This is perfectly consonant with the Islamic worldview. The earth belongs to Allah and His Messenger Muhammad — which means, in human terms, those who are the Believers in Allah and that Messenger. Everyone else must either convert, be killed, or in some cases be permitted to live, but only in a condition of permanent humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity, as “dhimmis.”
Nothing else has value. Nothing else is of interest. And since everyone since time began — a nice bit of backdating — is in the Muslim view born a Muslim, but for one reason or another falls away (talk about a bad environment!) — every claim by those of other faiths are meaningless.
Sometimes you smash the Bamiyan Buddhas, when you can finally get the right dynamite, after a thousand years of smashing Buddhist stupas, and Hindu temples, all over Asia. Sometimes you turn a church, or many churches, into foundations for mosques (see the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus), or turn the whole thing, merely by adding minarets, into a mosque (see the Hagia Sophia), taking care to break off all the crosses and vandalizing any pictures that depict persons. Sometimes you simply deny the claim altogether, as in the case of the Temple Mount.
This statement is not a strange one. It is one that almost every single “Palestinian” and for that matter, if asked, hundreds of millions of Muslims, would agree with. It is the “Palestinians” who own the Land of Israel. It is they who were always there, since time immemorial, tilling the soil. Nothing about Israel has anything to do with Jews or with Christians. It is a Muslim land. It became, of course, a Muslim “land” when Muslims conquered it, and let it fall into ruin and desolation — but it was still a Muslim “land” no matter how indifferent Muslims were to it, except as a place important, as a holy land, to Jews and to Christians, who therefore must be denied any claim to it, or any right to live in it, or even to visit it without strict permission of their Muslim masters.
When an early Umayyad caliph selected Jerusalem, selected the Temple Mount, as the site where he insisted that the “furthest mosque” (al-masjid al-aksa) mentioned in the Qur’an would be found, he was at first opposed by some Muslims. For of course there is no way to know what was meant by “the furthest mosque.” He was making a geopolitical statement, a planting of the flag of Islam right in the heart of Jerusalem, right on the place, the Temple Mount, most sacred to the Jews, and in the city known to Christians as the Holy Land. It was a geopolitical statement. For Islam is not so much, or not mainly, a religion, but rather, a geopolitics, a worldview, with some features of individual worship attached. It originates in the need for marauding and conquering Arabs to both justify and promote, to themselves and to the far more advanced and numerous peoples, Christians and Jews, whom they first conquered, that conquest, and to hold out to some of them the immediate prospect of remaining not the oppressed vanquished, but part of the conquerors — by abandoning their own faiths and becoming Muslims.
The statement by Ikrema Sabri is no different from, and is exactly consonant with, many remarks by Arafat and not only Arafat — by Muslim Arabs and by non-Arab Muslims who deny the claims of non-Muslims to their own history, their own monuments, their own civilization.
Indeed, the sinister Tariq Ramadan does the same thing when he keeps claiming, absurdly — he did it yet again a few weeks ago in the debate with Ibn Warraq, David Aronovich, and Douglas Murray — that the Western world owes so much, so incredibly much, to Islam, and could hardly have existed without the contributions of the “Islamic world” and Muslims. He has it exactly backwards. It is despite Islam, despite the conquests of many lands once full of Christians, that Western Christendom managed to flourish. Or, if one wishes to find some bleak truth in Ramadan’s remark, one can agree that the refugees from Islamic conquest, such as the Greek scholars who, clutching their manuscripts, fled Byzantium during the century-and-a-half before the final fall of Constantinople (May 29, 1453) helped to bring about the Revival of Learning and what is, or used to be called, the rediscovery of classical antiquity in what also used to be called (it is now, more bloodlessly, described in college courses and in professional-historical-graduate-student-speak as “the Early Modern Period”) the Renaissance.