Of Walls, Winged Horses, and Religious Tourism.

Vel Nirtist
American Thinker
27 November '10

There was only so much that Muhammad, Islam's founder and, according to the Muslims, the final and ultimate prophet of God -- could accomplish out of Mecca. To have a talk with the prophets that preceded him, to take a tour of heaven, and to visit with God Himself, he first needed to get to Jerusalem.

So -- in Wikipedia's terse account:

"Muhammad [has been] resting in the Kaaba in Mecca, when the archangel Jibral (Gabriel) comes to him, and brings him the winged steed Buraq, the traditional lightning steed of the prophets. The Buraq carries Muhammad to the Masjid Al Aqsa the "Farthest Mosque", which many Muslims believe is at the Noble Sanctuary (Temple Mount) in Jerusalem. Muhammad alights, tethers Buraq to the Western Wall and leads the other prophets such as Moses, Jesus, and Adam in prayer. He then re-mounts Buraq, and in the second part of the journey, the Mi'raj (an Arabic word that literally means "ladder"), he is taken to the heavens, where he tours the circles of heaven, and speaks with the earlier prophets such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. He then is taken by Gabriel to God."

Clearly, even to Muhammad, there was something special about Jerusalem. We know what it was pretty well -- Muhammad tried to position himself as a natural successor to the Jewish prophets and Jesus as "the seal of the prophets," and so Jerusalem -- the place where those he saw as his predecessors toiled, lived and died -- was sacred to him, too. Hence, the need for a tour of Jerusalem that resulted in the "night journey." Jerusalem was of value to him because of its Jewish and Christian connection.

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The Root of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Classic Islamic View of Jews, Part II

Hagai Mazuz
Hudson New York
01 September '10

In showing that the Arab-Israeli conflict is religious -- and not territorial -- based on texts from the book Kitāb al-Maghāzī ["The Book of Holy Raids"], which documents how the Muslim raids against the Jews in Medina and Khaybar in ancient Arabia were the source of inspiration for the Islamic terrorist organizations, questions arose as to whether we can generalize about Islam by examining just one book.

Kitāb al-Maghāzī, however, is just one of the many religious Islamic source books which contains anti-Jewish material. The most well known Muslim book is the Quran, which itself is filled with vehemently anti-Jewish material. Muslim sources explain that the Quran is a collection of revelations that Allah gave to Muhammad through the Angel Gabriel. When Muhammad encountered difficulties, Allah told him how to solve these problems via revelations; Uthman, the 3rd Caliph, collected all of them, and that is how the Quran was created.

The Quran is filled with a large amount of material regarding the Jews, most of which labels them as cold-hearted and evil. From this we learn that Muhammad had a lot of dealings with Jews, as Allah "provided" Muhammed with many verses which deal with them. There are also many verses which deal with biblical stories and the history of the Children of Israel (called Isrā'īlīyāt).

There is also a type of Islamic literature called "The Circumstances of Revelation" (in Arabic: Asbāb al-Nuzūl), that details the circumstances in which Allah revealed each and every verse in the Quran to Muhammad. It is clear from this literature that even in many of the verses in which the Jews and Christians are not mentioned, the Quranic scholars, in their explanation of these verses, tell us that this or that verse was "revealed" because of something the Jews or Christians did.

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The long history of anti-Semitism in Muslim lands

Robert Fulford
NationalPost
28 August '10

One of the 2002 Bali bombers, Amrozi bin Nurhasin, on trial in an Indonesian courtroom and headed toward execution, shouted out the message he wanted his crime to convey: “Jews: Remember Khaibar. The army of Muhammad is coming back to defeat you.”

This was his explanation of the murder of 202 people eight years ago. Of those who died, 88 were Australians, 38 Indonesians, 24 British. None were Jews. So what was Amrozi, a Java-born Indonesian, raving about? It’s a question worth considering as we assess the recent arrests for terrorist conspiracy in Ottawa. Islamic terrorists can finds motives in ancient struggles the rest of the world long ago forgot.

Martin Gilbert, the author of some 80 books, including the official biography of Winston Churchill, explains Amrozi’s meaning at the start of his alarming chronicle, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, published this week.

Amrozi was remembering an event 1,375 years in the past, when Muhammad attacked Jewish farmers living in the oasis community of Khaibar, in what is now Saudi Arabia. More than 600 Jews were killed and the survivors lost all their property and had to pledge half of their future crops to Muhammad.

Today, few Jews know the word Khaibar. But among certain Muslims it has permanent resonance. Khaibar set a precedent, endorsed by the actions of the Prophet. After Khaibar, non-Muslims who were conquered had to give up their property and pay heavy permanent tribute to their Muslim overseers. That form of discrimination lasted for centuries. It was this incident and its aftermath that nourished Amrozi’s homicidal ambition.

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Why Islam Will Never Accept the State of Israel

Steven Simpson
American Thinker
30 June '10

Posted before Shabbat

It is a common belief that the "Arab-Israeli conflict" is a conflict of two peoples fighting over the same piece of land and is therefore one of nationalism. Rarely, if ever, do we hear or read of the religious component to this conflict.

However, if anything, the conflict is more of a "Muslim-Jewish" one than an "Arab-Israeli" one. In other words, the conflict is based on religion -- Islam vs. Judaism -- cloaked in Arab nationalism vs. Zionism. The fact of the matter is that in every Arab-Israeli war, from 1948 to the present, cries of "jihad," "Allahu Akbar," and the bloodcurdling scream of "Idbah al- Yahud" (slaughter the Jews) have resonated amongst even the most secular of Arab leaders, be it Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s or the supposedly "secular" PLO of the 1960s to the present. Indeed, the question must be asked: If this is really a conflict of different nationalisms and not Islamic supremacism, then why is it that virtually no non-Arab Muslim states have full (if any) relations with Israel?

There is a common Arabic slogan that is chanted in the Middle East: "Khaybar, Khaybar! Oh Jews, remember. The armies of Muhammad are returning!" It would be most interesting to know how many people have ever heard what -- or more precisely, where -- Khaybar is, and what the Arabs mean by such a slogan. A short history of the Jews of Arabia is needed in order to explain this, and why Islam remains so inflexible in its hostile attitude towards Jews and Israel.

Until the founder of Islam, Muhammad ibn Abdallah, proclaimed himself "Messenger of Allah" in the 7th century, Jews and Arabs lived together peacefully in the Arabian Peninsula. Indeed, the Jews -- and Judaism -- were respected to such an extent that an Arab king converted to Judaism in the 5th century. His name was Dhu Nuwas, and he ruled over the Himyar (present day Yemen) area of the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, it is most likely that the city of Medina (the second-holiest city in Islam) -- then called Yathrib -- was originally founded by Jews. In any event, at the time of Muhammad's "calling," three important Jewish tribes existed in Arabia: Banu Qurayza, Banu Nadir, and Banu Qaynuqa.

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The Islamization of Jerusalem

Mordechai Kedar
Hudson New York
09 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

Although the importance of Jerusalem for Christians and Jews is part of universal concepts of history and theology and beyond dispute, when it comes to modern politics, we hear over and over again Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims demanding that Jerusalem become the capital of the future Palestinian state, owing to its holiness in Islam.

The question is: When and how did this city became holy to Muslims?

When the Prophet Muhammad established Islam, he introduced a minimum of innovations. He employed the hallowed personages, historic legends and sacred sites of Judaism, Christianity, and even paganism, by Islamizing them.

According to Islam, Abraham was the first Muslim, and Jesus and St. John (the sons of Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron) were prophets and guardians of the second heaven.

Many Biblical legends (“asatir al-awwalin”), which were familiar to the pagan Arabs before the dawn of Islam, underwent an Islamic conversion; the Koran as well as the Hadith (the Islamic oral tradition), are replete with them.

Islamization was enforced on places as well as persons: Mecca and the holy stone -- al-Ka’bah -- were holy sites of the pre-Islamic pagan Arabs. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and the Great Mosque of Istanbul were erected on the sites of Christian-Byzantine churches -- two of the better known examples of how Islam treats sanctuaries of other faiths.

Jerusalem, too, underwent Islamization: At first Muhammad tried to convince the Jews near Medina to join his young community. By way of persuasion, he established the direction of prayer (kiblah) to be to the north, towards Jerusalem, in keeping with Jewish practice; but after he failed in this effort, he turned against the Jews, killed many of them, and directed the kiblah southward, towards Mecca.

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