The New Double Standard

Submitted by Judith Antonelli (United States), Dec 19, 2002 at 00:11

After seeing the PBS documentary on Islam, I am struck by the following: the double standard that is applied to the Torah and the Quran.

For instance, Karen Armstrong--a Western, non-Muslim author--talked about the beauty of the Quran in Arabic, and how you can't judge the Quran in terms of sexism by 21st-century standards.

When was the last time you saw a documentary in which an "outsider" (someone other than a religious Jew) talked about the beauty of the Torah in Hebrew, and made the same defense about sexism?

You don't. Religious Jews, who believe in divine revelation, don't interact enough with modern society to be making biblical documentaries for TV; they talk only to each other, mostly. Most Jews accept academic biblical criticism and, by definition, are critical of the Torah more than they are in awe of it. (If only Muslims would have more of this trait, and Jews would have less of it!) Christianity treats the Torah at best as a mere precursor of the New Testament, and usually in a dismissive way--as a legalistic text with a vindictive God that Jesus' message came to replace with love and the spirit of the law. Secular agnostics and atheists, who come from a Jewish or Christian background that they have rejected, have nothing BUT negative stereotypes about "the Bible," usually based on an abysmal ignorance.

I am afraid we are seeing a new and growing trend in the secularized West: that Islam will, ironically, be romanticized by the very same cultural forces that disdain the Torah as sexist, warlike, outdated, etc. Judaism will become the target of all that is hated about religion, and Islam will be the target of all that is idealized about religion. The critics of the Torah will not be critical of the Quran, and the romanticizers of the Quran will not give the Torah that same benefit of the doubt. (The New Testament will not receive the same hostility as the Torah because it will be watered down to a mere "Jesus preached love" message.)

It's a new and subtle form of antisemitism, and I find it very, very scary.

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