The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Palestine

In contemporary Arab nationalist and Islamist discourse, the term “Palestine” (filasṭīn) refers to an area delimited by the former British Mandate of Palestine (1923–48). This same territory more or less incorporates the modern state of Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Filasṭīn first entered the Islamic politico-geographic lexicon following the Arab Muslim conquest of former Byzantine areas during the 630s. Adapting the Roman designation, Palestina Prima, the new rulers declared as jund filasṭīn (Military District of Palestine) an area situated between the Jordan River in the east and the Mediterranean coast to the west, Mount Carmel to the north, and Gaza to the south.

The significance of filasṭīn exceeded its administrative function. Muslims, generally, came to associate the region with Jerusalem, known in Arabic and Islamic texts as madīnat bayt al-maqdis, “City of the Holy Sanctuary.” In contemporary Palestinian spoken Arabic, this designation reduces simply to al-Quds, “The Holy” (i.e., the Holy City). Asserting the Muslim attachment, Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705) initiated the construction of the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the platform that had once supported the Jewish temple. Jerusalem’s importance declined after the Umayyad collapse in 750. Not until the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 would filasṭīn again become central to Muslim political imagination. The massive expansion of faḍā’il bayt al-maqdis (the excellences of Jerusalem) literature—a type of propaganda meant to encourage Muslims to take up the jihad against the foreign invaders—played a significant role in this revival.

In the modern period, Palestine served as an important symbol and rallying point of the Arab nationalist and Islamist causes. During the 1930s and 1940s, Palestinian leaders such as al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni (1895–1974), mufti of Jerusalem and head of the Supreme Muslim Council and Arab Higher Committee, made Palestine a central issue in Muslim anticolonial consciousness globally by sending delegations to raise funds and solicit political support as far away as India. Husayni also actively courted the backing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, a group founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928. Banna sent activists to organize chapters throughout Palestine. He also preached in Egypt on the threat of Zionism and the necessity of reviving the jihad to prevent the loss of Palestine to the Jews. Palestine, he declared, was an Islamic waqf (inalienable patrimony), and its defense was essential to the revitalization of the Islamic umma (community of all Muslims).

Whereas Banna’s perspective was Islamic, secular Arab and Palestinian nationalists saw the defense of Palestine as a matter of preserving Arab rights, sovereignty, and honor in the face of European and American imperialism. Although the Islamic cultural heritage was a critical component of their historical consciousness, the secular nationalists, particularly the main factions comprising the Palestinian Liberation Organization, tended to construe Palestine not as primarily Islamic but as a “holy land” in which diverse religious groups—Muslims, Christians, Jews, Samaritans, and others—historically coexisted. Against the exclusive ethno-nationalist vision of Zionism, or the religiously exclusive idea of an Islamic state, the Palestinian secular-nationalists proposed a multisectarian democratic state.

By contrast, the Palestinian Islamist movements that emerged in the aftermath of the 1967 war—groups such as Shaykh Ahmad Yasin’s (1937–2004) Islamic Collective (al-Mujamma‘ al-Islami, founded in 1973)—resisted the secular-nationalist dilution of Islam to a mere heritage shared by others, reasserting instead Banna’s emphasis on the priority of the Islamic religious claim. In the 1980s, new groups like the Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) radicalized this perspective by asserting that the road to the umma’s revival lay in jihad to retake Jerusalem.

International jihadist groups also made Palestine a rallying cause. The leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, declared in 2003, for example, that Palestine and Afghanistan constituted the most important arenas for jihad, since in both areas Muslims had the chance to weaken America and its staunchest ally, “the Jews.” Significantly, Palestinian Islamist groups such as Hamas resisted cooperation with al-Qaeda. Although Hamas invoked transnational Islamic solidarity, its policies and practices focused almost exclusively on combating the Israeli occupation and liberating Palestinian territory rather than on a global struggle against the United States.