The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem by Daniel Pipes

The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem

by Daniel Pipes

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

An aerial view of the Temple Mount.

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 purest 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."

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.

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" and their brethren in Jordan yell "We sacrifice our blood and soul for Al-Aqsa"? Why does King Fahd of Saudi Arabia call on Muslim states to protect "the holy city [that] belongs to all Muslims across the world"? Why did two surveys of American Muslims find Jerusalem their most pressing foreign policy issue?

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 the qibla 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." 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."

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 planks and large beams over some ruined remains." Not for the last time, safely under Muslim control, Jerusalem became a backwater.

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. 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." 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. 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 Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem.

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. 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 Medina or a town called Ji'rana, about ten miles from Mecca, which the Prophet visited in 630.
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 referring to 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."

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."

Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

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." 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. Jerusalem 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." Accounts 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. 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. 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.

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" 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." 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. 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," 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." 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."

By the early tenth century, notes Peters, Muslim rule over Jerusalem had an "almost casual" quality with "no particular political significance." 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. Emmanuel Sivan of the Hebrew University adds that "one does not detect either shock or a sense of religious loss and humiliation."

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." 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."

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: 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. 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." 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" 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." 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." By 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."

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," 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. The 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 Suleyman 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. 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."

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 Paassen, 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."

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." British rule over the 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, Muslim scholars over the centuries had variously theorized about the prophet tying the 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." East Jerusalem's Municipal Council 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."

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. 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."

"As during the era of the Crusaders," Lazarus-Yafeh points out, Muslim leaders "began again to emphasize the sanctity of Jerusalem in Islamic tradition." 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." Extravagant statements became the norm (Jerusalem was now said to be "comparable in holiness" to Mecca and Medina; or even "our most sacred place"). 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.

A Saudi 50-riyal bill showing both the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

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."

A mural in north Tehran shows the Ayatollah Khomeini looming over a picture of the Dome of the Rock, reminding Iranians of the importance their revolutionary leader placed on this holy site.

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." Since shortly after the regime's founding, its 1-rial coin and 1,000-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 on to 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.

A corrected 1,000-rial Iranian banknote.

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. So emotional has Jerusalem become to Muslims that they write books of poetry about it (especially in Western languages). 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.

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." 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."

Dubious Claims

Along with these high emotions, four 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. 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." Always? 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." 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." 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.

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. 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 translation uses italics:

from the sacred temple of Mecca to the farther temple of Jerusalem

the Asad translation relies on square brackets:

from the Inviolable House of Worship [at Mecca] to the Remote House of Worship [at Jerusalem]

and the Behbudi-Turner version 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. One of their number went yet further; according to Hooper, "the Koran refers to Jerusalem by its Islamic centerpiece, al-Aqsa Mosque." 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."

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." 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."

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." 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." '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." 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." 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." He also makes light of the Jewish connection, dismissively telling an Israeli interviewer, "I heard that your Temple was in Nablus or perhaps Bethlehem." Likewise, Arafat announced that Jews "consider Hebron to be holier than Jerusalem." The head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, announced that "the temple is not to be found underneath Al-Aqsa mosque as the Jews claim."

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.

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. 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." The Voice of Palestine radio station demands that Israeli politicians not be allowed even to touch the wall. '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."

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." 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." 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."

The final step is to deny Jews access to Jerusalem at all. Toward this end, a body of literature has blossomed that insists on an exclusive Islamic claim to all of Jerusalem. 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." A banner carried in a street protest puts it succinctly: "Jerusalem is Arab." 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, 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." 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]."

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." 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, 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."

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." 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.

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."

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." 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." 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." 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.

The similarities are striking. Jews pray thrice daily to Jerusalem and Muslims five times 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. 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.

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.

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," Palazzi concludes.

His analysis has a clear and sensible implication: just as Muslims rule an undivided Mecca, Jews should rule an undivided Jerusalem.

* Such was the misery of the Holy Land at this time, it became a by-word for a depressing place. In his novel The Woman in White (1860), for example, Wilkie Collins describes an unattractive English town, Welmingham, by conjuring up Palestine:

Is there any wilderness of sand in the deserts of Arabia, is there any prospect of desolation among the ruins of Palestine, which can rival the repelling effect on the eye, and the depressing influence on the mind, of an English country town in the first stage of its existence, and in the transition state of its prosperity? … The deserts of Arabia are innocent of our civilised desolation—the ruins of Palestine are incapable of our modern gloom!

---

Nov. 18, 2001 update: For updates to this analysis, see my weblog entry, "More on the Muslim Claim to Jerusalem."

More on the Muslim Claim to Jerusalem

This entry updates the central argument in "The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem," that Jerusalem's religious standing in Islam, depends on political needs.

An aerial view of the Temple Mount.

An article by Danny Rubinstein notes how Israeli Arabs have taken up the cause of Jerusalem because Muslims generally

cannot usually come to Al Aqsa, and the closure prevents even the 3 million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank from coming to Jerusalem. Those remaining, aside from the Arabs of Jerusalem, are the Israeli Muslims, and they have taken upon themselves the historic role of defending the Islamic holy places in the city. The Al Aqsa Association of Sheikh Raid Salah from Umm al-Fahm, the principal Muslim leader in Israel, has for years been carrying out the restoration and renovation in the mosques of the Temple Mount. Hundreds of Muslims from Israel come on the weekends to work as volunteers at the mosques. The Islamic Movement also funds some of the transportation of Israeli Arab worshipers to Al Aqsa.

Rubinstein also paraphrases three important observations by Yitzhak Reiter, editor of a recent book in Hebrew, The Sovereignty of God and Man - Sanctity and Political Centrality on the Temple Mount (Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies):

since the beginning of Islam, the Temple Mount (al-Haram al-Sharif) has flourished during three periods, all of them times when control of Jerusalem passed into non-Muslim hands: the Crusader period, the British Mandate period, and the Israeli period after June 1967. …
although the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem are only in third place in terms of religious importance (after Mecca and Medina, located in Saudi Arabia), politically, they are in first place. This fact has received particular emphasis during the past year, since the failure of the Camp David summit in July 2000.
During those talks, when the final status of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount was discussed between then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and PA Chairman Yasser Arafat and their associates, Israeli demands for sovereignty or some hold on the Temple Mount came up for the first time. Since then, Muslim spokesmen in general, and Palestinians in particular, have tried to deny any Jewish connection to the holy place.

An article from the "Palestine Post," Nov. 20, 1949.

(November 18, 2001)
Nov. 20, 2001 update: This is as good a time as any to recall the Arab states' reluctance to take control of Jerusalem back in November 1949; note the accompanying clipping from thePalestine Post of Nov. 20, 1949. It makes for a striking contrast to the current "Muslim Zionism."
May 15, 2002 update: In "Constructing a Counterfeit History of Jerusalem," I note burgeoning Palestinian attempts to deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem.
June 21, 2002 update: The Scotsman informs us that the Al-Maktoun Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies officially opened last month at the University of Abertay in Dundee. The institute has three research centres, one of which is "The Centre for Islamic Jerusalem Studies," said (unsurprisingly) to be the only institution in the world offering an M. Litt course in Islamic Jerusalem Studies.
Aug. 5, 2003 update: An Egyptian government weekly, Al-Qahira, issued by the Ministry of Culture, published an article by one of its columnists, Ahmad Muhammad 'Arafa, "Was the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey to Palestine or Medina?" in which 'Arafa doubts that the Isra'was to Jerusalem.
Aug. 19, 2003 update: Two weeks later, the intrepid Ahmad Muhammad 'Arafa questions the sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam. I discuss this at greater length in "The Prophet's Night Journey to Jerusalem."
Nov. 26, 2003 update: Ghazi Y. Khankan, executive director of CAIR's New York office, writes a public letter to George W. Bush today listing ten reasons "why Jerusalem and Palestine are of the utmost importance to 1.2 billion Muslims in the world." One of them, for example, is a hadith that "Jerusalem's area of Al-Aqsa Mosque and Masjid Al-Haram in Makkah will be connected together at the end of time."
May 18, 2004 update: In "Why Jerusalem is Not Holy to Muslims," Leah Bat-Chaim makes arguments similar to mine.
Apr. 19, 2004 update: In an article about a game show on Al-Manar, the Hizbullah television station, Neil MacFarquhar explains how "The Mission" differs from others of its genre:

Contestants from around the Arab world compete each Saturday night for cash and the chance to win a virtual trip to Jerusalem. To heighten the drama, points won by the finalists translate directly into steps toward the holy city that are flashed onto a map of the region. The show is a novel way for Hezbollah to promote its theme - that all Arab efforts should be concentrated on reconquering land lost to Israel, especially Jerusalem. "Any program at this television station must present the idea that the occupation of Palestine must end," said Ihab Abi Nassif, a 28-year-old high school physics teacher who is the show's host. "That is the core issue, which is why we work day and night to keep it vivid in people's minds." …
"The Mission" follows a standard game show format, with contestants quizzed about history, literature, geography, science and the arts. But at least half the questions revolve around Palestinian or Islamic history, and at least one contestant is usually Palestinian. … Some questions do focus on the men who carried out suicide operations. "The martyr Amar Hamoud was nicknamed 'The Sword of All Martyrs?' - true or false?" was one recent question. True. Mr. Abi Nassif, who never fails to address the subject of recapturing Jerusalem in his patter, went on to describe the man's exploits.
The prizes are not huge. Players who reach five million Lebanese pounds, or something over $3,000, earn the chance to double their winnings with one "golden question" worth the same amount. When the winner gains the 60 points necessary to reach Jerusalem, the song that is a staple of Hezbollah parades booms out. "Jerusalem is ours and we are coming to it," the chorus says in part.

Jun. 25, 2004 update: In The Qur'an, trans. by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 175, the translator identifies "the furthest place of worship" in footnote b as "In Jerusalem."
Aug. 4, 2005 update: Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spacesby Kimberly Katz arrived today and it has plenty of material confirming my points above about the 1948-67 era. In particular, see these passages:

"Jerusalem was a source of contention for many Palestinians, who claimed that the Holy City was being discriminated against, while Amman, the capital city, received a disproportionate share of political, economic, and infrastructure attention." (p. 81)
Yusuf Hanna wrote in 1954 that while Israel had made Jerusalem its state capital, in Jordan "we reduced Jerusalem from a position of preeminence to its current place that does not rise above the rank of a village." (p. 85)
"Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the [Jordanian] government decided to relocate central ministries left from the mandate period to Amman at Jerusalem's expense. In a memo to the prime minister, Anwar Nusayba, member of parliament for the Jerusalem region, complained of discrimination toward the city." (p. 87).

Jan. 4, 2006 update: I dramatize today one of the implications of this article at "Offer: $1 million for Finding "Jerusalem" in the Koran."

Hassan Khader, founder of the "Al-Quds Encyclopedia."

June 6, 2006 update: "The Muslim use of Zion represents a more powerful force today than the Jewish love of Zion" concludes my article today, "Muslim Zionism," an edited verion of an award speech given in Jerusalem a week earlier.
Sep. 16, 2006 update: Ra'ad Salah, Israel's most radical Islamist leader, told 50,000 demonstrators at a rally yesterday in Umm al-Fahm that Israel's occupation of the Temple Mount will end soon and Jerusalem will becomne the capital of an Islamic state. For good measure, he added that former prime minister Ariel Sharon and current president Moshe Katsav (currently under investigation for alleged sexual misbehavior) are "paying the price" for the damage they did to Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Ali Ünal, The Qur'an: with Annotated Interpretation in Modern English.

Jan. 1, 2007 update: In The Qur'an: with Annotated Interpretation in Modern English, by Ali Ünal (Somerset, N.J.: The Light, 2007), p. 565, the translation of 17:1 reads "from the Sacred Mosque in Makkah to the Masjid al-Aqsa in Quds (Jerusalem)." Footnote 2 compounds the error by stating that "This surah was revealed in Makkah at a time when the Prophet's Mosque in Madinah had not yet been built and the Ka'bah was full of idols; therefore the Muslims turned to that Masjid in Jerusalem for their prayers." The Prophet's Mosque had not yet been built but Al-Aqsa had been? How interesting.
Mar. 15, 2007 update: Re-reading J.J.G. Jansen's 1997 book, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism, I note this passage on p. 133:

in early 1990, a Muslim Brotherhood veteran, Sheikh Muhammad al-Ghazali, declared that once the Jerusalem Aqsa mosque was lost it would be the turn of the Ka'ba [in Mecca].

May 21, 2007 update: New Saudi currency shows Al-Aqsa Mosque on one side of a note and the Dome of the Rock on the other.
May 29, 2007 update: Shmuel Katz today quotes a nice contrast by the British historian Christopher Sykes:

To the Muslims it is not Jerusalem, but a certain site in Jerusalem which is venerated ... the majestic Dome of the Rock. To a Muslim there is a profound difference between Jerusalem and Mecca and Medina. The latter are holy places containing holy sites. Apart from the hallowed rock, Jerusalem has no major Islamic significance.

Aug. 13, 2007 update: Quran: A Reformist Translation, translated and annotated by Edip Yuksel, Layth Saleh al-Shaiban, and Martha Schulte-Nafeh, offers a stunningly different translation of 17.1:

Glory be to the One who took His servant by night from the Restricted Temple to the most distant temple.

Quran: A Reformist Translation, translated and annotated by Edip Yuksel, Layth Saleh al-Shaiban, and Martha Schulte-Nafeh..

What's so interesting here is that the translators understand masjid not in its technical Islamic meaning of mosque but in its generic pre-Islamic sense of temple. That conceptual breakthrough makes good sense to me.
Comment: I am quoted in this Qur'an endorsing it as follows:

I am not a Qur'an scholar and therefore am not in a position to judge the accuracy of your translation, and especially not the revisionist understandings of some controversial ayats. But I can say that the effort you and your colleagues have undertaken is very much in keeping with my sense of the process of modernization that the Qur'an itself and the Islamic religion more broadly must undergo. As such, I salute your work and hope it will be published and extensively discussed both in the United States and abroad.

Oct. 12, 2007 update: Comes news that, in anticipation of the U.S.-sponsored Annapolis meeting, the "Palestinians Want Western Wall as Part of Any Settlement." Adnan al-Husseini, adviser to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas on religious affairs, says the PA wants "full control" over Jerusalem. "The Wailing Wall is a Muslim waqf [mortmain], and therefore cannot be abandoned."
Dec. 11, 2007 update: It's not clear when Harun Yahya (a pen name used by the Turkish writer, Adnan Oktar) wrote "Muslim Palestine," but it appears to date from late 2001. It offers the original argument that Jerusalem ought to be under Muslim control because, "In contrast to Jews and Christians, Muslims have made their regard for the sacredness of Palestine an opportunity to bring peace" to the city. Indeed, "peace and harmony lasted as long as Muslims ruled."
May 26, 2008 update: The third edition of Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City (Yale University Press) has just arrived; chapter 5 contains a section on "Jerusalem Demoted" that provides detail at the Jordanian regime's efforts in the 1948-67 period to downplay the city's signficance: "During the nineteen years of Jordanian rule," Wasserstein writes, "Jerusalem's relative weight in the Jordanian polity was systematically reduced. … The Arab sector of the city was a much-diminished rump." Various examples then follow. Oddly, the British government considered it within its jurisdiction to remonstrate with Amman over this issue. The consul-general in 1955 wrote his government:

we would be well advised to make it clear to the Jordanian Government … that we are not prepared to allow them to treat the Old City of Jerusalem as though it were nothing more than a provincial townlet in Jordan, without history or importance."

Wasserstein notes that the Palestinian nationalist focus on Jerusalem was one reason for its neglect and demotion by the monarchy.
June 4, 2008 update: In a stunning exception to the usual hackneyed Palestinian/Islamist claims to Jerusalem, Al-Jazeera invited Bar Ilan University political scientist Mordechai Kedar to discuss the city. He pulled no punches, telling the show's host, Jimal Rian, that "This was our capital 3,000 years ago, and we were here when your forefathers were drinking wine, burying girls alive and worshipping pre-Muslim idols. This is our city and it will be our city forever." Arutz-7 recounts:

His reference to Muslims drinking wine, which is forbidden in Islam, infuriated the host. Rian wagged his finger in the air and said excitedly, "If you want to talk about history, you cannot erase Jerusalem from the Koran, and don't attack the Muslim religion if we want to continue talking." Dr. Kedar replied, "Jerusalem is not mentioned even once in the Koran. Jerusalem is a Jewish city." The Al Jazeera host responded by quoting a verse from the Koran in which he thought Jerusalem was mentioned by name, but stopped in the middle upon realizing that it only refers to "the farthest place." Dr. Kedar: "Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran even once. You can't rewrite the Koran on air on Al Jazeera."

The exchange can be seen on YouTube.
Aug. 14, 2008 update: Lela Gilbert of the Hudson Institute quotes Gabriel Barkay, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, on the origins of the exclusive Muslim claim to the Temple Mount, what she calls "Temple denial":

This denial of the historical, spiritual and archeological connections of the Jews to the Temple Mount is something new. There was always talk about the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem - called the "praise of Jerusalem" – in Arabic literature, in Islamic literature. This new idea of Temple denial is due to the Arabic fear of Jewish aspirations connected to the Temple Mount. It is part of something I call the "cultural intifada."

Barkay traces the change back to the 1990s:

In the Washington, DC think tanks surrounding President Bill Clinton, it was understood that the Temple Mount was the crux of the problem of the Middle East conflict. These think tanks decided that if there could be "split sovereignty" on the Temple Mount, then split sovereignty could also be achieved over the entire land of Palestine.
So they suggested that in a future agreement, the Temple Mount would be split horizontally. That is to say that whatever is above ground, the part that includes the shrines of the Muslims, would be under Palestinian sovereignty. Whatever is underground, which would include the remnants of the Temple of the Jews, would be under Israeli sovereignty.
It's a brilliant idea, an excellent idea, but totally idiotic from a practical point of view. You cannot have a building standing with its foundations in another country. You cannot have a building with the infrastructure and the plumbing in another country. And you cannot have sovereignty on the subground without having accessibility to the subground, because the accessibility is from above ground. The whole thing was stupid.

Sep. 15, 2008 update: Following his Al-Jazeera appearance (see the June 4, 2008 update, above), Bar Ilan University's Mordechai Kedar has written an article, "The myth of al-Aqsa: Holiness of Jerusalem to Islam has always been politically motivated," in Yedi'ot Aharonot. His argument closely follows the once I have been making since 1997.
He begins by noting the small importance of Jerusalem to Muhammad after theqibla was changed to Mecca. Only in 682, when Ibn az-Zubayr rebelled against the Umayyad rulers in Damascus and conquered Mecca, did the Umayyad caliph, who needed an alternative site for the pilgrimage, settle on Jerusalem which was under his control. To justify this change, Koran 17.1 was reinterpreted to refer to Jerusalem.
Kedar then considers the difficulties with placing "al-masjid al-aqsa" in Jerusalem.

For one, the people of Mecca, who knew Muhammad well, did not believe this story. Only Abu Bakr, (later the first Calif,) believed him and thus was called al-Siddiq ("the believer".)
The second difficulty is that Islamic tradition tells us that al-Aqsa mosque is near Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula. This was unequivocally stated in "Kitab al-Maghazi," a book by the Muslim historian and geographer al-Waqidi. According to al-Waqidi, there were two "masjeds" (places of prayer) in al-Gi'irranah, a village between Mecca and Ta'if - one was "the closer mosque" (al-masjid al-adna) and the other was "the further mosque" (al-masjid al-aqsa,) and Muhammad would pray there when he went out of town.
This description by al-Waqidi which is supported by a chain of authorities (isnad) was not "convenient" for the Islamic propaganda of the 7^th Century. In order to establish a basis for the awareness of the "holiness" of Jerusalem in Islam, the Califs of the Umayyad dynasty invented many "traditions" upholding the value of Jerusalem, which would justify pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the faithful Muslims. Thus was al-Masjid al-Aqsa "transported" to Jerusalem. It should be noted that Saladin also adopted the myth of al-Aqsa and those "traditions" in order to recruit and inflame the Muslim warriors against the Crusaders in the 12^th Century.

Kedar then interprets current events in this light, seeing that Yasir Arafat "did exactly what the Califs of the Umayyad dynasty did 1300 years ago: He marshaled the holiness of Jerusalem to serve his political ends." Kedar argues that because "the holiness of Jerusalem to Islam has always been, and still is, no more than a politically motivated holiness," Muslim leaders are limited in what they can do. Indeed, one who showed flexibility on this issue "would be putting his political head on the block should he give it up."
The essay ends with two questions:

Must Judaism and Christianity defer to myths related in Islamic texts or envisioned in Mohammad's dreams, long after Jerusalem was established as the ancient, true center of these two religions, which preceded Islam? Should Israel give up on its capital just because some Muslims decided to recycle the political problems of the Umayyads 1250 years after the curtain came down on their role in history?

Nov. 2, 2008 update: For scholarly background on the historic Jewish connection to Jerusalem, see Rivkah Fishman-Duker's survey of ancient Greek and Roman pagan authors dating from the third century BCE to the third century CE, for all of whom "Jerusalem definitely was a Jewish city." The article is at "'Jerusalem: Capital of the Jews': The Jewish Identity of Jerusalem in Greek and Roman Sources," Jewish Political Studies Review 20:1-2 (Fall 2008): 119-40. The quotes in turn can be found at Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1980).
Nov. 6, 2008 update: Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian Authority official in charge of diplomacy with Israel, told a media briefing that the Temple Mount has nothing to do with Judaism, reports Aaron Klein in "Jewish Temples never existed, says top Palestinian negotiator: Official leading peace talks claims Israel trying to 'invent' historical Jerusalem link." Qurei, a supposed moderate, began by noting that "Israeli occupation authorities are trying to find a so-called Jewish historical connection" between Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, declaring that

all these attempts will fail. The [Temple Mount] is 100 percent Muslim. The world must be mobilized against all these Israeli attempts to change the symbols and signs of Jerusalem. There is nothing Jewish about Al Aqsa Mosque. There was no so-called Jewish Temple. It's imaginary. Jerusalem is 100 percent Muslim. The Arab world is called to interfere to stop the Israeli plans in Jerusalem, to stop the Israeli attempts to create a Jewish character to Jerusalem and Al Aqsa mosque. Also to the Old City, which is the first step in the war to defend Jerusalem and Al Aqsa. They are competing against time in order to create facts on ground in the surrounding the imaginary Temple.

Jan. 4, 2009 update: A 16-page 1925 booklet in English published by the "Supreme Moslem Council" and titled A Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif, Jerusalem, contains passage that directly endorse the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. First, on p. 4, the guide discusses the location of the Temple Mount:

Top of the front cover of "A Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif, Jerusalem," from 1925

The site is one of the oldest in the world. Its sanctity dates from the earliest (perhaps from pre-historic) times. Its identity with the site of Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to the universal belief, on which "David built there an alter unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings."

The quotation about David is footnoted to II Samuel 24:25. Second, on p. 16, the Brief Guide tells about the underground area known as Solomon's Stables:

This is a vast substerranean [sic] chamber … Little is known for certain of the early history of the chamber itself. It dates probably as far back as the construction of Solomon's Temple. According to Josephus, it was in existence and was used as a place of refuge by the Jews at the time of the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D.

Jan. 22, 2009 update: Ibn Taymiya's anti-Jerusalem got an airing in my original article; I now learn that a key work of his on this subject, Qa'ida fi Ziyara Bayt al-Muqaddas, was published, with commentary, by Charles D. Matthews in "A Muslim Iconoclast (Ibn Taymīyyeh) on the 'Merits' of Jerusalem and Palestine," Journal of the American Oriental Society, 56 (1936), pp. 1-21.
Comment: Ibn Taymiya has been the single most important inspiration for modern Islamism, so it comes as a bit of a shock to read how, in the pre-Islamist days of 1936, Matthews could write that "It is reassuring for the future of the Islamic East that the spirit of Ibn Taymiyyeh in milder form has taken possession of many leaders of the people."
Apr. 24, 2009 update: Egypt's minister of awqaf (religious endowments),Muhammad Hamdi Zaqzuq, urges Muslims to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem so as to reinforce the city's Muslim identity and assure its role as capital of a future Palestinian state. "Just as Muslims go on pilgrimage... to Mecca, they should also go to Jerusalem and to Al-Aqsa Mosque by the hundreds of thousands every year. We can show the whole world that Jerusalem is something that concerns all Muslims. … I invite all Muslims... to go to Jerusalem, even with Israeli visas." If this proposition is followed through, he went on, "the whole world, and Israel, will have to accept this reality, which is that Jerusalem is for Muslims and they will not give up on it."
Zaqzuq acknowledged that he is exposing himself to virulent attacks on the grounds that he seeks normalization with Israel and that his proposal has so far been widely rejected.
July 1, 2009 update: In a report on a panel discussion of Jerusalem's disposition at the Center for American Progress in Washington, Hillel Fendel reports that two of the participants, Michael Bell, a former Canadian Ambassador to Jordan, Egypt and Israel, and Marshall Breger, a professor of law at Catholic University, think little of my argument about the Muslim claim to Jerusalem:

Both Breger and Bell dismissed the claims of those who challenge Islam's connection to the site. Breger agreed, but implied that current Islamic claims that Judaism's Holy Temple was never built there are totally unfounded, noting that the Waqf itself published literature some decades ago boasting that the Dome of the Rock is on the site of the Holy Temple. At that point, Bell said, "It's very important to realize that it's beside the point whether these belief systems are historically valid or not… It's not up to me to tell you whether your narrative is valid or not…"
Breger similarly said that the argument that Jerusalem is not so holy to Islam is "a silly one." He said, "It's true that when Jerusalem was not under Islamic control, such as during the Crusader period, the British Mandate and under Israeli control, there was more discussion about Jerusalem in Muslim sources… but it's silly to say that it's not so holy to Islam, because you have to accept a religion's definition of what is holy."

Comment: Silly? I wonder if Breger could provide a little more substance to his dismissive critique than to say we must accept as true whatever someone within a faith says about that faith.
July 30, 2009 update: The Ma'an news agency today published a news report, "Tension in Jerusalem as Israelis mark temple destruction," that lets slip where the ancient Jewish temple actually was located:

Thursday is the Jewish holy day of Tisha B'av (the ninth of the month of Av), which marks the destruction of the first and second temples, the ruins of which are believed to lie beneath the present-day Al-Aqsa Mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock Mosque.

Oct. 20, 2010 update: Hagai Mazuz and Harold Rhode review this general topic in "Is Jerusalem Sacred for Muslims?"
Nov. 30, 2010 update: The U.S. government has condemned Palestinian claims that the Western Wall has no significance for Jews, writes Natasha Mozgovaya in Ha'aretz:

Al-Mutawakil Taha, the Palestinian Authority' deputy minister of information, had said Wednesday that the wall, regarded as Judaism's holiest site, was part of an Islamic waqf, or religious endowment, and that only "Islamic tolerance" allowed Jews to pray there. His claims drew immediate anger in Israel, which on Tuesday was echoed by the U.S.
"We strongly condemn these comments and fully reject them as factually incorrect, insensitive and highly provocative," a U.S. State Department spokesman said. "We have repeatedly raised with the Palestinian Authority leadership the need to consistently combat all forms of de-legitimization of Israel including denying historic Jewish connections to the land."
The chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), also decried Taha's claim, calling it "provocative and inciteful". "I strongly condemn the [claim] that the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem has no religious significance to Jews," Berman said. "President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad know the spiritual importance of the Western Wall to the global Jewish community," he said, calling on Abbas to denounce Taha's report and clarify that the remarks were not the official position of the Palestinian Authority. … "To deny the Jewish connection to the Western Wall is to be deliberately provocative and inciteful, no less so than were one to deny the Palestinian connection to the Haram al-Sharif," Berman said.

Dec. 1, 2010 update: U.S. government engagement made the difference, as thePalestinian Authority took down Taha's outrageous remarks from its website. Which makes one wonder why Washington does not condemn this sort of nonsense more often.
Nov. 25, 2011 update: In the course of anti-Israel rally recorded on YouTube and focused on Jerusalem, a speaker announced that "Jerusalem is the heart of the Koran. Jerusalem is the heart of the Muslim world. Jerusalem is the heart of the Prophet's biography."
Dec. 28, 2013 update: In April 2009, noted above, Egypt's minister of religious endowments urged Muslims to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to reinforce the city's Muslim identity and its role as capital of a future Palestinian state. Today, the Jordanian minister of tourism, Nidal Qatamin, urged Muslims and Christians to visit Jerusalem, as WAFA paraphrased him, "to break the Israeli control over it and to show support for its Palestinian residents who are fighting Israeli plans to displace them."
Comment: These ministers may be focused on politics, but their urgings have religious implications.
Jan. 6, 2014 update: The Israeli journalist Pinhas Inbari published today a stunning short piece, "Multiplying Efforts to Undermine the Unique Status of Mecca in Islam" in which he discerns Syrian regime and broader Shi'i efforts to reduce the role of Mecca in Islam – an audacious if not crazy ambition. (Check the original for footnotes.)

When the revolt against Assad erupted in Syria, Saudi Arabia refused to recognize the Syrian government's authority regarding the Hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca and transferred that authority to the Free Syrian Army. This aroused fury in Damascus, and Assad's Syria took retributive measures that indeed brought the conflict between Syria and the Hijaz (a region in western Saudi Arabia) back to the Ummayad period (661-750), during which the Hijaz did not recognize the Ummayads and the Syrian army of the Ummayads saw fit to assault with catapults the Kaaba, the holiest structure in Islam which is situated in the courtyard of the Great Mosque in Mecca.
All this was mentioned explicitly in an interview with the TV station of the Lebanese Christian leader Michel Aoun, who is associated with Hizbullah. On August 14, 2013, Fayez Shaker, head of the Syrian Ba'ath Party branch in Lebanon and a former Lebanese minister, said that if Mount Qasioun in Damascus were to be fired upon, Syria would blow up the Kaaba.
The relevance of Jerusalem in this context emerged clearly with the publication of emails from Assad's office that were intercepted by anonymous hackers. At the time, in December 2011, Assad was preparing for a major speech. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood faction that is loyal to Assad (yes, there is such a thing) was preparing a campaign for the "liberation of Al-Aqsa" under Assad's aegis.4 One of the themes discussed for Assad's speech was that Jerusalem, not Mecca, is the proper direction of prayer (qibla) in Islam. Although in the end the theme was not included in the speech, it is likely to crop up again at some point.

Inbari also points to other efforts to enhance Jerusalem at the expense of Mecca.

A little over a decade ago, the Islamic Movement in Israel, which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, undertook an initiative to import water from the Zamzam spring in Mecca and to pour it into ten cisterns on the Temple Mount. Presumably, its leaders hoped to elevate Jerusalem's holiness and, by doing so, increase the number of Muslim visitors to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The initiative was thwarted. …
Most surprisingly – or perhaps not – the undermining of Mecca's status as the prime pilgrimage site came from the Shiites in Iraq, allies of Assad. On December 23, 2013, the Iraqi-Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, said the direction of prayer should be Karbala – the Iraqi city where the tomb of Mohammad's grandson, Hussein ibn Ali, is located – and not Mecca. Although this incensed the Sunnis, he did not retract his words.

He concludes that "the Shiite crescent is challenging the status of Mecca. The Iraqi Shiites favor Karbala as the Shiite holy city instead of Mecca, while the Assad regime touts Jerusalem." And then, as a bonus:

Al-Maliki's position is not, however, the only one among Iraqi Shiites. The Hizbullah Party of Iraq, which is the twin sister of Hizbullah in Lebanon, has sworn to wrest the holy places in the Hijaz from the Wahhabis and make them Shiite shrines. In the Sunni camp, as noted, the Muslim Brotherhood wants to make liberating Al-Aqsa the focus of the Arab turmoil with the ultimate goal of an Islamic caliphate, while the Salafis remain indifferent to this campaign.

Related Topics:  Arab-Israel conflict & diplomacy, History, Jerusalem

Related Articles:

• Constructing a Counterfeit History of Jerusalem
• The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem
• If I Forget Thee: Does Jerusalem Really Matter to Islam?

Sep. 3, 2002 update: My weblog entry "The Prophet's Night Journey; To Where?" takes up a fascinating new analysis by Ahmad Muhammad 'Arafa.

May 15, 2004 update: My weblog entry "Constructing a Counterfeit History ofJerusalem" builds on one aspect of this article.

Jan. 4, 2006 update: I dramatize today one of the implications of this article at "Offer: $1 million for Finding "Jerusalem" in the Koran."

Related Topics:  Arab-Israel conflict & diplomacy, History, Jerusalem

Related Articles:

• The Prophet's Night Journey; To Where?
• Constructing a Counterfeit History of Jerusalem
• More on the Muslim Claim to Jerusalem

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		Title	Commenter	Date
		Israel Liberated Judea and Samaria - Just like U.S. and its allies liberated Kuwait [86 words]	YJ Draiman	May 17, 2015 20:50
		The Jewish peoples war of survival was not won when Hitler lost. It continues to this day [610 words]	YJ Draiman	May 11, 2015 03:29
	1	Thanks for the link to Leah Bat-Chaim's Why Jerusalem is Not Holy to Muslims [56 words]	Joe Black	Dec 23, 2009 03:11
	2	Arabs and Muslims have no authority to claim Jerusalem [227 words]	Bestley Joe	Dec 11, 2009 08:14
		How can we expect anything human (or decent) from wacko self proclaimed genius historian Shamekh Alawneh? [260 words]	Svet	Aug 28, 2009 03:19
		Zechariah 12 [128 words]	Ugri	Aug 8, 2009 08:35
		Eyes Wide Open [37 words]	BK	Sep 25, 2009 18:12
		No doubt new herods will emerge. [92 words]	Ugri	Sep 27, 2009 04:42
		Tick Tock. [112 words]	Lynn	Jul 6, 2009 10:21
		TEMPLE MOUNT [9 words]	Fred	Jan 5, 2009 12:14
		Undeniable claim to Jerusalem [102 words]	Rebecca Moulds	Jan 4, 2009 23:38
		Jerusalem in the Bible [36 words]	Ugri	Jan 11, 2009 01:33
		Mosque on top of the claimants rock. [132 words]	Lynn	Dec 11, 2008 08:44
		More on the muslim claim to Jerusalem [109 words]	Debbie	Dec 3, 2008 23:12
	3	where were the jews during the past 3000 year, why they did not claim the land? [72 words]	sTs	Nov 19, 2008 11:37
		It speaks volumes [14 words]	Ugri	Nov 21, 2008 01:59
	1	Our dear Samer and the Jews and Allah says in the the Qur'an really says that the Jews are really his favorite nation [283 words]	dhimmi no more	Nov 30, 2008 07:58
		Where were those Jews? [244 words]	catarin	Dec 5, 2008 00:56
		You admit it then? [64 words]	MeeToo	Jan 9, 2009 09:20
	4	It is written in the Quran and in the Torah [312 words]	sTs	Jan 10, 2009 04:57
		Makes you wanna go hmmm... [246 words]	Lynn	Aug 30, 2009 10:00
		Arch of Titus [56 words]	Ugri	Nov 6, 2008 11:13
		muslim imperialism [128 words]	G.Vishvas	Nov 5, 2008 05:36
		Great! [11 words]	New York University	Oct 31, 2008 16:34
		Apples and oranges [149 words]	Rebecca Moulds	Sep 2, 2008 13:53
		Temple Mount revisited [93 words]	Ugri	Sep 3, 2008 01:36
		Israel is the Land of the ancient Jews [44 words]	Kattey	Nov 10, 2008 20:38
	2	Moses, Jesus, Mohammad are ALL Muslims [95 words]	Ahmad	Aug 30, 2008 05:55
	4	Moses and Jesus were never, will never be and WOULD never be Muslims [1077 words]	The Grand Infidel of Kaffiristan	Aug 30, 2008 23:54
		4 things [52 words]	Ynnatchkah	Sep 3, 2008 22:22
	1	Moses and Jesus were Muslims? [134 words]	Kattey	Nov 18, 2008 17:47
		Polar opposites between the Koran and the Bible [165 words]	jennifer solis	Nov 29, 2008 16:13
	1	More drivel from our dear Ahmad [558 words]	dhimmi no more	Nov 30, 2008 07:18
	2	If you follow God's words then you are a Muslim [396 words]	sTs	Dec 1, 2008 03:18
	1	The Quran is not perfect, and it is the offspring of the Torah and New Testament. [283 words]	Kattey	Dec 1, 2008 21:22
		Quran, Torah, Gospel are from one source [141 words]	sTs	Dec 3, 2008 01:12
		Moses and Jesus were Muslims? [128 words]	Anne	Dec 3, 2008 23:34
	2	Quran is Perfect, check how it was compiled [1124 words]	sTs	Dec 4, 2008 10:11
		A Muslim, any person who submits to the will of God [518 words]	sTs	Dec 5, 2008 00:48
		The Qur'an is perfect? Really? How about surat al-rajm? [286 words]	dhimmi no more	Dec 5, 2008 07:23
		Our dear Samer; It seems that your Allah says in the Qur'an that the Bible is not really corrupted [147 words]	dhimmi no more	Dec 5, 2008 07:35
		A muslim is any person who submits to God's will- response to Ts [133 words]	Debbie	Dec 5, 2008 20:37
		It seems that the star of David adornes the main building of al-Azhar University [199 words]	dhimmi no more	Dec 6, 2008 10:42
		Our dear Samer and more drivel [361 words]	dhimmi no more	Dec 6, 2008 11:01
	1	Ahmad, you sound desperate for numbers and converts. [131 words]	Zen	Dec 13, 2008 01:04
		sTs, you have a very simplistic view [196 words]	Zen	Dec 13, 2008 01:23
		You are not a Muslim [409 words]	sTs	Dec 15, 2008 06:17
		It is not wrong to look for the truth [429 words]	sTs	Dec 15, 2008 10:06
		No it is not wrong to look for the truth, It sets you free [120 words]	Debbie	Dec 15, 2008 20:32
	2	a response to Moses, Jesus, Mohammad are ALL Muslims by reader Ahmad [513 words]	Ifrahim	Jan 5, 2009 22:38
		Just a Simple Question [201 words]	Seif Al Deen	Jan 9, 2009 08:19
		koran [116 words]	D.Gerard Sebolf	Feb 22, 2009 09:27
		Jerusalem not mentioned in the Qur'an [168 words]	Roy Mason	Oct 1, 2009 06:43
		Jesus calling by killings of sword [417 words]	Alwyn	Oct 25, 2009 12:36
		islamic domineeringness [52 words]	hiall	Mar 4, 2014 04:27
		Here is a Strange Exception [37 words]	Alex	Aug 18, 2008 11:48
		WHY NOT GIVE THEM A CHOICE? [20 words]	IamJoseph	Aug 18, 2008 05:44
		A Brilliant Idea? What are they smoking? [462 words]	Lame Cherry	Aug 18, 2008 02:38
		Q17:1 [641 words]	dhimmi no more	Jul 27, 2008 13:16
	3	muslim greed, more greed and fascism [216 words]	G.Vishvas	Jul 23, 2008 05:53
		The Qur'an does not say the Prophet was taken to Jerusalem [123 words]	Akbarally Meherally	Jun 26, 2008 07:25
		The Temple Mount as a Flashpoint [29 words]	Yisrael Medad	Mar 12, 2008 06:48
		Can anyone be a Muslim and STILL defend the name Palestine? [138 words]	Dillah	Jan 25, 2008 23:06
		What Muslim holy sites? [195 words]	Kattey	Dec 15, 2007 21:34
		Hey [68 words]	demonarundo	Mar 9, 2008 16:45
		Islamic historical Propaganda [267 words]	Kattey	Mar 10, 2008 23:24
		here is the truth [142 words]	demonarundo	Mar 12, 2008 07:53
		Muslims honor all Prophets? [178 words]	Kattey	Mar 13, 2008 16:54
		islam thinks the whole world belongs to allaha [76 words]	phil Greend	Aug 31, 2007 19:15
		I am Muslim [51 words]	demonarundo	Mar 9, 2008 16:32
		Making colonisation appear indigenous! [113 words]	leigh	Jun 2, 2007 05:48
		I understand that history is a VERY flexible narrative [103 words]	Dan the Yid	Aug 17, 2007 04:00
		Proof positive; Jerusalem, Israel belong to Muslims [170 words]	Infidel	Nov 26, 2006 19:34
	12	"Jerusalem's not in the Qur'an, and Muhammad was never there" [691 words]	Lactantius Jr.	Jun 5, 2007 15:50
	1	Lactantius Jr, I think you misunderstood my comments [217 words]	Infidel	Jun 5, 2007 23:18
		Arabs have been doing Temple denial for a long time [219 words]	Elliott	Nov 6, 2008 08:21
		Not mentioned in the Torah either [23 words]	sTs	Dec 1, 2008 03:20
		"Which Bible books, which Temple?" [646 words]	Lactantius Jr	Dec 3, 2008 07:06
	2	Zabour and Zubur [691 words]	sTs	Dec 4, 2008 07:10
		More on Jerusalem and other topics [658 words]	sTs	Dec 4, 2008 11:11
		Which Jerusalem Temple did Muhammad visit? [320 words]	Lactantius Jr	Dec 5, 2008 05:12
		"What remains for you to do now" [125 words]	Lactantius Jr	Dec 5, 2008 06:25
		The word ZBR in the Qur'an, the Psalms of David and al-Isra'eeliat in the Qur'an [443 words]	dhimmi no more	Dec 6, 2008 09:17
		ZBR and an addendum [123 words]	dhimmi no more	Dec 7, 2008 08:29
		Jerusalem in the OT [92 words]	dhimmi no more	Dec 7, 2008 09:02
		Mohammed visits Mt. Sinai [97 words]	Dale Brown	Dec 6, 2009 21:27
		The mosque was not destoyed. it remains till this day ! [238 words]	Al -Aqsa	Jan 21, 2010 15:20
		Masjid Al-Aqsa [1462 words]	Lactantius Jr	Feb 19, 2010 17:53
		Mosque people were flaming racist until now. [194 words]	Hilme	Feb 28, 2010 09:29
		"living in peace with one another" [128 words]	Lactantius Jr	Feb 28, 2010 17:23
	1	You don't know what your saying [288 words]	Omar Saleh	May 17, 2010 23:10
		Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Qur'an and even Tabari had no clue what is really al-masjad al-aqsa and you our dear Omar think that you know? Masha'allah [982 words]	dhimmi no more	May 19, 2010 07:47
	1	To: dhimmi no more [177 words]	Omar	May 19, 2010 22:56
		Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Qur'an and even Tabari had no clue what is really al-masjad al-aqsa part duex [27 words]	dhimmi no more	May 20, 2010 17:27
		Our dear Omar and his excuse that the battery ran out [300 words]	dhimmi no more	May 20, 2010 18:09
		Q17:1 revisited [64 words]	dhimmi no more	May 20, 2010 18:20
		Our dear Omar and tahreef al-Qur'an [330 words]	dhimmi no more	May 22, 2010 08:01
	1	Jerusalem, the Abode of Peace [181 words]	Angela	Jun 14, 2010 09:20
	1	Jerusalem is in the quraan and the prophet muhamed was there [25 words]	yomna	Oct 1, 2011 17:37
	1	Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Qur'an and Muhammad was never there continued [399 words]	Lactantius Jr	Oct 5, 2011 04:43
		false statement about jerusalem [40 words]	saqib	Feb 19, 2013 00:25
		The Qur'an is silent about Jerusalem [131 words]	dhimmi no more	Feb 20, 2013 07:04
		Only Christ! [10 words]	hammar	Jul 13, 2013 15:00

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		United States is "occupied" territory - Not Jerusalem [181 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	YJ Draiman	Jun 5, 2015 01:02
	1	Jews and Christian's claim on Mecca [141 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	Prashant	May 29, 2015 03:20
		Oh, I forgot something: Hindu's claim on Kaaba [173 words]	Prashant	May 30, 2015 23:03
		Israel has no interest in Mecca [91 words]	Michael S	May 31, 2015 04:11
		Will India get involved too? [327 words]	Michael S	Jun 3, 2015 03:25
		I was pointing out the hypocrisy [146 words]	Prashant	Jun 3, 2015 22:03
		Give Al Aksa to the Ayatollah [311 words]	Michael S	Jun 6, 2015 03:22
		Link to 1925 Waqf Temple Mount Guide noting that the First and Second Jewish Temples were located on the Temple Mount [1515 words]	YJ Draiman	May 5, 2015 16:00
		Jerusalem Temple Mount Guide 1925 [218 words]	YJ Draiman	Apr 12, 2015 14:06
		How many holidays do the Arabs celebrate due to historical events in the land of ancient Israel [95 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	YJ Draiman	Apr 12, 2015 14:02
		Jerusalem the Eternal Capital of the Jewish People [918 words]	YJ Draiman	Apr 14, 2015 18:12
		Islam is Like Spolied Child [72 words]	Richard D Lionheart	Jan 9, 2015 08:59
	1	Many many mistakes!!!! [43 words]	Zainab	Nov 9, 2014 04:08
	1	Prove one mistake. [23 words]	Simon_Of_Sydney	Nov 25, 2014 22:55
	1	Get your facts straight [84 words]	Jon	Dec 3, 2014 18:47
		The Violent Men of Your People Will Exult Themselves to Fulfill the Vision [106 words]	Tillerofthesoil	Nov 6, 2014 11:32
		I realize that no one likes to see their God depicted in any way other than their God. [61 words]	anon	Aug 6, 2014 18:30
		An extremely simple issue to settle [138 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	Michael S	Jul 10, 2014 19:27
	2	The Dome is not an Islamic holy site [328 words]	Michael S	Jul 13, 2014 03:54
	1	Reading the inscriptions [252 words]	dhimmi no more	Jul 17, 2014 13:17
		The Muslims are Imperialist Colonialist Aggressors [164 words]	MIchael S.	Jul 22, 2014 02:39
	2	Real history [177 words]	dhimmi no more	Jul 29, 2014 20:41
		History vs. Speculation [403 words]	Michael S	Aug 1, 2014 02:44
		Many of The Cannanites converted to Judaism - Jerusalem: Israel's Eternal Capital [599 words]	YJ Draiman	Apr 14, 2015 16:51
		You have laid out the matter very well [38 words]	Michael S	Apr 15, 2015 00:49
		Defending Israel's Legal Rights to Jerusalem [1741 words]	YJ Draiman	May 5, 2015 16:23
		The Order and the Master [867 words]	Michael S	May 8, 2015 02:43
	1	The U.N. cannot create states, it can only recommend and so can other nations only recommend [604 words]	YJ Draiman	May 10, 2015 02:19
	1	Israel's rights to the land is ingrained in history, archeological findings, international law and possession [1260 words]	YJ Draiman	May 10, 2015 02:24
		Israel must be steadfast in protecting its rights and its people Many nations and people are questioning Israel's control of its liberated territory. [409 words]	YJ Draiman	May 11, 2015 02:19
		British were merely trustees of the Jewish state [32 words]	Michael S	May 11, 2015 08:20
		Israel must be steadfast in protecting its rights and its people [409 words]	YJ Draiman	May 15, 2015 14:03
		Population Exchange [203 words]	Michael S	May 27, 2015 03:05
	2	The name of the city of Ramla is not an Arabic word [322 words]	dhimmi no more	Apr 28, 2014 13:39
	4	You are clearly not open minded towards the muslim opinion of the topic [92 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	mahmoud Gharra	Apr 4, 2014 23:43
	5	Victims of Arabian imperialism and Allah is a Zionist [610 words]	dhimmi no more	Apr 13, 2014 10:21
	3	proof required to support muslim fantasy [199 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	Apr 17, 2014 01:27
	1	no 'age of consent' in islam - any age will do and consent isn't a requirement [576 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	Apr 17, 2014 01:53
	1	The Shia and Aisha! What a disaster but it is big time comedy![329 words]	dhimmi no more	Apr 19, 2014 14:32
	2	waiting patiently [218 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	Apr 23, 2014 00:50
	2	You will be waiting for a long time [231 words]	dhimmi no more	May 2, 2014 08:14
	3	al-Buraq parking located! [128 words]	dhimmi no more	May 4, 2014 09:25
	3	wonders of islam never cease [139 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	May 6, 2014 06:17
	1	The Buraq parking revisited [240 words]	dhimmi no more	May 10, 2014 07:32
	3	envy [229 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	May 11, 2014 04:58
		great advice for muslims [1 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	May 15, 2014 05:28
	2	Looking for the elusive Buraq and camels urine and MERS [140 words]	dhimmi no more	May 15, 2014 08:41
		transmission vectors [23 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	May 16, 2014 05:57
		But why oh why would people drink camel urine??? [2689 words]	Alain Jean-Mairet	May 16, 2014 10:17
	2	more weirdness [56 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	May 18, 2014 06:19
	1	Mohammed - slaking muslim thirst for BS for 1400 years [115 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	May 19, 2014 01:44
		The glorious Islam and breast feeding of the adult and Muslim men can divorce their wives if they eat too much [111 words]	dhimmi no more	May 19, 2014 11:55
	1	The prophet of Islam claimed that camels urine cures any and everything! [52 words]	dhimmi no more	May 19, 2014 12:02
	3	The elusive buraq and al-Hajar al-Aswad [314 words]	dhimmi no more	May 19, 2014 17:19
	1	deal gone wrong? [77 words]	Mohammed Wazir Ahkspaidar	May 21, 2014 06:36
		The crazy ahadith (plural of hadith) [65 words]	dhimmi no more	May 26, 2014 14:51
		forced conversions... [57 words]	murugan	Jul 26, 2014 22:58
		Refuted? [62 words]	Stuart McHardy	Jan 31, 2015 09:47
		3rd most important to you, but first important to them [162 words]	Valerie	Mar 27, 2015 20:36
	1	Arabs & Islam [110 words]	The Levite	Apr 1, 2014 15:17
	1	Don't state wrong facts [109 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	Amira	Mar 25, 2014 19:32
		Helping lost tablighees one at a time [60 words]	dhimmi no more	Mar 30, 2014 10:55
		But, I thought.... [54 words]	Stuart McHardy	Jan 31, 2015 09:57
	2	How is it possible that.... [12 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	Alan B	Mar 23, 2014 16:19
		Sunni Islamist Complains about Jewish Love for Jerusalem to Iranian Islamists [19 words]	PezDispenser	Mar 17, 2014 13:44
		Why is Jerusalem the most important city for Jews, Christians and Muslims [107 words]	peter van dijk	Oct 13, 2013 22:44
		Islam as a continued tradition [235 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	Adnan R Amin	Sep 14, 2013 19:25
	2	Islam / Esau ... [44 words]	Greg	Jun 10, 2013 20:30
		Descendents of Esau and Ishmael [33 words]	Robert	Aug 6, 2014 13:43
		If you won't come to The Rock in Mecca... [103 words]	Lynn	May 14, 2013 10:02
	3	FINALLY A TRUE PICTURE OF JEWISH HISTORY [135 words]	franz paul	Mar 1, 2013 18:34
		Jerusalem Being Taken off Certain Maps [96 words]	ralph	Jun 21, 2013 06:33
	4	politically selective memory [126 words]	Edoardo Recanati	Feb 5, 2013 07:41
	3	Jews and Muslims [156 words]	Sohaib	Nov 18, 2012 02:02
	1	What do you believe in? Curious [75 words]	Toa	Feb 14, 2013 19:23
	1	Thank you Mr Pipe [12 words]	Angel	Nov 13, 2012 17:22
	1	Jerusalem [124 words]	Dh	Aug 21, 2012 21:02
	1	thanks the post [101 words]	larrylee	Mar 26, 2012 22:27
	2	True Religion will allow religious freedom [59 words]	true religion	Feb 19, 2012 02:19
	3	MUSLIM PRAYERS. [24 words]	B.Ahmed	Dec 12, 2011 04:55
		MUSLIM PRAYERS [8 words]	Amira	Mar 25, 2014 19:35
	3	JERUSALEM [79 words]	DR THOMAS MATHAI	Nov 18, 2011 09:49
	1	so true sir [10 words]	alikecra	Jan 31, 2012 16:14
	1	aqssa mosque in saudia arabia [369 words]	rana	Oct 28, 2011 14:18
	2	... Info provided by Author [9 words]	Reader	Oct 13, 2011 12:35
	11	The paradox of Illogics [35 words]	Michael Hanni Morcos	Sep 30, 2011 12:03
	5	A Muslim Scholar's response [1525 words]	Khaled Dahak	Sep 23, 2011 20:16
	21	Khaled Dahak's reasoning is pathetic or Mecca is a Christian holy place [271 words]	Prashant	Sep 24, 2011 23:16
	7	facts [30 words]	caleb	Sep 25, 2011 03:02
	2	Jews did not keep their covenant with God, by rejecting the in Issa(Jesus) son of Maryam, thereby losing their claim to the blessed land of Palestine. [149 words]	Khaled Dahak	Sep 25, 2011 19:07
	11	murder in the name of islam [41 words]	caleb	Sep 26, 2011 21:50
	10	Re: Khaled Dahak: Blame the past [387 words]	Angel	Sep 29, 2011 11:16
	3	Re:Caleb [45 words]	Angel	Sep 29, 2011 11:28
		hogwash [20 words]	seabees	Dec 27, 2011 10:50
	6	RELIGION vs FACTS vs DNA [662 words]	Lydia	Jan 11, 2012 01:36
		did not know [10 words]	Fd	Mar 19, 2012 23:45
		Ah you forget Angel [25 words]	Barry Soetoro	May 21, 2012 21:06
	2	I believe your facts are faulty Mr Soetro [190 words]	stanley b	May 22, 2012 18:46
		Mr Angel's confused history of the Spread of Islam in Indonesia[452 words]	Khaled Dahak	Oct 9, 2012 02:50
	1	Khaled Dahak response to Prashant [165 words]	Khaled	Oct 26, 2012 13:26
	6	Circular logic for the thousandth time [166 words]	Prashant	Oct 27, 2012 01:54
	3	It seems that Q17;1 is really about the exodus of the Jewish people men ard masr ila ard al-ma3ad! [925 words]	dhimmi no more	Oct 27, 2012 16:43
		Our dear Khaled is quoting a corrupted book to prove a point! Go figure! [185 words]	dhimmi no more	Oct 28, 2012 06:58
	4	Camels and the flat earth and sky and other sordid matters [256 words]	dhimmi no more	Oct 28, 2012 07:11
	2	The eloquent Qur'an? Not really [227 words]	dhimmi no more	Oct 28, 2012 07:30
	4	Indonesia and the spread of islam by the lost tablighees and not by the Arabs [209 words]	dhimmi no more	Oct 28, 2012 10:51
	2	To Khaled and Soetoro: In Indonesia, the prove of history still "On Going" [221 words]	Angel	Oct 31, 2012 15:24
		Mr Soetoro: I do not forget [76 words]	Angel	Oct 31, 2012 15:28
		To Prashant, That's very true [46 words]	Angel	Oct 31, 2012 15:54
		Arogan Khaled [56 words]	Angel	Oct 31, 2012 16:05
		350 years was fact [23 words]	B. Soetoro	Nov 1, 2012 02:03
		Your story baseless Angel [38 words]	Bary Soetoro	Nov 1, 2012 21:03
	1	When the victim is the last one to realize that he is also a victim [57 words]	dhimmi no more	Nov 3, 2012 08:45
	2	The victims of Arabian cultural imperialism [193 words]	dhimmi no more	Nov 3, 2012 08:55
		massacre to indonesian moslems [447 words]	b. soetoro	Nov 4, 2012 00:26
		Victims of Arabian imperialism and islam is the religion of the arabs only [68 words]	dhimmi no more	Nov 7, 2012 06:57
	1	The victims of Arabian cultural imperialism [150 words]	Angel	Nov 13, 2012 16:59
	1	There is masacre of non muslim in Indonesia [78 words]	Angel	Nov 13, 2012 17:18
		Prayer strength calculate by math? [24 words]	Angel	Nov 13, 2012 17:34
		ZERO times is Jerusalem mentioned in the koran ! [41 words]	Phil Greend	Apr 6, 2013 18:59
		Residers [22 words]	Abdirahman	Aug 6, 2013 05:29
	2	The solution [90 words]	Jude Richvale	Nov 4, 2013 22:06
		A reply to your post [317 words]	William East	Jul 12, 2014 00:41
	1	Rock in Jerusalem [128 words]	George Craven	May 23, 2011 03:02
	8	Read this! It has a new perspective that y'all don't know as of now...[52 words]	Dipes	May 8, 2011 15:33
	6	The Apple of His Eye [102 words]	Charles Nickalopoulos	May 21, 2011 10:52
		What about Christians!?!?!?!?!?! [33 words]	Genevieve Gottlieb	Mar 29, 2011 22:51
		Religous role for Jerusalem for Muslims too [57 words]	LT	Mar 27, 2011 20:59
		Moral and ethical bankruptcy [208 words]	YJ Draiman	Mar 27, 2011 10:56
	1	Jerusalem is important to Islam, not for political, but on theological grounds [194 words]	Asad	Mar 22, 2011 03:44
	13	Circular logic of Islamists and more hyocrisy [217 words]	Prashant	May 28, 2011 13:29
	2	From where does this come from [44 words]	Jeff	Jun 1, 2011 14:50
		This is where it comes from [5 words]	Khaled Dahak	Sep 23, 2011 19:59
	3	Agree to Prashant [89 words]	Angel	Sep 25, 2011 18:38
		reply [16 words]	jerry	Apr 8, 2012 12:03
		Oh, Jerusalem! [132 words]	Andrew Haslam-Jones	Mar 15, 2011 15:41
		Oh, Jerusalem! [39 words]	Angel	Nov 13, 2012 18:26
	1	jerusalem [90 words]	Ry	Nov 25, 2010 23:11
	1	The Temple at Jerusalem is reffered as Mosque by Prophet Mohamed [133 words]	Mohamed Khan	Nov 11, 2010 20:01
	6	Muslims have more rights to the Western Wall (The last surviving 'Kotel' of the 2nd Temple in Jerusalem) [235 words]	Samir S. Halabi	Nov 28, 2010 12:19
	2	Clarification [272 words]	J Diedrich	Jan 4, 2011 00:52
	4	The 'Taqiyya' expert Mohamed Khan [109 words]	Samir S. Halabi	Mar 23, 2011 14:31
		Prayer direction of Muslims [580 words]	Mohamed Khan	Apr 4, 2011 03:13
		Muslims are sacrilegious [263 words]	George Reame	Oct 5, 2011 16:58
		A very well researched article indeed! [50 words]	david misango	Sep 8, 2010 15:13
	2	amazing piece each time i read it [104 words]	rick martins	Aug 27, 2010 04:54
	2	jewish ancestry in Jerusalem. [93 words]	vivi	Jun 5, 2010 18:07
		och! I got it now [66 words]	seraphime	Apr 22, 2010 02:15
		wiki [22 words]	J Diedrich	Jan 4, 2011 01:16
		How very enlightening [27 words]	Jim Plank	Mar 24, 2010 17:47
		Translation [46 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	David Sommer	Sep 4, 2009 06:45
	1	On Jerusalem and The Muslims [90 words]	Kathleen	Dec 12, 2009 15:56
	4	muslims have more rights than any other religion [154 words]	jaccki	Dec 14, 2009 00:18
		Guild [14 words]	vivi	Jun 6, 2010 15:05
		unethical [131 words]	1ummah	Jan 17, 2011 21:20
	1	Please make the Jerusalem International holy city for all three religions. [73 words]	Farooq	Jun 8, 2009 23:50
		Jerusalem for all Jews and christians [29 words]	Jeremaih Narh	Jun 12, 2009 11:47
	5	A reply to Farooq [145 words]	Kathleen	Dec 12, 2009 18:21
		On Muslims And a Comment by a good responder: [161 words]	Kathleen	Dec 15, 2009 14:39
		SAFE, who is safe? [86 words]	slayhy	Oct 28, 2011 15:11
	1	muslims do have a lot to do with islam [96 words]	anna	Jan 29, 2009 14:30
		anna [83 words]	btilly	Jan 29, 2009 19:38
	1	For Anna [109 words]	Angel	Sep 25, 2011 19:01
		Moriah is not in Jerusalem [46 words]	Guardian of Deen	Feb 18, 2014 19:02
	1	Our dear GoD is saying that Mecca belongs to the Jews! What a disaster [291 words]	dhimmi no more	Feb 20, 2014 07:40
	3	The problem with Muslim history. [190 words]	Catarin	Jan 10, 2009 11:58
		Just to set the record straight... [180 words]	Hala	Jan 22, 2009 17:20
		Muslim claim to Jerusalem. [47 words]	Catarin	Jan 24, 2009 14:48
		Wrong references [47 words]	asad	Mar 22, 2011 04:06
		For Halla [151 words]	Angel	Sep 25, 2011 19:12
		Your topic saying Muslims can lie in the interest of Islam [340 words]	ObamaPunk	May 10, 2012 10:06
		about islam [46 words]	unknown	Jan 10, 2009 11:48
	2	Just to remember [18 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	M.Rizwan Ali	Dec 2, 2008 14:58
	1	Daniel pipes, thank you [15 words]	samira	May 19, 2008 09:48
	1	Jews And Christians Claims To Jerusalam Much Greater [49 words]	AnneM	Apr 25, 2008 20:40
	1	For those who Actually Believe this essay [55 words]	Aisha	Jan 19, 2008 23:15
	3	look into your own opinion [54 words]	bos	Feb 5, 2008 16:08
	1	Proof? [16 words]	Abdullah	Jan 7, 2009 22:38
		its in the pudding! [560 words]	bos	Jan 9, 2009 06:12
	8	Response to Aisha [151 words]	Kathleen	Dec 12, 2009 16:24
	1	Not So Much [70 words]	Christian	Feb 4, 2011 08:17
		To Miss Kathleen [21 words]	Fatima Ali Khan	Dec 23, 2011 04:17
		Jerusalem Holy city for Muslims? [81 words]	PDM	Dec 20, 2007 18:37
	1	The seat of Mohammed in Jerusalem [343 words]	laurel	Oct 2, 2007 16:35
		great [3 words]	rachel	Jun 26, 2007 13:30
		claim on Jerusalem [235 words]	sufi Imdad Ali Soomro	Jun 2, 2007 02:30
	5	Soomro's argument is undefeatable [188 words]	Sunil	Apr 19, 2009 12:51
		Muslim claim to Jerusalem [307 words]	Sufi Imdad Ali Soomro	Apr 20, 2009 01:17
	2	I certainly disagree with your statements [55 words]	John Mathews	Sep 6, 2010 10:27
		To Sunil [40 words]	Angel	Sep 25, 2011 19:27
		GREAT stuff. Highly Informative [60 words]	Psalm	May 1, 2007 15:28
		Re: The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem [327 words]	Omar Kaj	Jan 9, 2007 10:02
	1	massively repeated nonsense [338 words]	T. Carr	May 18, 2007 10:28
	6	Quran [399 words]	yasha	Feb 8, 2009 00:14
	6	Reply to: The Muslim claim to Jerusalem [256 words]	Paul Jaramillo	Jul 6, 2006 05:41
		Paul, have a reality check before insulting [178 words]	Omar Kaj	Jan 9, 2007 11:10
	2	Reply to: Omar Kaj [120 words]	Psalm	May 1, 2007 15:44
	6	Jerusalem- The City of God [Jehovah- The Lord] [250 words]	clarence paul puckett	May 1, 2007 23:56
		Rubbish [82 words]	PDM	Dec 31, 2007 21:54
		Jerusalem? The land title issue [466 words]	lltotes90	Aug 5, 2008 23:19
	1	To clarence paul puckett US ...Well said. [64 words]	Kathleen	Dec 12, 2009 18:51
		Not so fast... [178 words]	Russ	May 30, 2011 05:47
		excellent & comprehensive [32 words]	moses nathan	Jun 7, 2006 17:45
		yeah....WOW. [293 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	Aliyah	May 2, 2006 19:14
		Reply to Islamist line on Jerusalem [312 words]	IZ	Oct 27, 2006 19:09
		Great example [30 words]	Craig	Apr 28, 2007 16:34
	1	What really happened Mr. Pipes...... [163 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	W Ahl	Feb 15, 2006 19:51
		So funny [55 words]	George	Nov 29, 2008 06:17
	2	Mphamad"s strange knowledge [99 words]	Angel	Sep 25, 2011 19:49
	1	Certainly agree that Muhammad had no knowledge about eastern religions [88 words]	Prashant	Sep 26, 2011 21:18
		what really happened ...... [35 words]	Amira	Mar 25, 2014 19:39
	2	Our dear Amira disagress with her/his Allah what a disaster [335 words]	dhimmi no more	Mar 30, 2014 10:52
		Names of Jerusalem [243 words]	Ben Small	Jan 16, 2006 00:13
		MUSLIMS/and Other Religions Except Christians have no Historic Right to Jerusalem [96 words]	Josepn Ngumbau	Jun 23, 2007 06:00
		are you sure [29 words]	Bos	Jun 29, 2007 07:54
	4	Muslims occupying other religion's holy shrines [436 words]	Bharat Raina	Jan 5, 2006 20:06
	1	Let.s not be selfish [56 words]	Mary Connor	Nov 16, 2007 08:47
		Enclave=ghetto [88 words]	T D E	Apr 19, 2010 18:40
	8	It is still the case today [89 words]	Michael Hanni Morcos	Sep 30, 2011 15:42
		Dome of the Rock [72 words]	Gerry D.	Jan 8, 2005 14:36
		Thanks! [26 words]	Jackie	Nov 1, 2004 18:23
		WOW! [85 words]	Bob Jacobo	Sep 30, 2003 07:05
	1	SEE THE HISTORY [42 words]	Humayon	Jul 8, 2009 07:34
	1	Accurate and Awesome [168 words]	Ruth Lowry	Sep 17, 2003 01:20
		Jerusalem in Sacred Texts [45 words] w/response from Daniel Pipes	Peter J. Herz	Sep 10, 2003 02:36
	1	Solution to Jews and Arabs holy sites [148 words]	Angel	Mar 10, 2010 20:51
		Good Work [50 words]	V. Coffey	Aug 22, 2003 05:31
	2	Dealing with historical islam in an honest way, thank you. [37 words]	Randolf Scott	Aug 14, 2003 13:13
	1	Disagree [175 words]	Frederick B. Wolfe	Apr 15, 2006 01:15
	3	B.S. as usual [600 words]	fbwolfe	Apr 19, 2006 01:41
		The barren land ? interesting observation ! everyone should go back to their home land, i couldnt agree more ;) [99 words]	samira	May 19, 2008 09:45
	1	Great history - thank you again Daniel Pipes [24 words]	M. McGuire	Aug 10, 2003 15:45
		Islam & Jerusalem [108 words]	Mohamed Khan	Jan 5, 2011 00:45
	2	More self serving evidence [65 words]	Rajeev	Jan 5, 2011 23:59
		Is that from hadith? Not all the hadith are reliable. Muhammed only claimed the Koran as the message. [5 words]	reader	Feb 4, 2011 22:15
	3	Mohamed & his followers praying towards Jerusalem - Evidence from Quran [438 words]	Mohamed Khan	Feb 5, 2011 23:06
		The Bleeding Obvious [13 words]	Amin Riaz	Aug 31, 2011 03:34
		JERUSALEM [149 words]	DR THOMAS MATHAI	Nov 20, 2011 12:15
	2	RELIGION vs FACTS vs DNA [662 words]	Lydia	Jan 11, 2012 16:03
	5	It's Mohammed Khan who's a pagan and a hypocrite not the Jews and Christians. [489 words]	Samir S. Halabi	Oct 9, 2013 06:43
		Highly informative and sorely needed [82 words]	Rika Zimmerman	Jan 3, 2003 13:08
	1	Informative and terrific! [25 words]	Michael Watkins	Nov 15, 2002 08:58
	2	Great historical essay [54 words]	J. Rocha	Jun 26, 2002 20:12