Seen in the recent demo in Birmingham:
For those who don't want to know it is a reference to the founding charter of Hamas and is a call to all followers of Islam to murder Jews.
It's more than that.
It's referencing a hadith (saying of Prophet Muhammad) that can be found in the
Sahihayn, the two collections of traditions about what Muhammad said and did that are regarded by Muslims as the most reliable books after the Qur'an itself.
It is also about the End Times. According to Jean Pierre-Filiu in his book
Apocalypse in Islam, 'The execution of the Antichrist is accompanied by the extermination of all those Jews who have persevered in impiety rather than convert to Islam.' The full passage reads as follows:
'The Last Hour will not come until the Muslims fight against the Jews and kill them. And when a Jew will hide behind a [stone] wall or a tree, the wall or tree will cry out "O Muslim! O servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me". And [the Muslim] will come to kill him. Only the
gharqad [will remain silent], for it is the tree of the Jews.'
Unsurprisingly, it is often latched onto by Salafi-Jihadists as a justification for their antisemitism.
Fortunately, that is not the end of the matter.
The foremost academic expert on Hadith in the world is Jonathan AC Brown. In his book
Misquoting Muhammad: the Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy, after acknowledging that this one 'was attested by the most respected early narrators' and that 'from the perspective of Sunni Hadith criticism it was above reproach', he nevertheless insists that because it is an eschatological hadith, 'it might still be unreliable.'
What he goes on to argue is that End Time hadiths might have been given an easier ride when it came to establishing their veracity, as this laxity towards them was a general feature of early Sunni Hadith criticism.
Only mentioning this because it illustrates very well a point I have made in other posts: if you have a sufficiently large enough corpus of scripture, you will probably be able to find passages which justify what you have already decided to believe or do, or you can interpret relevant ones in a manner that also suits your purpose.
The different approaches to the Hadith of Fighting Jews are exemplified by Brown and that placard holding woman, which suggests that their verdicts were prefabricated.
That Hamas Charter you mentioned also references the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion and treats this publication as if it were authentic (though I gather that the Charter was modified a few years ago so am not sure if the reference is still there).
Just thought it might be helpful to sketch in some of the background to the photo in that tweet.
