UP TO JERUSALEM
By Paul Merkley.
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BBCNews has a long history of hostility towards Israel and of up -front promotion of the “Palestinian” narrative. In keeping with its historic practice, it handed to Jeremy Bowen, a man with a long record of pejorative, anti-Israel expression, the job of reporting the live scenes of “Palestinian” stone-throwers expressing rage against President Trump’s then-pending decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Bowen led with this: “Jerusalem, of course, [sic] is as important to Palestinians as it is to Israel.”
Muslim enemies of the Jews, in alliance with the anti-Israeli academic and media elites in the West have worked hard for decades to establish this absurd thesis at the heart of western reporting on Israel. Their success is almost entirely attributable to the absence of historical knowledge among our opinion elites.
For inspiration on all of life’s questions, Palestinians turn to the Mufti of Jerusalem. On the matter of who belongs to Jerusalem and who does not the Mufti has pronounced repeatedly in recent years. For example:
The Muslims say to Britain, to France, and to all the infidel nations that Jerusalem is Arab. We shall not respect anyone else’s wishes regarding her. The only relevant party is the Islamic nation, which will not allow infidel nations to interfere. July 11, 1997.
Those who have not looked closely at Muslim attitudes towards other religions may be puzzled that Muslims would not concede that their Third Holiest Site (on a long list whose length no one truly knows) might, at least out of courtesy, co-exist in the vicinity of the Only Holy Site of the Jews. This zeal for al-Quds becomes more problematical still when one discovers in the pages of Islam’s own Holy Book that Muhammad, disappointed by the Jews’ rejection of his claims to inspired prophecy, turned his backs upon the Jews and their history.
In the early days of his mission (610 CE until 623), Muhammad established it as a Muslim duty to pray exclusively towards Jerusalem, and he ordered a Qibla, a mark pointing in the correct direction, to be set in every mosque; but then he changed the policy and the Qibla was re-oriented towards the Kaaba in Mecca. Mainstream Islamic teaching today is that when the Qibla moved to indicate Mecca, Jerusalem did not cease to be an Islamic site. This conforms to the fundamental premise that nothing that has ever belonged to Islam can ever be considered surrendered.
As proof of the pre-emptive supremacy of Islam over everything and everybody, alive or dead, Muslim teachers insist that Adam, the original father of us all, lived in the cave below the main surface of the rock upon which Jews imagine that Solomon’s Temple had once stood but on which stands today a Muslim place of worship – the Dome of the Rock. In this same cave, the “pit of souls,” the spirits of the dead meet twice a week for Islamic prayers — in Arabic. That makes sense, doesn’t it?
Within ten years of Muhammad’s death, Muslims were, by physical conquest, in possession of Jerusalem. But after a brief period of enthusiasm for the site, during which the present Dome of the Rock was built, Muslim energies were directed for the most part elsewhere — to capitals of new Muslim Empires, to Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Cordoba, and Constantinople (Istanbul.) Jerusalem lost its high priority in the Muslim imagination.
Somewhere in recent times, however, Muslims began speaking of Jerusalem as al-Quds (the Holy Place) and as “Islam’s Third Holiest Site.” Yet Jerusalem appears nowhere in the Qur’an – neither by name nor by allusion. It is only because Muhammad associated his “night journey” into the heavens (some sort of out-of-body-experience, if it was anything at all) with Allah’s promise to bring all religion under the sway of Islam, that the “furthest mosque” came, long after his death, to be associated with Jerusalem.
In 691 A.D., when the Umayyad dynasty, based in Damascus (660s to 750) was in possession of this region, but was not in possession of Mecca and Medina, Abd el Melek Ibn Merwan proposed that the Temple Mount was the site of Mohammed’s mystical night time journey to Al Aqsa (“the furthest mosque.”) An indentation on the rock (the tour guide will be glad to lead your hand to it) was then identified as the print left by Muhammad’s horse Burak (the one with the head of a peacock) as horse and rider had ascended into the heavens. None of this is in the Qur’an. There was, of course, no “mosque” at the site in Muhammad’s day, but only a Byzantine church, later replaced by the present Dome of the Rock.
Present Muslim doctrine is that the Holy site on the Temple Mount belongs to Islam, as it had never ceased to be a Muslim site. The Jews, in contrast, have never asserted any claim to possession of any site on earth but this one — the site of their ancient Temple. They have utterly no interest in asserting a claim to Mecca or Medina, or, for that matter, to Rome or Ephesus, or Constantinople, or Kapilavastu, or Disneyland, et cetera. The mindset out of which this Muslim attitude comes will not go away under persuasion.
Non-Muslims find it difficult to understand how modern Muslims reconcile their pre-emptive claims about Jerusalem with their zeal for the holiest city of all — Mecca. A. Yusuf Ali, in his widely-recommended commentary on the Qur’an, offers this explanation:
Abraham and Isma‘il together built the House of God in Mecca (long before the Temple of Jerusalem was built.) They purified it and laid the foundations of the universal religion, which is summed up in the word Islam, or complete submission to the Will of God. Abraham and Isma‘il were thus true Muslims. . . . Historically the Temple at Mecca must have been [emphasis added] a far more ancient place of worship than the Temple at Jerusalem. [Explanatory note # 121 (to Sura 2:122-141.)]
The key phrase in the above is must have been. Islam simply demands acquiescence in this story. No proof is suggested – nothing, that is, which would enable us to fit the Isma’il story into World History – nothing at all to enable us to locate it in time and place.
Surely (a non-Muslim thinks) Abraham cannot BOTH have been at Jerusalem, preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac, AND at Mecca, preparing to sacrifice his son Isma’il. Many good people decline to believe either story; others believe one and decline to believe the other. It is not possible to believe both. There is no common ground on which these stories can stand.
It never occurred to the illiterate founder of Islam that anyone would ask him to locate his story about Ishmael anywhere in the historical record. Indeed, it did not occur to him that there was such a thing as an historical record. Faithful Muslims today despise the very notion of historical facts which have standing in universal scholarship, external to the pages of the Qur’an. This is prudent, since there is nothing historical to which the pseudo-historical assertions of the Qur’an can be related. No hoards of documents have ever come out of the soil of Arabia to help us in answering the questions which arise in a mind not intimidated by fear of defying religious authority: How did Abraham and Ishmael get to Mecca? How does the story of Abraham and Ishmael and the Temple in Mecca fit into the narrative of World History? Who reigned over what kingdom? How can this be synchronized with the rise and fall of empires? In Muhammad’s time, there were no literate priests, no scribes, no official or sacred literature there were no archives to consult — no literature at all.
Kenneth Cragg, a Christian scholar who has made a worldwide reputation as an apologist for Islam, tries to equalize our appreciation for Christianity and Islam by sweeping away our fetishistic obsession with historical fact. Cragg asks: “In what sense are religious convictions ‘unfounded’ if, albeit historically questioned, they are lived in sincerely and intensely?”[Kenneth Cragg, Muhammad and the Christian (Oxford: One World, 1999), p. 5. ] This is shameless baffle-gab, meant to make a problem out of a simple matter –namely that Muhammad’s story about Abraham and Ishmael in Mecca is anti-History – it is all fantasy. It makes a world of difference to every self-respecting person whether Muhammad’s narratives stand upon history or just upon fantasy.
It is to the eternal shame of the BBC that it gave audience to Jeremy Bowen’s ignorant pronouncement: that “Jerusalem, of course, [sic] is as important to Palestinians as it is to Israel.” This is not true today, and never has been true. The fact that it has currency among media elites today is due to two deeply-ingrained and intimately related prejudices: one against the authority of history and the other against the rights of the Jews.
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[For some lines in this essay I have in part re-capitulated some lines from my essay, “The Muslim Came to Jerusalem,” Bayview Review, December 27, 2012.)
The Bayview Review 