Review Essay: The Islamic Moses and Muslim-Jewish Relations

While The Islamic Moses might suggest that the book is about the Prophet Moses in Islam, the reader might find it has more to do with Moses Maimonides and Moses Mendelssohn and the various intellectual currents that flowed through Islamic and Judaic thought over thirteen centuries.For the author, this comprised a productive and highly symbiotic "Judeo-Islamic tradition" that came to an end only in the last century.While The Islamic Moses is light in its account of the Qur'an's most extensively depicted prophet, it is a book for its time -completed in the wake of the October 7, 2023 round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.It succeeds in outlining a comprehensive -even if a sometimes gratuitous -history of Muslim and Jewish relations.In writing this history, Akyol effectively cites primary sources across several source languages, mostly from within the Middle Eastern cultural milieu.For Akyol, the Jewish-Muslim relationship can be broadly characterized by a rough start in seventh-century Medina (enshrined in the Qur'an and the sr literature, the earliest records of Muslim-Jewish encounters), followed by an oft-productive Convivencia under Pax Islamica that peaked under "the Ottoman Haven," until finally devolving into a bitter and protracted conflict sparked by the Zionist project in Palestine, with the relationship now in its "darkest hour."For Akyol, Jewish-Muslim conflicts (even in Medina) have never been religious, but political.Most recently, competing nationalisms have driven the conflict, and over the centuries, it was largely Christian Europe (first the Byzantine persecution of Jews and later the antisemitic literature from Eastern Orthodox Lands) that played disrupting roles in what was otherwise a rather harmonious relationship.The book begins with chapter 1, "The Moses of Mecca" which looks at the birth of Islam in Mecca, which Akyol succinctly summarizes by narrating the traditional account of the Prophet Muhammad's early life, experience of revelation, and his fellow Meccans' initial response.Akyol's free use of sr (biographical) literature seems odd, as later in chapter 8, he expresses revisionist attitudes towards the authenticity of hadith literature, whose chains of transmission historically underwent more rigorous verification than those of the early Meccan sr reports.It is worth pointing out Akyol's revisionist attitudes towards the hadith, as this is a reoccurring theme throughout the book, and for Akyol, a means of excluding hadith inconvenient to Jewish-Muslim relations as well as those more generally out of place in a liberal world.Taking his cue from Goldziher, Akyol writes approvingly of making the Qur'an the primary source of Islam, "while judging the hadith corpus, including its ethical content, in the light of the Qur'an and universal human reason."But as the historically-broad book shows, "universal human reason" makes for a fickle criteria, as it is bound to change according to time, place, and dominating ethos (no less religious vs. secular).While this approach allows Akyol to make the case for a more agile Islam in line with liberal values, it invariably diminishes the role of a major source of Islamic practical