Question about "Muslim Zionism"

Submitted by David (United States), May 27, 2022 at 19:20

The other day, the author posted a comment on Twitter about Muslim visits to the Temple Mount. I was wondering if he might be so kind as to answer a question about that post. The specific post mentioned that some 40,000 Jews had visited the Mount in the last year, alongside 10 million Muslims and a certain number of tourists from abroad, the specific number of which I do not recall. I'm curious what aspect of this was evidence of "Muslim Zionism." Indeed, I do find the specific centrality of the Temple Mount now to Arabs in Israel to be a curiousity. I would dare even say that they are beginning to mirror Jews in a certain sense, perhaps as an ineluctable result both of geography and the fact that their identity is increasingly defined by direct opposition to Israel, and, to paraphrase an old saying, the opposite of love is not hate. The fact that their object of love is the same as that of the Jews does seem to lend itself to the shaping of a new form of identity that is not necessarily Islamic. Although I'm not naive enough to ignore telltale differences between Jewish and Islamic practice, including most notably the fact that Muslims on the mount do worship with their backs away from the Golden Dome, and their heads toward Mecca. Nor do I disregard the invocations of the bloody ancient battles of Kaybar as calls to arms on Ramadan. But I suppose it's not impossible that, should Israel survive for 1000 years and should the Palestinian Arabs be separated from the rest of the Arab world, they might one day adopt some new strange hybrid religion that resembles the Judaism of the past in its symbols and hierarchies of importance.
Is this what the author had in mind when he referred to "Muslim Zionism?" Of course the problem is that the particular phenomenon of Palestinian Arabs visiting the Mount is not in itself compatible with Zionism. They explicitly wish to drive the Jews out, and they continue to think that he Quran will somehow empower them to fulfill this vision.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".