BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY: FANATICS, FANTASY, AND ...

... fairy tails - what do they have in common? The rewriting of bilical history through psuedo-claims by Muslim psuedo-intellects with psuedo-theories.

A few years ago, an article appeared on the Web site of the northern branch of Israel's Islamic Movement by the Egyptian archaeologist Abed al-Rahim Rihan Barakat, the director of antiquities in the Dahab area of Sinai. Barakat wrote, "The legend about the Jewish temple is the greatest historic crime of forgery." [CRIB emphasis]

Barakat went on to explain that David and Solomon had small houses of prayer and had no connection to a temple. He is not alone. A Saudi Arabian historian named Mohammed Hassen Sharab alleges that the Temple of Solomon was built on the site on which the Tower of David now stands. A fatwa on the Web site of the Muslim religious trust (Waqf) in Jerusalem contends that Solomon and Herod did not build the Temple, but only renovated an earlier structure, dating to the time of Adam.

Another claim, made by the Palestinian Authority mufti for Jerusalem, Ikrama Sabri, is that the Temple has been built three times, and that Herod built the third construction. Following this line of logic, the Third Temple has already been destroyed, and therefore the Jewish traditions regarding its future reconstruction are groundless. According to another Muslim version, which has found favor in the past few years, the Temple of the Jews was in Yemen, of all places.

The historian Dr. Yitzhak Reiter, who is now publishing a book entitled "From Jerusalem to Mecca and Back - the Muslim Rallying Around Jerusalem," has been collating for years thousands of publications, religious legal rulings, statements and pronouncements of Muslim clergymen, historians, public figures and statesmen on the subject of Jerusalem. His book draws in great detail a portrait of the great Muslim denial, a denial of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and to the Temple. This argument has strengthened in intensity since the Six-Day War.

These are transparent efforts by well-educated Muslim liars, whose only aim is to rewrite history in such a way as to credit Islam with every innovation and to discredit Israel as an illegitimate entity having no true history of its own.

For instance, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which according to modern research was built approximately 1,400 years ago, is now being described as a mosque that was built at the time of the world's creation, during the days of Adam, or of Abraham.

Another example ...

Abdus-Salam al-Abbadi, a former Jordanian minister of Muslim trusts, has invoked these traditions. So has Sheik Ikrama Sabri, who cited these traditions in a legal ruling he wrote a few years ago, in which he attributed the construction of the Holy Mosque in Mecca and of the Al-Aqsa compound to Adam, and the renewed construction of the Kaaba to Abraham and the renewed construction of Al-Aqsa to Solomon.

The Saudi historian Mohammed Hassen Sharab has also written that Al-Aqsa was built by Adam, and another Saudi historian claims that Al-Aqsa Mosque existed even before Jesus and Moses. Another tradition, which is quoted by some present-day Muslim writers, attributes the construction of Al-Aqsa to Abraham. This tradition contends that Abraham built Al-Aqsa 40 years after he built the Kaaba together with his son Ishmael.

It seems bizarre to need to do this in light of 6,000 years of human history but it is.

Reiter reveals hundreds and thousands of legal rulings, publications and sources that demonstrate the extent to which the denial of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and to the holy places has grown in the Muslim world.

Various Islamic sources are now trying to refute the Jewish conception of Jerusalem's centrality in Judaism, and deny the existence of the Temple in Jerusalem, and contend that the Western Wall is not an authentic remnant of the outer retaining wall of the Temple compound, but rather the western wall of the Al-Aqsa compound, the place that Muslims now identify with Al-Buraq, the Prophet Mohammed's wondrous beast of burden, which according to legend was tethered by the prophet to the wall.

The article is well worth the trip to read in toto, it is a real eye-opener.

Biblical archaeology; History; Islam; Israel; Jerusalem; Jewish history; Muslims; Temple