“The Koran just wants Jews to be better Jews”: Unedited Transcript of lecture given by Rick Sopher, July 30, 2026 at The ISGAP Summer Institute

Transcript of lecture given by Rick Sopher, July 30, 2026 at The ISGAP Summer Institute

Link to video of lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Q2kEEsdcU&t=1s

So, as the Wolf Institute, we really are bridge builders, and I think Rick Sofer, who’s joining us here today, is one of our first and foremost bridge builders at the Institute. Rick has been a trustee now for a few months, but beyond that, he’s been a supporter of the Institute for many, many years. And Rick, he will talk about his origins hopefully a little bit, maybe in the Q&A, when you ask him, prompt him why has he actually started doing this work.

Rick has a financial background, he was a banker for many, many years, but over the last decade or so, he has turned into a proper scholar. And Charles mentioned, I think in his introductory words, this importance of translating what we do in the Academy into public engagement, outreach work, policy work, and this is something that really, really lies at the heart of Rick’s work, because he wants to take the academic debate about Quran and Bible, about the relationship between the scriptures, and basically present it to a wider form of people. And this whole project started when we did one of our patrons tours with the Wolff Institute, very often we take patrons and we go to interesting places, interesting countries or cities with an exciting religious landscape, and I believe it was in Sarajevo, where Rick first presented a lecture on the parasha of the week, and related that parasha to the respective part of the Bible.

And from there, basically rose this academic project, where he started looking at all the parashat, and this all then translated into the establishment of a reading group, a reading group of academics and practitioners alike, where academics would discuss the newest research about the relationship between the Quran and the Bible, and practitioners would be there, it would be translated from the lofty academic grounds into something that’s sort of accessible language for everyone on the ground. And this is something that has always been really at the heart of Rick’s work. So, without further ado, I’m handing over to Rick now, and I hope that you’ll enjoy what Rick has to impart on the subject, because it really is transformative in many, many ways.

So, Rick, over to you. Thank you very much, Miriam, and thank you also, Charles and David at ISGAP for having me back, actually, to speak here. When, in the early days when I knew you, I really couldn’t really absorb why there was a two-week residential conference on anti-Semitism, but in recent years I’ve begun to, unfortunately, understand why.

So, my area that I want to speak about is, what does the Quran really say about Jews, Judaism, and the Bible? In it, I’m going to try and address these questions. Is the text of the Quran or its interpretation or its use responsible for Jew hate, or anti-Semitism, as you call it here? Does the Quran provide a basis for anti-Jewish sentiment in some way in contemporary discourse? I think you’ve been asked this question before by someone, but for my benefit, how many of you in this room have read the Quran from cover to cover? The back row. Why is it the back row? Okay, so many haven’t.

Most haven’t, but there’s probably 5% or something who have. So, I’m going to show you, I’m still a banger, actually, but I’m going to show you, to start off with, from a first-time reader of the Quran, what it felt like as a Jewish reader of the Quran. And what was the first thing that was surprising is that it contains so many references to biblical characters, to Musa, Moshe, 136 times he’s mentioned in the Quran.

Muhammad’s only mentioned four times by name in the Quran. You’ve got all these stories about Musa, Moshe, and Yaqub, and Yusuf, Jacob, and Joseph, and Adam, Noah, and Daud, and Suleiman. So many times the Quran kept reverting back to the characters that you’ll be familiar with from the Torah.

And it kept talking about Bani Israel, the children of Israel, seemed to have a special, even obsession with Jews and the children of Israel. And it wasn’t just that it mentioned their names, but the way that it did it was interesting. The Quran alludes to stories that it assumes that you know about.

So, like when it mentions Jonah, it doesn’t tell you the whole story about why he got on the ship, how much he paid for his ticket, where the boat was going, all that. It just assumes you know all that and gives you its lesson from that story. And sometimes, not just from the story as written in the Torah, but from rabbinic analysis that it seems to be familiar with.

I just want to get something out of the way since this is the ISGAP conference. The Quran does not call for the destruction or complete elimination of Jews. Okay? Get that straight at the start.

But it does contain some statements critical of some Jews, and we’ll get into those. I found them a little bit stinging, but we’ll get into them. Okay.

This is a verse, which I think is a particularly nice one, from the Quran. I wonder if I might just try this and see if this works. I’m gonna try and play the verse, at least the beginning of it.

See if you can pick out the word for Torah in the Quranic recital I’m about to make. Did you get it? There’s inna inzalna, we, Allah, sent down, inzalna, al-Torat, the Torah, fiha, and in it is huda wa nur, guidance and light. Quite nice, actually.

And in our discussions with our academic group that Miriam has mentioned, we had a near scholarly consensus that the Quran never contradicts anything fundamental contained in the Torah. A pretty big statement. It doesn’t go out to contradict the Torah.

We’ll come to what it does later, but one thing it doesn’t set out to do is to contradict the Torah. And it carries on. And we sent down the book to you, the Quran, with the truth, confirming, masaddikan, like tzedek, masaddik, can you see the similarity of the word, the cognate word? Confirming what is between his hands, the Bible, and muhaimanan.

What’s that word, muhaimanan? We’ve translated it as trusting over it, but really muhaimanan uses the root of the word amen, meaning like a confirmation, you know, amen is a confirmation. So this Quran picks up this word muhaimanan, says that the Quran, muhaimanan, confirms or trusts the Bible, and actually also including the gospel, whatever it meant by the gospel. Okay, let’s get to the gritty stuff.

Possibly one of the nastier verses that you could take from the Quran about Jews is whether the Quran (5:51) asks its followers not to be friends with Jews, and here is the verse, you who believe, it should say, do not take the Jews and Christians as friends. They’re friends only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them.

So if you take that verse on its own, it looks like the Quran is really anti-Jewish and anti-Christian. I mean, don’t be friends with them. Don’t go near them.

But let’s look into this a little bit more, because the translation that we’ve used here of awliya as friends is really a Western scholars translation. People like Muhammad, who was really Marmaduke, a convert to Islam about 150 years ago, and Arbery, sort of Western translators, would typically translate awliya as friends, so do not be friends with Jews or Christians. But I’m very conscious that the translation of any scripture is difficult, and there are different interpretations, and so I’ve thought about that for a long time, and last month I had the privilege of sitting down with a professor, the head of Islamic studies at SOAS, Muhammad Abdul Halim, and I sat down with him in the Central Mosque in London, and asked him about many verses where I had translation difficulties, including this one.

And it was very interesting that in his well-publicized translation of the Quran, he translated the word as awliya as allies. Do not take the Jews and Christians as allies. Why did he use allies? Because he was contextualizing the scripture, and looking at the surrounding verses, and all the other Islamic history material that he had, he understood that you shouldn’t take Jews and Christians as political allies in the context of Medina in roughly 628 CE, where there were all kinds of struggles going on between tribes, and it was really, his understanding was that he contextualized the verse to that particular time.

So what I’ve come to learn is that when you see what looks like a nasty or hostile verse in the Quran, and probably in other scripture too, it really depends whether you contextualize it or not, it gives you the clue as to whether it’s really a nasty verse or not. It just depends whether you contextualize it or not. And I had this again earlier in the year, where I was very fortunate to be invited to spend a couple of days at Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo.

And I want to tell you what happened there. I’m sitting with my friend, one of my friends at the mosque, for really a couple of hours chatting away. And then we had half an hour before the evening prayer, which I wanted to stand at the back and listen to.

And she said, what should we do now? At Al-Azhar Mosque, there’s all this stuff going on. There’s like a women’s class over there, and a men’s class over there, and people memorizing the Quran over there. And she said, well, should we just go into this one, the nearest one? And there was a room with an imam behind a desk, and about 20 people sitting down on the floor.

Sure, so we wander in there. And the imam is sitting behind a desk, and he’s reading a verse of the Quran and then explaining it. So we get to the next verse.

And I realized immediately that the verse he’s talking about is something very relevant to us, the people of the book, Ahl al-Kitab, because it starts, huwa iladhi akhraja. It was Allah who expelled iladhina kafaru, the disbelievers, min Ahl al-Kitab, from the people of the book, that’s us. It’s Allah expelling us, min diyarihim, from their homes, li awlil hashir, at the first exile.

 

So I thought, wow, this is going to be very interesting to hear his explanation in al-Azhar al-Azhar about a verse expelling Jews from their homes. I hope I’m okay sitting here. There’s the English translation.

 

So how did he go about it? Well, surprisingly to me, he was a master contextualizer. He spoke for the next 20 minutes all about the context of that verse, the particular issue that Muhammad had had at the time, trying to keep people on side, trying to work out who was fighting with him and who was not fighting with him. And this was all about that situation.

 

And the way he explained it in the mosque in al-Azhar was all contextualized. And so I think nobody who listened to that teaching would have gone outside and had any problem with a Jewish person because of that verse. And indeed, one man sitting on my side asked my friend who brought me in, what is this chap, foreigner? Yes.

Is he a Christian? He said, no, he’s Jewish. He said, oh, okay. Like, nothing happened.

I was really pleasantly surprised by all that. I know it’s an anecdote and not comprehensive, and that the al-Azhar mosque has been in the past a seat of Muslim Brotherhood teaching, which is much more aggressive, anti-Jewish kind of teaching than it is today. But there we are.

It’s an anecdote. Okay. So now let’s go back to those verses about anti-Jewish verses in the Quran.

So even if it wasn’t contextualized, how do we read it? Well, here’s a subsequent verse. Your true allies, you believers, are true allies of Allah, his messenger, and the believers, those who keep up the prayer, pay the prescribed alms and bow to Allah. Well, could that include some Jews, for example? Can those Muslims be friendly with those kind of Jews? Well, maybe.

The Quran continues. They are not all alike. There are some among the people of the book, Jews, Christians, and a few others, who are upright, qa’ima, who recite Allah’s book throughout the night, prostrating.

They believe in Allah on the last day, and so on. And they will be known as pious people. So yes, running through the Quran is this distinction, not between Muslims and Jews, us and them, but between people who are basically good people, who are, if you like it, believers in one Allah, or people who turn their back on one Allah.

And it’s interesting to me that that word in red there, red, purple, red, upright, qa’ima, that is an example of how the Quran seems to be continually echoing Jewish-y stuff. So we think, my co-author and I, that qa’ima there is an inference to the standing prayer, the amida, qa’ima, amida, and those are the good people, the people who pray the amida. So does the Quran intend to instruct perpetual enmity with Jews and Judaism? Well, let’s go to the historical context now.

So, Muhammad, as you may know, fled from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, and that led to a change of tone in the way that the Quran speaks about Jews and Jewish people. We know a lot about this from the historical biographies of Muhammad, the seerah, and several hadith, and it’s not surprising that when Muhammad left Mecca, where there were not many Jewish people, and arrives in Medina, where there were many Jewish people, that much of the Quran is set in the context of addressing a whole Jewish group that perhaps Muhammad thought he would bring with him in the worship of one Allah. And this is perceivable in the way that the Quran talks about Jews.

So the verses of the Quran can be divided into Meccan and Medinan verses, according to most scholarly analysis, and the Meccan verses, the ones where Muhammad was in Mecca, where there were not many Jewish people, talk a lot about the Banu Israel, the children of Israel, in a kind of conceptual, scriptural term. But it’s interesting that in the Medinan verses, when Muhammad gets to Medina and he comes face-to-face with a substantial Jewish community, you see the prevalence 17 times the Jews are referred to as Yahud, Jews, instead of the previous version Banu Israel. And this is also where the Ahl al-Kitab, the people of the book, Jews, Christians, and a few others, get mentioned a lot more.

And look at this Torah. The Torah itself is mentioned 17 times when Muhammad gets to Medina, and only two times previously. So there’s definitely something going on when Muhammad arrives in Medina and faces up to actual Jews.

And what we see when we look more closely is that the Quran statements are nearly always critical of the rabbis and teachers. It says, for example, why do rabbis and religious scholars not forbid them from saying what is sinful and eating what is unlawful? You can just imagine Muhammad arriving. He, as I said before, respects the Torah, which means he respects the dietary laws in the Torah.

He sees people maybe not obeying them, and he asks, why aren’t the rabbis doing anything about it? They’re all eating the wrong stuff. Why aren’t the rabbis speaking up? That’s what Quran 563 is going on about. And then the rabbis were entrusted with the scriptures of Allah, the Quran says critically.

They didn’t make sure that people followed and adhered closely enough to the scriptures of Allah. And again, about the food laws, it questions if all the food laws were contained in the Torah. You can just imagine he arrives and there’s some food laws and he questions them.

He said, where’s that in your book? And elsewhere it says, go bring the book. If you’re not sure, the Quran says, go and bring the Torah and recite it, if you’re telling the truth, and let’s check. Okay? And then again, he blames the people for taking the scholars and monks, like the rabbis, as lords beside Allah.

The people were following so closely their rabbis that he said they shouldn’t be. They should be following Allah and Allah’s laws. So the bottom line is that the Quran is consistently critical of rabbis and teachers.

And I put that into the kind of category of leadership struggle, if you like, that Muhammad criticizing the rabbis and leaders was part of his problem that he wanted to have authority over the Jewish community rather than the existing incumbent rabbis. Well now, how critical is the Quran? How are we going to measure how critical the Quran is in general and critical of Jews? Well, let’s do this. What is probably the nastiest verse? I ask many Muslims this.

What is probably the nastiest verse in the Quran about Jews? Well, probably it’s the one where it calls them apes and pigs. So let’s have a look at this verse, okay? I think someone mentioned this earlier in the week maybe, but anyway, this is my take on it. Why did it call Jews apes or pigs? Because they violated the Sabbath and doing that is described as a divine curse.

Here’s the verse. Not very nice. Not very nice thing to say about Jewish people who are breaking the Sabbath.

But anyway, that’s what it says. Note that no capital or physical punishments are mentioned. It’s just an insult.

Let’s just compare that as one way of assessing how nasty this is to the Jewish account in the Torah of the same thing. The man was caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath, as you know. What happened? They go to Moses.

Usual story. They go to Moses. Moses turns to Allah.

Allah sends down the verdict. They were to be stoned to death. Moses goes to the people.

He says stone them to death, and there it is. That’s what happened. This man was stoned to death by the whole community as commanded by Allah.

The whole community stoned him to death. So I’m just pointing out, you know, people tell you the Koran has nasty verses about Jews and calls them apes and pigs. Just to understand, like, how to set that, how to frame that.

Well, the Torah also criticizes the Sabbath breakers, and this one does it in what I think is a far more aggressive way, which is that the whole community, the brother is supposed to stone the brother, his brother, to death, which I think is a bit more aggressive than just calling them apes or pigs. Just to give you the comparison, okay? And the Torah and the Hebrew prophets consistently criticize the Israelites far more harshly than the Koran. You show me any nasty verse about Jews in the Koran, I’ll show you a nastier verse in the Tanakh about, you know, if you go to Jeremiah and other books, even the Deuteronomy and the curses, you’ll find much worse stuff in the Tanakh than you would in the Koran about Jews.

Okay, another one. But the Koran asks its followers to fight the Jews until they pay the jizya kind of a tax, or kind of a tax, right, or not? Well, yes, there is this verse. Fight those of the people of the book who do not believe in Allah and the last day, who do not forbid what Allah and his messenger forbidden, who do not obey the rule of justice until they pay the tax, the jizya, and they are, we’ve translated as, belittled.

Yeah? Okay. This was the verse that really some people criticized the whole of Islam for subordinating Jewish people through the history of Jews in Muslim lands. And it is absolutely true that the Jews never could really sustain a position of leadership in Muslim lands, and that they had to be subordinated.

This is absolutely true. They were subordinated in Christianity as well. And indeed, in those days, in most places, there was a subordinate class and the ruling class, and the Jews were in a subordinate class in Muslim countries.

No question about that. But how bad was the subordination? Well, let me give you an example of how this verse was used. Because as you well know, after 1492 in Spain, many of the Jews left Spain and Portugal and went largely to Ottoman countries.

Istanbul at the time had a massive influx over the next hundred years of Jewish people who’d left Spain and Portugal, and probably the population of Istanbul was expanded by 30 to 40 percent, estimates vary, but the population was expanded by 30 or 40 percent by immigrant Jews. So those of you who know UK recent history, you know about Brexit, you know we had loads of immigrants coming into the country, a big fight, should we keep them, should we not, are they useful, are they not? I can imagine the same kind of thing going on in the late 1500s in Spain. Who are these Jewish people? On the one hand, they’re quite useful.

They brought us the printing press, and they’re quite useful. On the other hand, they’re sort of not like us, and they’re different. So do we really want them? So the thing lands on the desk of a sultan at the time, Sultan Mehmet III, in 1602.

The question comes to him, he picks up the Quran, that verse 929, and he issues an edict, a firman, which declared the Quran commands the protection of Jews and Christians, the protection of Jews and Christians, as a religious duty for Muslims, as long as they pay the required tax, no one should interfere with their lives or business. Preventing their peaceful living would be a violation of Islamic law. So here’s an example, and I could show you quite a few others from around the Islamic world, of how that Quran, verse 929, which some Jewish writers say, oh that’s the one that made us suppressed, and that was a very nasty one, and we had to pay this tax, and all that stuff.

Well, that wasn’t always the case. In quite a few examples, and this is one, the verse 929 was used as a basis for protecting Jews as a kind of minority. Sahirun, belittled, but yet as a minority.

So overall, where do we get to now? Well, the Quran reveres the Torah, I think I’ve proved that. Arguably, was not seeking to reject Judaism, because it wasn’t seeking to overturn the Torah, and start a new religion. It probably wanted people to follow Muhammad in some way.

It rails against some Jews for not following Jewish law, it does that pretty consistently. Criticizes the Jewish rabbis and leaders, we went through that. And so, bottom line, why is the Quran, in some places, critical of Jews, and critical of its leaders? Well, part of it, a big part, I think, is that it was a kind of striving for authority over the monotheistic community.

So does it require perpetual animosity? Does the Quran require perpetual animosity against Jews? Big question for me, and it’s a question we put to the group that Miriam mentioned earlier, the Quran Bible Reading Group of the Wolfe Institute that Miriam chairs, and it’s been absolutely tremendous. We’ve pilled together all these top leading professors of what’s called intertextuality, comparing text, and okay, they’re all academicians, but nevertheless, they all pretty much unanimously agreed that the Quran did not require perpetual enmity against Jews. So I get to the point where I can say to ISGAP, if you were hoping for me to come here and show how terrible the Quran was, and how it was a kind of murder manual against Jews, you’ve got the wrong guy and the wrong interpretation, because it doesn’t.

Okay. So that’s why, actually, when we were on a Wolfe Institute trip to Istanbul, and we go to the big mosque, I did end up seeing a Jewish memorial prayer in front of the tomb of Sultan Mehmed III, the one who’d written that firman that granted peaceful conditions to Jews in the Ottoman Empire in 1603. Okay.

I mentioned that the Quran was full of stuff about the Torah, and about how it didn’t give you the information itself in the Quran, but it assumed that you knew what was in the Bible, the whole underlying story. So why do most Muslims generally not consult the Bible? I mean, you’re all top scholars. It’s an amazing group here.

If you read one book, and it kept referring to some source material, you’d probably click on Amazon and get that source book and read it, I think. But Muslims are told all the time, if you’re not sure, go and ask in the book, or go and ask the people of the book. But they don’t.

You go into any mosque, they don’t even have a copy of the Bible in most of them, because the Quran accuses the Jews of yuharifoon, falsifying the Torah. Well, what is this word yuharifoon, or the noun form that you may have heard of tahreef? Well, here’s an example of where it uses the word yuharifoon. Some of the Jews used to hear the words of Allah, and then yuharifoon them after they understood them.

So what is tahreef, yuharifoon? Well, this was the subject of intense debate in Islam, especially over the first four or five hundred years of Islam. There were some, initially, that said it meant changing the meanings of words, or taking them out of context. So I view that one as rather like, you know, a new rabbi comes along and he gives you his interpretation of the Torah, and you say, well, I don’t really like his interpretation, I like my old rabbi, kind of, he had a better interpretation.

That’s what I would call tahreef al ma’ana, changing the meanings of the words. That’s what the Quran might have been accusing the Jews of doing. But later on came the accusation that the Jews changed the words of the Bible themselves, changed the words, corrupted the scripture.

Tahreef al lafif. Well, this debate was pretty interesting, and here’s a kind of timeline of how it happened. There’s Muhammad dying in 632 CE, and then in the early days, all those scholars basically viewed the Bible as intact, as non-corrupted, but it was the interpretation, the Jewish interpretation, that they criticized.

Only later on, starting perhaps in the 1100s and in the 1300s, did it become firmly established in Islamic theology that the Jewish Bible had been corrupted. And this has implications, because as you may know, the Quran does not spell out which of the sons of Abraham was the son of the intended sacrifice, right? So for the first few hundred years of Islam, the dominant view was that it was Isaac who was the son of the sacrifice, because that’s what it said in the Bible. The Quran told you to respect the Bible, and so it was Isaac, and all the early scholars just assumed that it was Isaac.

And it was only later, once this idea that the Jews had corrupted the Bible came in, after 400 or 500 years after Muhammad had died, that the Isaac narrative gave way to an Ishmael narrative, that it was Ishmael who was the son of the sacrifice, and that the sacrifice had taken place somewhere near Mecca instead of somewhere in Syria or Canaan. Okay, now this is where I get into deep water, so I’ll take a sip of water. The Quran and the Holy Land.

From what I’ve said earlier, you might be able to guess what the Quran actually says about the Holy Land, but I’ll show it to you anyway. Here it is. Ya qawmi, O my people.

That means, O Ban Israel. Ban Israel had been mentioned a verse or two earlier. That’s Eretz HaKodesh, the Holy Land.

That Allah has qataba, written or ordained for you, and do not turn back and become losers. Pretty definitive, and I can tell you there’s no counterclaim in the whole of the Quran to the idea that the Israelites, the Ban Israel, should live in Al-Ard, Al-Muqaddisa, the Holy Land, Land of Canaan, Land of Israel. And in addition, the Quran invokes the Psalms, Tehillim, after the mention that the land is inherited by my righteous servants.

It actually quotes that. Jerusalem, of course, is not mentioned in the Quran except perhaps in the reference to al-Masjid al-Aqsa, the furthest mosque. There’s a scholarly debate about whether that means the mosque that’s in the celestial mosque, somehow a mosque in heaven, a place in heaven, or whether it actually means the physical location in Jerusalem.

And anyway, why was Jerusalem the furthest mosque? It wasn’t the furthest place on earth away. Jerusalem by name is not mentioned in the Quran. There’s a bit of discussion about the changing of the qiblah, the direction of prayer, because initially we know that Muslims used to pray towards Jerusalem, but in Muhammad’s time and in the Quran it says that he turned their direction of prayer.

It ended up being towards Mecca, which was actually a physical turning, turning your back on Jerusalem, in fact. But there’s all sorts of scholarly debates about what was really meant there. I just want to mention something else, because I have mentioned that the Quran stated very categorically that the children of Israel were to live in the Holy Land.

But I just wanted to point out, as a reminder and a counterbalance, that it wasn’t a mandate to live in the Holy Land exclusively, as it is mentioned in the Tanakh itself. The Tanakh very clearly says what you should do with strangers who live in your land, you shall not wrong them, you shall have the same law for the stranger and for the native. So it’s not an exclusive right.

Anyway, both the Quran and the Bible say to Allah belongs whatever’s in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. So now I’m going to come to something even more contentious, which is about how scripture is used in contemporary discourse. Now my field has really been on the Quran and the Bible.

But in recent period, I really don’t think I can mention that without talking a little bit with a few examples of how the Quran and the Bible are used today in contemporary discourse, whether they are used in a nice way, in a way that encourages good relations between Jews and Muslims, or in a way that’s perhaps inflammatory, that’s used to create bad relations between Jews and Muslims. Well, let’s take this. The 1988 Hamas founding charter, which I’m sure has been discussed in this forum.

The Hamas charter in 1998 really wanted to have a really good go against Jews. So it wanted to find really nasty verses of stuff that it could recite in its original charter. But this one that was in the 1988 charter, that you may have heard of, the time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees and will cry, oh Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him.

This verse is not found in the Quran. They had to go into the Hadith, a secondary literature of which there’s like 10,000 comments about what Muhammad was supposed to have said or did, some supposedly reputable sources, some other sources. It was compiled in the most respectable one, al-Bukhari, was compiled 200 years after Muhammad had died.

So it’s not the Quran, put it that way. And this verse that ended up in the Hamas charter was anyway a combination of two Hadith from two different compilations, and it wasn’t from the Quran. So I’m just pointing out that the Hamas, who wanted to find the worst verse they could, their main verse, the one that’s popularized, was not actually from the Quran, because I don’t think they could find one nasty enough in the Quran.

And let me carry on a bit. Okay, Ismail Haniya, after the 7th of October 2023 attacks, claiming that those attacks followed Allah’s instructions. How could he claim that the attacks of 7th of October 2023 followed Allah’s instructions? Well, he talked about the two men, the two men said, and he went on and on, and he said, oh, you will be predominant.

So these two men were going to be predominant, and it showed him, he was trying to use it to say that all Muslims would be predominant over Israel. Well, who were the two men that he was talking about? Because he was quoting from the Quran, anybody. Which two men was he talking about? That the Quran is, who was he using as the two men who were going to be victorious? Anyone? Someone.

I’ve given it on the TV. Yeah, it’s Caleb. So he’s using the two men, the Quranic verse about the two men, from which you’re supposed to know, because it doesn’t name them.

You’re supposed to know, if you know the Bible, that that was Joshua and Caleb. He uses them to show that they’re going to be victorious over Israel. So it’s a bit ironic.

I call that an abuse of context, I think. Okay, here’s another one. Then we will give you a victory over them, Abu Ubaidah, on the 4th of April, 24.

Well, who was you, and who was the victory over? Well, it was actually talking about the Babylonians and their destructions of the two temples. It’s hardly using the same context to talk about contemporary war in Israel and Gaza. I should point out, before you start going round to your various countries and saying, you know, the Hamas are terrible, they’re using scripture out of context, you’ve just got to be a little bit careful.

Because I have noticed myself that there’s quite a lot of use of scripture in a non-contextual way by Israeli officers of state, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who used Amalek twice, actually, in his verses. And Itamar Ben-Gvir, also using a fairly aggressive verse from Numbers on the children of Israel entering the land of Canaan. And Betzalel Smotrich, also referring to Amalek, plotting out Amalek.

So it is kind of something that, unfortunately, in war gets done on both sides, it seems to me, that verses of scripture are sort of pulled out and used and decontextualized and reused in a current context. So I’m afraid my conclusion is that this is something happening in a not very helpful way on all sides. So let me go back to my real subject, which is what does the Koran really want from Jews? Well, they just want, the Koran just wants Jews to be better Jews, respect their scripture, follow the laws, adhere to Judaism, follow the Torah and the Bible, no perpetual enmity.

That’s really where I’ve got to on my understanding of the Koran. And in the verses which were deemed to be some of the last verses to be revealed in the Koran, you have some rather nice statements, say, O people of the Book, Ahl al-Kitab, come to terms common between us and you, that we worship none but Allah, and that we associate nothing with him, and that none of us takes others as lords besides Allah. Quite nice.

And my favorite, probably, O people, we created from you a male and a female, and made you races and tribes, lita’rafu, that you may know one another. In other words, there’s an implicit instruction to co-exist, not to be the same, you’re created differently, but to know one another. There we go.

That’s it.