Muslim Lies About Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque

A famous Arabic proverb says: "A liar needs a good memory," and the reason is clear: a liar must remember their lies, and to whom they told which lie, because if they don't, they might contradict themselves and their lies will be exposed. This principle also applies to important issues like Jerusalem, whose sanctity to Sunni Islam is based on a late political interpretation of a Quranic verse, while for Shia Islam the third holiest city, after Mecca and Medina, is Najaf in southern Iraq.

Ancient Islamic sources mention that Al-Aqsa Mosque ("the farthest"), mentioned once in the Quran, was one of two mosques near a village on the Arabian Peninsula (now Saudi Arabia) called Ji'rana, between the cities of Mecca and Ta'if. The mosque closest to the village was called "Al-Masjid Al-Adna" – "the near mosque," while the farther one was called "Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa" – "the farthest mosque." This mosque is the "Al-Aqsa Mosque" mentioned in the Quran.

Fifty years after Muhammad's death, in 682 AD, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, the strongman of Mecca, rebelled against the Umayyad rulers in Damascus, closed the roads, and prevented people from Damascus from coming to perform the Hajj in Mecca. With no other option, they chose Jerusalem as an alternative site for the Hajj, which is one of the five pillars of Islam, and to justify their choice of Jerusalem, they invented the lie that the Al-Aqsa Mosque mentioned in the Quran is actually not in Ji'rana but in Jerusalem, thereby linking it to the Quranic myth of Muhammad's night journey to "Al-Aqsa Mosque" mentioned in the Quran. This led to the Sunni belief that Jerusalem is the third holiest place in Sunni Islam.

The Shia, who were persecuted by the Umayyads, did not accept the lie that Jerusalem is a holy place, and therefore the third holiest city for Shi'ites is Najaf in Iraq, where Ali ibn Abi Talib, the founder of Shi'ism, and many of its scholars are buried. It was only after Khomeini's revolution in 1979 that the Shi'ites – mainly the Iranians and Hezbollah – started to emphasize Jerusalem, so that the Sunnis would not accuse them of leaning toward Zionism.

The first lie, then, is the very claim that "the farthest mosque" is in Jerusalem, and other lies have been built upon this, mainly regarding the location of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Until not long ago, Al-Aqsa Mosque was the building on the southern part of the Temple Mount, with a silver dome on its roof. The entire area of the Temple Mount is called "Al-Haram Al-Sharif," "the Noble Sanctuary." However, after the Six-Day War, voices began to be heard calling for the establishment of a Jewish synagogue on the Temple Mount. (This was against the halachic ruling of the late Maran, may his memory be for a blessing, who stated that it is forbidden to ascend the Temple Mount and anyone who does so is liable to karet). The assumption was that Muslims would not oppose it since "Al-Aqsa" is located on the southern compound. Even Rabbi Goren, immediately after the Six-Day War, wanted to hold religious events on the Temple Mount.

As a result of these voices, Muslims decided that "Al-Aqsa," as it appears in the Quran, is not just the mosque on the southern compound but the entire compound. To cement this claim, they stopped using the term Al-Haram Al-Sharif as a designation for the Temple Mount compound and referred to the entire compound as "Al-Aqsa Mosque." (My colleague Prof. Yitzhak Reiter devoted a special discussion to this issue in his book "From Jerusalem to Mecca and Back," 2005). However, this false expansion is exposed and known, and for our purposes, we will mention here two documents that expose it: one well-known and the other less well-known.

The Lie Exposed

The well-known one is a booklet authored by Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini in 1924, which was reprinted many times in the following years without change. Dr. Daniel Tsel from Lexington, Massachusetts, gave me an original copy printed in 1930, and I thank him for that. The booklet is titled: A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif – Jerusalem – "A Brief Guide to Al-Haram Al-Sharif – Jerusalem," not Al-Aqsa. Al-Aqsa Mosque appears in the booklet only as a chapter, after the chapter on the Dome of the Rock, which is at the center of the compound with the golden dome. From this, according to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa Mosque is only the building on the southern part of the Temple Mount compound. That was the situation in the past.

I photographed the less-known document during a recent visit to my friend Chaim Steinberger in New York, who has a large collection of maps of the Land of Israel. Chaim showed me a Jordanian tourist map of Jerusalem, drawn in 1965, two years before the Six-Day War, when East Jerusalem was entirely illegally occupied by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, without the world crying out, saying or even whispering a word against this illegal occupation. The map was drawn by a Jordanian named Abd al-Rahman Razaq who worked as an official surveyor, and it received approval from the official tourism authority of the Jordanian government. Therefore, it can be said that the map is an official Jordanian map.

Looking at the map shows that in 1965, the Temple Mount compound was still called Al-Haram Al-Sharif, and it was located on Mount Moriah, while Al-Aqsa Mosque was only the building on the southern part of the compound. Thirty years before the peace agreement between the Kingdom of Jordan and Israel, the kingdom viewed Al-Aqsa Mosque only as the building on the southern part of Al-Haram Al-Sharif, the whole built on Mount Moriah. Only after the Jews freed their holy place during the Six-Day War in June 1967, did Islamic prevaricators decide to expand "Al-Aqsa Mosque" – which originally was in the Saudi desert – from the building on the southern Temple Mount to the entire Temple Mount.

For example: Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine between 1994-2006, delivered the Friday sermon on January 4, 2002, and his speech included the following passage (my additions in parentheses, M.A.): "O Muslims (throughout the world), when we talk about the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, we mean the mosque whose area is 144 dunams (the entire area of Al-Haram Al-Sharif) including the walls, the borders including the Al-Buraq Wall (the Western Wall), as well as the arcades, passages, vestibules, and plazas, in addition to the covered Al-Aqsa (the building in the south), the ancient Al-Aqsa (beneath the covered), the Marwani prayer hall (Solomon's Stables) and the sacred rock (the Foundation Stone, under the Dome of the Rock), all of them Al-Aqsa..."

However, here enters another lie, which the map reveals, and that is the location of the temple. In recent years, I have heard several Friday sermons that unfortunately I did not record, in which the preachers claimed that "Al-Haykal Al-Maz'oom" – "the (Jewish) temple that supposedly existed" – was never in Jerusalem, because Mount Moriah is not in Jerusalem at all. In one case, I heard a claim that the temple was on Mount Sinai, and in another, I heard it was on Mount Gerizim, and that the Samaritans preserve the original Jewish tradition. The Jordanian map also exposes these preachers in their lies.

The question is why Muslims are so concerned about the matter of Al-Aqsa that they have made this lie almost a core belief. The reason is simple: Islam sees itself as a religion that came to replace the previous religions, Judaism and Christianity, not to coexist peacefully with them. Islam sees itself as the "Din al-Haq," "religion of truth," while Judaism and Christianity are "Din al-Batil," "religion of falsehood." Muslims fear that the return of Jews to their land might restore Judaism to the status of a living, existing, active, and true religion, and this status will place a question mark, a theological threat, over the very existence and purpose of Islam.