Ze'ev Maghen
Encyclopedia
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.
, 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.
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."
Bar-Ilan University
Bar-Ilan University is a university in Ramat Gan of the Tel Aviv District, Israel.Established in 1955, Bar Ilan is now Israel's second-largest academic institution. It has nearly 26,800 students and 1,350 faculty members...
in Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
and a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies
Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies
The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies , is an independent academic body aspiring to contribute to promoting peace and security in the Middle East, through policy-oriented researches on national security in the Middle East, that is located near the Political Science department within Bar-Ilan...
. He is also part-time lecturer at the Shalem Center
Shalem Center
The Shalem Center is a Jerusalem research institute that supports academic work in the fields of philosophy, political theory, Jewish and Zionist history, Bible and Talmud, Middle East Studies, archaeology, economics, and strategic studies...
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
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
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.
Research and Teaching
He has published articles on contemporary IranIran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
, the theories of Joseph Schacht
Joseph Schacht
Joseph Schacht, born in Ratibor, 15 March 1902, died in Englewood, 1 August 1969, was a British-German professor of Arabic and Islam at Columbia University in New York. He was the leading Western scholar on Islamic law, whose Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence is still considered a centrally...
, 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?"
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. 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. (Charleston: CreaeSpace, 2010).