Saying ‘Before Islamic Conquest of Palestine’ Is Like ‘Before The Big Bang’ – Meaningless

by Imam Aswalo Mafissis

Mogadishu, Somalia, May 21 –  Let us dispense once and for all with the wrong-headed notion that Jewish exile and longing for return can in any way trump the Islamic claim to Palestine, because exploring those Zionist lies is tantamount to asking an astrophysicist what happened “before” the Big Bang: just as the entire notion of time and space cannot precede spacetime itself, nothing can be said to exist before Islam. Whatever one might imagine, it remains irrelevant.

My coreligionists and I have grown tired of the sophistry and weak argumentation evil or deluded people use to try to justify the Zionist usurpation of the Islamic land of Palestine, perhaps chief among them the wearisome contention that any sovereign Jewish presence in the land that preceded the advent of Islam fourteen centuries ago has any bearing on the question of who may exert political control over that swath of territory. There was no “preceded the advent of Islam.” The phrase itself is nonsensical. One might as well assert the right to live in, say, Rome, because his ancestors lived there before the Earth coalesced from the sun’s accretion disc. Incoherent rubbish.

What the imperialist propagandists behind the Zionist usurpation of Islamic waqf, and their willing or unwitting apologists, fail to understand, is that their premises of precedence, indigenous status, and “liberation” simply do not apply, either ontologically or even semantically. I can claim I have an inherent right to all the water in the sun, and you’d be perfectly reasonable to consider me a few asteroids short of a belt as a result. But that is the intellectual level of arguments that invoke anything that was “already there” when Islam arrived. It’s an existential impossibility. I urge everyone to ignore such distractions.

We must focus instead on drawing attention to the ongoing injustice and oppression facing our Palestinian brethren, whose identity as “Palestinian” only after Zionists established a state in Palestine. This issue carries a similar dynamic, in that anything referred to as “Palestinian” before the establishment of that state always meant something Jewish, since the use of the term “Palestine” was the preferred choice by outside, colonial powers, not the Muslims who lived there at the time. We must therefore also dismiss examination of “what came before 1948” in our rhetoric, since that leads us to certain… existentially impossible rhetorical situations.

Also, my opinion as a Somali Muslim means more than that of Jews who want to keep living in their ancestral homes.

Please support our work through Patreon.