With secret prayers, Jews challenge ‘status quo’ at Jerusalem holy site

As the group of Orthodox Jews came near the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem’s Old City, one began to mumble while staring down at his mobile phone. Another looked up in awe, eyes half shut in concentration. The woman’s lips moved silently.

 

Asked afterwards whether they had prayed, a violation of an 800-year-old ban on non-Muslim worship at the holy site, two of the group said they had done so in their hearts, while the woman declared proudly: “I prayed with my mouth moving.”

 

Monday’s visit to the compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount was low-key by most standards – no fighting broke out, no one was ejected by the police, everyone left calmly and life returned to normal.

 

But in critical ways it cut to the heart of an issue fuelling the worst violence between Palestinians and Israel in years: whether the status quo at the site, also known as the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, is being properly enforced.

 

In a region full of complexity, the Al-Aqsa/Temple Mount status quo occupies a special place. It upholds a rule that has effectively existed since 1187, when Muslim warrior Saladin defeated the Christian crusaders and held on to Jerusalem: non-Muslims may enter the sacred compound, but only Muslims can pray.

 

Before Muslims built the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa mosque in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, two Jewish temples, the second destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, stood at the site, which is both the holiest place in Islam outside Saudi Arabia and the most sacred place in Judaism.

 

After Israel seized the Old City and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war, it agreed to continue the status quo, recognizing the risks of igniting a religious war if anything were changed. It gave Jordan special responsibility for overseeing the Muslim holy sites via the Waqf, an Islamic trust.

 

Read More: With secret prayers, Jews challenge ‘status quo’ at Jerusalem holy site – Yahoo News