by Nadav Shragai
Israel could counter Muslim lies about the Jewish history of Jerusalem by pointing out 10 centuries of Islamic sources that confirm Jewish ties to the Temple Mount, or the Ottoman decrees that guaranteed the Jews the right to worship at the Western Wall.
The name Aref al-Aref means very little, if anything, to the Israeli public at large, but last month's resolution
by UNESCO, which adopted the Palestinian tangle of lies about the Jews
having no ties to the Temple Mount, Jerusalem, or the Western Wall,
could bring the late Palestinian historian -- who briefly served as the
mayor of east Jerusalem -- out of obscurity.
Al-Aref was an Arab journalist, politician,
and public official in the time of the British Mandate in Palestine. In
the final years of Jordanian rule over east Jerusalem, he also served as
director of the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum near Damascus Gate.
The museum has been moved and is now located in the Israel Antiquities
Authority. The British founded the museum during the Mandate, and when
Jordan "inherited" it, the Jordanian commissars used tape to cover up
the Hebrew script on some of the artifacts on display.
In spite of this, Al-Aref, an avowed
Palestinian nationalist, adhered to historical truth and scientific
research and wrote in his books that the Temple Mount (al-Haram
al-Sharif in Arabic) is the same Mount Moriah mentioned in Genesis, the
site of the Jebusite threshing floor that King David bought to build the
Temple on it, and that David's son, Solomon, built the Temple in the
year 1007 BCE.
According to Al-Aref's writings, remnants of
Solomon's Temple are located beneath Al-Aqsa mosque. The place, he
wrote, had belonged to Jews for a certain time, and then it returned to
Muslim ownership. He even identified the quarry to the right of Damascus
Gate as "Solomon's Quarry," although that might be incorrect, and said
that David and Solomon took stones from that location to construct the
Temple.
Professor Yitzhak Reiter of the Jerusalem
Institute for Israel Studies Institute and the Academic College of
Ashkelon, an internationally renowned expert on Islam, says that Al-Aref
wrote these things when the Old City of Jerusalem was still part of the
Kingdom of Jordan, and that they have scarcely been mentioned in Arab
history books since 1967 or in contemporary discourse. Reiter, author of
From Jerusalem to Mecca and Back: The Islamic Consolidation of
Jerusalem, investigated and discovered that "the story of the Jewish
Temple, details of its construction, its traditions, its existence and
even details about the destruction of the First Temple by
Nebuchadnezzar, were in the past a deeply entrenched motif in all types
of Arab Muslim literature."
Archaeologist Professor Dan Bahat, an
authority on the history of the Temple Mount and Jerusalem, who is
currently working on the Muslim chapter in his book about the history of
the Mount, points to a series of early Muslim sources which show that
the Muslims themselves, who today deny the existence of the Temple on
the Mount and any Jewish ties to Jerusalem, used to treat it very
differently.
"In the Quran itself there are sources, such
as Surah 2 and Surah 7, which identify the Hutta Gate [called Shaar
Haslichot, "Gate of Forgiveness" in Hebrew and the Berkeley Gate in
English] as the gate through which 'the children of Israel' would one
day enter the Temple Mount. The Berkeley Gate is located under the
Mughrabi Bridge, which goes over the women's section of the Western Wall
Plaza," Bahat explains.
Bahat also reveals that Jewish sources, mostly
from the Cairo geniza, teach us that elderly Jews were the ones who
showed the Muslims the edges of the Foundation Stone, a white stone that
was covered by trash and sewage. These were the borders that formed the
outlines of the Dome of the Rock building on top of the ancient stone.
Bahat says that Muslim writer Ibn Abu Rabiah,
who wrote about Jerusalem in the year 913, only about 200 years after
the Dome of the Rock was built, testified that the Dome of the Chain [a
freestanding dome on the Temple Mount] which today is identified as a
Muslim element, was called that because of a legend dating back to the
time of King Solomon, which said that a chain was suspended there
between Heaven and the Earth. If two litigants approached it, only the
honest one could grab hold of the chain. The liar or unjust man could
not.
Another revelation from Bahat: The Muslims who
knew about the Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and Jerusalem honored
the Jews in the first centuries after Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the
Rock were built by assigning them the upkeep: sweeping the floors and
rugs of the mosque, filling the lamps with oil and cleaning the ritual
baths.
"There is plenty of evidence of this. One is
from Mujir al-Din of the 15th century, whom Muslims consider one of the
greatest authorities on the early Islamic history of Jerusalem," Bahat
notes.
Bahat and Reiter reach far back into history,
but there is no need to. Until almost 1967, in the 50 years that
preceded the war that would change the map of Jerusalem and the region,
there were plenty of Palestinian and even Jordanian references that
identified the Jewish links to Jerusalem and its holy sites, in complete
contrast to what representatives of Jordan, the Palestinians, and the
Arab states in international bodies are claiming today.
"[Israel] has neglected to use this public
diplomacy tool in challenging the attacks that challenge Jewish ties to
Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Maybe it's time to use it," an official
in the Foreign Ministry said this week.
Indeed, recent archaeological discoveries -- the ancient Muslim inscription from
a mosque near Hebron that says that in the early days of Islam, the
Dome of the Rock building was called "Bait al-Maqdess" [an Arabicized
version of the Hebrew "Beit Hamikdash"], or the discovery of a First
Temple-era papyrus that
names Jerusalem in early Hebrew script -- are archaeological ammunition
that can be used to break down the Palestinian lies.
Another public diplomacy path Israel can use
is of course the countless quotes from the Bible, the Mishna, the
Talmud, the New Testament, and the books of Roman Jewish historian
Joseph ben Matityahu, also known as Josephus Flavius, who lived in the
first century C.E. and witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem and the
Second Temple.
Even a photocopy of an ancient manuscript by
Persian Quran commentator Tafsir Al-Tabari, which was smuggled out of
the University of Cairo library a few years ago by Egyptian nuclear
scientist and Zionist Noha Hassid, joins the catalogue of evidence in
favor of Israel.
The Al-Tabari document says that "Bait
Al-Maqdess [the Temple] was built by Solomon, son of David, and was made
of gold, pearls, rubies, and gems -- peridot, paved with silver and
gold, and had gold pillars." Israeli public diplomacy has taken
advantage of only a small amount of the professional literature by
people like Reiter, Bahat, attorney Dr. Shmuel Berkowitz (author of "How
Terrible is this Place" and "The Wars Over Holy Places"), or the books
by former Foreign Ministry Director General Dr. Dore Gold or this
author. All these works lay out documentation that proves that a good
liar has to remember to whom he told the truth, and when.
Take, for example, the UNESCO classification
of Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem as a "mosque," and especially the Turkish
support for that decision, do not square with the fact that the Ottoman
Turks are the ones who, 185 years ago, issued fermans (mandates or
decrees by an Islamic sovereign) that confirm the Jewish ties to
Rachel's Tomb and forbid "any person to prevent them [Jews] or oppose
them from visiting there."
Jordan's dominant role in the campaign to make
decision after decision that cancel and weaken Jewish links to
Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is also out of step with the official map
Jordan put out in 1965, only two years before the 1967 Six-Day War. The
map was drawn by a Jordanian named Abdel Rahman, who worked as an
official surveyor, and was approved by the Jordanian government's
Tourism Ministry. The map refers to the Temple Mount compound using the
standard Muslim name al-Haram al-Sharif, but adds -- significantly --
that it is located "on Mount Moriah."
The Palestinians and the Muslim Waqf, the body
granted authority over all Muslim sites in Jerusalem, will also find it
difficult to reconcile their total denial today that the Temple ever
existed, calling it "Al-Mazoom" (the pretender, the false), with the
content of a brief guidebook about the history of al-Haram
al-Sharif-Jerusalem, which the Waqf itself published several editions of
in the 1920s and 30s. At that time, the grand mufti of Jerusalem was
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, whom many call the father of the Palestinian
nationalist movement. He wrote, among other things, that "the identity
of the site [the Temple Mount] with the Temple of Solomon is beyond all
doubt."
Redrawing the maps
The fact that the Palestinians moved from
total denial of Jewish ties to the Temple Mount to denying any Jewish
ties to the Western Wall is also easily repudiated, not only through
archaeology and historical sources, but also by using the writings of
Muslims themselves.
In recent years, the heads of the Waqf and the
Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement [now outlawed] have put the
Western Wall through a process of Islamization and appropriated it for
the Muslim faith. The pinnacle was the baseless claim of Mahmoud
Al-Habbash, former Religious Affairs Minister in the Palestinian
Authority, that "no one other than the Muslims has ever used the Wall as
a place of worship at any time in history, until after the unfortunate
Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917."
The results of this trend can be seen in the
current Palestinian media. The official PA television station broadcast a
documentary program that portrayed Jews praying at the Western Wall as
"sinners" and "unclean," and Jewish history as fake. The program made it
clear: "We are now drawing up our maps. When the Jews disappear from
the picture, like a forgotten chapter from the history of our city, we
will rebuild the Mughrabi neighborhood on the Western Wall Plaza."
Attorney Berkowitz, who researched the Muslim
claims about the Western Wall, notes that Muslims never prayed on the
Western side of the wall. Berkowitz found that the Western Wall isn't
even mentioned as a Muslim holy site in any of the official books and
tour guides to al-Haram al-Sharif put out by the Waqf in 1914, 1965, or
even 1990.
The entries for al-Buraq and al-Haram
al-Sharif in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, published in 1917, make no
mention of the Western Wall as a holy site, and do not identify the site
with the place with al-Buraq, the wondrous steed of the Prophet
Muhammad, who according to later Islamic tradition was tethered to the
Western Wall at the end of his flight from Mecca to Jerusalem. The
Western Wall is even referred to as the "Wailing Wall."
Another book, by our friend Al-Aref, includes
the Western Wall in a list of Jewish holy sites and describes it thusly:
"The Western Wall is the outer wall of the Temple, which was built by
Herod ... and the Jews visit it often, especially at Tisha B'Av, and
when they visit they remember the glorious, unforgettable history and
begin to weep."
Evidence from the son of the father of the Hebrew language
But Berkowitz's most exciting discovery raises
the suspicion that the relatively late holiness the Muslims assigned to
the Western Wall was "wandering sanctity" to serve a political end. It
turns out that until the 11th century C.E., Muslim scholars were divided
about where Muhammad's winged horse had been tethered, and indicated
various locations throughout the Temple Mount compound. Some said the
prophet's horse was tethered south of the Golden Gate on the eastern
wall. Others argued for the southern wall, but no one in that period
said the horse had been tied to the Western Wall.
In the 11th century, explains Berkowitz, the
Muslim residents of Jerusalem and Muslim geographers pointed out a
certain place on the outer southern wall as the place where Muhammad's
horse was tied, and the double Huldah Gates in the southern wall, now
blocked, as the gates through which the Prophet Muhammad entered the
compound. Even as late as the 17th century, the spot on the southern
wall was still accepted as the place where al-Buraq was tethered.
The earliest Muslim tradition that identified
the "place al-Buraq was tethered" with the Jewish prayer site at the
Western Wall is from the mid-19th century, when Jewish began bringing
ritual object to the Wall and even trying to purchase the Western Wall
and the courtyards that surround it from the Waqf.
In Berkowitz's opinion, it's almost certain
that the Muslims moved the place where Muhammad supposedly entered the
Temple Mount compound and the place he tied al-Buraq to the Western Wall
as a response to the activity of the Jews. They even started calling it
"al-Buraq." They also built Al-Buraq mosque on the eastern side of the
Western Wall, on top of the Berkley Gate, where they display an
underground room as the spot where the prophet tied up his horse.
And here is one more important historical
tidbit: In the Ottoman Period, the Muslims themselves are the ones who
granted Jews fermans that recognized their right to the Western Wall and
their right to pray there. The first ruler to do so was Sultan Suleiman
the Magnificent in the second half of the 16th century, and after him
the Turkish Sultan Abdulmecid [Abdul Majid] I in 1841. Itamar Ben-Avi,
son of the reviver of the Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, tells of a
ferman that was granted to the Jews in 1868 and transferred to the
Council of Jewish Bequests in London, only to disappear mysteriously.
Nadav Shragai
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=37699
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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