Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Jerusalem
by Latheef Farook
Muslims worldwide observe the last Friday of the Holy Month of Ramadan as Masjid
Al Aqsa Day.
In 1979 late Iranian leader Imam Khomeini asked the Muslims all over the world to
choose the last Friday of the Holy Ramadan to show their solidarity with the
Palestinians and their legal rights.
After naming the last Friday of Ramadan as the Global Day of Quds every year
before saying the Friday Prayers, a great mass of the fast holders demonstrate to
support the oppressed people of Palestine.
This demonstration takes place all over the world.This year the Global Day of Al
Quds is observed on 17 Friday 2015.
Masjid Al Aqsa, the first qibla of the Muslims, second oldest masjid after Makkah and
the third most important holy place in Islam after Makka and Madina is located in the
city of Jerusalem known to Muslims worldwide as Al Quds (The Holy) or Baitul
Muqaddis (The House of Holiness).
The historical significance of the Masjid Al-Aqsa in Islam lies in the fact that the early
Muslims turned towards it in prayer for a period of around seventeen months after the
hijra or migration to Medina in 624 AC. Thus it became the qibla (direction) that
Muslims faced for prayer. According to Allame Tabatabayee, Allah prepared Muslims
for the change of the qibla, first by revealing the story of Ibrahim and his son Ishmael,
and their prayers for Makkah, their construction of the House of Allah (Ka'aba) and the
order to cleanse it of idols for the worship of the One True God-Allah. Then Quranic
verses were revealed which ordered Muslims to turn towards Masjid al-Haram, the
Holy Mosque in Makkah in their prayers.[Qur'an 2:142151]
Masjid Al Aqsa is the place where Prophet Ibrahim, the patriarch of all the three great
monotheistic faiths Judaism, Christianity and Islam prayed. It was in this very same
Masjid that Allah resurrected and assembled all the prophets and messengers for
Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) to lead the prayer with them during his divine night
journey to the heavens. Allah chose the Masjid of Jerusalem for this greatest prayer,
for the first time in history, because of its purity, nobility, distinction and highest
standing.
However, despite all this religious significance of Jerusalem for Muslims, the Zionist
Jews who occupied East Jerusalem in their war of aggression in June 1967 have been
repeatedly conspiring to destroy Masjid Al Aqsa and build in its place a new Solomons
Temple, the older temple having been destroyed by the Romans in 70 AC, the
remnants of which are only seen today as a wall known to Jews as the Wailing Wall.
As part of this conspiracy they commenced a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing
the Palestinians who had been living there for generations.
The question is what has around one and half billion Muslims worldwide done to save
Masjid Al Aqsa from the designs of Zionist Jews and their supporters in the US led
West.
During World War 1 Jerusalem was under Turkeys Ottoman rule .However following
Turkeys defeat in the war, Jerusalem was brought under British control on
December 9, 1917.
Over the years the Arab rulers abandoned the Palestinians, Jerusalem and even
Masjid Al Aqsa. Their only concern was to preserve their seats of power and comforts
and, to ensure this they even started having open and secret relations with the very
same Zionists despite all their conspiracies against Islam and Muslims.
The Zionist Jews have been desecrating Masjid Al Aqsa beginning from the time of the
British mandatory rule. A group of Jewish extremists, with the help of the British army,
broke into the Al-Aqsa complex on 20 August 1929 and took control of the western
area, including Al-Buraq Wall (now referred to as the Wailing Wall by the Jews). Within
15 days, 338 Palestinians died in their effort to thwart the Zionists' plan. In June 1967
the Zionists entered Haram As-Sharif in tanks, seized the key of Al-Magharibah Gate
and took control of the city's eastern side, including Al-Aqsa Mosque.
On August 21st 1969, a Jewish extremist called Dennis Michael Rohan (Jewish name:
Mikhail Rohan) set Al-Aqsa on fire. The fire destroyed most of the mosque, including
the historical minbar (pulpit), used by Salahuddin al-Ayyubi after he liberated Al-Aqsa
from the Christian Crusaders. The Palestinians succeeded in extinguishing the fire, but
Rohan was freed from all charges on grounds of insanity
In 1970, the Israelis commenced intensive excavations directly beneath Masjid Al
Aqsa on the southern and western sides. In 1977 digging continued and a large tunnel
was opened below the women's prayer area and a new tunnel was dug under the
mosque, going east to west in 1979.
In the 1980s, the Israelis started their so called archaeological project in the Masjid AlAqsa premises claiming that they were searching for the Temple of King Solomon.
They dug another tunnel near the western portion of the masjid in 1984.
In February 2007 Israelis started excavating a site, 60 meters away from the mosque,
to rebuild a collapsed pedestrian bridge. As part of this conspiracy the Zionist Jews
also trained Temple guards, sewed special Kohannim robes for the rabbis, and even
built a model of the temple near Masjid Al-Aqsa. War criminal Ehud Olmert, former
mayor of Jerusalem and former Prime Minister who slaughtered starving Palestinians
in Gaza, officiated at the opening of the Jewish Museum, built underneath Masjid AlAqsa.