The Haj - Leon Uris [56]
This outraged Mohammed, who put a curse on them forever. The Koran is filled with dozens of Mohammed’s sermons about Jewish treachery. Mr. Salmi always ended the school day with a reading from part of a particular surah from the Koran berating the Jews. His bony fingers quickly licked the pages until he came to a marked place and his eyes lit up as he read with rancor.
It didn’t take us long to get the idea from Mr. Salmi what the Jews were up to and why Mohammed detested them.
Surah 2, the second chapter, explains how it was really the Moslems who delivered the Jews from Pharaoh and how the Moslems divided the sea for the Jews to escape to Egypt and how the Moslems made the appointment for Moses to go up into the mountain for forty days and how the Moslems gave the Law to the Jews on Sinai and allowed them to become the People of the Book.
‘From the very beginning,’ Mr. Salmi said, ‘the Jews lied when they said they discovered the Law and wrote the Bible. They lied when they said Abraham was a Jew. He was a Moslem.’
The Christians were also nonbelievers, but we didn’t have to hate them as much as the Jews. Jesus had been sent to earth by the Moslems and had been saved by Allah. Jesus became a prophet of Islam. We do not believe that Allah has any children with a human likeness and Jesus was not the Son of God, as the Christians claim. Therefore, the Christians also lied about Jesus and were also in for terrible punishments, for they, too, failed to recognize Mohammed as the final Messenger of Allah.
Early in the year, when Surah 3 was read, many of us were curious. One boy asked Mr. Salmi how Abraham could be a Moslem more than two thousand years before Mohammed founded the religion. The beads of perspiration leaped through Mr. Salmi’s skin, wetting his entire head. Mr. Salmi’s answer to that question was ten strokes with the blackboard pointer across the boy’s ass.
Sometimes, when we sat in the yard, we tried to figure out Mohammed’s message. We became confused over dates and names and many things did not match up. The Koran seemed very mixed up about the Virgin Mary, having her born several hundred years before Jesus, but I wasn’t about to risk Mr. Salmi’s pointer to ask.
Besides, it was useless to ask. Unless a man were a holy man or a great scholar, the Koran was impossible to follow.
Surah 3, verses 114 to 116, warns the true believers, that is, us Moslems, against befriending Jews because they are disloyal and how Jews are happy when evil befalls the true believer.
Surah 7 warns that Jews cannot sleep at night because of the vengeance that the Moslems will take out on them because of their plot against Allah.
Surah 16 shows that the Jews are corrupt because they have turned from Islam and therefore the Moslems correctly invoked punishment upon punishment on them.
From Surah 2 to the end of the Koran in Surah 114, Mohammed establishes all the rules for the believers to live by so they may join him in paradise. We all liked the way Islam declared eternal war on the nonbelievers and we all hoped to be alive when we won the war over them.
Mr. Salmi would often screech out, when his head was really dripping, that ‘in Arab lands we know how to deal with Jews and infidels. Surah 22 tells it better than anything else. Mohammed had been rebuked by the Jews of Medina and preached that “turning the cold shoulder, they, the Jews, were led astray from the way of Allah; for them is humiliation in this world and on the day of resurrection the Moslems shall cause them to taste the punishment of the burning.” ’
Once or twice before going to school I tried to ask questions about the Koran of my Uncle Farouk but was answered with a slap or, if I stayed outside of slapping range, a threat.
The only surah that most Moslems knew and understood was Surah 1, a simple prayer of seven lines. Like all the surahs, it begins with ‘In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.