Ze'ev Maghen
Ze'ev Maghen is the Chair of The Department of Middle Eastern History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He is also part-time lecturer at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, where he teaches courses such as "Judaism and Christianity in the Eyes of Islam" and "Shi'ite Religion and Iranian Revolution." Maghen received his Ph.D in History from Columbia University in 1997. He is also the creator of the Lights in Action student network of North America. Professor Maghen is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Russian.[1]
Research and Teaching
He has published articles on contemporary Iran, the theories of Joseph Schacht, the Islamic purity code, the status of infidels in Islamic law, and Muslim conceptions of Judaism. His current research explores the influence of Jewish ideas and stories on Islamic sources.
Advocacy
Dr. Maghen is also an outspoken advocate of Jewish growth, Jewish knowledge, Jewish joy and Zionist outreach. In a peroration written to the Jewish student body of Columbia in 1990, Maghen satirically lambasted his peers for their apologetic response to supposed anti-semitic hate speech on campus:
"A man calls you a pig. Do you walk around with a sign explaining that, in fact, you are not a pig? Do you hand out leaflets expostulating in detail upon the manifold differences between you and a pig ("A pig has a snout, I have a nose; a pig wallows in mud, I only occasionally step in a puddle, and then, of course, inadvertently...")? Do you stand on a soap box and discourse eruditely on why, in general, it is extremely not nice to call people pigs, and appeal to the populace to please have no truck with an individual rude and nasty enough to say such things about an upstanding citizen like yourself? Fellow Jews, where in hell is your dignity? Where is your abhorrence of useless, thoughtless, counterproductive endeavor?"[2]
Iran
Professor Maghen has also taken a contrarian position on the West's attitude towards the Iranian threat in an influential article in Commentary Magazine.[3] He suggests that the Iranian perception and attitude towards the State of Israel has taken a dramatic turn for the worse in recent years. "This change," he writes, "includes not only an amplification of the traditional hostility toward the Jewish polity, but also—most ominously—a new conception of that polity as weak and unstable, an easy target for a united Muslim (or united Shiite) offensive." His main argument is that "Iranian-Islamist threats to Israel’s existence are sincere, and they signal the determined pursuit of tenaciously-held ends."
He avers that the Iranian hatred of Israel is analogous to the "two-minutes hate" in George Orwell’s 1984. It is the persistent indoctrination, described by Maghen as "imbibed with mother’s milk and drummed by rote into the consciousnesses of the Iranian citizenry." This is what makes it precisely so dangerous, suggests Maghen, because intense anger and hatred are all-consuming emotions that "subside quickly if the psyche is not to combust and collapse." At the same time these intense emotions are unsustainable. More often than not people who experience intense emotions like hate are equally capable of feeling other intense emotions empathy or remorse.
For this reason, argues Maghen,"genuine anger and hatred, of the kind that is really “meant” and strongly felt, are inefficient tools for creating or sustaining an atmosphere conducive to long-term persecution or mass murder." This is why, he argues, the most gruesome tragedies in history—enslavements, inquisitions, terrorisms, genocides—have been 'perpetrated not in hot blood but in cold: not as a result of urgent and immanent feeling but in the name of a transcendent ideology and as a result of painstaking indoctrination." Maghen reminds us of the holocaust, in which the majority of Germans in World War II did not passionately hate Jews. In fact, most had never even met the people they were butchering in mass. The murder of six million Jews was made possible not by an intensive hatred by a drilled-in ideology of mindless hate.
Maghen continues that what this is the precise attitude of today’s fundamentalist Shiites in Irian. "It is not their genuine, vehement hatred that we have to fear; it is their endless, drone-like training.
That Israel is the devil, the root of all evil, a criminal cancer that must be excised from the Muslim body politic—these propositions are not ephemeral feelings for most Iranian Muslims, but rather eternal truths that gradually, through endless, tantra-like repetition, have cloyed in the conscious mind while simultaneously installing themselves beneath the level of immediate emotion and awareness, in the place where basic instincts, automatic assumptions, and ontological verities reside.
Thus Maghen suggests that this is what's precisely most dangerous about the Iranian threat—that they don't really "mean it." By demonizing an entire people as a parasitic infestation,at the home, in school, in the mosque, and in the media, "the quarter-century-old routine of Israel-hatred, added to 1,400 years of traditional Islamic anti-Semitism, has prepared in the minds of Iranians and their neighboring coreligionists the moral ground for the eradication of the state of Israel."
Publications
- After Hardship Cometh Ease: The Jews as Backdrop for Muslim Moderation. (New York: W. de Gruyter, 2006).
- From omnipotence to impotence : a shift in the Iranian portrayal of the "Zionist regime" (Ramat Gan: Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, 2008).
- Virtues of the Flesh: Passion and Purity in Early Islamic Jurisprudence. (Boston: Brill, 2005).
- John Lennon and the Jews: A Philosophical Rampage. (The Toby Press, 2015).