Juan Cole
Informed Comment / August 15, 2024
Ann Arbor – The Times of Israel reported that a schism is brewing on the Israeli right wing.
The Ultra-Orthodox object to Jews praying at the Temple Mount on the grounds that it is the holy site of the Second Temple and for Jews to pray there before the Messiah comes is impious and defiles holy land. The official Israeli Rabbinate also holds this stance.
On Tuesday, Jewish Power leader Itamar Ben-Gvir led a group of Israelis in storming the Temple Mount, the third holiest shrine of the Muslims. Video emerged of them praying there.
The provocation was denounced by United Torah Judaism, a small Ultra- Orthodox party that is in coalition with the current Likud government. Some UTJ members are threatening to pull out of Netanyahu’s coalition government over the issue, saying that praying at the Muslim world’s third holiest shrine was bound to worsen relations with Israel’s neighbors and the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims.
The controversy between the Ultra-Orthodox and fascist wings of Judaism comes on top of a building crisis between the ultra-Orthodox community and the Netanyahu government over the conscription of the Ultra-Orthodox into the Israeli army.
I wrote on another occasion:
Americans who read about Muslims in Jerusalem may be confused. Many will know from the Old Testament about Jerusalem as the capital of the ancient kingdom of Judah and so will think an Israeli claim on the city is a historical revival. And, of course, they will know of Jesus’s relationship to the city where he was tried by the Roman prefect and executed for political sedition in the Roman manner, by crucifixion.
So what are the Muslims doing there? you may ask.
Very briefly: The Prophet Muhammad (d. 632) is believed by Muslims to have journeyed to Jerusalem and to have ascended from the site of the al-Aqsa complex up to heaven, from which he returned to continue his prophetic mission.
I argued in my book Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires that we may conclude from the Qur’an and the account of Jacob of Edessa that Muhammad likely did visit Jerusalem on a trading journey in 617 or 618, when it was under the rule of the Iranian Sasanian Empire, and had a mystical experience there at the Temple Mount, which was then abandoned. After the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 AD they gradually banned Jews from living there. At first they built pagan temples in the city, but after Constantine they built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and made it a Christian city. Iran conquered it in 614 and held it until early 630.
After the Prophet’s death in 632, the Eastern Roman Empire tried to reassert itself in Palestine (that was what they called it). There is some indication that Jews were persecuted, for having tilted to the Iranian side during the war. The Miaphysite Christian majority may also not have been happy about the re-imposition of Chalcedonian rule. There may have been uprisings among local Arabs. Somehow the second Muslim vicar of Muhammad, the Commander of the Faithful Umar ibn al-Khattab, got drawn into these struggles, and his armies conquered Jerusalem and the Near East, detaching them from the Eastern Romans. Umar built a small structure on the Temple Mount that later Umayyad kings expanded into the al-Aqsa Mosque, finishing it in 705.
Muslims then ruled Jerusalem, and considered it holy, from 636 until 1917, with the exception of a period of less than a century during the Crusades, 1099-1187 and 1243-1244. Most Jews and Christians in the area over time converted to Islam (and usually quite voluntarily).
Muslims ruled Jerusalem far longer than Jews did, in history.
Israel conquered East Jerusalem and occupied it in 1967.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
