The Haj - Leon Uris [55]
The other major topic in school was the Jews and what was called Zionism. In Tabah my Uncle Farouk was the village priest, or imam. He preached what my father told him to preach. No Sabbath sermon could ever be complete without words condemning the Jews for returning to Palestine. I did know that the Jews had murdered all the prophets and had lied about Abraham and had falsified the Bible. All of us kids knew that. Even though my father wanted nothing from the Jews, we were forced to live next to them, but we never had trouble. Hatred of Jews was not that strong in Tabah. I found out how really evil they were only after I began school.
When the Jews at Shemesh Kibbutz began to dig up antiquities in their fields, they built a museum to display them. Until then, when we found ancient potsherds, flints, and arrowheads in our own fields, we would go down to the highway and try to sell them to pilgrims and travelers on the way to Jerusalem. Once the Jews opened their museum we could sell them lots of what we found. If we found an entire broken pot, we would sell it one piece at a time, getting more and more for each new piece. The Jews spent hours putting the pot back into its original form.
Haj Ibrahim forbade any of the Tabah children from entering Shemesh Kibbutz. We were told that they sacrificed human babies and would more than likely slaughter and sacrifice us if we were caught inside their grounds. In addition to human sacrifices, the Jewish women ran around with their legs naked clear up to their sacred places and there were orgies going on all the time among people who were not even married. Every time we went to the kibbutz gate and asked for the man who ran the museum, our suppressed curiosity only made the tales of Jewish debauchery wilder.
Even so, no one of us kids was really afraid of the Jews. When we did pass or speak they were always friendly enough. What puzzled me personally was the fact that my father would mount el-Buraq and go off riding with Mr. Gideon Asch for hours. I think a lot of the attitude of letting each other alone stemmed from their friendship. When my father held court at the café I would often hear him say, ‘we will work the problem out with my good friend Gideon.’
If Tabah had a placid and resigned attitude about the Jews, Mr. Salmi didn’t. Since most of our time in school was spent learning the Koran, Mr. Salmi usually ended up with a tirade about what the Zionists had done to destroy Palestine and why we must hate them. When Mr. Salmi got going on the Jews, his large Adam’s apple bobbed up and down his skinny neck and his face often turned purple and the veins stuck out on his bald head and his voice rose to a shrill shriek.
‘Mohammed is the final and ultimate prophet. He alone is the Messenger of Allah. All other religions are therefore null and void. The nonbelievers are infidels, always to be suspected and eventually to be destroyed. The Jews in particular are in a never-ending plot to destroy Islam through heresy, subversion, and cunning ill will. The Koran tells us that. Jesus was a Moslem and Allah saved him from the Jews. It is in the Koran. One day, when Judaism and Christianity and all the other religions of nonbelievers have been destroyed and all their followers have been burned on the Day of the Fire, then Islam will rule the world. Mohammed makes that very clear. Mohammed also commands every Moslem to the sacred duty of devoting his life to these beliefs.’
We came to learn that Mr. Salmi was a secret member of the Moslem Brotherhood, which had been formed in Egypt and which killed anyone who opposed them. They were everyone’s enemy, even Moslems’.
Mr. Salmi was the first to infuse into me the impurity of all religions except Islam. When Mohammed began preaching in Mecca in the seventh century, wealthy Jews inhabited the peninsula. Surely, Mohammed thought, the Jews, particularly those in Medina, would flock to him and recognize his claim as the final and ultimate prophet and would