Jerusalem Means More to Jews Than to Muslims

At its base, the debate over Jerusalem consists of an argument between Jews and Muslims over who has the older, better documented and deeper ties to the Holy City.

A cursory review of the facts shows that there is not much of a contest.

Jerusalem has a unique importance to Jews. It has a unique place in Jewish law and a pervasive presence in the Jewish religion. Jews pray toward Jerusalem, mourn the destruction of their Temple there and wishfully repeat the phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem.” It is the only capital of the Jewish state, ancient or modern.

In contrast, Jerusalem has a distinctly secondary place for Muslims. It is not once mentioned in the Koran or in the liturgy. The Prophet Muhammad never went to the city, nor did he have ties to it. Jerusalem never has served as the capital of any Muslim polity, and has never been an Islamic cultural center.

Rather, Mecca is the “Jerusalem” of Islam. That is where Muslims believe that Abraham nearly sacrificed Ishmael, where Muhammad lived most of his life, and where the key events of Islam took place. Muslims pray in its direction five times each day, and it is where non-Muslims are forbidden to set foot.

Jerusalem being of minor importance to Islam, why do Muslims nowadays insist that the city is more important to them than to Jews? The answer has to do with politics. Muslims take religious interest in Jerusalem when it serves practical interests. When those concerns lapse, so does the standing of Jerusalem. This pattern has recurred at least five times over 14 centuries:

* The time of the Prophet. When Muhammad sought to convert the Jews in the 620s, he adopted several Jewish-style practices--a Yom Kippur-like fast, a synagogue-like place of worship, kosher-style food restrictions and also Tachanun-like prayers rendered while facing Jerusalem. But when most Jews rejected Muhammad’s overtures, the Koran changed the prayer direction to Mecca, and Jerusalem lost importance for Muslims.

* The Umayyad dynasty. Jerusalem regained stature a few decades later when rulers of the Umayyad dynasty sought ways to enhance the importance of its territories. One way was by building two monumental religious structures in Jerusalem--the Dome of the Rock in 691 and Al Aqsa Mosque in 715.

The Umayyads also did something tricky: The Koran states that God took Muhammad “by night from the sacred mosque in Mecca to the furthest (in Arabic, al aqsa) place of worship.” When this passage was revealed (about 621), “furthest place of worship” was a turn of phrase, not a specific place. But decades later, after the Umayyads built a mosque that they called Al Aqsa in Jerusalem, Muslims interpreted the passage about the “furthest place of worship” as a reference to Jerusalem. When the Umayyads fell in 750, however, Jerusalem lapsed into near obscurity.

* The Crusades. The Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 evinced little Muslim reaction at first. Then, as a Muslim counter-Crusade developed, so did a whole literature extolling the virtues of Jerusalem. As a result, at about this time Jerusalem came to be seen as Islam’s third-most holy city.

Then, safely back in Muslim hands in 1187, the city lapsed into its usual obscurity. The population declined, even the defensive walls fell.

* The British conquest. Only when British troops reached Jerusalem in 1917 did Muslims reawaken to the city’s importance. Palestinian leaders made Jerusalem a centerpiece of their campaign against Zionism.

When the Jordanians won the Old City in 1948, Muslims predictably lost interest again in Jerusalem. It reverted to a provincial backwater, deliberately degraded by the Jordanians in favor of Amman, their capital.

Taking out a bank loan, subscribing to telephone service or registering a postal package required a trip to Amman. Jordanian radio transmitted the Friday sermon not from Al Aqsa but from a minor mosque in Amman. Jerusalem also fell off the Arab diplomatic map: The PLO covenant of 1964 did not mention it. No Arab leader (other than King Hussein, and he rarely) visited there.

* The Israeli conquest. When Israel captured the city in June 1967, Muslim interest in Jerusalem again surged. The 1968 PLO covenant mentioned Jerusalem by name. Revolutionary Iran created a Jerusalem Day and placed the city on bank notes. Money flooded into the city to build it up.

Thus have politics, more than religious sentiments, driven Muslim interest in Jerusalem through history.