by Avi Zarmi

The Committee for Truth and Justice

It is an oft-stated truism that Jerusalem is a city holy to three faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Like most other "isms", this one is less than fully conversant with the truth.

The Jewish claim on Jerusalem is easily enough verified: opening the Bible, one can point to many hundreds of times that the city is mentioned, as the capital of the united kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon; as the site of Solomon's Temple, which stood for 410 years, most of it in the capital of the subsequent, divided kingdom of Judah as the place lovingly restored by the Jewish exiles returning from Babylon, who rebuilt the Temple on the same spot, there to stand another 420 years. Jews turn toward Jerusalem to pray, wherever they are, and three times a day pray for the restoration of the city and its Temple to them.

Nor need we rely only on Jewish sources. The Roman historian Tacitus, for instance, gives eloquent testimony to the ferocity with which Jewish fighters defended their holy city against the onslaughts of the Roman legions. Other, subsequent Roman historians document Hadrian's loss of three Legions in suppressing the later revolt led by Bar Kochva.

The Christian claim is similarly easy to verify. Significant episodes in all the gospels, and nearly the whole of the Gospel according to John, take place in the Holy City, as do many of the subsequent Acts of the Apostles. For many hundreds of years, various Christian denominations have clung jealously to their rights in various historic churches and other sites, and have maintained a presence of clergy and lay people alike, through the bitterest and most difficult times, to hold on to those rights.

And then there are the thousands upon thousands of Jewish and Christian pilgrims, who, every year, enthusiastically flock to the Holy City for the festivals of Passover, Sukkoth, and Shavuoth, on the one hand, and Christmas and Easter, on the other.

Which leaves us with the Muslim claim. One can read diligently through the Qur'an, from start to finish, without once finding a reference to the city of Jerusalem. The nearest thing to such a reference is a cryptic report of a trip on a winged steed, named al-Buraq, in which Muhammad was whisked to "the furthest mosque", wherever that may be, from which Muhammad is said to have ascended into heaven.

That's it; it is this "furthest mosque" which subsequent Sunni Muslim scholarship decided to identify with the Temple Mount in the Holy City. Nothing more. No pilgrimages; no holidays.

It is an historical fact (first noted, I believe, by Daniel Pipes in 2001) that Muslim reverence for the Holy City is more political than it is religious, and waxes and wanes according to the climate of the times. It is only when they find it expedient that Jerusalem suddenly achieves the status of the "third holiest city in Islam,” after Mecca and Madina.

The first of these occasions was during the lifetime of Muhammad himself as we know from the Hadith, Indeed, for a short while, Jerusalem was more important than the other cities. The reason was that, at the beginning of his career, Muhammad was interested in trying to attract Jewish converts to his new religion. For this reason, he initially ordered his followers to face toward Jerusalem when they prayed. But in short order, when the converts failed to come, and certainly after the conquest of the city of Yathrib in what is now Saudi Arabia, the slaughter of its largely Jewish population, and renaming (to this day) as Madinat an-Nabi, "The Prophet's City" or simply Madina for short, that they were redirected to face toward Mecca. Thus did Muhammad's initial ardour for Jerusalem cool.

Muslim interest in the city was kindled a second time in the days of the Umayyad Khalifate, based in Damascus. In about 680 CE, the city of Mecca rebelled against the Umayyads. In a bid to offset the importance and significance of Islam's holiest city rebelling against their rule, the Umayyad ruler Mu'awiyya built the splendid Dome of the Rock Mosque, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Some 35 years later, in about 715, his dynasty constructed the smaller al-'Aqsa Mosque, which they thus cunningly named "the Furthest" Mosque, recalling the story of Muhammad's ride on al-Buraq.

The reaction of non-Umayyads, the very rebels in the Arabian Peninsula, is interesting and telling. For instance, Muhammad ibnu'l-Hanfiya (a relative of the Muslim prophet) is recorded as having said: "The Umayyads pretend that God put his foot in the Rock in Jerusalem. ..." whence one can see that not all agreed on the location of the "furthest mosque" at that time.

The next period of Muslim interest in the fate of the city was during the Crusades of the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries. When Salah ad-Din finally succeeded in wresting the city from its western conquerors, it returned to its historic rôle as a Muslim backwater.

Despite their having built the Dome of the Rock and al-'Aqsa, the Muslims never, in the past, attempted to deny the Jewish connection and reverence for the Temple Mont in Jerusalem. There exists a tour guide, for instance, published in 1925 by the Supreme Muslim Council in English under the British Mandate, proudly proclaims that the Mount's "identity with Solomon's Temple is beyond dispute."

But that was in 1925. In 1929, as the conflict between the anti-Semitic Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Zionists escalated, the Muslims suddenly decided to expropriate the Kothel ha-Ma'aravi, the "Western Wall" which bordered the western edge of the Temple courtyard during Roman times (sometimes also called the "Wailing Wall", because of the emotional services held there by throngs of Jews on the anniversary of the Temple's destruction), by claiming that al-Buraq had been tethered to a (non-existent) iron ring in the wall, and therefore renaming it the "al-Buraq Wall."

In 1930, a British commission charged with determining the right of Jews and Muslims at the wall issued its report, excerpted below: "The sanctity of the wall and of the passage in front of it is due to the fact that on the Prophet's abovementioned journey, his winged steed (al- Buraq) came there and was tethered to the western wall of the Haram. …"

The Jews deny that the Wall and the Pavement in front of it, and the Moghrabi Quarter can be considered a Muslim Holy Place. According to the Jews, the Muslims themselves do not regard them so, because otherwise they would not have smeared the Wall with filth as the Jews state the Muslims have done on certain occasions, nor permitted the construction of a water closet close to the wall that is a direct continuation of the Wailing Wall to the south, and also forms part of the exterior of the Haram.

"Furthermore … it is only quite recently that the Muslims have begun to make out that the Prophet passed by there and that the winged steed was tethered to an iron ring in the wall. ... Moreover, the Muslims did not until recent years call the Wailing Wall Al-Buraq. The official guide to the Haram that was published by the Muslim authorities does not mention any special sanctity as inherent in the wall."

Needless to say, the Muslims have never dropped this spurious claim and continue to press it, confident in the effects of sufficient, and sufficiently loud, repetitions to drown out their own printed words of 85 years ago. It is this desire to score political points which underlies Article 18 of the PLO Charter, adopted in 1964: "The claims of historic and spiritual ties between the Jews and Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history or with the true basis of sound statehood."

A charter never abrogated or amended by the Arab entity being foisted on Jewish Israel as a "partner for peace".