Prominent American Islamic scholar Sheikh Yasir Qadhi delivered a lecture titled “The Signs of the End Times, Part 4” at the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC Masjid) in Plano, TX, where he is the resident scholar. He discussed a hadith that says that at the End of Times, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, which will call to the Muslims and tell them to come and kill the Jews hiding behind them. Sheikh Qadhi said this hadith is not antisemitic whatsoever, and he criticized MEMRI and Fox News for clipping Muslim scholars in the West who cite this hadith and for accusing these clerics of Hitler-esque antisemitism. He said that the hadith simply means that most of the Antichrist’s followers will be Jews, and that the hadith is merely describing a struggle between good and evil.
Sheikh Qadhi said that even though it explicitly mentions killing Jews, the hadith is predictive rather than prescriptive, and he claimed that Muslims cannot be antisemitic since Abraham and the Prophet Muhammad were Semites and since the majority of Semites are Muslims. Sheikh Qadhi went on to say that Muslims would have been obligated to protect Jews from the Nazis during WWII, and that events that took place after 1948 have nothing to do with events that took place before 1948. Sheikh Qadhi added: “Muslims cannot be antisemites [but] we can be anti-Zionists, and we are anti-Zionists.”
The video was uploaded to EPIC Masjid’s YouTube channel on August 31, 2019.
Sheikh Yasir Qadhi is a Texas-based Pakistani-American scholar who has studied at the University of Houston, at the Islamic University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia, and at Yale University.
For more from EPIC Masjid, see MEMRI TV Clips No. 6749 and No. 6847. For more from Sheikh Yasir Qadhi, see MEMRI TV Clip No. 7451.
