This is the text of an address given by Dr Obada Kayali at the Canberra Islamic Centre on the 30th of November, 2002. (December 2002)


Dear Brothers and Sisters

Assalamu Alaikum Warahmatullah
(May Peace and God’s Mercy be Upon You)

Today I feel very honoured that I am standing here among you in this great place. I feel proud of the achievement of the Islamic community in Canberra who persevered along the years in order to establish this centre by the hard work of the community itself. You have done this alone so that you will owe it to no government or organization and so that you will be free and independent.

My Brothers and Sisters,

We live in a beautiful and magnificent country. We thank God that so far this country has gone a long way along the path of democracy, justice and freedom. We are all equal Australian citizens who share the same feelings of love and duty towards Australia in her healthy multicultural society. And we all want to further advance and protect Australian democracy, justice and freedom.

Many of us have come to this country because of this very freedom that Australia offered and that which we were deprived of in the countries of origin. We did not want our children to suffer the same way as we did under despotic regimes. Yet we often discover that the moulds that we were forced to live into are still restricting us and confining our minds. We should not indulge in self blame. What we should be doing is indulging in self awareness. We should ask ourselves why is it that we prevent our minds from asking difficult questions? What are we afraid of?

Nearly all countries from where Muslims came are undemocratic. Either deliberately through despotic regimes or because of self imposed deprivation of freedom. People are either afraid of the government, or they are afraid of their relatives, or of their own family. This goes to the extent that subconsciously one prevents oneself from what we consider as trespassing onto forbidden territory. The territory of questioning and thinking. We even try to find excuses like ‘this is Haram’, or ‘we can not say this or that for we bring on our selves the wrath of God’. We forget when we say such things that in nearly every Surah of the Holy Quran there are two or more verses that clearly and loudly encourage and prompt us to think, reason, and find the truth for ourselves. One of the names of God is The Truth. Therefore by seeking the truth we are seeking God. And the Truth does not need us to protect it. It is us who need the Truth to protect us.

More than two hundred and fifty years ago, the French intellectual, Voltaire, said: “I may disagree with what you have to say but I shall defend to the death your right to say it”. I say this today because I am proud that this community has consciously opened itself to the world that is full of ideas and is not afraid of them. I say this because I know that not every one of you will agree with what I have to say this evening. I also know that some will not agree even with the way that I say certain things. And you do not have to agree. What is more important is that we have this forum in which ideas can and should be exchanged without fear.

The intolerance that the Arab and Islamic Worlds are suffering from these days is contrary to the very essence of Islam and what the Prophet and his immediate successors have set as example.

Today, brothers and sisters is the day of Al-Quds. The day of the city of my birth, Jerusalem Alquds (Jerusalem The Holy). Some would say, why are you saying Jerusalem? Isn’t this a Jewish name? For this my answer is No! it is not a Jewish name. The name Jerusalem is a Palestinian name to the city that the Palestinians built and founded long before there was anything called Jews, and even before anything called Hebrews and Arabs for that matter. That is before the supposed days of Abraham himself the father of Hebrews and Arabs.

To show this we only need to go back to two sources. These are history and The Bible. First let us go back to history. The most powerful sources of evidence that we have about the history of Palestine come from either archeology of Palestine or the well preserved Egyptian scripts. Remains of a walled fortified Canaanite city in Jerusalem were found and dated to the nineteenth century BC. It was not the only or the most important of the Palestinian cities in existence at that time. The cities of Sechem (nowadays Nablus), the city of Hebron, the city of Acco, and the city of Jericho were all in existence and of more importance. All these cities were built by the Canaanites whose culture was dominantly Syrian. The other independent historical source is the Egyptian one. Here we have names of foreign cities and its rulers inscribed on pottery and these were dated to the pharaoh Sesostris who ruled between 1878 and 1842 BC. The importance of these scripts is that among the nineteen Canaanite cities that they named there appears for the first time the name of a city called “Ru-Shalim-um”. The name means, in the language of the ancient Syrians “Shalem has founded” or in other words the city of Shalem, and Shalem was the Syrian god. Remember, that we are talking of a period that is even earlier than 1850 BC when the Patriarch Abraham is thought to have lived in nowadays Iraq. To put ourselves in more perspective, let us also remember that Moses himself is thought to have lived around 1250 BC and that David is thought to have lived about the year 1000 BC. That is Jerusalem had existed with her same name Ur-Shalim for at least eight hundred and fifty years before it was conquered by David.

Let us take another historical and exciting trip to the ancient city of Jerusalem. In the year 1887 AD, a marvelous discovery occurred in Egypt at a place called Tel el-Amarna. This discovery consisted of 350 letters now well famous as the Letters of Tel el-Amarna. These letters were from the princes of Canaan to the Pharaoh of Egypt Amenhotep the Third who ruled during the years 1386 to 1349 BC and his son the famous Akhenaton who ruled between the years 1349 till 1334 BC. At that time Canaan was under the rule of Egypt and those letters were telling the pharaoh about the state of affairs and begging for military help against their rivals and asking for money etc. Six letters were from the prince of Jerusalem called Abdi Hepa who speaks about Jerusalem as the capital of the land of Beit -Shalmani, that is the house of Shalem or Shulman. That is Jerusalem was still loyal to the god of Shalem, the Syrian god.

So, that was the evidence from history. Let us now talk about the evidence from the books of religion; namely the Old Testament. Before I go into this I must stop to say that the books of religion including the Quran, should never be taken as evidence of history. Yes, they can give clues to history, but not history itself. Stories that we read in these sacred books are often given in symbolic way. The Quran intentionally makes it clear that a story is not to be taken literally but rather must be taken for its moral value. No starker an example than the story of the People of the Cave, as narrated in the Quran. Having said all this, I am still going to use the Bible in a way of evidence. This I will do only for the sake of the argument. This is because the Zionist propaganda machine has used the Bible as a tool for its political purposes. First, Zionists claim that Palestine belongs to the Jews because God has given it to them. Second they claim that Jerusalem is the city of King David and that he built it and made it his capital. In both of these claims, Zionists invoke the Bible as their tool of proof. Therefore, I want to debate these claims using the Bible itself. Take first the claim that God gave Palestine to the Jews. Assuming that what we read in the Bible is history and accurate, let alone being fair for the already indigenous people of Palestine at the time and at any time. I am now quoting the Bible: It says in Genesis, Chapter 12 , verses 6 and 7; “And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Sichem, unto the plain of Moreh. And the Canaanite was then in the land. And the Lord appeared unto Abram and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land”. Then it says in Genesis Chapter 21 verse 13: “And Also the son of the bond woman (that is Hagar) will I make a nation because he is thy seed” Hence we can see that even if we use the Bible as a historical evidence for such a deal we can obviously see that the Promise of the land that belonged to the Canaanites has gone to the seed of Abraham who, according to the Bible itself are the Arabs through his eldest son Ishmael and the Hebrews through his younger son Isaac.

So this takes care of the issue of the so called promised land.

Let us now deal with the issue of Jerusalem and again using the same document; the Bible. It says in the Bible in Chapter 15 of Joshua, verse No. 63: “As for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah could not drive them out: but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day”. We also find the following similar verse in the Book of Judges Chapter 1 verse 21, it says: “And the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem; but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day”, that is until the day the anonymous ancient writer of the Bible wrote these words. Is it that difficult to see that Jerusalem was already an established Jebusite city to which David laid siege and even when he conquered it he could not drive the original inhabitants out?

So what is the problem here?

It is the claim of exclusivity. This is the problem. Whether we base the argument on tangible historical and physical evidence or on religious verses from the holy books, the conclusion is still the same. Palestine is a land that had many peoples who dwelled into it and the nowadays Palestinians are but their children, whether the ancestors were Canaanites, Philistines, Jebusites, Hebrews, or Arabs. My problem is with any body who claims the unique descendance of any one of these peoples and claims the exclusive ownership of that land at the expense of those who actually inhabited it since ancient time.

However, before I go further into the history and tragedy of my city, I find myself very much tempted to digress a bit. A short while ago I was talking about history and how in fact the history of the Palestinians was deliberately suppressed by the Zionist movement. I expect that you will be intrigued to know that the history of the Jews themselves is also often suppressed when it does not suit the colonialist propaganda and purposes. I will give you an example. It is that of the Jewish Empire. How many of us know that there was a Jewish Empire? I am not speaking now about David or Solomon. I am talking about an empire that existed between the late seventh and the tenth centuries AD and spanned the nowadays countries of Ukraine, a large part of southern Russia including most of the river Volga, parts of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. It was called the Khazar Empire. And it was Jewish. This is a fascinating story which I am only going to tantalize you with tonight because I do not want to digress too far. The existence of this empire is beyond doubt. Documents abound. Some of these documents are of particular interest to us. These are a series of letters of a correspondence around the years 954-961 AD that took place between a person called Hasdai Bin Shaprut and Joseph, King of the Khazars. Who on Earth was Hasdai Bin Shaprut? Hasdai Bin Shaprut, my dear friends, was the Jewish prime minister of the Islamic Caliphate of Spain whose citadel was Cordoba. The Jews in Spain were enjoying a most marvelous time under the Arab rule. Hasdai was perhaps the most brilliant personality of Jewish Spain in that era. This also was the most brilliant period of the Arabs in Spain. Hasdai was also openly a devout Jew. His position as the Prime minister of the Muslim Caliph gave him the power to gather information about fellow Jews in the world and try to look after them. Hasdai knew of the existence of a great Jewish independent state in the East and was so intrigued so he started this correspondence with King Joseph asking him about their origins etc.

So what is the big story here? The big story is that those Khazar Jews were mass converts to Judaism. The story of their conversion is fascinating. But those people had no ethnic connection to Palestine, unlike the Spanish Jews. The Khazars chose Judaism over the two main rival religions at that time; Christianity the religion of Byzantium to their West and Islam the religion of the Abbaside Caliphate to the South. They made a very clever and wise decision that guaranteed their independence and gave them a glorious empire for nearly two hundred years. However, in the end they were conquered and displaced by the Russians and they were driven to the west towards Hungary, Germany and Poland. Guess who those Jews have eventually become? They are The Ashkenazi Jews. They themselves even do not know it. Who did expose these hidden and startling facts? Non other than Arthur Koestler. Of course we know Koestler. He is the author of the great novel Darkness at Noon. He himself was a Hungarian Ashkenazi Jew. His novel, Darkness at Noon, was widely publicized and still is universally read. It is actually a great novel, but the deliberate publicizing of it was probably not exactly for the same reasons that Koestler intended. Darkness at Noon exposed the crimes of Stalin and his regime. It was not anti communist. It was anti Stalinist and a very humanistic work indeed. But the West in the middle of the cold war exploited the novel for their anti communist efforts, and Arthur Koestler became an unintending Darling. But, when the same Koestler wrote his documentary book “The Thirteenth Tribe” in which he narrated the history of the Jewish Khazar Empire, his work was stifled. What is wrong with his book? you may ask. Well, if you are a Zionist, especially a powerful Ashkenazi Zionist, saying that Jews are a race, and specifically a chosen race who were driven out of the land of Palestine and that they all must go back to Israel, then I do not think you will be very pleased to see documents proving that you actually originated in the Caucasus and that your ancestors adopted Judaism and were not really descendants of Jacob.

The point in this example is not exactly in the content, interesting as it is. The point is that Zionists have been selective in suppressing what they want whether from Palestinian or Jewish history in order to serve their colonial plan. It seems to me that there is a mentality of Selection when it comes to Zionism. First there is the idea that they are Selected by God and then the selection of what they want out of the Bible, the selection of what they want out of archeology and history and the selection of what they want out of the United Nations Resolutions. On this last thing, we are always bombarded with the notion that Israel has its legitimacy from the United Nations General Assembly resolution No. 181 of November 29, 1947 which recommended the partition of Palestine. But this same resolution gave in the same breath equal legitimacy to a Palestinian state. This same resolution assigned Jerusalem and Bethlehem under International administration. This same resolution gave the Jewish state 56% of Palestine (although the Jewish population were 608,000 and owned only between 6 to 8% of the land, compared to 1,269,000 Palestinians) and assigned 43% to the Palestinian state. Yet Israel swallowed immediately 78% of the country and prevented the remaining 22% from forming an independent homeland for the remainders of the Palestinian nation until it totally occupied them in 1967 and is still subjugating them until this day.

You may be interested to know that the Zionist movement was dominated by secular non religious or even openly atheist Jews. Among those was David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. Yet they did not have difficulty in invoking the promise of God, in whom they did not believe, when it suited them. On this, Ben Gurion was once quizzed whether as an atheist he believed that the Jews are the Chosen people. To this he replied that he believed they are ‘The Choosing people’.

But why should it matter whether Ashkenazi Jews or Chinese Jews or Sephardic Jews had their roots in Palestine? As far as I am concerned it should not matter at all. I do not see any thing wrong in that a Jewish person is so attached to Palestine and Jewish history and believes genuinely that he or she has descended from Palestinian Jews two thousand years ago. I do not see any thing wrong in that even if there is strong evidence that this person had no ancestry that relates them to Palestinian Jewry. For to be a Jew is also a state of mind to whom a Jew is entitled no matter what real origin they come from. I also do not see anything wrong in the Jews wanting to come back to Palestine and live away from the persecution that dogged them so cruelly in Europe for two thousand years. I do not see any thing wrong in the Jews being proud of their history, religion, language, literature, and scientific achievements. They are entitled to this pride like every other nation. I do not see anything wrong in me, a Palestinian, saying that the Jews have strong history in Palestine and in my city, Jerusalem. Of course they do and it is an ancient one too dating back to no less than 3000 years as I have narrated earlier. So where is my problem then?? My problem is that while I do not deny the strong connection of the Jews to Palestine, the Zionists deny mine. For who are we, the Palestinians? We have been in this land call it whatever you want, since the dawn of history. We were Canaanites, then Jebusites, then Philistines, then Hebrews, then Greeks and Arabs. Our religions changed from pagan to Jewish to Christian to Muslim. Our rulers changed from Syrians, to Hittites to Egyptians to Assyrians to Persians to Greeks to Romans to Byzantines to Arabs to Crusaders to Turks and to British. Our language changed from Canaanite to Aramaic to Greek to Arabic. But we are still the same people of the land. We are the people who never wanted to leave our land and have rather adapted to the changes in culture and politics around us. Who knows and why should it matter who my ancestor was two thousand years ago? But it does matter a lot when someone comes and tells me that I have no right whatsoever in the place of my birth. It matters to me a lot when a Russian Jew comes to my homeland not to live peacefully with me but to claim that the country who he has never seen before is his and his only and that I who was born there must leave. It matters to me a lot when I, thanks to my Australian passport, can only go in a tourist status to visit Jerusalem, let alone be able to live there, while if I was a Jew no matter from which country, I would be able to become an Israeli citizen the moment I set foot in Israel. It is the exclusive racism that is the heart of the problem. The Zionist movement openly advocated that Palestine is to become the state of one race only. It is to become the Jewish state where others have to leave. This is where I have a problem.

My dear Brothers and Sisters,

Perhaps one of the greatest characteristics of Islam and that which made Islam such a successful movement in an amazingly short time can be seen from the Verse No. 13 in the Surah of Al-Hujurat and I quote the exact translation word for word:

“O People , Behold, We have created you all out of a male and a female, and have made you into nations and tribes so that you might come to know one another. Verily, the noblest of you in the sight of God is the one who is most deeply conscious of Him. Behold, God is all knowing, all aware.”

The translator, Muhammad Asad, who is a great hero of mine, (and for the benefit of those who do not know him, he is the former Jewish Leopold Weiss of Austria), goes on to explain in his words and those of prominent ancient scholars what these verses really mean. He says: “...all of you belong to one human family. This verse connects with a previous one that calls on people to respect each other’s dignity”. Then he goes on his explanation that people’s evolution into nations and tribes is meant to foster rather than to diminish their mutual desire to understand and appreciate the essential human oneness underlying their outward differentiations; and correspondingly all racial, national or tribal prejudice is condemned implicitly in the Quran. Let us look at this extremely moving verse of the Quran. This is verse No 15 and verse 16 of the Surah Al-Qasas where it narrates the story of Moses it says:

“And one day he entered the city at a time when its people were resting in their houses unaware of what was going on in the streets and where he encountered two men fighting with one another—one of his own people and the other of his enemies. And the one who belonged to his own people cried out to him for help against him who was of his enemies—whereupon Moses struck him down with his fist, and thus brought about his end, But then he said to himself: This is of Satan’s doing! Verily, Satan is an open foe leading man astray, and he prayed : O my Sustainer! Verily I have sinned against myself! Grant me, then thy forgiveness, and God forgave him, for He alone is truly forgiving and Dispenser of Grace.”

Muhammad Asad carries on his explanation to say that “Moses has immediately, after he killed the Egyptian, realized that he had committed a grave sin not only by killing, however inadvertently, an innocent person, but also by basing his action on a mere tribal—or as we would describe it today, racial or national prejudice. Evidently, this is the purport of this Quranic segment of the story of Moses. Its moral has been stressed and explained by the prophet in many occasions...” [end of quotation of Muhammad Asad]. One of those occasions was when the prophet said: “There is no preference of an Arab over a non Arab, or a non Arab over an Arab, or a black over white or a white over black except by the virtue of their good deeds.”

This is what Muslims should rightly be proud of. That they carry to the world a religion that had, more than one thousand four hundred years ago, explicitly attacked racism and explicitly attacked excessive and blind nationalism. Nationalism can be a good thing as long as it expresses the legitimate rights of people. It is an expression of identity for those who had been unjustly persecuted because of their ethnicity, religion or colour. Jewish nationalism was a noble thing when the Jews were persecuted all over Europe severely and unjustly. But the moment any nationalism, whether it is German, Jewish, Palestinian, Arab or American, takes hold in the minds of people as an expression of superiority it ceases to become a noble affair. On the contrary, it immediately becomes a weapon to persecute others. This is what happened to the Jewish people whose suffering was exploited by political Zionism that converted their noble cause into a racist and colonialist adventure that mimics only those who persecuted them in the first place.

Brothers and Sisters,

Let us listen here to the translation of the opening verses in the Surah of Isra’a (The Night Journey):

“Limitless in His Glory is He who transported His servant by night from the Inviolable House of Worship (at Mecca) to the Remote House of Worship (at Jerusalem)—in the environs of which We had blessed—so that We might show him some of Our symbols: for, verily, He alone is all-hearing, all-seeing.”

Historically, this Surah (Chapter) from the Holy Quran dates to the year 620 AD.

The reference here is to two apparently physical entities. The house of worship at Mecca was physically there. As to the house of worship in Jerusalem, it existed in the past only, and at the time of the prophet Muhammad it was just a concept attached to a geographical location. For Muhammad and his followers, the link between the two locations, Mecca and Jerusalem in this miraculous night journey has immensely powerful meaning. This is a man in Mecca, an Arab who is now claiming to be nothing but the continuation of the true religion of Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus. The Quranic verse linked the Abrahamite site in Mecca, to the Davidic site in Jerusalem through the person of Muhammad as the messenger of God who is sent to bring people back to the faith. It is fascinating to know that at the time that this verse was revealed, Muhammad was a ridiculed and persecuted man in Mecca. His followers were beaten and tortured and his family was humiliated and boycotted. Yet, the revolutionary connotation in this verse is bewildering. This revolutionary connotation can only be seen when we remember that the Arabs at the time were nothing but tribes, inward looking and nearly undiscovered and un-interesting to the major players of that world, the Byzantines and the Persians. And here is an Arab, who only with the power of a verse like this, is plunging them straight into World affairs via a spiritual mission.

Eighteen years after these verses, only six years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, and in the year 638 AD the Arabs under the banner of Islam, conquered Jerusalem.

Sophronius, the Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem and effectively the leader of Jerusalem at the time, surrendered Jerusalem to the Muslims on condition that he would only surrender it to the Caliph himself. So the Caliph Omar obliged, and traveled to Palestine where he received the keys of the city from Sophronius in June 638 AD. Omar requested to see the holy places. So Sophronius took him to the magnificent buildings of the Anastasis. While he was standing near the tomb, the time of prayer came and the Patriarch invited him to pray inside the Christian shrine. Omar, courteously explained to the patriarch that he should not do this because had he prayed there, the Muslims in later years might confiscate it and claim it for a mosque. And having been alerted to this possibility, he decreed that no Christian holy place in Jerusalem may be converted to a place for Muslim worship. Omar prayed outside, on the steps, but again made a decree that under no circumstance should the Muslims build a mosque there. Omar then requested to see the site of the mosque of David. The patriarch led him to the temple mount and what he saw horrified him. The Byzantines had used the site as a rubbish dump to the extent that the filth was as high as the gate which could not be opened because of that, and the Muslims and the patriarch had to crawl on hands and knees to get up to the platform. The sight of the platform of Herod’s temple horrified the Muslims. The ruins and filth was filling the place. So, Omar after absorbing the shock, took off his cloak, rolled up his sleeves and started putting the garbage in it and carrying it out of the site. Immediately every one present followed suite. Once the site had been cleared, it was ready for the house of worship to be erected. Here, we go back to the verse of the Qur’an on the Night Journey where it tells us of the Remote House of worship. That is where this remote House of worship which actually did not physically exist at the time of Muhammad, was located. What existed was the concept of worship at a special place in Jerusalem symbolising the presence of God.

Still another bizarre surprise was on its way to Omar. Omar saw with his great wisdom, that in order to succeed as a new administration, he should leave the people to rule themselves and apply their own laws and traditions as they used to. But he was not aware of a certain unique situation that existed in Jerusalem. He was not aware that the Romans and after them the Byzantines had banned the Jews from entering Jerusalem and its suburbs. So the Jews approached Omar telling him of the situation. Omar was amazed and he revoked that law. He also invited seventy Jewish families who were living in the north of Palestine to come and live in Jerusalem.

Why did he do that?

I have already talked to you about the consciously pioneering principle in Islam regarding anti-racial discrimination. And this brings me to another deeply ingrained principle in Islam. This is the principle of Justice. Indeed, this is also supposed to be a main principle of Judaism as well. That principle of the necessity of justice and that God is the ultimate giver of Justice, and that it is the duty of every Muslim to uphold, protect and seek justice and if need be fight for it, is in fact the secret for the early great success of Islamic expansion and the secret of the rage and anger that Muslims of nowadays experience and feel. That is why Omar found the Byzantine law banning the Jews from entering Jerusalem, unacceptable. Yet, now, and as we speak, you may be interested to know that Palestinians are banned by an Israeli law to enter Jerusalem, and that Palestinian Muslims and Christians living only few kilometers from the Aqsa mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre have only seen their holy city in pictures. In this context also, I want to stop a while at a story that can have its lessons in our days. When Omar cleaned the site of the temple, and contemplated erecting the mosque building there, he consulted Ka’b Ibn Ahbar, a Jewish convert into Islam and an expert in Jewish Studies. Then he went further by inviting a group of Rabbis who travelled down to Jerusalem from Tiberias. And only after taking stock of the advice given of where on the mount he should build, he ordered the building on the spot of what became known as the Aqsa mosque. We also would only need a quick look at the pictures of the Western Wall, that is the Wailing Wall, the holiest of places in Judaism to see that the lower stones are huge while the rest are small. A further examination leads to the correct conclusion that at the time of the Islamic conquest of the then Christian Jerusalem, the only remnants of Herod’s temple were those big stones. It was the Muslims who repaired the rest of the wall to what we see today.

While we admire such examples, we should not get into the error of self glorifying. The Islamic world today can not be farther away from the principles of democracy, freedom, equality and justice. The reason is precisely because the countries where Muslims live were made to ignore the very principles that I have just talked about. I will not plunge now into this topic for it can take us another evening. Instead I want to come back to the subject of Jerusalem. I want to tell you about the Mosque of the Dome of the Rock. This is the most famous and magnificent Islamic building that dominates the skyline of Jerusalem. This brings us to the year 685 AD when the Caliph Abdulmalik started his reign.

The Caliph Abdulmalik was, arguably, the most capable emperor of the Umayyad dynasty. The capital of the Islamic empire had, by then, been Damascus for the past twenty four years and had been in the hands of the Muslims for just fifty years after it had been conquered and taken from the Byzantines in the year 635 AD. Damascus and greater Syria and Palestine were still Christian in their majority. Thus Abdulmalik found himself the emperor over lands the majority of which was Christian.

It is reported that when the great Muslim General Khalid Ibn Al-Walid conquered Damascus in 635 AD, three years after the death of Muhammad, the Byzantine governor of Damascus who surrendered the city to Khalid was a Christian Arab by the name Mansour Ibn Sargun. The family of Mansour stayed powerful and respected, and remained Christian. The son of Mansour was called Sergius Ibn Mansour, and he became a very important figure in the Umayyad administration, keeping the accounts of the empire. This Sergius had a son called John who grew up in close companionship with the future emperor Yazid. John, later on became the well known great theologian, John the Damascene. John the Damascene retired to live in a monastery called Mar Saba in Palestine, where he wrote his masterpiece, The Fount of Knowledge. This has been the first ever informed critique of Islam written by a Christian scholar who himself was an Arab and who lived in the citadel of the Islamic empire at the time of the zenith of the Islamic rise just within fifty years of the death of Muhammad. This was the atmosphere of tolerance and intellectual freedom of that time.

So Abdulmalik was conscious of the original teachings of Islam that Christians and Jews are people of the Book worshipping the same God albeit, according to the ideology of the Muslims, not adhering to the true word of God as revealed to Moses and Jesus. So here, especially in Syria and Palestine, we see rivalry of ideology rather than an unaffordable animosity. We see a Muslim emperor striving to appease and please his Christian majority subjects by deeds like making their land the centre of the now huge empire, with dazzling wealth pouring from all over the known world. Yet, the ideological but healthy rivalry flourished, not least because of the very teaching of tolerance that was endeavoured to be adhered to by the early Muslims. Abdulmalik had Jerusalem under his rule. Jerusalem at that time had, as the Jerusalemite historian Al-Maqdissi in the tenth century wrote “All the churches in the Sham (that is nowadays Syria and Palestine) were so enchantingly fair, and the dome of the Qiamah (the Church of Resurrection) so great and splendid that Abdulmalik feared that it would dazzle the minds of the Muslims.” The Mount of Olives too had the magnificent church of Ascension whose dome used to be illuminated at night and shine in a most magnificent way.

So, this was the atmosphere that was prevailing in Jerusalem and the Christian Arab Syria. Abdulmalik thought that he must react. So in 688 AD he commissioned the building of the dome of the rock. A specifically designed Islamic shrine though it is very interesting to note that two of its main three architects were known Christians. It was to distinguish the importance of the place represented and symbolized by the huge rock that protruded majestically on top of the temple mount. It was also designed to send a strong religious statement as well as a strong political one. It is interesting at this moment to mention that his deed was lavishly praised by the Jewish author of The Mysteries of Rabbi Simeon Ben Yohai who regarded the building as a preparation for the coming of the Messiah and praised the Muslim Caliph as a “lover of Israel” who “restored the breaches of the Temple”. Nevertheless, the Dome of the Rock mosque truly became the womb for Islamic architecture and spiritual art. It still dominates the skyline of Jerusalem inspite of the ugly blocks of settlements. Just imagine how it looked one thousand and two hundred years ago.

And so, Jerusalem remained under the rule of the Muslims but with her original indigenous people that are the Palestinians and who were then composed of a Christian majority and two growing minorities; the Jews who started to flock back with the blessing of the Muslim rulers after being banished under the Byzantines, and the Muslims who were rapidly converting to Islam from Christianity and Judaism.

Let us now jump to the year 1099 AD. Why would we do that? This is the year when Jerusalem and much of Palestine were conquered by the Crusaders. On their way to Palestine, the Crusaders found it an opportunity to also massacre any Jewish community that they found as part of their holy war. Crusader historians wrote with great admiration how the Crusaders army did not spare any soul living in Jerusalem. They wrote that ten thousand Muslims sought sanctuary in the Aqsa Mosque only to be butchered, all of them. The Jews of the city also sought sanctuary in the Synagogue and were equally massacred. They wrote with pride how in the alleys of Jerusalem, blood of the inhabitants flowed like rivers. This of course is the type of occupation that is deemed to fail no matter how spectacular it may appear at the time. Yet, the Israeli generals of our time do not seem to be interested in history. For the resistance of the Palestinians to the Crusader occupation of their land continued for nearly one hundred years. And similar to what we see these days, the humiliation of fellow human beings in Palestine awakened the dormant dignity in the Muslim people and caused enormous changes on the map of the Islamic world so as to counter the invaders. And so at last, the armies of the famous Salahuddin (Saladin), rolled into Palestine. Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, was a Kurd. He was not an Arab. That was the mentality at that time. The mentality of no-ethnic differentiation but only the unity of principles that counts. And, listen to this beauty! Our hero Saladin had a chief minister called Moussa Ibn Maymoun. Again, who on Earth you may ask is this Moussa Ibn Maymoun? He is, dear friends, non other than the famous Maymounidis who is one of the most important pillars of Judaism. For Moussa Ibn Maymoun was Jewish and openly so, and without fear he wrote on Judaistic philosophy and contributed hugely to Judaistic culture. Yet this man is also held dearly by the Arabs and Muslims as part of them and their culture.

And so Saladin, on a marvelous coincidence on the day of Israa, in the year 1187 AD enters Jerusalem in triumph. Recorded Western history tells us that the crusaders and their families expected nothing except death similar to that which they had inflicted when they came in the first place. Guess what! Not a single Christian was killed. The moving stories about that episode in the history of Jerusalem, abound. It is only sufficient for us to listen to this quotation from Saladin as quoted by Western historians, he said: “Christians everywhere will remember the kindness we have done them”. Yet, although the West still remembers, the arrogance of the West refused at that time as it does today to acknowledge the real secret that lies behind this phenomenon that happened first when the prophet Muhammad conquered Mecca, and again when the Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 635 AD and when they did it again in 1187 AD. This refusal to know is the most formidable obstacle between human beings.

Ironically, it was the Crusaders misadventure that consolidated the status of Jerusalem more and more in the hearts of Muslims. It is also the lesson that Muslims console themselves with when they ponder about the plight of Jerusalem these days as if we are still in the days of the first Crusade. Alas it is now people who claim relations with the great Hasdai Ibn Shaprut and Moussa Ibn Maymoun who are spearheading this new colonialism. It is those Zionists who hijacked the suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of the Crusades in Europe and Jerusalem and at the hands of the Spanish inquisition and the Russian pogroms and the Nazi holocaust. Those are the Zionists who claim Palestine exclusively for one race and one race only at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians. They are in fact the real Anti-Semites because it is their racist ideology that breeds nothing except hatred, blood-shed and catastrophes for every one including the Jews. And as we celebrate this day of Jerusalem Al-Quds, (Jerusalem the Holy), we will pray that the future of this city of Salam, this city of peace will again be the leader in which Muslims, Christians and Jews live together in total dignity, real democracy and genuine freedom.

And as I conclude, I want to share with you some words of Bernard Sabella, who is a Christian Palestinian intellectual, that he said at a recent Christian conference. He said: “When I hear the Athan ‘Allahu Akbar’ coming from the mosque I feel tenderness cupping my heart, because that call is part of me and my identity as a Palestinian.”

And today brothers and sisters, I also want to tell you how I remember the sounds of the bells of the churches in Jerusalem mingle with the melodic Athan from the minarets of her mosques and mix with the hopeful calls from the vendors in her aromatic ancient alleys. It is the lovely immortal real symphony of Jerusalem. How dare any one disturb it?

Page content last modified: 27 Apr 2003