Muhammad Iqbal Quotes
The Palestine question is very much agitating the minds of the Muslims. We have a very fine opportunity for mass contact for the purposes of the League….This will at once popularize the League and may help the Palestine Arabs. Personally I would not mind going to jail on an issue which affects both Islam and India. The formation of a Western base on the very gates of the East is a menace to both
This is one of the first examples of a Muslim organization “playing the Palestinian card” in the hope of helping itself and second, the Palestinians. Note the explicit concern of a Western “base” which is how they perceived Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine,
Muhammad Iqbal, 1877-1938, Urdu Poet & Politician, President, All India Muslim League Address, All India Muslim League, Allahabad, December 1930
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His is one extremist view of Jerusalem. Most historians agree that both Jews and Arabs have lived in Jerusalem since recorded history. Extremists on both sides of the Arab Israeli debate have constructs which deny the existence of the other group. Sisalem is one. Both the Palestinians and Jews claim Jerusalem as their capital and both have reasonable historical claims, and both have shared the city for thousands of years.
In Christian Europe anti-Semitism was rampant until the end of WWII. Innocent Jews were tortured and massacred. Many Islamic lands were much more tolerant and humane; many Jews not only flocked to them but thrived. Great Jewish Rabbis and philosophers did much creative work in Islamic lands—especially Andalusia which was then a Muslim nation. So many Muslims who deplored the Holocaust were puzzled when the United Nations placed the Jewish Homeland in the Middle East. Why not have Israel in Germany? However the Jews had a kingdom encompassing Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and much else of the Middle East centuries before Arabs ever came to the area and Islam existed. The Jews had conquered; then others did, and then the Ottoman Turks. Everyone with a claim on Palestine has taken it from some other people and then has had it taken from them by others. But there is a type of argument that the historically worst anti-Semites should provide the land for Israel.
The “Mandatory” was Great Britain who received the “Mandate” from the League of Nations to administer Palestine for the purposes set forth, and the methods specified, in this document. This together with {624531} are very important historically for two reasons. First, the San Remo Conference established the responsibility of the British for the Governance of Palestine. Second, it refutes an argument that some people make that the establishment of Israel by the United Nations in 1947 was a sudden act of guilt by the world over the Holocaust, thereby making the Muslim Arabs pay for the sins of the Christian Germans. What these quotations show is that the original mandate to the British by League of Nations, as early as 1920, envisioned the Jews as having a homeland in Palestine and provided specific methodologies and cautions regarding such an establishment. The world’s nations had decided the issue of the Jews in Palestine almost 20 years BEFORE the start of the Holocaust and more than 25 years earlier than the UN Resolution recognizing the nation of Palestine.
Dayan was a strong advocate for co-existence with the Arabs and an understanding of their frustrations and disappointments without bowing to the extremists who wanted to destroy Israel.
an old term for Muslims The Muslims were present in every state if India. Jinnah’s concept of nationhood is very Islamic in that Muslims are united even if they be in different states of nations. He was arguing to reserve some states as Muslim states by designation. 7 years later he would insist on a separate homeland. India was partitioned and Pakistan and Bangladesh resulted but at a fearful cost of tens of millions of lives.
He repudiated all cases in which a Muslim sold land to a non-Muslim, even though in the Holy Land, Christians, Jews and Muslims have been buying and selling land there to each other for centuries. This has been going on from the time of Christ for the Christians and Jews, and the Muslims from the time of the founding of Islam in the 7th Century. Even Caliph Omar, the authority he cited, allowed and recognized sales of land to Christians and Jews and purchases from them. Rantisi and his followers have actually killed Palestinians who have sold land to Jews.
This unanimous resolution was one of the major events that triggered the Israeli reaction to Arab plans and actions. The Arabs, organized a unified military command and had cut off the Water to the Sea of Galilee, and Act of War. The 6 Day War soon ensued. The Arabs, as with each of their wars, ended up with a worse position than before the aggression.
To make matters worse for the Muslims, the tiny foreign entity in their midst—populated by "heathens who do not follow the command of God"—have created a much higher standard of living for their people, improved the land and its productivity in ways that have been far superior to traditional Islamic methods, reclaimed much of the desert that the Muslims could not, and produced a military that has staved off the hostilities of all of Islam, and has done all this without any oil or other natural resources to sell. Israel is a living counter-example to the superiority of Islam and its traditions which is so important to Muslims.
This was an interview with Reuters News Agency in English. Arab leaders often make English Statements to the Western Press which are completely contradictory to what they say to their Arab constituents and followers. In this case he seems to acknowledge that Hamas and he do not deny the right of Israel to exist and accepts that nation per se. Yet at the same time Meshaal has never made this statement in Arabic and has made no gesture to change the Hamas Charter which calls for the destruction and elimination of Israel or to criticize the Hamas other leaders and followers who constantly call for “Death to Israel” and the destruction of the Jewish state. See {585395} for an eloquent statement of the practice of Arab leaders and politicians.
At that time Jews in Palestine were in the minority. The issue of how to obtain the land was hotly debated amongst Jewish groups. Jabotinsky was at one extreme—colonize and take the land just as the Arabs had done to the Jews when there was a Jewish majority. His view did not however prevail. The policy was to buy the land from individual Arabs and Jewish land up to 1948 was obtained that way. In that year the UN partitioned Palestine and 11 Arab armies attacked the new state of Israel and asked the Arab civilians to leave the area so that the Army could cleanse it of Jews. Many did not, and they or their descendants are still on their land or have sold it. The Arabs who left, were suspected of being possible collaborators or terrorists, and they have never been paid for their land or allowed to return. Compensation is still in dispute. At the same time Jews driven out of Arab countries by law and the military have never been compensated or given any right of return either.
Just like Spain and Persia, the Arabs by fighting lost not only more land, but also lost the respect of most of the non-Muslim War. The conscious decision to choose an irrational strategy that would cause loss of life, land and respect has none-the-less repeatedly been chosen by the Arab culture. much to its detriment. Azzam is one of the few Arabs to admit this to the non-Islamic World.
“Disbelievers” are non Muslims. The “Ummah” is the Arabic term for the Muslim Community as a whole. Note that this fundamentalist religious party is not only against the non-Muslim West, but it also opposes most of the leaders of the Muslim countries of the world on the grounds that they are nationalist and do not represent the Ummah of the Muslim world. So ironically, this party is not only opposed by the democracies of the world (Islamic and not) but also the Muslim Dictatorships such as Syria who arrest all members of the party periodically.
Hamas of one of the very few organizations whose very charter was opposed to all forms of diplomacy for the settlement of problems.
The importance of women in the Hamas, fundamentalist vision is to function as a brood mare to “manufacture” men and then to bring them up which at least requires something more than their bodies. The role of women in producing other women however is never mentioned as important.
The recommendation for partition was the basis of the decision of the United Nations in 1949 to partition Palestine.
At the time the Arabs, anticipating an English pullout of Palestine, were engaged in constant acts of terror to drive the Jews out with the British. The Jews however wanted to create a Jewish state within Palestine but had few men and weapons, needing to depend on the British for protection which was spotty at best. Wingate persuaded his superior to allow him to set up and train a Jewish Defense Force which was the origin of the Israeli Army.
He uses the term Palestine to mean the entire area including Israel.
It was signed by over 400 American notables—politicians and clergy, Christian and Jewish. Signers included the Mayors of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, congressmen and editors of most of the leading newspapers of the day. Blackstone’s Memorial predated the Zionist writings of Theodor Herzl by 4 years and Blackstone, thought a Christian, was credited as being the “Father of Zionism” by many of the American Jewish Zionist leaders. See {614859}.
A large part of the Middle East and the now “Arab” states used to be a very large Jewish State. Jews had lived in the Palestinian area and expanded from there, also using conquest as all other nations had and even occasionally, forced conversion, to establish the Jewish State. This was destroyed by the Romans and the Jews have not had a state until 1948 when the UN voted to create Israel.
In the complicated and arcane Middle East, substantial majorities of Israelis and Palestinians both favored a two state solution, thus creating a Palestinian State out of the West Bank and Gaza. However, the Hamas terrorist organization won the majority of seats in the Parliament and formed the “government” of the Palestinian Authority. Hamas opposed Israel’s right to exist at all, as that position as well as virulent Anti-Semitic threats to all Jews in the world. Many called for Hamas to change their charter and crease their opposition to the right of Israel to exist. The President of the Palestinian authority called for new elections but Hamas refused. Thus Blair and other diplomats the world over were in a very difficult situation.
Sir Muhammad Iqbal was a South Asian Muslim writer, philosopher, and politician, whose poetry in the Urdu language is among the greatest of the twentieth century, and whose vision of a cultural and political ideal for the Muslims of British-ruled India was to animate the impulse for Pakistan. He is commonly referred to by the honorific Allama (from Persian علامه ʻallāma, "very knowing, most learned".)