The Palestinian Struggle Through the Prophetic Lens

02 September 2024

Is Palestine a Muslim issue? What is the Islamic response to the Palestinian question? Put differently, “What would the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ do?”

Rarely do we encounter political situations in our lifetime in which the prophetic way is as clear as it is in the case of the Palestinian struggle. Questions of policy are often complex, morally ambiguous, even at times unanswerable, because the moral conundrums we must confront are often very different from the Prophet’s time and context. Not so in this case.

The question of whether the Muslims who take Allah’s Messenger as their role model should seek justice through resistance, or surrender, compromise, and accept the terms of their far more powerful and well-supported oppressor has more than one incontrovertibly normative and religious dimension; and for believing Muslims, on normative questions the Prophet ﷺ is the final authority. This is not to say that non-Muslims, who by definition do not follow the blessed Prophet ﷺ, could not find inspiration, strength, and truth in his model: the values and teachings that God Almighty revealed to him resonate deeply with human nature (fiṭrah), and are universal and accessible to all human beings. Islam is a religion that resonates with those striving for liberation precisely because it doesn’t promote surrender to and acceptance of tyranny as virtue. The Palestinian cause is no exception.

The facts are indisputable. Palestinians live in an apartheid, colonial-settler state, one that has dispossessed them of their land for some seventy years, has forced them to live in dehumanizing conditions that are worse than an open-air prison (unlike Palestinians, inmates are not periodically bombed), persecutes them for their religious affiliation, devastates them economically, seeks to (and yet has failed to) break them psychologically, interminably terrorizes and periodically massacres them as a policy (some of Israel’s politicians speak of killing Palestinians as ‘mowing the grass’).1 The Israeli state strategically backs its right-wing settlers who often make no secret of their genocidal intentions. Access to Islam’s third holiest shrine, Masjid al-Aqsa, is increasingly restricted and effectively denied to most Muslims and Palestinians. The current escalation of Israeli aggression and Palestinian resistance began with the Israeli settlers occupying al-Aqsa, hoping to repeat the Israeli takeover of the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron. 2 Much more could be said about it, but the Israeli public mood is captured today by the recent election of an even more extremist, right-wing government and the state-organized chants of “Death to Arabs” and “Muhammad is dead,” not to mention Israeli support of and inspiration to regimes such as India that have demonstrated genocidal intentions towards Muslims. 3

That Palestine is an especially Islamic issue does not mean it is exclusively so. The target population is overwhelmingly Muslim, but not exclusively so: Israel also targets Palestinian Christians, depriving them of their basic human and religious rights, and its racist elite even discriminate against non-white Jews. 4 Christian Zionism, that is as deeply anti-Semitic as it is hateful of Islam and Muslims, has been crucial to the creation and support of Israel, and continues to feed extremist, messianic fantasies. 5 Nor is this a Muslims-vs-Jews issue: some of the leading advocates of Palestinians’ rights—scholars, historians, and activists—are of Jewish origin. Whereas an Israeli historian has called Israel’s acts “incremental genocide” of the Palestinians, the leaders of Arab-Muslim states have routinely betrayed their Islamic duty to help their brethren and protect one of the three holiest shrines of Islam—not to mention the Palestinians’ Islamic rights—for the sake of their own personal, political, and economic gain. 6

The secular and colonizing roots of the idea that only political, nationalist, or human-rights interpretations of the conflict are acceptable, fertile for broad cooperation, and legible to the civilized world have been exposed in a brilliant essay by Muneeza Rizvi. 7 Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita (who is not Muslim, to the best of our knowledge) has similarly cautiously argued from a critical, decolonial perspective that it is indeed a Muslim issue. 8 What we offer here confirms some of their insightful contentions, but seeks to remind us of some of the profoundly Islamic dimensions of this struggle.

Let us briefly count some of the ways in which Islam and the Palestinian Question are inextricable. For believing Muslims, Palestinian or otherwise, the Israeli occupation of the holy mosque of al-Aqsa and its environs makes it an especially Islamic question, no different in principle than if a colonizer, God forbid, were to occupy Medina, the city of the Prophet ﷺ, murdering and dispossessing its inhabitants and preventing the believers worldwide from making pilgrimage (ziyārah) to it. Regardless of what anyone else in the world thought, it would be the paramount duty of all Muslims to liberate Medina; the Aqsa Mosque is no different. But there is more. Life, human dignity, and freedom from coercion in faith are nowadays universally recognized rights, affirmed in Islam for all of God’s servants. 9 Islam, nevertheless, has a particular way of ordering and securing these rights, especially if those violated are Muslims. The Palestinian issue checks this box. The sacred status of the Aqsa Mosque makes this even more poignant. For instance, accommodation of the five daily prayers and freedom from gratuitous insults against the Blessed Prophet ﷺ are especially Islamic issues. Even though many non-Muslims often support these, striving for these rights for all Muslims is a duty of all Muslims. The Palestinian question checks this box as well. But there is more. Allah declares the land surrounding al-Aqsa to be a blessed one in at least six verses—an honor that belongs to no other land—and in his miraculous prophecies about the end-times, the Beloved Prophet singled out those struggling to defend Masjid al-Aqsa as the last people on earth who will continue to stand for the truth even when others falter. 10 This honor alone would make the defense of “Masjid al-Aqsa and its environs” a sacred religious honor and duty. All these are well-known teachings that are not new to any Muslim who is moderately literate in Islamic tradition.

In this essay, rather than reiterating these teachings, we focus on an even deeper way in which the Palestinian cause is Islamic, though one that is often overlooked. And that is how the Palestinian struggle to protect al-Aqsa deeply resembles the Prophet’s own paradigmatic struggle against the Meccans. This most blessed of struggles was the occasion for a large portion of Qur’anic revelation and has been seen as a model by Muslims for their own struggles throughout history. In other words, few struggles today allow us to better appreciate and intimately experience the moral teachings of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s Sunnah. What makes this appreciation all the more urgent is the misuse of Prophetic teachings by the religious spokesmen of the opportunistic autocrats who are, ironically, proud pawns of the same type of Western elite that see themselves as, and sometimes act as, heirs to the crusaders of yore. 11 What could be a worse fate for those who claim to be Muslim leaders than to sell the third holiest shrine of Islam, the Blessed Mosque of al-Aqsa for a short price, and normalize with an apartheid regime that is actively expanding the occupation in defiance of international law? The normalizers turn the lesson of the sīrah and in particular the blessed Treaty of Ḥudaybīyah on its head, insinuating that they are in fact modeling prophetic behavior by making peace with the enemies of justice. Setting aside the fact that those claiming to be negotiating with the occupiers are not the aggrieved party, but Westoxicated autocrats who have always abused and betrayed the Palestinians at every step, there is a deeper deception at play. That is the obfuscation of the lesson and meaning of the sīrah and the Treaty of Ḥudaybīyah that are stated in the Qur’an and the Sunnah in no unclear terms.

After the Meccans persecuted the Prophet ﷺ and the believers for some thirteen years and drove them out of their homes, the Muslims migrated to Medina, establishing themselves as an independent political force. Where in Mecca they were but a group of individuals at the mercy of the Quraysh, in Medina Allah blessed them with the political agency required to properly counter the oppression they faced and preach their message. In a series of revelations, they were first permitted and then commanded to fight back against the Meccans. What stands out in these verses for our present purpose is how closely the reasons named in these verses resemble those that drive the Palestinian struggle today: persecution, expulsion from homes, usurpation of property, and blocked access to a sacred mosque.

Specifically, the reasons for the Battle of Badr that occurred in the second year of the Prophet Muhammad’s migration to Medina bear an uncanny resemblance to the Palestinian situation today. That encounter on the 17th of Ramadan, 2 AH, in which a small army of three hundred and some Companions with a meager supply of arms and only two horses defeated a far better-supplied Meccan army some three times their number, became a turning point in the story of Islam. And what could be a more Islamic struggle: the Blessed Prophet ﷺ declared that the Companions who participated in it were specifically guaranteed paradise. The reasons for this battle are, fortunately, described at length by Allah Almighty in the verses that address the events leading up to the Battle of Badr. Furthermore, the agreed-upon contextual details allow us to date the divine commentary on the matter and relate it to the precise time period.

Notes

1 See the Washington Post’s May, 14, 2021 article, “With Strikes Targeting Rockets and Tunnels, the Israeli Tactic of ‘Mowing the Grass’ Returns to Gaza,” and a detailed study, Confronting Apartheid: A Personal History of South Africa, Namibia and Palestine (2019) by John Dugard, distinguished South African legal scholar who was appointed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) chairman of a commission of inquiry on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories. A 2016 survey found that half of Israeli Jews endorse ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the public opinion has become more extreme since. See “Nearly Half of Israeli Jews Believe Arabs Should Be ‘Expelled’ from Israel, Survey Finds,” Independent, March 8, 2016.

2 “The Future of Ibrahimi Mosque in Danger,” Daily Sabah, September 6, 2021.

3 “Thousands of Israeli Youth Chant Muhammad Is Dead,” Real News Network, YouTube video, June 5, 2021. “‘Death to Arabs’ What is happening in Palestine right now?,” The Islam Channel, YouTube video, June 16, 2021. Reuters also reported a somewhat sanitized version of the state-supported right-wing march: “Israeli Nationalists March Raises Tensions in Jerusalem,” YouTube video, June 15, 2021. Also: “Why Indian Hindutva Supporters Back Israel on Gaza Bombing: As Israel Faces Criticism for Its Bombing of Gaza, It Has Received Support from India’s Hindutva Supporters,” Aljazeera, May 18, 2021. Achin Vanaik, “How India Has Moved with Israel: A Timetable of Milestone Events,” Wire, May 26, 2021.

4 “Israel’s Relentless War on Christian Palestinians,” Inside Arabia, Jan 24, 2020; Tani Goldstein, “Ethiopian-Israeli Community Has Hit Boiling Point, Leading Activist Says,” Times of Israel, July 8, 2019; Nadine Sayegh, “Racism: In Israel Some Jews Are More Equal Than Others,” TRT World, July 9, 2019.

5 Chrissy Stroop, “America’s Islamophobia Is Forged at the Pulpit: White Evangelicals’ Apocalyptic Fantasies Are Driving U.S. Policy,” Foreign Policy, March 26, 2019.

6 See the courageous works of Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), and Noam Chomsky, “Gaza’s Tormet, Israel’s Crimes, Our Responsibilities” (Z Commentaries, July 12, 2014,) and “Ceasefires in Which Violations Never Cease” (Open Democracy, September 4, 2014), Ilan Pappé, “A Brief History of Israel’s Incremental Genocide” in On Palestine (2015), and Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (2018). Also: Jeremy Bowen, “Five Reasons Why Israel’s Peace Deals with the UAE and Bahrain Matter,” BBC, September 15.

7 Muneeza Rizvi, “Palestine and the Question of Islam”

8 Steven Salaita, “Is Palestine a Muslim Issue?,” June 7, 2021.

9 The rights of God’s servants in Islam are to be distinguished from the Western “universal human rights” discourse, which has a secular origin and checkered, if not hypocritical, record of application. For penetrating analyses of the development and application of this modern concept, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford University Press, 2003), 127-58, and idem., “What do Human Rights Do?: An Anthropological Inquiry,” Theory and Event 4.4 (2000).

10 An excellent summary of these Qur’anic verses and prophetic hadiths is available at: Ammar Al Shukry, “The Glorious Virtues of Masjid al-Aqsa,” Muslim Matters, September 11, 2017.

11 See, for instance, Ola Salem and Hassan Hassan, “Arab Regimes are the World’s Most Powerful Islamophobes: Middle Eastern governments have forged alliances with right-wing groups in the West dedicated to anti-Islam bigotry,” Foreign Policy 3/29/19.

This is the introduction of the article. For the complete essay, see yaqeeninstitute.org