Grand Imam Ahmed Al-Tayeb’s Twelve Minutes of Hate Toward Israel and Jews at the UN Security Council

Apparently Ismail Haniyeh and Marwan Barghouti were otherwise occupied, so the UN Security Council invited the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, to address that august body on “tolerance” and “human fraternity.” It was quite a notable speech, though not in the way the Security Council intended. More on Al-Tayeb’s dozen minutes of ill-concealed hate toward both Israel and Jews can be found here: “Antisemitic Grand imam of Al-Azhar tells UN Security Council how to be tolerant,” Elder of Ziyon, June 15, 2023:

Egypt’s Grand Imam of Al-Azhar mosque, Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb, spoke at the UN Security Council Wednesday about the importance of “human fraternity,”  tolerance and mutual respect in achieving world peace.

The UN summarizes his statement:

Ahmed Al-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Al-Sharif and Chairman of the Muslim Council of Elders, rejected claims that Islam is a religion of the sword or war, insisting that war is only acceptable for self-defence.  Urging the international community to move away from pointless conflicts, he noted tragedies caused by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In Syria, Libya and Yemen, ancient civilizations have been destroyed, and these lands have become battlegrounds forcing their people to flee. Highlighting efforts made by religious leaders to promote human fraternity, he said Al-Azhar Al-Sharif aims to identify shared responsibilities in addressing climate change and the escalating wars.

Islam, Al-Tayeb wants us to believe, is not a religion of the sword or war. Then how was it that Islam spread out of Arabia, and within a century after the death  of Muhammad, Muslims had conquered most of the Middle East and North Africa? How did the Muslims turn Zoroastrian Persia into an Islamic state? How did Islam later spread into Hindu India, into Buddhist Central Asia, into western China? Was it all achieved through reasoned debate or quiet theological discussions by Muslim missionaries who managed to persuade, through the force of their presentation on behalf of the Faith, tens of millions of people to convert to Islam? Not at all. History records the violent conquest by Muslims of all of these areas, where they then imposed their faith by violence and the threat of violence. The conquered peoples could choose to accept Islam or, if they were fellow “People of the Book” – Christians and Jews – could continue to practice their religion, but they then were forced, as “dhimmis,” to accept a host of economic, political, and social disabilities, including the payment to the Islamic state of the onerous “jizyah,” a capitation tax, in order to remain free from Muslim violence. In short, they had to submit to a form of extortion. Those who were not Christians and Jews had it even worse. They had only two choices: convert, or be killed. Later the Muslims found ways to extend the “dhimmi” treatment to the Zoroastrians of Persia, in order to keep receiving jizyah payments. The Muslim rulers in India, too, with the exception of Akbar, collected jizyah from Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs under their rule. Al-Tayeb of course mentions none of this: Islam, he insists, has nothing to do with violence, or the threat of violence that payment of the jizyah is meant to obviate.. But you and I and all historians of Islam know better: The spread of Islam is one long unending tale of violence and war. Shouldn’t someone tell the Grand Imam that he has apparently forgotten the well-known hadith in which Muhammad says “I have been made victorious through terror”? (Bukhari 452.2.220)

Tayeb actually spoke for about 12 minutes, and even when addressing the UN on tolerance, he proved his own intolerance.  As he railed against wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, he added, “I am talking about my sanctities and your sanctities in Palestine, and the arrogance of power and the cruelty of the tyrant” – implying that Israel is violating Muslim and Christian holy places in Jerusalem. He deliberately excluded Jews when he said  “your sanctities” in Jerusalem, saying – for those willing to listen to his words carefully – that Jews walking on their holiest site are “tyrants.” 

He didn’t have to name the “the Jews” as the ones who were violating what he called “my sanctities,” that is, Muslim sacred places, and “your sanctities,” which referred to Christian sacred places. That was meant to be understood without the need to spell it out. It is the “arrogant” Jews, in Al-Tayeb’s view, who are violating the holy places of Muslims and Christians in Jerusalem.

The reality is very different. Jews are not violating Al-Aqsa. It is Muslims themselves, those who have turned part of Al-Aqsa into a storehouse for weapons – rocks, fireworks, bottles for Molotov cocktails – and also into a fort, from which they can throw those rocks and fireworks at Jewish visitors to the Mount. They also take previously stored rocks from Al-Aqsa to the edge of the Temple Mount in order to hurl them down on Jews praying at the Western Wall far below. It is not Jews, but those Muslims who have been using Al-Aqsa as a weapons storehouse and a fort who desecrate the Mosque.

To this UN icon of tolerance, Jews do not have any rights to their holy places in Jerusalem – only Muslims and Christians.

Al-Tayeb alludes to Jews as the “arrogant” ones who are violating the “sanctities” of both Christians and Muslims, but never says a word about Jewish holy places. He does not recognize, for example, that the Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism. Nor does he recognize what enormous sacrifices the Israelis have made, in curbing their own freedom of worship on the Mount, so as not to offend Muslims. It was Defense Minister Moshe Dayan who in 1967, without consulting anyone, issued the rules limiting Jewish religious observances. Jewish visitors would not be allowed to say prayers, either openly or silently, on the Mount. They would not be allowed to bring with them Jewish prayerbooks, prayer shawls, or tefillin. They would be allowed to visit the Mount only on five days of the week, and then, only for three hours in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. Muslims, on the other hand, would be allowed to visit the Mount (or as they call it, Haram al-Sharif) at any time of day, on any day of the week. This was meant to mollify the Muslims who had just lost so much territory, including east Jerusalem and the Old City, but it hasn’t worked. The Muslims will only be mollified when the Old City, indeed when all of eastern Jerusalem, is again in their possession, and Jews again banned entirely from the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

Tayeb also insisted that violence is the exception and not the rule in Islam, and that Muslims only wage war for good reasons – self defense, land, and honor. No one will dare point out that waging a war for “honor” goes against what the UN stands for. And no one will point out that every Arab war waged on Israel was for “honor” far more than for “defending Palestinians” or “land.”

Violence is endemic to Islam. You can look at the history of Islam’s vertiginous spread. Think of the Arab armies that within 100 years of Muhammad’s death had conquered most of the Middle East and North Africa, invaded Iberia, and then thrust upwards into Gaul before being stopped by Charles Martel at Poitiers in 632 A.D. Then, going east, other Muslim Arabs conquered Sassanian Persia. Muslims in subsequent centuries went further still, conquering much of India, central Asia, and even part of western China. Almost everywhere the Muslims conquered, they imposed Islam, by force or the threat of force, on Infidels other than the Christians and Jews.

Just cast a glance at the Islamic states today. There are civil wars still going on in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. There is sectarian strife – Sunnis against Shi’a – in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon – and “restive” Shi’a populations in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. In both Egypt and Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood remains a threat to the government. Algeria had to fight a long and bloody campaign to suppress the Islamist Salvation Front, and soon may be involved in a shooting war over Morocco’s annexation of the Western Sahara. Muslim terror groups are everywhere: Boko Haram, currently the world’s most violent terror group, is active not only in Nigeria, but in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso northern Cameroon. Other terror groups include Al-Shebaab in Somalia, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Islamic State remnants still fighting in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and the northern Sinai, the anti-Shi’a group, Sipah-e-Sahaba, in Pakistan, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the supposedly “non-violent” Hizb-ut-Tahrir in a dozen Muslim states. There are separatist movements from the Polisario Liberation Front in the Western Sahara, to the Kurds fighting for greater autonomy against the central governments in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. The Sunni Baluchis in eastern Iran are fighting the Shi’a Persians, in the hope of joining Baluchis in western Pakistan in an independent Baluchistan. The 20 million Azeris in Iran would like to be united with ten million fellow Azeris in Azerbaijan. Arabs in Ahwaz Province in southern Iran long to be free of their Persian overlords.

Violence and war are all over the Qur’an and hadith. Muhammad took part in eighty military campaigns, fighting in twenty of them. He set out the rules for how the loot taken from those conquered should be divvied up — he, of course, was to get one-fifth of the total taken. Muhammad did not abjure violence, but encouraged it. He asked his followers “who will rid me” of three people who had mocked him – the poetess Asma bint Marwan, the 120-year-old Jewish poet Abu ‘Afak, and another Jewish notable and poet in Medina, Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf. And, one by one, they were all killed by those followers eager to please Muhammad. Remember his famous hadith: “I have been made victorious through terror.” That characterized so much of his life.

Both the Qur’an and hadith are full of calls to violence against Infidels, and of descriptions of wars fought by the victorious Muslims. No detail is held back. We learn, for example, of how Muhammad took part in the decapitation of 600 to 900 bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza. The history of the spread of Islam is one not of “coexistence,” as Al-Tayeb wants us to believe, but of war, conquest, and submission. In dozens of Muslim states today, violence, including both terrorism and conventional combat, constitute their default condition; save for the small oil Arab states along the Persian Gulf, there is not a single Muslim polity anywhere in the world that can be described as having known only peace.