Written 1981,
revised January 2001
JERUSALEM : THE
TEMPLE MOUNT AND THE KORANIC TEXT
The Arab claim to Islamic sanctity and exclusive ownership of the Temple
Mount of Jerusalem, site of the famous El-Aksa Mosque, is based on the first
verse in the 17th Sura of the Koran, the nearly 1,400 year old book
sacred to over 1000 m. Muslims throughout the world. Translated into English
the verse reads as follows:
“Praise
to Him who carried his Servant at night from the holy place
of worship to the distant place of
worship the roundabouts of which
we have blessed so that we might show him some of Our signs; for
He is all-hearing and all-seeing.”
The verse is preceded by the hieratic formula: “In the name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate”. This
makes it clear that “Praise to Him” means Allah, and that “his Servant”
means his messenger Muhammad. Over
the centuries commentators and scholars, Muslim and others, have written whole
libraries to explain and interpret this seemingly cryptic and allusive passage
of 21 words in Arabic. A major issue, for instance, has been whether it means
that Muhammad was carried symbolically or bodily from Mecca to Jerusalem, or
whether the flight was a nightly vision. Another debate has arisen over which
places of worship are meant as those of departure and destination. In
traditional Muslim interpretation and tradition Muhammad was taken up after his
nightly journey to Jerusalem on a second lap: to the seventh heaven to be shown there signs of Allah’s
power and glory.
The Koran is throughout a book of clarity of thought, of purpose and
certainty. Muhammad was aware and self-confident of that. Right at the
beginning (in Sura 2, verse 2) it says “This is the Book in which there is no
doubt. It is guidance to those who fear Allah.” True, to Westerners the Koran is a tiring book to read
because of its many repetitions. But it needs to be borne in mind that it was meant to persuade, not to
entertain. History proves that it has achieved its didactic purpose with
astonishing success.
For those who read the Koran in a language other than the original
Arabic, we must add a word about translation. Take the word “masgad”, used twice in the opening verse of Sura 17.
Many translators of this verse
into English (even the Indian Muslim Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s of 1934) use the English terms “mosque” or “temple” for the Arabic “masgad” While this is
correct literally today, both translations mislead here in the light of seventh
century facts. Today “mosque” and
“temple” are understood to
be places of Muslim and Jewish worship respectively. Neither in
Mecca nor in Jerusalem were during Mohammad’s lifetime any Muslim or Jewish
shrines, certainly no Muslim “mosque”. The famous “Ka’bah” of Mecca, now
Islam’s holiest site, was indeed a “masgad”, but at that time still a place
of p a g a n worship. It was cleared of its pagan idols and dedicated to Islam
only in 630, after Muhammad had
gained control of the city, eight years after he and his followers fled for
their lives from there to Medina to escape the wrath and Threats of the
Meccans. Hence the proper and historically correct translation for ‘masgad’ in
this passage can only be a neutral ‘place of worship’.
On the Temple Mount in Jerusalem was in Muhammad’s time a “masgad” too,
but it again, like the Ka’bah in Mecca,
not of Islam and hence no “mosque”. The second Khalif, Omar
(634 – 644), occupied Jerusalem in 638, six years after Muhammad’s death. The impressive building that today is
called “El Aksa” was then the site
of a Christian church, or a chapel. The successor of Omar, the Khalif Abd El
Malik (685 – 705), had it rebuilt
as the Muslim “mosque” we see
today. (He also built an entirely new mosque nearby on the Temple Mount, known
as the Dome of the Rock, regarded
to be one of the jewels of Muslim architecture).
For many years after Muhammad’s death the city had no Arabic name. After
the Muslim conquest Jerusalem was renamed “Iliya”, the Roman “Aelia Capitolina”
in Arabic pronunciation and abbreviation.
The present Arabic name for the city, “El Kuds” (the Holy One), was
adopted long after Muhammad’s death.
Thus, all historic facts suggest that in Sura 17, 1, the meaning and
proper translation of “masgad” should be no more than “place of worship”.
The word “aqsa” (which means “most distant”) could not therefore refer
to an Islamic sanctuary. The
masgad of Mecca, was holy (the
Koran calls it “haraam”), but to pagans, not to Muslims. It is for these reasons that Muhammad did not
provide any geographic or religious details or names to identify either of
these two infidel shrines of his time. His listeners in the Arabian peninsula
understood well enough that such a nameless, casual reference to “places of
worship” implied his dissociation from both of these idolatrous sites.
We get an even closer view of what Muhammad meant by “aqsa” by
examining the qualifying words
“whose roundabouts we have blessed”. Why did Allah single out for his blessing
only the area “around” the place of worship? Why not the whole Temple Mount,
both the “roundabouts” a n d the
“masgad” This distinction, enigmatic on a first reading, calls for an explanation.
We find it in the following verse, 17,2. Allah is speaking on an event of the
distant past, seemingly quite unrelated to a nightly journey, or the vision of
a journey, to Jerusalem. It reads: “We gave Moses the Book and made it a
direction for the People of Israel
not to accept any other than Me as their patron.” Thus it was for a specific didactic purpose that Muhammad
cited here the story of Moses going up to meet Allah and receiving from his
hands “the Book” (the Bible), bringing it down to guide the people of Israel
and offering them the choice between obeying it - and its rewards; or turning
away from it - and its penalties. Here and throughout the Koran Muhammad cited
to his audience more or less familiar tales from the Bible as precedents. As
in legal pleading he quoted
precedents to strengthen the case for his own new faith as Allah’s final and
universal revelation, this time in Arabic, to his own people, replacing,
without invalidating, previous revelations to “the people of the Book”, meaning
the Jews and the Christians.
Muhammad thought that citing this divine “sign” given to Moses, was best
suited to manifest the authenticity of his own message. With this purpose in
mind he called up in his listeners
the vision of a nightly ride to the “distant place of worship” where to the
best of their information on the Bible the meeting of God and Moses had taken
place. From the summit of the
mountain, Muhammad and his audience believed, Moses had gone up to heaven to
receive and bring down Allah’s first book to the banu Isra’il. (In the most
ancient manuscripts the 17th Sura
significantly bears the title “Banu Isra’il”, as it refers to them at its
beginning and again at its end). The association shows that Muhammad felt
himself performing on behalf of his Arabian people the same mission which Moses
had performed for the people of Israel – ascending to heaven to receive Allah’s latest revelation, this time
delivered in Arabic as his final message.
The
neutral reference to the “blessed environment” of the “distant” Christian
masgad of verse 17,1 now makes contextual sense : only the historic nearby
environment, or precinct, not the Christian shrine itself in contemporary
Jerusalem, could be a suitable
site for Allah’s new revelation and blessing. That blessing was therefore
restricted to the masgad’s “roundabouts”. Muhammad could not and did not regard
the Byzantine chapel on the Temple Mount as a hallowed take-off place for his
own ascent to Allah. An ascent from inside a Christian shrine of his time was
unthinkable for him and his contemporaries.
And just as the people of Israel were punished whenever they disobeyed
God’s commandments in the Bible, Muhammad goes on to warn his Arabians (in
verses 9 and 10 of Sura 17) to
face the same choice between good and evil: “Verily this Koran guides to what is most right and delivers
good news to the believers who act righteously and shall have great reward. For
those who do not believe in the hereafter We have prepared a grievous penalty”.
The same choice for the two nations, of Israel and Arabia; the same form of
delivery of Allah’s guidance direct to his chosen messengers Moses and
Muhammad; the same holy site for transmitting his sign; the same sign, “a sacred
book”, this time in Arabic.
There is more evidence to support this interpretation. Towards the end
of Sura 17 ( altogether 111 verses) Muhammad repeats the vision of his meeting
with Allah. (One of the elements of the Koran’s powerful effect is repetition).
He quotes the very words of those who cast doubt on his claim to be Allah’s
messenger and outright castigates these critics. They say to him (in verse 90):
“We shall not believe you until you cause a spring to gush forth for us from
the earth” (yet another “sign” Allah had given Moses with which to convince his
people). Mecca’s sarcastic doubters present a whole list of miracles they want
to see Muhammad perform before believing him, such as owning “a golden house;
or you mount a ladder up to heaven. No, we shall not believe even your ascent
until you bring down to us a book we can read.”
From their contacts with
the Jews of Arabia and other countries in the Middle East the Meccan public
was quite familiar with the Biblical story of Moses coming down from the
mountain with the Book and finding the people of Israel having relapsed into
idolatry and getting punished for it. Muhammad unflinchingly faced the
challenge of their taunts. The purpose of his nightly journey was to be shown
“signs” of Allah’s might and in turn to show these to his sneering Meccans.
They want to see such signs as: “a book we can read”, to convince them of the
truth of his claim to be “Allah’s authentic messenger”, just as Moses brought
down the Book for the people of Israel to read.
The aim of Muhammad’s repeated citations in Sura 17 and elsewhere of
Moses and “the Book” he brought down is now apparent. It is also evident in the
frivolous demands of the
unbelievers (meaning his detractors in Mecca) to be shown “signs”. In several
passages he reminded them that the text of the Koran itself was such a sign. He
challenged his doubting listeners “to produce a book like it, even with help
from others.” A list of all the
passages in the Koran that portray Abraham and Moses as models of delivering to
the banu Isra’il the message of God’s unity, power and mercy would show how
much Muhammad thought of his own mission as parallel to theirs.
We hold that the meaning of
Sura 17, read in its historic frame, now becomes quite transparent. For
Muhammad, the “blessed
roundabouts” of the undefined, unnamed, “distant place of worship” - in his
lifetime first Byzantine, then Persian, then Byzantine again in rapid
change - was the site, real in the distant past, historic now, of
Moses’ encounter with God, of the delivery of “the Book” intended to guide the
people of Israel. It set a precedent for his own encounter with, and personal
experience of, Allah’s power, of his “signs”, one of them the divine
revelations that form the text of the Koran.
For
the Arabian Muhammad the significance of Jerusalem, its place in the history of Israel and its prophets
was not a contemporary, political or a territorial claim, but purely religious,
a place to illustrate the relationship between Allah and man, the spot on earth
where monotheism was first revealed to humanity. Jerusalem was to Muhammad’s
generation a minor town in “Syria”, the Byzantine province whose capital was
Damascus. For the past 300 years the Middle East had been territory disputed by
the two major powers, Byzantium and Persia. In Mohammed’s lifetime (570 – 632) the Holy Land was a
subdistrict of Syria, to his Arabians foreign, non-Arab, mainly Christian
territory, under the dominion of the Byzantine rulers. Except for a short time
it was held by Persia, still pagan (Zoroastrian) then. For 300 years the two
rival powers fought intermittent wars for supremacy in the Middle East. One of
the recurrent battles between them took place in 615 in the Syrian Yarmuk
Valley. The Byzantines were decisively beaten and as a result lost the entire
province of “Syria” to Persia. Among Persia’s next-door Arabian neighbors, the
pagan Meccans, rejoiced. They rejected the Christian religion of Byzantium no
less than the new monotheistic faith of Muhammad which he had begun propagating
a few years earlier and which they still regarded as not much more than a
variant of Christianity.
This Meccan rejoicing at the discomfiture of the Byzantines (who were a
“People of the Book” by virtue of their Christian faith) and the triumph of the
Persians (pagans like the Mecans) stirred Muhammad into a rebuke of his
compatriots. In Sura 30, verses 2
- 4, he warned his fellow citizens:
“The Byzantines were defeated in a land close by (meaning Syria, MED). But a few years after their defeat they
will be victorious. The decision was with Allah in the past and will be in the
future. On that day the true believers will rejoice.”
From this theological comment and perceptive forecast of Middle East
military affairs in his time Muhammad goes on (in sura 30, verses 5 - 6) to
state a basic dogma of Islam: “With Allah’s help! He helps those whom he will, exalted as he is by mercy and
might. A promise of Allah – He will never go back on it. But most men heed it
not.” Nine years later Muhammad’s prediction of a reversal came true. The
Byzantine forces sent by Greek emperor Heraclius recovered Syria from the
Persians.
After
Muhammad’s death one of the early Muslim armies bent on conquest swept from
Arabia westward and in a short time overran Syria to the shore of the
Mediterranean, welcomed by a Christian and Jewish population disaffected by the
corrupt and oppressive Byzantine administration. Iliya (Jerusalem) was taken
638 by one of Caliph Omar’s officers and it remained strategically and
politically unimportant as it had been before. It was a mere historic relic and
museum of a defunct Israel. The Muslim conquerors made the thriving port city
of Caesarea the capital of the sub-district, later on Ramleh, not Iliya.
A religious-Islamic aspect of the conquest was not on Caliph Omar’s mind
when he ordered Palestine to be occupied. According to tradition, the first
thing he wanted to see in Jerusalem was the historic site where a previous
conqueror, King David, was said to have prayed to his god for the first
time. The Temple Mount of
Jerusalem, and the city itself, became sacred to Islam about fifty years after
the city’s occupation, and that in the wake of military and political events
elsewhere. The Koran does not
mention the city and accords it no sanctity. Mohammad made Mecca and its sacred
shrine, the Ka’bah, pagan before his return to the city in 630, the central place of worship of his new
faith. He never looked back on
contemporary Jerusalem. The great triumph of his divine mission was to lay down
for all times, by personal example, in the Koran with deliberate detail, the
rites and devotions which every true believer is called to perform in Mecca as
a Muslim pilgrim at least once in his life. The holy places and shrines of the
older monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Christianity, in Jerusalem, Hebron,
Bethlehem and Nazareth were all superseded by those of Mecca as the focus of
Islam, just as Islam followed previous revelations of the first monotheistic
faiths. Islam was Allah’s final revelation, Muhammad insisted, and replaced the
two previous ones, just as he himself was Allah’s ultimate messenger to the
whole family of man.
The evidence of history and of the Koran has led non-Muslim scholars to
suggest that verse 1 of Sura 17
may have been inserted into the canonic text only later, after the city of
Jerusalem was taken in 638. An
argument backing their view is
Sura 30, verse 2, in which Muhammad referred to Syria as a “n e a r” neighbour of Arabia, as indeed it is. This clashes with the
rather strained interpretation of Jerusalem as the site of the “faraway”
masgad. If he spoke of Syria as “a land close by”, it is indeed unlikely that
he could have thought of contemporary Jerusalem as being the site of the
“distant place of worship” - el masgad ul-aqsa. The term makes sense however,
if instead of reading into “el-aqsa” a spatial, geographical meaning, we read
it as “distant” in a celestial sense, the site of divine presence.
It is not surprising that during the life of Muhammad there was no
original Arabic name yet for
Jerusalem. “El Kuds” came into use only two generations after his death. Even
for some time after the conquest of Byzantine Syria by the Arabians it was
still “Iliya”, the revived ancient name “Aelia Capitolina” which the Romans
called the city they had razed after putting down the last rebellion of Israel.
It must be kept in mind that the text of the Koran as it has come down
to us, was not written or edited by Muhammad himself. His early followers did,
writing down some at once, others later as they remembered his words. Out of
the Koran’s surviving records one
unified version was edited and approved as definitive only during the reign of
the third Khalif, Othman, in 653,
21 years after Muhammad’s death.
On the exact chronological order in which he proclaimed the 114 Suras (chapters), scholars
disagree to this day. If some phrases were inserted into the text soon after
Omar’s death to suit new political or religious circumstances like the conquest
of Jerusalem we shall never know. But what is certain beyond doubt is that the
“environment we have blessed” refers to the ancient Biblical Jerusalem and to
the Holy Land bestowed as an irrevocable “blessing and favour” for all
time on the banu Isra’il.
Why the Koran’s explicit confirmation of Israel’s legal title to the
Holy Land, “the eastern and western parts of it” (Sura 7, v. 137), has gone
unnoticed, unmentioned or perhaps deliberately ignored in the heated religious
and political disputes of Muslim theologists, non-Muslim scholars and politicians in our century has puzzled our MED team, all the more since the Koran is so
explicit on the subject. One of reasons is probably that the Koran is rarely
read by people raised in the Western humanist and literary tradition. Another
reason seems to be the reluctance of Muslims to discuss the subject even among
themselves. The Arabs today have a vested political and emotional interest in
maintaining their claim to
Jerusalem as a sanctuary of their faith and to Palestine as their territory
regardless of the difficulty of reconciling their claim with the Koranic text
of Allah’s irrevocable promise.
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