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What the Koran Says about the Land of Israel


[Jewish Chronicle-UK] Simon Rocker - The foundation text of Islam, the Koran, recognizes the special link between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. Cairo-trained British imam Sheikh Dr. Muhammad Al-Husseini says, "You will find very clearly that the traditional commentators from the eighth and ninth century onwards have uniformly interpreted the Koran to say explicitly that Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel) has been given by God to the Jewish people as a perpetual covenant. There is no Islamic counterclaim to the land anywhere in the traditional corpus of commentary." One classic commentator of the Koran, Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (838-923), describes the verse in the Koran (5:21), "O my people! Enter the Holy Land which God has decreed for you," as "a narrative from God...concerning the saying of Moses...to his community from among the children of Israel and his order to them according to the order of God to him, ordering them to enter the Holy Land." "No fundamentalist, no matter how hard they try, can overrule the existing tradition to say there is, in fact, an Islamic counterclaim to Eretz Yisrael," Dr. Al-Husseini says.
2009-03-27 06:00:00
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