opened their doors to rehabilitate them.

In Europe, however, isolation in the “ghetto” and occupational restrictions forced them to take up usury and money-lending, which increased Christian hatred toward them. Yet, this persecution yielded an unintended benefit for the Jews: it strengthened their ethnic and religious solidarity. European governments dealt with them as collective entities rather than individuals, enabling the rabbis to establish what resembled a “state within a state” in the ghetto.

The Age of Enlightenment: The Trap of Assimilation and the Melting of Identity

With the dawn of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the world order of European Christianity began to change. The Enlightenment restored the primacy of reason at the expense of the Church, making reason the foundation of human society and the political system. Suddenly, under this new philosophy, Jews who had lived as outcasts found themselves recognized as equal citizens in a universal society based on rationality.

These ideas were politically translated by the French Revolution, which carried the slogans “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” and whose armies shattered the walls of the Jewish “ghetto” wherever they went in Europe. Jews enthusiastically entered this new “paradise,” abandoning their old languages, adopting European ones, and storming universities, public offices, and national armies. By 1797, the Jew found himself in parliaments, and it seemed his religious difference had lost its significance in the face of the sweeping wave of secularism.

But this “emancipation” came at a heavy price: cultural assimilation. Moses Mendelssohn, the most prominent advocate of Jewish assimilation, advised his people to Germanize themselves in every way, while keeping their faith as an internal matter. However, the contradiction between applying Jewish law and adopting European culture led to the development of an “inferiority complex” among Jews toward their Christian neighbors.

This conflict produced the “Reform Judaism” movement, which attempted to Christianize Jewish traditions by changing rituals, eliminating Hebrew in prayer in favor of local languages, and introducing musical instruments into synagogues. It reached the point where thinkers like Abraham Geiger called for the deletion of all references in the Bible indicating the election or distinction of Jews, stripping the faith of its ethnic and national aspirations to blend completely into the modern secular fabric. In America, where there was no history of the ghetto, this assimilation ate deeply into Jewish identity until it nearly obliterated it.

But history, as al-Faruqi describes it, harbored a bloody and complex trajectory that would turn this equation upside down, pushing Europe toward a racist “romantic” relapse, and pushing Jews to invent “Zionism” as a final cry of despair.

Europe’s Romantic Relapse: The Shattering of the Enlightenment Illusion

While the Age of Enlightenment opened the doors of integration for Jews in Western Europe and the Americas, the winds in Eastern Europe and Russia blew contrary to their desires. In Tsarist Russia, the rationalist roots of the Enlightenment never took hold; rather, the importation of ideas was limited to science, industry, and commerce. As soon as the idea of “Mother Russia” crystallized, driven by romantic nationalist sentiments, the Jews found themselves facing a harsh ultimatum: either complete “Russification” and forced assimilation, or death.

Despite the attempts of some Jewish leaders, such as Leo Pinsker, to persuade their people to Russify, these efforts were met with a horrifying explosion of pogroms in 1871 and 1881. There was no clear justification for these massacres other than the European failure to absorb the Enlightenment, and a regression to blind nationalism that saw the Jew merely as a foreign body.

On the other side of the continent, in France—which had exported the concepts of liberation through its revolution—the scene was even more painful and dramatic. Al-Faruqi puts his finger on the Western wound by invoking the famous “Dreyfus Affair.” Alfred Dreyfus was a fully integrated French Jewish officer, loyal to his republic, but he was falsely accused of treason. His trial proved that the guardians of the French Republic were the first to reject him simply because of his Jewishness. At that moment, the writer Maurice Barrès, the spokesman for these anti-Jewish sentiments, coined his definition of patriotism as the fusion of “blood and soil,” and that France was a “collective entity” with no place for anyone who did not belong to this biological and Christian cultural heritage.

Europe, in both its Eastern and Western halves, proved that its discarding of religion in favor of reason was a temporary deception. It replaced the God of the Church with the “God of the State” and the “Nation”—romantic, ethnic concepts that made the Jew, no matter how hard he tried to integrate, an outcast by definition.

Zionism: The Cry of Despair and the Last Resort

In the heart of this storm of European rejection emerged Theodor Herzl, a correspondent for the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. Herzl was a Reform Jew, steeped in Western culture, who went to cover the Dreyfus trial in Paris hoping to find avenues for Christian-Jewish understanding. But what he witnessed there completely shattered his hopes; he realized that the illusion of the “European Jew” was impossible and futile.

From the womb of this profound despair, Zionism was born—not as a religious movement or a messianic prophecy, but as a “choice of necessity” to escape the burning holocaust. Herzl realized that there could be no return to the “ghetto,” and therefore Jews must uproot themselves from Europe and depart to establish a state of their own that would guarantee their security and dignity.

Surprisingly, as al-Faruqi documents, Palestine was not the only or inevitable choice in Herzl’s mind. He seriously considered establishing his state in Argentina, Uganda, or even Russian Central Asia. His motive was not to establish a religious state restoring the glories of the Prophet David, but to build a replica of the European secular national state; a state based on colonial and ethnic ideology. Herzl concluded with bitterness that Christian and European hatred alone forged the Jewish people and maintained their cohesion. Zionism, therefore, is a European disease par excellence, transferred from the oppressive master to the victim who decided to adopt the exact same tools as the executioner.

Theological Schizophrenia: Universalism vs. Ethnocentrism

Perhaps the most profound contribution of al-Faruqi in this book is his stunning dissection of the theological foundations within the biblical text itself. Al-Faruqi establishes, starting from the Islamic perspective, that the Torah in its origin is a divine revelation given to Moses, but the text available today is the product of centuries of editing, alteration, and rewriting by priests and scribes.

This human intervention produced a text that speaks with two contradictory “voices”: a “Universalist” current and an “Ethnocentrist” current.

The universalist current views God as one, transcendent, Creator of the universe, and a just judge who holds all humans accountable, including the Jews, based on their moral commitment. According to this current, the divine covenant is conditional upon righteousness, and if the Jews act corruptly, God will punish them. In this context, Palestine is nothing more than the place where revelation descended, and there is no causal relationship between “real estate” or “stones” and the Divine Essence.

In contrast, the ethnocentrist current emerges, reflecting tribal paganism. In this current, the deity descends to wrestle with humans and is defeated (as in the story of Jacob wrestling with the Lord), and transforms into a god specific to a particular tribe, favoring and preferring them even if they act corruptly. Here, the concept of the “covenant” degrades from a moral obligation to a racist biological “promise” transmitted through blood and flesh (symbolized by male circumcision), regardless of the individual’s moral behavior. Within this current, the deity is “localized” and geographically tied to the land of Palestine and Jerusalem, becoming a local god worshipped only on those hills.

Zionism drew its inspiration from this isolationist ethnic current, completely ignoring the universal and moral dimensions of the Jewish religion. It blended this biblical ethnocentrism with European romantic philosophy to produce a hybrid and dangerous ideology.

Zionism as a Religion: The Secularization of Judaism and the Deification of “Race” and “Land”

Zionism was not concerned with matters of religion, theology, or the application of religious law (Halakha) that preoccupied Reform rabbis in Europe. The leaders of the movement were par excellence secularists, who had absorbed secular, anti-religious European thought. And because the Enlightenment and rationality closed the doors to a return to biblical literalism after historical criticism had dismantled it, they resorted to “Romanticism” as a last refuge.

Secular Zionism defined Judaism as purely “nationalism,” rejecting the classical definition of a Jew as one who believes in God and applies His law. According to them, what makes a Jew Jewish is his belonging to the land, shared destiny, and community, even if he is an atheist who denies the existence of God.

Here emerges the role of thinkers like Martin Buber, whom some consider the “spiritual” face of Zionism. Buber brought about a devastating theological shift when he considered that revelation is not what God sent down, but rather what humans “felt” and the community experienced. Buber elevated the Jewish race and the Palestinian land to the level of sanctification, speaking of a “holy matrimony between land and people,” claiming that Jewish existence is impossible without the rocks and sands of Palestine.

This thought, as al-Faruqi categorizes it Islamically, is not merely “Shirk” (associating others with God), but rather a far more heinous sin represented in equating the Creator with the created and equating God with nature and history, which is exactly what the ancient Hebrew prophets fought against among the Pharaohs, Assyrians, and Babylonians. Zionism adopted the Hegelian philosophy in deifying the state and the race, becoming a monstrous replica of European fascism.

Al-Faruqi sorrowfully asserts that this Zionist experiment is a pure offspring of European history and European suffering. It is completely alien to the Jews of the Islamic world and the East, who knew no romantic persecution and lived for centuries in a tolerance that yielded their Golden Age in philosophy, literature, and poetry. The Zionist uprooting of millions of Eastern Jews from their Arab and Islamic homelands to thrust them into a Western colonial project is, according to the author, “spiritual genocide” and a major cultural crime committed under the false guise of “messianic salvation.”

The Secular State and the Palestinian Impasse: A Critique of the “Imported Solution”

In the concluding chapters of his book, Dr. Ismail Raji al-Faruqi shifts from historical and theological dissection to contemporary political analysis, confronting one of the most widely circulated propositions in the 1970s and 1980s: the “Secular Democratic Palestinian State.” Al-Faruqi argues that this proposition, despite its liberal appeal to the West, represents an intellectual and historical trap for the Palestinians and the Islamic world alike.

Al-Faruqi emphasizes that secularism originated in the West as a solution to disentangle the Church and the State after centuries of religious wars. However, projecting it onto the Palestinian reality ignores the nature of “Zionism” as an ideology. Zionism, as detailed in previous sections, is an exclusionary movement by nature, based on “racial purity” and the “divine right to the land.” Therefore, talking about a secular state comprising Zionists, Muslims, and Christians is an attempt to reconcile opposites; Zionism cannot abandon its ethnic Jewish character without ceasing to exist itself.

Furthermore, the author sees the secular solution as an “escape from identity.” Palestinians and Muslims, in their quest to appease global public opinion, adopted a Western language alien to their civilizational heritage. Al-Faruqi argues that the problem is not “religion” that we need “secularism” to solve; rather, it is “colonial injustice” wearing a distorted religious mask. Accepting a secular state modeled on the West means, in al-Faruqi’s view, relinquishing Islamic sovereignty over a holy land, and reducing the cause from an existential and civilizational conflict to a mere border dispute that can be resolved through administrative arrangements.

The Islamic Stance on Zionism: Absolute “Illegitimacy”

Al-Faruqi devotes ample space to articulating the “Islamic ruling” on the Zionist entity. Here he strictly differentiates between “Judaism” as a heavenly religion and “Zionism” as a colonial political movement. For al-Faruqi, Islam recognizes Judaism and protects its followers under the contract of “Dhimma” or citizenship in the Abode of Islam (Dar al-Islam), but it rejects Zionism entirely because it is based on two pillars that are Islamically invalid:

• Usurpation of Land: Islam views the earth as belonging to God, and sovereignty over it belongs to those who establish justice and equity. Zionism was founded on the expulsion of the indigenous population by force of arms, which is “usurpation” that grants no legitimate right, no matter how much time passes.

• Racial Supremacy: Islam shatters the concept of the “Chosen People” in the ethnic sense. Preference in Islam is tied to piety and righteous deeds (“Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you”), whereas Zionism drags humanity back to “Jahiliyyah” (ignorance) which distinguishes between people based on blood and lineage.

Therefore, al-Faruqi concludes that “Israel” is not a normal state that can be coexisted with, but rather a “continuous aggression” and a breach of the divine moral covenant. He believes that the Islamic duty is not limited to recovering the land, but extends to “dismantling the Zionist structure” to enable Jews, Muslims, and Christians to live once again under the umbrella of Islamic justice that the region knew for centuries.

The Islamic Civilizational Alternative: Toward a Contemporary “Dhimma”

Al-Faruqi does not stop at rejection, but presents a positive vision for what he calls the “Islamic Solution.” This solution does not mean the “annihilation” or expulsion of the Jews; rather, it means a return to the “Islamic World Order” that historically prevailed in the region. Al-Faruqi reminds us of the Golden Age in Andalusia and Baghdad, where Jews lived in security and prosperity they never dreamed of in Christian Europe.

The alternative he proposes is a state based on “religious and legal pluralism.” In this model, Jews enjoy autonomy in their religious affairs and personal status, but within an Islamic political and civilizational framework that rejects Zionism as colonial thought. Al-Faruqi sees this as the only path to achieving lasting peace, because it is a peace that stems from “justice,” not from fluctuating “balances of power.” Restoring Jerusalem and Palestine to the bosom of the Ummah is, in essence, a process of “liberation” for the Jews themselves from the captivity of the nationalist Zionist ideology that turned them into invaders and colonizers, distancing them from the moral values of their prophets.

Conclusion: Al-Faruqi’s Message to Future Generations

Ismail Raji al-Faruqi concludes his book with a cry of warning and awakening. He believes that the “Problem of Israel” is in reality the “Problem of the Muslims”; it is a mirror reflecting our weakness, our fragmentation, and our divergence from the essence of our religion and our civilizational philosophy. Israel’s survival and strength do not stem from its justice or moral superiority, but from unlimited Western support on the one hand, and the Islamic civilizational vacuum on the other.

Al-Faruqi calls for a “cultural and intellectual revolution” starting from education and the rebuilding of the Islamic personality to be capable of confronting the Zionist challenge. His book is not merely a book on politics; it is a call for Ijtihad (independent reasoning) to understand the era and employ the tools of science, theology, and international law to restore usurped rights.

Al-Faruqi departed, leaving behind this work to serve as a beacon for researchers and thinkers. “Islam and the Problem of Israel” remains a living document reminding us that the conflict, at its core, is a struggle over “truth” and “justice.” The more we hold onto these values, the closer we get to the solution. Reviewing this book today is not merely recalling the memory of a great thinker, but a necessity to understand a reality that is still boiling, and to search for exits that go beyond half-measures and fleeting political painkillers.z