A Muslim voice for Israel
Dr Qanta Ahmed is a committed Muslim who speaks up strongly for Jews and Israel and denounces Islamist extremism. The courageous New York physician and academic will be in Australia this month for Project Rozana, an initiative in which partners, including Hadassah Australia, are trying to improve medical services for Palestinians. Ahead of her visit, she spoke to Peter Kohn.
PK: As a Muslim, how did you arrive at your perspective on Islamist extremism?
QA It’s a question I grapple with myself. I was raised by my parents in England, where I was born. My parents were born in British India and settled in the UK. My job as a Muslim daughter was to be the best student. Every opportunity was open to me. I went to the best school I could visit, a Christian school, and I learnt about Christianity and had a pluralistic upbringing.
When I chose my career to continue in New York, I joined university programs and training; and when I specialised, a lot of the outstanding academics and clinicians happened to be Jewish, although it was never central to what we did. These were my colleagues, teachers and mentors. My medical mentors were Reform American Jewish people.
A few years later, when I was established as a specialist, I was invited to an event in Long Island, to a Reform congregation, Temple Judea, where Rabbi Abner Bergman was retiring. He had the largest collection of Holocaust artefacts outside of any collections held at a museum. Later – when the rabbi and his wife and I happened to be living in Charleston, South Carolina – we developed a friendship and many of the conversations revolved around Judaism and around Islam. He invited me to a rabbinical conference in Israel.
Later, when I launched my career in New York, I expected to be in touch with this rabbi, but he unfortunately became ill and had a very untimely death. In the four years we were in contact, he had given me enormous insights into Judaism; and I wrote an article, “Me And My Rabbi, My Rabbi And Me”, which was published in The Jerusalem Post as a eulogy to Rabbi Bergman, who was the one who had urged me to see Jerusalem.
After that, my interest in Israel only continued to develop. I published my book, In The Land Of Invisible Women, about my journey through Saudi Arabia and my spiritual journey towards Islam, and during the Haj in the very orthodox Wahabi Islam, which was so alien to the Islam my parents had brought me up with.
I began publishing more frequently, on the situation of women in the Middle East, on radical Islam, or Islamism. I was awarded a journalism fellowship at Cambridge (UK), and I studied the ideology of martyrdom in terrorism and the use of Islamic scripture in the service of terror ideology. That led me to closely examine the situation in Israel and Palestine, and I began publishing more about it.
PK: Tell us about your visits to Israel.
QA: I visited Israel in May 2013 and in the past year-and-a-half I’ve been four times, and now going on my fifth trip there, before going to Australia. I have not come before to a place that’s so magnetic that it’s demanded of me to come five times in one year.
I’ll never forget at Hadassah Hospital standing in an elevator. A lady in a corner was wearing a head-to-toe abaya with a veil, to my side a Modern Orthodox Jewish man, and there’s another man dressed in fullblown Chassidic regalia. I realised all my worlds – of New York, Riyadh, what little I knew of Judaism, and of my own identity in Islam – were to be found in this tiny elevator.
PK: How do Muslims respond to you?
QA: The responses are across the spectrum. There are intense reactions. It’s several years since I’ve been to the Saudi kingdom and I don’t expect any invitations. Many people have withdrawn their friendship and are criticising; they personally attack me, berating me. But if I meet someone from the Gulf world who still wants to meet with me, they want to know about Israel. There’s such a curiosity.
On the other hand, I’ve been called “a Zionist in the guise of a Muslim”. Some of it is highly abusive, I’m thick-skinned now. But my family, as they have done throughout my life, have not placed limitations on me; they just want me to be respectful and not defamatory. If you expose Islamism, there’s intense retribution – from the Islamists, who want to delegitimise you, from liberals who think any criticism of Islam is somehow discriminatory, and from Islamophobes, who wrongly see all Muslims as problematic.
PK: Do you ever fear for your personal safety?
QA: I don’t really. I have around me some very caring people and trusted counsel. I take proper precautions for wherever I plan to travel. And I try to reassure myself that, as a long as I try to communicate what I consider to be truthful and for the common good – that there is more than one path to our Maker and if that is my message – then God will protect me.
PK: Unpacking Islamist zealotry, what drives this malevolent force within Islam?
QA: Islamism is a totalitarian ideology which was birthed in the early 20th century. It seeks to create a fictional Islamic caliphate, one that doesn’t have any bearing to any experience of historical Islam. While it uses democratic institutions to augment power, such as [former president Mohamed] Morsi in Egypt and [President Recep] Erdogan in Turkey, it then removes these and is fundamentally antidemocratic. Islamists enshrine jihadist violence and view Zionism as a cosmic enemy. They take words, images and language from Islam and manufacture it into something that’s absolutely anathema to Islamic principles. Islamism is un-Islamic, because Islam itself talks about the Torah, about Moses and Harun or Aaron, and also the Gospels. Islamism is in reality the new global anti-Semitism.
PK: Why do relatively few moderate Muslims speak out against Islamist activities and views?
QA: There are a number of people, at least in the English-speaking world [who speak out]. In places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, speaking up against Islamist values carries dire physical risk. The Islamists have been extremely successful in controlling the narrative there. Meanwhile, in the West, and I can only speak for the US, political correctness aids Islamism. And Muslims themselves [in Western countries] don’t want to cause waves. They are far more interested in succeeding in their professions and getting a good education for their children.
PK: What role will Project Rozana play in bridging Jewish–Muslim relations?
QA: My main reason for visiting Australia is to raise awareness for Project Rozana, which is a joint project of Anglican Overseas Aid (Australia), Hadassah Australia and Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem, for which we are raising funds to train Palestinian doctors in specialist capacities to serve the Muslim population in the West Bank. It requires collaboration between Muslims and Jews, between Israelis and others in the West Bank. The public believes that Jews and Muslims are always supposed to be warring and can never collaborate. That’s the kind of narrative that serves Islamism.
PK: Have you been to Australia before?
QA: No, this is my very first time and I don’t know how it’s escaped my travels. Australia’s been in my imagination since I was a young schoolgirl and an adventurous schoolmate went to Australia and was my pen-pal. I got letters from Bondi, Toowoomba .. I’m an avid reader and in my childhood I read A Town Like Alice and other books by Nevil Shute. The first Australians I met were, like me, migrant workers in Saudi Arabia. It’s not often I go to a place I haven’t been before, so I’m very excited about it.
Dr Qanta Ahmed is speaking at St Kilda Town Hall in Melbourne on November 16 and at the B’nai B’rith Centre in Sydney on November 19. To book tickets in Melbourne go to www.hadassahaustralia.org/qantamelbourne or call (03) 9272 5600. For more information on the Sydney event contact (02) 9321 6300
Dr Ahmed’s background
DR Qanta Ahmed has become a major voice among Muslims for a clear perspective on the evils of Islamist extremism, and has written and spoken publicly about this subject. The daughter of Pakistani immigrants in Britain, she graduated from the University of Nottingham and now lives in Manhattan. She has written numerous articles and appeared in various media promoting the building of bridges between Israelis and Arabs. She is visiting to promote Project Rozana, a joint initiative between Anglican Overseas Aid Australia, Hadassah Australia and Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem. Named for Rozana Ghannam, a four-year-old treated successfully at Hadassah after she fell from the balcony of her home in the West Bank, the project seeks to improve the health and medical conditions of Palestinians.
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