Was Jerusalem always an Arab city and the Temple Mount always Muslim?

“Jerusalem has always been an Arab city, and the Temple Mount was always Muslim.”

Jerusalem was the capital of Jewish kingdoms a thousand years before Islam existed. The Temple Mount is the site of the First and Second Temples; the Western Wall is their surviving remnant. Islam arrived in the 7th century CE, and the Dome of the Rock (691) and Al-Aqsa Mosque (705) were built on the existing Jewish holy platform. Jerusalem appears by name over 600 times in the Hebrew Bible and not once in the Quran. Jews lived in the city across the centuries and were already a majority of its population by the mid-19th century, before modern Zionism.

Origin of the claim

The political version of this claim has a specific author and a specific date. Haj Amin al-Husseini, appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921, spent the late 1920s building a movement on the charge that Jews praying at the Western Wall, under strict limits inherited from Ottoman rule, were plotting to seize the Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Temple in its place. The charge was invented. It nonetheless helped trigger the August 1929 riots, in which Arab mobs killed 133 Jews across Mandate Palestine, including 67 in the Hebron massacre, ending nearly a millennium of continuous Jewish presence in that city. Husseini’s framing, that any Jewish claim on the Mount is aggression against a site that has always belonged exclusively to Islam, is the direct ancestor of the slogan repeated today.

The record, before Islam and after

The strongest honest version of the religious claim is real: Jerusalem, called al-Quds, is Islam’s third holiest city. Tradition holds that Muhammad’s Night Journey carried him to “the farthest mosque,” identified by later hadith and tafsir, not by the Quran’s own text, with the Temple Mount. The Dome of the Rock was completed in 691 CE under Caliph Abd al-Malik, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque around 705 CE under his son al-Walid I; the complex has stood as a masterwork of early Islamic architecture for over 1,300 years. Muslim rule of the city, interrupted only by the Crusader kingdom of 1099 to 1187, ran from Caliph Umar’s capture of Jerusalem in 637 CE to the fall of the Ottomans in 1917.

Islam’s claim on Jerusalem is real, but it is not exclusive and it is not first. Jerusalem was already the capital of the united Kingdom of Israel under David around 1000 BCE, a full sixteen centuries before Muhammad’s first revelation in 610 CE. Solomon built the First Temple on the same platform around 957 BCE; Babylon destroyed it in 586 BCE. The Second Temple, built after the return from exile and later expanded by Herod, stood until Rome destroyed it in 70 CE. The Temple Mount itself sits on Herod’s retaining walls, and the Temple Mount Sifting Project has recovered First and Second Temple period seals, coins and floor tiles from fill removed from the Mount, physical confirmation of continuous Jewish use of the site well over a millennium before the mosques were built.

The population record settles the demographic half of the claim. Jerusalem was never a purely Arab city even in the modern era: Ottoman and consular counts already showed a Jewish majority by the 1850s, a majority that held through the British Mandate, decades before the Zionist movement or the State of Israel existed.

When Jordan held the Old City from 1948 to 1967, it treated exclusivity as policy rather than heritage: 58 synagogues in the Jewish Quarter were destroyed or desecrated, the ancient Mount of Olives cemetery was vandalized and its headstones used for paving and latrines, and Jews were barred entirely from the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, a breach of Jordan’s own commitment under Article VIII of the 1949 Armistice Agreement to arrange free access to Jewish holy sites. Since Israel’s reunification of the city in 1967, day-to-day administration of the Temple Mount compound has remained with the Islamic Waqf under a status quo arrangement, the opposite of the erasure the claim projects onto Israel.

Who pushes it today

Husseini’s framing outlived him. Hamas’s founding-era rhetoric and Palestinian Authority statements routinely describe the Temple Mount in language that omits any Jewish history, and Waqf-linked clerics and officials have at times denied the Temples ever stood there at all, a position historians call Temple denial, the local analogue of Holocaust denial in method: assert exclusivity, discount the archaeology, repeat. The claim also surfaces in symbolic international venues, UN and UNESCO resolutions on the Old City that refer to the compound solely by its Muslim name, a framing choice that drew objection even from officials within those same bodies over the omission of the site’s Jewish and Christian history.

The exclusive claim is the false one

Jerusalem is genuinely holy to three faiths and home to Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. Muslims have lived there continuously for well over a thousand years, and the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque are irreplaceable Islamic monuments in their own right, not later additions to be minimized. The false claim is the exclusive one, that the city and the Mount were always and only Arab or Muslim, which erases the Jewish foundations that lie literally beneath the later mosques and ignores the demographic and archaeological record of a city Jews never fully left.