Part III of the Series: Prophets, Empires & the Modern World

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Part III of the Series: Prophets, Empires & the Modern World

From Karbala to the Khilafat: How the Tragedy of 680 CE Planted the Seeds of the Modern Israel-Iran Confrontation

At the end of Part II, we arrived at a question that most historians and analysts have failed to ask seriously: if Jews and Muslims lived largely in peace for over a thousand years, when did the modern conflict between them actually begin? And more specifically — why is Iran, of all nations, the most implacable enemy of the Israeli state today?

The conventional answer points to 1948, the founding of Israel, or to 1979, the Iranian Revolution. Both answers are wrong — or rather, they are correct only at the surface level. The true roots of this confrontation stretch back thirteen centuries, to a desert plain in Iraq, on a single day in October of the year 680 CE.

That day was the Battle of Karbala. And to understand it is to understand nearly everything about the modern Middle East that our newspapers fail to explain.

The Background: Who Was Husayn ibn Ali?

To understand Karbala, we must first understand who Husayn was and why his death mattered so profoundly.

Husayn ibn Ali was born in January of 626 CE. His father was Ali ibn Abi Talib — the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad (?), and the fourth Caliph of Islam. His mother was Fatimah al-Zahra — the beloved daughter of the Prophet, described in hadith as the leader of all women of paradise. Husayn was therefore the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (?) through the Prophet’s own daughter. The Prophet himself is recorded in multiple hadith as expressing extraordinary love for Husayn and his brother Hasan. In one famous hadith, he said: “Husayn is from me, and I am from Husayn. Allah loves whoever loves Husayn.”

This is not a minor genealogical detail. In Islamic culture — and in the broader Semitic cultural world — the family of a prophet carries a sanctity that is almost without parallel. Husayn was not a distant relative. He was the flesh and blood of the Prophet of Islam, raised in his household, loved by him personally. His death, and the manner of it, would shake the Muslim world to its foundations.

The Rise of the Umayyads and the Breaking of the Covenant

To understand why Husayn died, we must go back further — to the question of succession after the Prophet’s death.

The Prophet Muhammad (?) passed away in 632 CE. The question of who would lead the Muslim community — the Ummah — after him became the central political fault line of early Islamic history. The first three caliphs — Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, Umar ibn al-Khattab, and Uthman ibn Affan — were chosen through consultation and community consensus. Ali ibn Abi Talib became the fourth Caliph in 656 CE, but his tenure was marked by civil conflict. He was assassinated in 661 CE by a member of the Kharijite faction.

After Ali’s assassination, his son Hasan ibn Ali briefly assumed leadership but concluded a peace treaty with Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan — the powerful Governor of Syria and founder of the Umayyad dynasty. The treaty had one crucial condition: Muawiyah would not appoint a hereditary successor. The Caliphate would revert to the family of the Prophet after Muawiyah’s death. This was a solemn covenant.

Muawiyah violated it completely. Before his death in April 680 CE, he appointed his own son Yazid as his heir — transforming the caliphate from an institution of religious leadership into a hereditary monarchy. This was not merely a political act. It was, in the eyes of the Muslim community, a profound corruption of the entire structure of Islamic governance. Yazid, by all contemporary accounts, was a man known for drinking wine, keeping hunting dogs, and conducting himself in ways incompatible with the gravity of the caliphate.

Husayn ibn Ali refused to pledge allegiance to Yazid. His refusal was not merely political ambition — it was a principled moral stand. As he said himself: “Anyone like me will never accept anyone like Yazid as a ruler.” He was choosing principle over safety, and he knew what it would cost him.

The Journey to Karbala

Husayn left Medina in late 679 CE, eventually making his way to Mecca. There, he received hundreds of letters from the people of Kufa — a city in what is now southern Iraq, which had been a stronghold of Ali’s caliphate and remained deeply loyal to the family of the Prophet. The Kufans begged Husayn to come to them. They pledged their allegiance, their swords, their lives. They promised that tens of thousands would rally to him when he arrived.

Husayn sent his cousin, Muslim ibn Aqeel, to Kufa in advance to assess the situation. The initial report was encouraging — Muslim found the city brimming with support, and wrote to Husayn that conditions were favorable. But then Yazid’s new governor, the ruthless Ubaydullah ibn Ziyad, arrived in Kufa. Within days, he had arrested Muslim ibn Aqeel and had him executed. The promised supporters melted away under the threat of violence. Kufa went silent.

The news of Muslim’s execution reached Husayn while he was already on the road, deep in the desert. His companions urged him to turn back. Some left. But his closest followers — family members, lifelong companions, and a small number of devoted men who refused to abandon him — stayed. By the time the caravan arrived at the plain of Karbala on October 2, 680 CE, Husayn’s force numbered approximately 72 fighting men, accompanied by women and children of the Prophet’s family.

Facing them was a Umayyad army of thousands — some accounts say four thousand, others far more.

The Tenth of Muharram: The Day the World Changed

For eight days, Husayn’s small camp sat in the open desert. Yazid’s forces cut off their access to the Euphrates River. The children of the Prophet’s family — including an infant — went without water in the scorching Iraqi sun.

On the night before the battle, Husayn gathered his companions. He told them plainly: the enemy wants only me. Whoever wishes to leave in the darkness of night has my blessing and my thanks. Every one of them refused to leave.

On the morning of October 10, 680 CE — the 10th of Muharram in the Islamic calendar, known as Ashura — the battle began. One by one, Husayn’s companions and family members were killed. His brothers. His nephews. His sons. Including, according to various accounts, his infant son Ali al-Asghar, who was killed while Husayn held him in his arms pleading for water for the child.

Husayn fought until he was too wounded to continue. He was surrounded, struck repeatedly, and beheaded. His severed head and the heads of his companions were placed on spears and carried to Damascus, to Yazid’s court. The women and children of the Prophet’s family — including Husayn’s sister Zaynab bint Ali, a woman of extraordinary courage who would bear witness to the world about what had happened — were taken as prisoners.

The Umayyad forces won the battle. They lost the war for history.

The Earthquake That Created Shia Islam

Before Karbala, “Shia” — from “Shiat Ali,” meaning “the party of Ali” — was largely a political faction, not a distinct religious sect. It was a group of Muslims who believed that leadership of the Ummah rightfully belonged to the family of the Prophet. There were no separate theological doctrines, no distinct rituals, no separate religious identity.

Karbala changed everything.

The German scholar Heinz Halm, one of the foremost Western authorities on Shia Islam, wrote that there was no religious aspect to Shi’ism prior to 680 CE. The death of Husayn and his followers was, in his words, the “big bang” that created the rapidly expanding cosmos of Shi’ism and brought it into motion.

Karbala gave the followers of Ali’s family something they had not had before: a theology of martyrdom, a sacred narrative of sacrifice, and a burning sense of collective grief and injustice that has never been extinguished in fourteen centuries. The story of a small band of righteous people — the family of the Prophet — being abandoned by the masses, surrounded by an army of power, and slaughtered in the desert while standing on principle became the founding myth and the living wound of an entire civilization.

The Shia commemorated Ashura — the 10th of Muharram — not as a distant historical event but as a wound that was re-opened and re-lived every year. The phrase that became the defining cry of Shia consciousness across generations captures it perfectly: “Every land is Karbala. Every day is Ashura. Every month is Muharram.”

Iran: The Nation That Made Karbala Its Identity

Here the story turns to Persia — and this is where the bridge to the modern world becomes visible.

When the Muslim armies conquered Persia in the 7th century CE, they ended the ancient Sasanian Empire. Persia had been a great civilization for over a thousand years. Its people had their own language, their own culture, their own imperial identity. The Arab conquest was, from a Persian cultural perspective, a humiliation — however much many Persians eventually embraced Islam with genuine devotion.

For centuries, Persia remained largely Sunni — it was home to some of the greatest Sunni scholars in Islamic history, including Imam al-Bukhari, Imam al-Tirmidhi, and Imam al-Ghazali, all of whom were from the Persian cultural world. But underneath the surface, there was always a current of sentiment — both religious and cultural — that looked toward Ali’s family, toward the oppressed, toward resistance against Arab political dominance.

Then came the Safavids.

In 1501 CE, a young military leader named Shah Ismail I of the Safavid dynasty conquered Tabriz and declared himself Shah of Iran. His first act — before consolidating military control, before establishing administration — was to declare Twelver Shia Islam the official state religion of Iran. This was a political as much as a religious decision. Iran was surrounded by Sunni powers: the Ottoman Empire to the west, the Uzbek khanates to the east. By making Shia Islam the state religion, Ismail gave Iran a distinct religious identity that would permanently differentiate it from its rivals and unify its diverse population around a single, emotionally powerful narrative — the narrative of Karbala.

For the next two centuries, the Safavids pursued this conversion with enormous force. Sunni scholars who refused to convert were executed. Shia scholars were imported from Lebanon and Iraq to staff religious institutions. Public rituals of mourning for Husayn — weeping, lamentation, the dramatic re-enactment of Karbala — were institutionalized across the country. Within roughly a century, Iran was transformed from a predominantly Sunni nation into the world’s most Shia state. Today, approximately 90–95% of Iran’s population is Shia Muslim.

What the Safavids understood — and what has remained true ever since — is that for Iranian Shia Muslims, Karbala is not merely a historical event. It is the central organizing story of their civilization. Husayn is not merely a historical martyr. He is the supreme symbol of justice against tyranny, of standing alone against overwhelming power, of refusing to submit to illegitimate authority even at the cost of one’s life. Every Iranian ruler who has invoked Husayn’s memory has tapped into something deep and inexhaustible.

The Thread That Connects Karbala to Israel

Now we arrive at the connection that most analysts miss entirely.

The Umayyad dynasty — the force that killed Husayn, that cut off the water supply from the Prophet’s grandchildren, that carried his head on a spear to Damascus — was headquartered in Damascus, in Syria. The Umayyads were Arab in identity, Syrian in base, and their political culture was shaped in significant part by the Levantine region — which included the Jewish communities of Palestine and the broader Fertile Crescent.

From the Shia Iranian perspective — formed over fourteen centuries of commemorating Karbala — the Umayyad tradition represents something specific: the tradition of illegitimate power, of worldly authority dressed in religious clothing, of those who killed the family of the Prophet in the name of political control. This is not merely a medieval grievance. It is a living theological framework through which Iranian political culture understands power, justice, and resistance.

When the modern State of Israel was founded in 1948 — backed by Western powers, built on Palestinian land, governed by Ashkenazi political leadership — what Iranian Shia religious culture saw was a pattern it recognized completely: a powerful, externally-backed political project, claiming religious legitimacy, dispossessing and oppressing the weaker party, with the full support of the dominant world powers. The parallel to the Umayyad caliphate — powerful, politically backed, claiming Islamic credentials while oppressing the righteous — was not lost on Shia scholars and clerics.

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini framed the Israeli state in the language of Karbala — as a Yazidian power, as a force of oppression that the heirs of Husayn were bound to oppose — he was not inventing a new ideology. He was plugging the Palestinian cause into the oldest and deepest story in Iranian religious consciousness. He was telling Iranian Shia Muslims: this is your Karbala. These are your people. This is the moment you stand up, as Husayn stood, and refuse to submit.

That is why the slogan of the Iranian Revolution — “Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala” — was applied directly to Palestine. And that is why, unlike most Arab states which have made peace with or accommodation toward Israel, Iran’s opposition is not transactional or political. It is theological. It is civilizational. It is rooted in a grief and a sense of justice that is fourteen centuries old.

What This Means for the Modern Conflict

Several conclusions flow from understanding this history properly.

First, the Iran-Israel conflict is not a conflict between Judaism and Islam. It is a conflict between, on one side, an Ashkenazi-led political state founded on European Zionist ideology with Western military backing, and on the other side, a Shia Iranian civilization that has for five centuries defined itself through the prism of Karbala — through resistance to unjust power, through solidarity with the oppressed, through refusal to acknowledge illegitimate authority regardless of the cost.

Second, Iran’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian resistance movements is not primarily an expression of Arab solidarity — Iran is not Arab. It is an expression of Shia theological conviction. The Quds Force is named after Jerusalem — al-Quds in Arabic. The annual Al-Quds Day rally, established by Khomeini in 1979 on the last Friday of Ramadan, frames Jerusalem not as a foreign policy interest but as an Islamic obligation. This framing is Karbala in modern dress.

Third, the conflict will not be resolved by the methods being applied to it. No military campaign, no diplomatic agreement between Arab states and Israel, no American-brokered deal will address the roots of Iranian opposition to the Israeli state — because those roots are not in policy. They are in theology and civilizational identity. Iran does not oppose Israel because of this or that military action. Iran opposes the Israeli state because, from a Shia Iranian perspective, its very existence represents an act of Yazid — an act of worldly power crushing the righteous, backed by the dominant empire of the age.

Fourth — and this is perhaps the most important insight — the Palestinian people themselves occupy a particular place in this framework. They are the Husayns of the modern age: the small band, the family, the people abandoned by much of the world, surrounded by overwhelming force, denied water and bread, dying in the desert of history while the powerful look on. Whether one agrees with this framing or not, understanding that this is how Iran genuinely understands the situation — not as a calculation but as a sacred obligation — is essential to understanding why the conflict looks the way it does.

A Note on Perspective and Responsibility

This analysis does not endorse violence, nor does it assign collective guilt to any people or faith. It is the responsibility of an honest historian and analyst to trace causes accurately, even when those causes are uncomfortable or when they challenge simplified narratives on all sides.

The tragedy of Karbala was a genuine human catastrophe — the killing of the Prophet’s grandson and family by a political power that had usurped legitimate authority. Its grief is real. Its lessons about justice and standing against tyranny are genuinely profound, recognized even by Sunni Muslims and by non-Muslims who have studied it seriously.

At the same time, the people of Gaza and Palestine are real people suffering real dispossession and violence in the present. The Iranian revolutionary state has its own complexities, contradictions, and abuses of power that exist alongside its invocation of Karbala’s memory. And the Jewish people — all three branches of them — carry their own centuries of suffering and legitimate fears.

What the history tells us — from the Babylonian exile, through the ministry of Jesus, through Karbala, through the Safavid transformation of Iran, to the founding of modern Israel — is that the Middle East is not a region of simple conflicts between simple enemies. It is a region where the wounds of the past are very much alive in the present, where the words “justice” and “martyrdom” and “promised land” carry the weight of millennia, and where no solution that ignores history will last.

What Comes Next

In Part IV, we will trace the thread from the Abbasid revolution — which overthrew the Umayyads with the help of Persian and Shia forces in 750 CE — through the fragmentation of the Caliphate, the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, and the Ottoman Empire, to ask a question that ties all of these threads together: what does the collapse of the Khilafat in 1924 have to do with the birth of Israel in 1948 — and why are these two events, separated by just twenty-four years, not a coincidence?

(To be continued)

The Three Branches of Jewry: Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi — History, Identity, and the Real Story Behind the Modern Middle East Conflict

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Part II of the Series: Prophets, Empires & the Modern World

The Three Branches of Jewry: Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi — History, Identity, and the Real Story Behind the Modern Middle East Conflict

Who are the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi Jews? How did two ancient catastrophes — one Babylonian, one Roman — forge three entirely distinct civilizations from a single people? And why is the current Middle East conflict not, as it is so often framed, a Jewish-Muslim conflict at all?

Published as Part II  ·  Series: Prophets, Empires & the Modern World  ·  Continued from Part I

Jewish History Ashkenazi Sephardi Mizrahi Bani Israel Israel-Palestine Islam & Judaism Jesus of Nazareth

Two Catastrophes That Changed Jewish History Forever

To understand who the Jewish people are today — and why the current conflict in the Middle East is so deeply misunderstood — we must go back to two seismic moments of destruction that scattered a single people across the entire known world.

The first catastrophe came in 586 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king, marched on Jerusalem, razed the First Temple (known in Islamic tradition as Haikal-e-Sulaymani — the Temple of Solomon), and took the Jewish people into captivity in Babylon (present-day Iraq). This event, known as the Babylonian Exile, would fundamentally reshape Jewish identity, theology, and geography.

The second blow came in 70 CE, approximately seventy years after the birth of Jesus. The Romans, under General (later Emperor) Titus, destroyed the Second Temple — the same temple that the Jews had rebuilt with the permission and financial patronage of Cyrus the Great of Persia. (Muslims widely identify Cyrus with Dhul-Qarnayn, the “Two-Horned One” mentioned in Surah Al-Kahf of the Quran. The reasons for Cyrus’s special relationship with the Jewish people will be explored in detail in a future installment of this series.)

Between and after these two disasters, a significant number of Jewish families fled south and east, seeking refuge in the Arab territories of the region — areas corresponding to present-day Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Their descendants would come to be known as the Mizrahi Jews. These were the Jewish communities present in Medina during the time of the Prophet Muhammad (?). They were, in the truest sense, Arab Jews.

It is from this single historical rupture — the scattering of the Jewish people — that three major branches of world Jewry were born.

The Three Branches: A Comparative Overview

Understanding these three groups is not merely an academic exercise. It is, in fact, the key to unlocking the real nature of the modern conflict in Gaza, the West Bank, and the broader Middle East.

Branch One

Ashkenazi Jews

Etymology: From Hebrew “Ashkenaz,” associated with Germany Origins: Largely derived from communities in Persia, then Central Asia, and into Eastern Europe Spread: Russia, Poland, Germany, and eventually Western Europe and the Americas Language: Yiddish (Germanic-Hebrew hybrid) Notable: Dominant group in the founding of the State of Israel; every Israeli Prime Minister has been Ashkenazi

Branch Two

Sephardi Jews

Etymology: From Hebrew “Sepharad,” meaning Spain Origins: Jews who migrated from Jerusalem toward the Iberian Peninsula Spread: After 1492 expulsion — Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Istanbul Language: Ladino (medieval Spanish-Hebrew hybrid) Character: Scholars, scientists, philosophers — intellectually formative in the Islamic Golden Age

Branch Three

Mizrahi Jews

Etymology: From Hebrew “Mizrach,” meaning East Origins: Jews who fled to Arab territories during the Babylonian and Roman destructions Spread: Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, North Africa Language: Judeo-Arabic dialects Character: Scholars and merchants; the majority of great Jewish religious authorities were Mizrahi or Sephardi

The Ashkenazi Jews: Warriors, Scholars, and Survivors

The Ashkenazi Jews represent the most politically dominant branch of contemporary Judaism. Their name derives from the Hebrew word Ashkenaz, historically associated with Germany. However, their earliest traceable communities after the destructions of Jerusalem were situated in Persia and Central Asia, before gradually migrating westward into Russia and Eastern Europe.

Genetically, studies published in the National Library of Medicine confirm that approximately 40–60% of the Ashkenazi gene pool derives from European sources, particularly along the maternal line — suggesting significant intermarriage with local European women who converted to Judaism. This makes the Ashkenazi community genetically distinct from both the Sephardi and Mizrahi branches, who retain a far higher proportion of ancient Middle Eastern ancestry.

Historically, the Ashkenazi experience in Europe was one of cyclical persecution. They faced pogroms under the Christian Tsars of Russia, expulsions across medieval Europe, and ultimately the Holocaust under Hitler’s Nazi Germany — a campaign that murdered approximately six million Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom were Ashkenazi.

Key Historical Fact

It is a profound and rarely discussed irony of modern history: the people who suffered most in twentieth-century Europe — the Ashkenazi Jews — went on to become the political founders and dominant ruling class of the State of Israel. Today, every single Israeli Prime Minister has been Ashkenazi, despite Mizrahi Jews now constituting more than half of Israel’s Jewish population.

Today, it is largely Ashkenazi political and military leadership that governs Israel, conducts military operations in Gaza, and pursues confrontation with Iran. This distinction — between which branch of Jewry is actually directing these actions — is critical to any honest analysis of the conflict.

The Sephardi Jews: Architects of the Golden Age of Islam

The Sephardi Jews — whose name derives from Sepharad, the Hebrew word for Spain — represent one of the most remarkable stories of inter-civilizational collaboration in world history.

After fleeing Jerusalem, these communities made their way to the Iberian Peninsula. For centuries, under Muslim rule in Andalusia, they did not merely survive — they thrived. Córdoba and Granada, the twin capitals of Islamic Spain, were cities of extraordinary intellectual ferment. Jewish scholars, physicians, philosophers, and scientists worked alongside Muslim and Christian counterparts in what historians call the Convivencia — the coexistence. Figures such as Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon), born in Córdoba in 1138, produced works of philosophy and medicine that shaped the entire medieval world.

“In Arab-Muslim territories during the Middle Ages, the Jewish condition was easier, as a rule, than it was in Europe.” — Historian Paul Johnson, cited in academic research on Jewish ethnic divisions

This era ended brutally in 1492 — the same year Columbus sailed to the Americas — when the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, expelling all Jews from Spain. It was Muslim rulers who opened their doors: the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II famously welcomed the expelled Jews, reportedly saying that Ferdinand had impoverished his own kingdom by expelling such talented people. Sephardi communities rebuilt in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Istanbul — where many still thrive today.

The Sephardi character, shaped by centuries in Islamic civilization, tends toward intellectualism, peacefulness, and coexistence. They have historically been the least bellicose of the three branches — a fact with direct relevance to the current conflict.

The Mizrahi Jews: The Arab Jews of the Ancient World

The Mizrahi Jews are, in many ways, the oldest continuous diaspora community in the world. Mizrahi means “Eastern” in Hebrew, and these are the Jews who fled south and east during the Babylonian and Roman catastrophes — settling in the Arab lands of the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and Mesopotamia.

Their culture, appearance, language, and customs were so deeply intertwined with the surrounding Arab world that distinguishing them from their Muslim and Christian Arab neighbors was, for centuries, nearly impossible without deliberate inquiry. The Jewish communities of Medina whom the Prophet Muhammad (?) encountered were Mizrahi Jews — Arab-speaking, Arab-looking, Arab-cultured. The great scholars of Jewish law in the medieval period — the Geonim of Babylon — were Mizrahi. The majority of revered Jewish religious authorities throughout history have come from the Mizrahi or Sephardi traditions, not the Ashkenazi.

Today, Mizrahi Jews remain deeply opposed to the Israeli occupation and military campaigns. Their reasoning is not merely political — it is theological. Many Mizrahi religious authorities hold that God did not promise the Jewish people a modern nation-state, and that every attempt to establish one has historically brought catastrophe. They argue, with compelling historical evidence, that Israel’s misfortunes have always followed attempts at political statehood. These communities maintain warm relations with Palestinian Muslims and are among the most vocal Jewish critics of Israeli military policy.

Remarkable Fact

When Hamas or Hezbollah targets an Israeli building, it is widely reported in Arabic-language news — sometimes from the groups themselves — that Mizrahi Jews (Arab Jews) are warned to evacuate before an attack. The distinction between branches is not abstract: it is, in some conflict zones, literally a matter of life and death.

Jesus of Nazareth: A Mizrahi Jew

One of the most consequential and least discussed historical facts about Jesus is that he was, by any meaningful definition, a Mizrahi Jew. He was born in a Jewish community that had been living in the Arab lands for centuries, spoke Aramaic (a Semitic language closely related to Arabic), and in physical appearance — as described by historical and scriptural accounts — would have resembled the Arab people of his region: olive-toned skin, dark hair, brown eyes.

The name we know him by in English — “Jesus” — is a Latinization of the Greek “I?sous,” which is itself a rendering of the Hebrew/Aramaic name Yeshua (also written Yehoshua). His mother, Mary (Maryam in Arabic and Aramaic), was from the village of Nazareth in Galilee. The practice of appending one’s hometown to one’s name was a Persian custom that the Jewish people adopted during their long exile in Babylon — hence Yeshua min Natzrat: Jesus of Nazareth. This is also why Muslims refer to Christians as Nasrani — derived from Nazareth, the hometown of their prophet.

It is one of the great ironies of Western art history that a man who, by every historical and ethnographic account, had the features of an Arab Levantine, has been depicted for centuries with blonde hair and blue eyes — the physical characteristics not of Mizrahi Jews, but of Ashkenazi ones.

The Birth, Flight, and Ministry of Jesus

The story of Jesus’s birth is one of political danger from the outset. Jerusalem at the time was under Roman colonial rule — referred to as Judaea after the Jewish people — with the local client king Herod (Herodes the Great) exercising authority under Roman oversight. The Roman governor of the province was Pontius Pilate.

~6–4 BCE

The Annunciation and the threat from Herod

Mary (Maryam), betrothed to Joseph (Yusuf), a carpenter, conceived Jesus miraculously before the marriage was consummated. Upon learning of this, Herod — warned by astrologers of the birth of a “King of the Jews” — ordered the massacre of all male children under two years of age in Bethlehem and its surroundings.

~6–4 BCE

Flight to Egypt

Joseph, warned in a dream, fled with Mary and the infant Jesus to Egypt, where they lived for approximately four years — until Herod’s death. Islamic and Christian traditions both record this flight, though the Quran does not name Joseph.

~4 BCE – 26 CE

Return to Nazareth; years of ministry in Galilee

After Herod’s death, the family returned to Nazareth in Galilee — a fertile valley between mountains and the Mediterranean coast. Jesus spent his formative years and the majority of his ministry in this region. His earliest disciples were Galilean fishermen. Saint Peter — as foundational to Christianity as Abu Bakr al-Siddiq (R.A.) is to Islam — was himself a fisherman from Galilee who met Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

~29–33 CE

Entry into Jerusalem; trial and crucifixion

Jesus, accompanied by his twelve disciples, entered Jerusalem at approximately 32–33 years of age (scholars disagree on the precise date). The Jewish rabbinical authorities charged him with blasphemy. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate, under pressure, ordered his flogging and crucifixion.

~33 CE

The Ascension — Islamic and Christian accounts diverge

Here the Islamic and Christian narratives part ways. According to the Quran and Islamic tradition, God raised Jesus alive to the heavens — he was not crucified, and a likeness was cast upon another. In Christian theology, Jesus died on the cross, was buried, and rose physically on the third day. Both traditions agree on one critical point: Jesus will return before the Day of Judgment, descending — according to Islamic hadith — at the white minaret of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

What is significant for our historical analysis is this: the people who persecuted Jesus, brought him before the Roman authorities, and demanded his crucifixion were the Pharisaic rabbinical establishment of Jerusalem — themselves Jewish. The earliest Christians fled from Jewish persecution into Central Asia, Greece, Rome, and across the Mediterranean. For nearly two thousand years after the death of Jesus, it was Christians who persecuted Jews — not Muslims.

The Real History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Not What You Think

Here is a historical argument that will surprise most readers accustomed to the contemporary framing of the “Jewish-Muslim conflict”: for the vast majority of recorded history, Jews and Muslims did not have a fundamental conflict. The real, deep, centuries-long conflict was between Jews and Christians.

Consider the evidence:

After the fall of Granada in 1492, it was the Spanish Christians who expelled the Sephardi Jews — and it was the Muslim Ottoman Empire that welcomed them. The Jews of Muslim Andalusia lived in relative peace for seven centuries. Under the Christian Tsars of Russia, Jewish communities faced systematic pogroms, legal discrimination, and mass murder. Hitler’s Germany — a country with a deeply Christian cultural heritage — perpetrated the Holocaust. For nearly two thousand years, the principal persecutors of the Jewish people were European Christians, not Muslims.

Muslim societies, from Baghdad to Cairo to Istanbul, repeatedly offered Jewish communities refuge, legal protections, and intellectual freedom. The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides was a refugee from Christian persecution in Córdoba who found safety and career in the Muslim court of Saladin in Cairo. The Ottoman Empire absorbed hundreds of thousands of Sephardi Jews after 1492. The Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt was home to one of the most flourishing Jewish communities in the medieval world.

This does not mean the relationship was without friction. During the Prophet’s time in Medina, three specific incidents — involving treaty violations, espionage, and collaboration with the enemy during the Battle of the Trench — led to military confrontations with the Bani Qaynuqa, Bani Nadir, and Bani Qurayza tribes. The Quran addresses these episodes directly. These were political conflicts arising from specific betrayals, not a theological declaration of eternal enmity.

The modern conflict between the State of Israel and the Muslim world is not an ancient religious war resumed. It is a 20th-century political project — Zionism — that arose in Europe, was shaped by European Jewish experience, and was imposed on the Middle East by a specific branch (Ashkenazi) of a deeply divided people.

Four Conclusions That Reframe the Modern Conflict

If we analyze Jewish history up through the era of Jesus with clear eyes, four conclusions emerge that fundamentally alter how we should understand the present:

Jews are not synonymous with the Children of Israel (Bani Israel). The Jewish people are one tribe — Bani Yehuda — among the original twelve tribes of Israel. For approximately 2,700 years, the tribe of Judah has denied the other ten tribes their share of political power and ancestral land. The first conflict of the Jewish people is not with Muslims or Arabs — it is an internal one, with their own kinsmen among the other tribes of Israel, who have been dispossessed for nearly three millennia.

The “Promised Land” was not promised exclusively to the Jews. According to both the Torah and Islamic understanding, the land of Canaan (modern Israel-Palestine) was designated for all twelve tribes of Bani Israel — not for Bani Yehuda alone. The current Israeli state, controlled almost exclusively by Ashkenazi Jews, is thus engaged in a double injustice: the dispossession of Palestinian Muslims and the exclusion of the other eleven tribes of Israel from their covenanted inheritance.

Not all Jews support the Israeli state or its military campaigns. The Mizrahi and Sephardi communities — historically the most peaceful, most learned, and most integrated branches of world Jewry — are largely opposed to Israeli military aggression. Many hold the theological position that God never intended for the Jewish people to have a modern nation-state, pointing to the pattern of catastrophe that has historically followed every such attempt. These communities maintain solidarity with Palestinian Muslims and are among the most vocal Jewish critics of Israeli policy on the global stage.

If there is a deep religious grievance between Jews and any other faith community, it is with Christians, not Muslims. Jewish communities crucified (or facilitated the crucifixion of) the prophet of Christianity, burned the Gospel, and persecuted early Christians into exile. In return, Christian Europe persecuted Jews for two thousand years. Muslims, by contrast, provided refuge, legal protection, and intellectual partnership to Jewish communities in almost every era. The framing of the current Middle East conflict as a “Jewish-Muslim” conflict is historically illiterate. It is, in its modern form, the product of one specific group — the Ashkenazi political and military leadership of Israel — and bears no essential relationship to the long history of Jewish-Muslim coexistence.

What Comes Next: When Did the Modern Conflict Between Muslims and Jews Begin?

After reviewing this history, a natural question arises: if Jews and Muslims have historically lived in relative peace, when did the modern hostility begin? The answer will surprise you.

The roots of the current confrontation between the Israeli state and the Muslim world — and in particular, the specific antagonism between Israel and Iran — do not lie in the founding of Israel in 1948, nor in the Arab-Israeli Wars of the twentieth century. The seeds were planted much earlier, in the sands of seventh-century Arabia, in the immediate aftermath of one of the most consequential events in Islamic history: the tragedy of Karbala.

That story — and the long shadow it has cast across fourteen centuries — is where we turn next.

Continued in Part III From Karbala to the Khilafat: How the tragedy of 680 CE planted the seeds of the modern Israel-Iran confrontation — and why this conflict is far older, and far deeper, than most analysts acknowledge.