Between Tefillin and the Kaaba

A Letter to the Jewish People from a Muslim

Dear Jewish people,

We do not hate you.

We do not wish you harm.

And when Muslims fail that standard, they fail Islam before they fail you.

The Holocaust was not created by Islam.

Despite what your supposed “leaders” may tell you – Hitler, Goring , Himmler, Eichmann and Goebbels did not quote from the Quran or Hadith. 

The machinery of Auschwitz, the racial laws, the gas chambers and the Zyklon B were products of Nazi Germany and its collaborators. The Holocaust was the systematic murder of six million Jews by a European racial state.

That history should never be blurred.

Neither should ours.

One of Judaism’s greatest minds, Moses Maimonides, lived much of his adult life in the Muslim world and became a physician in Egypt under the Ayyubid Governorate associated with Saladin (Salahuddin Al Ayubi). Jewish intellectual life did not merely survive there; at important moments it participated in the scientific and philosophical culture of Islamic civilisation. What would Judaism be today without the contributions of Rambam? 

That does not mean Muslim-Jewish history was paradise.

It was not. Human life rarely is ever.

But neither should anyone erase the other history.

When Nazi persecution reached Muslim-majority Albania, Muslim families hid Jewish neighbours and refugees, fed them, sheltered them and accepted mortal danger for doing so. Yad Vashem records that Albania protected both its own Jews and Jewish refugees; remarkably, more Jews were inside Albania after the war than before it.

Families such as the Veselis did not ask whether the frightened person knocking on the door was politically useful.

They opened the door.

That is part of our history too.

Between Tefillin and the Kaaba

A Jew wraps tefillin around his arm and remembers God.

A Muslim circles the Kaaba declaring that there is no god except God.

The rituals differ.

The theological claims differ profoundly.

Shirk and Shituf we reject categorically.

But both traditions understand something modern politics repeatedly forgets:

Power does not determine truth.

I am going to give a slightly cartoonish example to drive the point home. 

Imagine going to a doctor because you are seriously ill. Instead of examining you, running tests, identifying the cause and prescribing treatment, the doctor stares out of the window and says: “Look at those pigeons. They are the problem. If we get rid of them, you will get better.”

It would sound absurd.

The same applies to politics.

If a country has failing schools, overcrowded hospitals, weak productivity, unaffordable housing, poor transport, slow courts or stagnant wages, the serious questions are structural:

How is the system funded?

Where is capacity failing?

What incentives are broken?

What has happened to productivity?

Where is money being wasted?

Which institutions are badly designed?

What evidence shows the proposed remedy will actually improve the problem?

Simply identifying an unpopular minority, immigrant population, religious group or external enemy does not answer any of those questions.

How, exactly, does removing the “pigeons” train more doctors?

How does it build hospitals?

How does it recruit teachers?

How does it increase productivity?

How does it repair railways?

How does it reduce court backlogs?

How does it grow the economy?

If those causal steps cannot be demonstrated, the diagnosis is probably political theatre.

This is how scapegoating works. A complicated institutional failure is converted into a simple human enemy. The public is given a target instead of an explanation.

I am also making a point here which may be slightly controversial – apart from Gordon Brown in the UK, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Angela Merkel in Germany and Manmohan Singh in India, I have yet to come across a “qualified leader” in modern history.

Not a single one.

KGB agents, investment bankers, people with degrees from MIT in “management”, people on reality TV running Casinos, journalists good at humour and false news, humanitarian lawyers who don’t understand humanity don’t count. Management is not a degree, it’s a joke. I have a BSc in Management from the LSE. I swiftly moved onto “proper sciences” like Psychology and Mathematics. It doesn’t train you to think properly. It’s basically an MBA, which is not something I recommend anyone do. 

A special mention for Volodymyr Zelenskyy – just for the amount of harassment he has had to deal with, and situations outside his control, but we have yet to see his peacetime credentials.

Why don’t we hire data scientists, physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, economists, biologists, chemists, pharmacologists to run countries? Why the least qualified? The most dramatic? The loudest tie in the room? The most ethically bent out of shape? We are hiring heads of state, not peacocks. People with no ability to analyse or diagnose problems properly, or look through available solutions and choose the optimal path? Someone who has done a clinical trials process, someone who has helped an ecosystem recover, someone who understands heat transfer between systems is possibly far more qualified than the person whose only skill is to “rile up people”.

This Hadith sums this up beautifully. All of the ones we see today, in a system we have set up, “ask for power” explicitly. In most cases, it reveals a psychology not fit for power. Lee Kuan Yew is the only exception to this rule I can think of.

Abdur Rahman ibn Samurah reported: The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said to me, “O Abdur Rahman, do not ask for authority! If it is given to you at your request, you will be held fully responsible for it. If it is given to you without your request, you will be helped by Allah in it.”

Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 7146, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 1652, Grade: Muttafaqun Alayhi (authenticity agreed upon) according to Al-Bukhari and Muslim

This also balances with how we are supposed to act in the face of injustice :-

Back to the core issue then – the emotional sequence becomes:

Problem → anxiety → identifiable group → blame → promised removal → imagined cure.

Nobody ever told me how the imagined cure relates to the problem, or where the causality lies. What does killing one person have to do with my transportation problem? 

Removing the target does not necessarily cure the disease.

Sometimes the continued need for a scapegoat is evidence that the doctor never understood the illness.

A competent physician investigates causes.

A competent government should do the same.

And use data to prove it.

And when leadership repeatedly points out of the window rather than examining the patient, perhaps the question is no longer what to do about the pigeons.

Perhaps it is whether we need a better doctor.

Moses (Musa a.s.) did not confront Pharaoh because Moses possessed the larger army.

He confronted Pharaoh because Pharaoh was wrong.

The Qur’an preserves that same moral architecture. Pharaoh boasts of dominion; Moses (Musa ʿalayhi ṣ-ṣalātu wa-s-salām) stands before him with revelation.

The weak man can be right.

The powerful man can be catastrophically wrong.

That sounds obvious until politics begins.

We must also heed the warning, that God has his own armies. He does not always need humans to execute what he wills. The seas part, people start infighting, landslides, earthquakes, storms, economic collapse – while eloquently explained by politicians as “other factors”, the spiritual seeker may see as a divine test or retribution. 

We know about the plagues of Egypt. 

I would class “Instagram” and “Reality shows” as 2 of the 5 plagues today. Meta’s landmark case is a step in the right direction. 

No reflecting pool is “deflecting” a bad economy. 

The ancient psychological equation we know not to trust from religion appears again from our politicians :-

weak = defeated
defeated = wrong
wrong = enemy
enemy = undeserving

Once that equation is accepted, history becomes impossible to read morally.

Because between Genghis Khan and Moses (Musa a.s.) , military strength would make Genghis Khan the prophet.

Between Pharaoh and the Children of Israel, Pharaoh would possess truth because he possessed the state.

Between Nazi Germany and the Jew hiding beneath the floorboards, the Nazi would become morally superior because he possessed the rifle.

We know that is absurd.

So why resurrect the same logic whenever the weak person belongs to somebody else’s tribe?

Your Torah Already Answers It

The Torah says:

“You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Exodus 23:9.

And:

“You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Deuteronomy 10:19.

Leviticus goes further:

“The stranger who resides with you shall be as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself.”
Leviticus 19:34.

The memory of Egyptian oppression is therefore not merely historical.

It becomes an ethical instrument.

Remember what vulnerability felt like.

Then do not manufacture it for somebody else.

The Qur’an Gives Muslims the Same Test

The Qur’an says:

“Do not let the hatred of a people lead you to injustice. Be just; that is nearer to righteousness.”
Qur’an 5:8.

Classical tafsīr understands the command plainly: hostility cannot excuse injustice, even toward an enemy.

That is an extraordinarily difficult command.

It is easy to demand justice for one’s friends.

Revelation tests us when justice becomes expensive.

A Muslim who sees an innocent Jewish child and thinks only Jew has failed this verse.

A Jew who sees an innocent Muslim child and thinks only enemy has abandoned the moral reasoning embedded in his own scripture.

The child comes first.

The category comes afterwards.

We Need to Stop Inheriting Each Other’s Monsters

Muslims should never ask Jewish people to minimise the Holocaust.

Jewish people should not be required to abandon fear accumulated through centuries of persecution merely to make somebody else’s politics more comfortable.

But fear cannot become inheritance without limit.

Neither can guilt.

A Muslim born today did not build Auschwitz.

A Jewish child born today did not personally design every policy of the State of Israel.

Collective moral inheritance is precisely how propaganda prevents reconciliation.

The murderer becomes the neighbour.

The government becomes the civilian.

The terrorist becomes the religion.

The soldier becomes the ethnicity.

Eventually everybody inherits crimes they did not commit.

And nobody can leave the battlefield.

Dear Jewish People

There are Muslims who hate Jews.

We should say so.

There are Jews who hate Muslims.

You should say so.

I am arguing their faith hasn’t been perfected, or their tribal loyalties have hijacked their minds. The founding father of our religions, Abraham (Ibrahim a.s.) rejected the idols of his community. This also removes any idea of “born” or “ethnic superiority”. His father was a pagan. 

Blessing was always related to character, morals and a person’s heart, conduct, and actions – not which family they were born into. 

There are Muslim preachers who turn political grievance into antisemitism, and there are Jewish extremists who transform Palestinians or Muslims into an undifferentiated threat.

Neither deserves theological protection.

Because the Torah and the Qur’an both place something above tribal comfort:

Justice.

I cannot tell you that Muslim civilisation always protected Jews.

History would contradict me.

But I can tell you that Muslim civilisation cannot honestly be reduced to Jewish hatred either.

Maimonides wrote in Arabic.

Jewish physicians served Muslim rulers.

Jewish communities lived for centuries across Muslim lands.

And when Nazism came hunting Jews in parts of Europe, Muslims are among those honoured by Yad Vashem because they opened their homes rather than their graves.

That memory matters.

Not because it settles today’s conflict.

Because it proves today’s hatred is not inevitable.

Between Us

Perhaps somewhere between the tefillin wrapped around an arm and the pilgrim circling the Kaaba or praying at Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, is a truth both communities already know:

God is greater than the tribe.

Justice is greater than victory.

And weakness does not make somebody wrong.

Might is not always right.

And unjust military force and wrongfully shedding blood leads to one thing – global public humiliation, ostracising and possibly boycotting. We must on a scale from North Korea to Norway, move towards Norway and less towards North Korea in every democracy. 

If might was right, Moses would have been wrong before Pharaoh.

Every persecuted Jew in Europe would have been wrong before the Reich.

Every oppressed people in history would have deserved oppression merely because they could not stop it.

That cannot be our morality.

So from one Muslim to the Jewish people:

I do not ask you to forget your dead.

I ask you to remember what their vulnerability taught humanity.

I do not ask you to trust every Muslim.

I ask you not to make two billion people inherit the crimes of those you fear most.

And Muslims must offer you precisely the same covenant in return.

No inherited hatred.

No collective guilt.

No child transformed into an enemy before he has even learned the word.

Between the Tefillin and the Kaaba there is enough difference for honest disagreement.

There must also remain enough humanity for us to say:

Your life is sacred too.

Footnote :- History shows those who dehumanise others eventually dehumanise themselves, destroy their economies, their standing in the world, go bankrupt, and turn feeble. From the Soviet Union to the Reich, history is merciless to every single one of them – from the Khans of Mongolia to Stalin to Hitler to Imperial Britain, not a single one survived unscathed. In the process, the mental health and morality of their citizens turns so demented, it gives rise to newer social ills.

History also shows, those who don’t resist, turn into “cows” being milked by others. Large parts of Africa still stand testament to this today. Every ill must be resisted, every wrong righted, and maybe finally, as a collective humanity, we can “correct” the only thing scientific advancement hasn’t corrected and only religion can – human morality.