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A Koranic Reconciliation with the Jewish Return

(Jerusalem Post) Yossi Klein Halevi - Nabil Hilmi, the dean of a law school in Cairo, is planning to sue "every Jew in the world" for the "theft" of 1,125 trillion tons of Egyptian gold during the Exodus 3,000 years ago, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported this week. Hilmi graciously offered to spread the repayment term over the next 1,000 years - with interest, of course. That the Jews were slaves - to a pharaoh whom the Koran itself calls evil - is irrelevant to Hilmi. The good news is that Hilmi is acknowledging that Jews are the legitimate descendants of the children of Israel, contradicting the anti-Jewish discourse in much of the Arab world which holds that the Jews have no roots in the Land of Israel. If Jews are in fact the descendants of the children of Israel, that means they have the right to the Land of Israel - according to the Koran itself. In Sura 5, verses 20 and 21 declare: "Remember when Moses said to his people: O my people, remember the favors that God bestowed on you when he appointed apostles from among you, and made you kings and gave you what had never been given to anyone in the world. Enter then, my people, the Holy Land that God has ordained for you." There are brave - admittedly isolated - Muslim voices who insist that the Koran does indeed recognize the Jewish right to the Holy Land. Khaleel Mohammed, an Islamic scholar who taught at Brandeis University and is now at San Diego University, told a group at Brandeis's adult education summer institute, "As a Muslim, I have no choice but to believe that God gave the land to the Jews."
2003-08-29 00:00:00
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