Muslim Jerusalem

Why do Muslims insist that Jerusalem is their Holy City?

When Mohamed and his faithful followers moved from Mecca to Medina, they found themselves among three Jewish tribes/clans (BANU-L-NADIR, BANU KAINUKA and BANU KURAIZA) which settled there some time after their expulsion from their homeland and also living there were two Arab, pagan tribes.

Mohammed, who at this stage needed more followers, decided to win those tribes over and convert them to his newly invented religion.

Islam was yet not as fully developed as we know it today, and Mohammed was still having his sessions with Allah (the Medina period revelations).

To attract the Jews and to convince them that Islam was also their true religion and he was a true prophet, Mohammad ordered his companions to pray while facing the same direction as the Jews as well as to observe the same time for fasting.

Saheeh Bukhari - 2004, Narrated Ibn Abbas: When the Prophet (SAW) came to Al-Madinah and saw the Jews fasting the day of Ashoora' [Passover], he said, "What is this [day]?"
They replied, "This is the day which God saved the children of Israel from their enemy , thus Moses fasted it."
He said, "I have more right to Moses than you."
So he fasted it and ordered fasting it.

Mohammad and his companions continued to pray for 19 months offering the quibla (direction of prayers) imitating the local Jews ( facing Jerusalem) but the recalcitrant Jews rejected Mohammad’s invitation to become his followers.

Musnad Ahmad - 23464, Narrated Awf bin Malik: The Prophet (SAW) and I with him went one day until we entered a Jewish Synagogue in Al-Madinah on a holiday of theirs. They hated our entrance on them. So the Messenger of Allah (SAW) said, "O ye Jews, show me twelve men [among the Jews] who believe that there is no God but Allah and that Mohammad is his messenger, and Allah will spare all the Jews under heaven his wrath the wrath he has."
They [the Jews] silenced everyone and no one answered him. So he repeated what he said and no one answered. So he repeated it for the third time and no one answered. So he said,
"You refuse! By Allah, I am the last [Prophet] and I am the final [Prophet] and I am the chosen Prophet; whether you believe or not."

Mohammad then decided to deal with the Jews in a much more decisive way and ordered the direction of prayers back towards Mecca (the traditional pagan way).

Submission of Banu Nadir to the Muslim troops (14-century painting)

Saheeh Muslim - 1765, Narrated Abi Hurayrah: While we were at the Mosque, the Messenger of Allah (SAW) came to us and said, "Go to the Jews."
So we went out with him until we arrived. So the Messenger of Allah (SAW) stood up and called on them, "O ye Jewish people, become Muslims and you will be safe."
They replied, "You have delivered [your message] O Aba Al-Qasim [Mohammad's Kunyah (title)]."
So he said to them, "That [delivering the message] is what I want. Become Muslims and you will be safe."
They replied, "You have delivered [your message] O Aba Al-Qasim [Mohammad's Kunyah (title)]."
So he repeated what he said for the third time and said, "Know that the land is for Allah and his Messenger, and I want to exile you from this land. So let him he who finds something valuable in his possession sell it; or know that the land is for Allah and his Messenger."

Qur'an-2:144 We have seen the turning of thy face to heaven (for guidance, O Muhammad). And now verily We shall make thee turn (in prayer) toward a qiblah which is dear to thee. So turn thy face toward the Inviolable Place of Worship, and ye (O Muslims), wheresoever ye may be, turn your faces (when ye pray) toward it. Lo! Those who have received the Scripture know that (this revelation) is the Truth from their Lord. And Allah is not unaware of what they do.

At this stage Mohammad forgot all about the Jewish holy place and neither its description nor its name is mentioned in the whole Qur’an even once.

Mohamed now devoted his time to killing and driving out all infidels from the peninsula.

Battle of Khayba. Hazrat Ali slays Jewish leader Marhab.

Saheeh Muslim - 1767, Narrated Omar bin Al-Khattab: He [Omar] heard the Messenger of Allah (SAW) saying, "O I indeed will exile the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula until I leave no one but a Muslim."

There were no more attempts (no revelations) trying to incorporate Judaism and Christianity into Islam and the Jews and Christians were condemned by Allah to be what they are now – descendants of apes and pigs, who must either submit to Islam or become dhimmis.

Qur'an-9:29 Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low. Fight against Christians and Jews “until they pay the tribute (the Dhimmi) readily, being brought low.”

After Muhammad’s death, the Muslims armies under Khaliph Umar captured Jerusalem in 638, but there were no historical references/sources left which would mention any Muslim claims as to whether Jerusalem was a holy Islamic place (neither Muslim nor Christian).

The Jerusalem (as a Muslims holy place) issue was born some 50 years after the prophet’s death in 682 when Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr rebelled against the second Umayyad khaliph, Yazid B. Muawiya and after taking Mecca prevented pilgrims from fulfilling the Hajj.

Yazid’s successor Khalif Abd al-Malik needed an alternative place for the pilgrimage and decided upon Jerusalem which by then was under his control.

To convince the pilgrims that the new place was as good as Mecca Abd al-Malik used some creative "theology" and re-discovered that the prophet had traveled to some place called the Remote Mosque (Al-Aqsa), during his extravagant night-voyage into heaven in A.D. 619.

AL-Aqsa mosque was indeed mentioned in the Qur'an:

Qur'an-17.1 Glory be to Him Who made His servant to go on a night from the Sacred Mosque to the Remote Mosque of which We have blessed the precincts, so that We may show to him some of Our signs; surely He is the Hearing, the Seeing.

And so the Remote or Furtherest Mosque was “rediscovered” as the sacred Temple in Jerusalem.

There was only one problem. Muhammad could not see any great temple in Jerusalem during his mystic journey with Angel Gabriel because the last Jewish temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Roman Emperor Titus (some 500 years before Muhammad’s alleged birth).

Somehow though, such trivia as facts and history had never seemed to bother Islamic scholars and theologians.

To support the new Khaliph’s Quranic discovery, a new Temple, which became the Dome of Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhra) and later the Remote Mosque ( al-Aksa Mosque ) were conveniently built.

Al Malik did not succeed though in convincing his fellow Muslims about the sanctity of Jerusalem and so they continued to direct their “quibla” towards Mecca and the pagan Kabaa as they always had even before the invention of Islam.

In fact the contemporary Arabs knew that the Remote Mosque (al-Aksa) had always been near Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula. This is stated in Kitab al-Maghazi by a historian and geographer al-Waqidi (d.822 A.D.)According to him there were two places of prayer in al-Gi’ranah, a village between Mecca and Ta’if, one was “the closer mosque” (al-masjid al-adana) and the other was “the remote mosque” (al-masjid al-aqsa).

And so the “holiness of Jerusalem” was abandoned for many years until Saladin (1138-1193) found the revival of al-masjid al-aqsa myth useful to inspire fighting spirit among the Muslims against the Crusaders.

After the crusaders were driven away, for over seven hundred years Jerusalem remained still a predominately Christian city and the “Muslim “Holy Temples” collected cobwebs and never attracted much devotion from the followers of Allah.

Jerusalem itself (as well as so called Palestine) lost its significance and became a provincial city with a dying economy.

The Arch of Titus and the details depicting the spoils from the destroyed Second Jewish Temple, the temple which according to Yassir Arafat had never existed (contradicting al-Malik)

Most of the inhabitants suffered poverty and hardship as the surrounding area from the beginning of the Muslim conquest became an object of frequent plunder of predatory Bedouin tribes and various factions of Islamic invaders.

The jihad against the Jewish and Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem and Palestine was relentless and it came in bursts of devastating hostilities.

(E.g. in 937 A.D.):

The Muslims attacked . . . in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (26 March 937) and set fire to the southern gates of Constantine’s church and to half of the exedra, whereupon the Church of the Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection collapsed. . . . According to al-Makin and al-Maqrizi, the Church of the Resurrection and the Church of the Calvary were also robbed of their treasures. . . . It seems at the same time the Muslims attacked in Ascalon again. According to Yahya b. Sa’id, the assault was made on “the great church there, known by the name of Mary the Green. They destroyed it and robbed it of all its contents and then set fire to it.’ . . . The bishop of Ascalon then left for Baghdad to get permission to rebuild the church, but he did not succeed. The church was left in ruins, for the Muslims who lived in Ascalon agreed amongst themselves that they would not allow it to be built again. As to the bishop, he never returned to Ascalon and remained in Ramla until his death. (Gil, History of Palestine quoted from -A. Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, p.48)

During so called periods of relative “peace” the inhabitants of Jerusalem as well as the whole Palestine were exposed to apartheid, humiliation and intolerance:

Neglected Dome of the Rock in a state of disrepair ca 1875

(Reported in 1011) - They were ordered to wear black turbans. The Christians had to wear a cross the length of a cubit and weighing five ratls around the necks: the Jews were obliged to wear a block of wood of similar weight …... they had to wear some distinguishing mark in the bath—houses, and finally al—Hakim decided that there were to be separate bath-houses for their use, . . . Ibn Al—Athir conveys ... that al-Hakim ordered (after the destruction of the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem... ) that all the churches in the realm be destroyed, and this was done, and that the Jews and Christians were then to accept Islam, or emigrate to Byzantine lands. They were also obliged to wear special distinguishing signs. Many converted… Bar Hebraeus speaks of thousands of churches which were destroyed in the Fatimid kingdom at that time; the decree regarding the wearing ii the cross around the neck was also, he says, a means of pressuring the Christians to convert. The wooden block the Jews were obliged to wear, had to be in a shape of a calf, as a reminder of the golden calf. (Gil, History of Palestine quoted from -A. Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, p.48-49)

The Turcoman period just before the crusades (1071-1099) was known among the inhabitants of Palestine as the “End of Days”:

Then Atsiz advanced on Jerusalem from Damascus, placed the city under siege, and promised its inhabitants the aman; on this basis, the inhabitants opened the gates of the city to him. Atsiz prevailed over Jerusalem, completely ignoring his promise of aman, and went on rampage. He slaughtered 3,000 people there….
He also conducted campaigns of annihilation against Ramla, until all its people had fled, against Gaza, where he murdered the entire population. He likewise massacred people in al-Arish and elsewhere and wrought endless havoc in Damascus, where only 3,000 of the original 500,000 had remained, due to starvation and and scarcity. Jaffa too was attacked, and its governor … fled from the town to Tyre, together with all the city’s inhabitants, while the walls of Jaffa were destroyed on Atsis orders. (cited in Andrew, G. Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad,

Despite the most vigorous Islamic attempts to convince gullible Westerners that the Muslim invasion of Palestine was in fact the liberation of “Arabs from Byzantine oppression”, the historical sources speak up loud and clear about the centuries of Muslim, rape, pillage, genocide and forced conversions of Christians and Jews.

The quotation below is a contemporary poem by Solomon ha-Kohen b. Joseph, from a family of Palestinian Jewish eligious leaders ca: 1070):

They were a strange and cruel people, girt with garments of many colors,
Armed and officered-chiefs araong ‘the terrible ones’
And capped with helmets, black and red,
With bow and spear and full quivers;
And they trumpet like elephants, and roar as the roaring ocean,
To terrify, to frighten those who oppose them,
And they are wicked men and sinners, madmen, not sane,
And they laid waste the cities, and they were made desolate
And they rejoiced in their hearts, hoping to inherit.
He [God) also remembered what they had done to the people of Jerusalem,
That they had besieged them twice in two years,
And burned the heaped corn and destroyed the places,
And cut down the trees and tranwled upon the vineyards,
And surrounded the city upon the high mountains,
And despoiled the graves and threw out the bones,
And built palaces, to protect themselves against the heat,
And erected an altar to slay upon it the abominations;
And the men and women ride upon the walls
Crying onto the God of gods, to quiet the great anger,
Standing the whole night, banishing sleep
While the enemy destroy, evening and morning,
And break down the whole earth, and lay bare the ground,
And stand the highways, intending to slay like Cain,
And cut off the ears, and also the nose,
And rob the garments, leaving them stand naked,
And also roar like lions, and roar like young lions;
They do not resemble men, they are like beasts,
And also harlots and adulterers, and they inflame themselves with males,
They are bad and wicked and spiteful as Sodomites.
And they impoverished the sons of nobles, and starved the delicately bred.
And all the people of the city went out and cried in the field,
Anti covered their lips, silent in their pains,
Anti they had no mercy on widows, and pitied not the orphans.

(J. Greenstone's translation quoted from -A. Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, p.50-51)

Farming, the life support system, virtually ceased and was replaced by the nomadic Bedouin herdsmen adding even further to the total deprivation of the agricultural land.

At the eve of the "final solution" to the "Jewish Problem",
the Mufti and Adolf Hitler confer
in Berlin, November 21, 1941

When Mark Twain visited Palestine in 1867 he was surprised to find the holy city of Jerusalem dirty, impoverished and neglected:

A FAST walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is…..
The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in this birthplace of christianity. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently -- the eternal "bucksheesh." To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here. (source)

The final chapter however of the saga was created by the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini who revived the myth of Jerusalem as the third holiest Muslim City in order to oppose the resurrection of Israel.

Since Arab nationalism was non-existent (the idea of a state as understood by the West is totally alien to Islamic culture) he reinvented the Islamic holiness of Jerusalem to stir the local Muslim Arabs into violent jihad against the Jews.

And so as soon as Herbert Samuel appointed him to the position of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini started his propaganda to raise Jerusalem’s status as an Islamic holy city. One of his first projects was to refurbish the decaying Temple of the Rock and al Aqsa mosque.

His disciple and replacement - Arafat continued this Holy Islamic Farce.

Of course the ordinary, brainwashed Muslims will always do what they are told by their leaders and imams but why should the West repeat the same errors again and again by allowing murderous political systems like the Nazis or Islam to exist and expand?

References:

Andrew G. Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Books, 2005
Serge Trifkovic, The Sword of the Prophet, Boston: Regina Orthodox Press, 2002
Daniel Pipes, The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem , 2001
Leah Bat-Chaim, Why Jerusalem is Not Holy to Muslims, Published: 05/18/04