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Cities & Lands · Land of the prophets · Second of the sanctuaries' story

القدس والأرض المباركة

Al-Quds · The Blessed Land

Promised to Musa's people if they entered striving, opened to this ummah by a caliph on foot.

The whole account

The account

The Qur'an calls its region "the land We blessed for the worlds" (21:71): Ibrahim's destination out of the fire, Maryam's chamber and Zakariya's mihrab, the holy land Musa's generation refused to enter and wandered forty years outside (5:21-26). At its heart stands al-Aqsa, the second mosque placed on earth.

Its role in this ummah's story is a chain of solemn handovers: first qiblah; terminus of the Isra; opened without sack in the caliphate of Umar, who entered leading his camel in turn with his servant and cleaned the neglected rock with his own garment; and named by the Prophet ﷺ among the six signs he told the companions to count: "the conquest of Bayt al-Maqdis" (Bukhari 3176). The end of the story returns here as the beginning did: the era of Isa's justice runs through this land, and the hadith of the fitan calls it the land of the muster. The Codex holds al-Quds the way the tradition does: not as a prize but as an amanah, a trust whose keeping measures the ummah holding it.

The facts

The Qur'an on it

وَنَجَّيْنَاهُ وَلُوطًا إِلَى الْأَرْضِ الَّتِي بَارَكْنَا فِيهَا لِلْعَالَمِينَ

We delivered him and Lut to the land We blessed for the worlds.

Qur'an 21:71

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