Futuwwa is far from ‘chivalrous’

Re: On The Curriculum In Gaza, April 29.

Futuwwa in the Palestinian school curriculum can only signal intent of systematically hardening Gaza youth attitudes toward Israel. While some specialists writing in the 1930s and 1950s interpreted Futuwwa as referring to “chivalrous virtues of young men [in the] Brotherhoods of Youth,” it was, in fact, a dynamic movement whose adherents intended to implant religion and ideology especially at times of crisis in frontier zones — like that between Palestine and Israel now.

Far from being chivalrous, Hermann Thorning (writing in 1913) knew Futuwwa books to be vulgar and militant. In the early 1940s, some SS-intellectuals postulated historical links between medieval European knights and the Arabic Futuwwa movement and jihad. Indeed, popular writing in Germany at that time about the Futuwwa so enthused the Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach (1907-1974) that he visited Tehran and Baghdad in the fall of 1937 to discuss specifically the national Arabic Youth Movement known as “el-Futuwwa.” The subsequent visit of a Futu

wwa delegation under the leadership of Bahaeddin Tabbah, to the Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress in September 1938, should remind us that the Arabic Muslim leadership today knows exactly what it is doing when it schools youths in Hamas camps and Palestinian schools.