We demand no less a right than Muslims do

By YISRAEL MEDAD
I learned that a new academic journal has made its appearance:
Its blurb has it that

The Journal of Islamic Archaeology is the only journal today devoted to the field of Islamic archaeology on a global scale.  In the context of this journal, "Islamic archaeology" refers neither to a specific time period, nor to a particular geographical region, as Islam is global and the center of the "Islamic world" has shifted many times over the centuries....The term refers to the study of pre-modern Muslim societies, polities, and communities - wherever they are found - through the material traces which they have left behind.Editor: Bethany J. Walker, University of Bonn

Between you and me, that wording --- no particular geograpahic region, no specific time, global scale --- sounds like a bit like an echo of some scientific jihadism.
In any, case, I don't know why it is limited to dealing with "pre-modern" Muslim life.
It would seem that modern-day Islam is very much involved in creating the conditions for future archaeology.  You know, wars, destroying cities, subjugating societies, etc.
I checked it out and this article is intriguing as the conflict over that mosque is current and politically charged.
Why so charged?
Well, consider this:

It originally was a Catholic Christian church built by the Visigoths, although it was later converted to an Islamic mosque in the Middle Ages; after the Reconquista, it was made a Catholic Christian church once again...Since the early 2000s, Spanish Muslims have lobbied the Roman Catholic Church to allow them to pray in the cathedral. This Muslim campaign has been rejected on multiple occasions, both by the church authorities in Spain and by the Vatican.

Now, let's return to that article.  In the Abstract we learn it deals with:

...a) The transition of the city from its late-antique stage, specifically in the area occupied by the Mosque and the Alcazar after the Islamic Conquest; b) The configuration of the islamicized landscape within the madīna through the analysis of its evolution, from the foundation of munyas and suburban productive spaces to the constitution of suburban quarters; c) The definition and distribution of secondary or “quarter” mosques, baths and maqabirs, product, in many cases, of pious acts through the institution of waqf; d) The characteristics of the suburban quarters, born in the urban growth experienced after the proclamation of the Umayyad Caliphate; e) And, finally, the occupation of the city after the fitna at the beginning of the eleventh century and, particularly, the urban revitalization experienced under the Almohads.

Notice the use of that dread "occupation" word.  So, we Jews in our historic homeland, like me in Shiloh, are, well, right at home with Islam.
But that pray-in campaign, and in 2010, there were arrests, begs the question;
if the Muslims demand a right to pray at a location
of a former Mosque, built where a Church was,
why are they so adamant that Jews,
whose Temple area was occupied by Muslims,
who built a Mosque on it,
but these Jews now want the right to pray there?
Are not we Jews doing the same thing the Muslims are?
Our rights are less than what they demand for themselves?
 
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