Ed Husain
Rabbi Sacks: A Teacher to the Muslim World
Ed Husain - Rabbi Sacks: A Teacher to the Muslim World
- Good evening, Carly. Hi. Hi, ed. Good evening everybody. Welcome back to Lockdown. Ed, it’s such a great pleasure to have you back with us. Ed Hussein is a British writer and political advisor who has worked with leaders in governments across the world. He’s an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and has held senior fellowships at Think Tanks in London and New York, including at the Council of Foreign Relations. Ed is the author of “The Islamist”, “The House of Islam: A Global History”, and “Among the Mosques: A journey through Muslim Britain”. His writing has been shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize, a regular contributor to The Spectator Magazine. He has appeared on the BBC and CNN and has written for The Telegraph, The Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications. Ed Hussein is a friend of Lockdown University, and it is such a pleasure to have you back with us, and I’m so happy to be here with you in wonderful London. So thank you, Ed, and thank you Carl for being with us all tonight. And over to you.
Thank you very much, Wendy. As everyone knows, this is Rabbi Sacks Memorial Week in partnership with the Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust. And I have to say all of this week is a personal privilege for me as I was very close to Rabbi Sacks, but today’s particularly a privilege because I love chatting with Ed and being with a fellow Brit as I dial in from New York always feels good. So Ed, we are going to have a conversation that I suspect many on the schedule might have been delighted to see, how Rabbi Sacks has affected the Muslim world and a reflection from you. So, this hour, I think, will be fairly unique. I want to have some reflective moments, but also perhaps ask some difficult questions about what that really means. So I was hoping you could start by telling us a little bit about your background and relationship with Rabbi Sacks and why you are the person to talk about this.
Carly, thank you for inviting me again, and thank you to Wendy for a very warm welcome as always, and thank you to all of you who are here today, tonight, depending on where you are in the world. Carly, with Rabbi Sacks there are two dynamics. First I remember always seeing him on British television screens, listening to him on the radio, but there was always an activist Muslim default that stopped me, and I think thousands of us, from engaging with Rabbi Sacks seriously in our teen and early twenties, simply because he was also a vocal and ardent supporter of the state of Israel. And many of us growing up in Britain got caught up in the whole activism that meant you had to choose sides, that you couldn’t be two state solution. You couldn’t want justice for the Palestinians, but security for the Israelis, which is something we embraced later. So seeing Rabbi Sacks in the public domain was always this intelligent, attractive voice figure. And yet something about his politics didn’t quite make sense.
And then I think lots of us just grew up and grew older. By the time I was about 26, 27, I was listening to him on the Today programme, I was watching him on the BBC. And I made the effort of starting to read some of his books. At first they were difficult, but I think my first meeting with him was what really changed my attitude towards Rabbi Sacks, and that happened in the year 2007. I’d written the first book that Wendy kindly referenced, “The Islamist”. And he had read “The Islamist” and he asked to meet, and I was still a little bit unsure about this great rabbi figure wanting to meet. So I went to his home. And what I was struck by were several things. First, there was security outside his home. And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the fact that here was a prominent British intellectual, a religious leader, a well-known Jewish figure in the world who had to have security outside his home. And that just troubled me as a fellow Brit. Secondly, when I sat down with him, I was really struck by his warmth, his intelligence, his love, his open-hearted conversation, and asking about the East End. I was born in the East End, his grandparents were born in the East End. And third was his genuine engagement and care for the plight of Muslims in the UK. And I think we’ve bonded over that for our first meeting. And we’d stayed in touch for the subsequent 15 years or so.
So, as you know, I was one of Rabbi Sacks’s close protection officers. So I can certainly comment on the security piece, but let’s dig a little deeper on Rabbi Sacks himself. One of the things we’ve talked about this week was his lessons on leadership and kind of what he taught people about being a leader. Are there comparable Muslim figures or figures who you would kind of say are the equivalent with Rabbi Sacks that you feel he had a particular relationship with? He often talked about the Archbishop of Canterbury and other key interfaith figures. For our audience, who would you kind of see that Rabbi Sacks could be engaged with in the Muslim world in the UK?
So that’s a great question, Carly. And I’ve got to be honest, and I’ve got to speak the truth. I don’t want to kind make up stuff just to fluff up.
You know me, if you make up stuff, I’ll call you.
You’ll call me out, you’ll call me out. I know. It’ll only take you two minutes. No, but I just think that this was the nature of Rabbi Sacks that he was unique. I mean, I cast my eye across 52 Muslim nations, and I cast my eye across 30 million Muslims in the West. I cast my eye across 1.6 billion Muslims globally. And Rabbi Sacks was unique, not only to the Jewish community globally, because there aren’t really many Jewish figures that match him for the simple reason that he understood the West as what it is. It’s a project in philosophy. And he studied philosophy as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate, both at Cambridge and then at Kings College London at where he got his project, in the same way that Maimonides had done something similar 900 years ago in Egypt, understood the Aristotelian project, the civilizational alignment. The problem with the vast majority of Muslim scholars today is that we don’t have someone of the calibre of Rabbi Sacks who understands the West philosophically.
So Rabbi Sacks was able to speak, I think, on behalf of all three monotheistic faiths in a way that, I mean even the Archbishop of Canterbury today, or indeed George Kerry and others who awarded Rabbi Sacks with honorary doctorates could really articulate the way in which Rabbi Sacks understood what the West was as a body of ideas. It was only he who had written a book in defence of liberal democracy justified in religious terms. None of the other religious leaders did. So as we got to know Rabbi Sacks and read his works more, there isn’t really a comparable figure. Now, there were others in the Muslim world that reached out to him, yes. There were others that looked up to him, yes. Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah comes to mind, who’s now the Mufti of the United Arab Emirates, was previously a professor at the University of Jedda in Saudi Arabia, who was previously the Vice President in Mauritania. And he’s a teacher to Sheikh Hamza Yusuf Hanson and others in the West, who always looked to Rabbi Sacks for theological philosophical guidance. But I think I’d be wrong to say that they were on par with him. They weren’t, they always saw him as someone who was advanced for the very reason that he understood theology, history, but also philosophy. And that trilateral relationship, if you like, hasn’t really been matched by many Christian or Muslim figures. So he stands on his own for that reason. And by the way, Professor Akbar Ahmed at the American University now, who was previously at Cambridge, was a good friend of Rabbi Sacks. Sheikh Ahmad Zaki here in London previously was a good friend of Rabbi Sacks. But they would all agree with me, I think, in that none of us in the Muslim world matched that theological rooting in the Hebrew Bible, that understanding of the Western philosophical tradition, and then speaking on behalf of all three monotheistic faiths.
So in 2016, Rabbi Sacks wrote in the Islamic monthly, something called The Road Less Travelled. And he talked about that we in the Jewish community sometimes forget how much we have to owe to Islam. And some of the fundamental theologies and thinkers that actually we’ve drawn from, and even talked about Maimonides as one of the kind of great Jewish thinkers that was deeply also indebted to Islam. So I know we could do an entire hour on this, but in terms of the types of ideas that Rabbi Sacks was talking about, what would you highlight as the key ones?
Well, I’m a big fan of this book that Jonathan Sachs wrote, “The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid a Clash of Civilizations”. And this came out in 2003, two years after 9/11, when everyone was talking about the clash of civilizations and how it was inevitable. And it was Rabbi Sacks at that point that reminded us in this very important book, the dignity of difference, that we are not all the same, that we do have differences, but those differences need not lead to clashes. And that was a very bold statement and a very original contribution that he made, again, on the basis of theology, history, and philosophy. He could have gone the other way and said, “No, the clash with Islamic civilization is inevitable and the West and Israel must lead that war,” which is what many people said at that time. And it was convenient and comfortable, but he took a bold, truthful principle position. And I think that was one of his most original contributions right after 9/11. And another book, if I may, that helped us across the world to think about the importance of nation states was this, “The Home We Built Together”.
I think it came out in 2007, and in “The Home We Built Together”, he draws this parable of a group of people, a hundred people walking around the earth and coming into a country home and saying, “Can we have shelter? And the homeowner says, "Yes, this is a country house come in. You can stay here for, I don’t know, 10 days, 15 days. But these are the rules. And then you leave the country house.” And second way of doing this is a hotel. A hundred people come into a hotel, they check in, they have their own separate rooms, and they have their contractual agreement with the hotel owner that I pay X amount per night. And in return you do A, B, and C for me. Clean the hotel room, provide me with a meal. And at a given time I check out and I leave. And the third example is for a group of people to go into a open land and say that here are a hundred of us and we want shelter. And the landowners say, “Yes, come on board, we share this land. Together we will build our homes. Together you will be children of the soil, and this land is yours too, and let’s share this land and let’s build a home together.” And Rabbi Sacks’s point was that the West had reached a point where multiculturalism was failing and assimilation was failing. And he was calling for all of us to build a home together on the liberal democratic nation state idea while maintaining our differences.
And I think those are the kind of big ideas and these parables that will pass the test of time. And we will again and again continue to look to Rabbi Sacks’s works just as we do today to Maimonides’s works for Rabbi Sacks was at that key juncture between not rejecting the liberal democratic state or the nation state, but embracing it, reframing it, not embracing the clash of civilizations, but rejecting it and providing a new way of being. And he goes on with “To Heal a Fractured World”, again in the ethics of responsibility, not constantly talking about me, me, me and my rights, but about responsibility to all of us. So in that way, I think Rabbi Sacks’s ideas are abiding, but he reinterpreted and refreshed them for us and future generations.
And I know we’re only 15 minutes in, so to leap into one of the elephants in the room is probably a little early, but I’m going to do it anyway. A lot of the challenge around interfaith engagement is it’s all well and good when everything’s nice and fluffy and there’s not major disagreements, but when there are areas of tension, it’s how do the interfaith relationships hold, whether that’s a conflict in Israel, whether that’s a rise in anti-Semitism that can be attributed to another faith. That can often put a lot of tension on interfaith dialogue. In terms of how the Muslim and the Jewish communities can navigate some of those tensions on them, is that something you and Rabbi Sacks talked about? And how would you see that as something we can all learn from today?
The amazing thing about rabbis was that you never knew when he would call you. And you’d always get calls normally organised via his office and colleagues ahead of a new book publication, during a crisis, comparing notes ahead of an opinion piece. And he was rare in that he would canvas different types of opinions, but he would never compromise, other than I think to keep the Jewish community much more coherent. I mean, you could see almost always he would take a position and then often feel the need to be a centrist and navigate between the kind of various denominations within the Jewish community. I always thought it was the intrafaith challenge that troubled him more than the interfaith, because he was very comfortable with Muslims and Christians of various denominations. And because he was such a pure monotheist, if you like, Muslims were very much at home with him.
It was this question of Israel that he was a constant supporter of the state of Israel through thick and thin, while explaining that opposite. I mean, I found his explanation to be one of the most compelling when he said when religion defined all of us, Judaism was a problem for many people. When race defined the world, being of Jewish race was a problem. Now that nation states define a world, the one Jewish state is now the problem. The way he explained it was something that we could share with Arab leaders, and that’s why the power of truth and God matters in that where he stood with an uncompromising way, we now see many, many Arab and Muslim countries following in that very space. And this is the great irony that yes, he was engaged with interfaith work, especially with Professor Akbar Ahmed at Cambridge, Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah, and then Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and others in America in the last three or four years of his life. But what was really powerful was that, two incidents come to mind, one, right after 9/11 and right after the 7th of July terrorist attacks here in the UK, government people brought Rabbi Sacks and Muslim leaders in the same room thinking that this was the first time it was done. He was the first to say, “We’ve been friends for decades.”
So despite the political problems, he had those deep relationships with the Muslim leaders. But two, and more importantly, many Muslim influencers started to follow where Rabbi Sacks was on the question of, yes, there are 52 Muslim nation states, and yes, there are almost 80 Christian states, and absolutely there should be one Jewish state. And that kind of argument started to really have an effect. And it is a great shame, Carly, that there were invitations for him from about 2019 onwards to come to Saudi Arabia, to the UAE, to Bahrain, to Pakistan, to Malaysia. I remember being involved in some of those conversations, but then he fell ill and he couldn’t go. But his vision was something that won out on the interfaith stage.
And in Rabbi Sacks’s absence, which we all feel every time there is something that you would kind of turn to him to ask for advice. How do you think the Muslim and the Jewish world, and I’m slightly reluctant ‘cause I laughed when you said intrafaith because saying the Muslim world is a bit like saying the Jewish world, which we can also laugh at as this kind of big catch all term. But we’ve started it so we’ll keep going down that rabbit hole. But putting Rabbi Sacks himself to one side for a second, what are you think post Abraham Accords, post some of these kind of geopolitical opportunities, what are the lessons that you think the Jewish world and the Muslim world can emulate going forwards about whether it’s that we’re all kind of people of the Abrahamic faiths or the role of faith in today’s day and age. What can those two worlds bring to the world in the kind of legacy of Rabbi Sacks?
Rabbi Sacks’s legacy was that if you, or I mean if our participants today just go onto YouTube after this conversation and look up journey across Europe done by Professor Akbar Ahmed and his interview with Rabbi Sacks on Islam. I mean, it’s profound how Rabbi Sacks very openly talks about the fact that Rabbi Maimonides, or Rambam, spent time in Egypt, but also under Lucia in Spain. And yes, he left under Lucia, and yes, he was welcomed by Salidin and the Egyptians and where he became the leader of the Jewish community in Egypt and Yemen and the correspondence he had with the Jewish world, as you say, at that time. What’s profound is that Rabbi Sacks acknowledges that Rabbi Maimonides was able to put those 13 cradle points, the commentary on the midrash and much else in terms of Jewish law because he was reflecting and in dialogue with Islamic communities. And the beautification of Judaism at that point, and its codification, Rabbi Sacks says came from his learning from the Muslim world. And it was from the Muslim world and the Jewish world to continue to use those generic terms that the Christian world has impacted. And this is something Rabbi Sacks studied and pronounced upon with great profundity that it was only St. Thomas Aquinas who was then able to advance the ideas on reason and religion based on those two great influences. So that’s the interfaith legacy. Now in today’s world, where Rabbi Sacks is impact among Jews and Muslims is I think in his other great book “Not In God’s Name” confronting religious violence.
And he’s powerful in this book, in that he defends God, he defends Islam, he defends Judaism, he defends Christianity. And he says, and this is at the height of ISIS, by the way. This came out in 2014, 2015, and I remember discussing this book with him, and he went to great lengths to cite chapter and verse to make the argument that the violence committed by extremes in various denominations, but especially from extreme Muslims, should not be done in the name of God. And if they claim that how we as people of God, children of Abraham, must reclaim that. Now very few Muslim scholars made that kind of scriptural, global, liberal argument based on scripture in a way that Rabbi Sacks, again, was ahead of his time. So I think that’s the legacy that we can’t let the extremists and the religious fanatics take God and our heritage of Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Moses, Jacob, Joseph, Jesus, Mohamed, all of that Abrahamic heritage away from us because we somehow think they’re more authentic. They’re not more authentic. And that particular book by Rabbi Sacks “Not In God’s Name” makes the case why. And that’s why we see even today in Washington DC, the Israeli foreign minister, the Emirati Foreign Minister, and the American Secretary of State, all three of them, children of Abraham, able to talk among themselves because they’ve embraced that common Abrahamic heritage.
So one of the kind of actual concrete, quite literally examples of what you’re talking about could be the Abrahamic family house being built in the UAE. And that is going to be, first of all if you’ve not seen the plans online people, I recommend you go and have a look 'cause it’s going to be a real thing of beauty that you can actually really see going up as we speak. But it’s really going to be that the church, the mosque, and the synagogue all in one place together. And we, we’ve touched on the Abraham Accords and I know it’s something that you have a lot of knowledge on. Do you think Abraham Accords and what’s now happening in the UAE, a Jewish community, visible, open, is this kind of embodiment and example of what you are talking about? Or is that more of a kind of happy coincidence and aligning of geopolitical allies that’s kind of allowed this. Is this a religious breakthrough or is this a kind of geopolitical breakthrough?
Carly, you know better than most that everything in the Middle East is religious. Even the geopolitics is determined by religious identities. The fact that Turkey and Pakistan were having joint military drills with Azerbaijan last week because they want to annoy the Iranians and let the Iranians know there’s a strong message. The fact that Israel has openly been backing Azerbaijan is because there’s a neighbour there that’s dominated by a particular version of Shia Islam, an obsession with the Wilayat al-Faqih model, which is the clerics ruling in absence of the Messiah, if you like. And that model of putting extreme clerics in government in Iran is what mobilises Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, and indeed Egypt and countries further afield such as Morocco and Jordan and so on. So yes, there is that religious identity at play, but had it not been for the kind of inclusive vision that Rabbi Sacks and others, Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah and others, in the religious space advocated how they stood against the Muslim Brotherhood narrative, how they stood against the Iranian narrative, had that clear blue water not been marked out in the geopolitical space, it would’ve made it difficult for our friends in the Emirates and Bahrain and Sudan and Morocco and elsewhere to join the Abrahamic Accords for the very reason that previously we saw Egypt and Israel, we saw Jordan and Israel and other nations make peace with Israel, but it was a cold peace.
The reason why it’s a warm peace now because it’s rooted in the common heritage of God and of Abraham and being the children of Abraham and sharing the land. And I don’t think I’m breaking a secret here if I say when the Pope visited the UAE in 2019, and there was an announcement and a desire on the part of the Egyptian Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb and Pope Francis to build a church and to build a mosque, it was Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, who personally said I’m not leaving our Jewish cousins out. We are also building a synagogue. I mean, it took that bold political decision, but he was right. And now everyone’s kind of warmly welcoming it. But I think it’s a coming together of all the factors that you identified.
And to look a little closer to home. Your new book where you toured mosques of the UK. At a high level, I’m sure there was a great respect and understanding between Muslim leaders and, and for Rabbi Sacks’s work, but what does that really mean kind of on the street for the Muslim world, and let’s take the UK rather than like not just doing the Muslim world, but across the whole globe as an example. How does that really kind of play out?
See, my heart sinks Carly, when you ask about Britain. Honestly, especially with Muslims in Britain, I love being in the Middle East because the issues that we’re talking about, we can talk about openly. From Morocco all the way to Oman. We can’t in Yemen and we can’t in Algeria for other other reasons. And we can’t in parts of Gaza, but everything we’ve talked about so far, this conversation we could sit in most of the Arab Muslim capitals and have that conversation, but I can’t have this conversation with you openly in Blackburn, in Rochdale, in Keithley, in Coventry, in Manchester, in Birmingham. And that’s what breaks my heart, that there’s something going on in the Muslim world proper as it were in the Middle East with Israel, with Jewishness and Bahrain. I was with a Bahrainian friend earlier today, the synagogue being revitalised, the Minan growing and so on. But there’s the number of antisemitic attacks in France and in Britain are at all time high. Attacks on American Jews are at a 250 year high if we include the Charlottesville and the Pittsburgh attack.
So just there’s something going wrong, I fear in the West, which is much more politicised and a marrying off the radical left and the radical Islamist right. This normalisation of antisemitism, which is not the case. A visibly Jewish person is more at home today in parts of Istanbul or parts of the Gulf, in the way that they’re, as we saw, not in gold as green. This guy from Dewsbury was able to walk along a visibly Jewish person and attack him. So Rabbi Sacks was successful at that meta level and was successful in conveying his message, I think among intellectuals, policymakers, philosophers and others. And he remains a compelling figure. But I think where the rubber hits the road in parts of the northern cities in England, we haven’t been successful. And I’ve got to be honest that there is a real problem brewing in parts of the north of England.
So I’ve just come back from the UAE as you know, and several kind of friends said to me like, oh, you feel I was going to be there for Sukkot and Simchat Torah, like I was going to observe them. And in fact, I had three or four places to choose from to go to in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi. And one friend said to me, do you really feel safe doing that? And I said, “To be quite frank, I feel much safer doing that in the UAE than I do in certain parts of Europe today.” But I’ve got a fortunate position here that I’m holding you hostage. So what do you think we can do about this? It’s great that for the first time in 52 years there was a Jewish wedding in Bahrain this week, and there really is now six or seven Minyan to choose between in the UAE who could have possibly imagined it. And as you say, the rulers of the UAE advocate for their Jewish cousins. But as you and Wendy sit in London, let’s have the more difficult conversation about the UK or other places in Europe. What is it that you think the Jewish community could do better to educate about anti-Semitism, whether that be through some of the lessons of Rabbi Sacks or more broadly?
The Jewish community here in Britain is, mostly, as I understand it, I could be wrong, based in the south, mostly in London. And the antisemitism, as I detected, is active on university campuses and in northern communities. So there’s a real disconnect between the vibrancy and the cosmopolitanism of London and the South versus the ghettoization and the economic difficulties in the north. Now the British government has talked about levelling up, and I think that’s where the levelling up needs to happen in our identities, in our being common citizens. And whether it’s the Jewish community reaching out or whether recognising that in this current government, we’ll probably have ministers in key positions that are completely aligned with the conversation that you and I are having, Carly. It’s probably going to be a last in several governments to come where you have the home secretary, the culture secretary, the foreign secretary. Michael Gove, who’s a great friend of both the Jewish communities and of Israel and indeed moderate Muslims. And so we have that opportunity in government. We have a willingness among Jewish communities, and we have the UAE. I think what’s needed is for all three forces, whether it’s intelligent and influential Jewish communities, as well as moderate Arab countries, including Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Bahrain, and others, and the more enlightened Muslim leaders in the south of the country to reach out to the north.
So one of the things we did successfully and we were very impressed and happy with about two and a half years ago, is we took 10 imams from major northern mosques, mosques with congregations of up to 7,000, 8,000 people out to Israel. And that really caused a conversation in Leeds, Manchester, Oldham, Wolverhampton, and Cardiff. So we took Imams from some of the largest mosques, and the fact that Imams were absent on a Friday, that they were in Jerusalem, that they were in Israel, they were tweeting about it, they were Instagramming, the congregations at first had a shock. How is it that you are going there? It goes against the BDS kind of mood music in the background. But by the end of the trip, I’ll just share one anecdote with you. Some of the imams wanted to meet more Palestinians from Jerusalem. We’d met Palestinians from the West Bank and elsewhere, but they wanted to meet more from Jerusalem. And this was on the penultimate evening. And by then they had gone to Yad Vashem and they’d seen the history that informed the modern state of Israel, the Holocaust, the Shoah, and what Jewish identity meant to so many Israeli and other people who live in Israel. And that evening we invited a group of Palestinians, and there was a young man there whose grandfather or great-grandfather was Haj Amin al-Husseini. And he came in and he was very prominent about Haj Amin al-Husseini, that he was from the Husseini family. And he was very, very proud of what his grandfather had done and his alliance with the Nazis and all the imams were in complete shock that 25, 26 year old Husseini could sit there and justify what his grandfather had done. And it didn’t take any of us who are kind of much more pro-Israeli to talk about this, that Imam said you and your family need to issue a collective apology.
Now these are British imams telling a Palestinian Husseini how to behave. And I think getting more imams and community leaders out to Israel to see the reality of the country and all of its complexities, to my mind is the real silver bullet that changes opinions because there’s no point just saying let’s all get together and have nice meals every year, Friday or Saturday night. It doesn’t work because every time there’s a terrorist attack from Gaza and Israel responds, those same communities have tensions. And it was those imams that ultimately made the real difference in changing perception. So I think there’s real work to be done in Britain for getting more imams out to Israel to meet them. And by the way, do you know the strangest thing, Carly, is that once imams go out there, and I’m not advocating this, but it’s just they find that sharia law is upheld in Israel, and they came back saying if Israeli Muslims and Arabs can have sharia as law, why can’t, in Britain, we have Sharia law? So they came back convinced that Britain needed to become more Israeli. It’s a strange situation, but I’m not saying we go there, but I’m saying that’s how open they felt after spending nine days in Israel.
Okay, well, I’ll let you talk to the conservative government about copying the Sharia law of Israel to the UK. Now, the role of education was something that Rabbi Sacks was a big advocate of. And you’ve obviously touched on the huge importance of visiting Israel and direct engagement. But what about education in terms of textbooks and what’s taught in kind of mosque after school activity and that kind of thing about the way that the Muslim world and the Jewish world view each other. How important is that and how much do you think that’s a challenge that we have to face going forwards?
10 Years ago if we had this conversation, it would’ve been impossible for me to answer you with good examples. We were really alone 10 years ago when we were talking about all of these people. Ayaan Hirsi ali and a whole group of others on the kind of neo-conservative far right were bashing us saying, “Oh you moderates, you have no support. you moderates are just lulling us into a false sense of confidence.” And then what you saw was everything you’ve just identified with textbooks and education where Jewish people were given the most horrendous caricatures and blood libel. Now those schools and those syllabi are still active in Gaza and the West Bank, but they’re no longer being taught in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or the UAE or Bahrain or indeed Morocco. And I think those are, if I’m not mistaken, parts of Jordan too. So those are huge advances to be banked. And in Britain, in most religious schools, in the old religious textbooks, there is kind of religious, but I think it’s put in context, there is this kind of dislike of people of other faiths. But the fact that the Saudis have changed. Now we used to have sermons from Mecca, Carly, I don’t know how to explain how strong this is. Every Friday, every Muslim turns their ears to Mecca and the sermons in Mecca were against Jewish people. Now it’s gone the other way. There’s praise of Jewish people from Mecca. And this, we’ve got to be honest, is due to the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And now that comes with a cost because of his shutting down of journalistic free space. But it’s worth remembering that we’ve got to prioritise our reforms. And yes, he’s wrong in Jamal Khashoggi and accusations but yes, he’s also right on what he’s trying to do on reforming his education system. So at least we have some good news which we didn’t have 10 years ago. So Rabbi Sacks was right to identify this, right to write about this often, and we have results now. Even six years ago, some of the Gulf countries were hesitant to remove this stuff from the syllabi because they thought the Iranians would call them out. Well, now they’ve changed. And the momentum seems to be in the right direction, at least in those Muslim majority countries.
I like the fact that you brought an elephant into the room, and not me this time, but I’m going to leave the Saudi question there. How much do you think the kind of Jewish principle of Tikkun Olam that I know the charitable principle is also kind of represented similarly in Islam is a unifying force. If you look at the recent arrival of Afghan refugees in the UK, a synagogue in Bushy was called out as one of the quickest to respond. And for Jews around the world, there has been a real kind of touching moment about how you look to help Afghan refugees. And I’ve seen similar kind of partnerships happening between mosques and synagogues about welcoming those refugees. Do you think relationships can be built through those kind of channels, or do you think it, going back to your point around some of the harder conversations that needed to be happened and then doesn’t help to just have one interfaith dinner a year. Do you think we need to have the difficult conversations front and centre or actually the interfaith relationships can be built through those kinds of partnerships?
The interfaith soft cuddly Bear stuff does help because it builds relationships at a very basic level, but you’ve then got to elevate them to the difficult conversations. Otherwise radio silence just emerges every time there’s a Middle East conflict, or people find themselves unable to condemn attacks on our Jewish friends and cousins, be they in France or in Belgium or here. And that’s not acceptable. You can’t just sit around and say, yes, aren’t our scriptures so comparable and beautiful? You’ve got to go beyond saying, which son was it? Was it Isaac that Abraham was asked to sacrifice or was it Ishmael? And that’s where we’re stuck. It doesn’t really matter whether there’s Isaac or Ishmael, because for us, we are here now. And yes, Ishmael is the father head of the Muslims, and yes, Isaac is the father ahead of the Jewish people, but they were both sons of Abraham. Okay, what’s next? What’s next is we’ve got real issues around land, love, loyalty, language, laws, liberties that define us. And you know, as Rabbi Sacks said, the dignity of difference. So I think we’ve got to bring those issues into the room. And without having that difficult conversation, the fluff remains just that, fluff. And it’s only when those difficult conversations are had over the years that you start to see real change. And I say this because I’ve seen this in action over and over again, Carly.
I’ve been at Muslim conferences, peace conferences with over 600, 700 Muslim imams from around the world. And I’ve had one particular British Jewish friend of mine in the room who wouldn’t stop talking about what he loves most, God and Israel. And bringing those issues into the room changed the feeling in the room that eventually some of the Imams came and said that they’d wanted to visit Israel. Others said they would like the Israeli prime Minister to visit. Others said they would like to host Jewish people and rabbis and Jewish influencers in their mosques. But it’s based on the fact that we’ve got to find a just and fair solution for the Israelis and the Palestinian conflict without resorting to violence or without resorting to expelling people or without resorting to not recognising any one country, because that’s where the debate is with extreme elements of the Palestinians. With the Afghan issue, forgive me for saying this, but you’ve probably done more than most Muslims have. The Pakistanis have taken them in and they want to expel them. The Turks are building walls 'cause they don’t want them to come in via Iran. Now when Trump builds the wall, there’s a global outcry, but Turks can build a wall with Iran to stop the Afghans coming in now today live and nobody talks about it. So my friends are those who are kind of open with the truth. And I’ve got to say the fact that most Muslims don’t really want any Afghans in their countries. It’s been the Jewish people have responded most vociferously because they know in their DNA what it is to be Jewish and what it is to be removed from a country from the story of Exodus to what happened in Leopoldstadt in the last century to what’s going on in France now. So I think there’s a Jewish DNA that comes immediately, came to Syria, came to Kurdistan, came to Somalia, and now in Afghanistan in a way that most… Turkey, the wall says it all. I say no more, I’ll get into trouble. But there is a discrepancy there.
I like getting you into trouble, but I will not push you any further on that. Do you think as we look to the future, there are those stepping up into Rabbi Sacks’s kind of legacy place, particularly around interfaith and who can kind of continue this, build a sturdy bridge vision between the Jewish and the Muslim world? And if not, how do we go out and find them?
There are some, and I’m really happy you asked that question, Carly, because when I speak to young rabbis, I hear them talking of something called the secular world. And that terrifies me that they’ve got this demarcation going on in their mind between where they are and where everyone else is. And I’m obviously not a Jewish theologian, but when I read the books of five books of Moses, Moses was engaged with the wider world, Joseph was engaged with the wider world. We can’t just cut ourselves off when there’s a world out there that’s… I mean one of Rabbi Sacks’s last book was on morality, it was about engaging with the rest of the world. It’s about reminding people of the Abrahamic heritage of what morality means, about giving. I mean Abraham was promised that his people would be a light unto the nations. Prince Charles called Rabbi Sacks a light unto England. We can’t, Jews, Muslims, and others, can’t be lights if we are isolated in our own little darknesses. So I worry when I hear young rabbis talking about the secular world out there somewhere. But that said, what’s really heartwarming is some of the rabbis you’ve put me in touch with who are working in the UAE, who are working on the campuses, NYU, NYU Abu Dhabi. And they seem to be, at the moment at least, mostly from the US. I’m not identifying many rabbis here in the UK who are engaged with what’s going on in the Middle East, much less engaged with. There are three rabbis that come to mind in North London, Rabbi Baruch being one of them, but not many. And, again, in the spirit of speaking the truth and being open, the genius of Rabbi Sacks was that he understood philosophy. That was a genius of Rabbi Maimonides, Rambam, that he understood philosophy. Too many imams and rabbis today just want to focus on the law, sharia or halakha, and not want to focus on philosophy. And if there are young rabbis or the parents of rabbis listening, then that’s where the call is. That’s where the battle of ideas takes place. And that’s where we’ve got to be, in the philosophical space. And Rabbi Sacks was brilliant at that, whether it was Radio 4, whether it was in the palaces or whether it was his various professorships, he made the compelling argument for the reconciliation of secularism and religion in the public space.
First of all, given Rabbi Sacks wrote 25 books, I really hope all 25 are sitting next to you, because I’m amazed so far by the number you’ve pulled out at each moment. So you get super points for that. In terms of, we always say in the media world bad news sells, good news doesn’t sell newspapers. Politicians in today’s day and age don’t stand up and hold interfaith relations as something of success. Today’s world is all about the kind of sound bite and the Twitter level of kind of engagement. And my experience often in building relationships with people who don’t necessarily agree with you or who don’t have huge common ground is very hard to do it in a kind of Twitter style universe. And you need to be in front of each other and kind of engaged. And as you said, Rabbi Sacks was very good at kind of picking up the phone to you, hearing your ideas and engaging. As the people listening to this kind of look to see how they can engage and perhaps carry some of Rabbi Sacks’s legacy forwards, what do you think is the real way to kind of dig deeper and have some of those meaningful relationships being mindful of, as you say, you can’t just do the interfaith fluffy stuff, but also today’s world doesn’t lend itself to nuance and sophistication in the way we communicate.
Yes. That’s such an important question, Carly, because you’re completely right, it’s all impersonal, and no amount of Twitter direct messaging or WhatsApp smileys can really compensate for the warmth of sharing a meal. And as Rabbi said, the dignity of difference. I’ve benefited from Rabbi Sacks’s intellectual leadership, but I’ve also benefited from some of his students and some of his admirers. For example Jonty Feldman is a good friend of mine, and I’ve known him for 15 years. For the first seven of them, we disagreed fundamentally. He was somewhere else on Israel and I was somewhere else on Israel. And we would always disagree, but there was a civility that we would continue to be friends. And now thanks to his invitation, I’ve gone out to the Middle East and I’ve gone out to Israel and I’ve understood the complexities of Israeli life, and then I’m able to take that and speak to Muslim leaders, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, about that. So small acorns, I think, we should never underestimate the importance of those one or two relationships and where they lead to. And too often I think Muslims and Jews don’t have those very personal relationships. And it’s strange, it’s hard to understand why other than the political reasons. But I think that that’s where it starts. I also think it starts that there’s a dynamic between Jewish and Muslim women. They feel that there’s a, and I’ve seen this again and again, there’s a joint feeling of injustice done to them by Muslim and Jewish men, especially in relations of divorce and not being able to get divorce 'cause there’s ghet I think the Jewish community and Muslim women can’t get it directly. There’s a similarity there.
And I also often feel, you talked about Tikkun Olam, but I also feel that that common pursuit of justice builds ties between Jewish and Muslim women. And the third and the final element, which is against something that Rabbi Maimonides showed us, that he was the physician to Sultan al-Kamil, who was the top minister to Saladin. And occasionally Rabbi Maimonides was the physician, or the GP in today’s language, to Saladin or the Sultan himself. And one of the things I’m struck by in the Gulf that many of our friends in the Gulf, they all have physicians who are Jewish physicians either in New York, LA or London. So they clearly trust Jewish people with their lives. But I often feel that that isn’t talked about often enough. And if there’s anything we can do to bring out those stories in the media space that gives Jewish people more confidence and a sense of being proud of their Jewishness when they reach out to Muslim friends. And, forgive me, a final and the fourth point is this, we shouldn’t shy away from our heritage of who we are. We all have varying degrees of relationship with God. God is not this good guy or angry guy in the sky, it’s that force, it’s that energy, it’s that love. And I’ve always found that bringing God into a conversation in the room in the Middle East binds Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Arabs and others in a way that very few other things do. And it’s just how we do that without being fundamentalist or fanatical or judgmental or literalist or angry about it. Focusing on the love, the commonality, the compassion, the justice. And I think that’s a really powerful starting point, the common heritage we have. And the only time you recognise and understand the power of this is when you try to have a conversation with someone who’s say from a deep Hindu India or deep Shinto Japan or deep Confucian in China, now just try the concept of a one God and Abraham and all the prophets, it is a total different world. That’s when we appreciate how much we have in common when we’re trying to understand how different we are to our Japanese, Chinese, and other friends.
So we’ve talked about the two Abrahamic faith here, obviously there is a third one that we haven’t yet touched on. And that’s the role of Christianity, which obviously Rabbi Sacks also had very extensive relationships. And when Tony Blair opened Memorial Week this week, the current and former archbishops were in the front row. How much is this a kind of triad of relationships and the role of the Christian community, he should be embraced or is it actually Jews and Muslims have got enough to kind of work on amongst themselves and we shouldn’t be trying to solve it three ways?
No, we need to have, I always say, and not everyone understands this, and I might upset people and forgive me if I do, but Christians are downstream from Judaism. Now, without Judaism, we don’t have Christianity. And without Judaism and then Christianity, you don’t have Islam because Muhammad in many ways, our prophet Muhammad was trying to reform what went wrong in Christianity. And that always makes a very powerful conversation. You always find that Jews and Muslims come closer together because their places of worship don’t have carved images and they both have a sense of difficulty going into churches and so on. But, the United States of America is a Christian power. Israel’s strongest allies are among Christian nations, and today Israel and the global Jewish community enjoy most comfort and security in Christian majority nations. And Muslims are emulating the success of the Christian West in terms of individual liberty, the rule of law, gender equality, and so on. So, I mean, for all those and other obvious reasons, the fact that Rabbi Sacks and others were applauded by Christianity. And the Christianity in the last 200 years is not, well, I say the 200 years and I think Germany, but Christianity does have a long history of understanding the significance of the Jewish people, venerating them. But at the same time, it has a history of also, now this is where Muslims are, Muslims don’t think Jesus was crucified and Muslims don’t think Jesus was God. So we don’t have all that stuff going on in our heads. So I think even if there was world peace between Muslims and Jews, we also need our Christian friends in the tent because there is a lot of antisemitism, latent antisemitism that needs addressing. And we see that every so often rearing its ugly head. So you’re completely right. We are just focused on it because of the Muslim and Rabbi Sacks dynamics, but without Christianity it doesn’t make sense. There is a trio there.
And we’ve spent most of the last hour reflecting on Rabbi Sacks’s legacy. To put you on the spot as someone who who does have this unique ability to kind of communicate across the Abrahamic faiths and to play a real role, how do you hope to honour Rabbi Sacks’s legacy in your work going forwards?
That’s a great question. Forgive me for sounding pompous, but Rabbi Sacks at Cambridge was a student of Sir Roger Scruton when he was doing his masters. And Roger Scruton, I was his last student. So Rabbi Sacks was his first. I feel that there’s something there that I took from the same teacher that Rabbi Sacks learned from 'cause he was England’s greatest philosopher. That puts that kind of burkin responsibility to continue. And I’m just finishing up my doctoral thesis. I cite Rabbi Sacks in that thesis. And I think I’ll continue going on doing that. And then I read him frequently. His book on ethics is a weekly reminder of the portion of the Hebrew Bible, of the five books of Moses. So I think that’s the way I’ll continue just by remembering his legacy, by citing him often and reminding our Christian, Muslim, and indeed atheist and other friends of Rabbi Sacks’s call and invitation to the Abrahamic inclusive tent of love, justice, compassion, kindness, light, and a sense of responsibility to all humanity and not just to each other.
And what would you recommend as a kind of reading list for people who are on this, who are looking, and I don’t mean all 25 for Rabbi Sacks’s books, but who are looking to kind of continue to learn in this way, to read perhaps Muslim scholars that they wouldn’t normally, but that is a part of the way we’ve been talking about things.
I think Rabbi Sacks’s last book “Morality” is an absolute must because it’s a distillation of everything that he’s been thinking about and researching and writing about. I mean, that’s an excellent starting point. For Christian, the last Pope Ratzinger wrote a book on Jesus. The life of Jesus is very powerful because he deals with Jesus as who he was, a Jewish rabbi, a radical rabbi. And that’s very powerful. And in terms of understanding Muhammad, there’s a book by Martin Lings, also known as Abū Bakr Sirāj ad-Dīn who converted, called “Muhammad: Life of the Prophet on the Earliest Sources”. And I think those three books connect us to the founding figures of our three faith-based traditions and the commonalities that we share. I mean, in terms of, yeah, I think most of your participants will know about homo sapiens and other books. But I think those three are the ones that connect us to the founders of the three faith traditions. And Rabbi Sacks does a brilliant job in morality, in identifying what the threats are today, how we’re all ripping ourselves apart with these new group identities, rather than being citizens with nation states with whom we have contracts. So that would be a first reading list.
Thank you. And to close for everyone on this call who wants to kind of look to emulate this bridge to the Muslim world and either or Muslims that we’ve got listening want to emulate a bridge to the Jewish world that Rabbi Sacks talked about, being mindful of all that we’ve heard about, having difficult conversations and whatever else. What would you urge as the kind of one step forwards or one piece of bridge building that people can do as an important first step?
Well, our Jewish friends should certainly go and visit the Abrahamic family house. Go to Dubai, go to Abu Dhabi, go to Bahrain, and see and smell and sense and touch and feel and eat the difference. Kosher restaurants are now available across those parts of the world. We anticipate in the coming years Saudi Arabia joining this alliance of civilizations, and we anticipate others coming on board to support those initiatives. Because I think those of you who are financially well off investing in deals and the economies of those countries sends a positive message that peace and prosperity are connected. You make peace, people become prosperous. You don’t make peace, well, you have Lebanon where Iran has just switched off an ancient finishing civilization is now covered in darkness because of their relationships with Iran. And that’s the contrast. You move with the children of Abraham, you see light, which was God’s promise. You go with evil, you see darkness. I mean, it’s not complicated. So that would, I think, would be the first step. And in the other way, I would really, really encourage our Muslim friends to go to Israel, or go to if you, if you’re not able to travel for whatever reason, go to a Saturday morning service, go to and see the commonalities and the similarities. And recognise and understand, and indeed read the five books of Moses or indeed read the New Testament and recognise that we as Muslims cannot be Muslims unless we believe in Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Sarah and Rebecca and that entire tradition.
We just can’t, that’s where we get it from. And we believe in the one God of Abraham. We don’t believe in the many gods of our Greek friends and others. So it’s understanding that heritage, that we are Jews, we are downstream, circumcised, but non-tribal because we don’t come from the tribe of Isaac. We’re Jews. That’s what it is. And the moment you click that, the hatred drops because it’s almost as though you’re hating yourself. Because we are from a different lineage, but we embrace the Jewish one God, and we embrace the Jewish many elements of the law. And I think going to Israel and to Jerusalem brings it all to light. You see all three faith tradition, the church of the , page to the mosque, you see the wall and you see Solomon’s heritage right there staring at us. So I think those would be practical steps for us to take with an open mind, because without the open mind, these things just don’t work.
And I want to say thank you. I know we could have done hour two, and I know we’re definitely going to have you back to talk about your PhD thesis as and when you’re ready. Honestly, this was a really enjoyable hour and from the chats everybody has has been very appreciative of the hour you’ve spent with us. I will mention that there are several people who would love that your book “The Islamist” would be put in Audible form. So if you’re looking for something to do with your Christmas break, I’m sure they would appreciate you reading that out. And thank you so much for joining us, and we look forward to having you back at the Lockdown family. And on behalf of Wendy, we’re very grateful and the Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust team.
Thank you Carly, thank you for everything you do. And thank you for everything you’ve done for Afghans of late, and thank you for the calls for justice that you’ve taken from London to New York and further afield. And I hope your arm feels better and you’re able to-
Thank you.
[Ed] Thank you.
Thank you. Bye for now.