172 • ChAPTEr 4
[the direction of prayer] of the Christians,”^129 is the subject of the only
paragraph of Margoliouth’s book that al-Muqtaṭaf’s article translates in
its entirety. though the translation is placed in quotation marks, there
is a significant difference between the original English and the Arabic
translation. Margoliouth writes that “the period during which the city
could claim the title imperial was very short, extending no longer than
the reigns of David and Solomon, the former of whom appears to have
brought several of the surrounding peoples into subjection.”^130 In this
sentence, he is commenting on the imperial position of Jerusalem, a sta-
tus defined by the subjugation of non- Israelite peoples under the power
of the Israelite sovereign. In al-Muqtaṭaf’s rendering, the sentence reads:
“the period in which this city was the capital [‘āṣima] of the country of
the Jews was extremely brief, limited to the reigns of David and Solo-
mon.”^131 Al-Muqtaṭaf’s reviewer, in other words, translates Margoliouth’s
line as a statement of the limited nature of the historical claim on Jeru-
salem as the Israelite capital. One wonders whether this mistranslation
may have resulted from a deliberate misconstrual of Margoliouth’s state-
ment to serve a particular political (perhaps anti- Zionist) interest.
these journals thus exhibited a strong interest in the Bible, biblical
archaeology, and the question of the historicity of biblical narratives.
Like the (usually european) researchers on whose work they reported,
some of the articles aimed to prove the reliability of biblical accounts,
while others were more skeptical. For most, the fact of an Israelite past
in Palestine was accepted without question, though, as we find in the
mistranslation of Margoliouth’s text, opposition to Zionism at times
may have colored the way in which the Bible and related research were
presented to readers.
Makaryus and the Statelessness of the Jewsthe journals and their editors, as we have already seen in al-Manār,
also addressed Jewish ambitions in palestine more explicitly and di-
rectly. even before herzl founded the World Zionist Organization in
(^129) though referring to Jerusalem as the Christian qibla is unusual, the idea is grounded
in a long- standing tradition and connected, one presumes, to the eastward orientation
of many churches. as reuven Firestone noted in private correspondence, the ninth- to
tenth- century scholar Muhammad ibn Jarir at- tabari mentions in his commentary on Q.
2:145 that both Jews and Christians prayed facing Jerusalem. See also Firestone, “ritu-
als: Similarities, Influences, and Processes of Differentiation,” 703.
(^130) Margoliouth and tyrwhitt, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus, Three Chief Cities of the
Egyptian Sultans, 295.
(^131) al-Muqtaṭaf 33:1 (January 1908), 81.