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Literary Cafe:
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemtism
From Sacred Texts to Solemn History

Tuesday, September 24, 2013 at 7:30 pm

by Andrew Bostom
Author Appearance

Location: A home in Westwood (please call the AFA office for the address)

Admission: $15.00

Parking: 

About the Book: 

This comprehensive, meticulously documented collection of scholarly articles presents indisputable evidence that a readily discernible, uniquely Islamic antisemitism-a specific Muslim hatred of Jews-has been expressed continuously since the advent of Islam. Debunking the conventional wisdom, which continues to assert that Muslim animosity toward Jews is entirely a 20th-century phenomenon fueled mainly by the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict, leading scholars provide example after example of antisemitic motifs in Muslim documents reaching back to the beginnings of Islam. The contributors show that the Koran itself is a significant source of hostility toward Jews, as well as other foundational Muslim texts including the hadith (the words and deeds of Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters) and the sira (the earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad). Many other examples are adduced in the writings of influential Muslim jurists, theologians, and scholars, from the Middle Ages through the contemporary era. These primary sources, and seminal secondary analyses translated here for the first time into English - such as Hartwig Hirschfeld's mid-1880s essays on Muhammad's subjugation of the Jews of Medina and George Vajda's elegant, comprehensive 1937 study of the hadith - detail the sacralized rationale for Islam's anti-Jewish bigotry. Numerous complementary historical accounts illustrate the resulting plight of Jewish communities in the Muslim world across space and time, culminating in the genocidal threat posed to the Jews of Israel today.

About the Author:

Andrew G. Bostom, M.D., M.S. is the author of the highly acclaimed The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims and his new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn Histor. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Renal Diseases at Rhode Island Hospital , the major teaching affiliate of Brown University Medical School . Dr. Bostom has published numerous articles and commentaries on Islam in the The New York Daily News and many other publications.