The Death of a Prophet by Shoemaker Stephen J.;

The Death of a Prophet by Shoemaker Stephen J.;

Author:Shoemaker, Stephen J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00


The Holy Land of Divine Promise: The Sanctity of Jerusalem in Formative Islam

One of the most remarkable aspects of Sebeos’s near contemporary account of Islam’s emergence within the late ancient Near East is its indication that the liberation of the biblical Holy Land lay at the heart of Muhammad’s preaching. According to Sebeos, Muhammad exhorted his followers, a group comprised of Jews and Arabs, to rise up and conquer the sacred land that God had promised to them. “Truly, you are now the sons of Abraham, and God is fulfilling the promise to Abraham and his descendants on your behalf. Now love the God of Abraham with a single mind, and go and seize your land, which God gave to your father Abraham, and no one will be able to stand against you in battle, because God is with you.”100 Similar sentiments are expressed much later in the Chronicle of Dionysius of Tellmahre (d. 845), which reports that Muhammad would “extol for them the excellence of the land of Palestine, saying that ‘Because of belief in the one God, such a good and fertile land has been given to them.’ And he would add, ‘If you will listen to me, God will also give you a fine land flowing with milk and honey.’”101

Much more importantly, however, the Qurʾān itself seems to advance the same idea, suggesting that this theme may indeed have formed an important element of Muhammad’s preaching. Sūra 33:27 proclaims that “He made you heirs to their land [أَرْضَهُمْ] (of the ‘people of the Book’) and their dwellings and to a land which you have not yet trodden,” a land that the Qurʾān elsewhere names “the Holy Land” ().102 Sūra 10:13–14 similarly relates: “We destroyed generations before you when they acted oppressively while their apostles brought them proofs, yet they did not Believe. Thus do we repay a guilty people. Then we made you successors in the land [الْأرَْضِ] after them, so we may see how you behave.”103 Likewise, sūra 21:105–6, citing Psalm 37:29, promises, “We wrote in the Psalms, as We did in [earlier] Scripture, ‘My righteous servants will inherit the land [الْأرَْضِ].’ There truly is a message in this for the servants of God!”104 According to these Qurʾānic passages, God has chosen the Believers to inherit the Promised Land, and they were called to liberate it from the rule of the wicked and once again establish righteousness in the sacred lands: indeed, sūra 10:14 rather oddly seems to speak of these events as if they had already occurred. The similarities to Sebeos’s account of Muhammad’s preaching are certainly quite striking, and accordingly one must imagine that the liberation of the Holy Land likely formed a core element of the early Believers’ religious ideology. Al-Ṭabarī’s report that the leaders of the Arab armies justified their invasion of the Near East to their opponents by insisting that the land had been promised to them by God would seem to confirm the presence of this mindset among the early Believers.



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