I don’t fully understand this. Jewish people lived in that region long before Islam was even invented. How could Muslims now claim that it has some sort of indispensable significance to their belief system? It is a region that already had a people and holds significance to others. Isn’t this just manufacturing an artificial claim?
Jewish people lived in that region long before Islam was even invented.
As did other dominant groups before and after them. In any case the Jewish population's size and influence peaked after a major catastrophe (the Bar Kokhba revolt) some 500 years before the first wave of Islamization even reached the region.
Isn’t this just manufacturing an artificial claim?
What they did was no different from the inevitable self-imprinting both religious movements and settler groups do in places the get traction in - they started to believe in a part-mythical, part factual "origin story" of how they got there and assumed dominance, and that was that. In essence no more "artificial" from the imprinting of any other group that attains dominance in a region over time (including that of the Jews in the area, many centuries previously).
Islam's telling to itself seems to go about like this:
By way of context: (1) it took a long time for this to happen (specifically in two waves about 550 years apart), and (2) even by the first wave, the Jewish community had already been vastly diminished (in part by expulsion, in part by assimilation as the other commenter notes), and the region had already been long since Christianized.
So there was no major Jewish imprinting to dismantle or oppose by then - or even make reference to, by then. If anything (with Christianity's imprint melting away before them) the region probably started to appear as a tabula rasa to them, in short enough order.
From the very beginning, Islam positioned itself as a successor to Judaism and Christianity - it is unsurprising that even early Islam classified as a holy city the city which both of its predecessors (from its own perspective) viewed as the holiest city on Earth. As a non-Muslim I don’t believe that Muhammad was a genuine prophet, but I doubt he was a conscious fraud either - I think he genuinely believed his revelations were from God, even if they actually arose somehow from his unconscious mind. He came out of a community of Arabs (the Hanifs) who were attracted to monotheism and dissatisfied with the traditional Arab polytheist religion, but who at the same time viewed both Judaism and Christianity as too “foreign”-they viewed Judaism’s religious laws as overly onerous, and as an ethnic religion, conversion to Judaism involved effectively giving up their pre-existing Arabic ethnic identity for a new Jewish one; Christianity was the state religion of their external Byzantine enemy, plus its Trinitarianism seemed too close to the polytheism they’d rejected. Coming out of this milieu, Muhammad was familiar with the idea of Jerusalem as a holy city from both of those religions, so he essentially “split the difference”: proposed Mecca and Medina as holy cities of his own, while simultaneously inheriting the idea of Jerusalem as holy from those two earlier monotheistic religions which he positioned his own as a replacement for. And to reiterate, even if this was his unconscious logic, consciously he was just doing and saying whatever God told him to.
Also, it wasn’t just Jewish people who lived in what is now the territory of Israel in ancient times - it always had a significant population of polytheists (Canaanite, Phoenician, etc), plus two thousand years ago the Samaritans were a massive community of military significance, not the tiny minority they are today. Most of its non-Jewish population converted to Christianity - along with a significant chunk of its Jewish population. And then when Islam came along, the majority of its Christian population converted to Islam (a slow process over many centuries). Arguably, Palestinians are just as much descendants of its ancient population as Jews are, indeed, Palestinians are likely in part descended from Jewish converts to Christianity and Islam.
