While I am no authority on the religious claims, I have read a bit about this topic, including
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/84 which is where I take all the quotes in this write-up. There are a number of points that have only been addressed tangentially, if at all, elsewhere in this node.
One is the claim that regardless of where we think the "furthest mosque" actually was, the Islamic connection to Jerusalem predates the Jewish. Narzos touched on this point, but didn't consider its implications.
"The Islamic connection to Jerusalem is older than the Jewish. The Palestinian "minister" of religious endowments asserts that Jerusalem has "always" been under Muslim sovereignty. Likewise, Ghada Talhami, a polemicist, asserts that "There are other holy cities in Islam, but Jerusalem holds a special place in the hearts and minds of Muslims because its fate has always been intertwined with theirs." Always? Jerusalem's founding antedated Islam by about two millennia, so how can that be? Ibrahim Hooper of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations explains this anachronism: "the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem does not begin with the prophet Muhammad, it begins with the prophets Abraham, David, Solomon and Jesus, who are also prophets in Islam." In other words, the central figures of Judaism and Christianity were really proto-Muslims. This accounts for the Palestinian man-in-the-street declaring that "Jerusalem was Arab from the day of creation."
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/84
Extrapolating this reasoning, the entire earth belongs to Islam, and all the earth's people are lapsed proto-muslims. Of course, Christianity and Judaism have a similar conceit; to me it just emphasizes the importance of treating all holy books as literature and not literal truth.
A second point is that the Islamic concern about Jerusalem seems to be highest when it is not in their possession; when they do have possession of it, there are very few references to it in history or literature, and it seems to suffer from a kind of benign neglect.
"This pattern first emerged during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. Since then, it has been repeated on five occasions: in the late seventh century, in the twelfth century Countercrusade, in the thirteenth century Crusades, during the era of British rule (1917-48), and since Israel took the city in 1967."
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/84
Rather than making this a cut-and-paste write-up I will simply refer you to Mr. Pipes article for the rest of the analysis, in which he discusses each of these historical periods, and much more. I don't feel qualified to evaluate all these conflicting claims and points, but I do feel they ought to be discussed.
A word about me. My last name contains the word "Hadj". I explore this on
my homenode, everyone's invited.