The Temples of Jerusalem in Islam
by Martin Kramer
The political status of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is the subject of final status
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. According to
press reports, at one moment in the Camp
David negotiations last July, senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb
Erakat asked his Israeli counterpart: "How do you know that your
Holy Temple was located there?" A Jerusalem
Report cover story (September 11) placed this in the context
of a growing Palestinian denial of the existence of the First
and Second Temples. "It's self-evident that the First Temple
is a fiction," one Palestinian archaeologist at Bir Zeit
University is quoted as saying. "The Second also remains in the
realm of fantasy."
Archaeologists will have their debates, and their
place is in the academy. (There, the biblical account of the First
Temple is contested, while the existence of the Second Temple, and
its general location on the Temple
Mount, are regarded as well-attested facts.) But at the
negotiating table, the subjective sanctity of any site is a concrete
reality which must be respected in its own terms. This is all the
more so in the case of the existence and location of the First and
Second Temples: both are attested by precisely the same Islamic
sources which render the Haram al-Sharif (including the Aksa
Mosque and the Dome
of the Rock) holy to Islam.
(The Qur'anic passages below are quoted from what
is widely considered to be the most orthodox Sunni translation and
commentary, prepared by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, vetted and corrected by
four committees commissioned by King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and
published at the King Fahd Holy Qur'an Printing Complex in Medina,
Saudi Arabia, by royal decree.)
Did the Temples Exist?
The Qur'an refers to the existence of both temples in verse 17:7. In this
passage, the Qur'an deals with God's punishment of the Children of
Israel for their transgressions:
(We permitted your enemies)
To disfigure your faces,
And to enter your Temple
As they had entered it before,
And to visit with destruction
All that fell into their power.
The word translated as "Temple" by
Abdullah Yusuf Ali (and by the influential translator Marmaduke
Pickthall before him) is masjid. This word, which is usually
translated as mosque, has the meaning of a sanctuary wherever it
appears in a pre-Islamic context. The usual Muslim exegesis of this
verse (including that of Abdullah Yusuf Ali) holds that it refers to
the destruction of the First and Second Temples.
Muslim tradition is especially adamant about the
existence of the First Temple, built by Solomon,
who appears in the Qur'an as a prophet and a paragon of wisdom. Verse
34:13 is an account of how Solomon summoned jinn (spirits) to build the Temple:
They worked for him
As he desired, (making) Arches,
Images, Basons
As large as wells,
And (cooking) Cauldrons fixed
(In their places)
Early Muslims regarded the building and
destruction of the Temple of Solomon as a major historical and religious event, and accounts of the Temple
are offered by many of the early Muslim historians and geographers
(including Ibn Qutayba, Ibn al-Faqih, Mas'udi, Muhallabi, and Biruni).
Fantastic tales of Solomon's construction of the Temple also appear
in the Qisas al-anbiya', the medieval compendia of Muslim legends
about the pre-Islamic prophets. As the historian Rashid Khalidi wrote
in 1998 (albeit in a footnote), while there is no "scientific
evidence" that Solomon's Temple existed, "all believers in
any of the Abrahamic faiths perforce must accept that it did."(1) This is so for Muslims, no less than for Christians and Jews.
The Location of the
Temples
So much for the existence of the Temples. But what
of their location? The Islamic sanctity of the Haram al-Sharif is
based upon verse 17:1:
Glory to (Allah)
Who did take His Servant
For a Journey by night
From the Sacred Mosque
To the Farthest Mosque
This is the textual proof of the isra', the
earthly segment of the Night Journey of the Prophet Muhammad:
overnight, Muhammad was miraculously transported, round-trip, from
"the Sacred Mosque" (al-Masjid al-Haram)-that is, the Ka'ba
(or its vicinity) in Mecca-to "the Farthest Mosque" (al-Masjid
al-Aqsa). Later Muslim tradition came to identify "the Farthest
Mosque" with Jerusalem. But during Muhammad's lifetime, no
mosque stood in Jerusalem;
the Muslims conquered the city only several years after his death.
Abdullah Yusuf Ali's commentary on this verse summarizes the
traditional explanation: "The Farthest Mosque," he writes,
"must refer to the site of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem on
the hill of Moriah."
When Muslims did build a mosque on this hill,
Muslim tradition holds that it was built deliberately on the verified
site of earlier sanctuaries. According to Muslim tradition, when the
Caliph Umar visited Jerusalem after its conquest, he searched for David's sanctuary or prayer niche (mihrab Dawud), which is mentioned in the
Qur'an (38:21). (David was believed to have chosen the site on which
Solomon built.) When Umar was satisfied he had located it, he ordered
a place of prayer (musalla) to be established there. This evolved
into a mosque-precursor of the later Aksa
Mosque. Thus began the Islamization of the complex that
later came to be known as the Haram al-Sharif. It became the
tradition of Islam that Muslims restored
the site to its earlier function as a place of supplication venerated
by all the prophets, including Abraham, David and Solomon.
Sari Nuseibeh, president of Al-Quds University,
has emphasized this original meaning of the site for Muslims: the
mosque is the last and final in a series of sanctuaries erected
there. "The mosque was itself a revivication of the old Jewish
temple," writes Nuseibeh, "an instantiation of the unity
with the Abrahamic message, an embodiment of the new temple yearned
for and forecasted. And why should this seem strange when Muhammad
himself, according to the Qur'an, was the very prophet expected and
described in the 'true' Jewish literature?"(2)
Whether it is called the Temple Mount or al-Haram
al-Sharif, this corner of Jerusalem is the physical overlap between Judaism and Islam. Verse 17 of
the Qur'an, quoted above, is entitled Bani Isra'il, the Children of
Israel. The present-day State of Israel has acknowledged the sanctity
of the site for present-day Muslims, in the interest of peace. For
Muslims to question or even deny the existence of the Temples, in
disregard of the Qur'an and Muslim tradition, is to cast doubt upon
the very sources which underpin their own claim.
Sources: Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, PEACEWATCH, (September 18,
2000), Reprinted with permission.
(1) Rashid Khalidi,
"Transforming the Face of the Holy City: Political Messages in
the Built Topography of Jerusalem," paper presented to the
conference on "Landscape
Perspectives on Palestine," Bir Zeit University, November
12-15, 1998.
(2) Sari Nuseibeh, "Islam's
Jerusalem,"
Martin Kramer is director of the Moshe Dayan
Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University
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