Love of the Land: The Islamization of Jerusalem

The Islamization of Jerusalem

Mordechai Kedar
Hudson New York
09 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

Although the importance of Jerusalem for Christians and Jews is part of universal concepts of history and theology and beyond dispute, when it comes to modern politics, we hear over and over again Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims demanding that Jerusalem become the capital of the future Palestinian state, owing to its holiness in Islam.

The question is: When and how did this city became holy to Muslims?

When the Prophet Muhammad established Islam, he introduced a minimum of innovations. He employed the hallowed personages, historic legends and sacred sites of Judaism, Christianity, and even paganism, by Islamizing them.

According to Islam, Abraham was the first Muslim, and Jesus and St. John (the sons of Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron) were prophets and guardians of the second heaven.

Many Biblical legends (“asatir al-awwalin”), which were familiar to the pagan Arabs before the dawn of Islam, underwent an Islamic conversion; the Koran as well as the Hadith (the Islamic oral tradition), are replete with them.

Islamization was enforced on places as well as persons: Mecca and the holy stone -- al-Ka’bah -- were holy sites of the pre-Islamic pagan Arabs. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and the Great Mosque of Istanbul were erected on the sites of Christian-Byzantine churches -- two of the better known examples of how Islam treats sanctuaries of other faiths.

Jerusalem, too, underwent Islamization: At first Muhammad tried to convince the Jews near Medina to join his young community. By way of persuasion, he established the direction of prayer (kiblah) to be to the north, towards Jerusalem, in keeping with Jewish practice; but after he failed in this effort, he turned against the Jews, killed many of them, and directed the kiblah southward, towards Mecca.

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Love of the Land: The Islamization of Jerusalem