While it has become a mainstay of Muslim anti-Israel propaganda to deny the historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and the very existence of the two Temples there, an obscure Arabic inscription serves as a reminder that it was not always thus, as Ilan Ben Zion writes:
The previously overlooked dedicatory inscription from the mosque of Umar in Nuba, a village some sixteen miles southwest of Jerusalem, mentions the village as an endowment for the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque. But what’s striking is that the Dome of the Rock is referred to in the text as “the rock of the Bayt al-Maqdis”—literally, “the Holy Temple”—a verbatim translation of the Hebrew term for the Jerusalem Temple that early Muslims employed to refer to Jerusalem as a whole and to the gold-domed shrine in particular. . . .
Israeli researchers, who presented their findings during a conference on Jerusalem archaeology last week, dated it to the 9th or 10th centuries CE, based on the Arabic writing’s orthography and formulation comparable to dedicatory inscriptions from mosques in Ramleh and Bani Naim. . . .
Further, medieval Muslim traditions surrounding the Dome of the Rock cited by the authors “identified the mount again and again with King David and with King Solomon’s Temple” and “understood the mount to be the ancient Temple rebuilt, the Quran the true faith, and the Muslims the true children of Israel.”
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/centuries-before-trying-to-deny-it-muslims-carved-jewish-link-to-jerusalem-into-mosque/