Den amerikanske historikern ochjournalisten Paul Berman berättar
i en intervju i Guernica hur ett möte
i Sverige inspirerade honom till
forskning kring Muslimska Brödra-
skapets samarbete med nazisterna.
***
Läs hela artikeln
***
Guernica: This Islamist collaboration
with the Nazis went astonishingly far.
The Nazi scholars were seeking ways
to cast Hitler as the newest prophet,
or the twelfth Imam, in order to draw
in Arabs and Muslims onto the Nazi side
in the war.
Paul Berman: The Germans had a
research center at the University of
Tübingen of orientalists, looking for
ways to present the Nazi project in
Muslim terms. German theoreticians
and scholars were coming up with all
kinds of ideas of their own, like, couldn’t
they present Hitler as somebody perhaps
granted a new revelation beyond
Mohammed; or in relation to Shiism,
couldn’t Hitler be presented as the
twelfth imam? Of course, the Mufti
didn’t think there was going to be a new
revelation because that would be against
Islam; Mohammed is the final prophet.
But he did go along with recasting some
German ideas in Islamic terms, the most
important of these was how to think about
the Jews.
In the Nazi idea, we sometimes forget what
Nazi antisemitism was.
There were two aspects: one was biological.
The Nazis were racists on biological grounds
and the Jews were inferior. And the Germans
wanted to exterminate these and other inferior
races for the genetic good of the future of Aryan
mankind. But there was another strand, which
was paranoid, based on a paranoid conspiracy
theory.
***
