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Why They Keep Calling Al-Aqsa the Temple Mount | Dr. Omar Suleiman
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Why They Keep Calling Al-Aqsa the Temple Mount | Dr. Omar Suleiman
“Al-Aqsa should be a multi-faith site.” Sounds reasonable, right? That’s the core issue. The phrase was built to sound reasonable.
In this deep dive, Dr. Omar Suleiman shows you what’s really being asked for when someone says it.
You’ll come away understanding what’s actually being proposed, what’s happening on the ground right now, and why Al-Aqsa’s future deserves careful attention. The aim isn’t to tell you what to think. It’s to equip you to engage in these conversations and ask better questions.
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.
00:00Imagine the year is 2030. The takeover of Palestinian land is almost complete. Al-Aqsa is now under full Israeli control, and the compound is now labeled an interfaith space.
00:13The Dome of the Rock still shines. The courtyards are still full. Meanwhile, Muslims pray only when given permission. The call to prayer can be suspended at any time,
00:23and the Friday sermon is provided by Israel's Ministry of Tourism to be read word for word by the Imam. All along, Israeli settlers from Brooklyn or London or wherever create social media content right from the pulpit.
00:37And while those suspicious Muslim visitors are imprisoned, foreign celebrity visitors hold concerts with no respect for the sanctity of the place. Nothing has been demolished. Everything is by definition open.
00:50And yet Al-Aqsa has been lost, all in the name of being shared. Now let's come back to 2026. The entire Al-Aqsa compound spans about 35 acres and is still governed by a status quo arrangement,
01:03which is controlled by the Jordanian Waqf, at least technically. Only technically because certain actors are actively working to remove that control. While almost every mosque in Gaza is bombed by crazed soldiers laughing on camera,
01:17one of Islam's holiest mosques is about to be confiscated in the name of sharing. The equipment is already there. The tunnels are already being dug under the compound. The police loudspeakers installed on three of its gates,
01:31and Muslim worshippers routinely beaten and banned while the settlers' hours and numbers continue to expand. And while this is all happening, some folks in the West are suggesting an interfaith solution.
01:43It sounds simple enough. How many liberals will happily sing the song, what's wrong with an open space in Al-Aqsa, while their conservative counterparts openly try to accelerate Armageddon?
01:54Actually, lies that the Jews and Arabs were enemies and that Al-Aqsa mosque was under attack. Constantly they would say it was under attack. These lies passed down from generation to generation,
02:09fueled a vicious cycle of terror and violence that spread across the region and all over the world. Similar to liberal Zionism and the use of platitudes of peace like the two-state solution
02:20while the occupying state keeps taking more, the effect is one and the same. It places blame on the indigenous population and makes it seem as if it's those violent Muslims once again standing in the way of peace.
02:32It transforms Muslim rights to Al-Aqsa into a movable object, a free-for-all. When in reality, this compound has been internationally recognized and protected as sacred even by Western standards.
02:45The old city and its walls have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981 and on the list of World Heritage in Danger since 1982. So what changed now? I've spent much of my life in interfaith dialogue
03:00and working with religious leaders of different backgrounds to defend places of worship and the rights and dignity of all people. But interfaith in the same sentence as Al-Aqsa has to be understood within a longer historical trajectory.
03:13It has nothing to do with dialogue and everything to do with normalizing settler colonialism dressed up as religious coexistence and interfaith Al-Aqsa is a Trojan horse. And this is how it's played out.
03:27Let's start in Ramadan on February 25th, 1994 at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil. An American-born Israeli settler walks into the morning Fajr prayer
03:36and opens fire on Palestinian worshippers killing 29 civilians and wounding over a hundred. There is blood all over the carpets, blood all over the floor.
03:48The scene is the most horrific scene I've ever seen in my life. In response, an Israeli-appointed commission divides the mosque, roughly 60% to Jewish worshippers and 40% to Muslims.
04:01A cold-blooded premeditated act of mass killing, of terrorism, was effectively rewarded. So on paper, the Ibrahimi Mosque is divided with equal closure days.
04:12But in reality, Israeli military controls have progressively hardened around the mosque. So the mass murderer got a statement of condemnation. The Palestinians got more checkpoints.
04:23And all along we have the endless moments of Israeli soldiers beating worshippers, making violent calls through the microphones meant to call people to prayer, and of course putting it all on social media just like they did with their crimes in Gaza,
04:36Lebanon and everywhere else they seek to occupy. And then in January 2020, the Trump administration unveiled its deal of the century. While Israel laid its final claim to Jerusalem as its eternal undivided capital,
04:51Palestinians are further pushed into pockets behind the separation wall. The deal says that the status quo would continue uninterrupted. But then it also allows people of all faiths to enter the premises.
05:03And this is what the fine print plans. Al-Aqsa, all 35 acres, shrinks down to just one building. Not the compound, not the gold dome of the rock, but the silver-domed Qibli Mosque at the southern end.
05:17This is the only allocated Muslim prayer space. 3% of the compound stays sacred. 97% becomes a plaza. Now note that this is not about visitation hours
05:29or that the occupation suddenly wants everyone to come to Al-Aqsa for tourism. Introducing this rhetoric means more settlers now enter the compound with police protection,
05:39while Palestinian worshippers who pray at the same site are treated as troublemakers and routinely removed by the same Israeli security forces. And we can assume what removal by the IDF looks like and what it often results in.
05:52Skunk water, flash bombs, you name it. The point is that change doesn't always look like a formal declaration. Sometimes it's just selective non-enforcement. Unbelievable, because in the years that I was here in the battle,
06:05if anybody dared to prostrate, we would be immediately arrested. But now the policemen allow them to prostrate here. And then when anyone objects, the new practice is defended as a long-denied religious right.
06:20One group enters under police protection and with ministers of the state. The other enters through checkpoints and only at the discretion of that very same state.
06:39This is not equal access. We have to ask who issues the permits and who can shut its gates at a moment's notice and who builds tunnels beneath it unhindered. And the theft is being written right here in the United States.
06:52In October of 2025, Congresswoman Claudia Tenney introduced House Resolution 852, affirming Israeli sovereignty over the compound, demanding equal access and religious freedom.
07:04In July of 2026, the House adopted her companion amendment as well. My amendment would emphasize the need for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom
07:14to work to ensure religious freedom and equal access for all with respect to the Temple Mount. The title states religious freedom for all on the Temple Mount, not at Aqsa. That same month, Ben-Gavir, Israel's minister of national security,
07:28marched on at Aqsa with his fanatical followers and celebrated what he called the huge progress being made and said settlers were praying and feeling like they're the owners of the place. A month later, they renamed the gates.
07:42Israeli forces removed the signs marking the Damascus Gate, known as Bab al-Amud, the name that Palestinians have used for this entrance for centuries. And they put up new ones in Arabic, English, and Hebrew and called it the Ancient Gate.
07:57It might seem inconsequential, but ethnic cleansing is not just the destruction of a people. It's the destruction of language, culture, faith, and everything sacred to that people.
08:08Every colonial project renames what it takes, erasing the relationship a people has with their own land. And generation by generation, everything is lost.
08:18And then you have this marriage of evil, yet somehow theologically opposed agendas. Zionist Jewish temple activists who claimed Solomon as their own get to now destroy Al-Aqsa so that they can bring about the Third Temple.
08:32And then a significant strand of American evangelicals, including members of the current administration, who hold that Christ's return requires that the temple be rebuilt first, are also pushing for the exact same thing.
08:45And both groups now see a unique window of opportunity. While the occupying state seems to have gotten away with genocide and West Bank settlers take more and more villages with impunity, they know that they need to move fast.
08:57While Israel is more unpopular now than ever before, it still feels like it can do whatever it wants, for now. So before the world learns to check them, they want to take as much as they possibly can.
09:09Because they know, and so do we, that the window of opportunity is getting smaller because the global window on occupation is finally closing in. In 2022, a self-proclaimed Judeo-Christian rancher named Byron Stinson
09:24shipped five red heifers to the Israeli settlement of Shiloh. Because according to Jewish law, the ashes of a flawless red heifer are needed to make people ritually pure, which temple activists see as necessary for restoring temple worship.
09:37As far as we know, the last red heifer who was valid for the mitzvah was 2,000 years ago, when the second temple was standing. Evangelicals love it because it aligns with their goals. But what about Palestinian Christians?
09:50You see, they too are victims of Israel's destruction and obstruction of their religious sites. The bombing of the Church of St. Porphyrius,
09:59one of the oldest churches in the world that ironically was operating just fine in Gaza before the genocide. Or how about the Holy Family Church, which suffered the exact same fate? Or maybe in southern Lebanon, the St. George Melkite Catholic Church?
10:13Or the Church of St. George in Yaron? Or maybe the Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation? All of them were struck by Israeli missiles. And what about the Christians in Bethlehem and Jerusalem,
10:25regularly harassed and barred from their places of worship, just like Muslims are from Al-Aqsa? Israel is denying us, preventing us from going to Jerusalem to pray for the first time in history, to go freely.
10:39If you're lucky, the military gives you a permit every now and then to visit Jerusalem. Now there's a simple way to test the principle that's being proposed. Muslims hold the Al-Buraq wall sacred too. We believe it to be the wall beside which the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
10:53tethered Al-Buraq on the night of his miraculous journey. Now Jewish worshippers know it as the Western Wall, and they pray there every day. So I want you to imagine that a Palestinian government announced this.
11:04Muslim officials will enter the Western Wall prayer plaza under armed protection. At first, a few of them will quietly pray there. Then Muslim ministers will publicly pray there, and announce that they finally feel like they own the place.
11:18Then Muslim prayer hours will gradually expand. Then they'll ask for shared administration. And anyone who objects to this will be accused of standing against religious freedom. You see, no one would call that dialogue.
11:30No one would tell Jewish worshippers that refusing it proves that they're intolerant. They would call it what it is, a takeover with a press release attached to it, colonization. And when someone says Muslims would have done the exact same thing if they possessed Jerusalem,
11:45well, we don't have to speculate about what Muslims might have done, because we already know what they did. When Umar ibn al-Khattab entered Jerusalem around the year 638, he didn't enter as a powerless visitor asking the authorities to accommodate him.
11:59He entered as a ruler. No army could have prevented him from taking any of its churches, or stopped him from praying wherever he pleased. Yet one of the first governing instruments associated with his entry
12:11was an assurance of protection, Al-Ahd Al-Umariyah. The Umariyah Covenant, where the Christians of Jerusalem were granted safety for their lives, for their possessions, for their churches, for their crosses, and for their worship.
12:24Their churches were not to be occupied or destroyed. Their property was not to be seized, and they were not to be compelled in any way with regard to their religion. As for the Jewish community, Umar even went a step further.
12:36You see, under Byzantine Christian rule, Jews had been expelled from Jerusalem. Umar brought back 70 Jewish families and resettled them in the city. Then came the moment at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
12:49The patriarch, Sophronius, invites Umar to pray inside the church, and he refuses. Not because he didn't want to, but because he had foresight. He knew that if he prayed in that church, it was likely that Muslims after him would say,
13:02well, Umar prayed there, so it's ours now. A ruler's prayer on the day of conquest becomes a precedent. So instead, he walks out and prays on the open ground outside, and that land still bears witness to his noble restraint.
13:16So he prayed outside, and this has shaped the relationship between Christians and Muslims for centuries to come. Opposite the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today stands Masjid Umar,
13:28the Mosque of Umar, in the exact same place that he prayed. And then after Umar came Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, who entered Jerusalem after the Crusades and upheld the same spirit of restraint and preservation,
13:40and treated Jerusalem's religious communities with such justice that it's admired by historians and scholars all around. Until today, two Palestinian Muslim families still hold the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
13:53One keeps the key, the other turns it. Every morning before dawn, a Muslim man climbs a wooden ladder and opens the doors of the holiest church in Christianity. And you know what? It stays a church every morning,
14:07and it's been that way for a thousand years. In contrast to this, Israeli police opened the gates at al-Aqsa, and Israeli police closed them. But they decide which Palestinians walk through, and at what age, and whether or not they get to even return home.
14:21And the same government tells the world that the site is open to everyone. So whenever you hear that Muslims should relinquish al-Aqsa and just let it be shared, ask yourself, shared by whose consent?
14:34Administered by whom? Enforced against whom? Who arrives with the police? And why are there even checkpoints? Who writes the rules? And who is responsible for the security of al-Aqsa?
14:46 Who writes the rules? And who gets to shut the gates? So no, we won't fall for this Trojan horse that's dressed in benevolent interfaith language.
14:59Masjid al-Aqsa is not for sale. And we won't sit back and let it be stolen in the name of being shared.
