The relative harmony
between Jews and Muslims frayed not due to ancient hatreds but a form of
European imperialism—namely Zionism.
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.
For decades, Israel and its Zionist allies in the West have invested
millions in propaganda campaigns to portray Muslims and Jews as
irreconcilable enemies for centuries to the Western public, even
depicting Muslims in the West as an untrustworthy “fifth column.” This
narrative has fuelled the targeting of innocent Muslims by police and
security agencies, exacerbated Islamophobia well before the 9/11
terrorist attacks, and intensified crackdowns on pro-Palestinian
activists—many of whom are Muslim—since Israel’s assault on Gaza began
in October 2023.
Yet
history reveals a far more nuanced reality. For much of the past 1,500
years if Islam’s existence, relations between Jews and Muslims have been
characterized by coexistence, respect, and shared prosperity, severely
disrupted only by modern colonial interventions and the advent of Zionism.
Drawing on centuries of documented harmony and history dismantles the
myth of eternal enmity between the two faith communities. From the
Prophet Muhammad’s foundational pact with Jewish tribes to the Ottoman Empire’s embrace of Sephardic refugees,
and even into the 20th century when Palestinians extended hospitality
to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, the record shows a pattern of refuge
and collaboration.
Only with the rise of Zionism and the Nakba—the 1948 catastrophe that displaced over 750,000 Palestinians—did this equilibrium shatter, as some of those welcomed refugees returned the hospitality of Palestinians by dispossessing their hosts. By reclaiming this history we can demonstrate that it is the Zionist political agenda and not religious imperatives that have sown division between these two faith communities.
A Foundation of Coexistence: The Dawn of Islam
The story begins in 7th-century Arabia, where Islam emerged amid a mosaic of Jewish, Christian, and pagan communities. Contrary to later Zionist distortions, the Prophet Muhammad’s interactions with Jews were shaped by proximity and shared monotheistic roots, not inherent antagonism. The Constitution of Medina, drafted in 622 CE shortly after Muhammad’s arrival in the city, stands as one of the earliest examples of interfaith governance between Muslims and Jews. This charter explicitly included Jewish tribes in the ummah—the broader Muslim community—granting them autonomy in religious practice, legal affairs, and mutual defence against external threats.
It was a revolutionary document, establishing Jews as equal partners in a pluralistic society and setting a precedent for “dhimmi” status: protected non-Muslims who paid a poll tax in exchange for exemption from military service along with full communal rights.
As Islamic conquests unified the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond under the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid caliphates from the 7th to 9th centuries, Jewish communities—long marginalized under Christian Byzantine and Sassanid rule—found unprecedented stability. Unlike the recurrent pogroms and expulsions in Christian Europe, Muslim lands integrated Jews into the fabric of society. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, Jews served as administrators, scholars, and traders, contributing to the caliphates’ golden age. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad, an epicentre of translation and innovation during the Abbasid era (8th–13th centuries), saw Jewish and Muslim intellectuals collaborate to render Greek, Persian, and Indian texts into Arabic, preserving knowledge that would later be the foundation of the European Renaissance. Figures like Saadia Gaon, a 10th-century Jewish philosopher, thrived under Muslim patronage, blending Talmudic scholarship with Islamic theology.
This pluralism extended to daily life. Synagogues and mosques coexisted in urban quarters, and inter-communal dialogues enriched both faiths. The Quran itself acknowledges Jewish prophets like Moses and Abraham, urging respect for “People of the Book,” though it critiques specific theological disputes. While tensions arose from time to time—such as the 627 CE siege of the Banu Qurayza tribe amid tribal warfare—these were political, not religious conflicts, often resolved through negotiation rather than military campaigns.
The Golden Age in Al-Andalus
Nowhere was this harmony more luminous than in Al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Spain from the 8th to 15th centuries. Under the Umayyad Emirate of Cordoba, Jews escaped the Visigothic persecutions that had plagued them in Christian Iberia, including forced baptisms and mass executions. Cordoba became a beacon of tolerance, its libraries rivaling Baghdad’s. Jewish viziers like Hasdai ibn Shaprut advised caliphs on diplomacy and medicine, while poets and philosophers crossed confessional lines.
The 10th-century “Golden Age” produced Maimonides (Musa ibn Maymun), the preeminent Jewish thinker, whose Guide for the Perplexed synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish law under Muslim intellectual influence. In Granada and Toledo, Muslims, Jews, and Christians advanced astronomy, mathematics, and poetry. Jewish scholars translated Arabic works into Hebrew, disseminating them across Europe.
However, this era was not without friction. Occasional fatwas in some regions restricted Jewish dress or synagogue construction, echoing dhimmi hierarchies. Yet violence was rare compared to the Christian Crusades or Black Death massacres in Europe, where Jews were scapegoated and burned alive. Historian Bernard Lewis notes that, over 14 centuries, “there is nothing in Islamic history to parallel the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, or the Nazi Holocaust.” Muslim rulers positioned themselves as guardians of all minorities, rooted in Quranic calls for justice.
Refuge from European Fury
As Christian Europe’s intolerance peaked—the 1492 Alhambra Decree expelling 200,000 Jews from Spain—Muslim realms offered sanctuary. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire derided Ferdinand and Isabella as fools for impoverishing Spain to enrich his domains, welcoming Sephardic Jewish refugees to Istanbul, Salonika, and Izmir. There, Jews revitalized trade and scholarship, and by the 16th century, they comprised a third of Salonika’s population, dubbing it “the mother of Israel in exile.” This pattern persisted during the 12th-century Crusades, when European Christians slaughtered Jews in the Rhineland and Jerusalem. While in Palestine Saladin (Salahuddin Ayyubi) recaptured the city in 1187 and invited Jews (who had been expelled from Jerusalem by Christian rulers) to return, ending centuries of exclusion under Roman and Byzantine rule.
In North Africa and the Levant, Jews under Muslim governance fared far better than in Christian lands. When the 628 CE Byzantine-Persian treaty included protections for Jews—later betrayed by Roman massacres—Muslim leaders like Caliph Umar reaffirmed safe passage. By the 19th century, as Ottoman reforms equalized rights, Jewish communities in Baghdad and Cairo flourished alongside Muslims, sharing markets and festivals.
A Shared Stand Against Fascism
This legacy of refuge extended into the 20th century, even as European antisemitism surged. During World War Two Muslims across Europe, Africa and the Middle-East risked everything to shield Jews from Nazi horrors. Iranian diplomat Abdol-Hossein Sardari, the “Iranian Schindler,” issued over 2,000 passports to Iranian Jews in occupied Paris, exploiting Nazi racial pseudoscience by claiming they were “Aryan” descendants of Cyrus the Great—who had freed Jews from Babylonian captivity in 539 BCE.
In Albania, a Muslim-majority nation under German occupation, the entire society conspired to hide Jews. By war’s end, Albania’s Jewish population had grown, the only Nazi-occupied country to achieve this. The Pilkus family in Albania sheltered Holocaust survivor Johanna Neumann, convincing neighbours she was a German relative. “They put their lives on the line to save us,” Neumann recalled. In Tunisia, Khaled Abdul Wahab hid two Jewish families in his farm’s stables, defying Gestapo raids. At Paris’s Great Mosque, Imam Kaddour Benghabrit forged Muslim certificates for Jews, while Turkish consul Selahattin Ulkumen ferried 50 Jews to safety on boats from Rhodes. Noor Inayat Khan, a British Muslim spy, transmitted vital intelligence from occupied France until her execution at Dachau. Even in Palestine, amid rising Zionist-Palestinian tensions, thousands volunteered against the Nazis. A 2019 study revealed 12,000 Palestinians—Muslims and Christians—served in British forces, fighting in North Africa and Europe. The Palestine Regiment saw Arabs and Jews shoulder-to-shoulder fighting against Hitler’s Nazi forces, a unity later fractured by the Nakba in 1948.
Palestinian Hospitality Betrayed
In Mandatory Palestine, this spirit manifested profoundly. As Nazi persecution escalated in Germany in the 1930s, over 60,000 German Jews fled to Palestine under the Haavara Agreement, despite British quotas limiting immigration to quell Arab unrest. Initial arrivals in the 1920s and early 1930s were often met with Palestinian hospitality. Oral histories and contemporary accounts document Palestinian families housing destitute Jewish refugees in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, sharing meals and aiding integration. Palestinian leader Musa Alami recounted villagers offering shelter to European Jews, viewing them as fellow Semites fleeing tyranny—before Zionist land purchases and exclusivist settlements soured relations between the two communities.
Tensions boiled during the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, sparked by fears of dispossession, but even then, individual acts of kindness persisted. Tragically, this generosity was repaid with expulsion. By 1948, Zionist terrorist groups like the Haganah and Irgun—bolstered by those once-welcomed refugees—destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages, expelling 750,000 in the Nakba. In places like Deir Yassin, Lydda and Ramle, families who had hosted Jews were driven out at gunpoint, their homes seized, and the inhabitants massacred. Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, documented how these operations, code named Plan Dalet, ethnically cleansed Arab populations to secure a Jewish majority on territory seized by the Zionists. The betrayal was stark. Palestinians, who had opened their doors amid global indifference, became refugees in their own land.
Colonial Shadows: The Modern Fracture
The relative harmony between Jews and Muslims frayed not due to ancient hatreds but due to a form of European imperialism—namely Zionism. Born in 19th-century Europe, this Jewish supremacist ideology framed Palestine as a “land without a people” for a “people without a land,” conveniently ignoring its 1.2 million Muslim, Christian and Jewish inhabitants. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, a British colonial proposal, pledged a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine without the consent of its inhabitants, enabling mass immigration that tripled the Jewish population by 1947. Post-World War Two, as Britain withdrew its forces from Palestine, the United Nations’ Partition Plan allocated 56% of the territory for a Jewish state—despite Jews owning just 7% of the land, and accounting for only 33% of the population. The ensuing war cemented the Nakba, with Israeli policies of settlement expansion, exclusion, and blockade perpetuating Palestinian displacement.
The history of Jewish-Muslim relations is not a tale of a centuries long religious conflict as Zionists would like everyone to believe. It is rather a rich narrative marked by remarkable coexistence during very hostile eras of history. Only in the 20th century, with the colonization of historic Palestine, did tensions flare, fracturing ties between these communities in the Middle East.
The Zionist narrative of perpetual enmity between Jews and Muslims serves a political agenda, yet history offers a beacon of hope. From the inclusive pact of Medina to the flourishing Jewish communities in Al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim lands, to the heroic acts of Muslims shielding Jews from Nazi persecution during World War II, these faith communities wove a tapestry of relative peace and mutual respect, unlike what Jews had experienced for centuries in Christian Europe. Ultimately this was all undone not by religion but by the political machinations of the Zionist movement. By drawing on this shared heritage, Muslims and Jews seeking peace in the Middle East can find inspiration to forge a harmonious future, and work towards an end to the decades-long conflict in historic Palestine that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives since 1948.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
Only with the rise of Zionism and the Nakba—the 1948 catastrophe that displaced over 750,000 Palestinians—did this equilibrium shatter, as some of those welcomed refugees returned the hospitality of Palestinians by dispossessing their hosts. By reclaiming this history we can demonstrate that it is the Zionist political agenda and not religious imperatives that have sown division between these two faith communities.
A Foundation of Coexistence: The Dawn of Islam
The story begins in 7th-century Arabia, where Islam emerged amid a mosaic of Jewish, Christian, and pagan communities. Contrary to later Zionist distortions, the Prophet Muhammad’s interactions with Jews were shaped by proximity and shared monotheistic roots, not inherent antagonism. The Constitution of Medina, drafted in 622 CE shortly after Muhammad’s arrival in the city, stands as one of the earliest examples of interfaith governance between Muslims and Jews. This charter explicitly included Jewish tribes in the ummah—the broader Muslim community—granting them autonomy in religious practice, legal affairs, and mutual defence against external threats.
It was a revolutionary document, establishing Jews as equal partners in a pluralistic society and setting a precedent for “dhimmi” status: protected non-Muslims who paid a poll tax in exchange for exemption from military service along with full communal rights.
As Islamic conquests unified the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond under the Rashidun, Umayyad, and Abbasid caliphates from the 7th to 9th centuries, Jewish communities—long marginalized under Christian Byzantine and Sassanid rule—found unprecedented stability. Unlike the recurrent pogroms and expulsions in Christian Europe, Muslim lands integrated Jews into the fabric of society. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, Jews served as administrators, scholars, and traders, contributing to the caliphates’ golden age. The House of Wisdom in Baghdad, an epicentre of translation and innovation during the Abbasid era (8th–13th centuries), saw Jewish and Muslim intellectuals collaborate to render Greek, Persian, and Indian texts into Arabic, preserving knowledge that would later be the foundation of the European Renaissance. Figures like Saadia Gaon, a 10th-century Jewish philosopher, thrived under Muslim patronage, blending Talmudic scholarship with Islamic theology.
This pluralism extended to daily life. Synagogues and mosques coexisted in urban quarters, and inter-communal dialogues enriched both faiths. The Quran itself acknowledges Jewish prophets like Moses and Abraham, urging respect for “People of the Book,” though it critiques specific theological disputes. While tensions arose from time to time—such as the 627 CE siege of the Banu Qurayza tribe amid tribal warfare—these were political, not religious conflicts, often resolved through negotiation rather than military campaigns.
The Golden Age in Al-Andalus
Nowhere was this harmony more luminous than in Al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Spain from the 8th to 15th centuries. Under the Umayyad Emirate of Cordoba, Jews escaped the Visigothic persecutions that had plagued them in Christian Iberia, including forced baptisms and mass executions. Cordoba became a beacon of tolerance, its libraries rivaling Baghdad’s. Jewish viziers like Hasdai ibn Shaprut advised caliphs on diplomacy and medicine, while poets and philosophers crossed confessional lines.
The 10th-century “Golden Age” produced Maimonides (Musa ibn Maymun), the preeminent Jewish thinker, whose Guide for the Perplexed synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish law under Muslim intellectual influence. In Granada and Toledo, Muslims, Jews, and Christians advanced astronomy, mathematics, and poetry. Jewish scholars translated Arabic works into Hebrew, disseminating them across Europe.
However, this era was not without friction. Occasional fatwas in some regions restricted Jewish dress or synagogue construction, echoing dhimmi hierarchies. Yet violence was rare compared to the Christian Crusades or Black Death massacres in Europe, where Jews were scapegoated and burned alive. Historian Bernard Lewis notes that, over 14 centuries, “there is nothing in Islamic history to parallel the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, or the Nazi Holocaust.” Muslim rulers positioned themselves as guardians of all minorities, rooted in Quranic calls for justice.
Refuge from European Fury
As Christian Europe’s intolerance peaked—the 1492 Alhambra Decree expelling 200,000 Jews from Spain—Muslim realms offered sanctuary. Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire derided Ferdinand and Isabella as fools for impoverishing Spain to enrich his domains, welcoming Sephardic Jewish refugees to Istanbul, Salonika, and Izmir. There, Jews revitalized trade and scholarship, and by the 16th century, they comprised a third of Salonika’s population, dubbing it “the mother of Israel in exile.” This pattern persisted during the 12th-century Crusades, when European Christians slaughtered Jews in the Rhineland and Jerusalem. While in Palestine Saladin (Salahuddin Ayyubi) recaptured the city in 1187 and invited Jews (who had been expelled from Jerusalem by Christian rulers) to return, ending centuries of exclusion under Roman and Byzantine rule.
In North Africa and the Levant, Jews under Muslim governance fared far better than in Christian lands. When the 628 CE Byzantine-Persian treaty included protections for Jews—later betrayed by Roman massacres—Muslim leaders like Caliph Umar reaffirmed safe passage. By the 19th century, as Ottoman reforms equalized rights, Jewish communities in Baghdad and Cairo flourished alongside Muslims, sharing markets and festivals.
A Shared Stand Against Fascism
This legacy of refuge extended into the 20th century, even as European antisemitism surged. During World War Two Muslims across Europe, Africa and the Middle-East risked everything to shield Jews from Nazi horrors. Iranian diplomat Abdol-Hossein Sardari, the “Iranian Schindler,” issued over 2,000 passports to Iranian Jews in occupied Paris, exploiting Nazi racial pseudoscience by claiming they were “Aryan” descendants of Cyrus the Great—who had freed Jews from Babylonian captivity in 539 BCE.
In Albania, a Muslim-majority nation under German occupation, the entire society conspired to hide Jews. By war’s end, Albania’s Jewish population had grown, the only Nazi-occupied country to achieve this. The Pilkus family in Albania sheltered Holocaust survivor Johanna Neumann, convincing neighbours she was a German relative. “They put their lives on the line to save us,” Neumann recalled. In Tunisia, Khaled Abdul Wahab hid two Jewish families in his farm’s stables, defying Gestapo raids. At Paris’s Great Mosque, Imam Kaddour Benghabrit forged Muslim certificates for Jews, while Turkish consul Selahattin Ulkumen ferried 50 Jews to safety on boats from Rhodes. Noor Inayat Khan, a British Muslim spy, transmitted vital intelligence from occupied France until her execution at Dachau. Even in Palestine, amid rising Zionist-Palestinian tensions, thousands volunteered against the Nazis. A 2019 study revealed 12,000 Palestinians—Muslims and Christians—served in British forces, fighting in North Africa and Europe. The Palestine Regiment saw Arabs and Jews shoulder-to-shoulder fighting against Hitler’s Nazi forces, a unity later fractured by the Nakba in 1948.
Palestinian Hospitality Betrayed
In Mandatory Palestine, this spirit manifested profoundly. As Nazi persecution escalated in Germany in the 1930s, over 60,000 German Jews fled to Palestine under the Haavara Agreement, despite British quotas limiting immigration to quell Arab unrest. Initial arrivals in the 1920s and early 1930s were often met with Palestinian hospitality. Oral histories and contemporary accounts document Palestinian families housing destitute Jewish refugees in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem, sharing meals and aiding integration. Palestinian leader Musa Alami recounted villagers offering shelter to European Jews, viewing them as fellow Semites fleeing tyranny—before Zionist land purchases and exclusivist settlements soured relations between the two communities.
Tensions boiled during the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, sparked by fears of dispossession, but even then, individual acts of kindness persisted. Tragically, this generosity was repaid with expulsion. By 1948, Zionist terrorist groups like the Haganah and Irgun—bolstered by those once-welcomed refugees—destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages, expelling 750,000 in the Nakba. In places like Deir Yassin, Lydda and Ramle, families who had hosted Jews were driven out at gunpoint, their homes seized, and the inhabitants massacred. Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, documented how these operations, code named Plan Dalet, ethnically cleansed Arab populations to secure a Jewish majority on territory seized by the Zionists. The betrayal was stark. Palestinians, who had opened their doors amid global indifference, became refugees in their own land.
Colonial Shadows: The Modern Fracture
The relative harmony between Jews and Muslims frayed not due to ancient hatreds but due to a form of European imperialism—namely Zionism. Born in 19th-century Europe, this Jewish supremacist ideology framed Palestine as a “land without a people” for a “people without a land,” conveniently ignoring its 1.2 million Muslim, Christian and Jewish inhabitants. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, a British colonial proposal, pledged a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine without the consent of its inhabitants, enabling mass immigration that tripled the Jewish population by 1947. Post-World War Two, as Britain withdrew its forces from Palestine, the United Nations’ Partition Plan allocated 56% of the territory for a Jewish state—despite Jews owning just 7% of the land, and accounting for only 33% of the population. The ensuing war cemented the Nakba, with Israeli policies of settlement expansion, exclusion, and blockade perpetuating Palestinian displacement.
The history of Jewish-Muslim relations is not a tale of a centuries long religious conflict as Zionists would like everyone to believe. It is rather a rich narrative marked by remarkable coexistence during very hostile eras of history. Only in the 20th century, with the colonization of historic Palestine, did tensions flare, fracturing ties between these communities in the Middle East.
The Zionist narrative of perpetual enmity between Jews and Muslims serves a political agenda, yet history offers a beacon of hope. From the inclusive pact of Medina to the flourishing Jewish communities in Al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim lands, to the heroic acts of Muslims shielding Jews from Nazi persecution during World War II, these faith communities wove a tapestry of relative peace and mutual respect, unlike what Jews had experienced for centuries in Christian Europe. Ultimately this was all undone not by religion but by the political machinations of the Zionist movement. By drawing on this shared heritage, Muslims and Jews seeking peace in the Middle East can find inspiration to forge a harmonious future, and work towards an end to the decades-long conflict in historic Palestine that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives since 1948.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
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