here is a link to the article by Hamza Yusuf, he says that for Iran to have a conference questioning the historicity of the holocaust undermines the historicity of their own faith

http://www.hahmed.com/blog/2007/06/28/holocaust-denial-undermines-islam-by-shaykh-hamza-yusuf/

Ismaeel Hijazi
Nuneaton

Without having seen the original quotes, what I would suspect Sheikh Hamza Yusuf would say is that Muslim scholars set up elaborate systems to check the historical accuracy of reports based on the soundness of the transmission of a report and the veracity and soundness of the transmitters. The Qur’an and some narrations of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) are considered to be mutawatir (or of unimpeachable authenticity, having been mass-transmitted by multiple and reliable persons from one generation to another). In this sense, the mass witnessing of a large historical event like the Holocaust is verifiable in the same way — the transmission of an event from one generation to the next. By all empirical standards precious to Islamic scholarship, the Holocaust is therefore not falsifiable. Of course I would imagine that Sheikh Hamza Yusuf is not saying that an historical event has the same nature as a sacred scripture.

Kind regards, Yahya

Is this courageous statement accurate and if it is, then what is your take on it ?

An example of this is the repeated invocation of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, who worked with the Nazis, but how representative is he? What about the Albanian Muslims, whose role in saving Jews only really came out in 1991/2 when Albania opened up after the fall of the Berlin wall? Sixty-three Albanians were honoured in all by the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, which had a touring exhibition in their honour this year. According to their traditional code of honour, besa, Albanians, as a whole, refused to hand over lists of Jews either to the Italians or after the German occupation in 1943. Albanians competed to have the besa of protecting Jews from persecution, including the 200 Jewish Albanians and the larger numbers of Jews who came over the border fleeing persecution. Necdet Kent, the Turkish consular-general to Marseilles (1941-44), won the argument with Vichy France that all its Turkish citizens, including its Jewish ones, should be repatriated to Turkey regardless of creed or any other consideration. Confronting the Nazi guards, Kent refused to get off a train heading towards Auschwitz until all the 70 Jewish Turks were released. An Iranian diplomat in Paris during World War Two, Abdol Hossein Sardari, also saved Jews by giving them blank Iranian passports. Selahattin Ulkumen, the Turkish consular-general on the island of Rhodes saved 42 Jewish Turks when the Germans sought to deport all 1,700 Jews from there in 1944. Jews were also saved in Bosnia and Macedonia, but I don’t know if these were the righteous acts of Muslims or not. Robert Satloff’s “Among the Righteous” (pub. US 2006, pub. UK 2007) also recovers the unreported history of the Muslims of North Africa who also saved their Jewish neighbours from the punishment camps for Jews run in the Italian and (Vichy) French colonies (of course some Arabs collaborated with these regimes too). At the beginning of 2007, Satloff put forward the name of Khaled Abdelwahab, a Tunisian farmer who saved Jews, as the first Arab to be honoured among the “Righteous of the Nations” at the Yad Vashem. The case is apparently still under consideration according to a report in Haaretz this week. In all, among the 22,000 named as among those who saved Jews, seventy are Muslims, most of whom are from Turkey and the Balkans. No Arabs have yet been named.

Anita – The piece is arguing that remembrance days loose their potency and power the further removed they are from their original context. For instance, it is in Germany where the lessons of the Holocaust are most salient, but then there were others who were complicit in betraying Jews to the Nazis around Europe, as well as others who hid them or took them to safety, so the Holocaust has a wider resonance for the whole continent. There is also historical evidence that the Allies failed to act with dispatch in retaking Europe when reports of the camps began to leak out in the early 1940s. This is why Europe is for me the most salient place to remember the Holocaust, if the concern is with avoiding a repetition of the kinds of politics that gave rise to its horrors. I’m not suggesting that the UN or anyone else shouldn’t mark the Holocaust, but merely that nowhere else except in Europe can it have the same resonance. On the other hand, if the Holocaust is being remembered out of grief and mourning for lost family members, communities, even whole nations of diasporic Jews, then that is, of course, entirely different. There is no consideration of geography on that score.

Anita Bullock, UK

As muslims we will quite happily break bread with all and sundry – but on a common level of humanity and reciprocity. It is difficult to sit down and share lessons from the holocaust with people who in the same breath work to sever some of the few remaining humanitarian lifelines to our beleaguered brothers and sisters, particularly in Gaza where the hardship is most acute. Its time to take away HMD from the old guard of the board of deputies into a broader, inclusive and politically neutral arena. I believe that there is a vital role for the newly-formed Independent Jewish Voices in achieving this task.

Haroon Ravat, Walsall

Here’s an extract: “By making the Jewish Holocaust somehow “exclusively” painful and the Nazi oppression “exclusively” evil they are not decreasing, but rather increasing, the risk of its recurrence.”

Zainab al-Atta, UK