NEWS FEATURE: Some Muslims See Jerusalem Conflict As Sign of Approach of End Times

c. 2000 Religion News Service JERUSALEM _ Mitkhal Natur, a noted Muslim scholar, opens a green bound volume of the Koran decorated with delicate borders of gold. Sitting in his tiny office in the shadow of Jerusalem’s ancient Old City and its holy sites revered by Muslims, Christians and Jews, he paraphrases the sacred prophecy […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Mitkhal Natur, a noted Muslim scholar, opens a green bound volume of the Koran decorated with delicate borders of gold. Sitting in his tiny office in the shadow of Jerusalem’s ancient Old City and its holy sites revered by Muslims, Christians and Jews, he paraphrases the sacred prophecy of the apocalypse in a foreboding tone of voice:

“And we gave Moses the book … and we gave it to the children of Israel. … They will make corruption in the world two times, and they will be raised very high. When the second time comes, they will enter the mosque and destroy it.”


Natur isn’t the sort of man who is eager to rush the end of times. An established lawyer in late middle age, who dresses impeccably in suit and tie, he is the author of a number of weighty volumes on Islamic family law, and is involved in local dialogue efforts with religious Christians and Jews.

Still, like many devout Muslims today, Natur can’t ignore the multiplying signs of the final days as they seem to be unfolding before his eyes _ signs which in the popular Palestinian Muslim mind, could even culminate in the Jewish destruction of al Aqsa mosque.

“This messianic expectation is a part of our heritage,” said Natur. “There is a whole Islamic literature of the `signs of the times.’

“That literature describes how Jesus, the son of Mary, will come down and cleanse the world at a time when it is full of sin and when people have strayed far away from their religion. He will defeat the `dajjal,’ or false messiah, who is a monster with just one eye. And he’ll bring Islam to all of the world.

“Today, we have all of the signs that the world is in the last days,” he added. “Those signs tell us that boys of the street will rise to become rulers, ladies will go naked, even if they are wearing clothes. Skyscrapers will be built, and people will behave like animals because they are far away from religion.”

Islamic “end-time” expectations, largely muted in classical Islam, are playing an increasingly significant role in the thinking of Muslims throughout this region, and in the popular Palestinian view of the current revolt against Israel, which has been dubbed the “al Aqsa Uprising.”

The battle takes its name from the 1,300 year-old mosque, revered by Muslims as the place from which the 7th century prophet Mohammed ascended into heaven and by Jews and Christians as the site of the Roman-era Temple Mount.


Jerusalem’s al Aqsa, and not Mecca, is the place where Islamic end-time scenarios are due to be played out, according to the popular interpretation of Koranic verses like the ones cited by Natur. And Jews, who have returned a “second time” to rule here after centuries in exile could be the enemy in the final battle.

Popular Muslim expectations of such a confrontation have been building for years, experts say. They have been inflated by Christian millennialist thinking, Jewish messianism, and even by last summer’s round of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations at Camp David. The negotiations, in Muslim eyes, demeaned the holy site by making it the focus of political bargaining.

“The basic idea is that we are on the cusp of the end. And al Aqsa, the national Palestinian symbol, is also the setting for the apocalypse in the Islamic literature on the end,” said Gershom Gorenberg, a researcher for the Boston-based Center for Millennial Studies and author of a new book on apocalyptic thinking, “The End of Days.”

It was end-times expectations, in part, that helped set the religious stage for the heated Palestinian clashes with Israel that erupted in late September at the mosque following a visit by Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon. Images of religious war continue to fuel the fervor of believers in the current Ramadan month of fasting, in which a martyr’s blood smells “sweeter than perfume,” in the words of Natur, and when the souls of Muslims killed by Israelis ascend directly to God.

Like their Jews and Christians, Muslims, too, await the appearance of a messianic figure, known in Islam as a “mahdi.” In classical Muslim tradition, that mahdi is often associated with Jesus, revered in Islam as a prophet. The mahdi will defeat the false messiah on the cosmic stage of Jerusalem.

In more ways than one, Islamic apocalyptic expectations are like a mirror image of the Christian and Jewish vision of the end. Modern Jewish and Christian messianic activists have aspired to rebuild the Third Jewish Temple, each in fulfillment of different biblical prophecies. Meanwhile, popular Muslim thinking holds that a Jewish desecration or destruction of al Aqsa may also be a preliminary to the apocalypse and the ultimate triumph of Islam.


“The theater of the end is triangular, and in the eyes of apocalyptic believers on all three sides, the great drama has begun,” Gorenberg said. “The sound system is hope and fear; each time an actor speaks, his words reverberate wildly. Three scripts are being performed. The cast of Jewish messianists has starring roles in the Christian play; Jews and Christians alike have parts in the Muslim drama. What one sees as a flourish of rhetoric can be the other’s cue for a battle scene.”

On such a stage, Sharon’s visit to the mosque triggered its violent response. While secular Israelis saw the visit as part of the political power struggle over Jerusalem, intended to highlight historical Jewish attachments to the Temple Mount, the visit resonated for Muslims with apocalyptic meaning.

“When the Palestinian-Israeli conflict began, it was a national conflict,” said Natur. “But recent events have turned it into a religious war.

“We want to live with the Jews. But God doesn’t play games. We can’t give one centimeter of al Aqsa to any other authority. When Jews try to touch the mosque, they are applying dangerous pressure, and bringing the final days nearer. If they leave the mosque out of the conflict, then they are taking the pressure off of the apocalyptic pot.”

Even before Sharon’s fateful appearance at al Aqsa, devout West Bank Palestinians and Arab Israeli citizens, had been rallying around the slogan, “the Mosque is in danger.” Under that banner, thousands of Muslim volunteers had participated in a months-long campaign to excavate and renovate and claim underground portions of the mosque for Islamic believers to the dismay of Israeli archaeologists denied access to the excavations and potential archaeological treasures.

But the real roots of modern day apocalyptic Islamic thinking extend all of the way back to Israel’s 1967 conquest of Jerusalem’s Old City, in which the mosque came directly under non-Muslim rule for the first time in centuries, says Gorenberg.


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At that time, Israel’s chief of staff Moshe Dayan had sought to reassure jittery Muslim leaders. He removed an Israeli flag that had been hung over the sanctuary in the flush of victory, and returned the keys to the mosque to the Islamic Wakf, or trust, which had traditionally safeguarded the site.

Yet two years later, in 1969, the worst Muslim nightmares were nearly realized. A messianic Christian tourist from Australia set fire to the mosque, nearly burning down the sanctuary and touching off Israeli-Palestinian clashes around the West Bank.

In 1990, when a group of Jewish religious extremists sought to ascend to al Aqsa in order to lay a symbolic cornerstone for the third Jewish temple, disturbances broke again.

A 1996 decision by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to complete the excavations on a 3rd century B.C. passageway running underground alongside the Muslim sanctuary touched of yet a new round of clashes, claiming dozens of casualties.

For Israelis, the tunnel excavations were seen as a legitimate exploration of ancient Jewish history in Jerusalem on Jewish turf. Running outside the mosque compound and alongside the western retaining wall of the ancient Herodian-era Temple Mount, the tunnel from the Hasmonean-era of Jewish history exposed underground sections of the famous Western Wall, revered by Jews for centuries.

But Palestinian Muslims, from taxi drivers to college professors, remained convinced that in fact the tunnel had been dug by Israel under the mosque’s foundations in order to destabilize it and cause its collapse.


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Along with the realpolitik of events, a new generation of Islamic apocalpytic writers have fueled end-times expectations, said Gorenberg, anchored not only in classic Islamic sources but also in popular Israeli and Arab newspaper reports. The authors, widely read in Palestinian society, but unknown in the West, include names like the Egyptian Sa’id Ayyub or the Palestinian Faiq Daud, whose book “The Great Events Preceding the Appearance of the Mahdi,” appeared in West Bank bookstores in 1999.

Typically, such authors also borrow themes from traditional Christian anti-Semitic sources, in order to elaborate on end-times Islamic prophecies. The dajjal becomes an overtly Jewish figure, not unlike evangelist Jerry Falwell’s controversial image of the anti-Christ. Conspiracy theories make American Christians and Israeli Jews bedfellows in plots to destroy al Aqsa.

“A central harbinger in the Islamic scenario is the dajjal, a figure adopted into Muslim mythology from anti-Jewish Christian theology,” said Gorenberg. “The focus of the dajjal’s attention is al Aqsa; he wants to build the Jewish Temple at al Aqsa, and the attempt to destroy al Aqsa the preliminary to the end.”

Ultimately, end-time scenarios in Islam, like those in Christianity and Judaism, speak to a deep and genuine human yearning for a divine solution to the problems of an imperfect modern world wracked by corruption, chaos and injustice, Gorenberg said. But the Islamic end-time vision, also like its Jewish or Christian counterpart, cannot grant fellow monotheists any official role in the kingdom to come.

“For many believing Muslims, Islam, which began in Mecca and Medina, will end in Jerusalem. Yet today the city is ruled by Jews, whose faith Islam is expected to supersede,” said Gorenberg. “For many believing Muslims then, Jerusalem’s condition, and the fact that al Aqsa Mosque is under Jewish rule, precisely expresses the distance between the world as it is and the world as it should be _ the gap that the apocalypse is meant to close.”

DEAEND FLETCHER

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