EARLY HISTORY JERUSALEM - What is the significance of Jerusalem to Jews and Muslims?

EARLY HISTORY JERUSALEM - What is the significance of Jerusalem to Jews and Muslims?

EARLY HISTORY JERUSALEM

What is the significance of Jerusalem to Jews and Muslims?

Photo © JIA

Jerusalem 2002

For the Jews, the significance of Jerusalem is quite clear. 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 Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD 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, as 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

For Muslims, the role of Jerusalem is more complex, a combination of religious and political aspects. Some Arabs claim they are related to the Jebusites who founded Jerusalem during the bronze age. At the time of the arrival of the Israelites in Palestine the Jebusites were defeated by Joshua and their king was slain, but they were not entirely driven out of their city Jebus till the time of David, who made Jebus, renamed Jerusalem, the capital of his kingdom instead of Hebron. The site on which the temple was afterwards built belonged to Araunah, a Jebusite, from whom it was purchased by David, who refused to accept it as a free gift (2 Sam. 24:16-25). The Jebusites disappeared by 586 BC and it is highly doubtful that any modern Arabs, nomads from Arabia, are descended from them.
Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Qur'an and did not occupy any special role in Islam long after Mohammed's death. Following the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 636 AD, the new government did not make Jerusalem the political center of the area. This was fixed at Lydda till the year 716, then at Ar-Ramla (Ramleh). But in the Muslim view, too, Jerusalem, the city of David and Christ, became a very holy place, third only after Mecca and Medina, because of political developments.
In the reign of Caliph 'Abd-al-malik (684-705, the fifth Ommaid caliph, at Damascus, Syria) the people of what is now Iraq revolted and conquered the Hijaz, the region and province in eastern Saudi Arabia, including the cities of Mecca and Madina, Jedda and At Ta'if. Syrian Muslims could not longer go to those cities. In order to give his followers a substitute for the haraman (Mecca and Medina), which they were prevented from visiting, the Caliph resolved to make Jerusalem a center of pilgrimage. He, therefore, set about to adorn the place of the Temple with a splendid mosque.
It appears that the Christians had left the place where the Temple had once stood untouched. Omar visited it and found it filled up with refuse. In his time a large square building with no architectural pretension was put up to shelter the True Believers who went there to pray. In 691 'Abd-al-malik replaced this by the exquisite "Dome of the Rock" (Qubbet-es-Sachra), built by Byzantine architects, that still stands in the middle of the Temple area.
Then, in 715, to build up the prestige of their dominions, the Ommaid caliphs concocted a masterstroke: they built a second mosque in Jerusalem, again on the Temple Mount, and called this one the Furthest Mosque (al-masjid al-aqsa, or Al-Aqsa Mosque), from a passage of the Qur'an (17:1) describing the Prophet Mohammed's Night Journey to heaven (isra'). With this, the Ommaids retroactively gave Jerusalem a role in Mohammed's life, a role that was entirely fictional since Mohammed never visited Jerusalem, died in 632, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque was not built until 715, eighty-three years after his death.
This association of Jerusalem with al-masjid al-aqsa fit into a wider Muslim tendency to identify place names found in the Qur'an with locations they coveted, and then to claim it and build a mosque to replace whatever was there before.
An 1854 report states Jerusalem's total population at 15,000, of which a majority (8,000) were Jews.

Sources and additional reading on this topic:

• Jerusalem (A.D. 71-1099)
• The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem
• AlAqsa.org Information Center
• The Jerusalem Archives
• Jebusites
• The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Basic Facts, Jerusalem
• Jerusalem: Whose City?
• The Islamic Claim to Temple Mount
• The Prophet Muhammad's 'Night Journey' was Not to Jerusalem but to Medina

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