al-Gharqad
Al-Gharqad refers to a tree or bush in Islamic tradition that is said to play a role in the end-time battle between Jews and Muslims. A narration from the "Kitāb al-fitan" (No. 82), the book in which Muslim collected the eschatological hadiths about the temptations on the Day of the Last Judgment, says that Abu Huraira reported that Muhammad said the following:
- The hour will not strike until the Muslims fight and kill the Jews so that the Jews hide behind stones and trees. However, the stones or trees say: O, Muslim! O servants of God, a Jew is hiding behind me. Come and kill him! Only not al-Gharqad; for it is a tree of the Jews.
The tree
The Baqīʿ al-Gharqad cemetery in Medina is named al-Gharqad. "Baqīʿ" originally means "wide land with various trees". According to Lane , the site was used as a cemetery after the trees were felled there. Baqīʿ al-Gharqad was also called “kaftatun” according to Lisān al-ʿarab , derived from the verb kafata (to prevent people from doing something, to hold them back), which could contain a reference to the hadith.
However, it remains unclear which bush or tree al-Gharqad was. There seems to be consensus that al-Gharqad was thorny and useless. The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition describes the plant as a kind of blackberry. The orientalist Tilman Nagel writes that the Baqīʿ al-Gharqad was passed with Christ's thorn before it was used as a cemetery.
Today al-Gharqad refers to the plant family Nitrariaceae .
Usage today
This hadith was instrumentalized in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and is, for example, part of Article seven of the Hamas Charter . According to the idea of fundamentalist Muslims, Israel is increasingly planting al-Gharqad in order to hide behind it on Judgment Day . The idea of al-Gharqad is seen by many as evidence of the existence of anti-Semitism in Islamist currents.
Individual evidence
- ^ Edward William Lane: Arabic-English Lexicon , sv b - q - ʿ and: Michael Lecker: Muslims, Jews & Pagans. Studies on Early Islamic Medina. Brill, Leiden 1995, p. 15.
- ^ Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg: The Road to Martyrs' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber , Oxford 2005, p. 22.
- ^ The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition, sv Baḳīʿ al-Gharḳad
- ^ Tilman Nagel: Mohammed. Life and legend. Munich 2008, p. 802.
- ↑ Federal Agency for Political Education: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in the Hamas Charter. A case study on hostility towards Jews in the Islamist discourse