...but if I were, I'd be frummer than you.

  This is an oft-repeated classic. An irreligious person says, "You frummies are hypocrites. You avoid biur by selling your Chametz, you sell your businesses to goyim before Shabbos, you circumvent the issur sirus by giving your animals to goyim, by מודר הנאה in Nedarim 43, so many places. You are just playing games. I am not Frum. But if I were frum, I would be frummer than you."

What surprised me was that Mohammed said it and it is apparently recorded in the Quran. 

Here's the story and the resulting brouhaha.

https://www.memri.org/reports/saudi-childrens-cartoon-depicts-quranic-story-which-allah-transforms-jews-apes

The gist of the story being that Allah commanded a village of Jews to refrain from fishing on Shabbos, and tested them by sending fish only on Saturday. Some withstood the test, but others, those tricksy Jews... put nets in the water on Friday and retrieved them on Sunday! Some Jews condemned this behavior. Others said it was nobody's business - live and let live. So Allah came down, and turned the sinners into apes, and then they died. 

This story was presented in cartoon form on a Saudi website, and people complained about it. My own dear wife was offended.

I was not offended at all. It doesn't bother me for others to say that the Ribono shel Olam gave the Jews Taryag mitzvos, and when they don't keep them, they are punished. What are they saying that we don't say?  He did not say that Jews are Apes, he said that Allah punished mechallelei Shabbos by turning them into Apes. That's ok for me. But several things did surprise me.

1. Apparently, Mohammed recognized that the Ribono shel Olam is makpid that Jews should keep Shabbos on Saturday and not do melacha, although he did not make it part of Islam. He probably was concerned about עכו"ם ששבת. 

I believe that this attitude persists in Islam today. First you have this article in Al Jazeera making light of the hetter of mechiras chametz. Then there is the story involving Marwan Barghouti. As I heard it, a guard was eating a sandwich on Pesach. He asked, but it's Pesach, I thought Jews do not eat bread on Pesach. The guard answered that that's only the Chareidim in Bnei Brak, but he doesn't believe any of that.  Barghouti said that until then, he was always worried that the Jews had a God given right to Israel, it was their covenant with God. But now that he saw that the Jews weren't keeping any covenants,  they were not following such basic things as not eating bread on Pesach, and he decided that eventually, if the Arabs make it hard enough, the Jews will just go away.

2. I see an implication here that although he imitated Yahadus in many ways, or had a mesora from Avrohom Avinu, perhaps one of the reasons he did not simply embrace Yiddishkeit was his perception that the practice of Judaism in his day was not sincere or pure.  He found the practice of haaramos offensive, similar to the early Christian criticism of the Pharisees.

3.  He held that this practice was a trick. This implies, to me, that it's not the pshat that he interpreted the Torah like lehavdil Beis Shammai's (17a) shvisas keilim. Beis Shammai's shvisas keilim is not a chiyuv missah, it is a separate din that besides issur melacha, your keilim have to shoveis as well. And even Beis Shammai agrees that if you're mafkir, you're ok. That's not what bothered Mohammed. He did not think about the din of shvisas keilim, he assumed that the issur is only on the gavra. What seems to have bothered him was the "spirit" of the law. If Allah said not to fish on Shabbos, then you should not arrange that your fishing is getting done on Shabbos.

As I said, it was the classic "...I would be frummer than you fakers, my Shabbos would be special."

I'm looking forward to seeing what the Muslims do about Imitation Pork, which the OU just decined giving a hechsher. (I once thought about creating a hechsher or a restaurant that specialized in just such products. I was going to call it FLAG Kosher. Flag stands for "Fress Like a Goy.")

I did see this in Tablet Magazine:

Recently, Slate staff writer Aymann Ismail wrote an article about how Impossible Pork and similar products are “testing his faith” as a Muslim by offering a tempting loophole against Islam’s prohibition against pork, but not exactly fulfilling the spirit of the law. “Our community is bound by rules meant to keep us from what hurts us,” he wrote. “But doesn’t Impossible Pork ragu sound damn delicious? Besides, God is merciful.”