In contrast to the widespread misconception, Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Quran — not by the name al-Quds, and not by al-Maqdis, as the city is most commonly referred to in Arab literature. This is most surprising, in light of the fact that dozens of passages from the Quran are predicated on stories from the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, where Jerusalem is mentioned countless times. Relatively later on, some Islamic scholars noted that ”Al-Aqsa” (“the farthest”) mosque — from where the Quran says the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven — was located in Jerusalem.

In Islamic tradition Jerusalem is called “first of the two directions” (of prayer), and “third of the two holy sanctuaries.” According to the accepted interpretation of the first name, Muhammad initially marked Jerusalem as the direction of prayer, but later pointed his followers toward Mecca while forbidding them to pray facing Jerusalem. The meaning of the second name is that in Islam there are two holy places, Mecca and Medina. Jerusalem is debased in this manner almost entirely throughout Islamic history.

For 1,300 years of Muslim rule in this region, not once was Jerusalem the capital of a caliphate. The Fatimid and Ottoman rulers even chose Ramla as their local capital. In 1845, on the eve of Zionism, only 15,000 people lived in Jerusalem, about half of them Jewish. From 1949 until the Six-Day War in 1967, the Jordanian sovereigns neither made it their capital there nor nurtured it. The Western Wall plaza area, where according to several Islamic scholars Muhammad tethered his mythological horse, Buraq, was in a state of disrepair, used as a garbage dump rather than a holy site for Muslim pilgrims from across the globe.

With that, Jerusalem was noted for its importance in Islam on two occasions: First, when a Muslim sultan needed a counterweight to the sultan that ruled Mecca. The other occasion was when the city was ruled by non-Muslims. When the Crusaders first conquered Jerusalem, religious literature exalting the city and its sanctity began to appear. Ibn Taymiyyah, the preeminent Islamic scholar and theologian of 13th century and forefather of present-day radical Islam, forbade pledging allegiance to the city and banned it as an additional pilgrimage destination to Mecca (Haj), decreeing that anyone who did so should be put to death.

In our times, with the return of Jerusalem to Jewish rule after 2,000 years in exile, “al-Quds” is once again of the utmost importance to Muslims. Subsequent to this fabricated importance is a crucial religious imperative: the duty to expel the “infidels” from “Dar al-Islam” (the house of Islam); or in other words, any stretch of land that was once under Muslim rule.

UNESCO recently ruled that the Temple Mount and Western Wall are Palestinian sites. This decision, which was disgracefully supported by many Western countries, merely emboldens the Muslims in their tendentious pursuit of eliminating Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish people. Let us not fool ourselves: For them, this is nothing but the first step on the path to destroying the State of Israel.http://www.gettyimages.com/license/630810527