Why Do Muslims Care About Palestine?

An answer for our fellow Americans

I’ve found myself asked this a lot these days. Most Muslims, and that includes most American Muslims like me, aren’t Palestinian, Arab, or even Middle Eastern. So why do we care so much about Palestine? What follows is an answer in three parts.

Of course, for those Muslims who are Palestinian, and for anyone who is Palestinian, I cannot imagine what this conflict must feel like. But even for those who aren’t Palestinian, and that’s the vast majority of Muslims, this conflict captures our attention like no other. Part of that is doubtless the sheer mercilessness of this war, one of the most disproportionately brutal conflicts in recent history.

For months, we’ve watched our brothers and sisters bombarded. In Ramadan, we’re watching them literally starved to death. What’s happening matters. As human beings. As part of a faith tradition whose spiritual family is under attack. But where it’s happening matters, too, and is part of the answer that unfortunately isn’t often shared in ways that manage to capture the intimacy and intensity of that connection.

Sometimes when you read primers on Islam, you get lines like “Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam,” which is the kind of thing you’d expect from someone who hasn’t lived in or with a faith. When someone says maghrib is the prayer we perform at sundown, that’s true, but only in the most rudimentary way. That description hardly captures the magic of connecting to God as the light disappears from the sky.

A day ends, a day begins, and we are reminded of the Architect of these rhythms and our place in them. Just like putting Jerusalem on a listicle barely conveys what Jerusalem means. I’ve often found it far more effective to share a story. This one takes us to Arabia in 619, just nine years after Muhammad became a Prophet, may God’s peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his companions.¹   

The year 619 feels like the lowest point in his mission, when the blessed Prophet (S) and his small band of followers have been exiled to an open-air prison outside Mecca, wasting away under brutal sanctions. In short order, Muhammad loses his protective uncle, Abu Talib, who’d always looked out for him, and then his beloved wife, Khadijah, the first to believe in him, the love of his life, his rock and anchor.

Now get this part. When the first Muslim dies, when the beloved of God’s beloved dies because of the persecution of the religion God asked him to preach, God brings Muhammad (S) to visit heaven in consolation and love. But God brings him by way of Jerusalem. So, yes, Jerusalem is our third holiest city and the first (and last) direction of Muslim prayer. But so much more than that. So much more than that.

It’s the city God took His beloved to when he was caught in a year of sorrow.

Photo Credit: Al Jazeera (Screenshot).

In what’s called the night journey and the ascent, Muhammad (S) met his Prophetic predecessors at the Noble Sanctuary in (what’s now occupied) Jerusalem. These tens of thousands of blessed Prophets, spiritual siblings, pray side-by-side. Among them are many names Americans recognize: Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Kings David and Solomon, Zechariah, John the Baptist and Jesus.

And many of these are connected to Palestine or called the holy land home. What’s more, these Prophets, peace be upon them all, aren’t just steppingstones to the Prophet Muhammad, like a prologue nobody really reads. Rather each was an exemplary Muslim and their apostles and flocks were too, differing in particulars, but dedicated to the same primordial theology, the foundational and intended faith of all humanity, a unitarian monotheism that reaches back before the Garden of Eden.

That’s why the Qur’an commands believers to proclaim

We believe in God and what has been revealed to us and what has been revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and their descendants and what was given to Moses and Jesus and what was given to the Prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them and we are in submission to Him. (2:136)

I’ll get back to the “exemplary” part soon, but not before we spend a little more time with this incredible and intense connection.

The Prophets Abraham and Ishmael built the Ka’aba in Mecca, paired with a mosque (temple) in Jerusalem. As long as Ishmael’s descendants maintained monotheism, Isaac’s descendants even came annually to Mecca as pilgrims, too. Every year, millions of modern Muslims land in Saudi Arabia in a deliberate repeat of this sacred struggle, their numbers swollen by the Kingdom’s wealth, new technologies of transportation and coordination, and rising middle classes.

Just as many yearn to visit Jerusalem, too, and would, if not for the occupation: The Prophet Muhammad even commanded the upkeep of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque.

So here’s the second part of it.

From Gaza, where Muhammad’s great-grandfather is buried, to Hebron and beyond, the entire land is considered blessed, now and forever. Some Muslim scholars further consider Mary a Prophet, peace be upon her, but all Muslims revere her as among the most virtuous of all people. Her miraculous, fatherless, fully human son, Jesus, is Islam’s Messiah, the word and spirit of God, peace be upon him, scheduled to return to confront the Anti-Christ in what is now Israel, south of Tel Aviv, save humanity, and live out the rest of his life.

Some add that he’s meant to be buried next to the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. The evidence for that seems weak, but that the opinion can even be circulated and taken seriously tells you a lot about how intensely we are connected to this place. After all, a thoughtful listener would get why it matters intensely to so many Muslims that one-ton bombs are being dropped on a land God has referenced and revered across the generations and chosen repeatedly for revelation.

But then I realized that that still doesn’t capture the feelings we have right now. They go down further. They feel viscerally personal, intimate and painful. The answer will resonate with readers of this Substack, which is after all aimed at parents and educators. But it should also resonate with Americans, for our identity is, in so many ways, a chosen one (or should be). I can explain the answer through a much more recent story—my own.

My parents arrived in this country about fifty years ago. I’m hardly linearly or genetically connected to America in a crude, blood-and-soil kind of way. Lots of Americans, arguably, don’t have roots that go back that far. But even then, we feel connected to America, past, present, and future. When I last visited the Lincoln Memorial, I was moved. When I walked by the White House, I was inspired. And indignant. But never indifferent.

What happened in a past I wasn’t literally connected to nevertheless feels intimately part of my present—and, most importantly, my future.

And if you understand that, you’ll understand what comes next.

It’s a commonplace in the Muslim tradition that everyone has responsibilities and rights. Trees. Cats. People. Old folks, young folks. Men, women. Among the many rights children have over their parents is a good name. Imam Omar Suleiman is a really influential American Muslim scholar (and of Palestinian origin). Every year, I believe, he releases a YouTube series; this year’s is called Why Me.

In an early episode, he talks about what naming kids means. And he compared it to praying, which had never occurred to me before, but now seems brilliantly self-evident and self-evidently beautiful. By naming our kids, we’re asking God to help our kids grow into the virtues of those we name them after.

The Imam’s first name is the name of the second Caliph, an Arab. His last name is the Arabic version of a Hebrew name, Schlomo, or Solomon, as in the Prophet-King Solomon, peace be upon him. But step away, to a Pakistani Punjabi family like mine, which has no immediate connection to the holy land or its Semitic peoples.

My first name is the Arabic version of Aaron, as in Moses’ brother. It’s not lost on me that Moses asked for Aaron to join him in his mission to Pharaoh because his brother was a good communicator. It’s the Arabic version of a Hebrew name. My brother is named after a venerable follower of the Prophet Muhammad, of course an Arab, but we’re not Arab, nobody speaks Hebrew, and as kids, we were raised in New England.

In my family, we’ve got kids named after Mary, Jesus, David, and Moses, and their siblings include Muhammads and followers of Muhammad, peace be upon him, and you know people by the names they give their kids, because those names say who we are, what we revere, what we hope for in the future, and even what and who the future is supposed to look like.

And that’s the point.

Conversations about Islam have improved a lot over recent years, but even then, they’re often incomplete. So we hear that Islam is a branch of the Abrahamic tree, for example, but less that Muslims don’t see Islam as a new religion so much as a primordial truth that recurs throughout history, that is as relevant now as it was in 619, and in 619 as it was in 2000 BC, and back to the first man and first woman.

And I think that’s a big part of the answer. I’m hardly arguing that our spiritual bond with Palestine, and with Mecca and Medina, creates a political right. That would be ludicrous: Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants who have suffered for refusing to accept displacement and destruction. But that spiritual bond reveals a truth that connects history—and geography.

Just as Islam recurs throughout history, Islam repeats itself across geography, and all kinds of people, from Cincinnati to Sialkot, have embraced this faith, made it their own, down to the names they give their kids, and that sense of ownership, and connection, and investment, and aspiration means many things. Among these is that come what may, wherever we come from, we’re never going to look away.

1. The Arabic for which is summarized by the letter “S.”