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Abrahamic religions

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Response To "Muhammad as Al-Amin (the Trustworthy): How His Enemies Really Viewed Him" And The Christian Missionaries 26

It has become a habit for some to pub­lish respons­es to any paper deal­ing with the issue of Islam, its truth­ful­ness and the false­hood of oth­er reli­gions. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true of the Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies as such peo­ple do not care whether they pro­vide an effi­cient respons­es or not ; all they care about is to respond, regard­less of the out­come. Is this reac­tion an idi­ot­ic one ? Well, we can­not claim that it is a stu­pid strat­e­gy ; because it is always use­ful to show your fol­low­ers that you are able to respond and speak loud­ly, drown­ing oth­er voic­es. The psy­cho­log­i­cal fac­tor is after all always impor­tant here. But what is glar­ing indeed are the con­tent of such respons­es” because the writer tries to show that he is com­pe­tent in the field when in actu­al fact he is total­ly unqualified.

The Position of Jerusalem and al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf in Islam 27

Dur­ing the Mi’raj, the Prophet(P) is report­ed to have received from God the com­mand of five dai­ly prayers (salah) that all Mus­lims must per­form. Upon his return to Mec­ca, the Prophet insti­tut­ed these prayers. It is sig­nif­i­cant to note that he made Jerusalem the direc­tion (al-Qiblah) which Mus­lims must face while doing their prayers (nar­rat­ed by al-Bukhari, 41 and by Mus­lim, 525). Jerusalem is thus called Ula al-Qiblatain (the first qiblah). The Prophet (P) and the ear­ly com­mu­ni­ty of Islam wor­shipped towards the direc­tion of Jerusalem dur­ing their stay in Mec­ca. After the Hijra’ (migra­tion), Mus­lims in Med­i­na also con­tin­ued to pray fac­ing Jerusalem for almost sev­en­teen months until God com­mand­ed the Mus­lims to change their direc­tion of prayer from Jerusalem to Mec­ca (Qur’an 2:142 – 150). These estab­lished facts clear­ly sig­ni­fies the impor­tance of Jerusalem in Islam.