How should one go to Jerusalem?

Let us repeat our last question: Is the real lesson to be drawn from visits to Jerusalem to return to history, to relive the historical experience today or to live always in history, to carry the burdens of history into the present?

While we are at it, let us also ask this: How possible is it to go to history? And does history speak in the same way to everyone who turns to it? If history speaks in some way, does everyone hear the same voice? Does the one who goes to history really take what he hears from there, or does he make it say what he wants to hear?

According to the implication contained in all these questions, history is not a very safe field. Whatever a person's intention is, whatever his direction and his struggle, he continues it in history too, finds it there or thinks he has found it. No one looks at the events taking place today in the same way, so let us not wait for a verse from history that will produce this commonality.

And yet we said that Jerusalem is a mirror that reflects not only the state of the world we live in but also history. The historical layers and rows, stacked on top of one another or lined up side by side in Jerusalem, give you at once an experience in which history is lived simultaneously. There is no doubt that this is a unique experience that you could not have anywhere else in the world. But experiencing it, being in Jerusalem, does not necessarily enlighten a person in the same way.

The one who goes to history takes along all the burden he carries from today. The one who turns to history takes, in every fight, the side that suits him, whichever side he has taken in whatever fight in today's world.

Jerusalem is a magnificent stage of history on which no event of history has ended definitively, which repeats itself to everyone who looks. There, everything is, in effect, as if written in an open book. For the one who wants to take a lesson, it is possible to see and live firsthand there what Allah tells us in all the books He sent. But it is just as possible to distort the real message of that stage of history, as if distorting Allah's book. Allah's sign does not open every person's eyes in the same way. Some it leads further astray.

Rejecting the message brought by the prophets, instead of opening one's ears wide to listen to it and follow it, is not always the worst or the most dangerous thing. Worse is to appear to receive that message and then make it one's own property, monopolize this property and keep people away from it. Allah's message, His mercy and compassion are for all people. All the prophets who passed through Jerusalem struggled for this. Yet the reason Jerusalem itself is today a subject of conflict is the aggressive, usurping, occupying attitude of those who want to make it their private property, together with all the values it contains, against those who want to listen to it and do what it requires.

The Zionist occupation, which wants to appropriate Allah's mercy and blessing by being jealous of other people, claims to rebuild the temple Prophet Solomon built. By its nature, a temple is a place where Allah is worshipped. Allah never wants people to be oppressed, but for the sake of building this temple, millions of people are oppressed every day. The holiest temple is the human heart. In and around Jerusalem, the Zionist occupiers, in order to build this stone temple, demolish millions of temples every day in the most savage manner.

The arrogant, crude aggression, without the slightest respect for humanity, that they have been carrying out for 70 years is the most striking manifestation of how even Allah can be turned into a property. Zionism is to regard it as a right to oppress all of Allah's other servants, going beyond even the claim to be "Allah's most favored servants" to the ambition of being "His only favored servants." Perhaps the only mentality that should be kept away from Jerusalem is the one that holds Jerusalem under occupation today. All of humanity is living through the consequences of this occupation in the heaviest way.

Israel is a going back. That is, it is reaction itself. Its obstinacy in shaking the stones of the whole world out of place, with the claim of putting every stone in Jerusalem back as it was, is a reactionism that lies in ambush for life, tampers with human nature, and sows nothing but spite, hatred, division and conflict in the world.

Those who want to see the cost of this reactionism to humanity should go and look at the areas of Jerusalem that Israel holds under occupation. Let them look at what it has done to the city of al-Khalil, the heritage of humanity where the tombs of Prophet Abraham, his wife Sarah, his son Isaac and his wife, and Prophet Joseph are located. In 1994, after a Zionist terrorist, a medical doctor, entered the mosque during Friday prayer and strafed the congregation at prayer with automatic weapons, causing the deaths of 29 people and the wounding of more than a hundred, Israel, instead of punishing the aggressor of Zionist terrorism, used the incident as a pretext to occupy the mosque and the entire neighborhood in which it stands, turning it into an open-air prison where the residents can reach their own homes by passing through several checkpoints. What you call a checkpoint consists of the turnstiles used when entering the most heavily guarded prisons and the insolent, humiliating, arbitrary treatment of the Zionist officials stationed there. The aim is to wear this people down so that they give up and leave. It is impossible to experience this scene and not curse Israel, and through it contemporary civilization. For it is this so-called contemporary civilization itself that gives opportunity to this inhuman treatment and harbors it.

One should of course go to Jerusalem as a living stage of history, but one should go the right way. Not like the Zionists. Acknowledging that, just like history, it holds lessons for us today... Not carrying hatred and spite toward history for today, but on the contrary, knowing that Allah has enveloped all humanity with His mercy and compassion, not withholding Him from anyone, intending to serve humanity truly, one should come away from there.

Look at the irony of it: the Almighty Allah has bestowed His Glorious Name not on those who jealously guard Him from other people and consider themselves chosen by Him, but on the very people whom they belittle by calling them "ummi" (unlettered).

And that this should of course not become an occasion for arrogance for Muslims is a lesson He has shown precisely through examples from the conditions of the Children of Israel.