SUMMARY

U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Callista Gingrich, in an official January 16, 2020 written statement on the launching, at her residence, of the so-called “Abrahamic Faiths Initiative,” (AFI) opined, rapturously,

 

“The Abrahamic Faiths Initiative serves as a powerful demonstration that, through fraternity, cooperation, and mutual respect between the Abrahamic faiths, peace in our world is possible.”

Last February, 2019, to commemorate the signing of the Abu Dhabi Declaration, in conjunction with a visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by Pope Francis and Ahmad al-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University—Sunni Islam’s Papal equivalent of its Vatican—UAE despot Sheikh Al-Nayan ordered the construction of the Abrahamic Family House on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. When Ambassador Gingrich gave her live remarks to the AFI at Villa Richardson on January 14, 2020, she acknowledged Grand Imam Tayeb’s signing of the Abu Dhabi “Document on Human Fraternity” as critical inspiration for the initiative:

 

“The Abrahamic Faiths Initiative was inspired in part by the seminal Document on Human Fraternity and Living Together, signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar in Abu Dhabi last year.”

 

Affording Grand Imam al-Tayeb a prominent foundational role in the AFI, by itself, should have given the Jewish (especially), and Christian participants, pause.

 

As Egypt’s Grand Mufti, and since 2010, till now, Grand Imam Papal equivalent of Sunni Islam’s Vatican, Al-Azhar University, Al-Tayeb has sanctioned homicide bombing murder of Israeli Jews, including non-combatants; condemned Jews, eternally, openly equating them with Zionists, while invoking Koran 5:82—a central Antisemitic verse—for causing “Muslim distress…since the inception of Islam 1400 years ago”; accused “Global Zionism” of midwifing ISIS and related jihad terror groups to “destroy the Middle East”; claimed the “Zionist entity,” i.e., Israel, was plotting to “march on the Kaaba [in Mecca] and on the Prophet’s Mosque [in Medina]. This is on their minds and in their hearts”; denied (notwithstanding his own blatant examples!) the very existence of antisemitism, “the issue of antisemitism is a lie that continues to deceive nations to this day”; and rejected basic freedom of conscience and sanctioned the Sharia-based killing of “unrepentant” apostates from Islam.

 

Al-Tayeb’s intimate involvement with the AFI, and the movement’s clear UAE rootedness, in the heartland of Islamdom, is pathognomonic of the fact that “Abrahamism” is quintessential Islamic supremacism.

 

The presentation includes a detailed analysis of Islam’s authoritative classical and modern “Abrahamic”  theology, rooted in Koran 3:67, and its exegesis. This is perhaps best demonstrated through the prism of al-Tayeb’s immediate predecessor as Al-Azhar Grand Imam, the late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi (d. 2010), arguably Sunni Islam’s greatest modern Koranic commentator. Tantawi maintained:

 

This noble verse [Koran 3:67] mentions Abraham and exposes those unbelievers from the People of the Book [Scripture] who claimed the Abraham was a Jew or a Christian as it shows that, unlike Abraham, it was they who were polytheists…There is an insinuation here concerning the Islamic nation (Umma) and an acknowledgment that the followers of Muhammad are more worthy of being affiliated with Abraham than the People of the Book because the believers sought the truth and believed in it. Conversely, the People of the Book sought worldly and material things in place of things heavenly and spiritual. They forsook the truth and went after their lusts and desires.

 

Tantawi’s gloss on Koran 3:67 ends with an avowal of conspiratorial Islamic Jew-hatred: