Amazingly, however, Muslims now maintain not only that Jerusalem is their third holiest site, and they will never abandon it, but also that it has no sanctity or historic significance for Jews. Talk about nerve: the sole reason it received any attention from Muslims at all was because of its Jewish history, which they now deny.
We must not be fooled: Muslim ties to Jerusalem have always been based on little more than political expediency disguised as religious fervor. We are currently experiencing the fourth wave of Muslim aggrandizement of Jerusalem. The first time was as described above – after which, Muhammad’s abandonment of Jerusalem was so total that not only did he never mention the city in the Koran, but later, when Muslims conquered the Holy Land, they totally ignored Jerusalem and established their capital in Ramle.
Some decades after Muhammad’s death, Islam again felt the political need to aggrandize Jerusalem. Caliph Abdel Malik sought a response to the capture of Mecca and Medina by a rival Muslim leader, and came up with the idea of renewing Jerusalem as “top holy city.” But once the city was no longer needed to buttress the Muslim leaders, its importance to Islam once again waned proportionately.
The third Muslim infatuation with Jerusalem occurred during the 12th-century Crusades. Salah a-Din needed to inflame his warriors against the Christian Crusaders, and briefly made Jerusalem the focus of jihad and religious longing. For centuries thereafter, Jerusalem remained way in the background for the Muslim world, which focused instead on Mecca and Medina as its holy cities.
Today the Muslim world once again has taken to claiming Jerusalem as a pinnacle of its religious aspirations – and its political interests this time are simply to rid the Middle East of Israel. As recently as 1964, when the PLO was founded, its original charter did not even mention Jerusalem. Yet now Hamas and Fatah spokesmen highlight the city’s “sanctity” – and young Muslim mothers speak of “death for Jerusalem” as a self-evident religious duty.
The international community should understand Islamic claims to Jerusalem as nothing more than the desire to do away with Israel. The sooner the Western world recognizes the true objectives of those who are now fighting Israel, the better chances it will have of winning the next world war.