Page 33 - Non-violence and peace-building

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Learn from History

n the past, God appointed the Jews as possessors of
Idivine scriptures. The Jews’ past provides important
lessons for the Muslims’ future. It is for this reason that
the initial chapters of the Quran contain many verses
about the history of the Jews. In the corpus of Hadith ,
1
it is narrated that Muslims will also face all the sorts
of degeneration that the Jews faced: “You will surely
follow in the ways of those before you, span by span
and cubit by cubit, so much so that if they were to enter
an iguana’s hole, you would follow after them.” (Sahih
Bukhari and Sahih Muslim)
All the communities that are given divine scriptures
always face the same situation. The principles for their
success as well as of their failure are also one and the
same. In this sense, the history of the Jews is the history
of every other people who were given divine scriptures.
This history of the Jews provides Muslims the very same
lessons as it does for the Jews themselves.

At the time of Moses, God began showering His
blessings on the Children of Israel—the Jews—and

1 The corpus of reports of the deeds and sayings of, or attributed to,
the Prophet Muhammad.

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