The American Muslim (TAM)

Muslims Who Fought Against the ‘Real’ Fascists

Sheila Musaji

Posted Sep 4, 2006 • Permalink • Printer-Friendly Version

Muslims Who Fought Against the ‘Real’ Fascists

by Sheila Musaji

With the recent increase in the use of the misleading term Islamic Fascists it is important to point out a few facts. There may have been a few Muslims who cooperated with the Nazis/Fascists during the Second World War, but they were a small minority. Most Muslims followed the Qur’anic injunction:

“Oh you who believe, stand up firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even if it be against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor; for God can best protect both. Do not follow any passion, lest you not be just. And if you distort or decline to do justice, verily God is well-acquainted with all that you do” (Quran 4:135).

The bottom line is that all of those who participate in, cooperate with, or do not speak out against evil (no matter what their religion) bring shame on the human race, and all of those who stand for justice and compassion give us all hope.

Bulgarian Christians and Muslims protected Jews from the Nazis.

Albania was the only Muslim majority country in Europe. Albania not only saved Albanian Jews from the Nazis, but, in fact, Albania was the only country in Europe that had a larger Jewish population at the end of the war than before the war. Not one Albanian Jew or any other Jew who came to Albania for protection was turned over to the Nazis. There was a film called “The Optimists” which tells the virtually unknown story of how 50,000 Jews living in Bulgaria survived the Holocaust despite intensive Nazi efforts to deport them to death camps. Fifty thousand Jews didn’t die because Bulgarian Christians and Muslims found ways to protect Jews from their would-be murderers. - - The Albanian Refik Vesili who — as a 16-year-old — saved eight Jews by hiding them in his family’s mountain home. - The English-Albanian plaque in the Jewish Corner of Tirana’s National Museum lists the names of 33 Muslim Albanians who have been honored by Yad Vashem, and leaves space for other people “whose names remain unrecorded.”

300,000 Moroccan Jews in Israel mourned the death of King Hassan of Jordan in 1999. His father, Mohammed V, is widely credited with having saved Morocco’s Jews from deportation during World War II, and Hassan continued the philo-Semitic policies of his father. Although there was an outbreak of anti-Jewish incidents following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jewish community was generally safe under the protection of both Mohammed and Hassan, who proudly considered the Jews “Moroccans of Jewish origin.

Arabs and Jews once fought together under the British Flag against the Nazis in the Palestine Regiment.

Noor Inayat Khan fought against the Nazis and was killed at Dachau concentration camp.

The stories of Muslim rescuers of Jews are largely unknown and unpublished. Only in the past fifteen years have Holocaust researchers brought a few to the public’s attention. Yad Vashem and other Holocaust memorial groups have honored several Muslims (whose courageous stories we have been able to confirm) as Righteous Gentiles. The Muslim rescuers include:

- The Bosnians - Not only did Dervis and Servet Korkut hide many Jews from the local pro-Nazi regime, including a young Jewish woman resistance fighter named Mira Bakovic, but Dervis Korkut saved the precious Sarajevo Haggadah, concealing it in his home and thus keeping the 14th-century volume, the best known illuminated Hebrew manuscript, intact.

- Selahattin Ulkumen, the Turkish Consul at Rhodes, whose rescue of several dozen Jews from certain extermination at Auschwitz led to the death of his wife Mihrinissa when the Nazis retaliated against him

The Central Mosque of Paris served as a shelter for hundreds of French Jewish children being rescued from deportation to death camps. This mosque was built in the 1920s, as an expression of gratitude from France for the over half-million Muslims from its African possessions who fought alongside the French in the 1914-1918 war. About 100,000 of them died in the trenches. A film has been made about this called Their Children Are Like Our Own Children.

The majority of Allied troops that landed on the beaches of Provence in August, 1944 were “Free French” Muslims from North and West Africa. Thousands of Moroccan and Indian Muslim troops voluntarily served in the liberation of Italy. They risked and gave their lives along with Polish freedom fighters and American GIs at Monte Cassino. Tens of thousands more Soviet Muslim troops bravely served at hellish Stalingrad and Leningrad. All of us should honor and be thankful for their sacrifice in helping end the scourge of Nazism.

The bottom line is that all of those who participate in, cooperate with, or do not speak out against evil (no matter what their religion) bring shame on the human race. As the Qur’an warns us all: “Oh you who believe, stand up firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even if it be against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor; for God can best protect both. Do not follow any passion, lest you not be just. And if you distort or decline to do justice, verily God is well-acquainted with all that you do” (Quran 4:135).

Robert Satloff reported in a NYT article that ”Arabs welcomed Jews into their homes, guarded Jews’ valuables so Germans could not confiscate them, shared with Jews their meager rations and warned Jewish leaders of coming SS raids. The sultan of Morocco and the bey of Tunis provided moral support and, at times, practical help to Jewish subjects. In Vichy-controlled Algiers, mosque preachers gave Friday sermons forbidding believers from serving as conservators of confiscated Jewish property. In the words of Yaacov Zrivy, from a small town near Sfax, Tunisia, “The Arabs watched over the Jews.” I found remarkable stories of rescue, too. In the rolling hills west of Tunis, 60 Jewish internees escaped from an Axis labor camp and banged on the farm door of a man named Si Ali Sakkat, who courageously hid them until liberation by the Allies. In the Tunisian coastal town of Mahdia, a dashing local notable named Khaled Abdelwahhab scooped up several families in the middle of the night and whisked them to his countryside estate to protect one of the women from the predations of a German officer bent on rape.”