The Prophet Muhammad said: “Judgment Day will come only when the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, until the Jew hides behind the tree and the stone, and the tree and the stone say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah , there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’ – except for the Gharqad tree.”
No matter how frequently I cite the hadith of the gharqad tree, its evil impact on some segments of the Muslim world, and its place of prominence within the hadith collections of Al-Bukhari and Abu Muslim, the multiculturalist Western media simply refuses to acknowledge it. Instead, most often, I am cast as an “Islamophobe” simply for mentioning it.
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Mohammed created his religion, his followers continue to create more. OK, let the Mahdi come. Then You Know Who arrives later!! GO JESUS!! And when HE comes back, you better be on HIS side!! Can’t wait!!!!!
Hi Joel:
Greetings once again, and best wishes to you and yours for the New Year!
Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, whose book _The Road to Martyrs Square_ contains (pp. 19-24) the most detailed account I’ve found of the Gharqad tree and the hadith you quote, write:
QUOTE: If you tried to find reference to the obscure tree in the Qur’an, you would come up with nothing. :UNQUOTE
David Cook, in _Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature_, suggests that there’s a clear break between classical Islamist apocalyptic writing, which “makes no effort to relate the traditions to the events taking place around the reader” and a more recent trend notably exemplified by Sa’id Ayyub, which makes liberal use of anti-Semitic conspiracy literature (eg the Protocols) and evangelical Christian input (in the case of Safar al-Hawali, citation of Hal Lindsey), and places a strong but new emphasis on the Zionism, the Israelis, and more generally the Jews as the end times enemy.
QUOTE: Having absorbed the anti-Semitic conspiracy idea, they then read classical Muslim apocalyptic literature and are disappointed to find it does not concern itself much with the Jews. They are obliged to fall back primarily on a single hadith known as the “tradition of the rocks and the trees” :UNQUOTE
Similarly, Oliver and Steinberg write of “the revival of the tradition of the Gharqad as the ‘tree of the Jews’ during the intifada” and note:
QUOTE: For both Israelis and Palestinian, the spiny Gharqad has gone from an obscure reference in a little known hadith to a major player in the battle for Jerusalem and the Holy Land – indeed, the fate of the world. :UNQUOTE
David Zeidan, in Evangelical Quarterly, July 2006, Vol. 78 Issue 3, p. 237, sums the issue up nicely:
QUOTE: This modern Muslim apocalyptic material differs from the classical system, and is based on new premises. The traditional apocalyptic rarely quoted the Qur’an, was based mainly on Hadith, and was mainly moralistic. Israel and the Jews have now moved to centre stage, and the modern Islamic apocalyptic is convinced that the Qur’an explains and predicts everything relating to the Jews, to the Holy Land, to the founding of the State of Israel, to Jerusalem and to the final Muslim victory. Islamists have selected a few relevant Hadith from among thousands, and one or two Qur’an verses, and have turned them into the centre piece of their end time vision. From the many Hadith on ‘The Hour’ they have selected the Hadith on Jews hiding behind trees and stones, and Muslims killing them. This has become vastly popular and widely quoted across the Muslim world. :UNQUOTE
IMO in light of the above, speaking of the Gharqad tree hadith’s “place of prominence within the hadith collections of Al-Bukhari and Abu Muslim” is very much overstating the case.
It is in the Hamas Charter, it is dangerously popular – but it is also a testament to radical Muslim acceptance of European Protocol-style anti-Semitism in the last sixty years, which its emphasis on the Jew as enemy marks as a serious aberration from the mainstream of Islamic eschatology.
i’ve had conversations with 2 individuals who, although not religious, both didnt want to see the verses in the quran about killing people – even though i pointed out that it applied to themselves. They spent ages talking about freedom of religion, and respecting other’s beliefs, etc. But when i tried showing them the verses, both times they refused to look at the pages.
Never underestimate the Power of PC
Hi Charles,
I hope you are doing well as well! Glad to hear from you.
I’m slightly delirious from lack of sleep with the new baby, but I think you’ve imposed an equation onto me that I didn’t make. If I had said that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was part of historical, orthodox Islam, such would be a gross anachronism, of course. It first appeared in Russia just around the turn of the 20th century, I believe. Likewise some of the more modern anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Such is not the case, of course with Islamic anti-Semitism in general however. I think Andrew Bostom and Bat Yeor in particular, have done an excellent job of exposing the popular myth of historical Islamic tolerance toward Jews. This isn’t to deny periods or places where Muslims behaved comparably, or perhaps even far better, than some other particular Christian culture or nation, but to present Islam’s track record as “tolerant” or stellar toward the Jews, as is now an unassailable fact among modern mainstream academic and popular history books, is again, simply a multiculturalist myth.
But back to the hadith of the garghad tree. I said that it features prominently in the hadith collections of both Muslim and Bukhari. It does: Sahih Muslim, 41:6985, 41:6981, 41:6982, 41:6983, 41:6984, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:56:791, 4:52:177. So my reference to the hadith collections of Abu Muslim and Sahih Bukhari as foundational, historical and orthodox is not in question. So again, this hadith features prominently within both collections, which are together the greatest source and most highly regarded collections of extra Qur’anic sacred literature for Sunni Muslims. Of course, while throughout most of Islamic history, there was no Jewish State to attach this genocidal fantasy to, which clearly violates every sense of good human conscience imaginable, today there is, and as such, like a demonic time-bomb, this tradition will remain popular among devout traditionalist Muslims until it (Israel) doesn’t. Obviously, I wish it were not so. And of course, I do not see recent global changes trending in a favorable direction that would lead me to believe otherwise.
Blessings!
Joel,
Congratulations on your new baby. You set a good example by continuing to trust God and live for him in the face of what could be very turbulent times ahead.
The cleric’s demeanor is quite calm, reasoning from the truth of his word; “believing the lie” to such an extreme that murdering an entire race of people in cold blood is divinely ordained to bring peace upon the Earth. Satan is spinning his web, and some jump in with both feet, loving the darkness and hating the light. The irony is that the Mahdi will usher in the Day of Judgment — on their own heads. Praying for many to see his light and turn to The Lord Jesus before that day comes. He is mighty to save! Thanks for keeping up your blog.
Anna
Given the behaviour of that “cleric” and so many others, I can’t help but think of the Statue in Daniel 2.
Gold and Silver are not alloys. However Bronze is, (and when you look at Old English, the same word was used for bronze and brass. For brass is an alloy of copper and silver). Then we have iron, and finally iron mixed with clay.
As long as we keep our wits about ourselves, the Mahdi will not be handed victories on the cheap.
Lets us the word Antichrist. There is no such thing as the Mahdi.
Hi Joel:
I’m not suggesting you think the Protocols were “part of historical, orthodox Islam” — just that radical Islamic eschatology differs markedly from “classical” Islamic eschatology, primarily in giving far more emphasis to anti-Semitism than previously, under the influence of the Protocols — which David Cook calls “the lens through which the apocalyptic writers view the world”. This association with the Protocols presumably came about as a result (a) of “Hitler’s Mufti” Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s collaboration with Hitler in WWII and (b) of the new situation in the Middle East resulting from the establishment of the State of Israel and intensified by the June 1967 defeat of Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
The rise of this strand of anti-Semitism — an infection from genocidal Nazi Europe — coincides with increasing use of the Gharqad tree hadith. And that hadith and its relative prominence or lack thereof at different points in Islamic eschatological thinking is what I’m really getting at.
Thus you wrote:
I don’t believe that the variant repetitions you mention constitute “prominence” when compared with other hadith. Dr Alan Godlas writes:
Thus more than half the hadith in Bukhari are hadith of which more than one version is listed, and finding two versions of a single hadith (4:56:791, 4:52:177) is far from unique. Similarly with Muslim – I don’t have frequency figures here, but the run of 5 variants, 41:6981-6985 is hardly surprising in my experience.
The existence of so many variants can be attributed to the thoroughness of the hadith collectors. Alfred Guillaume, in his Tradition of Islam, suggests:
Richard Landes, in Jeffrey Kaplan’s Millennial Violence, Past, Present and Future (p. 273 n. 45), gives the Gharqad tree hadith as his example of “tropes from the Crusades”. My impression, based on a conversation with David Cook a while back, is that the Gharqad tree hadith can lie pretty much dormant for centuries — and that it “awakens” and is widely quoted when for some reason, as with the Crusades or the recent history of the State of Israel, the politics of the time and place place special emphasis on the Jews and Jerusalem.
@ Joel on getting newborn babies to sleep, you need to do what I did, when rocking him to sleep you need to chant “who’s your daddy who’s your daddy I’m your daddy”. Works every time.
Charles,
I agree with all that you have said. Among my various Islamic eschatology books, there are some which are of the straight laced, dry lists of the signs from a more classical perspective kind, and then there are the many varieties of modern innovative mixture kind. My original point, is that most often when I am discussing these things with left-leaning interviewers etc., they refuse to believe that there is anything anti-Semitic in Islam’s actual foundational sacred documents. Who knows when this hadith was truly “inspired” but it now sits in the two most respected collections, and trying to get the Islamic world to simply throw it away, as would only be proper, I do not see happening. Preferably, they would just convert to Christianity. : ) And you as well.
Bless you
I thought this was pretty ironic. I believe and I think many people also believe the mahdi is the antichrist and I got this book on the mahdi from a islamic book store and the book says the mahdi is foretold in the book of revelation. The funny thing is they say he the rider on the white hourse with a bow and we believe thats the antichrist.