The call of Al-Aqsa Mosque, 55 years ago and after

On 21 August 1969, that is, exactly 55 years ago today, when an Australian-born extremist named Michael Dennis Rohan set fire to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the fire that broke out in the eastern wing of the mosque on the southern side of the mosque burned to ashes everything inside, including Saladin's historic minbar, and also threatened the mosque's ancient dome. The first ummah-wide Muslim reaction against the order that the Zionist occupation, advancing step by step since 1917, when Jerusalem fell into British hands, had established by humiliating the Muslim world was also revived upon this event.

A year after 1917, the end of the World War and the occupation process of the Ottoman State had in any case begun. None of the so-called Muslim states founded in 1918 on the lands the Ottomans abandoned without fighting had a priority called Jerusalem. In essence they did not have a concern called Islam or Muslims either. There was in any case no place for such a concern in their founding genetics. With the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924, there was also no longer any center left that could call them at any time to gather around such a concern.

The formation of a Zionist structure on the lands of Palestine therefore advanced step by step without any international opposition. The Arab reactions displayed over time against the founding of Israel had no function other than feeding a national identity substituted for Islam. Non-state formations that were conscious that the war was not an Arab-Israeli war but one between Muslims and Zionists took their places in the war and nourished the resistance. But the states' concern was something else entirely.

Everyone knows that in Syria, which for years had made anti-Israel stance its official policy, the superiority that gave Israel the possibility of an occupation in the 1967 war stemmed not so much from the Israeli army itself as from Hafez Assad's betrayal. The abandonment of the Golan to Israel during this war without any fighting was merely an interesting repetition of similar intrigues in 1918. After selling the Golan in this way, Hafez Assad's Baath official ideology, which built the whole of its official ideology on weeping for the Golan, is the typical discourse and model of all the regimes founded on Ottoman lands in the First World War.

This official discourse of the Baath regime, which never turned the dramatic official discourse it built over the occupation of the Golan into a motivation or policy of resistance or revolt against Israel, worked only to keep its own people under control. Not only in Syria, but in all similar regimes. That is why the martyr Sayyid Qutb said his famous words: "Do not feel safe against the enemy by looking at the grandeur of our armies. The purpose of these armies is never to fight the enemy or Israel, but only to fight their own peoples."

The Al-Aqsa Mosque fire that took place 55 years ago today, in spite of everything, awakened for the first time in the whole Islamic world, after the abolition of the Caliphate, an ummah front. King Faisal bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, who moved into action upon this attack, convened the Islamic Conference, and thanks to this, exactly 45 years after the abolition of the Caliphate, it became possible for the first time for all Islamic countries to make an issue their concern in their capacity as Muslims.

The unifying power of attacks is a sociological reality. Attacks set group solidarities in motion, awaken and feed common identities. That is why the existence of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque, and their exposure to attack, set in motion, in a way wholly unexpected by the Zionists and the world system, a global Muslim solidarity 45 years ago. But, and unfortunately, from that very day on, all Zionist measures have been mobilized so that such a solidarity would not function, and these have been very effective. So much so that this Islamic World, which moved into action 55 years ago and made itself felt as an actual power, cannot form up with the same strength today in the face of the Muslims subjected to genocide in Gaza.

Truly, despite this unity formed in 1969, after a short while the occupying regime continued recklessly to implement its plans over the Al-Aqsa Mosque. While excavations to find the remains of the Temple beneath it continue, the possibility of the Al-Aqsa Mosque collapsing increases with each passing day. The program being implemented to change the identity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is under the administration of Muslim Palestinians, and to Judaize it, is being carried out step by step thanks to the unresponsiveness or inadequate responses of the whole Muslim world.

In September 2015 the Israeli government tried to impose the principle of "total sharing" by specially allocating Al-Aqsa Mosque to Jews during Jewish holidays. Although Israel withdrew from this decision for a while following the international reactions that came, in July 2017 Netanyahu attempted to secure full control of the occupying regime's security control over Al-Aqsa Mosque through control of cameras and gates, and again withdrew. But recently these two-steps-forward, one-step-back policies, Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and in doing so his simultaneously having some Arab countries take steps toward normalization with Israel, have emboldened Israel even further on this matter. Moreover, now there is not even a bloc of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to object to it.

It does not exist, true, but perhaps precisely where this great occupation, this reckless and uncontrolled aggression has become common knowledge and darkened all hopes, the valiant men of Gaza, with all the prices they have paid with their blood and their lives, have revived all hopes of an alternative world.

Truly, 55 years ago the Zionists shied away from claiming that attack, stressing that the person who carried out the act was mentally ill; 55 years later the world is still full of "bigoted, unbalanced and mindless people" like Trump, Biden, Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir and the other Zionists.

The valiant men of Gaza, in the face of the world order established by these unbalanced ones, carry the glad tidings of Allah's promise.