After a torrent of Iranian ballistic missile attacks hit  Israel, Iran  only  agreed to a hudna  to stop firing, a term  misconstrued to mean a  “cease fire.”

A hudna connotes no more than a temporary respite and does not remotely resemble either a “truce” nor a “cease fire.”

Indeed, there four terms now in use in the Arabic realm in this context:

  • Hudna: a tactical pause intended only for rearmament,
  • Tahida: a temporary halt in hostile activity which can be violated at any time
  • Hudaybiyyah: No fighting for 10 years: invoking after the “treaty of Hudaybiyyah” in 628 AD
  • Sulch: a total cessation of hostile activity

The reality is that a hudna, tahida or hudaybiyyah do not compare to the mu’ahada treaty of peace that Egypt signed with Israel in 1979, or the mu’ahada treaty of peace that Jordan signed with Israel in 1994.

The authoritative Islamic Encyclopedia (London, 1922) defines “hudna” as a “temporary treaty” which can be approved or abrogated by Islamic religious leaders, depending on whether or not it serves the interests of Islam, and that a “hudna” cannot last for more than 10 years.

That Islamic Encyclopedia mentions the Hudaybia treaty as the ultimate “hudna.”

Arafat often  referred to a hudna in his speeches when he would refer to the Oslo accords. In the words of the Islamic Encyclopedia:

The Hudaybia treaty, concluded by the Prophet Muhammed with the unbelievers of Mecca in 628, provided a precedent for subsequent treaties which the Prophet’s successors made with non-Muslims. Muhammed made a hudna with a tribe of Jews back then to give him time to grow his forces, then broke the treaty and wiped them out. Although this treaty was violated within three years from the time that it was concluded, most jurists concur that the maximum period of peace with the enemy should not exceed ten years since it was originally agreed that the Hudaybia treaty should last ten years.

A real truce was achieved at the end of World War I, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.

A hudna, tahida or hudaybiyyah would not have ended the hostilities in World War I or in any war

Happy days are not here again.

Tragically, the US and Israel governments promote  a false notion that a hudna is a cease fire.

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