The Third Temple is already standing. It is Bayt al-Maqdis: the ancient House restored to the worship of Abraham’s Lord. Why destroy the very fulfilment you claim to await?
The Temple Institute and those who share its Zionist vision have an inconvenient problem. The place they want to ‘restore’ is already alive with the worship of Abraham’s God.
In its own words, the Institute says that the ‘Temple Mount’ must first be cleared of the Dome of the Rock and the existing mosques before construction of a ‘Third Temple’ can begin.
Its preferred scenario apparently imagines nearly two billion Muslims somehow consenting to the buildings being demolished and rebuilt elsewhere.[1]
Read that again. Bayt al-Maqdis, the first qiblah, in which the One God is worshipped, is to be dismantled to make room for another building apparently intended for the worship of that same God.
The irony is sharper still when you read Ezekiel. The very prophet whose vision is invoked for the Third Temple told rulers to stop dispossessing people and forbade its prince from taking their inheritance!
Ask Solomon, not the Colony
Jewish views on a future Temple differ. Maimonides envisaged a restored Davidic king, a rebuilt sanctuary and renewed sacrifices. Ezekiel describes detailed rites and sacred architecture.[2]
Start with Sulaymān, Solomon, the man to whom the original sanctuary is attributed. In his dedicatory prayer, recorded in 1 Kings 8, he asks God to hear the foreigner who comes from a distant country to seek His Name. Why? So that all the peoples of the earth may know and revere God.[3]
Isaiah gives the same vision its unforgettable expression:
“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”[4]
Isaiah also speaks of offerings and sacrifices. But the larger point remains: the House exists for God’s worship, not the glorification of one race claiming supremacy over all other people.
Now look at Jerusalem. Upon that ancient sacred precinct, Muslims from Africa, Asia, Europe, Arabia and beyond worship the Lord of Ibrāhīm, Mūsā, Dāwūd and Sulaymān. They recognise every one of them as a prophet and bow before the Creator without idols or partners. The Qur’ān explicitly calls its followers back to the way of Ibrāhīm.[5]
And this worship did not arrive yesterday. When Jerusalem came under Muslim rule in 637–638 CE, ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, companion of the Final Messenger Muḥammad ﷺ, re-established the ancient sanctuary. The Dome of the Rock and the monumental congregational buildings came later, under Muslim rulers.[6]
Bayt HaMikdash, Bayt al-Maqdis: the Same House
A one-minute clip from an earlier talk, in which I argued that Bayt HaMikdash is simply Bayt al-Maqdis, managed to upset Jews and Muslims in almost equal measure.
Some Muslims were ready to accuse me of blasphemy, while some Jews seemed convinced I was possessed by the devil.
But the names themselves obviously make the connection. The Hebrew Bayt HaMikdash (בית המקדש) and the Arabic Bayt al-Maqdis (بيت المقدس) both convey the idea of the Holy House, the House of the Sanctuary.
We are therefore speaking of the same ancient sacred site in Jerusalem, not two unrelated places. The Arabic name also came to designate the surrounding city.[7]
And this is more than a resemblance between words. The Prophet ﷺ spoke of Sulaymān, the builder of Bayt HaMikdash, building Bayt al-Maqdis, and in that very narration called the House, meaning ‘the Temple of Solomon’ is of course a masjid. The Temple and the Masjid belong to the history of the same House. And Solomon is a Prophet of Islām. Al-Nasāʾī records the Hadith under the virtues of al-Masjid al-Aqṣā and prayer there. It was never conceived as a house for another god, subsequently borrowed for an unrelated purpose.[8]
The buildings and rites have changed, but the House’s defining purpose has not: the worship of the One Lord of heaven and earth. This is exactly what ʿUmar’s restoration did.
This is why we firmly hold that Bayt al-Maqdis is the Third Temple: the ancient sanctuary restored to its purpose, not a rival sanctuary that must be removed before that purpose can return.
For Zionists who share the Temple Institute’s vision, there is an inconvenient distinction: the essential purpose of the House does not require our accepting every condition of rabbinic messianic conjecture. Because the purpose all are agreed upon is the worship and sanctification of the One God and this is already happening. There is therefore no room for correction.
Fundamentally, if there is a Third Temple that shall restore the worship of the One God, this is it.
The Testimony the Institute Cannot Conveniently Dismiss
Without requiring his testimony, Maimonides, one of Judaism’s greatest legal and theological authorities, explicitly recognised Muslims as monotheists. He disagreed with Islam’s claims, but recognised its worship of the One God.[9]
That distinction is devastating to the premise of replacement. You may disagree with the worshippers. You may dispute their revelation. You may object to the worshippers’ origins, but you cannot credibly pretend that God is absent from the sacred precinct because its worship is conducted in Arabic.
And so those wanting to destroy the Masjid must answer something rather more honest than a question of architecture. Why must Muslims be removed from their established sanctuary for the Mount supposedly to become a house of monotheistic worship again?
Consider another awkward precedent in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah calls Cyrus of Persia God’s ‘anointed’. Cyrus was not an Israelite king, nor the Davidic Messiah expected by later Jewish tradition. Yet he became the instrument through which Jewish exiles were permitted to return and rebuild.[10]
God’s purposes do not always arrive through the ancestry that those awaiting them want. The reality is that God cares little about your race. Muḥammad ﷺ, from the line of Ismāʿīl, is the Final Messenger; his companion ʿUmar restored Jerusalem’s ancient sanctuary to worship.
From the East, Towards the Gate of Mercy
If you insist upon the image of an anointed restorer in the mould of Cyrus, coming from the east to renew the worship of the One God, then look at ʿUmar. Even the geography of his arrival deserves attention.
‘Umar travelled towards Jerusalem through al-Jābiya, northeast of the city. The historian Daniel J. Sahas, drawing together accounts of the Caliph’s meeting with Patriarch Sophronius, places ʿUmar’s encampment on the Mount of Olives, facing Jerusalem from the east. In Sahas’s reconstruction, he met the Patriarch there before entering the city.[11]
And what stands opposite the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Valley? Bāb al-Raḥma, the Golden Gate, set in the eastern wall of the sanctuary. In his vision, Ezekiel describes God’s glory approaching the House from the east and speaks of the eastern gate and its prince.[12]
Who was Ḥizqīl, and why the Third Temple?
Ezekiel, known as Ḥizqīl (حِزْقِيل) in Islamic tradition, was an Israelite prophet carried into Babylonian exile around 597 BCE. From exile he lived through the destruction of Solomon’s Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 587/586 BCE, and later described a restored sanctuary (Ezekiel 40–48).
In Muslim texts, Ibn Kathīr names Ḥizqīl when explaining the Qur’ānic account of people restored to life in al-Baqarah 2:243. The Qur’ān recounts their revival but does not name the prophet.[13][14]
Why, then, is it called the Third Temple? Solomon’s House was the First. After its destruction by Babylon, the returning monotheist, Judean exiles built the Second under Persian rule, completing it around 516 BCE. Herod substantially rebuilt and enlarged that same Second Temple centuries later; his building was not counted as another Temple era. Rome destroyed it in 70 CE. Moreover, traditional Jewish commentators mention that the Second Temple incorporated only part of Ezekiel’s description. They therefore await a Third Temple to realise the vision in full. The unmet expectation concerns more than Herod’s building work.[15]
Without needing the biblical narrative to prove the Masjid’s finality, Ezekiel’s vision contains far more than the doorway. He describes waters flowing eastwards from the House and bringing life to the land (47:1–12). Later Muslim rulers supplied al-Aqṣā with wells and fountains, among them the Ayyubid al-Kaʾs for ablution and the Mamluk fountain of Qāytbāy.[16]
And here is the starkest irony of the entire Third Temple campaign. The Institute invokes Ezekiel for the House it wishes to rebuild. Yet in that very vision, Ḥizqīl commands the princes of Israel to abandon violence and oppression: “Stop dispossessing my people.” (Ezekiel 45:9).
He goes further. In Ezekiel 46:18, the prince is expressly forbidden from taking the people’s inheritance and driving them from their property. And in 47:22–23, the prophet provides a share of the land’s inheritance even for resident foreigners and their children. In a vision filled with gates, courts, priestly rites and measurements, the protection of people’s inheritance is an explicit divine command.[17]
Anyone appealing to his authority must explain why its proposed fulfilment begins by the dispossession and destruction of the very sanctuary in which Abraham’s Lord is already worshipped.
A princely ruler arrives from its eastern hinterland, and worship of the God of Ibrāhīm is restored upon the ancient sanctuary. The symbolism is extraordinary. But for those blinded by ethno-supremacist delusions, it seems that the most unacceptable feature of this annointed restorer is that his name was ʿUmar.
The Jewish Scholar beside ʿUmar
The early Muslim sources place beside him Kaʿb al-Aḥbār, a learned Yemeni Jew who embraced Islam. ʿUmar asked Kaʿb to locate the ancient Rock and advise him where to establish the prayer area. Kaʿb proposed placing it behind the Rock, so that, in his words, the two prayer directions, that of Mūsā and that of Muḥammad, might be brought together.[18]
ʿUmar answered, Ḍāhayta al-Yahūdiyya: ‘You have followed the Jewish way.’ He rejected making the Rock the focus of Muslim prayer and established the prayer area facing Makkah. Yet he also cleared the sacred precinct and restored worship there. He therefore honoured the prophets of Israel but instructed that worshippers must adopt the final qiblah.[18]
Consider the significance of that exchange. A scholar formed by Jewish scripture was consulted about restoring worship at the sanctuary of Israel’s prophets and how the Masjid should be re-established. Kaʿb suggested an alignment with the Rock; ʿUmar insisted upon the qiblah established by the Final Messenger ﷺ.
And the Jewish presence is not confined to Kaʿb. A Judaeo-Arabic account preserved in the Cairo Geniza remembers Jewish elders guiding ʿUmar to the site and helping uncover the Rock.
The medieval Muslim geographer al-Muhallabī preserves a similar account. These later traditions recall Jewish participation in the Muslim restoration rather than depicting it as an erasure of Judean sacred history.[19]
There is a final image worth considering. Later Muslim historians recount that ʿUmar asked Bilāl ibn Rabāḥ, the formerly enslaved Abyssinian who had endured torture for proclaiming Aḥad, Aḥad, to sound the adhān in Jerusalem. And Ibn Kathīr relates that ʿUmar led prayer reciting Sūrat Ṣād, with its account of Dāwūd, and Sūrat al-Isrāʾ, whose opening recalls the Night Journey to this very sanctuary.[20][21] These were true followers of Dāwūd and faithful to the revealed Zabur, Torah, Injil and Qur’an.
An Arab caliph, a Muslim scholar from a Jewish background, Jewish elders remembered in the city’s traditions, and the voice of a freed African slave announcing God’s Oneness.
How extraordinary, then, that a movement claiming to restore the House now proposes to remove the very sanctuary whose revival was remembered with Jewish knowledge and Muslim worship side by side.
When Colonial Appropriation Masquerades as ‘Restoration’
The scholar Assaf Tamari argues that contemporary Third Temple imagery can make the Mount a symbol of completed sovereignty, with the replacement of the Dome of the Rock imagined as its ultimate expression.[22]
In this colonial logic, ‘restoration’ becomes the word for appropriation. A living sanctuary that long predates the modern, secular Zionist project is treated as an obstacle to its fulfilment. Its worshippers are recast as trespassers, their centuries of devotion as an interruption, and the removal of their sacred inheritance as religious renewal.
The Amānah of Bayt al-Maqdis
Bayt HaMikdash and Bayt al-Maqdis name the same ancient House, the sanctuary of the prophets, whose defining purpose has always been the worship of the One God.
The Final Revelation did not sever us from that history, but entrusted us with its continuation. Through Muḥammad ﷺ and the restoration under ʿUmar رضي الله عنه, this Ummah inherited an amānah: to bear witness before humanity[23] and, by Allah’s permission, lead people from darkness into light.[24]
We are the final and permanent trustees of its prophetic inheritance. Not by virtue of race or ancestry, nor by any licence to kill and oppress, but through a responsibility that demands justice and courage.
Our obligation is to fight in defence of al-Aqṣā, protect its worshippers, and pass this sacred amānah to the next generation, undiminished.
References and Primary Texts
1. The Temple Institute, Frequently Asked Questions.
2. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars 11:1.
3. 1 Kings 8:41–43, Solomon’s prayer for the foreigner.
4. Isaiah 56:6–7, a house of prayer for all peoples.
5. Qur’ān 3:67–68, the religion and heirs of Ibrāhīm.
6. Beatrice St. Laurent and Isam Awwad, The Marwani Musalla in Jerusalem: New Findings (2013).
7. On the Hebrew and Arabic sanctuary names and continuity of sacred geography, see A Re-Examination of the Sources of Inspiration of Ethiopian Concentric Prayer Houses, Religions 15(6), 657, section 4: “From Bayt al-Maqdis to Templum Domini”. For the Arabic term’s use for both the sanctuary and the city, see al-Mawsūʿa al-Fiqhiyya al-Kuwaytiyya, vol. 8, p. 265, entry “Bayt al-Maqdis,” reproduced in al-Jamhara.
8. Sunan al-Nasāʾī 693, “The Virtue of al-Masjid al-Aqṣā and Praying Therein”, identifying Sulaymān’s Bayt al-Maqdis as a masjid; compare Sunan Ibn Mājah 1408.
9. Maimonides on Islamic monotheism, My Jewish Learning.
10. Isaiah 45:1, Cyrus as God’s anointed.
12. Ezekiel 43:1–4 and 44:1–3, the eastern approach and the eastern sanctuary gate.
13. Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Baqarah 2:243, identifying Ḥizqīl in the exegetical account: Tafsīr Ibn Kathīr.
14. Jewish Encyclopedia, Ezekiel, the Babylonian exile and the prophet’s lifetime: Ezekiel.
15. Josephus’s account of Herod’s reconstruction; traditional Jewish explanation of why Ezekiel’s design was not realised by the Second Temple: The Posen Library: Herod’s Renovation of the Temple; Chabad: Why Was Ezekiel’s Temple Never Built?.
16. Ezekiel’s life-giving waters and water facilities in the Muslim sanctuary: Ezekiel 47:1–12; Al-Kaʾs, water sources and wells of al-Aqṣā; Archnet: Qāytbāy Fountain (1482).
17. Ezekiel on justice, the prince and the rights of resident foreigners: Ezekiel 45:9; Ezekiel 46:18; Ezekiel 47:22–23.
21. Ibn Kathīr, al-Bidāya wa-l-Nihāya, reports concerning ʿUmar’s prayer at Bayt al-Maqdis.
22. Assaf Tamari, The Political Imagination of the Temple Mount, Political Theology (2025).
23. Qur’ān 2:143, the Ummah appointed to bear witness over humanity.
24. Qur’ān 14:1, revelation that brings humanity from darkness into light by Allah’s permission.
