Introduction :

This small book was first published privately in 1970. It was written in response to a request made by a council of Anglican and Protestant churches held in London for a statement about the holiness of Palestine for Muslims.

It is now published for the second time without alteration. It presents the Muslim point of view without giving prominence to  other points of view which should be presented by others, not by me. I tried to be as impartial as possible, an attitude which is sometimes hard to maintain.

The question of the sanctity of Palestine rests on tradition and on historical facts: Islamic tradition is partly Jewish and Christian, and Muslims maintain that any tradition that is part of the evolutionary process of religion is sacred. But the secular part which should be based on facts is different. This secular part is not really favourable to the Jewish claim in particular. This claim can only be based upon tradition that dates back to thousands of years ago. If the secular Jews were to drop the religious tradition, there will be no clash between Jews and Muslims. The core of the conflict is the Jewish Temple. Orthodox Jews maintain that the site of the Temple is not known with certainty, and the people who have a priestly status to rebuild the Temple are not known and, therefore, the third Temple should not be rebuilt at all by human hands, but will drop ready-formed from heaven. The rebuilding will have to be left to a prophet who will decide how it should be done.

Reform Jews take a similar attitude, and maintain that the third Temple should not be built until the messianic age.

Conservative Jews also hold a similar view. Zionists are understood to be bound by the constitution of the state of Israel, which protects the Muslim holy places.

It will be remembered that early Muslims used to turn their faces in worship towards Jerusalem, the holy city of Judaism and Christianity which were regarded by Islam as two stages in the evolution of religion. But when Islam was firmly established as a religion and a state, Muslims were told to turn their faces during worship to Mecca, the first holy city in Islam, but also a purely Arab city.

It will also be remembered that Muslims till now bear biblical names, after the names of Jewish prophets or patriarchs as well as Chrisitian names, such as, for men, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, Joseph, Elias, Jesus, and for women, Zulaikha, Sarah, Rebecca (all in their Arabic forms).

But the problem of the holy places remains unsolved, especially between the Jews and the Muslims. I think that the problem is rooted in the question whether the Jewish religion was originally a religion to serve God or to serve a worldly state or whether the Jewish community is a theocracy or a worldly state. Was David, or Solomon, a monarch or a prophet? Was the Temple built to glorify God or to glorify a monarch? Such questions are being mooted among Jews, Christians and Muslims, and especially between the Orthodox Jews and the Zionists, or more specifically, between the protagonists of theocracy and the worldly state. Again, is Islam a religion or a worldly philosophy? Was Muhammad a prophet or a statesman?

Now a group of extremist Jews take it into their heads that the Temple should be rebuilt. The first question that comes to mind is where and how will the Temple be rebuilt? The attempt needs a site, a plot of land, and a structural plan. The second question is, in whose honour will the Temple be rebuilt; in honour of Yahwah or in honour of Solomon who built the first Temple? Yahwah was a tribal god among many other pagan gods, and worshipped only in Judea. Solomon was a tribal chief, also in Judea. The whole idea dates from three thousand years ago. Modern Jews have sloughed off the old conception about their god and about their old history of a monarchy based on myth and legend. They are now mostly secularists and it is hoped that they will try to refurbish or to jettison a lot of their traditions which seem to be discordant with modernism. Some of them, I think, regard the attempt to rebuild the Temple as a type of fetishism or idolatry.

There is an important point I would like to mention here, and that is the Muslim outlook of the holy places of Judaism and Christianity. Those places are treated by Muslims as sacred as the Muslim ones. When ’Umar, the second Caliph, conquered Jerusalem, he looked for a sacred spot where he could build a mosque, and there he built it. But when he visited the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre he refused to worship there, out of respect for the place and for fear that Muslims might regard the church as a holy place for Islam and claim it. I think that this fear was by way of precaution. This spirit is characteristic of Islam. It is like the peaceful coexistence advocated by Islam and proves that a Mulsim, however potent he may be, should fraternize with Jews and Christians and not force them into uniformity-which was the Christian way in the Middle Ages. They were not either terrorized by anything similar to the Papal Inquisition, and it would not be an untruth to say that Islam in spirit is dead against terrorism which is induced by ethnic nationalism in the West and the religious nationalism in Judaism as understood in the West. The sporadic acts of protest against injustice as done by Muslims here and there, even when they are violent in nature, should not be called terrorism. The Jews, for instance, practiced terrorism through Irgun and Stern gangs and through their fanatic groups for their religious national cause, and got away with it. But Muslims, fighting for self-determination, in the Balkans, Cyprus, Palestine, Kashmir, the Caucasus, the Phillipines and other parts of the world are labelled as terrorists. Self-determination is still denied to them, but the Christian eastern Timor has been given self-determination.

By the way, globalization in its present sense is not Islamic. But Islam is ready to accept it if it is based upon the three principles of Islam, namely egalitarianism, peaceful coexistence and justice, especially social justice.

In today’s world, the predominant feature is segregationism in all fields of life, coupled with an innate tendency to differentiate, to discriminate. Peaceful coexistence was not in the West. It was advocated by Islam as one of its tenets in the name of symmetrical recognition, as stated in the Qur’an with reference to international and racial relations. The second tenet is social justice, the third principle or tenet in Islam is egalitarianism. The West apparently cannot stomach the principle of egalitarianism neither before God nor before the law, national or international.

It is hoped, however, that the world’s present hysterical tendency of divisiveness as inherited from the religious past, will yield place to a future of unity, with terms of egalitarianism, symmetrical recognition and its concomitants, so that one can live one’s life safe from hunger and secure against fear.

1. Segregationism

Islam’s tolerant and reverential attitude towards other religions, as shown by the reverence granted by Islam to the holy places and sites of Judaism and Christianity, should be regarded as a proof of tolerance and universalism. Islam is truly universalist and tolerant in its basic commandments. Its policy is to live and let live. It never advocated segregationism, conformity, compulsory conversion, colonialism, oppression of religious or ethnic minorities, or racialism. In contrast, it advocated egalitarianism, peaceful coexistence and justice, especially social justice. It never condoned injustice, aggression, despotism, dictatorship, tyranny or terrorism in its various forms, visible and invisible. The recent accusation of terrorism, levelled against Islam, is not fair. It is an act of flying in the face of truth, and an act of prejudice on the part of an interested party.

The tolerant and reverential attitude referred to above should have been requited by a symmetrical and equitable attitude. This has not been the case. Islam has consistently been under attack  for the past two centuries. Islam is more sinned against than sinning. It is not a strange feature for Islam but to be peaceful for it has always been so. If it occasionally shows signs of revolt here and there, it is because something unfair is being done against it. Islam’s acts are purely defensive, and not aggressive. Aggression is unjust and strongly condemned by Islam. Therefore, Islam may be justly adjudged as pacifist and ecumenistic. But what can one say about the onslaught on Islam in the Balkans, in Cyprus, in Palestine, in Kashmir, in the Phillipines and elsewhere, where Muslims are denied the right to self-determination and accused on top of that of being terrorists?

Segregationism, whether religious or ethnic, is anathema in Islam, but has been practiced by Judaism in the past and at present, both in religion and in worldly matters. The Jews, especially, are segregationists, and the whole world is now suffering from this attitude. It has therefore become aggressive and dangerous. It has given birth to prejudice, schizophrenia, hypocrisy, double talk,  double standards, double think, created a split between “us” and “them”, and resulted in dividing mankind into poor and rich, weak and strong, and into master and slave.

The latest manifestation of this spirit is to select certain countries and call them at will “axes of evil”, as George Bush, president of the United States, has called Iraq, Iran and North Korea. President Reagan before him had called the Soviet Union the “focus of evil”. But where was the “focus of good”, and where is now the “axis of good”? Is evil here only whimsical or is it factual? This is divisiveness.

But one would like to ask in this connection where does this division of the world’s peoples into Evil and Good come from? The first source that comes to one’s mind is the Jewish doctrine that divides humanity into those who are Chosen and those who are Gentiles.

This doctrine seems to have imprisoned the world in its grip. The Gentiles now are the Muslims in Afghanistan, in India, in Iran, in Iraq, in Libya, in the Sudan and, above all, in Palestine. The world, especially in the West, seems to be insensitive to the cruelties perpetrated against the Muslims in Afghanistan where they are forced in millions to leave their homes and live in ramshackle tents, dying of starvation and exposure, in Iraq where Muslims are bombarded and have been under siege for more than ten years, with as consequence a high rate of infantile mortality and in Palestine where Muslims are being killed, as Gentiles, like sheep, by organized military campaigns with all sorts of deadly weapons. The unarmed Muslims there are the terrorists. Muslims in Iran are on the list for the same unjust punishment. Perhaps North Korea will be spared, because, I suppose, it is not Muslim. This is how matters stand in the modern world: no justice and no morality.

This situation is no doubt disastrous. Can we do something about it and reverse the rush towards the abyss? The situation in Palestine, against Arabs in general and Muslims in particular, is an epitome of the situation in the world, where segregationism, subjugation, spoliation, expulsion, assassination are openly practiced, while the world watches, unable or unwilling to do anything.

One last thing about the question of holiness. Perhaps from a religious point of view the holy land for the Jews  should be Sinai’ where Moses is said to have received from heaven the Pentateuch and where the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years. Palestine later became Jewish by conquest. The Temple, first built in Jerusalem, was built in a town which was then Jebusite and then Canaanite, and part of Judea, the southern half of the Monarchy. This half represented the historical home of the Jews, and the northern part was not very much concerned about the southern one, even in matters of religion. If the Temple is regarded as holy, it is holy in the sense of its similarity to the holy sanctuaries in Assyria, Babylon, Canaan, and the surrounding areas, which were more like pagan sanctuaries, erected mainly in glorification of a tribal god and a tribal chief. To be attached to it seems to be reminiscent to the attachment of a pagan to a fetish, especially if we remember that the Temple was built nearly three thousand years ago.

There is, however, perhaps in the Jewish mind a similarity between the Ka’ba in Islam and the Temple in Judaism. This similarity does exist but superficially. First of all, is Jerusalem, the Canaanite city, holy because of the Temple, or is the Temple holy because of a holy city? Secondly, Holiness should belong to Mount Sinai’ where Moses received the Pentateuch, and to the Sinai’ wilderness where the Jews sojourned for forty years. Jerusalem was Jebusite and then Canaanite, and then continued to be alien to  Jews for hundreds of years under the rule of the Ptolemics and the Seleucids.

Thirdly, Jerusalem was located in Judea where the Jews amounted to one fifth of the whole Jewish population, with the north in Israel forming four fifths of the population. The north was hardly concerned with what was transpiring in Jerusalem under David or Solomon, even during the Monarchy. According to the Jews, Solomon was not a prophet to have sanctity but a king. Fourthly, the Ka’ba became holy to all Arabs and Muslims as soon as Islam was established. Judaism was not established during the Monarchy, and Israel in the north had a different version of the Pentateuch known as the Samaritan Pentateuch, said to date from the 4th century B.C. Fifthly, the Jews who were exiled to Babylon were Judean. In their exile, they created Judaism anew, influenced of course by the special tendencies they developed during their Babylonian Captivity. It was they, after their return to Jerusalem, who were responsible for the craze about their past, and especially the Temple and the Golah. The exiled constituted a distinct community made up mainly of priests. The Judaism that was practiced then was purely traditional and was the subject of suspicions, especially from the Sadduces among Jews.

Throughout their whole history, whether traditional or factual, the Jews have been looking for an identity, of whatever nature, especially during the Diaspora. They clung to Judaism, but soon many of them found it to be shaky as a foundation for their identity. Only a small minority focused on the Temple as a plank for identity. The Zionists finally stumbled on the idea of forging an identity based on Jewish nationalism to be created in Palestine, and not solely on the Temple, as the Golah tried to do. The current struggle in Palestine between the Arabs and the Israeli is really between a well-established and historical Arab nationalism and a Jewish nationalism still in the making.

2. Discrimination

One can hardly fail to notice the discrimination used in describing insurgent groups in countries such as in Colombia, Northern Ireland, Spain and Sri Lanka. These groups are described as rebels, sectarian, separatists or nationalists, but never as terrorists. But when it comes to the insurgents in Palestine, Kashmir and the Phillipines, they are invariously described as terrorists, presumably because they are Muslims. India, lately, has followed this lead and even went so far as to allege that Pakistan is behind the Kashmiri Muslim groups who want self-determination for the territory. Pakistan is therefore a terrorist country, like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and the Sudan, all Muslim countries.

Another duality lies in the implementation of Security Council resolutions. It has been proved time and again that a resolution unfavourable to a Muslim country, like Palestine, Iraq, Libya, or the Sudan is sure to be implemented, but Resolutions such as 195, 242, 338, 495 are sure to be shelved because they are in favour of an Arab country. Resolution 195 relates to the Palestinian refugees, still living in camps.

Self-determination has been denied to the Bosnians, Kossovars, Turks in Cyprus, Palestinians, Kashmiris and the Muslims in the Phillipines, but given to East Timor. One would like to know why.

To conclude, I would like to refer to two significant verses in the Qur’an, which may be taken as an indicator of the pacifist spirit of Islam. The first one says: “If anybody commits an act of aggression against you, retaliate by acting likewise, but if you fear God, forgive”. The second says: “Let not ill-will (against a people) induce you not to act justly. Do act justly. This is nearer to being piously afraid of God.” A third verse says: “There should be no forcible conversion in religion, now that the right way has been made distinct from error.”

I think the above three verses speak for themselves. They emphasise prohibition of aggression and use of force, and preach justice. Therefore they are relevant now.

Hasan S. Karmi