Jerusalem
Jerusalem and the Jewish people are so intertwined that telling the history of one is telling the history of the other. For more than 3,000 years, Jerusalem has played a central role in the history of the Jews, culturally, politically, and spiritually, a role first documented in the Scriptures. All through the 2,000 years of the diaspora, Jews have called Jerusalem their ancestral home. This sharply contrasts the relationship between Jerusalem and the new Islamists who artificially inflate Islam's links to Jerusalem.
The Arab rulers who controlled Jerusalem through the 1950s and 1960s demonstrated no religious tolerance in a city that gave birth to two major Western religions. That changed after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel regained control of the whole city. Symbolically, one of Israel's first steps was to officially recognize and respect all religious interests in Jerusalem. But the war for control of Jerusalem and its religious sites is not over.
Palestinian terrorism has targeted Jerusalem particularly in an attempt to regain control of the city from Israel. The result is that they have turned Jerusalem , literally the City of Peace , into a bloody battleground and have thus forfeited their claim to share in the city's destiny.
“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”
Psalm 122:6
Psalm 122:6
Jerusalem, wrote historian Martin Gilbert, is not a ‘mere’ city. “It holds the central spiritual and physical place in the history of the Jews as a people.” 1
For more than 3,000 years, the Jewish people have looked to Jerusalem as their spiritual, political, and historical capital, even when they did not physically rule over the city. Throughout its long history, Jerusalem has served, and still serves, as the political capital of only one nation – the one belonging to the Jews. Its prominence in Jewish history began in 1004 BCE, when King David declared the city the capital of the first Jewish kingdom.2 David’s successor and son, King Solomon, built the First Temple there, according to the Bible, as a holy place to worship the Almighty. Unfortunately, history would not be kind to the Jewish people. Four hundred ten years after King Solomon completed construction of Jerusalem, the Babylonians (early ancestors to today’s Iraqis) seized and destroyed the city, forcing the Jews into exile. Fifty years later, the Jews, or Israelites as they were called, were permitted to return after Persia (present-day Iran) conquered Babylon. The Jews’ first order of business was to reclaim Jerusalem as their capital and rebuild the Holy Temple, recorded in history as the Second Temple.
Jerusalem was more than the Jewish kingdom’s political capital. It was a spiritual beacon. During the First and Second Temple periods, Jews throughout the kingdom would travel to Jerusalem three times yearly for the pilgrimages of the Jewish holy days of Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot, until the Roman Empire destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE and ended Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem for the next 2,000 years. Despite that fate, Jews never relinquished their bond to Jerusalem or, for that matter, to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel.
No matter where Jews lived throughout the world for those two millennia, their thoughts and prayers were directed toward Jerusalem. Even today, whether in Israel, the United States or anywhere else, Jewish ritual practice, holiday celebration and lifecycle events include recognition of Jerusalem as a core element of the Jewish experience. Consider that:
- Jews in prayer always turn toward Jerusalem.
- Arks (the sacred chests) that hold Torah scrolls in synagogues throughout the world face Jerusalem.3
- Jews end Passover Seders each year with the words: “Next year in Jerusalem”; the same words are pronounced at the end of Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the Jewish year.
- A three-week moratorium on weddings in the summer recalls the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the Babylonian army in 586 BCE. That period culminates in a special day of mourning – Tisha B’Av (the 9th day of the Hebrew month Av) – commemorating the destruction of both the First and Second Temples.
- Jewish wedding ceremonies – joyous occasions, are marked by sorrow over the loss of Jerusalem. The groom recites a biblical verse from the Babylonian Exile: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning,”4 and breaks a glass in commemoration of the destruction of the Temples.
Even body language, often said to tell volumes about a person, reflects the importance of Jerusalem to Jews as a people and, arguably, the lower priority the city holds for Muslims:
- When Jews pray they face Jerusalem; in Jerusalem Israelis pray facing the Temple Mount.
- When Muslims pray, they face Mecca; in Jerusalem Muslims pray with their backs to the city.
- Even at burial, a Muslim face, is turned toward Mecca.
Finally, consider the number of times ‘ Jerusalem ' is mentioned in the two religions' holy books:
- The Old Testament mentions ‘Jerusalem’ 349 times. Zion, another name for ‘Jerusalem,’ is mentioned 108 times.5
- The Quran never mentions Jerusalem – not even once.
Even when others controlled Jerusalem, Jews maintained a physical presence in the city, despite being persecuted and impoverished. Before the advent of modern Zionism in the 1880s, Jews were moved by a form of religious Zionism to live in the Holy Land, settling particularly in four holy cities: Safed, Tiberias, Hebron, and most importantly – Jerusalem. Consequently, Jews constituted a majority of the city’s population for generations. In 1898, “In this City of the Jews, where the Jewish population outnumbers all others three to one …” Jews constituted 75 percent6 of the Old City population in what Secretary-General Kofi Annan called ‘East Jerusalem.’ In 1914, when the Ottoman Turks ruled the city, 45,000 Jews made up a majority of the 65,000 residents. And at the time of Israeli statehood in 1948, 100,000 Jews lived in the city, compared to only 65,000 Arabs.7 Prior to unification, Jordanian-controlled ‘East Jerusalem’ was a mere 6 square kilometers, compared to 38 square kilometers on the ‘Jewish side.’
Despite 1,300 years of Muslim Arab rule, Jerusalem was never the capital of an Arab entity, nor was it ever mentioned in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s covenant until Israel regained control of East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967.
Overall, the role of Jerusalem in Islam is best understood as the outcome of political exigencies impacting on religious belief.
Mohammed, who founded Islam in 622 CE, was born and raised in present-day Saudi Arabia; he never set foot in Jerusalem. His connection to the city came years after his death when the Dome of the Rock shrine and the al-Aqsa mosque were built in 688 and 691, respectively, their construction spurred by political and religious rivalries. In 638 CE, the Caliph (or successor to Mohammed) Omar and his invading armies captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire. One reason they wanted to erect a holy structure in Jerusalem was to proclaim Islam’s supremacy8 over Christianity and its most important shrine, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
More important was the power struggle within Islam itself. The Damascus-based Umayyad Caliphs who controlled Jerusalem wanted to establish an alternative holy site if their rivals blocked access to Mecca. That was important because the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca was (and remains today) one of the Five Pillars of Islam. As a result, they built what became known as the Dome of the Rock shrine and the adjacent mosque.9
To enhance the prestige of the ‘substitute Mecca,’ the Jerusalem mosque was named al-Aqsa. It means ‘the furthest mosque’ in Arabic, but has far broader implications, since it is the same phrase used in a key passage of the Quran called “The Night Journey.” In that passage, Mohammed arrives at ‘al-Aqsa’ on a winged steed accompanied by the Archangel Gabriel; from there they ascend into heaven for a divine meeting with Allah, after which Mohammed returns to Mecca. Naming the Jerusalem mosque al-Aqsa was an attempt to say the Dome of the Rock was the very spot from which Mohammed ascended to heaven, thus tying Jerusalem to divine revelation in Islamic belief.
Jerusalem never replaced the importance of Mecca in the Islamic world. When the Umayyad dynasty fell in 750, Jerusalem also fell into near obscurity for 350 years, until the Crusades. During those centuries, many Islamic sites in Jerusalem fell into disrepair and in 1016 the Dome of the Rock collapsed.10
Still, for 1,300 years, various Islamic dynasties (Syrian, Egyptian, and Turkish) continued to govern Jerusalem as part of their overall control of the Land of Israel, disrupted only by the Crusaders. What is amazing is that over that period, not one Islamic dynasty ever made Jerusalem its capital.11 By the 19th century, Jerusalem had been so neglected by Islamic rulers that several prominent Western writers who visited Jerusalem were moved to write about it. French writer Gustav Flaubert, for example, found “ruins everywhere” during his visit in 1850 when it was part of the Turkish Empire (1516-1917). Seventeen years later Mark Twain wrote that Jerusalem had “become a pauper village.”12
Indeed, Jerusalem’s importance in the Islamic world only appears evident when non-Muslims (including the Crusaders, the British, and the Jews) control or capture the city.13 Only at those points in history did Islamic leaders claim Jerusalem as their third most holy city after Mecca and Medina.14 That was again the case in 1967, when Israel captured Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem (and the Old City) during the 1967 Six-Day War. Oddly, the PLO’s National Covenant, written in 1964, never mentioned Jerusalem. Only after Israel regained control of the entire city did the PLO updated its Covenant to include Jerusalem.
As recently as the mid-20th century, when Arabs last controlled parts of Jerusalem, they exhibited no respect for the Holy City.
In 1948, when Jordan took control of the eastern part of Jerusalem, including the Old City, it divided the city for the first time in its 3,000-year history. Under the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel, Jordan pledged to allow free access to all holy places but failed to honor that commitment. From 1948 until the Six-Day War in 1967, the part of Jerusalem controlled by the Jordanians again became an isolated and underdeveloped provincial town, and its religious sites the target of religious intolerance.
The Old City was rendered void of Jews. Jewish sites such as the Mount of Olives were desecrated. Jordan destroyed more than 50 synagogues15, and erased all evidence of a Jewish presence. In addition, all Jews were forced out of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City adjacent to the Western Wall, an area where Jews had lived for generations.
For 19 years, Jews and Christians residing in Israel (and even Israeli Muslims) were barred from their holy places, despite Jordan’s pledge to allow free access. Jews, for example, were unable to pray at the Western Wall; Christian Arabs living in Israel were denied access to churches and other religious sites in the Old City and nearby Bethlehem, also under Jordanian control.16During Jordan’s reign over eastern Jerusalem, its restrictive laws on Christian institutions led to a dramatic decline in the holy city’s Christian population by more than half – from 25,000 to 11,000,17 a pattern that characterized Christian Arabs in other Arab countries throughout the Middle East where religious freedom is not honored.
It was only after the Six-Day War that the Jewish Quarter was rebuilt and free access to holy places was reestablished. It is worth noting that after Jordan annexed the West Bank in the 1950s, it too failed to make Jerusalem – a city that Arabs now claim as ‘the third most holy site of Islam’ – its capital.
When Israel reunited Jerusalem after the 1967 Six-Day War, one of its first acts was to grant unprecedented freedom to all religions
Israel reunited Jerusalem as one city in 1967, after Jordan joined the Egyptian and Syrian war offensive and shelled the Jewish part of Jerusalem. Israeli leaders vowed the city would never again be divided.
Despite the disgraceful treatment of the Jewish Quarter and the Mount of Olives under the Jordanians and despite the Arabs’ violation of their pledges to make all holy sites accessible to Jews and Christians, one of the first acts Israel undertook after reuniting the city was to guarantee and safeguard the rights of all citizens of Jerusalem. This included not only free access to holy sites for all faiths but also represented an unprecedented act of religious tolerance. Israel granted Muslim and Christian religious authorities responsibility for managing their respective holy sites18 – including Muslim administration of Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount. Eventually, however, the Waqf, which holds administrative responsibility over the Temple Mount, violated the trust with which it was invested to respect and protect the holiness of the Temple Mount for both Muslims and Jews.
Arab leaders continue to insist that Jerusalem is an Arab city. That myth is used to implement a strategy to wrest partial control of Jerusalem from Israel and to make Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state. It is also part of a long-range strategy to destroy the Jewish state. This is one reason PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat rejected the unprecedented now-or-never Israeli proposal at peace talks in 2000 at Camp David. The proposal sought to solve the impasse over the status of Jerusalem by offering Arabs a share in the administration of parts of the city. Afterwards, Arafat revealed his real position in a post-summit statement that declared the PLO’s demand for sovereignty over Jerusalem included the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Temple Mount mosques, the Armenian Quarter, “and Jerusalem in its entirety, entirety, entirety.” 19
Palestinians have nurtured a myth that historically there were two Jerusalems – an Arab ‘East Jerusalem’ and a Jewish ‘West Jerusalem.’
Jerusalem was never an Arab city; Jews have held a majority in Jerusalem since 187020, and ‘east-west’ is a geographic, not political designation. It is no different than claiming the Eastern shore of Maryland should be a separate political entity from the rest of that state.
In 1880, Jews constituted 52 percent of the Old City population in East Jerusalem and were still inhabiting 42 percent of the Old City in 1914.21 In 1948, there were 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem, with 60,000 Arabs. A joint Jordanian-Israeli census reported that 67.7 percent of the city’s population in 1961 was Jewish. A 1967 aerial photo reveals the truth about the area called ‘East Jerusalem’: it was no more than an overcrowded walled city with a few scattered neighborhoods surrounded by villages. Prior to unification, Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem was a mere 6 square kilometers, compared to 38 square kilometers on the Jewish side.
Although uniting the city transformed all of Jerusalem into the largest city in Israel and a bustling metropolis, even moderate Palestinian leaders reject the idea of a united city. Their minimal demand for ‘just East Jerusalem’ really means the Jewish holy sites (including the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall), which Arabs have failed to protect, and the return of neighborhoods that house a significant percentage of Jerusalem’s present-day Jewish population. Most of that city is built on rock-strewn empty land around the city that was in the public domain for the past 36 years. With an overall population of 591,400 today, separating East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem is as viable and acceptable as the notion of splitting Berlin into two cities again, or separating East Harlem from the rest of Manhattan.
Arab claims to Jerusalem, a Jewish city by all definitions, reflect the “what’s-mine-is-mine, what’s-yours-is-mine” mentality underlying Palestinian concepts of how to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. That concept is also expressed in the demand for the ‘Right of Return,’22 not just in Jerusalem - Israel’s capital, but ‘inside the Green Line.’
Arabs deny the bond between Jews and Jerusalem; they sabotage and destroy archaeological evidence, even at the holiest place in Judaism – the Temple Mount.
Arabs continually denied the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s connection to Jerusalem. Arafat and other Arab leaders insisted that there never were Jewish temples on the Temple Mount. They also claim the Western Wall was really an Islamic holy site to which Muslims have historical rights.23 Putting rhetoric into action, Islamic clerics who manage the Temple Mount have demonstrated flagrant disrespect and contempt for the archaeological evidence of a Jewish presence.
Between 1999 and 2001, the Muslim Waqf removed and dumped more than 13,000 tons of what it termed rubble from the Mount and its substructure, including archaeological remains from the First and Second Temple periods, which Israelis found at dumping sites. During construction of a new underground mosque in a subterranean hall believed to date back to the time of Herod,24 and the paving of an ‘open air’ mosque elsewhere on the Temple Mount, the Waqf barred the Israel Antiquities Authority from supervising, or even observing, work. When archaeological finds from any period – Jewish or otherwise – are uncovered in the course of construction work, the Authority is mandated by law to supervise and observe everywhere in Israel – legislation that dates back to 1922 and documented in the international accord of the League of Nation’s - the “Mandate for Palestine.”
Such gross disregard for the pre-Islamic Jewish heritage of Jerusalem – particularly on Judaism’s holiest historic site - is a far more insidious form of the same Islamic intolerance that motivated the Taliban to demolish two gigantic pre-Islamic statues of Buddha carved into a cliff in Afghanistan.25
Jerusalem, it seems, is at the physical center of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, two distinct issues exist: the issue of Jerusalem and the issue of the Holy Places. Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, a former judge ad hoc on the bench of the International Court of Justice and a renowned and respected scholar of international law at Cambridge University, has said:
“Not only are the two problems separate; they are also quite distinct in nature from one another. So far as the Holy Places are concerned, the question is for the most part one of assuring respect for the existing interests of the three religions and of providing the necessary guarantees of freedom of access, worship, and religious administration. Questions of this nature are only marginally an issue between Israel and her neighbors and their solution should not complicate the peace negotiations. As far as the City of Jerusalem itself is concerned, the question is one of establishing an effective administration of the City which can protect the rights of the various elements of its permanent population - Christian, Arab and Jewish - and ensure the governmental stability and physical security which are essential requirements for the city of the Holy Places.”26
Judge, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht underscored in his investigation of the legal issues surrounding the status of Jerusalem and the Holy Places that the notion of internationalizing Jerusalem was not part of the original international mandate:
“Nothing was said in the Mandate about the internationalization of Jerusalem. Indeed Jerusalem as such is not mentioned, – though the Holy Places are. And this in itself is a fact of relevance now. For it shows that in 1922 there was no inclination to identify the question of the Holy Places with that of the internationalization of Jerusalem.”27
Professor Julius Stone, one of the 20th century's best-known authorities in Jurisprudence and international law,28 notes that Resolution 181 “lacked binding force” from the outset, since it required acceptance by all parties concerned:
“While the State of Israel did for her part express willingness to accept it, the other states concerned both rejected it and took up arms unlawfully against it.”
Judge Lauterpacht wrote in 1968 about the new conditions that had arisen since 1948 with regard to the original thoughts of internationalization of Jerusalem:
“-The Arab States rejected the Partition Plan and the proposal for the internationalization of Jerusalem.
-The Arab States physically opposed the implementation of the General Assembly Resolution. They sought by force of arms to expel the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem and to achieve sole occupation of the City.
-In the event, Jordan obtained control only of the Eastern part of the City, including the Walled City.
-While Jordan permitted reasonably free access to Christian Holy Places, it denied the Jews any access to the Jewish Holy Places.29 This was a fundamental departure from the tradition of freedom of religious worship in the Holy Land, which had evolved over centuries. It was also a clear violation of the undertaking given by Jordan in the Armistice Agreement concluded with Israel on 3rd April, 1949. Article VIII of this Agreement called for the establishment of a Special Committee of Israeli and Jordanian representatives to formulate agreed plans on certain matters “which, in any case, shall include the following, on which agreement in principle already exists... free access to the Holy Places and cultural institutions and use of the Cemetery on the Mount of Olives.”
-The U.N. displayed no concern over the discrimination thus practiced against persons of the Jewish faith.
-The U.N. accepted as tolerable the unsupervised control of the Old City of Jerusalem by Jordanian forces - notwithstanding the fact that the presence of Jordanian forces west of the Jordan River was entirely lacking in any legal justification.
-During the period 1948-1952 the General Assembly gradu¬ally came to accept that the plan for the territorial inter¬nationalization of Jerusalem had been quite overtaken by events. From 1952 to the present time virtually nothing more has been heard of the idea in the General Assembly.
On 5th June, 1967, Jordan deliberately overthrew the Armistice Agreement by attacking the Israeli-held part of Jerusalem. There was no question of this Jordanian action being a reaction to any Israeli attack. It took place notwith¬standing explicit Israeli assurances, conveyed to King Hussein through the U.N. Commander, that if Jordan did not attack Israel, Israel would not attack Jordan. Although the charge of aggression is freely made against Israel in relation to the Six-Day War the fact remains that the two attempts made in the General Assembly in June-July 1967 to secure the condemnation of Israel as an aggressor failed. A clear and striking majority of the members of the U.N. voted against the proposition that Israel was an aggressor.”30
Today, more than 55 years later, Israel has reunited Jerusalem and provided unrestricted freedom of religion. Access of all faiths to the Holy Places in the unified City of Peace is assured. Judge, Sir Elihu Lauterpracht confirm this:
“Moslems have enjoyed, under Israeli control, the very freedom which Jews were denied during Jordanian occupation.”31
Lastly, it should be noted: If UN Resolution 181 was valid today (which it is not), then so is the provision in Part III-D that stipulates that after 10 years, the city’s international status could be subject to a referendum of all Jerusalemites regarding a change in the status of the city – a decision that today, as in the past, would have been made by the city’s decisive Jewish majority.
Both the General Assembly and the Security Council have limited influence on the future of Jerusalem.
Judge Sir Lauterpacht explained in 1968:
“The General Assembly has no power of disposition over Jerusalem and no right to lay down regulations for the Holy Places. The Security Council, of course, retains its powers under Chapter VII of the Charter in relation to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression, but these powers do not extend to the adoption of any general position regarding the future of Jerusalem and the Holy Places.”
Originally, internationalization of Jerusalem was part of a much broader proposal that the Arab states rejected – both at the UN and ‘on the ground,’ by
“a rejection underlined by armed invasion of Palestine by the forces of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia … aimed at destroying Israel.”
The outcome of consistent Arab aggression was best described by Professor, Judge Schwebel:
“As between Israel, acting defensively in 1948 and 1967, on the one hand, and her Arab neighbors, acting aggressively in 1948 and 1967, on the other, Israel has better title in the territory of what was Palestine, including the whole of Jerusalem.”32 [italics by author]
Arab leaders point to UN Resolution 242 as a basis for their claim to Jerusalem.
Resolution 242 was adopted after the 1967 War, when Israel captured territory from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, after they attacked Israel. However, the resolution never mentions Jerusalem, nor does UN Resolution 242 call for a full withdrawal from territory captured but merely a withdrawal to “secure and recognized boundaries” that are to be negotiated by the parties concerned. Arab Palestinians were not a party to the resolution.
Arthur Goldberg, the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN (in 1967) who helped draft the resolution, testified in regard to the omission of Jerusalem from Resolution 242:
“I never described Jerusalem as occupied territory. Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem and this omission was deliberate.”
In conclusion of the role the UN and international law may play in determining the future of Jerusalem, one may again quote Judge Lauterpacht:
“(i) Israel's governmental measures in relation to Jerusalem - both New and Old - are lawful and valid.
(ii) The future regulation of the Holy Places is a matter to be determined quite separately from the political adminis¬tration of Jerusalem. Territorial internationalization of Jerusalem is dead - but the possibility of functional internationalization is not. The latter means, in effect, the recognition of the universal interest in the Holy Places situated in Jerusalem and the adoption of links between Israel and the world community to give formal expression to that interest.”
Palestinian Arabs have concentrated many of their terrorist attacks on Jews in Jerusalem, hoping to win the city by an onslaught of suicide bombers who will make life in the City of Peace unbearable. But this is not a new tactic. Arab strategy to turn Jerusalem into a battleground began in 1920.
Unfortunately, Arab leaders often turn to violence to gain what they were unable to achieve at the negotiating table. When talks broke down at Camp David in 2000, Palestinian Arab leaders unleashed the al-Aqsa Intifada, which has amounted to a full-blown guerrilla war against Israel.
It began the day before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when Arab mobs hurled rocks from the Temple Mount onto Jewish worshipers praying at the Western Wall below. That rock attack turned into a steady campaign of terrorist attacks. As the priming powder for the Intifada, Palestinian leaders incited Palestinians and Muslims throughout the world with fables that falsely suggested that Jews began an assault on al-Aqsa when Ariel Sharon made a half-hour visit to the Temple Mount during tourist hours.33 The truth is that Palestinians’ plans for warfare had begun immediately after Arafat walked out of the Camp David talks.
Why do Palestinians focus terrorist attacks on the City of Peace? Because Palestinians despite their rhetoric fully understand Jerusalem’s symbolic and spiritual significance to Jews.
Suicide attacks - on public buses and cafes, malls, and other crowded sites in the heart of the city - since the 1993 Oslo Accords are designed to make life hell for Jewish Jerusalemites. Atrocities like the February and March 1996 bombings of two #18 buses that killed 26 people and the August 2001 bombing of a Sbarro pizzeria34 that killed 15 (including five members of one family), are part of an ongoing 120-year-old battle for Jerusalem that Arabs have waged in opposition to Zionism.
In April 1920, a three-day rampage by religiously incited anti-Zionist Arab mobs left six dead and 200 injured in the Jewish Quarter. The attackers gutted synagogues and yeshivot and ransacked homes. Arabs planted time bombs in public places as far back as February 1947, when they blasted Ben-Yehuda Street, Jerusalem’s main thoroughfare, leaving 50 dead. This was all done before the establishment of the State of Israel. In the 1950s, Jordanians periodically shot at Jewish neighborhoods from the walls of the Old City. And after the city was united in 1967, Arabs renewed their battle for the city by planting bombs in cinemas and supermarkets. The first terrorist attack in that renewed battle came with the 1968 bombing of Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda, the open market, that left 12 dead. The plain facts about Palestinians’ behavior clearly demonstrates that they have forfeited any claims – historical, religious or political – to the City of Peace.
- Jerusalem’s Jewish connection dates back more than 3,000 years. Even after Jews lost control of the city in 70 CE, a Jewish spiritual and physical bond with Jerusalem remained unbroken, despite 2,000 years of dispersion.
- Although Islamic dynasties controlled Jerusalem for some 1,300 years, they never once made it the capital of an Arab state. Even Jordan, which controlled part of the city for 19 years, until 1967, refrained from making it its capital. Furthermore, Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Quran, Islam’s most holy book.
- Given the central role Jerusalem plays throughout Jewish history; given Arabs dismal record toward the rights of Jews and Christians in a sensitive, sacred city like Jerusalem; and coupled with the Arabs’ horrific record of bringing carnage to the City of Peace; Israel has a legal, historical and moral right to control Jerusalem as its undivided capital.
Jerusalem must remain a unified capital under Israel’s exclusive sovereignty in order to protect the interests of the Jewish people and as the only guarantee that the interests of all other faiths will be protected.
1 “Jerusalem: A Tale of One City” The New Republic, Nov. 14, 1994. (11362) Martin Gilbert is an Honorary Fellow of Merton College Oxford and the biographer of Winston Churchill. He is the author of the “Jerusalem: Illustrated History Atlas” (Vallentine Mitchell) and “Jerusalem: Rebirth of the City” (Viking-Penguin).
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
4 Psalm 137:5 “If I forget you, Jerusalem , let my right hand”
5See Ken Spiro, “Jerusalem: Jewish and Moslem Claims to the Holy City,” at:
http://www.aish.com/Israel/articles/Jerusalem_Jewish_and_Moslem_Claims_to_the_Holy_City.asp. (11341)
6“The eighty thousand Jews in Palestine, fully one-half are living within the walls, or in the twenty-three colonies just outside the walls, of Jerusalem. This number – forty thousand Jews in Jerusalem - is not an estimate carelessly made. …” Edwin S. Wallace, Former U.S. Consul “The Jews in Jerusalem” Cosmopolitan magazine (1898; original pages of article are in possession of the author).
7“JERUSALEM - Whose City?” at:
8“Dome of the Rock” at:
9See Ken Spiro, “Jerusalem: Jewish and Moslem Claims to the Holy City,” at:
http://www.aish.com/Israel/articles/Jerusalem_Jewish_and_Moslem_Claims_to_the_Holy_City.asp. (11341)
10Daniel Pipes, “If I Forget Thee: Does Jerusalem Really Matter to Islam,” New Republic, April 28, 1997, at:
11See Ken Spiro, “Jerusalem: Jewish and Moslem Claims to the Holy City,” at:
http://www.aish.com/Israel/articles/Jerusalem_Jewish_and_Moslem_Claims_to_the_Holy_City.asp. (11341)
12Daniel Pipes, “If I Forget Thee: Does Jerusalem Really Matter to Islam,” New Republic, April 28, 1997, at:
13Ibid.
14See Ken Spiro, “Jerusalem: Jewish and Moslem Claims to the Holy City,” at:
http://www.aish.com/Israel/articles/Jerusalem_Jewish_and_Moslem_Claims_to_the_Holy_City.asp. (11341)
15Dore Gold, “Jerusalem in International Diplomacy,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, at http://www.jcpa.org/jcprg10.htm. (10747)
16“Jerusalem: A Tale of One City,” The New Republic, Nov. 14, 1994. (11362) Martin Gilbert is an Honorary Fellow of Merton College Oxford and the biographer of Winston Churchill. He is the author of the “Jerusalem: Illustrated History Atlas” (Vallentine Mitchell) and “Jerusalem: Rebirth of the City” (Viking-Penguin), at:
17Ibid.
18Ibid.
19Dore Gold, “Jerusalem in International Diplomacy.” See:
http://www.jcpa.org/jcprg10.htm. (10747)
20For these and more statistics, see “Jerusalem: The City’s Development from a Historical Viewpoint,” at:
21Rami Yizrael, “The Jewish Quarter in Old Jerusalem in the War of Independence” (in Hebrew), Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute at:
http://ybz.org.il/?ArticleID=71. (11343)
22The Right of Return here refers to Arab demands that Israel allow all the Palestinians who fled in 1948 and left in 1967 – more than four million Arabs by their own estimates – to simply ‘overrun’ Israel demographically.
23According to Egyptian Minister of Waqfs (religious endowments) Mahmoud Hamdi Zakzouk: “Jews have no legitimate claim to Al-Buraq Wall,” April 28, 2001. The Western Wall, it is claimed, was the ‘hitching post’ where the Prophet tied his winged steed in “The Night Journey” before ascending into heaven.
24Mark Ami-El, “Destruction of the Temple Mount Antiquities,” August 2002, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, August 1, 2002, at:
http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp483.htm. (11567)
25Dore Gold, “Jerusalem in International Diplomacy.” (10747)
26Judge, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht “Jerusalem and the Holy Places,” The Anglo-Israel Association, October 1968. Lauterpracht was Judge ad hoc of the International Court of Justice. He also published Aspects of the Administration of International Justice (1991). He is the Director, Research Centre for International Law at Cambridge University, and Member, Arbitration Panel, World Bank Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.
27Ibid.
28Professor Julius Stone, Israel and Palestine - Assault on the Law of Nations (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). This work represented a detailed analysis of the central principles of international law governing the issues raised by the Arab-Israel conflict. Professor Stone was recognized as one of the twentieth century's leading authorities on the Law of Nations and one of the world’s best-known authorities in both Jurisprudence and International Law. His 26 major works include the authoritative texts Legal Controls of International Conflict, Aggression and World Order, The International Court and World Crisis and The Province and Function of Law.
29All citizens of the State of Israel were denied access to the Holy Places under Jordan control.
30Draft resolutions attempted to brand Israel as aggressor and illegal occupier as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War were all defeated by the UN General Assembly and Security Council.
A/L.519, 19 June 1967, submitted by: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
“Israel, in gross violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the universally accepted principles of international law, has committed a premeditated and previously prepared aggression against the United Arab Republic, Syria and Jordan …” (emphasis added) at:
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/2795fff6b58b212c052566cd006e0900!OpenDocument. (10919)
“Israel, in gross violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the universally accepted principles of international law, has committed a premeditated and previously prepared aggression against the United Arab Republic, Syria and Jordan …” (emphasis added) at:
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/2795fff6b58b212c052566cd006e0900!OpenDocument. (10919)
A/L. 521, 26 June 1967, submitted by: Albania
“Resolutely condemns the Government of Israel for its armed aggression against the United Arab Republic, the Syrian Arab Republic and Jordan, and for the continuance of the aggression by keeping under its occupation parts of the territory of these countries;” (emphasis added) at:
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Foreign%20Relations/Israels%20Foreign%20Relations%20since%201947/1947-1974/28%20Draft%20Resolution%20by%20Albania%20at%20the%20Emergency%20Se. (10921)
“Resolutely condemns the Government of Israel for its armed aggression against the United Arab Republic, the Syrian Arab Republic and Jordan, and for the continuance of the aggression by keeping under its occupation parts of the territory of these countries;” (emphasis added) at:
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Foreign%20Relations/Israels%20Foreign%20Relations%20since%201947/1947-1974/28%20Draft%20Resolution%20by%20Albania%20at%20the%20Emergency%20Se. (10921)
A/L. 522/REV.3*, 3 July 1967, submitted by: Afghanistan, Burundi, Cambodia, Ceylon, Congo (Brazzaville),Cyprus, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mali, Pakistan, Senegal, Somalia, United Republic of Tanzania, Yugoslavia and Zambia.
”Calls upon Israel to withdraw immediately all its forces to the positions they held prior to 5 June 1967” (emphasis added). At:
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/76bf6a75b8482d15052566c6006560d4?OpenDocument. (10918)
”Calls upon Israel to withdraw immediately all its forces to the positions they held prior to 5 June 1967” (emphasis added). At:
http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/76bf6a75b8482d15052566c6006560d4?OpenDocument. (10918)
A/L.523/Rev.1, 4 July 1967, submitted by: Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana,
Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela.
“Israel to withdraw all its forces from all the territories (emphasis added) occupied by it as a result of the recent conflict;” at:
31Judge, Sir Elihu Lauterpracht, “Jerusalem and the Holy Places,” p. 11.
32Professor, Judge Schwebel. What Weight to Conquest? in “Justice in International Law”, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
33“What started the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000?” at:
34“Suicide bombing at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem, August 9, 2001,” at:
The Camp David II summit and the "Aqsa intifada" that followed have confirmed what everyone had long known: Jerusalem is the knottiest issue facing Arab and Israeli negotiators.
In part, the problem is practical: the Palestinians insist that the capital of Israel serve as the capital of their future state too, something Israelis are loathe to accept. But mostly, the problem is religious: the ancient city has sacred associations for Jews and Muslims alike (and Christians too, of course; but Christians today no longer make an independent political claim to Jerusalem), and both insist on sovereignty over their overlapping sacred areas.
In Jerusalem, theological and historical claims matter; they are the functional equivalent to the deed to the city and have direct operational consequences. Jewish and Muslim connections to the city therefore require evaluation.
Comparing Religious Claims
The Jewish connection to Jerusalem is an ancient and powerful one. Judaism made Jerusalem a holy city over three thousand years ago and through all that time Jews remained steadfast to it. Jews pray in its direction, mention its name constantly in prayers, close the Passover service with the wistful statement "Next year in Jerusalem," and recall the city in the blessing at the end of each meal. The destruction of the Temple looms very large in Jewish consciousness; remembrance takes such forms as a special day of mourning, houses left partially unfinished, a woman's makeup or jewelry left incomplete, and a glass smashed during the wedding ceremony. In addition, Jerusalem has had a prominent historical role, is the only capital of a Jewish state, and is the only city with a Jewish majority during the whole of the past century. In the words of its current mayor, Jerusalem represents "the purist expression of all that Jews prayed for, dreamed of, cried for, and died for in the two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple."1
What about Muslims? Where does Jerusalem fit in Islam and Muslim history? It is not the place to which they pray, is not once mentioned by name in prayers, and it is connected to no mundane events in Muhammad's life. The city never served as capital of a sovereign Muslim state, and it never became a cultural or scholarly center. Little of political import by Muslims was initiated there.
One comparison makes this point most clearly: Jerusalem appears in the Jewish Bible 669 times and Zion (which usually means Jerusalem, sometimes the Land of Israel) 154 times, or 823 times in all. The Christian Bible mentions Jerusalem 154 times and Zion 7 times. In contrast, the columnist Moshe Kohn notes, Jerusalem and Zion appear as frequently in the Qur'an "as they do in the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, the Taoist Tao-Te Ching, the Buddhist Dhamapada and the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta"—which is to say, not once.2
The city being of such evidently minor religious importance, why does it now loom so large for Muslims, to the point that a Muslim Zionism seems to be in the making across the Muslim world? Why do Palestinian demonstrators take to the streets shouting "We will sacrifice our blood and souls for you, Jerusalem"3 and their brethren in Jordan yell "We sacrifice our blood and soul for Al-Aqsa"?4 Why does King Fahd of Saudi Arabia call on Muslim states to protect "the holy city [that] belongs to all Muslims across the world"?5 Why did two surveys of American Muslims find Jerusalem their most pressing foreign policy issue?6
Because of politics. An historical survey shows that the stature of the city, and the emotions surrounding it, inevitably rises for Muslims when Jerusalem has political significance. Conversely, when the utility of Jerusalem expires, so does its status and the passions about it. This pattern first emerged during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. Since then, it has been repeated on five occasions: in the late seventh century, in the twelfth century Countercrusade, in the thirteenth century Crusades, during the era of British rule (1917-48), and since Israel took the city in 1967. The consistency that emerges in such a long period provides an important perspective on the current confrontation.
I. The Prophet Muhammad
According to the Arabic-literary sources, Muhammad in a.d. 622 fled his home town of Mecca for Medina, a city with a substantial Jewish population. On arrival in Medina, if not slightly earlier, the Qur'an adopted a number of practices friendly to Jews: a Yom Kippur-like fast, a synagogue-like place of prayer, permission to eat kosher food, and approval to marry Jewish women. Most important, the Qur'an repudiated the pre-Islamic practice of the Meccans to pray toward the Ka‘ba, the small stone structure at the center of the main mosque in Mecca. Instead, it adopted the Judaic practice of facing the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during prayer. (Actually, the Qur'an only mentions the direction as "Syria"; other information makes it clear that Jerusalem is meant.)
This, the first qibla (direction of prayer) of Islam, did not last long. The Jews criticized the new faith and rejected the friendly Islamic gestures; not long after, the Qur'an broke with them, probably in early 624. The explanation of this change comes in a Qur'anic verse instructing the faithful no longer to pray toward Syria but instead toward Mecca. The passage (2:142-52) begins by anticipating questions about this abrupt change:
The Fools among the people will say: "What has turned them [the Muslims] from theqibla to which they were always used?"
God then provides the answer:
We appointed the qibla that to which you was used, only to test those who followed the Messenger [Muhammad] from those who would turn on their heels [on Islam].
In other words, the new qibla served as a way to distinguish Muslims from Jews. From now on, Mecca would be the direction of prayer:
now shall we turn you to a qibla that shall please you. Then turn your face in the direction of the Sacred Mosque [in Mecca]. Wherever you are, turn your faces in that direction.
The Qur'an then reiterates the point about no longer paying attention to Jews:
Even if you were to bring all the signs to the people of the Book [i.e., Jews], they would not follow your qibla.
Muslims subsequently accepted the point implicit to the Qur'anic explanation, that the adoption of Jerusalem as qibla was a tactical move to win Jewish converts. "He chose the Holy House in Jerusalem in order that the People of the Book [i.e., Jews] would be conciliated," notes At-Tabari, an early Muslim commentator on the Qur'an, "and the Jews were glad."7 Modern historians agree: W. Montgomery Watt, a leading biographer of Muhammad, interprets the prophet's "far-reaching concessions to Jewish feeling" in the light of two motives, one of which was "the desire for a reconciliation with the Jews."8
After the Qur'an repudiated Jerusalem, so did the Muslims: the first description of the town under Muslim rule comes from the visiting Bishop Arculf, a Gallic pilgrim, in 680, who reported seeing "an oblong house of prayer, which they [the Muslims] pieced together with upright plans and large beams over some ruined remains."9 Not for the last time, safely under Muslim control, Jerusalem became a backwater.10
This episode set the mold that would be repeated many times over succeeding centuries: Muslims take interest religiously in Jerusalem because of pressing but temporary concerns. Then, when those concerns lapse, so does the focus on Jerusalem, and the city's standing greatly diminishes.
II. Umayyads
The second round of interest in Jerusalem occurred during the rule of the Damascus-based Umayyad dynasty (661-750). A dissident leader in Mecca, ‘Abdullah b. az-Zubayr began a revolt against the Umayyads in 680 that lasted until his death in 692; while fighting him, Umayyad rulers sought to aggrandize Syria at the expense of Arabia (and perhaps also to help recruit an army against the Byzantine Empire). They took some steps to sanctify Damascus, but mostly their campaign involved what Amikam Elad of the Hebrew University calls an "enormous" effort "to exalt and to glorify" Jerusalem.11 They may even have hoped to make it the equal of Mecca.
The first Umayyad ruler, Mu‘awiya, chose Jerusalem as the place where he ascended to the caliphate; he and his successors engaged in a construction program – religious edifices, a palace, and roads – in the city. The Umayyads possibly had plans to make Jerusalem their political and administrative capital; indeed, Elad finds that they in effect treated it as such. But Jerusalem is primarily a city of faith, and, as the Israeli scholar Izhak Hasson explains, the "Umayyad regime was interested in ascribing an Islamic aura to its stronghold and center."12 Toward this end (as well as to assert Islam's presence in its competition with Christianity), the Umayyad caliph built Islam's first grand structure, the Dome of the Rock, right on the spot of the Jewish Temple, in 688-91.13 This remarkable building is not just the first monumental sacred building of Islam but also the only one that still stands today in roughly its original form.
The next Umayyad step was subtle and complex, and requires a pause to note a passage of the Qur'an (17:1) describing the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey to heaven (isra'):
Glory to He who took His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque to the furthest mosque. (Subhana allathina asra bi-‘abdihi laylatan min al-masjidi al-harami ila al-masjidi al-aqsa.)
When this Qur'anic passage was first revealed, in about 621, a place called the Sacred Mosque already existed in Mecca. In contrast, the "furthest mosque" was a turn of phrase, not a place. Some early Muslims understood it as metaphorical or as a place in heaven.14 And if the "furthest mosque" did exist on earth, Palestine would seem an unlikely location, for many reasons. Some of them:
Elsewhere in the Qur'an (30:1), Palestine is called "the closest land" (adna al-ard).
Palestine had not yet been conquered by the Muslims and contained not a single mosque.
The "furthest mosque" was apparently identified with places inside Arabia: either Medina15 or a town called Ji‘rana, about ten miles from Mecca, which the Prophet visited in 630.16
The earliest Muslim accounts of Jerusalem, such as the description of Caliph ‘Umar's reported visit to the city just after the Muslims conquest in 638, nowhere identify the Temple Mount with the "furthest mosque" of the Qur'an.
The Qur'anic inscriptions that make up a 240-meter mosaic frieze inside the Dome of the Rock do not include Qur'an 17:1 and the story of the Night Journey, suggesting that as late as 692 the idea of Jerusalem as the lift-off for the Night Journey had not yet been established. (Indeed, the first extant inscriptions of Qur'an 17:1 in Jerusalem date from the eleventh century.)
Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya (638-700), a close relative of the Prophet Muhammad, is quoted denigrating the notion that the prophet ever set foot on the Rock in Jerusalem; "these damned Syrians," by which he means the Umayyads, "pretend that God put His foot on the Rock in Jerusalem, though [only] one person ever put his foot on the rock, namely Abraham."17
Then, in 715, to build up the prestige of their dominions, the Umayyads did a most clever thing: they built a second mosque in Jerusalem, again on the Temple Mount, and called this one the Furthest Mosque (al-masjid al-aqsa, Al-Aqsa Mosque). With this, the Umayyads retroactively gave the city a role in Muhammad's life. This association of Jerusalem with al-masjid al-aqsa fit into a wider Muslim tendency to identify place names found in the Qur'an: "wherever the Koran mentions a name of an event, stories were invented to give the impression that somehow, somewhere, someone, knew what they were about."18
Despite all logic (how can a mosque built nearly a century after the Qur'an was received establish what the Qur'an meant?), building an actual Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Palestinian historian A. L. Tibawi writes, "gave reality to the figurative name used in the Koran."19 It also had the hugely important effect of inserting Jerusalem post hoc into the Qur'an and making it more central to Islam. Also, other changes resulted. Several Qur'anic passages were re-interpreted to refer to this city.20Jerusalem came to be seen as the site of the Last Judgment. The Umayyads cast aside the non-religious Roman name for the city, Aelia Capitolina (in Arabic, Iliya) and replaced it with Jewish-style names, either Al-Quds (The Holy) or Bayt al-Maqdis (The Temple). They sponsored a form of literature praising the "virtues of Jerusalem," a genre one author is tempted to call "Zionist."21Accounts of the prophet's sayings or doings (Arabic: hadiths, often translated into English as "Traditions") favorable to Jerusalem emerged at this time, some of them equating the city with Mecca.22 There was even an effort to move the pilgrimage (hajj) from Mecca to Jerusalem.
Scholars agree that the Umayyads' motivation to assert a Muslim presence in the sacred city had a strictly utilitarian purpose. The Iraqi historian Abdul Aziz Duri finds "political reasons" behind their actions.23 Hasson concurs:
The construction of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque, the rituals instituted by the Umayyads on the Temple Mount and the dissemination of Islamic-oriented Traditions regarding the sanctity of the site, all point to the political motives which underlay the glorification of Jerusalem among the Muslims.24
Thus did a politically-inspired Umayyad building program lead to the Islamic sanctification of Jerusalem.
Abbasid Rule
Then, with the Umayyad demise in 750 and the move of the caliph's capital to Baghdad, "imperial patronage became negligible"25 and Jerusalem fell into near-obscurity. For the next three and a half centuries, books praising this city lost favor and the construction of glorious buildings not only came to an end but existing ones fell apart (the dome over the rock collapsed in 1016). Gold was stripped off the dome to pay for Al-Aqsa repair work. City walls collapsed. Worse, the rulers of the new dynasty bled Jerusalem and its region country through what F. E. Peters of New York University calls "their rapacity and their careless indifference."26 The city declined to the point of becoming a shambles. "Learned men are few, and the Christians numerous," bemoaned a tenth-century Muslim native of Jerusalem.27 Only mystics continued to visit the city.
In a typical put-down, another tenth-century author described the city as "a provincial town attached to Ramla,"28 a reference to the tiny, insignificant town serving as Palestine's administrative center. Elad characterizes Jerusalem in the early centuries of Muslim rule as "an outlying city of diminished importance."29 The great historian S. D. Goitein notes that the geographical dictionary of al-Yaqut mentions Basra 170 times, Damascus 100 times, and Jerusalem only once, and that one time in passing. He concludes from this and other evidence that, in its first six centuries of Muslim rule, "Jerusalem mostly lived the life of an out-of-the-way provincial town, delivered to the exactions of rapacious officials and notables, often also to tribulations at the hands of seditious fellahin [peasants] or nomads ... . Jerusalem certainly could not boast of excellence in the sciences of Islam or any other fields."30
By the early tenth century, notes Peters, Muslim rule over Jerusalem had an "almost casual" quality with "no particular political significance."31 Later too: Al-Ghazali, sometimes called the "Thomas Aquinas of Islam," visited Jerusalem in 1096 but not once refers to the Crusaders heading his way.
III. Early Crusades
The Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 initially aroused a very mild Muslim response. The Franks did not rate much attention; Arabic literature written in Crusader-occupied towns tended not even to mention them . Thus, "calls to jihad at first fell upon deaf ears," writes Robert Irwin, formerly of the University of St Andrews in Scotland.32 Emmanuel Sivan of the Hebrew University adds that "one does not detect either shock or a sense of religious loss and humiliation."33
Only as the effort to retake Jerusalem grew serious in about 1150 did Muslim leaders seek to rouse jihad sentiments through the heightening of emotions about Jerusalem. Using the means at their disposal (hadiths, "virtues of Jerusalem" books, poetry), their propagandists stressed the sanctity of Jerusalem and the urgency of its return to Muslim rule. Newly-minted hadiths made Jerusalem ever-more critical to the Islamic faith; one of them put words into the Prophet Muhammad's mouth saying that, after his own death, Jerusalem's falling to the infidels is the second greatest catastrophe facing Islam. Whereas not a single "virtues of Jerusalem" volume appeared in the period 1100-50, very many came out in the subsequent half century. In the 1160s, Sivan notes, "al-Quds propaganda blossomed"; and when Saladin (Salah ad-Din) led the Muslims to victory over Jerusalem in 1187, the "propaganda campaign ... attained its paroxysm."34 In a letter to his Crusader opponent, Saladin wrote that the city "is to us as it is to you. It is even more important to us."35
The glow of the reconquest remained bright for several decades thereafter; for example, Saladin's descendants (known as the Ayyubid dynasty, which ruled until 1250) went on a great building and restoration program in Jerusalem, thereby imbuing the city with a more Muslim character. Until this point, Islamic Jerusalem had consisted only of the shrines on the Temple Mount; now, for the first time, specifically Islamic buildings (Sufi convents, schools) were built in the surrounding city. Also, it was at this time, Oleg Grabar of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study notes, that the Dome of the Rock came to be seen as the exact place where Muhammad's ascension to heaven (mi‘raj) took place during his Night Journey:36 if the "furthest mosque" is in Jerusalem, then Muhammad's Night Journey and his subsequent visit to heaven logically took place on the Temple Mount—indeed, on the very rock from which Jesus was thought to have ascended to heaven.
IV. Ayyubids
But once safely back in Muslim hands, interest in Jerusalem again dropped; "the simple fact soon emerged that al-Quds was not essential to the security of an empire based in Egypt or Syria. Accordingly, in times of political or military crisis, the city proved to be expendable," writes Donald P. Little of McGill University.37 In particular, in 1219, when the Europeans attacked Egypt in the Fifth Crusade, a grandson of Saladin named al-Mu‘azzam decided to raze the walls around Jerusalem, fearing that were the Franks to take the city with walls, "they will kill all whom they find there and will have the fate of Damascus and lands of Islam in their hands."38 Pulling down Jerusalem's fortifications had the effect of prompting a mass exodus from the city and its steep decline.
Also at this time, the Muslim ruler of Egypt and Palestine, al-Kamil (another of Saladin's grandsons and the brother of al-Mu‘azzam), offered to trade Jerusalem to the Europeans if only the latter would leave Egypt, but he had no takers. Ten years later, in 1229, just such a deal was reached when al-Kamil did cede Jerusalem to Emperor Friedrich II; in return, the German leader promised military aid to al-Kamil against al-Mu‘azzam, now a rival king. Al-Kamil insisted that the Temple Mount remain in Muslim hands and "all the practices of Islam"39 continued to be exercised there, a condition Friedrich complied with. Referring to his deal with Frederick, al-Kamil wrote in a remarkably revealing description of Jerusalem, "I conceded to the Franks only ruined churches and houses."40 In other words, the city that had been heroically regained by Saladin in 1187 was voluntarily traded away by his grandson just forty-two years later.
On learning that Jerusalem was back in Christian hands, Muslims felt predictably intense emotions. An Egyptian historian later wrote that the loss of the city "was a great misfortune for the Muslims, and much reproach was put upon al-Kamil, and many were the revilings of him in all the lands."41By 1239, another Ayyubid ruler, an-Nasir Da'ud, managed to expel the Franks from the city.
But then he too ceded it right back to the Crusaders in return for help against one of his relatives. This time, the Christians were less respectful of the Islamic sanctuaries and turned the Temple Mount mosques into churches.
Their intrusion did not last long; by 1244 the invasion of Palestine by troops from Central Asia brought Jerusalem again under the rule of an Ayyubid; and henceforth the city remained safely under Muslim rule for nearly seven centuries. Jerusalem remained but a pawn in the Realpolitik of the times, as explained in a letter from a later Ayyubid ruler, as-Salih Ayyub, to his son: if the Crusaders threaten you in Cairo, he wrote, and they demand from you the coast of Palestine and Jerusalem, "give these places to them without delay on condition they have no foothold in Egypt."42
The psychology at work here bears note: that Christian knights traveled from distant lands to make Jerusalem their capital made the city more valuable in Muslim eyes too. "It was a city strongly coveted by the enemies of the faith, and thus became, in a sort of mirror-image syndrome, dear to Muslim hearts,"43 Sivan explains. And so fractured opinions coalesced into a powerful sensibility; political exigency caused Muslims ever after to see Jerusalem as the third most holy city of Islam (thalith al-masajid).
Mamluk and Ottoman Rule
During the Mamluk era (1250-1516), Jerusalem lapsed further into its usual obscurity – capital of no dynasty, economic laggard, cultural backwater—though its new-found prestige as an Islamic site remained intact. Also, Jerusalem became a favorite place to exile political leaders, due to its proximity to Egypt and its lack of walls, razed in 1219 and not rebuilt for over three centuries, making Jerusalem easy prey for marauders. These notables endowed religious institutions, especially religious schools, which in the aggregate had the effect of re-establishing Islam in the city. But a general lack of interest translated into decline and impoverishment. Many of the grand buildings, including the Temple Mount sanctuaries, were abandoned and became dilapidated as the city became depopulated. A fourteenth-century author bemoaned the paucity of Muslims visiting Jerusalem.44The Mamluks so devastated Jerusalem that the town's entire population at the end of their rule amounted to a miserable 4,000 souls.
The Ottoman period (1516-1917) got off to an excellent start when Süleyman the Magnificent rebuilt the city walls in 1537-41 and lavished money in Jerusalem (for example, assuring its water supply), but things then quickly reverted to type. Jerusalem now suffered from the indignity of being treated as a tax farm for non-resident, one-year (and very rapacious) officials. "After having exhausted Jerusalem, the pasha left," observed the French traveler François-René Chateaubriand in 1806. At times, this rapaciousness prompted uprisings. The Turkish authorities also raised funds for themselves by gouging European visitors; in general, this allowed them to make fewer efforts in Jerusalem than in other cities to promote the city's economy. The tax rolls show soap as its only export. So insignificant was Jerusalem, it was sometimes a mere appendage to the governorship of Nablus or Gaza. Nor was scholarship cultivated: in 1670, a traveler reported that standards had dropped so low that even the preacher at Al-Aqsa Mosque spoke a low standard of literary Arabic. The many religious schools of an earlier era disappeared. By 1806, the population had again dropped, this time to under 9,000 residents.
Muslims during this long era could afford to ignore Jerusalem, writes the historian James Parkes, because the city "was something that was there, and it never occurred to a Muslim that it would not always be there," safely under Muslim rule.45 Innumerable reports during these centuries from Western pilgrims, tourists, and diplomats in Jerusalem told of the city's execrable condition. George Sandys in 1611 found that "Much lies waste; the old buildings (except a few) all ruined, the new contemptible." Constantin Volney, one of the most scientific of observers, noted in 1784 Jerusalem's "destroyed walls, its debris-filled moat, its city circuit choked with ruins." "What desolation and misery!" wrote Chateaubriand. Gustav Flaubert of Madame Bovary fame visited in 1850 and found "Ruins everywhere, and everywhere the odor of graves. It seems as if the Lord's curse hovers over the city. The Holy City of three religions is rotting away from boredom, desertion, and neglect." "Hapless are the favorites of heaven," commented Herman Melville in 1857. Mark Twain in 1867 found that Jerusalem "has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village."
The British government recognized the minimal Muslim interest in Jerusalem during World War I. In negotiations with Sharif Husayn of Mecca in 1915-16 over the terms of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans, London decided not to include Jerusalem in territories to be assigned to the Arabs because, as the chief British negotiator, Henry McMahon, put it, "there was no place … of sufficient importance … further south" of Damascus "to which the Arabs attached vital importance."46
True to this spirit, the Turkish overlords of Jerusalem abandoned Jerusalem rather than fight for it in 1917, evacuating it just in advance of the British troops. One account indicates they were even prepared to destroy the holy city. Jamal Pasha, the Ottoman commander-in-chief, instructed his Austrian allies to "blow Jerusalem to hell" should the British enter the city. The Austrians therefore had their guns trained on the Dome of the Rock, with enough ammunition to keep up two full days of intensive bombardment. According to Pierre van Paasen, a journalist, that the dome still exists today is due to a Jewish artillery captain in the Austrian army, Marek Schwartz, who rather than respond to the approaching British troops with a barrage on the Islamic holy places, "quietly spiked his own guns and walked into the British lines."47
V. British Rule
In modern times, notes the Israeli scholar Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Jerusalem "became the focus of religious and political Arab activity only at the beginning of the [twentieth] century." She ascribes the change mainly to "the renewed Jewish activity in the city and Judaism's claims on the Western Wailing Wall."48 British rule over city, lasting from 1917 to 1948, then galvanized a renewed passion for Jerusalem. Arab politicians made Jerusalem a prominent destination during the British Mandatory period. Iraqi leaders frequently turned up in Jerusalem, demonstrably praying at Al-Aqsa and giving emotional speeches. Most famously, King Faysal of Iraq visited the city and made a ceremonial entrance to the Temple Mount using the same gate as did Caliph ‘Umar when the city was first conquered in 638. Iraqi involvement also included raising funds for an Islamic university in Jerusalem, and setting up a consulate and an information office there.
The Palestinian leader (and mufti of Jerusalem) Hajj Amin al-Husayni made the Temple Mount central to his anti-Zionist political efforts. Husayni brought a contingent of Muslim notables to Jerusalem in 1931 for an international congress to mobilize global Muslim opinion on behalf of the Palestinians. He also exploited the draw of the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem to find international Muslim support for his campaign against Zionism. For example, he engaged in fundraising in several Arab countries to restore the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa, sometimes by sending out pictures of the Dome of the Rock under a Star of David; his efforts did succeed in procuring the funds to restore these monuments to their former glory.
Perhaps most indicative of the change in mood was the claim that the Prophet Muhammad had tethered his horse to the western wall of the Temple Mount. As established by Shmuel Berkowitz,49Muslim scholars over the centuries had variously theorized about the prophet tying horse to the eastern or southern walls—but not one of them before the Muslim-Jewish clashes at the Western Wall in 1929 ever associated this incident with the western side. Once again, politics drove Muslim piousness regarding Jerusalem.
Jordanian Rule
Sandwiched between British and Israeli eras, Jordanian rule over Jerusalem in 1948-67 offers a useful control case; true to form, when Muslims took the Old City (which contains the sanctuaries) they noticeably lost interest in it. An initial excitement stirred when the Jordanian forces captured the walled city in 1948 -- as evidenced by the Coptic bishop's crowning King ‘Abdullah as "King of Jerusalem" in November of that year—but then the usual ennui set in. The Hashemites had little affection for Jerusalem, where some of their worst enemies lived and where ‘Abdullah was assassinated in 1951. In fact, the Hashemites made a concerted effort to diminish the holy city's importance in favor of their capital, Amman. Jerusalem had served as the British administrative capital, but now all government offices there (save tourism) were shut down; Jerusalem no longer had authority even over other parts of the West Bank. The Jordanians also closed some local institutions (e.g., the Arab Higher Committee, the Supreme Muslim Council) and moved others to Amman (the treasury of the waqf, or religious endowment).
Jordanian efforts succeeded: once again, Arab Jerusalem became an isolated provincial town, less important than Nablus. The economy so stagnated that many thousands of Arab Jerusalemites left the town: while the population of Amman increased five-fold in the period 1948-67, that of Jerusalem grew by just 50 percent. To take out a bank loan meant traveling to Amman. Amman had the privilege of hosting the country's first university and the royal family's many residences. Jerusalem Arabs knew full well what was going on, as evidenced by one notable's complaint about the royal residences: "those palaces should have been built in Jerusalem, but were removed from here, so that Jerusalem would remain not a city, but a kind of village."50 East Jerusalem's Municipal Counsel twice formally complained of the Jordanian authorities' discrimination against their city.
Perhaps most insulting of all was the decline in Jerusalem's religious standing. Mosques lacked sufficient funds. Jordanian radio broadcast the Friday prayers not from Al-Aqsa Mosque but from an upstart mosque in Amman. (Ironically, Radio Israel began broadcasting services from Al-Aqsa immediately after the Israel victory in 1967.) This was part of a larger pattern, as the Jordanian authorities sought to benefit from the prestige of controlling Jerusalem even as they put the city down: Marshall Breger and Thomas Idinopulos note that although King ‘Abdullah "styled himself a protector of the holy sites, he did little to promote the religious importance of Jerusalem to Muslims."51
Nor were Jordan's rulers alone in ignoring Jerusalem; the city virtually disappeared from the Arab diplomatic map. Malcolm Kerr's well-known study on inter-Arab relations during this period (The Arab Cold War) appears not once to mention the city.52 No foreign Arab leader came to Jerusalem during the nineteen years when Jordan controlled East Jerusalem, and King Husayn (r. 1952-99) himself only rarely visited. King Faysal of Saudi Arabia spoke often after 1967 of his yearning to pray in Jerusalem, yet he appears never to have bothered to pray there when he had the chance. Perhaps most remarkable is that the PLO's founding document, the Palestinian National Covenant of 1964, does not once mention Jerusalem or even allude to it.
VI. Israeli Rule
This neglect came to an abrupt end after June 1967, when the Old City came under Israeli control. Palestinians again made Jerusalem the centerpiece of their political program. The Dome of the Rock turned up in pictures everywhere, from Yasir Arafat's office to the corner grocery. Slogans about Jerusalem proliferated and the city quickly became the single most emotional issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The PLO made up for its 1964 oversight by specifically mentioning Jerusalem in its 1968 constitution as "the seat of the Palestine Liberation Organization."53
"As during the era of the Crusaders," Lazarus-Yafeh points out, Muslim leaders "began again to emphasize the sanctity of Jerusalem in Islamic tradition."54 In the process, they even relied on some of the same arguments (e.g., rejecting the occupying power's religious connections to the city) and some of the same hadiths to back up those allegations. Muslims began echoing the Jewish devotion to Jerusalem: Arafat declared that "Al-Quds is in the innermost of our feeling, the feeling of our people and the feeling of all Arabs, Muslims, and Christians in the world."55 Extravagant statements became the norm (Jerusalem was now said to be "comparable in holiness" to Mecca and Medina; or even "our most sacred place").56 Jerusalem turned up regularly in Arab League and United Nations resolutions. The Jordanian and Saudi governments now gave as munificently to the Jerusalem religious trust as they had been stingy before 1967.
Nor were Palestinians alone in this emphasis on Jerusalem: the city again served as a powerful vehicle for mobilizing Muslim opinion internationally. This became especially clear in September 1969, when King Faysal parlayed a fire at Al-Aqsa Mosque into the impetus to convene twenty-five Muslim heads of state and establish the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a United Nations-style institution for Muslims. In Lebanon, the fundamentalist group Hizbullah depicts the Dome of the Rock on everything from wall posters to scarves and under the picture often repeats its slogan: "We are advancing." Lebanon's leading Shi‘i authority, Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, regularly exploits the theme of liberating Jerusalem from Israeli control to inspire his own people; he does so, explains his biographer Martin Kramer, not for pie-in-the-sky reasons but "to mobilize a movement to liberate Lebanon for Islam."57
Similarly, the Islamic Republic of Iran has made Jerusalem a central issue, following the dictate of its founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, who remarked that "Jerusalem is the property of Muslims and must return to them."58 Since shortly after the regime's founding, its 1-rial coin and 1000-rial banknote have featured the Dome of the Rock (though, embarrassingly, the latter initially was mislabeled "Al-Aqsa Mosque"). Iranian soldiers at war with Saddam Husayn's forces in the 1980s received simple maps showing their sweep through Iraq and onto Jerusalem. Ayatollah Khomeini decreed the last Friday of Ramadan as Jerusalem Day, and this commemoration has served as a major occasion for anti-Israel harangues in many countries, including Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco. The Islamic Republic of Iran celebrates the holiday with stamps and posters featuring scenes of Jerusalem accompanied by exhortative slogans. In February 1997, a crowd of some 300,000 celebrated Jerusalem Day in the presence of dignitaries such as President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Jerusalem Day is celebrated (complete with a roster of speeches, an art exhibit, a folkloric show, and a youth program) as far off as Dearborn, Michigan.
As it has become common for Muslims to claim passionate attachment to Jerusalem, Muslim pilgrimages to the city have multiplied four-fold in recent years. A new "virtues of Jerusalem" literature has developed.59 So emotional has Jerusalem become to Muslims that they write books of poetry about it (especially in Western languages).60 And in the political realm, Jerusalem has become a uniquely unifying issue for Arabic-speakers. "Jerusalem is the only issue that seems to unite the Arabs. It is the rallying cry," a senior Arab diplomat noted in late 2000.61
The fervor for Jerusalem at times challenges even the centrality of Mecca. No less a personage than Crown Prince ‘Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has been said repeatedly to say that for him, "Jerusalem is just like the holy city of Mecca."62 Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah goes further yet, declaring in a major speech: "We won't give up on Palestine, all of Palestine, and Jerusalem will remain the place to which all jihad warriors will direct their prayers."63
Dubious Claims
Along with these high emotions, three historically dubious claims promoting the Islamic claim to Jerusalem have emerged.
The Islamic connection to Jerusalem is older than the Jewish. The Palestinian "minister" of religious endowments asserts that Jerusalem has "always" been under Muslim sovereignty.64 Likewise, Ghada Talhami, a polemicist, asserts that "There are other holy cities in Islam, but Jerusalem holds a special place in the hearts and minds of Muslims because its fate has always been intertwined with theirs."65Always? Jerusalem's founding antedated Islam by about two millennia, so how can that be? Ibrahim Hooper of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations explains this anachronism: "the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem does not begin with the prophet Muhammad, it begins with the prophets Abraham, David, Solomon and Jesus, who are also prophets in Islam."66 In other words, the central figures of Judaism and Christianity were really proto-Muslims. This accounts for the Palestinian man-in-the-street declaring that "Jerusalem was Arab from the day of creation."67
The Qur'an mentions Jerusalem. So complete is the identification of the Night Journey with Jerusalem that it is found in many publications of the Qur'an, and especially in translations. Some state in a footnote that the "furthest mosque" "must" refer to Jerusalem.68 Others take the (blasphemous?) step of inserting Jerusalem right into the text after "furthest mosque." This is done in a variety of ways. The Sale translation69 uses italics:
from the sacred temple of Mecca to the farther temple of Jerusalem
the Asad translation70 relies on square brackets:
from the Inviolable House of Worship [at Mecca] to the Remote House of Worship [at Jerusalem]
and the Behbudi-Turner version71 places it right in the text without any distinction at all:
from the Holy Mosque in Mecca to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Palestine.
If the Qur'an in translation now has Jerusalem in its text, it cannot be surprising to find that those who rely on those translations believe that Jerusalem "is mentioned in the Qur'an"; and this is precisely what a consortium of American Muslim institutions claimed in 2000.72 One of their number went yet further; according to Hooper , "the Koran refers to Jerusalem by its Islamic centerpiece, al-Aqsa Mosque."73 This error has practical consequences: for example, Ahmad ‘Abd ar-Rahman, secretary-general of the PA "cabinet," rested his claim to Palestinian sovereignty on this basis: "Jerusalem is above tampering, it is inviolable, and nobody can tamper with it since it is a Qur'anic text."74
Muhammad actually visited Jerusalem. The Islamic biography of the Prophet Muhammad's life is very complete and it very clearly does not mention his leaving the Arabian Peninsula, much less voyaging to Jerusalem. Therefore, when Karen Armstrong, a specialist on Islam, writes that "Muslim texts make it clear that … the story of Muhammad's mystical Night Journey to Jerusalem … was not a physical experience but a visionary one," she is merely stating the obvious. Indeed, this phrase is contained in an article titled, "Islam's Stake: Why Jerusalem Was Central to Muhammad" which posits that "Jerusalem was central to the spiritual identity of Muslims from the very beginning of their faith."75 Not good enough. Armstrong found herself under attack for a "shameless misrepresentation" of Islam and claiming that "Muslims themselves do not believe the miracle of their own prophet."76
Jerusalem has no importance to Jews. The first step is to deny a Jewish connection to the Western (or Wailing) Wall, the only portion of the ancient Temple that still stands. In 1967, a top Islamic official of the Temple Mount portrayed Jewish attachment to the wall as an act of "aggression against al-Aqsa mosque."77 The late King Faysal of Saudi Arabia spoke on this subject with undisguised scorn: "The Wailing Wall is a structure they weep against, and they have no historic right to it. Another wall can be built for them to weep against."78 ‘Abd al-Malik Dahamsha, a Muslim member of Israel's parliament, has flatly stated that "the Western Wall is not associated with the remains of the Jewish Temple."79 The Palestinian Authority's website states about the Western Wall that "Some Orthodox religious Jews consider it as a holy place for them, and claim that the wall is part of their temple which all historic studies and archeological excavations have failed to find any proof for such a claim."80 The PA's mufti describes the Western Wall as "just a fence belonging to the Muslim holy site" and declares that "There is not a single stone in the Wailing-Wall relating to Jewish history."81He also makes light of the Jewish connection, dismissively telling an Israeli interviewer, "I heard that your Temple was in Nablus or perhaps Bethlehem."82 Likewise, Arafat announced that Jews "consider Hebron to be holier than Jerusalem."83 There has even been some scholarship, from ‘Ayn Shams University in Egypt, alleging to show that Al-Aqsa Mosque predates the Jewish antiquities in Jerusalem – by no less than two thousand years.84
In this spirit, Muslim institutions pressure the Western media to call the Temple Mount and the Western Wall by their Islamic names (Al-Haram ash-Sharif, Al-Buraq), and not their much older Jewish names. (Al-Haram ash-Sharif, for example, dates only from the Ottoman era.) When Western journalists do not comply, Arafat responds with outrage, with his news agency portraying this as part of a "constant conspiracy against our sanctities in Palestine" and his mufti deeming this contrary to Islamic law.85
The second step is to deny Jews access to the wall. "It's prohibited for Jews to pray at the Western Wall," asserts an Islamist leader living in Israel.86 The director of the Al-Aqsa Mosque asserts that "This is a place for Muslims, only Muslims. There is no temple here, only Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock."87 The Voice of Palestine radio station demands that Israeli politicians not be allowed even to touch the wall.88 ‘Ikrima Sabri, the Palestinian Authority's mufti, prohibits Jews from making repairs to the wall and extends Islamic claims further: "All the buildings surrounding the Al-Aqsa mosque are an Islamic waqf."89
The third step is to reject any form of Jewish control in Jerusalem, as Arafat did in mid-2000: "I will not agree to any Israeli sovereign presence in Jerusalem."90 He was echoed by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah, who stated that "There is nothing to negotiate about and compromise on when it comes to Jerusalem."91 Even Oman's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Yusuf bin ‘Alawi bin ‘Abdullah told the Israeli prime minister that sovereignty in Jerusalem should be exclusively Palestinian "to ensure security and stability."92
The final step is to deny Jews access to Jerusalem at all. Toward this end, a body of literature blossoms that insists on an exclusive Islamic claim to all of Jerusalem.93 School textbooks allude to the city's role in Christianity and Islam, but ignore Judaism. An American affiliate of Hamas claims Jerusalem as "an Arab, Palestinian and Islamic holy city."94 A banner carried in a street protest puts it succinctly: "Jerusalem is Arab."95 No place for Jews here.
Anti-Jerusalem Views
This Muslim love of Zion notwithstanding, Islam contains a recessive but persistent strain of anti-Jerusalem sentiment, premised on the idea that emphasizing Jerusalem is non-Islamic and can undermine the special sanctity of Mecca.
In the early period of Islam, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis notes, "there was strong resistance among many theologians and jurists" to the notion of Jerusalem as a holy city. They viewed this as a "Judaizing error—as one more among many attempts by Jewish converts to infiltrate Jewish ideas into Islam."96 Anti-Jerusalem stalwarts circulated stories to show that the idea of Jerusalem's holiness is a Jewish practice. In the most important of them, a converted Jew named , Ka‘b al-Ahbar, suggested to Caliph ‘Umar that Al-Aqsa Mosque be built by the Dome of the Rock. The caliph responded by accusing him of reversion to his Jewish roots:
‘Umar asked him: "Where do you think we should put the place of prayer?"
"By the [Temple Mount] rock," answered Ka‘b.
By God, Ka‘b," said ‘Umar, "you are following after Judaism. I saw you take off your sandals [following Jewish practice]."
"I wanted to feel the touch of it with my bare feet," said Ka‘b.
"I saw you," said ‘Umar. "But no … Go along! We were not commanded concerning the Rock, but we were commanded concerning the Ka‘ba [in Mecca]."97
Another version of this anecdote makes the Jewish content even more explicit: "in this one, Ka‘b al-Ahbar tries to induce Caliph ‘Umar to pray north of the Holy Rock, pointing out the advantage of this: "Then the entire Al-Quds, that is, Al-Masjid al-Haram will be before you."98 In other words, the convert from Judaism is saying, the Rock and Mecca will be in a straight line and Muslims can pray toward both of them at the same time.
That Muslims for almost a year and a half during Muhammad's lifetime directed prayers toward Jerusalem has had a permanently contradictory effect on that city's standing in Islam. The incident partially imbued Jerusalem with prestige and sanctity, but it also made the city a place uniquely rejected by God. Some early hadiths have Muslims expressing this rejection by purposefully praying with their back sides to Jerusalem,99 a custom that still survives in vestigial form; he who prays in Al-Aqsa Mosque not coincidentally turns his back precisely to the Temple area toward which Jews pray. Or, in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's sharp formulation: when a Muslim prays in Al-Aqsa, "his back is to it. Also some of his lower parts."100
Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328), one of Islam's strictest and most influential religious thinkers, is perhaps the outstanding spokesman of the anti-Jerusalem view. In his wide-ranging attempt to purify Islam of accretions and impieties, he dismissed the sacredness of Jerusalem as a notion deriving from Jews and Christians, and also from the long-ago Umayyad rivalry with Mecca. Ibn Taymiya's student, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya (1292-1350), went further and rejected hadiths about Jerusalem as false. More broadly, learned Muslims living after the Crusades knew that the great publicity given to hadiths extolling Jerusalem's sanctity resulted from the Countercrusade—from political exigency, that is—and therefore treated them warily.
There are other signs too of Jerusalem's relatively low standing in the ladder of sanctity: a historian of art finds that, "in contrast to representations of Mecca, Medina, and the Ka‘ba, depictions of Jerusalem are scanty."101 The belief that the Last Judgment would take place in Jerusalem was said by some medieval authors to be a forgery to induce Muslims to visit the city.
Modern writers sometimes take exception to the envelope of piety that has surrounded Jerusalem. Muhammad Abu Zayd wrote a book in Egypt in 1930 that was so radical that it was withdrawn from circulation and is no longer even extant. In it, among many other points, he
dismissed the notion of the Prophet's heavenly journey via Jerusalem, claiming that the Qur'anic rendition actually refers to his Hijra from Mecca to Madina; "the more remote mosque" (al-masjid al-aqsa) thus had nothing to do with Jerusalem, but was in fact the mosque in Madina.102
That this viewpoint is banned shows the nearly complete victory in Islam of the pro-Jerusalem viewpoint. Still, an occasional expression still filters through. At a summit meeting of Arab leaders in March 2001, Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhafi made fun of his colleagues' obsession with Al-Aqsa Mosque. "The hell with it," delegates quoted him saying, "you solve it or you don't, it's just a mosque and I can pray anywhere."103
Conclusion
Politics, not religious sensibility, has fueled the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem for nearly fourteen centuries; what the historian Bernard Wasserstein has written about the growth of Muslim feeling in the course of the Countercrusade applies through the centuries: "often in the history of Jerusalem, heightened religious fervour may be explained in large part by political necessity."104 This pattern has three main implications. First, Jerusalem will never be more than a secondary city for Muslims; "belief in the sanctity of Jerusalem," Sivan rightly concludes, "cannot be said to have been widely diffused nor deeply rooted in Islam."105 Second, the Muslim interest lies not so much in controlling Jerusalem as it does in denying control over the city to anyone else. Third, the Islamic connection to the city is weaker than the Jewish one because it arises as much from transitory and mundane considerations as from the immutable claims of faith.
Mecca, by contrast, is the eternal city of Islam, the place from which non-Muslims are strictly forbidden. Very roughly speaking, what Jerusalem is to Jews, Mecca is to Muslims – a point made in the Qur'an itself (2:145) in recognizing that Muslims have one qibla and "the people of the Book" another one. The parallel was noted by medieval Muslims; the geographer Yaqut (1179-1229) wrote, for example, that "Mecca is holy to Muslims and Jerusalem to the Jews."106 In modern times, some scholars have come to the same conclusion: "Jerusalem plays for the Jewish people the same role that Mecca has for Muslims," writes Abdul Hadi Palazzi, director of the Cultural Institute of the Italian Islamic Community.107
The similarities are striking. Jews pray thrice to Jerusalem, Muslims five times daily to Mecca. Muslims see Mecca as the navel of the world, just as Jews see Jerusalem. Whereas Jews believe Abraham nearly sacrificed Ishmael's brother Isaac in Jerusalem, Muslims believe this episode took place in Mecca. The Ka‘ba in Mecca has similar functions for Muslims as the Temple in Jerusalem for Jews (such as serving as a destination for pilgrimage). The Temple and Ka‘ba are both said to be inimitable structures. The supplicant takes off his shoes and goes barefoot in both their precincts. Solomon's Temple was inaugurated on Yom Kippur, the tenth day of the year, and the Ka‘ba receives its new cover also on the tenth day of each year.108 If Jerusalem is for Jews a place so holy that not just its soil but even its air is deemed sacred, Mecca is the place whose "very mention reverberates awe in Muslims' hearts," according to Abad Ahmad of the Islamic Society of Central Jersey.109
This parallelism of Mecca and Jerusalem offers the basis of a solution, as Sheikh Palazzi wisely writes:
separation in directions of prayer is a mean to decrease possible rivalries in management of Holy Places. For those who receive from Allah the gift of equilibrium and the attitude to reconciliation, it should not be difficult to conclude that, as no one is willing to deny Muslims a complete sovereignty over Mecca, from an Islamic point of view -notwithstanding opposite, groundless propagandistic claims - there is not any sound theological reason to deny an equal right of Jews over Jerusalem.110
To back up this view, Palazzi notes several striking and oft-neglected passages in the Qur'an . One of them (5:22-23) quotes Moses instructing the Jews to "enter the Holy Land (al-ard al-muqaddisa) which God has assigned unto you." Another verse (17:104) has God Himself making the same point: "We said to the Children of Israel: ‘Dwell securely in the Land.'" Qur'an 2:145 states that the Jews "would not follow your qibla; nor are you going to follow their qibla," indicating a recognition of the Temple Mount as the Jews' direction of prayer. "God himself is saying that Jerusalem is as important to Jews as Mecca is to Moslems,"111 Palazzi concludes.
His analysis has a clear and sensible implication: just as Muslims rule an undivided Mecca, Jews should rule an undivided Jerusalem.
Daniel Pipes is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
1 Ehud Olmert, "I Am the Most Privileged Jew in the Universe," Middle East Quarterly, Dec. 1997, p. 65.
2 It is, however, in some places referred to, such as Sura 17:7. It also bears noting that "Mecca" appears just once in the Qur'an.
3 The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 23, 2000.
4 Associated Press, Aug. 11, 2000; Reuters, Aug. 25, 2000.
5 Reuters, Aug. 12, 2000.
6 American Muslim Council, "American Muslims Identify Top Ten Issues," Feb. 29, 2000; Council on American-Islamic Relations, "New Survey Reiterates American Muslim Concern for Jerusalem," July 6, 2000.
7 At-Tabari, Jami` al-Bayan fi Tafsir al-Qur'an (Cairo, 1321/1903), quoted in F. E. Peters,Jerusalem (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 181.
8 W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad in Medina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 200.
9 Quoted in Peters, Jerusalem, pp. 195-96.
10 Its holiness in the monotheistic traditions gave it a special standing. For example, while the word for Zion in Arabic is Sihyawn (or Sahyun) and it historically refers to Jerusalem (or sometimes to Byzantium), on rare occasions it has referred to Mecca, possibly "an early tendency to enhance the holiness of Mecca by attributing to it holy merits of Biblical places and persons." The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, c.v. "Sihyawn."
11 Amikam Elad, "Why Did ‘Abd al-Malik Build the Dome of the Rock?" Bayt al-Maqdis: 'Abd al-Malik's Jerusalem, ed. Julian Raby and Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), vol. 1, p. 48.
12 Izhak Hasson, "The Muslim View of Jerusalem: The Qur'an and Hadith," The History of Jerusalem: The Early Muslim Period, 638-1099, ed. Joshua Prawer and Haggai Ben-Shammai (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 358.
13 For a revisionist account, which interprets the construction of the Dome of the Rock as the beginning of Islam, see Moshe Sharon, "The Birth of Islam in the Holy Land," The Holy Land in History and Thought, ed. Moshe Sharon (Leiden: E J. Brill, 1988), pp. 225-35.
14 B. Schreike, "Die Himmelreise Muhammeds," Der Islam 6 (1915-16): 1-30; J. Horovitz, "Muhammeds Himmelfahrt," Der Islam 9 (1919): 159-83; Heribert Busse, "Jerusalem in the Story of Muhammad's Night Journey and Ascension," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 14 (1991): 1-40. See also Heribert Busse and Georg Kretschmar, Jerusalemer Heiligstumstraditionen (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987).
15 Arthur Jeffrey, "The Suppressed Qur'an Commentary of Muhammad Abu Zaid," Der Islam, 20 (1932): 306.
16 Alfred Guillaume, "Where Was Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa?" Al-Andalus, (18) 1953: 323-36.
17Quoted in Joseph van Ess, "‘Abd al-Malik and the Dome of the Rock," Bayt al-Maqdis: `Abd al-Malik's Jerusalem, ed. Julian Raby and Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), vol. 1, p. 93.
18 Ibn al-Rawandi, "Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at the Sources," The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, ed. Ibn Warraq (New York: Prometheus, 2000), p.101.
19 A. L. Tibawi, Jerusalem: Its Place in Islam and Arab History (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969), p. 9.
20 Examples are in Hasson, "The Muslim View of Jerusalem," p. 353.
21 R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, "The Meaning of Jerusalem to Jews, Christians, and Muslims," Jerusalem in the Mind of the Western World, 1800-1948, vol. 5 of With Eyes toward Zion, ed. Yehoshua Ben-Arieh and Moshe Davis (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), p. 10. The "virtues of Jerusalem" literature was once thought to date from centuries later, but recent research has established its Umayyad origins.
22 Ignaz Goldziher, Muhammadanische Studien, vol. 2 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1889-90), pp. 34-37.
23 Abdul Aziz Duri, "Jerusalem in the Early Islamic Period, 7th-11th Centuries AD," in Jerusalem in History: 3,000 B.C. to the Present Day, rev. ed., ed. Kamil J. Asali (London: Kegan Paul International, 1997), p. 112.
24 Hasson, "The Muslim View of Jerusalem," p. 377.
25 Paul Wheatley, The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 297.
26 F. E. Peters, The Distant Shrine: The Islamic Centuries in Jerusalem (New York: AMS, 1993), p. 71.
27Shams ad-Din al-Muqaddasi, Ahsan at-Taqasim fi Ma`rifat at-Taqalim, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1877). Quoted in Guy Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), p. 86.
28 Mutahhar b. Tahir al-Maqdisi, Kitab al-Bad' wa't-Ta'rikh, vol. 4, ed. Clément Huart (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1907), p. 72.
29Amikam Elad, Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), p. 1.
30 S. D. Goitein, "Al-Kuds," The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d edition, vol. 5, pp. 329, 322.
31 Peters, Jerusalem, p. 214.
32 Robert Irwin, "Muslim Responses to the Crusades," History Today, Apr. 1997, p. 44.
33 Emmanuel Sivan, Interpretations of Islam: Past and Present (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1985), p. 76.
34 Ibid., pp. 83, 87.
35 Ibn Shaddad, An-Nawadir as-Sultaniya wa'l-Mahasin al-Yusufiya, vol. 3 (Paris, 1884), p. 265; quoted in Donald P. Little, "Jerusalem under the Ayyubids and Mamluks, 1187-1516 AD," Jerusalem in History: 3,000 B.C. to the Present Day, rev. ed., ed. Kamil J. Asali (London: Kegan Paul International, 1997), p. 179.
36 Oleg Grabar Mohammad Al-Asad, Abeer Audeh, and Said Nuseibeh, The Shape of the Holy(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 157. See also p. 113.
37 Little, "Jerusalem under the Ayyubids and Mamluks," p. 181.
38 Hans I. Gottschalk, Al-Malik al-Kamil von Ägypten und seine Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1958), p. 88.
39 R.J.C. Broadhurst, A History of the Ayyubid Sultans of Egypt Translated from the Arabic of al-Maqrizi (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 26.
40 Ibid., p. 26.
41 Ibid., p. 207.
42 Quoted in Claude Cahen and Ibrahim Chabbouh, "Le testament d'al-Malik as-Salih Ayyub,"Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales, 29 (1977): 100.
43 Sivan, Interpretations of Islam, p. 100.
44 ‘Ali b. ‘Abd al-Kafi as-Subki (d. 746/XX), Shifa' as-Saqam fi Ziyarat Khayr al-Anam (Cairo, 1318), p. 49. Referenced in Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-1099, trans. from Hebrew (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 99.
45 James Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1970), p. 171.
46 Henry McMahon to John Shuckburgh, Mar. 12, 1922, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4, companion document volume, part 3, p. 1805. The author thanks Sir Martin for this reference.
47 Quoted in Pierre van Paasen, Days of Our Years (New York: Hillman-Curl, 1939), p. 379. Although van Paasen's credibility has sometimes been called into doubt, his biographers H. David Kirk and Beverly Tansey have checked out "his often colorful pronouncements against the sober realities" and found him reliable ("Pierre van Paasen's Unheeded Warnings of a Coming Holocaust,"Midstream, July/Aug. 2000, p. 10.
48 Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, "The Sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam," Some Religious Aspects of Islam: A Collection of Articles (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), p. 70.
49 Milhemet Ha-Meqomot Ha-Qedoshim (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim Le-Heker Yisrael, 2000).
50 Quoted in Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem: The Torn City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), p. 28.
51 Marshall J. Breger and Thomas A. Idinopulos, Jerusalem's Holy Places and the Peace Process(Washington: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998), p. 15.
52 Malcolm H. Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958-70, 3d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
53 Text in Y. Harkabi, The Palestinian Covenant and its Meaning (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1979), p. 126.
54 Lazarus-Yafeh, "The Sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam," p. 223.
55 The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 29, 2000. The inclusion of Christians (and the absence of Jews) makes Arafat's political purposes particularly obvious.
56 PA Mufti ‘Ikrama Sabri quoted in Khalid Amayreh, "Mufti of Palestine: Alqods is the Sister of Mecca and Madina," Islamic Association for Palestine, Aug. 6, 2000; Hasan Abu ‘Ali, a stone throwing teenager, quoted in Associated Press, Sept. 30, 2000.
57 Martin Kramer, "Redeeming Jerusalem: The Pan-Islamic Premise of Hizballah," The Iranian Revolution and the Muslim World, ed. David Menashri (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990), p. 125.
58 Cited in Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi, Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 23.
59 Examples in English include A. L. Tibawi, Jerusalem: Its Place in Islam and Arab History(Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969); M. A. Aamiri, Jerusalem: Arab Origins and Heritage(London: Longman, 1978); Islamic Council of Europe, Jerusalem: The Key to World Peace(London: Islamic Council of Europe, 1980).
60 Such as Imad Saleh, Entre mon rêve et Jérusalem: Poèmes (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999).
61 Reuters, Oct. 21, 2000.
62 Reuters, June 14, 2001.
63 Ha'aretz, June 11, 2001.
64 Al-Quds, Nov. 14, 1997.
65 Ghada Talhami, "Jerusalem in the Muslim Consciousness," The Muslim World, 86 (1996): 229.
66 Ibrahim Hooper, "Jerusalem Belongs to All Faiths," The Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1996.
67 Yunis Yusuf, a 78-year old Palestinian who sells vegetables in the Dheisheh refugee camp, in Christine Hauser, "Jerusalem is explosive issue at U.S. peace summit," Reuters, July 10, 2000.
68 English examples: The Holy Qur-an: Text, Translation and Commentary by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, fn. 2168 and The Meaning of the Glorious Koran by Mohammed Marmeduke Pickthall, fn. 2.
69 The Korân: Translated into English from the Original Arabic by Reverend George Sale (first published in 1734).
70 The Message of the Qur'än: Translated and explained by Muhammad Asad.
71 The Quran: A New Interpretation, Textual Exegesis by Muhammad Baqir Behbudi, trans. Colin Turner.
72 "American Muslim Organizations Emphasize Muslim Rights in Jerusalem," July 10, 2000, a statement endorsed by American Muslim Council, American Muslim Foundation, American Muslims for Jerusalem, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Association for Palestine, Islamic Circle of North America, Islamic Society of North America, Muslim Public Affairs Council.
73 Hooper, "Jerusalem Belongs to All Faiths."
74 The Palestinian Information Center, Sept. 21, 2000.
75 Time.com, Apr. 10, 2001.
76 See http://al-awda.org, May 16, 2001.
77‘Abd al-Hamid as-Sa'ih, Radio Amman, Sept. 23, 1967, quoted in Middle East Record, 3 (1967): 294.
78 Quoted in David Holden and Richard Johns, The House of Saud: The Rise and Rule of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p. 344.
79 Interviewed by Aaron Lerner of the Independent Media Review & Analysis, an Internet service at http://www.virtual.co.il/city_services/lists/imra-l, Mar. 24, 1997.
80 See http://www.pna.org/mininfo/j_ourcap/sites.htm.
81 Makor Rishon, May 22, 1998; Die Welt, Jan. 17, 2001.
82 Makor Rishon, May 22, 1998. Curiously, A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif (Jerusalem: Supreme Moslem Council, 1930), a nine-page English-language tourist guide, tells otherwise: "The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings." A footnote refers to 2 Samuel 26:25. The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 26, 2001, reports on this booklet.
83 Al- Jazira Television, June 28, 1998.
84 As described in "Recent study reveals: Al-Haram Al-Sharif's western wall is not the Wailing," ArabicNews.com, Mar. 5, 2001, http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/010305/2001030524.html.
85 Wikalat al-Anba' al-Falastiniya, Oct. 25, 1990; PA Mufti ‘Ikrama Sabri, Reuters, Feb. 20, 2001. Two days later, the Egyptian mufti endorsed this fatwa (Reuters, Feb. 22, 2001).
86 The Jerusalem Report, Apr. 3, 1997. A. L. Tibawi, Jerusalem: Its Place in Islamic and Arab History (Beirut: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969) primarily argues against any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in general and to the Western Wall in particular, which Tibawi in one place (p. 34) disrespectfully refers to as "the Wailing place."
87 Sheikh Muhammad Husayn, The New York Times, Oct. 27, 1996.
88 Voice of Palestine, Feb. 23, 2001.
89 Sawt Al-Haqq wa'l-Hurriya, Aug. 25, 2000. Nonetheless, out of "respect to Judaism," the Palestinian Authority is willing to permit Jews to pray at the Western Wall—on condition Jews have no sovereign rights there; as PA Mufti ‘Ikrima Sabri puts it, "granting free access to the wall does not mean that the wall will belong to them. The wall is ours." (Kull Al-Arab, Aug. 16, 2000). All quotations from Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), "The Debate at Camp David over Jerusalem's Holy Places," Aug. 28, 2000.
90 Al-Hayat al-Jadida (Gaza), Aug. 10, 2000. Cited in "The Debate at Camp David over Jerusalem's Holy Places."
91 Associated Press, Sept. 14, 2000.
92 Reuters, Sept. 19, 2000.
93 For example, in English: Mohammed Abdul Hameed Al-Khateeb, Al-Quds: The Place of Jerusalem in Classical Judaic and Islamic Traditions (London: Ta-Ha, 1419/1998); Ghada Hashem Talhami, "Academic Myths and Propaganda," Middle East Policy, Feb. 2000, pp. 113-29.
94 Islamic Association for Palestine, "Camp David II Must Address the Historical Injustices against the Palestinian People," July 12, 2000.
95The New York Times, Mar. 1, 1997.
96 Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 70-71.
97 At-Tabari, Ta'rikh ar-Rusul wa'l-Muluk, vol. 1, ed. M.J. de Goeje, et al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1879-1901), pp. 2408-09; text in Bernard Lewis, Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, vol. 2 of Religion and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 3.
98 As-Suyuti, "Ithaf al-Akhissa," manuscript, Hebrew University Library, fol. 81a, l.8, quoted in "al-Kuds" in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. The curious term Al-Masjid al-Haram ("Mosque of the Sanctuary") is not in use among Muslims.
99 On which, Gil, A History of Palestine, pp. 67 note, 90, 102.
100 Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, "Arafat's Gift: The Return of Ariel Sharon," The New Yorker, Jan. 29, 2001, p. 55.
101 Eva Baer, "Visual Representations of Jerusalem's Holy Islamic Sites," The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art, published as Journal of the Center of Jewish Art, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, vol. 23-24, ed. Bianca Kühnel, (1997-98): 392.
102 Ami Ayalon, Egypt's Quest for Cultural Orientation (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1999), p. 7. Reference to Arthur Jeffrey, "The Suppressed Qur'an Commentary of Muhammad Abu Zaid," Der Islam 20 (1932), p. 306.
103 Reuters, Mar. 28, 2001.
104 Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (London, Profile Books, 2001), p. 11. On p. 13, Wasserstein notes that "political considerations have played a significant part" in all three of the major monotheistic traditions' focus on Jerusalem.
105 Sivan, Interpretations of Islam, p. 79.
106 Moshe Kohn, The Jerusalem Post, June 2, 2000.
107 Abdul Hadi Palazzi, "Antizionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary Islamic Milieu" at http://www.ummah.net/islamic_institute/.
108 Heribert Busse, "Jerusalem and Mecca, the Temple and the Kaaba," The Holy Land in History and Thought, ed. Moshe Sharon (Leiden: E J. Brill, 1988), pp. 236-46, provides a fuller list of comparisons and connections between the two cities and concludes that the many similarities are not a coincidence: the Prophet Muhammad, he finds, apparently "made use of elements from Jewish sources" in transforming the Ka‘ba from a local, pagan temple into a universal, monotheistic sanctuary (p. 244).
109The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 31, 1997.
110 Abdul Hadi Palazzi, "Antizionism and Antisemitism at http://www.ummah.net/islamic_institute/. Palazzi also notes the curious fact that those Islamists who closely follow Ibn Taymiya's ideas about politics are also the ones leading the fight for an Islamic Jerusalem; they choose entirely to ignore the fact that Ibn Taymiya himself saw no special role for Jerusalem in Islam.
111 The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 28, 1997.
2 It is, however, in some places referred to, such as Sura 17:7. It also bears noting that "Mecca" appears just once in the Qur'an.
3 The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 23, 2000.
4 Associated Press, Aug. 11, 2000; Reuters, Aug. 25, 2000.
5 Reuters, Aug. 12, 2000.
6 American Muslim Council, "American Muslims Identify Top Ten Issues," Feb. 29, 2000; Council on American-Islamic Relations, "New Survey Reiterates American Muslim Concern for Jerusalem," July 6, 2000.
7 At-Tabari, Jami` al-Bayan fi Tafsir al-Qur'an (Cairo, 1321/1903), quoted in F. E. Peters,Jerusalem (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 181.
8 W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad in Medina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 200.
9 Quoted in Peters, Jerusalem, pp. 195-96.
10 Its holiness in the monotheistic traditions gave it a special standing. For example, while the word for Zion in Arabic is Sihyawn (or Sahyun) and it historically refers to Jerusalem (or sometimes to Byzantium), on rare occasions it has referred to Mecca, possibly "an early tendency to enhance the holiness of Mecca by attributing to it holy merits of Biblical places and persons." The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, c.v. "Sihyawn."
11 Amikam Elad, "Why Did ‘Abd al-Malik Build the Dome of the Rock?" Bayt al-Maqdis: 'Abd al-Malik's Jerusalem, ed. Julian Raby and Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), vol. 1, p. 48.
12 Izhak Hasson, "The Muslim View of Jerusalem: The Qur'an and Hadith," The History of Jerusalem: The Early Muslim Period, 638-1099, ed. Joshua Prawer and Haggai Ben-Shammai (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 358.
13 For a revisionist account, which interprets the construction of the Dome of the Rock as the beginning of Islam, see Moshe Sharon, "The Birth of Islam in the Holy Land," The Holy Land in History and Thought, ed. Moshe Sharon (Leiden: E J. Brill, 1988), pp. 225-35.
14 B. Schreike, "Die Himmelreise Muhammeds," Der Islam 6 (1915-16): 1-30; J. Horovitz, "Muhammeds Himmelfahrt," Der Islam 9 (1919): 159-83; Heribert Busse, "Jerusalem in the Story of Muhammad's Night Journey and Ascension," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 14 (1991): 1-40. See also Heribert Busse and Georg Kretschmar, Jerusalemer Heiligstumstraditionen (Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987).
15 Arthur Jeffrey, "The Suppressed Qur'an Commentary of Muhammad Abu Zaid," Der Islam, 20 (1932): 306.
16 Alfred Guillaume, "Where Was Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa?" Al-Andalus, (18) 1953: 323-36.
17Quoted in Joseph van Ess, "‘Abd al-Malik and the Dome of the Rock," Bayt al-Maqdis: `Abd al-Malik's Jerusalem, ed. Julian Raby and Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), vol. 1, p. 93.
18 Ibn al-Rawandi, "Origins of Islam: A Critical Look at the Sources," The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, ed. Ibn Warraq (New York: Prometheus, 2000), p.101.
19 A. L. Tibawi, Jerusalem: Its Place in Islam and Arab History (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969), p. 9.
20 Examples are in Hasson, "The Muslim View of Jerusalem," p. 353.
21 R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, "The Meaning of Jerusalem to Jews, Christians, and Muslims," Jerusalem in the Mind of the Western World, 1800-1948, vol. 5 of With Eyes toward Zion, ed. Yehoshua Ben-Arieh and Moshe Davis (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), p. 10. The "virtues of Jerusalem" literature was once thought to date from centuries later, but recent research has established its Umayyad origins.
22 Ignaz Goldziher, Muhammadanische Studien, vol. 2 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1889-90), pp. 34-37.
23 Abdul Aziz Duri, "Jerusalem in the Early Islamic Period, 7th-11th Centuries AD," in Jerusalem in History: 3,000 B.C. to the Present Day, rev. ed., ed. Kamil J. Asali (London: Kegan Paul International, 1997), p. 112.
24 Hasson, "The Muslim View of Jerusalem," p. 377.
25 Paul Wheatley, The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh through the Tenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 297.
26 F. E. Peters, The Distant Shrine: The Islamic Centuries in Jerusalem (New York: AMS, 1993), p. 71.
27Shams ad-Din al-Muqaddasi, Ahsan at-Taqasim fi Ma`rifat at-Taqalim, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1877). Quoted in Guy Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), p. 86.
28 Mutahhar b. Tahir al-Maqdisi, Kitab al-Bad' wa't-Ta'rikh, vol. 4, ed. Clément Huart (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1907), p. 72.
29Amikam Elad, Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), p. 1.
30 S. D. Goitein, "Al-Kuds," The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d edition, vol. 5, pp. 329, 322.
31 Peters, Jerusalem, p. 214.
32 Robert Irwin, "Muslim Responses to the Crusades," History Today, Apr. 1997, p. 44.
33 Emmanuel Sivan, Interpretations of Islam: Past and Present (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1985), p. 76.
34 Ibid., pp. 83, 87.
35 Ibn Shaddad, An-Nawadir as-Sultaniya wa'l-Mahasin al-Yusufiya, vol. 3 (Paris, 1884), p. 265; quoted in Donald P. Little, "Jerusalem under the Ayyubids and Mamluks, 1187-1516 AD," Jerusalem in History: 3,000 B.C. to the Present Day, rev. ed., ed. Kamil J. Asali (London: Kegan Paul International, 1997), p. 179.
36 Oleg Grabar Mohammad Al-Asad, Abeer Audeh, and Said Nuseibeh, The Shape of the Holy(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 157. See also p. 113.
37 Little, "Jerusalem under the Ayyubids and Mamluks," p. 181.
38 Hans I. Gottschalk, Al-Malik al-Kamil von Ägypten und seine Zeit (Wiesbaden, 1958), p. 88.
39 R.J.C. Broadhurst, A History of the Ayyubid Sultans of Egypt Translated from the Arabic of al-Maqrizi (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 26.
40 Ibid., p. 26.
41 Ibid., p. 207.
42 Quoted in Claude Cahen and Ibrahim Chabbouh, "Le testament d'al-Malik as-Salih Ayyub,"Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales, 29 (1977): 100.
43 Sivan, Interpretations of Islam, p. 100.
44 ‘Ali b. ‘Abd al-Kafi as-Subki (d. 746/XX), Shifa' as-Saqam fi Ziyarat Khayr al-Anam (Cairo, 1318), p. 49. Referenced in Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-1099, trans. from Hebrew (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 99.
45 James Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1970), p. 171.
46 Henry McMahon to John Shuckburgh, Mar. 12, 1922, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4, companion document volume, part 3, p. 1805. The author thanks Sir Martin for this reference.
47 Quoted in Pierre van Paasen, Days of Our Years (New York: Hillman-Curl, 1939), p. 379. Although van Paasen's credibility has sometimes been called into doubt, his biographers H. David Kirk and Beverly Tansey have checked out "his often colorful pronouncements against the sober realities" and found him reliable ("Pierre van Paasen's Unheeded Warnings of a Coming Holocaust,"Midstream, July/Aug. 2000, p. 10.
48 Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, "The Sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam," Some Religious Aspects of Islam: A Collection of Articles (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), p. 70.
49 Milhemet Ha-Meqomot Ha-Qedoshim (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim Le-Heker Yisrael, 2000).
50 Quoted in Meron Benvenisti, Jerusalem: The Torn City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), p. 28.
51 Marshall J. Breger and Thomas A. Idinopulos, Jerusalem's Holy Places and the Peace Process(Washington: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998), p. 15.
52 Malcolm H. Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958-70, 3d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
53 Text in Y. Harkabi, The Palestinian Covenant and its Meaning (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1979), p. 126.
54 Lazarus-Yafeh, "The Sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam," p. 223.
55 The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 29, 2000. The inclusion of Christians (and the absence of Jews) makes Arafat's political purposes particularly obvious.
56 PA Mufti ‘Ikrama Sabri quoted in Khalid Amayreh, "Mufti of Palestine: Alqods is the Sister of Mecca and Madina," Islamic Association for Palestine, Aug. 6, 2000; Hasan Abu ‘Ali, a stone throwing teenager, quoted in Associated Press, Sept. 30, 2000.
57 Martin Kramer, "Redeeming Jerusalem: The Pan-Islamic Premise of Hizballah," The Iranian Revolution and the Muslim World, ed. David Menashri (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990), p. 125.
58 Cited in Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi, Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 23.
59 Examples in English include A. L. Tibawi, Jerusalem: Its Place in Islam and Arab History(Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969); M. A. Aamiri, Jerusalem: Arab Origins and Heritage(London: Longman, 1978); Islamic Council of Europe, Jerusalem: The Key to World Peace(London: Islamic Council of Europe, 1980).
60 Such as Imad Saleh, Entre mon rêve et Jérusalem: Poèmes (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1999).
61 Reuters, Oct. 21, 2000.
62 Reuters, June 14, 2001.
63 Ha'aretz, June 11, 2001.
64 Al-Quds, Nov. 14, 1997.
65 Ghada Talhami, "Jerusalem in the Muslim Consciousness," The Muslim World, 86 (1996): 229.
66 Ibrahim Hooper, "Jerusalem Belongs to All Faiths," The Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1996.
67 Yunis Yusuf, a 78-year old Palestinian who sells vegetables in the Dheisheh refugee camp, in Christine Hauser, "Jerusalem is explosive issue at U.S. peace summit," Reuters, July 10, 2000.
68 English examples: The Holy Qur-an: Text, Translation and Commentary by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, fn. 2168 and The Meaning of the Glorious Koran by Mohammed Marmeduke Pickthall, fn. 2.
69 The Korân: Translated into English from the Original Arabic by Reverend George Sale (first published in 1734).
70 The Message of the Qur'än: Translated and explained by Muhammad Asad.
71 The Quran: A New Interpretation, Textual Exegesis by Muhammad Baqir Behbudi, trans. Colin Turner.
72 "American Muslim Organizations Emphasize Muslim Rights in Jerusalem," July 10, 2000, a statement endorsed by American Muslim Council, American Muslim Foundation, American Muslims for Jerusalem, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Association for Palestine, Islamic Circle of North America, Islamic Society of North America, Muslim Public Affairs Council.
73 Hooper, "Jerusalem Belongs to All Faiths."
74 The Palestinian Information Center, Sept. 21, 2000.
75 Time.com, Apr. 10, 2001.
76 See http://al-awda.org, May 16, 2001.
77‘Abd al-Hamid as-Sa'ih, Radio Amman, Sept. 23, 1967, quoted in Middle East Record, 3 (1967): 294.
78 Quoted in David Holden and Richard Johns, The House of Saud: The Rise and Rule of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p. 344.
79 Interviewed by Aaron Lerner of the Independent Media Review & Analysis, an Internet service at http://www.virtual.co.il/city_services/lists/imra-l, Mar. 24, 1997.
80 See http://www.pna.org/mininfo/j_ourcap/sites.htm.
81 Makor Rishon, May 22, 1998; Die Welt, Jan. 17, 2001.
82 Makor Rishon, May 22, 1998. Curiously, A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif (Jerusalem: Supreme Moslem Council, 1930), a nine-page English-language tourist guide, tells otherwise: "The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings." A footnote refers to 2 Samuel 26:25. The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 26, 2001, reports on this booklet.
83 Al- Jazira Television, June 28, 1998.
84 As described in "Recent study reveals: Al-Haram Al-Sharif's western wall is not the Wailing," ArabicNews.com, Mar. 5, 2001, http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/010305/2001030524.html.
85 Wikalat al-Anba' al-Falastiniya, Oct. 25, 1990; PA Mufti ‘Ikrama Sabri, Reuters, Feb. 20, 2001. Two days later, the Egyptian mufti endorsed this fatwa (Reuters, Feb. 22, 2001).
86 The Jerusalem Report, Apr. 3, 1997. A. L. Tibawi, Jerusalem: Its Place in Islamic and Arab History (Beirut: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969) primarily argues against any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in general and to the Western Wall in particular, which Tibawi in one place (p. 34) disrespectfully refers to as "the Wailing place."
87 Sheikh Muhammad Husayn, The New York Times, Oct. 27, 1996.
88 Voice of Palestine, Feb. 23, 2001.
89 Sawt Al-Haqq wa'l-Hurriya, Aug. 25, 2000. Nonetheless, out of "respect to Judaism," the Palestinian Authority is willing to permit Jews to pray at the Western Wall—on condition Jews have no sovereign rights there; as PA Mufti ‘Ikrima Sabri puts it, "granting free access to the wall does not mean that the wall will belong to them. The wall is ours." (Kull Al-Arab, Aug. 16, 2000). All quotations from Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), "The Debate at Camp David over Jerusalem's Holy Places," Aug. 28, 2000.
90 Al-Hayat al-Jadida (Gaza), Aug. 10, 2000. Cited in "The Debate at Camp David over Jerusalem's Holy Places."
91 Associated Press, Sept. 14, 2000.
92 Reuters, Sept. 19, 2000.
93 For example, in English: Mohammed Abdul Hameed Al-Khateeb, Al-Quds: The Place of Jerusalem in Classical Judaic and Islamic Traditions (London: Ta-Ha, 1419/1998); Ghada Hashem Talhami, "Academic Myths and Propaganda," Middle East Policy, Feb. 2000, pp. 113-29.
94 Islamic Association for Palestine, "Camp David II Must Address the Historical Injustices against the Palestinian People," July 12, 2000.
95The New York Times, Mar. 1, 1997.
96 Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 70-71.
97 At-Tabari, Ta'rikh ar-Rusul wa'l-Muluk, vol. 1, ed. M.J. de Goeje, et al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1879-1901), pp. 2408-09; text in Bernard Lewis, Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, vol. 2 of Religion and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 3.
98 As-Suyuti, "Ithaf al-Akhissa," manuscript, Hebrew University Library, fol. 81a, l.8, quoted in "al-Kuds" in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. The curious term Al-Masjid al-Haram ("Mosque of the Sanctuary") is not in use among Muslims.
99 On which, Gil, A History of Palestine, pp. 67 note, 90, 102.
100 Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, "Arafat's Gift: The Return of Ariel Sharon," The New Yorker, Jan. 29, 2001, p. 55.
101 Eva Baer, "Visual Representations of Jerusalem's Holy Islamic Sites," The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art, published as Journal of the Center of Jewish Art, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, vol. 23-24, ed. Bianca Kühnel, (1997-98): 392.
102 Ami Ayalon, Egypt's Quest for Cultural Orientation (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1999), p. 7. Reference to Arthur Jeffrey, "The Suppressed Qur'an Commentary of Muhammad Abu Zaid," Der Islam 20 (1932), p. 306.
103 Reuters, Mar. 28, 2001.
104 Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (London, Profile Books, 2001), p. 11. On p. 13, Wasserstein notes that "political considerations have played a significant part" in all three of the major monotheistic traditions' focus on Jerusalem.
105 Sivan, Interpretations of Islam, p. 79.
106 Moshe Kohn, The Jerusalem Post, June 2, 2000.
107 Abdul Hadi Palazzi, "Antizionism and Antisemitism in the Contemporary Islamic Milieu" at http://www.ummah.net/islamic_institute/.
108 Heribert Busse, "Jerusalem and Mecca, the Temple and the Kaaba," The Holy Land in History and Thought, ed. Moshe Sharon (Leiden: E J. Brill, 1988), pp. 236-46, provides a fuller list of comparisons and connections between the two cities and concludes that the many similarities are not a coincidence: the Prophet Muhammad, he finds, apparently "made use of elements from Jewish sources" in transforming the Ka‘ba from a local, pagan temple into a universal, monotheistic sanctuary (p. 244).
109The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 31, 1997.
110 Abdul Hadi Palazzi, "Antizionism and Antisemitism at http://www.ummah.net/islamic_institute/. Palazzi also notes the curious fact that those Islamists who closely follow Ibn Taymiya's ideas about politics are also the ones leading the fight for an Islamic Jerusalem; they choose entirely to ignore the fact that Ibn Taymiya himself saw no special role for Jerusalem in Islam.
111 The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 28, 1997.
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