Returning to the First Qibla
A love letter to Jerusalem: what I learned about the future of humanity being in the ghost town holy city during the barbaric assault on Iran and the unending genocide in Gaza.
O Jerusalem,
O beauty wrapped in mourning.
O Jerusalem, city scented with prophets,
O shortest path between earth and sky,
Where the Prophet once passed.
O Jerusalem,
O city of sorrows,
Who will save the Gospel?
Who will save the Qur’an?
Who will save humanity?
- Nizar Qabbani
“The idea, in 1841, of a Mohammedan (that is, a Muslim) quarter of Jerusalem is bizarre. It's like a Catholic quarter of Rome. A Hindu quarter of Delhi. Nobody living there would conceive of the city in such a way. At that time, and for centuries before and decades after, Jerusalem was, if the term means anything at all, a Muslim city.” - Matthew Teller, “Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City”
There is a well-known Arabic poem by the 9th century poet Abu Tammām who, on first love, famously said, “Let your heart go wherever it wishes in passion, true love is only for the first beloved.”
Whenever I come across these lines (overused by the perpetually lovesick, melancholic types if you ask me), I think of Bayt al-Maqdis, Jerusalem, the first qibla of Islam.
But what does it mean to be the first center of devotion? Does the later changing of the Muslim qibla to Mecca mean that Jerusalem becomes any less important? What if, to remedy our vision in this time of compounded jahiliyya and pervasive darkness, we returned—in devotion, direction and moral compass—to first principles, to the first qibla—as Abu Tammām’s poem evokes, as a primordial light, as an ancient love that guides, as the ultimate compass that aims towards an eternal meaning no other consequent love could replace?
I visited Islam’s “first love” on the day the Jewish state offensively and cruelly attacked the Islamic Republic.
Under missiles and sirens, I experienced the mournful soul of a qibla under siege.
The normally bustling city was eerily empty, save for a few native Palestinian ammos, store owners and taxi drivers who sat defiantly in the face of their occupiers in full military gear, as they smoked cigarettes and drank tea on the ancient steps of the ghost city. Ahl al-Quds are known for their signature Jerusalemite stoicism: a general jaded, blasé’ and blunt—but kind—attitude, undoubtedly accentuated and wearied by generations of living under Zionist oppression.
Half a dozen Ashkenazi-looking police in tight-fitting uniforms, sunglasses and M16s stood smugly, preventing everyone entry to the Old City, (except for Jewish people, of course). Although forcible closures to al-Aqsa were common, Jerusalemites say this decision to shut down the entirety of the Old City is drastic, even for Israel, as it was previously done in recent memory during the Covid-19 pandemic and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
At the time of writing this post, the forcible closure lasted a dramatic 12 days.
At the time of writing this, the genocide in Gaza is ongoing at 633 days, with over 84,000 people killed—one sacred soul too many—and millions forcibly displaced, starved, tortured in the largest, most documented concentration camp in history.
At the time of writing this, it has been 107 years, 5 months and 29 days since the Balfour Declaration was signed, which gave greedy British zealots illegal license to sell Palestine as a part of a mere real estate grab.
At the time of writing this post, it will soon be almost 1500 years since the bearer of the final revelation to humanity was born. The honest one. The trustworthy one. The continuously-praised one ﷺ.
How many Muharrams has it been since the beloved grandson of the Prophet, Al-Hussain, was murdered by those high-and-mighty corrupt ones, greedy for power and control? 1344 years or so? How many Karbalas have been committed against the human spirit since then? How many a thousand blood-soaked Ashura mornings in the crimson skies of Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq?
Being in Palestine during a time of war accentuated the fragmenting aims of the occupation. After all, a war has been occurring every single day for about a century now—the endless war for the soul of Palestine. The war to restore justice and light in the bleeding, bereaved land. Every household in the West Bank, Jerusalem, inside the 1948 borders—and most critically, Gaza—has been facing ethnic cleansing in a myriad of ways: apartheid walls, checkpoints, racist policies and now, in its most menacing zenith, 630+ days of forced famine, bullets, bombs, skeletal remains, decaying babies, dismembered limbs, slow death and mass graves.
Though it was not my first time in Palestine, the occupation is monstrous when you confront it face-to-face. No amount of books read can replace being on the ground under occupation and experiencing it yourself, even if only for a few days. The occupation is deeply inhumane. It refracts and feeds off of ghettoization, extraction and control. It regulates movement, names, houses, life, death and even breath. They are so creative with all shades of repression, it can only strike you as deeply unnatural, as supremely cold-hearted and mechanical. It is the archetypal cancerous nation state on steroids. It provides different designations to different Palestinians, but to them, they are all one and the same: vermin, Aravim, “death to the Aravim,” they chant in the streets of Jerusalem. Every Palestinian living under occupation faces the Jewish state’s machinery of extermination on a daily basis.
But the occupation is also afraid. Very afraid. It hides behind its expensive military gear, and fights a defenseless refugee population in diaper-filled cowardice: behind tanks, in air-conditioned control rooms and in fighter jets. But just like a house cat that thinks it is a lion, its sense of power is delusional. It is clearly over-playing its hand. Along with the US, it offensively orchestrated bloody wars from Iraq and Iran for the past two decades—leaving millions dead in its wake: the sinister “Clean Break” plan to “take out seven [Muslim] countries in five years, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran” is now firmly under way.
Like the arrogant, arbitrary colonial lines drawn in the past, they think they can “redraw the region” through the law of the jungle—not ethics, not rights nor laws—but ruthless brute power at any cost. Seeing and walking in the streets of the ethnostate firsthand, I could smell the arrogant vestiges of British colonialism everywhere, but I also saw the unmistakable, age-old welcoming Muslim character of the city that cannot possibly be erased. Though its legacy is that of a nuclear superpower and a foreign colonial outpost that has done everything in its power to wipe out Palestine and redraw and “transcend the Middle East,” instead of exuding might and power, it seemed to me cowering, weak, meek and afraid.
At the first sign of trouble, thousands of colonizers and settlers went underground to hide in shelters. Billions of American tax dollars spent in the way of defense systems and “iron domes.” Yet how fickle is their calculus, thinking that military power can outweigh spiritual power. It is truly delusional. It made me feel sad for normalizers with Zionism and Arab rulers, who are oh so afraid of this small, temporary, egomaniacal entity.
Its exterior is a mirage: while world leaders today cannot see past its material and technological strength, those who see with the light of God see it as nothing but ash, as heaps of bones, and as an aberration of the holy. They see nothing but a dark magic trick. The occupation’s inflated sense of self recalls this Qur’anic verse: “the parable of those who take protectors other than God is that of a spider spinning a shelter. And the flimsiest of all shelters is certainly that of a spider, if only they knew.” (Qur’an 29:41)
Seeing the streets of the holy city eerily empty was a pronounced, bitter confirmation that Jerusalem—that humanity itself—is under siege. Today, the Holy is held hostage by supremacists who think of Muslims as amalek and see the native inhabitants of the land, Palestinians, as cattle, worthy of being exterminated.
If Jerusalem represents the human soul—if it represents the eternal spatial symbol for the primordial covenant of humanity with the Divine—then being in an empty, afraid Jerusalem reminded me of our collective heart: it too is empty and afraid, strangulated, gasping for breath. For freedom. For dignity. For justice.
In Arabic, the word “al-Quds” translates to “the holy one.” Al-Quds seeps holiness from every orifice, step, stone and rock. It is said that there is not a single inch on its hallowed grounds that a Prophet, saint, or messenger did not step on. Even its rocks weep, heavy with sorrow and oppression.
But what is “holiness” and what makes a place “holy”? Isn’t it a caricature of religion and spirituality to call a place “the holy land,” while less than 72 km away, the people of Gaza are being starved and slaughtered? What’s so “holy” about endless, maniacal blood shed, a genocide suspended in a seemingly perpetual stalemate? What is so sacred about so much senseless suffering?
Would Jerusalem still be holy, if the spirit of God, ‘Isā (Jesus), was not brought to it as a prodigal child, if it weren’t the place he preached to the poor or if it weren’t where he was believed to crucified at the end of his life? If his Blessed Mother Mary did not perfume its earth and prayer niches with her reverent devotion and singular reliance on God to drown out the verbal abuse of her naysayers? Would it still be holy if it wasn’t made the portal to the heaven by a bereaved messenger? The bridge to God through an orphaned and widowed prophet? The site where the Beloved One, Muhammad ﷺ journeyed from Mecca to the Sacred Compound, where he led all the prophets in prayer and ascended to converse with the angels and with God, leaving behind his tormentors in his beloved Mecca, where he was being hunted and persecuted by the Quraysh?
The truth is, a place is only made “holy” to a degree commensurate with the intensity of human faith and nobility in the face of suffering. Think of Gaza and the faith of its people. It is made holy by the righteous insistence of brave, lonely, warriors of light and the roaring, trembling chambers of a resistor’s heart. It is made holy through a grieving mother’s salty, hot tears of sorrow which stain the pure clothes of her beloved son, a resplendent shahid, as the yearning for his presence engulfs her in the middle of the night in her cold, tattered tent.
A place is made holy through the fire and brimstone that irons its residents’ insides. Jerusalem is holy because the humans who dwelled in it embodied the spirit of God in both haunting, painfully human—and Divine—ways: after all, the mi'raj, the heavenly ascension, came not in a time of estatic euphoria, but after the Prophet’s “year of grief, ” after he suffered blow after blow, and the bitter incident at Taif where he was pelleted with stones and dejection. The mi’raj came as an elixir of sweet rebirth after drowning in a seemingly endless sea of poisonous sorrow.
That is holiness. That is what it means to be Prophetic. This is the bittersweet beauty of the human experience in which the Divine dwells.
Holiness is to resist the demonic arrogance of supremacy. It is to quash the tyranny of Pharaoh. It is to kiss the locks of the bloodied hair of Al-Hussain and all the shuhada before and after him. It is to cry into the abyss of darkness over the destruction of the earth, the trees, the schools and the homes. It is to drink from the salty sea and make ablution with ashy rain water. It is to drown in tears only to be rescued from the belly of the whale unexpectedly. It is to hold close—in reverent awe—the blessed holy spirits of the wounded, the destitute, the orphaned and the martyred.
Holiness is to curse the merchants of death and despair and the maniacal monsters that break the backs of good men, destroy loving homes, steal childhoods and starve babies.
The Holy spirit—ruh al-quddus—isn’t “moderate” in the face of tyranny. It doesn't act “nice” with tyrants. It does not “obey” religious rulers who are more afraid of creation than they are of the Creator. Holiness does not bend to the sinister will of powerful “peacemakers” who only sow mischief in the land (Baqarah: 11). The Holy Spirit roars. The Holy Spirit fights back darkness with light. It is so imbibed in Divine love, it becomes a fearless tsunami with a tide so powerful, that it drowns both idols and demons in its wake.
Jerusalem carries herself like a “sitti”, like a wrinkly, beautiful Palestinian grandmother who was has witnessed the ongoing nakba of her people for far too long. Her eyes are lined with the kohl of sadness from witnessing far too many children gunned down and the torching down of her childhood grove’s favorite millennia-old olive tree.
Al-Quds exudes an air similar to its native residents: sorrowful due to relentless, compounded repression, but tethered to the throne of God, undeterred. You can almost hear its walls and hills heaving, sobbing, crushed by the river of blood, coursing through its hills from the Crusades to today’s Karbala, Gaza, a mere 70km away.
You can almost feel its ancient minarets and church bells calling out for the soul of humanity to be revived. To awaken. Crushed by the weight of its occupiers’ tyranny, supremacy and hubris, the mosques and domes cry out: “What is the matter with you, that you profess to speak in the name of God, while you have turned this land of prophets and saints into a graveyard of precious, beloved children?” Looking out from the Mount of Olives, it as though I could almost hear the hallowed hills speak: “how many of you fickle tyrants afflicted with the disease of aggrandizing self-worship tried to claim me and hold me siege over the centuries? Joke is on you, idolatrous fools. You can neither defy nor speak in the name of God. You will never crush the spirit of the True Holy, the Prophets, the wretched, the mystics, the weak, the poor and the subjugated. I was once a graveyard for the tyrannical likes of you—the Crusaders and their ilk— and I always will be.”
In Al-Quds, if you close your eyes, you can almost see the river of blood coursing through the historic Via Dolorosa, Latin for 'Sorrowful Way', the iconic street in the Old City of which is traditionally held to be the path Jesus walked on the way to his final persecution. You can almost behold the sacred, crucified body of Sidra Hassounah hanging on its ancient walls. You can almost smell the bloody stench of the courtyard of al-Aqsa and the Holy Sepulcher, gushing with the blood of thousands of Palestinian children and bags of body parts and flour.
To herald their doomsday “temple”, they have been working to weaken the infrastructure of al-Aqsa by excavating illegal tunnels under it for years while settlers storm the Muslim compound to provoke and harass the worshippers. They make no qualms about planning for its destruction to pave way for their twisted prophecy, and yet, mind-bogglingly enough, you will find Abraham Accords aligned Muslim scholars who readily offer them the Aqsa on a silver platter and say, “there is quite a bit of space on the Temple Mount,” and it is the fault of “extremists” who do not want to “share.” With scholars like these…
You see, every accusation is a confession. While they call them “terrorists” for fighting for their land, the tunnels of Gaza were dug to weaken the real “terror tunnels” under the city of Jerusalem. But the utter depravity and madness of our time is such that you will find Arabs and Muslims who are for hastening the destruction of al-Aqsa and denigrate any form of resistance that seeks to protect dear life and the sacred sites by calling their positions shari’a-compliant “peace-seeking.” This is nothing but dajallic, anti-christic rhetoric, so run from it as you would run from a lion, as the traditional scholars say.
Returning to the First Qibla
When it was the direction of prayer for Muslims in the early phases of the public call to the final revelation, the Prophet Muhammad was mocked by the Jews of Medina for praying towards what they saw as their qibla, Jerusalem, while not following their creed: “my qibla, my creed,” evoking the Iblisian cry, “I am better than him.” The base, human possessive desire to own a qibla for one anointed group is in itself an absurdity, because the fundamental idea behind a direction of prayer is to turn to face God alone, who resides in neither east nor west.
Possessiveness is antithetical to the spirit of prayer because prayer is in itself an act of surrender: when Moses was told by God to “take off your sandals, for you are in the sacred valley,” (Qur’an, 20: 12) he was being commanded to check his ego at the door: to strip himself out of any pompous, righteous, indignant sense of self. To walk barefoot away from dogma and attachments. To lay bear and light before the altar of the Sacred, feeling the weight of its grounding rooting.
But when Jerusalem was the Muslim qibla, the Bani Isra’il of Medina would not “take off their sandals” and would refuse that call to come “barefoot”, to humble themselves before this “Arab” Prophet of God, even though they came to Medina to seek him, as he was prophesied to them in their scriptures. Instead, they mocked him out of a possessive attachment to their qibla. “It is ours, not yours,” they tease, like a toddler fighting over a toy. As if God can be taken or owned.
Because of this hardened, stubborn position—and to mitigate strife for the Prophet and reduce tensions between the two religious communities—the qibla was thus changed by Divine command, based on the following revelation:
“We see you O Prophet turning your face towards heaven (in distress). Now We will make you turn towards a direction of prayer that will please you. So turn your face towards the Sacred Mosque in Mecca—wherever you are, turn your faces towards it.” (Qur’an, 2:144)
The Qur’an says that even this move to change the qibla to Mecca was mocked: “The foolish among the people will ask, “Why did they turn away from the direction of prayer they used to face?” Say, O Prophet, “The east and west belong only to God. He guides whoever He wills to the Straight Path” (Qur’an, 2:142)
Thus, a return to the first qibla, Jerusalem, is a uniting reorientation to the Divine. It is a call for both the Bani Isra’il, who historically regard Jerusalem as their holiest space, and the Bani Ismai’l, whose father, Abraham, built the Ka’ba, to “walk barefoot” and leave their sandals of tribalism, supremacy, racism and God complex behind.
Today, both these sacred qiblas are occupied. Mecca is under occupation by those who deform Islam by turning into empty rituals devoid of ethics and meaning in the name of worldly and tribal interests, and Jerusalem is occupied by supremacists who cannot see that God only “chooses” the righteous and the just, and that He does not choose any people based on tribe or creed. “Save for those who comes to God with a sound heart." (Qur’an 26:89)
The call to return to the first love, so to speak, is a call to first principles. What does it mean to be human? To be holy? It is a call to return to the heart of humanity, where God himself dwells: “Neither My Heavens nor My Earth contain Me, but the heart of My believing servant contains Me.” To return in metaphysical orientation to the first qibla is not a rejection of the command to pray to Mecca, “the first house of God,” rather, it represents an ascension to leave the illusory world of forms behind. It is a call to rise and universalize the Prophetic call to all of humanity: based not on a Bani Isra’il-like tribal exclusion, nor an Arab Ismaili chauvinism, but rather, a reintegration of the qiblayatan for all of humanity. The uniting power of the two qiblas—two parts of a whole—represents the primordial covenant of a return to Oneness.
Today, the racist refusal to accept the Prophet Muhammad’s call to all of humanity continues. It is still characterized by that same, age-old mockery he faced in Medina, only today, it is done by Zionists and Christian Neo-Cons. They too mock the first qibla of Islam and desecrate it with the endless bloodshed of the gentle Cana’anite inheritors of Moses and David. But working towards spiritually and politically liberating and uniting qiblayatan can act as a shield of light and quash efforts such as the sinister “Abrahamic Shield”, a godless future for the entire Middle East designed by neo-pagan satanists, who desecrate the name of Abraham in the name of abornmalization and ethno-supremacist repression.
To fight this godless vision for humanity, let us all “return” to Jerusalem—the holy of holies— to heed its yearning call to prayer—an adhaan—for true surrender. To restore its role as a portal between humanity and Divinity and as a transcendental phenomena perpetually fighting and resisting injustice with the light of the Sacred.
So consider this is your call to ascend to Jerusalem too, to leave your sandals at the door and turn your heart to face the first qibla, orienting yourself to the Just, the Avenger who dwells in East nor West. Reintegrate the qiblayatan first in your heart, and move in the world fully whole. Become a walking Qur’an, a walking qibla. Do not fear dwelling in the holy darkness—however long the night and however tedious the fight—for it is through the womb of suffering that a light will come to eviscerate the idols and monsters of our time.
We will return to a free Jerusalem inshAllah, the first love, and the last.
۞ لَّيْسَ ٱلْبِرَّ أَن تُوَلُّوا۟ وُجُوهَكُمْ قِبَلَ ٱلْمَشْرِقِ وَٱلْمَغْرِبِ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱلْبِرَّ مَنْ ءَامَنَ بِٱللَّهِ وَٱلْيَوْمِ ٱلْـَٔاخِرِ وَٱلْمَلَـٰٓئِكَةِ وَٱلْكِتَـٰبِ وَٱلنَّبِيِّـۧنَ وَءَاتَى ٱلْمَالَ عَلَىٰ حُبِّهِۦ ذَوِى ٱلْقُرْبَىٰ وَٱلْيَتَـٰمَىٰ وَٱلْمَسَـٰكِينَ وَٱبْنَ ٱلسَّبِيلِ وَٱلسَّآئِلِينَ وَفِى ٱلرِّقَابِ وَأَقَامَ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَءَاتَى ٱلزَّكَوٰةَ وَٱلْمُوفُونَ بِعَهْدِهِمْ إِذَا عَـٰهَدُوا۟ ۖ وَٱلصَّـٰبِرِينَ فِى ٱلْبَأْسَآءِ وَٱلضَّرَّآءِ وَحِينَ ٱلْبَأْسِ ۗ أُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ ٱلَّذِينَ صَدَقُوا۟ ۖ وَأُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ هُمُ ٱلْمُتَّقُونَ
Righteousness is not in turning your faces towards the east or the west. Rather, the righteous are those who believe in Allah, the Last Day, the angels, the Books, and the prophets; who give charity out of their cherished wealth to relatives, orphans, the poor, ˹needy˺ travellers, beggars, and for freeing captives; who establish prayer, pay alms-tax, and keep the pledges they make; and who are patient in times of suffering, adversity, and in ˹the heat of˺ battle. It is they who are true ˹in faith˺, and it is they who are mindful ˹of Allah˺. (Qur’an, 2:177)
*I’d like to thank , who, through a healing conversation with her, helped me to finish this article and reminded me that when all feels lost, to always follow the qibla back Home. PS. Yes, you can write—and you must.