The Holocaust, Muslims and Jews Remembering the Righteous Jan 27th 2014, 17:49 by B.C. TODAY, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in 1945, is the date when many countries hold commemorations of the Nazi holocaust and other acts of genocide in modern history. In Britain, the run-up to the event used to be a time of bitter arguments between senior Muslims and Jews. Between 2001 and 2007, the Muslim Council of Britain (an umbrella group comprising hundreds of large and small Islamic bodies) stayed away from the ceremony on the grounds that it failed to recall suffering in recent conflict zones like Kashmir or the West Bank. After much internal wrangling, the MCB decided to end its stay-away policy in December 2007, only to reinstate it in 2009 in protest against Israeli actions in Gaza. Every year since then it has had at least a low-key presence at the commemoration. For critics of the MCB, its attitude to Holocaust Memorial Day confirmed its reputation as an unrepresentative hard-line outfit, in which various groups of Pakistani and Arab Islamists had virtually taken control. The councils friends on the secular political left were deeply embarrassed by the MCBs line and bluntly told its leaders that unless they changed course and showed proper respect for the anniversary, they would be seen as incorrigible anti-Semites. Insiders say the councils south Asian leaders got the point more quickly than their Arab colleagues did. More recently, efforts to defuse Muslim-Jewish tension over the commemoration have been rather more subtle. For the second year running, local bodies around London are taking turns to host an exhibition dedicated to the righteous Muslims who have been recognised in Israel as people who showed courage in saving Jews (or in some cases, the Jewish heritage) from the Nazi onslaught. The exhibition was put together by Fiyaz Mughal, head of Faith Matters, an NGO, and it draws on research by the American writer Robert Satloff. In which countries, you might be asking, did Hitlers forces, Muslims and Jews come together in significant numbers? In the Balkans, for a start: many of the righteous followers of Islam were Albanians who felt obliged to succour Jews under their nations code of honour. And in neighbouring Bosnia, for example, one Jewish family, the Kavilios, was sheltered by its Muslim compatriots, the Hardagas. During the Bosnian conflict in the 1990s, the Kavilios returned the favour by helping the Hardagas to escape the war zone. Meanwhile, a precious 600-year-old Jewish manuscript, the Passover Haggadah, was hidden from the Nazis by an imam in the Bosnian Muslim stronghold of Zenica. Similarly inspiring stories emerged from Algeria and Tunisia when they were under the control of pro-Nazi forces. Mr Satloff uncovered the tales of a Muslim Tunisian landowner who hid Jewish fugitives in his farm builders until they were rescued by the Allies, and of shepherds in western Tunisia who concealed fleeing Jews on the grounds that they are our cousins. Grief, pain and remembrance can often serve as a bond between people who may agree on little else. Today more than any other day, that maxim of human life should hold good. And stories make the point better than philosophical arguments do.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 14:24:22 +0000
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