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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Qods Day celebrations continue: Jerusalem prayers

Here is a list of all Muslim prayers that mention Jerusalem:







Once again, there are none.

As far as Jewish prayers that mention Jerusalem, here are a small sample:

3 times a day: "And to Jerusalem, Your city, may You return in compassion and may You rest within it, as You have spoken. May you rebuild it soon in our days as an eternal structure, and may you speedily establish the throne of David upon it. Blessed are You, Builder of Jerusalem."

After every meal: "Rebuild Jerusalem, the holy city, soon in our days. Blessed are You, Who rebuilds Jerusalem in His mercy, Amen."

At the end of the Passover Seder and at the end of Yom Kippur prayers: "Next year in Jerusalem!"

So now we have seen that there is no mention of Jerusalem in Islamic numismatics, art, poetry, and prayer that predate Zionism. The Muslim claim that Jerusalem is holy seems not to be evident from how Muslims have treated it throughout the centuries. The relatively recent innovation of Qods Day appears to have been created for purely political purposes, because Muslims, historically, have ignored the Holy City.

Qods Day has been moved up to this Friday, so I don't have the time I wanted to research Jerusalem being mentioned or ignored in Islamic folksongs or literature and compare them to Jewish mentions of Jerusalem throughout the centuries. I'm pretty sure that we would see the exact same results that we've seen so far. (We already know that Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran, as opposed to the hundreds of times it is mentioned in the Jewish Bible.)

So I want to once again thank Iran for giving me this opportunity to celebrate the city that is holy to Jews as well as Christians, and has been treated like garbage by Islam through most of its history.