The Religious Significance of Jerusalem to Islam

Nadene Goldfoot
When Mohammed lived(570 CE-632 CE) , there was no mosque in Jerusalem.  The Koran tells only that Mohammed in a single night was taken to heaven by Buraq, a horse with wings, a woman's face and a peacock's tail.  He was first taken to a place the Koran called the "uttermost mosque": --il masjad al aksa.
أقصى مسجد.  
Jerusalem is not mentioned in the story at all.  After his death, the tradition was that the "uttermost mosque" must have been the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah.  The 1st Temple was built by King Solomon (961 BCE-920 BCE)  of the Jews.  It held the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred vessels and offerings and had a court for worshipers.  The makeup of it was a hall, shrine and inner sanctum for the holy of holies. Then it was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE and was rebuilt in 538-515 BCE by the Jews and called the 2nd Temple.  This time it included the Western Wall (also called the Wailing Wall).

The Western Wall is part of the wall enclosing Herod's Temple still standing in the Old city of Jerusalem. Herod lived from 73 BCE to 4 CE and was the King of Judea who had been appointed governor of Galilee by his father, then was appointed king by the Romans.   The wall  is very close to the Holy of Holies which was at the western end of the temple.  It's regarded as sacred.  Regular services had been held before it.  Though Jordan had taken over this part of Jerusalem in 1948, a paragraph in the Israel-Jordan  1949 Armistice Agreement  affirmed the Jewish right of access to it which Jordan denied to them anyway.  It wasn't until 1967 that Jews could again go to the Wall.  It's the first place Jewish tourists go to when they visit Jerusalem today.  The tradition is to place a prayer  written on a little piece of paper into the niches of the wall.   One good thing about Herod is that he had rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem on a magnificent scale.

The Temple Mount was the existing sacredness of the place that had been holy to Jews for nearly 2,000 years before Mohammad.  This must be why Mohammed's followers chose it as being the fitting and awesome place for Mohammed's ascent.  A mosque is the Arabic name for a temple, a building used for public worship by the Muslims.

The Moslems called the site, Buraq, which has become a memorial to Islam's recognition of the Jewishness of the Holy Place.  It's why the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque were built on the Mount.  They called this Haram-A-Sharif, and it became the 3rd holiest place in Islam after Mecca and Medina, which are in Arabia.  Nobody knows if Mohammed ever came to Jerusalem or not.  There is no proof.

What is known is that Mohammed was establishing Islam in Arabia and hoped that both Jews and Christians would adopt the new religion.  He called on them to accept him as the successor of both Moses and Jesus.  First he ordered that when praying, the Moslem should copy the Jewish custom of turning his face towards Jerusalem, which was at that time under Christian rule.  When neither Jews or Christians were converting to his new religion, he got angry and 18 months later after his decree changed it and they were to turn their faces towards Mecca.

In fact, when directing the needs to build a mosque, it was then built so that the worshippers could face Mecca for prayer and they built in a prayer niche.  Most mosques built during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods have been destroyed.  Ones remaining are one in Damascus and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.   The Dome is the golden shrine on the Mosque of Omar.  The intentions of the builders was to outdo other religious buildings.  It was constructed from 689 CE-691 CE in the Muslim conquest of Syria of 637 CE by the Rashidun Caliphate.

Mohammed  and his followers knew that Jerusalem was a Holy City to the Jews and then to the Christians.  In following in the tradition to its holiness,  they made Jerusalem's Temple Area the site of his ascent to their 7th heaven.  It was not Mohammed's dream that made the Temple Mount holy to Islam.  It was the existing sanctity of the place.

In the siege of Jerusalem during the Roman war, the 2nd Temple served as a center of military activity and then was destroyed by the Romans soldiers with only the wall remaining.  In 70 CE Jerusalem fell to the Romans.  A Roman temple was later built on the site.

In the Moslem Period, the Mosque of Omar had been built over the Temple area.  This is the only claim to Jerusalem that the Moslems have.  Jerusalem was never a holy city to Islam.  Palestine has no significance in the Moslem religion.  It never existed as a country under Arab or any of the other Moslem administration.  The city of Jerusalem as such has no significance in Islam.  It was just that they were able to take over a site that had been holy to both previous religions of Judaism and Christianity.  That was a feather in the cap for Islam.

Resource: Battleground, fact and fantasy in Palestine by Samuel Katz
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
Middle East Past & Present by Armajani and Ricks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dome_of_the_Rock

Islam and Judaism

Islam, The Muslim Religion Today

by Nadene Goldfoot


Most Americans have been of the opinion that Islam is a religion of peace such as Judaism and Christianity and do not know what to make of the acts of jihadists who have become violent. They think that just because the twin towers were hit by a few odd balls who happened to believe in violence and were of the Muslim religion is no reason to think that all Muslims now have violence in their hearts and plan future actions of violence against us.


To understand Islam, one must study the history of this religion. Its leader and prophet was Mohammed who lived from 570 AD to 632 AD. He followed the Meccan trade caravans where he met Jews and Christians. He really felt bad that he wasn’t one of the people of the book, and started asking questions of them. He was an illiterate man and depended on his memory at this time. By age 40, he was always thinking about G-d, the hereafter, and the Day of Judgement.
Somehow he decided that he was chosen to be the Arab prophet and started proclaiming his revelations from the angel Gabriel, which finally became written down as the Koran. He said that his version was the corrected form of the Old and New Testaments.


His Koran reveals that it was copying Judaism. Both are purely monotheistic faiths. Islam allows that Jesus was a prophet, so makes that concession. Both religions have systems of religious law; both have daily prayers, only where Jews pray three times a day, Mohammed outdid us with five times a day. Both have dietary laws and do not eat anything from a pig. In the Koran, it is Abraham's son Ishmael that is to be sacrificed, not Isaac as Ishmael's line became the Arabs.


When Mohammed was 25 years old, he married a wealthy 40 year old woman,Khadijah, who set him up so that he didn’t have to worry about money. He wound up marrying either 11 or 13 women during his life, which was not uncommon at this period for his people. Many of these marriages were of convenience for the women. One of his wives, Safia, was said to be of Jewish origin.

He married a six-year-old girl named Aisha but allowed her to live with her parents until he consumated the marriage when she was about nine or ten. Virginity was important in those days.


He thought that Jews would accept his faith being so much of his was copied from the Jews, but they didn’t. They remained faithful to their own religion of Judaism, which angered him immensely. When he realized his attempts failed, he was most angry and changed some of his rites and became very hostile towards the Jews of Medina, who were either killed as a result or expelled. Hatred for Jews is peppered throughout the Koran. When I read the Koran, obtained through the public library while living in Eastern Oregon, I was totally shocked to find so many hateful references to Jews. If you see a Jew under a rock (hiding?) Kill him. I see the Palestinian jihadists referring to these lines in their hatred of us. They take this seriously and have embellished on it. His religion spread basically by conquering with the sword. He believed in beheading his opponents. Many Jewish tribes were wiped out this way or converted.


Even President Bush was under the opinion as most all Americans that Islam was a religion of peace. This belief continued even after seeing jihadist Muslims win elections in the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere. The new Iraqi and Afghan constitutions have included sharia, Islamic law which includes the death penalty for Christian converts as the highest law of the land. Sadly, the majority of peaceful Muslims are not showing signs of resisting or condemning a global Islamic jihad. They’re probably afraid of being killed if they do so.


There is Talaal Eid, 59 year old Lebanon born, a Boston Iman who is so moderate that he even visited the Pope and prayed for Bush. He says he is against jihadists, who are Wahhabi extremists. He received his degree from Harvard. He is not liked or respected by many Muslims in Boston. Today he is a chaplain in Brandeis.


Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed was an open supporter of Osama bin Laden who preached jihad in Britain for a long time and finally left during the jihad bombings in London of July 7, 2005. He said that Muhammad himself would want the cartoonists who made fun of Muhammad dead. Some Muslims point out how peaceful Muhammad was while others show otherwise. As for the cartoonist, they cite: "and the messenger Mohammed said, whoever insults a prophet, he must be punished and executed". "This man should be put on trial and if it is proven to be, executed".


Since there is to be a mosque very near the site of the twin towers promoted by Iman Feisal Rauf, New York is divided about its need to be in that one spot. Many cite the fact that this shows an Islam win of building mosques in places, such as the Cordoba mosque in Spain, built when Muslims took over the country and ruled there. . This proposed mosque will also be named "Cordoba House". Others see no reason to be sensitive and feel we are showing that we are different and better than they by our religions accepting theirs in our midst. They just don’t think about the meaning of the site picked.


Now more and more Americans have chewed over the idea of what Islam might stand for and are ready to burn Korans. This is angering the many Muslims in the world and we might find our remaining soldiers in the Middle East in danger for their lives because of this. Remember what happened to the Danish cartoonists and the threats to them.


There are 48 Muslim majority countries. The total world population of Muslims as of 2009 is 1.82 billion. Of Christians, there are about 2.1 billion, and of Jews, there are only 14 million of us. (There are about 6 million in Israel, 6 million in the states, and the others are scattered throughout the world.) Remember your math: it take 999 million plus one more to make one billion. That makes our possible 14 million look mighty small.


Reference: The Jewish Standard Encyclopedia
What Does Judaism Say About...? by Louis Jacobs
The Truth about Muhammad by Robert Spencer
http://www.islamicpopulation.com/
Islam, The Muslim Religion Today
http://bibelen.blogspot.com/