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compiler, Abu al- Fidaʾ, who in turn quotes Abu al- Fath Muhammad ibn
ʿAbd al- Karim ash- Shahrastani (d. 1153– 1154). A Persian- born Sunni
Muslim, ash- Shahrastani wrote Kitābal-milalwa-n-niḥal (The Book of
Religions and Systems of Thought, c. 1127– 1128), comparing the other
religions of his day to Islam. For al- Khalidi’s comparison of the Torah’s
relative silence on the afterlife as compared to the ancient egyptian
faith, he cites a contemporary 1878 French work on the ancient his-
tory of the peoples of the Orient by emmanuel van den Berg.^117 These
two sources— ash- Shahrastani and van den Berg— are illustrative of
al- Khalidi’s dual education: in the Arab- Islamic tradition, on the one
hand, and the nineteenth- century european Orientalist tradition, on
the other.
Beyond showing the sources for al-Khalidi’s understanding of Ju -
daism, however, this passage also reveals a telling choice of focus and
terms of comparison. Al- Khalidi’s decision to highlight the absence of
the concept of the afterlife and resurrection in the Hebrew Bible, and
the lack of the doctrine of reward- and- punishment, was not accidental,
I would suggest, nor without particular resonance. Rather, this was a
conventional trope of Muslim- Jewish polemics from the medieval pe-
riod, and it has clear roots in the Qurʾan.^118 Indeed, the second sura of
the Qurʾan emphasizes the centrality of the principle of the afterlife; it
actually identifies the Qurʾan as a guide for the righteous who “have
firm faith in the Hereafter” (Q. 2:4).^119 In the Qurʾan, belief in divine
judgment on the Last day is critical for the self- definition of the be-
liever, and in defining the nonbelieving Other:
As for those who disbelieve . . . God has sealed their hearts and
their ears, and their eyes are covered. They will have great tor-
ment. Some people say, “We believe in God and the Last day,”
when really they do not believe. They seek to deceive God and
the believers but they only deceive themselves. (Q. 2:6– 9)In the ninth sura of the Qurʾan, we read of the call to “fight those of
the People of the Book who do not [truly] believe in God and the Last
day” (Q. 9:29). Jews, of course, are among Islam’s People of the Book,
ahlal-kitāb, and yet, al- Khalidi insists, in the tradition of the Qurʾan
and subsequent polemics in the Muslim- Jewish ideological encounter,
Jews do not believe in the Last day on which divine judgment will be
(^117) Van den Berg, Petitehistoireanciennedespeuplesdel’Orient. This small volume can
still be found in the Khalidi Library.
(^118) See Perlmann, “The Medieval Polemics between Islam and Judaism,” 123– 24.
(^119) Unless otherwise noted, the translations of the Qurʾan provided here generally
follow Abdel Haleem, TheQurʾan.