Al-Aqsa

Al-Aqsa is the silver-domed mosque at the southern end of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, built by the Umayyad caliphs in the early 8th century CE and revered in Islam as its third holiest site. It stands on the platform that held the two Jewish Temples for roughly a thousand years before Islam existed. In recent decades a political project has worked to stretch the mosque’s name over the entire 35-acre esplanade, so that “Al-Aqsa” no longer means a building but the whole mountain, and any Jewish or Israeli presence anywhere on it becomes an intrusion “into Al-Aqsa.” In 2022 Wikipedia adopted that redefinition as an article of its own.

What and where it is

The name comes from Quran 17:1, which says God carried Muhammad by night “from the sacred mosque to the farthest mosque,” al-masjid al-aqsa. Jerusalem is not named in the verse or anywhere in the Quran; Islamic tradition identified the “farthest mosque” with Jerusalem, the story elaborated in the accounts of the Night Journey. After the Arab conquest of Jerusalem around 638 CE, the Umayyads built on the great platform: the Dome of the Rock, the golden dome over the exposed bedrock, was completed under the caliph Abd al-Malik in the late 7th century, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque proper, the congregational prayer hall at the platform’s southern edge, was completed under his successors around 705 to 715 CE. Earthquakes destroyed it repeatedly; the standing building is substantially an 11th-century reconstruction. In Muslim usage the wider compound is al-Haram al-Sharif, “the Noble Sanctuary.” The mosque’s rank as Islam’s third holiest site, after Mecca and Medina, is genuine and more than thirteen centuries old.

Before the mosque: a thousand years of the Temple

The platform Al-Aqsa stands on is the Temple Mount. Solomon’s Temple stood there from around the 10th century BCE until the Babylonians destroyed it in 586 BCE; the Second Temple was dedicated in 516 BCE, monumentally expanded by Herod beginning in 19 BCE, and destroyed by Rome in 70 CE. The Western Wall is a Herodian retaining wall of that expansion. The archaeological record is not seriously contested: the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which recovers artifacts from debris the Waqf illegally excavated and dumped in 1999, has catalogued First and Second Temple period finds by the thousands. The claim that no Temple ever stood there, “Temple denial,” is a staple of Palestinian official rhetoric, and the question of whether the Temple Mount was always Muslim has a short answer: it was Jewish sacred ground for over a millennium before the first mosque was built on it.

”Al-Aqsa is in danger”: the libel and its body count

The cry that Jews are about to destroy or seize Al-Aqsa is the single most lethal slogan in the conflict’s history, and it predates the State of Israel by decades. Amin al-Husseini, the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, built his career on it, turning a 1928 dispute over a prayer screen at the Western Wall into a campaign claiming the Jews planned to raze the mosques and rebuild the Temple. In August 1929 that incitement produced Palestine-wide pogroms that killed 133 Jews in a week, including 67 in Hebron, ending a Jewish community that had lived there for centuries. The pattern has repeated ever since. In 1969 an arson attack on the mosque’s medieval pulpit by Denis Michael Rohan, a deranged Australian Christian whom Israeli courts committed as insane, was broadcast across the Muslim world as an Israeli plot. In September 2000 the Second Intifada was branded the “al-Aqsa Intifada,” and Fatah’s suicide-bombing wing named itself the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization since 2002. And Hamas named the 7 October 2023 massacre of some 1,200 people “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”; see who attacked first on October 7. The mosque has stood unharmed under Israeli sovereignty for nearly six decades. The slogan’s death toll keeps rising anyway.

Who actually controls it

From 1948 to 1967 Jordan held the Old City, barred Jews from the Western Wall entirely, and destroyed dozens of synagogues in the Jewish Quarter. When Israel captured the Old City in the Six-Day War on 7 June 1967, it did the opposite of what the libel predicted: defense minister Moshe Dayan handed day-to-day administration of the compound to the Muslim Waqf within days. Under the status quo that has governed ever since, the Waqf runs the mosques, Muslims pray on the Mount, Jews and other non-Muslims may visit at limited hours through one gate but may not pray there, and Israel provides security. The 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty commits Israel to respect Jordan’s special role at the Muslim holy places. It is difficult to name another sovereign in history that captured its own faith’s holiest site and immediately entrusted it to the rival religion; the record of the arrangement is that the mosque has been more secure, and Muslim worship more continuous, under Israel than under most of its previous rulers.

The name that swallowed the mountain

Calling the whole compound “Al-Aqsa” is not a neutral synonym; it is the political claim, promoted by the Waqf, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority alike, that all 35 acres are a mosque, that Jews at the site are therefore inside a mosque, and that the Temple Mount, the name carrying three thousand years of Jewish history, does not exist. Wire-service headlines that “Israeli forces storm Al-Aqsa” almost always describe police entering the open plaza, frequently after rioters stockpiled stones and fireworks inside the prayer hall; readers picture soldiers in the sanctuary itself. When Wikipedia built a dedicated article enshrining the compound-wide definition in 2022, it converted one side’s naming campaign into the encyclopedia’s own structure. The full audit documents the pattern.

The fear’s real fuel, and why the libel still stands convicted

The strongest version of the fear is that it isn’t invented from nothing: a fringe Temple movement in Israel does advocate rebuilding the Temple, some Israeli politicians have demonstratively visited the Mount or called for changing the status quo, and Ramadan-season police raids inside the prayer hall, whatever provoked them, are genuinely inflammatory.

None of that supports the “Al-Aqsa is in danger” charge that has fueled a century of killing. Al-Aqsa’s sanctity in Islam is real, ancient and profound, and Muslim attachment to it needs no propaganda to explain, which is exactly why the propaganda has worked for a hundred years on people who never checked. The mosque has stood physically unharmed under Israeli sovereignty for nearly six decades, administered day to day by the Muslim Waqf under an arrangement Israel itself set up within days of capturing the Old City in 1967. A fringe movement’s advocacy and a handful of provocative visits are not evidence of a plan to destroy the mosque; they are the fuel a century-old incitement campaign, run first by the Grand Mufti and now by Hamas, keeps feeding into a still-standing building to justify more killing.

Temple Mount · Al-Aqsa Mosque (glossary) · Was Jerusalem always an Arab city? · The status quo at the holy places · Jerusalem · Wikipedia & the conflict

Sources

The live Wikipedia article, for comparison