I have written a bunch of articles on this theme about journey to Jerusalem by now. Sometimes I think that Jerusalem is the center of gravity of our world. There is a strange mystique about this town. And there is something about this place that has intrigued human generations over the millennia. Wars have been fought over it. And I don’t know how much more will be lost before something gained about it. Anyhow, my argument has always been that Jerusalem, and the country that surrounds it, belongs equally to Jews, Muslims and Christians. In saying that I don’t take end-times prophecies into account, as when the time comes, Christ will reclaim the country for himself. My argument is that till the time (Jesus) Christ comes back, the job of us ordinary human beings should not be to turn every prophecy into a self-fulfilling prophecy. And if we have to live peacefully, we have to behave and embrace plurality. I like to say this to anybody who belongs to one of these Abrahamic religions. People who do not belong to one of these religions, Jerusalem is not dear for them and they should not worry about associating it with it as such.
Every religion has its epistemology and that of Islam is quite profound. Nonetheless, when early Muslims seized Jerusalem and its country from the Roman empire, they peacefully and respectably settled Jews and Christians about it. This is not only cool, it is also a yardstick about how to come to terms with the future of the country in terms of Muslims. This is to say that Muslims should make room for this idea in their psyche that this is a shared country. Other parties, who will not embrace this idea of plurality, shall do this to their own peril.
Speaking of epistemology, Islam, like all other religions, purports itself to be the one true religion of God. This is backed by strong epistemology to an extent that when newly converted Muslims from Western countries convert to Islam, and when they look at the glorious history of the religion, they rationalize the many conquest Muslim conquerors have been making around the Eurasian landmass in the medieval times. This is fine. But my purpose in writing this post is that those conquests sometimes did have nefarious motives. Actually a long list of conquests can be made in which one can argue that they were all nefarious. So, the belief or impression that Muslims were conquering the world to spread Islam is not true.
For instance, in 712 AD Walid Bin Abdul Malik sent an army to conquer India. When I was child, I was sold this story that there was an Arab cargo ship that was sailing between Sri Lanka and Arab lands, and was looted by pirates near what is Karachi now. Deebal was the name of the port back in the day. Walid, as the commander of the faithful, sent an army to Sindh to fight with the local king, Raja Daahir. This is absolutely the wrong version of the story as it is also not mentioned like this in Chachnaama; a chronicle of the history of SIndh from the times Muslims started invading it.
The truth, as it is written in Chachnaama and elsewhere, is that the daughter of Imam Ali (RA), Ruqayya-bint-e-Ali (RA) had fled to India while trying to escape from the persecution of the blood-thirsty Banu Umayya. Walid (the Umayyad caliph) had asked through a letter to Raja Daahir to return her to his men or else be prepared for an invasion. The brave Raja stood his ground and did not return. Upon this he was invaded. This happened in 712 AD. This is the same year in which he sent an army to Spain and conquered it. Muslims ruled over there for 700 years and Spanish people still hate us. So much so that we lament the loss of our lost glory even though Spain belonged to Spanish people in the first place. There is no mention in the Quran or the Hadith about Spain, let alone its conquest. And Walid had no legal mandate to conquer Spain. He was an illegitimate ruler whose grip on the driving seat of Islam had crystalized due to three generations of his family’s machinations against the family and companions of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). This is a well known fact in Islamic history. Both Shia and Sunnis know this, and this is largely the cause of their rifts too. So why don’t they speak up against it. By the way, this was the same year that Walid the moron conquered central Asia, all in the name of Islam. He was a debauch who would amass the wealth coming from these territories to build palaces for himself and his kin in Damascus and elsewhere where his relatives were. Back in the day, many companions of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) were against the extravagant lifestyle of Ummayad’s as this is what Islam is not about. Moreover, with that stolen money he made the dome of the rock in 712 AD. So you see that this year in human history is almost like the year 1492, but in which many wrongs were done. I argued in a previous article that dome of the rock is misplaced and shouldn’t have been built on the site of the temple of Solomon (although I also argue that since it is there now, other faiths should kindly respect it as a gesture of good will).
So why do I write about all of this? I am a fifteenth generation Muslim myself. My own ancestors were proud Hindus. But as an intelligent species that humans are, it is our job to come to the truth. Early Muslims were not necessarily expansionist. Agreed that they clashed with the Roman and the Persian empires. But these clashes were foretold, for one thing, and were with largely agnostic empires, for the other. The result of these clashes were that liberation followed for Christians and Jews. They could live freely in the country of Jerusalem. But Hazrat Umar (RA), who seized all of the Middle East from the Roman empire, did not expand further north of Syria, although he could have done that. SImilarly, Iman ALi (RA) had this law that Muslim soldiers could not buy lands in foreign countries that they served in. His argument was that the land belonged to the local people. And that Muslim soldiers should just do their job (i.e. maintain law and order) and the get the hell out of the country when their tenure is finished. This is what makes Islam a charming enterprise and not the possibility of conquests.
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Journey to Jerusalem: From Indus or Nile by Psyops Prime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.