Al-Aqsa Mosque.. the jewel in the crown of Islamic architecture targeted by the Israeli occupation

The crisis inside the Temple Mount, which covers an area of ​​144 acres and includes the Al-Qibli Mosque and the Dome of the Rock and all its chapels, buildings, squares and walls, is not only a religious crisis, but also a political crisis that has been exacerbated since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem in 1967.

After the dawn prayer on the second Friday of Ramadan, which coincided with the beginning of the Jewish Passover holiday, which falls in mid-April, the Israeli occupation forces returned again and turned the squares of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque into a theater of operations in which they suppressed and arrested worshipers.

And the occupation forces shot the young men holed up inside the Al-Qibli prayer hall after destroying its unique glass windows, which are called "Qamariyat" in Islamic architecture. To produce a single window, one of those brutally destroyed by the occupation, the craftsman needs to work with great skill and infinite precision for about 6 months.

Before Israel resorted to direct, blatant, public destruction, last year it prevented all restoration and maintenance work in Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as the entry of all necessary materials for this, in an attempt to place Al-Aqsa Mosque and its historical religious monuments under the swords of time and natural factors to come upon it and destroy it.

Dora the crown of Islamic architecture

Although it was one of the main pillars of the Isra and Mi’raj incident, Jerusalem remained a small city that did not affect the course of Islamic history until it was conquered by the Muslims in 637. In conjunction with his visit to Jerusalem to receive its keys from the city’s patriarch Sophronius, Omar Ibn Al-Khattab launched the journey of Islamic urbanization in the Holy City Through his modest construction of the Omari Mosque (Al-Aqsa Mosque).

In the wake of the damage of the wood canopy on the supervising rock on the southeast side of the Temple Mount due to natural factors, the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik bin Marwan ordered the allocation of the Kharaj of Egypt - the richest state of the Islamic state at the time - for the construction of the Dome of the Rock mosque in 66 AH / 685 AD, and it was completed in 72 AH/691AD, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque was rebuilt, and it was one of the most prominent features of Islamic architecture in the Umayyad era.

Over the course of Islamic history, which is close to 15 centuries old, the mosques of Jerusalem and its monuments have witnessed unparalleled attention from all successive Islamic controversies. Whereas architecture in Damascus expresses the Umayyad era and in Baghdad the Abbasid era, the Fatimid and Mamluk in Egypt and the Ottoman in Turkey, Islamic architecture in Jerusalem expresses all those historical eras, making Jerusalem and its maximum jewel the crown of the unique and unique Islamic architecture.

Occupation and its destructive attempts

The crisis inside the Temple Mount, which covers an area of ​​144 acres and includes the Al-Qibli Mosque and the Dome of the Rock and all its chapels, buildings, squares and walls, is not only a religious crisis, but also a political crisis that has been exacerbated since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem in 1967.

In addition to the continuous and fierce occupation attempts through which it seeks to Judaize Jerusalem, erase the Arab and Islamic identity of the city, and impose its full control under the name of sovereignty, which it began to sing after the previous US administration recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, fierce Israeli attempts appear to impose the temporal and spatial division scheme on the mosque.

In addition, the occupation seeks to withdraw the Jordanian guardianship of Al-Aqsa Mosque by restricting the Al-Aqsa Mosque Reconstruction Committee and preventing it from carrying out its work for 4 consecutive days last year. For the first time since the occupation of Jerusalem, in 2019, the Israeli municipality usurped the restoration work of the southwestern wall of Al-Aqsa, while the police usurped the authority to restore the "Jumblatt Retreat" it occupies in the Dome of the Rock in May of the same year.

History of Israeli violations

Since its occupation on June 10, 1967, Al-Aqsa Mosque has been subjected to a long series of Israeli violations. Here are the highlights in chronological order:

1- In August 1969, Australian Zionist Denis Rohn set fire to Al-Qibli Mosque, one of the chapels of Al-Aqsa Mosque. At that time, the fire destroyed the pulpit of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, the mihrab of Zakaria and Omar Mosque, and damaged 3 of the corridors of the mosque and the roof of its eastern side.

2- The eighties witnessed many settler groups blowing up Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, or carrying out massacres in them. While the attempt to blow up the Dome of the Rock in 1982 failed, a Jewish extremist succeeded in storming the prayer hall and shooting those present, killing two Palestinians.

3- In the 1990s, Jewish settlers tried to lay the foundation stone for the construction of the Third Temple inside the mosque, which was the cause of what was known as the Al-Aqsa massacres: the first that killed 21 Palestinians in 1990, and the second that resulted in the death of 63 Palestinians in 1996, in defense of Al-Aqsa.

4- In the year 2000, the spark of the second Palestinian intifada erupted from the heart of Al-Aqsa Mosque, when Ariel Sharon, who was at the time the head of the opposition in the Knesset, representing the Likud party, stormed it.

5- The year 2010 is considered “the most dangerous juncture towards the Jews starting to build huge Jewish monuments in the vicinity of Al-Aqsa”, as it witnessed the opening of the “Khrab Synagogue”, which is the largest synagogue in the Old City and is only a few meters away from the mosque. In addition to the intensification of the settlers' storming of the mosque projects that have been going on since 1967, and which have witnessed a remarkable escalation in recent years.

6- According to the 2016 report by Al-Quds International Foundation, the number of excavations in the vicinity of Al-Aqsa Mosque reached 63, distributed on the four sides in the vicinity of Al-Aqsa.