Do Muslims Have A Legal Right Over Jerusalem?

Do Muslims Have A Legal Right Over Jerusalem?

By Mohammad Asghar

IN The Year 2000, Israelis and the Palestinians were on the verge of signing at Camp David, under the auspices of the then American President Bill Clinton, a historical agreement that would have settled all the disputes between them and brought peace and prosperity to the Middle East, in general, and to the Muslims of Palestine and the Jews of Israel, in particular. This agreement would also have made our earth a much better place for all of us to live in relative peace. But when all the arrangements were ready for the signing of the agreement, the Palestinians backed out, demanding, among others, that the Israelis grant them complete sovereignty over East Jerusalem’s Islamic holy site, in particular, the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

But what right do the Muslims have to claim their complete sovereignty over East Jerusalem and why Israel should not cave in to their demand? To find the answer to this crucial question, we need to go to the Quran and see what it says about Jerusalem and if Muslims have at all any right over it.
The name “Jerusalem” does not appear in the Quran. However, a verse in it supposedly alludes to Jerusalem, saying:
17:1: “Glory to (Allah) Who did take His servant for a Journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque, whose precincts We did bless,- in order that We might show him some of Our Signs: for He is the One Who heareth and seeth (all things).”

Muhammad was clearly the speaker of this verse. He claimed that Allah took him for a journey by night from the Sacred Mosque (in Mecca) to the farthest Mosque whose precinct Allah blessed in order that he could show Muhammad some of His Signs. Muhammad, however, did not describe where that farthest mosque was located and what Signs of Allah he had seen at or in the vicinity of that mosque.
In the footnote to the above verse, Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, one of the foremost Muslim scholars, confirms that the Mosque referred to in the verse was located in Jerusalem.1 N. J. Dawood holds the same opinion.2 Abdullah Yusuf Ali, having been helped by the Hadith literature as well as by his strenuous study of them, which also enabled him to elucidate the mystical meaning of the journey, maintains: “The holy Prophet was first transported to the seat of the earlier revelations in Jerusalem, and then taken through the seven heavens, even to the Sublime Throne, and initiated into the spiritual mysteries of the human soul struggling in Space and Time.”3

The location of the so-called ‘Farthest Mosque’ (‘Masjidul Aqsa’ in Arabic) thus established, let us now focus on whether the night journey Muhammad had allegedly made was corporeal, or a dream
But before doing that, let us note one important fact, it being: curiosity to know has always been one of mankind’s strongest instincts. It is not that this instinct is possessed only by the humans, even animals, such as ape and bear et al, are also born with it that allows them to know their surroundings before they can venture out into a difficult and dangerous world of their own.

The fact that man had always been curious to know about him, his supposed creator, his surroundings and the universe is manifest from the religious scriptures, in which, at least eighty-five percent of today’s world population firmly believe, supposedly, in order to live a “righteous life.” From these scriptures, we learn how our distant ancestors had tried to uncover the heavens’ secrets. Two of the secrets they tried to unveil related to our origin and the mysteries that abound in the heavens.

Because all humans have originated from a single couple (i.e. Adam and his wife who had only sons and no daughters), all humans in the beginning naturally spoke a single language. Using the unity brought to them by their common language, they took to building a tower to the heavens, so that they could learn what was going on inside each one of the seven heavens.

However, when Allah came to the earth to see if everything on it was alright, He became dumbfounded when He saw the humans building a tower to the heavens. He realized that if He permitted them to complete it, all the secrets that are hidden behind the walls of the heavens would become known to them and they would use His secrets against Him to gain advantage over Him, His angels and His activities.

Therefore, Allah decided to confound the humans by introducing various languages amongst them. This effectively prevented the mischievous humans from completing the construction of the tower, as they lost their ability to communicate with each other. He also scattered them all over the world in order to deny them the ability to come together and make another attempt to build another tower to the heavens. 4

At the time Allah had taken the above stated action, He was not aware of a simple fact: the builders of the tower could not have gone beyond the earth’s atmosphere, and complete the tower, as there is no oxygen in the outer space. Without oxygen, no life can survive in its hostile and turbulent conditions. Had Allah not stopped our ancestors from building the tower, none of us would be living on earth today to talk about their suicidal mission!

Despite the fact that humans cannot enter the outer space due to the earth’s gravity, nor can they traverse through the space in a state of weightlessness without oxygen, Allah often invited humans to His home in the Gardens (heaven) to prove that they are no match for Him. This is inferable from one of the verses of the Quran, but the people to whom He had extended His invitation did not take it seriously, as they knew Allah was playing a trick on them. The verse in question reads:
“Even if We opened out to them a gate from heaven, and they were to continue (all day) ascending therein,”

Anticipating what was going to be His invitees’ response, Allah shut them up by telling them:
“They would only say: “Our eyes have been intoxicated: Nay, we have been bewitched by sorcery.”5
Since Allah has clearly indicated that humans could ascend to heaven and enter the Gardens corporeally, there is no reason for us to think that Muhammad, the best and the most capable man among all the humans, had not traveled in person to see Allah in His home; the impracticability of a physical voyage for an ordinary mortal to undertake it, without Allah’s active and direct help, through an oxygen-less and turbulent space being a subject that does not fall within the scope of my present write up.

Activities that are supposed to have preceded the journey support Muhammad’s physical ascension to heavens. Muhammad, son of Ishaq, born in A.H. 85 (i.e. seventy-three years after Muhammad’s death), and considered to be one of the earliest traditionists of Islam, reports, on the authority among others, of Umm Hani, a daughter of Abu Talib, who witnessed the event unfolding before her eyes, as well as on the basis of what Muhammad himself had related to al-Hasan, one of his trusted Companions, support Muhammad’s physical ascension to heavens. Al-Hasan quotes Muhammad, telling him:
“While I was sleeping in the Hijr Gabriel came and stirred me with his foot. I sat up but saw nothing and lay down. He came a second time and stirred me with his foot. I sat up but saw nothing and lay down again. He came to me the third time and stirred me with his foot. I sat up and he took hold of my arm and I stood beside him and he brought me out of the door of the mosque and there was a white animal, half mule, half donkey, with wings on its sides with which it propelled its feet, putting down each forefoot at the limit of its sight and he mounted me on it. Then he went out with me keeping close to me.

When I came up to mount he shied. Gabriel placed his hand on its mane and said, are you not ashamed, O Buraq, to behave in this way? By Allah, none is more honourable before Allah than Muhammad has ever ridden you before (sic). The animal was so ashamed that he broke out into a sweat and stood still so that I could mount him.”6

Philip K. Hitti’s short remark on the Muslims’ daily five prayers supports Ibn Ishaq’s assertion, for he writes: “The number five {daily prayers}, according to al-Bukhari, was a comprise reached after Allah had asked for fifty on the occasion of Muhammad’s visit to the seventh heaven on his nocturnal journey (sur.17:1).”7

Dr. Martin Lings, also known as Sheikh Abu Bakr Sirajuddin, who was able to gather information on Muhammad’s activities from ‘earliest sources,’ almost fourteen hundred years after his subject’s death, made it clear that his nocturnal journey to Jerusalem and from there to the Throne of Allah was, indeed, a physical one. After describing how he was spurred by angel Gabriel with his foot, Dr. Lings quotes Muhammad himself, telling his followers:
“The Prophet then told how he mounted Buraq, for so the beast was named; and with the Archangel at his side, pointing the way and measuring his pace to that of the heavenly steed, they sped northwards beyond Yathrib and beyond Khayber, until they reached Jerusalem. Then they were met by a company of Prophets- Abraham, Jesus and others – and when he prayed on the site of the Temple, they gathered together behind him in prayer. Then two vessels were brought before him and offered him, one of wine the other of milk. He took the vessel of milk and drank from it, but left the vessel of wine, and Gabriel said: “Thou hast been guided unto the path primordial, and hast guided thereunto thy people, O Muhammad, and wine is forbidden for you.”

Then, as had happened to others before him – to Enoch and Elijah and Jesus and Mary – Muhammad was taken up out of life to Heaven. From the rock in the centre of the site of the Temple he again mounted Buraq, who moved his wings in upward flight and became for his rider as the chariot of fire had been for Elijah. Led by the Archangel, who now revealed himself as a heavenly being, they ascended beyond the domain of earthly space and time and bodily forms, as they passed through the seven Heavens he met again those Prophets with whom he had prayed in Jerusalem. But there they had appeared to him as they had been during their life on earth, whereas now he saw them in their celestial reality, even as they now saw him, and he marveled at their transfiguration. Of Joseph he said that his face had the splendor of the moon at its full, and that he had been endowed with no less than the half of all existing beauty. Yet this did not diminish Muhammad’s wonderment of his other brethren, and he mentioned in particular the great beauty of Aaron. Of the Gardens that he visited in different Heavens he said afterwards: “A piece of Paradise the size of a bow is better than all beneath the sun, whereupon it riseth and setteth; and if a woman of the people of Paradise appeared unto the people of earth, she would fill the space between Heaven and here below with light and fragrance.” Everything he now saw, he saw with the eye of the Spirit; and of this spiritual nature, with reference to the beginning of all earthly nature, he said: “I was a Prophet when Adam was yet between water and clay.”8

According to Dr. Lings, Muhammad did not know whose foot stirred him thrice in Mecca, and that he found out the stirrer’s identity only when he was in flight towards the heavens. He also maintained his human form during his travel through the space and a transformation in him took place after he reached one of the heavens, and when he found himself in the midst of the earlier prophets. It was only after his transformation did he begin to see everything around him with the eye of a Spirit, an ability that also enabled him to measure the width, length and height of a celestial woman’s light and fragrance with which, she would be able to fill the space that lies between the heavens and our earth, if Allah ever allows her to perform this feat!

The claim that Muhammad had become a Spirit in one of the seven heavens is, though, debatable, it, nevertheless, does not invalidate the fact that he had undertaken all the activities prior to his arrival on one of the heavens in the form of a human being. Our assertion is strengthened not only by some of the renowned scholars of Islam,9 but also by the fact that a Spirit does neither need to be spurred, nor a horse-like animal to ride through one place to another, nor a vessel to drink from. These apply only to the humans, a fact that has induced me to conclude that Muhammad had, indeed, undertaken his journey to heavens via Jerusalem in the form of an earthly man!

The form in which Muhammad is said to have traveled through the space established beyond any question, let us now note some of the fallacies that have become an integral and essential part of the Muslim faith.

At the time Muhammad took off from Mecca on his celestial trip, there was a Mosque located in the precincts of the Ka’aba, called “Masjidul Haram.” In this mosque, the Pagans assembled to say their prayers to a host of their gods and also to carry out meditations in their spare time. Those among them who had no home of their own occasionally spent their nights in it.

The fact that Muhammad had traveled from one mosque in Mecca to another in Jerusalem suggests that there was mosque in Jerusalem, like the Meccan one, with four walls and a roof on top of it. It was a mosque in the real sense of the word, as there was no way for Allah to mistake a Jewish Synagogue or a Christian Church for a Muslim Mosque.10 It is this assumption that makes me believe that the venue in Jerusalem to which Allah had taken Muhammad, actually had a mosque in which he said his prayer in the company of some prophets of the yore, before taking off on his journey to the heavens.

But does history support the existence of a “mosque” in Jerusalem in the time of Muhammad, when no Muslims could have lived in this pre-dominantly Jewish City to worship in?

The truth of the matter is that there existed no “mosque” in Jerusalem at the time Muhammad is believed to have set his foot on its soil in 620 A.D. Faced with this reality, Abdullah Yusuf Ali was forced to admit:

“The Farthest Mosque must refer to the site of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem on the hill of Moriah, at or near which stands the Dome of the Rock, called also the Mosque of Hadhrat ‘Umar. This and the Mosque known as the Farthest Mosque (Masjid-ul-Aqsa) were completed by the Amir ‘Abd-ul-Malik in A. H. 68 {i.e. in 690 A.D}. …”11

Recent critical study of the Quranic verse on Muhammad’s alleged journey to the heavens via Jerusalem has opened up the minds of many Muslims. Ahmad Muhammad ‘Arafa, a columnist for the Egyptian weekly Al-Qahira, is one of them. The Weekly is published by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.

In one of his articles published by the Weekly, Ahmad has clearly demonstrated that that “the Sura of the Night of Journey” does not refer to a miraculous journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, but to the Prophet’s emigration (Hijra) from Mecca to Medina.”12 The fact that his article was published by the Egyptian government journal bears a strong indication to the fact that not only the Egyptian government, but also its religious establishments found his finding to be absolutely credible, hence its publication by an Islamic government-owned Weekly!

Prof. Fazlur Rahman does not believes in Muhammad’s physical ascension to heaven. Instead, he says that his so-called journey was a spiritual experience, which was later woven by ‘orthodoxy’ into the doctrine of a single, physical, locomotive ascension to heaven, for “a religion cannot live on purely ‘spiritualized’ dogmas and that reification is necessary even if only to serve the purpose of a ‘vessel’ for the spirit.”13

In the light of some of the logical and historical facts I have stated above, let us now explore the probable cause to conceal which, Muhammad must have concocted one of the history’s bizarre and greatest lies. It is a lie that has no parallel, nor has any other man thus far been able to match it, despite modern mankind’s ability to transform their lies into a highly sophisticated and skilful art.

The night Muhammad was supposed to be on his way to heaven, he was sleeping either in Hijr or in the house of Umm Hani, his cousin. A widow, she is believed to have lived in Mecca with a slave-girl. How she earned her livelihood is not known to any historian of Islam.

Her attestation of Muhammad’s trip from her house to Jerusalem supports our hypothesis; that it was her close proximity to Muhammad that night that had enabled her to describe the time (masra), or the place from where he had departed on his journey without someone else’s knowledge. In fact, she confirmed that Muhammad was not sleeping in Hijr that night; rather, he was sleeping with her in her house14 from where He was taken to heaven by Allah. Her story appears to be more credible than the one narrated by his clever and sycophantic companions. Had she not spent the night with him, it would not have been possible for her to know, firsthand, any detail of the journey, given the fact that she was not married to him, nor was she reported to have maintained a close contact with him all the time to know about all the events that were taking place in his life.

It might have so happened that when Muhammad was sleeping with Umm Hani, his followers needed to get in touch with him. They searched for him everywhere, but could not find him. Asked in the morning where he had been the night before, he accounted his non-availability to some of his followers with a story that they could never verify, no matter how hard they try.

It was a lie that had not only put some of Muhammad’s inquisitive followers’ curiosity to rest; it also saved his prophetic mission from being destroyed by his clandestine relationship with Umm Hani, a cousin, having sex with whom was a major sin in the eyes of the very Pagans Allah despised from the core of His heart for living unethical lives!

Muhammad’s claim that he met Allah on the seventh heaven scandalized the whole of Mecca. Even many of his own followers found it too absurd to believe, making almost all of them think about leaving Islam.15 Abu Bakr intervened and affirmed as being true what Muhammad had told them. His support of Muhammad’s story saved the situation, but the scandal kept Mecca abuzz for so long as he lived in it.

For the extraordinary support he gave to his master’s16 lie, Abu Bakr got the appellation of “Siddiq” – the teller of truth – from the grateful Prophet of Allah!

With his followers as well as his own migration to Medina in 622 A.D., the story of his alleged nocturnal journey began to fade away from the Meccans’ mind. It also disappeared almost entirely from the memory of his generation of the Muslims, as we do not find any mention of it in the reputable literatures, both Islamic and historical, that were written, subsequent to his death, depicting the post-migration history of Islam.

The memory of the alleged journey surfaced, however, when important Muslim personalities began to realize a grave mistake that they or their predecessors had made by requiring the Muslims to pray to Allah five times a day, instead of three or four times, as dictated by the Quran.

None of the verses of the Quran specifically mandated five daily prayers for the Muslims, even though saying prayers ritualistically is an important requirement of Islam. According to the following verse, Muslims are required to pray only three or four times every day:
“And establish regular prayers at the two ends of the day and at the approaches of the night: For those things that are good remove those that are evil: But that the word of remembrance to those who remember (their lord):”17

Despite the fact that the verse has not prescribed five daily prayers for the Muslims, yet some of their scholars have tried their best to correct the mistake their ancestors had made after the death of Muhammad by requiring all Muslims to pray five times a day. Below is an example of how one scholar has explained certain words of this verse in order to justify his forefathers’ mistake:
“The two ends of the day: Morning and afternoon. The morning prayer is the Fajr, after the light is up but before sunrise. …The early afternoon prayer, ‘Zuhr,’ is immediately afternoon. …

Approaches of the night: Zulafun, plural of Zulfatun, an approach, something near at hand. As Arabic has, like Greek, a dual number distinct from the plural, and plural number is used here, and not the dual, it is reasonable to argue that at least three “approaches of the night” are meant. The late afternoon prayer, ‘Asr,’ can be one of these three, and the evening prayer, ‘Magrib,’ just after the sunset, can be the second. The early night prayer, ‘Isha,’ at the supper time when the flow of sunset is disappearing, would be the third of the “approaches of the night,” when we commit ourselves to Allah before sleep. These are the five canonical prayers of Islam.”18

Morning and afternoon are the two ends of the day? Again, the late afternoon is an ‘approach of the night’? What are we supposed to make of this attempt?

In spite of what the learned scholar has tried to make out of the above verse, there still remains a dispute among the Muslims on the number of prayers they are required to perform every day. Sunnis believe it to be five; Shias, by and large, consider it is three,19 not because the Quran is unclear on this vital aspect of the Islamic faith, but also because Musaylima, a supposedly false prophet, who propagated his own religion in the time of Muhammad, had prescribed three daily prayers for his followers.20
Since the requirement of the five daily prayers was not possible for them to justify without Allah’s direct commandment, which was missing from the Quran, they contrived to fill the void through the medium of Muhammad’s alleged visit to Allah’s Throne, which is located on the seventh sky and is accessible only to His angels. .

According to a putative Hadith, while Muhammad was in Allah’s company, Allah instructed him to order his followers to pray fifty times a day. He accepted it without considering its impact on his followers. Told by Moses that prayer is a weighty matter and that his followers would not be able to bear it, he returned to Allah and sought to have the number of the daily prayers reduced. Allah cut the fifty daily prayers by ten first, but as Muhammad kept on insisting,, He finally reduced their number to five.

The so-called heavenly sanction for the daily five prayers thus taken care of, the Muslim heavyweights added verse 1 to Sura 17, its aberrant rhyme21 back-biting its origin, so that it could be used, whenever necessary, to defend the number of their daily prayers.

Muhammad and some of his devout followers did not keep their prayers restricted to five times. They prayed “nigh two-thirds of the night, or half the night, or a third of the night.22 They could do it, as they had nothing to do during day time, except to make plans on how to plunder and kill the Jews, intercept the Pagan caravans and loot their possessions!

The latter-day Muslims also invented a number of Hadiths to strengthen their lie on Muhammad’s alleged visit to heaven. One such Hadith reads:
”Narrated ‘Imran bin Husain:
The Prophet said, “I looked at Paradise and found poor people forming the majority of its inhabitants; and I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women.”23

This Hadith, known as Sahih or authentic to all the Muslim scholars, leaves no doubt that Muhammad had, indeed, seen both the Paradise and the Hell during his visit with Allah and they are located in the heavens. It also tells the Muslims something about the Hell that could not be true, considering what the Quran says about its inhabitants.

On the question of who entered the heavenly Gardens (heaven) and the gates of Hell, the Quran clearly says: As soon as a person is buried, angels appear in his or her grave. They ask him or her various questions to find out how he or she lived on earth. Unsatisfactory answers mean that he or she lived a sinful life. This determination makes him or her liable for all tortures the angels ask the Hell to inflict upon his or her person.24

Satisfactory answers prove to the angels that the respondent lived a pious life before his or her death. They, therefore, reward him or her by hooking the interior of his or her grave with heaven;25 this enabling him or her to live in the grave, until he or she is transferred to one of the Gardens by Allah to live in it forever in its soothing and extremely comfortable ambience.

Martyrs, who die in the cause of Allah, are not required either to face the angels’ inquisitions, nor do they remain in their graves, for soon after their burial, Allah has their bodies transported to one of the Gardens He has built, specially, for them. They meet Allah in their new abode.

Though we are not sure if the Jinns also die in the hands of the angels, but it is clearly stated in the Quran that they will face judgment in the court of Allah. Like humans, pious and righteous Jinns will enter and live in the Gardens to enjoy their bliss together with making love to the Hurs, while the sinful ones will find themselves in the fire of Hell to burn in it forever. How many Hurs the dwellers of the Gardens will get to make love to is not mentioned in the Quran.

How much the Jinns, made of fire, are now suffering from the fire of the Hell is also not clear. Perhaps, they are not affected at all; rather, they are proving instrumental in providing succor to those humans, who followed them on earth, by sheltering them in their (Jinns’) neutralized zone, where fire has no effect on them. It is a possibility we must not discard, for Jinns have proved elusive and unmanageable to Allah before; they might now be defying Him in the Hell as well.

It should not be difficult for us to conclude from the above narration that the martyred men and the Jinns have been living in Paradise or the Gardens in the company of Allah26 ever since they began laying down their lives in His cause, and for His religion. But it is not the same case with Hell; the bulk of its man and Jinn inhabitants entered it after they, along with the wives of the prophets Noah and Lut, were found guilty by Allah on the Day of Judgment. Thereafter, sinful men and the Jinns are now entering the Hell, upon their death, on a daily basis.

But why Allah terrorized and made to swoon27 the inhabitants of Hell and of the Gardens, except Gabriel. Michael, Israfil and the Angels of Death,28 with the sound of the Trumpet blown by angel Israfil on the Day He decided to bring the Universe to an end thousands of years ago before Muhammad’s arrival on earth?

As the Quran provides no answer to the question, we surmise it was His extreme anger and sadistic nature that had forced Him to terrorize, and made to faint, even those humans and Jinns who had laid down their lives for Him and were living in His company as well as those innocent but ordinary angels, who served Him to the best of the ability He granted them at the time of their creation. Despite His tacit admission that He is possessed by such a horrible and despicable nature, Muslims find no fault in Him and, instead of shunning Him, they madly submit themselves to His tantrums without ever realizing that He is only capable of causing fear and panic and death and destruction, with happiness and well-being of His creations playing no part in His psychology.

Allah’s statement that He ordered the wife of Noah and the wife of Lut to ‘enter the fire of Hell along with others that enter it’29 as well as Muhammad’s statement that he saw the Hell filled up with women during his tour of it and the Gardens in 620 A.D. prove that the Dooms Day has already occurred and that men and the Jinns are now being judged by Allah on a daily and case-by-case basis. This should come as a mighty good news for all the inhabitants of earth, for they can now relax with the confidence that all of them are not going to be perished in a kangaroo court after their death.

As far as the Muslims’ claim on Jerusalem is concerned, the Chronology of the Muslim history bears out the fact that the early Muslim rulers, such as Abu Bakr and Umar, had never believed that Jerusalem was a sacred site that needed recovery from its Jewish and Christian occupants. In fact, they believed that it was a land that Allah had gifted to the Jews, the Children of Israel. In course of time, they turned it into a holy site of their own religion. Mindful of this fact, the first two Muslim Caliphs never laid their claim on it or on any part of it, for doing that would have amounted to denying what the Quran has inferred about Jerusalem and its ownership.

Umar occupied Jerusalem in 637 A.D., when the Islamic Empire was in its expansion mode. Caliph Abd-ul-Malik added Islamic sanctity to the City of Jerusalem by building, in 690 A.D., “Masjid-ul-Aqsa” or the ‘Furthest Mosque’ on the hill of Moriah on which also stood the Jewish Temple of Solomon on the pretext that Muhammad had stopped here on his way to heaven. This was the first and the most important step that legitimized, to the detriment of the later-day Muslims’ interest and well being, the Islamic lie in order to justify their false claim on Jerusalem.

For so long as Muslims were able to maintain their over-all hegemony over the Jews and the Christians, it did not matter much to them whether they were in control of Jerusalem’s hill of Moriah, or the Jews were in charge of it. The question of ownership or control of the hill began popping up after Muslims lost their power to the Christians. They had to lay their claim on Jerusalem because that was what they could think of for the purpose of rekindling their hatred towards the Jews many among whom, in the sight of Allah, are the descendants of apes, and thus despised.30 Eventually, their hatred towards the Jews became a serious pathological ailment for them, the virus of which shuts down their good senses every time they have an occasion to revive their antagonism and hatred of the Jews.

How devastatingly Muslims’ false claim on Jerusalem has been affecting a section of them is deducible from the effects that the rejection of the Camp David Peace Accord has produced so far. Had the Palestinians accepted the Accord, it would have restored almost 93 percent of the Israeli occupied land to them. But they rejected the Accord, as it did not contemplate the transfer of East Jerusalem to them, where the Farthest Mosque is located, to the control of the Muslims.

As a result of the rejection of the Accord, a warlike situation continues to exist between Israel and the Muslim states that surround it. Since the Israelis have been continuing with the occupation of the Palestinian land, the Palestinians have not only been killing the Jews but their own people as well, while carrying out their terrorist attacks against Israel. The Palestinians’ attacks on Israeli civilians invariably evoke retaliatory actions from the Israeli armed forces. Such actions kill not only their targets, but also innocent Palestinian civilians, women and children.

I attribute the death of the innocent people in Israel and Palestine, primarily, to the Muslims’ false claim on Jerusalem. I also postulate that the game of death and destruction in the Middle East is going to continue unabated for so long as Muslims would continue to live with falsehood and hatred that the Quran continues to instill in their mind against the Jews and against all those people who are not Muslims. .

It is my firm conviction that peace in the Middle East rests with the Muslims alone. They must, therefore, remove the lie from their belief system and start living in a world that is realistic and congenial for all of its inhabitants. Nothing short of it is going to bring peace and prosperity to them. The sooner they realize this truth, the better it would be for them as well as for other citizens of the world.

1 The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, p. 204.
2 The Koran, p. 197.
3 The Holy Quran, Vol. 1, p. 691.
4 The Torah; Genesis; 11:4-8.
5 The Quran; 15:14, 15.
6 Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, p. 182.
7 Op. cit. p. 131.
8 Muhammad, his life based on the earliest sources, pp. 101, 102.
9 Abul Ala Mududi, Tafhimul Quran, Vol. 2, p. 589.
10 Cf. The Quran; 22: 40.
11 The Holy Quran, Vol.. 1, p. 693.
12 See Al-Qahira (Egypt); August 5, 2003.
13 Islam; p. 14.
14 Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, .p. 184.
15 Cf. Abul Ala Mududi, Tafhimul Quran, vol. 2, p. 588.
16 Cf. The Quran; 39:10 & 53. According to these verses, all Muslims are Muhammad’s servants.
17 The Quran; 11:114.
18 Abudullah Yusuf Ali, op. cit. vol. 1, p. 545.
19 Dr. Rafiq Zakaria, Muhammad and the Quran. p. 74.
20 F. E. Peters, The Origin of Islam,. p. 159.
21 Cf. F. E. Peters; op. cit, p. 14.
22 The Quran; 73:20.
23 Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 54, Number 464.
24 Cf. The Quran; 16:29.
25 Cf. The Quran; 16:32.
26 Cf. The Quran; 3:169.
27 Cf. The Quran; 39:68.
28 Tafsir al-Jalalayn of verse 27:87.
29 The Quran; 66:10.
30 The Quran; 2:65 et al.


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