MUḤAMMAD IBN ABDALLAH, the new prophet of Mecca in the Hijaz, did not believe that he was about to found a new world religion when he received his first revelation in 610, the same year that King Khosrow II invaded Byzantine territory. Muḥammad, a merchant famous in Mecca for his integrity, had long been concerned about the spiritual malaise he could discern in the city. Mecca was enjoying a greater material prosperity than ever before, but as a direct result, some of the old tribal values were being undermined. Instead of taking care of the weaker members of society, in the old way, people had become preoccupied with building up their private fortunes. Some people felt obscurely dissatisfied with the old paganism, which no longer seemed adequate now that they were beginning to enter the modern world. It was widely believed that Allah, the high god of the Arabian pantheon whose name simply means “God,” was in fact the deity who was worshipped by the Jews and the Christians. Yet those Jews and Christians with whom they came in contact often taunted the Arabs because God had sent them no revelation or prophet of their own.
All this changed forever in the month of Ramadan in 610 CE, when Muḥammad felt overwhelmed by a terrifying divine presence and found the words of a divinely inspired scripture pouring from his lips. For the next twenty-two years, Muḥammad continued to receive new revelations from Allah, which were later collected by his followers in the Arabic scripture known as the Qur
ān, the Recitation. At last God had spoken to the Arabs in their own language and had brought them into the community of true believers. Thus Muḥammad did not see his revelation as new; what was revealed through him was simply the old religion of the one God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians. It called upon the people of Mecca to make an existential surrender (islām) of their whole lives to God. If they lived in the way that Allah desired and built a just and decent society, they would prosper and be in harmony with the divine laws that were fundamental to existence.
Islām, therefore, did not mean submission to something alien. From the perspective of the Qurān, it was a profoundly natural act. God had sent prophets and messengers to all the people on the face of the earth to tell them the way they ought to live. Only by surrendering to this divine imperative could people fulfill the potential of their humanity. It was rebellion (kufr) against God that was unnatural, ungrateful, and perverse, because it was a denial of reality. It could bring only disorder and disruption into the lives of individuals and societies. A muslīm, one who made this surrender to God, on the other hand, would find that life had harmony, purpose, and direction, because he or she would at last be in tune with the way things were supposed to be; Muslims were thus returning to the original perfection that God had envisaged for men and women when he had first created the world.
The whole of islām, therefore, can be seen as a quest for wholeness, a return to the paradise that human beings had lost. Yet there was nothing whimsical or escapist about the Qurān or its prophet. Not only was Muḥammad a spiritual genius, he had political gifts of a very high order. In the Qurān, God gives very clear and concrete commands. It is wrong to build a private fortune and good to share your wealth equally; the first religious duty is to create a society where the poor and vulnerable are treated with respect. Like the Hebrew prophets, Muḥammad stressed the prime duty of practical compassion: care for the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the oppressed was a Muslim’s first responsibility. The Qurān does not demand intellectual submission to a complex set of religious doctrines—indeed, it has no time for theological speculation about matters that nobody can prove one way or the other. As in Judaism, God was experienced in a moral imperative rather than in orthodoxy.
The message of the Qurān had immediate relevance in Mecca, then (as noted) in the throes of a capitalistic revolution in which the more vulnerable members of Muḥammad’s tribe of Qureish had been pushed aside in the stampede for wealth. Many of the first people to respond to the Qurān were slaves, women, and other disadvantaged people, particularly from among the poorer and less successful clans. The Meccan establishment, however, had no desire to change the status quo. Its members were appalled when Muḥammad also commanded them to neglect the worship of the traditional gods and worship Allah alone; this seemed an act of impiety to the traditions of their ancestors and an apostasy from the ancient sanctities of Arabia. The Meccan aristocracy persecuted the small Muslim community and in 622 Muḥammad was forced to leave Mecca with some seventy Muslim families for the settlement of Yathrib, some 250 miles to the north. This hijrah (“migration”) marks the start of the Muslim era, because it was at this point that Muḥammad was able to put his ideals fully into practice and form the first community (ummah) whose social system and spirituality embodied the teachings of the Qurān.
The next ten years were dangerous and frightening for the Muslims, and the growing ummah constantly faced the prospect of extermination. The hijrah had been a shocking, even a blasphemous, action. By abandoning their tribe, the Muslims had violated one of the most sacred values of Arabia: the tie of blood. They had torn away from their true place in the world and cast themselves adrift in an extremely hostile world where the individual could not usually survive without the support of the tribal group. The ummahwas subject to an ongoing threat of war with the powerful city of Mecca. It also had to contend with the antagonism of some of the Jews and pagans of Yathrib, who did not want to join this revolutionary society based on ideology rather than kinship. Some Jews and pagans plotted to kill Muḥammad; others were prepared to betray the ummah to Mecca. If they had been successful, the Muslims would certainly have all been killed in a vicious Meccan vendetta. Death and massive slaughter did occur. Muslims lost their lives in desperate battles against Mecca, and, in their struggle for survival, three of the most important Jewish tribes of Yathrib were either expelled from the settlement or massacred. But eventually the Prophet brought peace to Arabia, which had hitherto been torn apart in an unstoppable cycle of tribal violence and vendetta. One tribe after another joined Muḥammad’s ummah, and eventually, in 630, even the proud city of Mecca voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army and Muḥammad occupied his hometown without bloodshed.
Islam as the religion of peace and unity. At Zeita, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Muslims kiss each other’s hand, a greeting customary in the ummah at the time of the Prophet Muḥammad.
Islam’s birth had been violent, but the Qurānic ideal was harmony and unity. The very word islām derives from the same root as salīm (“peace”). The great ideal of the Qurān was tawḥīd, “making one.” Individual Muslims should order their lives so as to make God their chief priority: when they had achieved this personal integration, they would experience within that unity which was God. The whole of human society also had to achieve this unity and balance and bring all its activities under the aegis of the sacred. Muslims were thus engaged in a ceaseless struggle (jihād) to restore all things, in the human and in the natural world, to the primal perfection envisaged by God. Consequently there must be no divisive sectarianism in religion. Originally Muḥammad believed that the Jews and Christians belonged to the same faith. He was shocked to discover that they had quarreled about doctrinal matters that nobody could prove one way or the other. It was also extremely painful to him when most of the Jews of Yathrib refused to accept him as an authentic prophet and closed their doors to the Muslims. The Qurān therefore instructed Muslims to return to the original, pure religion of Abraham, who had lived before either the Torah or the gospel and had, therefore, been neither a Jew nor a Christian. He had simply been a muslīm, one who had made this total surrender of his life to God.1 From the more friendly Jews of Yathrib, Muḥammad learned that the Arabs were thought to be the descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael: they too could call themselves children of Abraham, like the Jews and the Christians.
But Muḥammad was also convinced that not all Jews and Christians subscribed to this exclusive sectarianism, and, despite his own desperate struggle with the Jews, he insisted that all his followers must respect the ahl al-kitāb, those who followed an earlier revelation:
Do not argue with the followers of an earlier revelation otherwise than in the most kindly manner.… Say: “We believe in that which has been bestowed from on high upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon you: for our God and your God is one and the same, and it is to him that we all surrender ourselves.”2
Over and over again the Qurān insists that the revelation to Muḥammad did not cancel out the teaching of previous prophets: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Job, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus.3 The Qurān was simply a restatement and a reminder of the single message that God had sent down to all peoples. It was idolatry to prefer a creed or an institution to God himself, who transcends all human systems. By returning to the original faith of Abraham, Muslims would make God, not a religious establishment, the goal of their lives.
This vision of the essential unity of the religious quest of humanity would profoundly affect Muslim policy in Jerusalem. Muslims had a rather different sacred geography from their predecessors. Because everything came from God, all things were good, so there was no essential dichotomy between the “sacred” and the “profane” as in Judaism. The aim of the ummah was to achieve such integration and balance between divine and human, interior and exterior worlds, that such a distinction would become irrelevant. There was no intrinsic “evil”; no “demonic” realm, standing over against the “good.” Even Satan would be forgiven on the Last Day. Everything was holy and had to be made to realize its sacred potential. All space, therefore, was sacred and no one location was holier than another. Yet Islam is a realistic faith, and Muḥammad knew that human beings need symbols on which to focus. Consequently, from the earliest years, the Muslims were taught to regard three places as sacred centers of the world.
The first of these was Mecca. At the heart of the city was a cube-shaped granite shrine of considerable antiquity known as the Ka
bah. It was widely regarded as the holiest place in Arabia. Each year the tribes would assemble from all over the peninsula to take part in the arduous and intricate rites of the ḥajj pilgrimage, Christian Arabs alongside the pagans. By Muḥammad’s time, the Kabah was dedicated to the Nabatean deity Hubal and surrounded by effigies of the Arabian pantheon, but it may well originally have been the shrine of Allah, the high god. Like most sacred space, the Kabah was thought to stand at the center of the world: the gate of heaven was positioned directly above it, so it was a place where the divine world had made itself accessible to the mundane. Embedded in the wall of the Kabah was the Black Stone, a meteorite which had once dropped from the sky, linking heaven and earth. Like the Herodian Temple in Jerusalem, the Meccan sanctuary (Ḥaram) represented the whole of reality, and the Kabah represented being itself. The box-shaped shrine also symbolized the earth, its four corners radiating from a central point. Worshippers circled around the shrine at a steady trot, not unlike the pas gymnastique, in the ritual of ṭawāf seven circumambulations that followed the direction of the sun. They were thus putting themselves symbolically in tune with the rhythms and motions of the cosmos—taking the right direction and the right path. In nearly all cultures, the circle is a symbol of perfection and eternity. By means of these circumambulations, Arabs passed from mundane reality to a sense of transcendent wholeness. ṭawāf was a meditative exercise: circling around the still, small point of the turning universe, pilgrims learned to orient themselves, finding their own center and priorities. To this day, pilgrims who perform the ṭawāf with other worshippers describe the bonds of their ego dissolving as they become one with the people. The holiness of the Kabah was protected by a sacred area with a twenty-mile radius. It became a sanctuary where all violence was forbidden and thus a refuge from the ceaseless tribal warfare. This had been responsible for Mecca’s commercial success. Arabs could meet there in relaxed circumstances, trading with one another without fear of enemy attack.
Muḥammad felt deeply attracted to the Kabah. He liked to pray in the Ḥaram, recite the Qurān there, and perform the ṭawāf. He was drawn by the legend that was probably current in pre-Islamic Arabia that Adam, the first man, had built the earliest shrine on this sacred spot. It was, therefore, the first temple built in God’s honor in the whole world. The Meccan Ḥaram had been the site of the Garden of Eden, where Adam had been created, had named the animals, and had been honored by all the angels.4 Mecca thus represented that lost paradise, which could be momentarily recovered by performing the traditional rites of this holy place. The shrine was later rebuilt by Seth, Adam’s son; by Noah after the Flood; and by Abraham and Ishmael.5 Finally it had been rebuilt by Qusayy ibn Qilāb, the ancestor of the Meccan tribe of Qureish. The Kabah linked the past with the present, the human with the divine, the internal world with the external.
Yet when Muḥammad taught his first converts to prostrate themselves in prayer before Allah as an outward sign of their interior islām, he told them to turn away from the Kabah to face Jerusalem. The Kabah was now contaminated by idols, so Muslims must focus on the spiritual center of the Jews and Christians who worshipped Allah alone. This qiblah (“direction of prayer”) marked their new orientation away from their tribe toward the primordial faith of the whole of humanity. It also expressed Muḥammad’s sense of solidarity and continuity with the ahl al-kitāb. Then in January 624, when it became clear that most of the Jews of Yathrib would never accept Muḥammad, the ummah declared its independence of the older traditions. Muḥammad made the congregation turn around and pray facing Mecca instead. This change of qiblah has been described as one of Muḥammad’s most creative gestures. It marked a return of the Muslims to the primordial faith of Abraham before it was split into warring sects by the Jews and Christians; it was an attempt to find a lost unity, represented by the primal shrine rebuilt by Abraham, the true muslīm. Since the Kabah had no associations for either Jews or Christians, the Muslims were tacitly declaring that they would bow to none of the established religions but only to God himself:
Verily, as for those who have broken the unity of their faith and become sects—thou hast nothing to do with them.…
Say: “Behold, my Sustainer has guided me to a straight way through an ever-true faith—in the way of Abraham, who turned away from all that is false, and was not of those who ascribe to aught beside Him.”
Say: “Behold, my prayer, and [all] my acts of worship, and my living and my dying are for God alone.”6
The change of qiblah was also consoling for the Meccan Muslims who made the hijrah to Yathrib and were now living in exile. It healed their sense of dislocation and symbolically directed them toward the sacred associations of home.
When Muḥammad entered Mecca in triumph in 630, his first act was to purify the Kabah by smashing the idols and removing the effigy of Hubal. Two years later, shortly before his death, he performed the old pagan rites of the ḥajj, giving them a new, monotheistic interpretation. They now became a symbolic reenactment of the experience of Hagar and Ishmael after Abraham had abandoned them in the wilderness. Mecca would remain the holiest place in the Muslim world and the Ḥaram became a symbolic expression of the Islamic religious experience. The Qurān constantly reminds Muslims that we can only speak of God in terms of “signs” and “symbols” (ayāt). Each one of its verses is called an āyah, a “similitude,” and such images as paradise or the Last Judgment are also symbols, since God and his doings can be expressed by human beings only in figurative form. Muslims are therefore used to thinking symbolically and could see the holiness of Mecca, the primordial sacred space, reflecting the whole dynamic of the Islamic vision. Just as there is only one God and one religion made manifest in many forms, so too there is one sacred space—Mecca—that is revealed plurally. All subsequent holy places in the Islamic world would derive their holiness from Mecca and can be seen as extensions of this central sanctity. So too the cosmos is an āyah of God and reveals his presence in phenomena. All other shrines in the Islamic world would thus be modeled on Mecca, the archetypal symbol of the sacred: this would be an expression oftawḥīd, the sacralization and unification of the universe.
One of the most holy of these other places was Jerusalem. Muslims never forgot that the holy city of the ahl al-kitāb had been their first qiblah. This city had been a symbol that had helped them to form a distinct Islamic identity, to turn their backs on the pagan traditions of their ancestors and seek a new religious family. Jerusalem had been crucial in this painful process of severance and would always occupy a special place in the Muslims’ spiritual landscape. It remained a vital symbol of Islam’s sense of continuity and kinship with the ahl al-kitāb, whether or not Jews and Christians were willing to acknowledge this. Muslims called the city madinat bayt al-maqdis, the City of the Temple. It had long been a spiritual center of their monotheistic predecessors. The great prophets David and Solomon had prayed and ruled there: Solomon had built a sacred mosque. The city was associated with some of the holiest prophets, including Jesus, whom the Muslims held in high esteem, even though they did not believe that he was God.
Later Muslims could claim that the Prophet Muḥammad had also visited Jerusalem, conveyed there miraculously from Mecca one night by God:
Limitless in His glory is He who transported His servant by night from the Inviolable House of Worship [al-masjid al-Ḥaram] to the Remote House of Worship [al-masjid al-aqsa]—the environs of which We had blessed—so that We might show him some of Our symbols [ayāt].7
The “Inviolable House of Worship” was certainly the Kabah but there is nothing in the Qurān to link the Remote Mosque with Jerusalem. But later, probably some generations after Muḥammad, Muslims had made this identification. They said that one night in about 620, before the hijrah, when Muḥammad was praying beside the Kabah, he was carried by the angel Gabriel to Jerusalem. They flew through the night on a winged horse named Burāq and alighted on the Temple Mount. There they were greeted by a large crowd of prophets, Muḥammad’s predecessors, after which Gabriel and Muḥammad climbed through the seven heavens up a ladder (al-mirāj) which extended from the Temple Mount to the divine Throne. Prophets presided over each one of the celestial spheres—Adam, Jesus, John the Baptist, Joseph, Enoch, Aaron, Moses, and, finally, Abraham at the threshold of the divine realm. There Muḥammad received the final revelation, which took him beyond the limits of human perception. His ascent to the highest heaven had been the ultimate act of islām, a return to the unity whence all being derives. The story of Muḥammad’s Night Journey (al-isrā) and Ascension (al-mirāj) is clearly reminiscent of the Throne Visions of Jewish mystics. More important, it symbolized the Muslims’ conviction of continuity and solidarity with the older faiths. The flight of their Prophet from the Kabah to the Temple Mount also revealed the transference of Mecca’s holiness to Jerusalem, al-masjid al-aqsā. There was a divinely established connection between the two cities.
But Jerusalem was only the third-holiest site in the Islamic world. The second was Yathrib, the home of the first ummah, which Muslims called al-madinah, “the City.” When Muḥammad took his small group of converts to Medina, he had also conveyed the holiness of Mecca, the primal sacred space, to this new city. After his death, Muḥammad was revered as the Perfect Man by Muslims: he was not divine—Muḥammad had tirelessly warned Muslims not to deify him as the Christians had deified Jesus—but his faith, virtue, and surrender to God had been so wholehearted that he had forged in his own person a living link (qutb) between heaven and earth. Muslims, therefore, combined the ancient symbolism of sacred space with the more recent cult of the holy human being. People as well as places could link the celestial and the mundane. Because it had been the Prophet’s home, Medina had also become a place where heaven touched earth, especially at Muḥammad’s tomb, where his presence was most concentrated. Medina was also holy because the ummah had come into existence there. On the same principle of tawḥīd, all future Islamic cities and states participated in the primal sanctity of Medina, which had become a symbol of the attempt to bring the whole of human life under God’s rule.
In the same way, all future mosques built in the Islamic world were modeled on the first humble mosque that Muḥammad built in Medina. It was a rough building that expressed the austerity and simplicity of the early Islamic ideal. Tree trunks supported the roof, a stone marked the qiblah, the direction of prayer, and Muḥammad stood on a stool to address the congregation. These would all be represented in later mosques by columns supporting the roof, the miḥrāb, a niche indicating the orientation to Mecca, and the pulpit (minbar) for the preacher. They would also have a courtyard, like the one in Medina which played a crucial role in the life of the first ummah. Muḥammad and his wives lived in little apartments or huts around the periphery of this courtyard. The poor of the city could congregate there to receive alms, food, and care. Public meetings to discuss social, political, and military as well as religious matters were also held in the courtyard. Similarly today the mosque remains a center of all kinds of activity in the Muslim community and is not used exclusively for religious functions.
This is often surprising—even shocking—to Jews and Christians, who regard holiness as essentially separate from the profane world. They imagine that Muslims cannot really regard their mosques and sanctuaries as sacred if they chat with their friends there or “exploit” its sanctity by holding political rallies. But this is to misunderstand the Islamic concept of the sacred, which is not seen as separate (kaddosh in Judaism) but something that informs the whole of life. When Muḥammad set up house with his wives in the courtyard of the mosque, he showed that the sexual, the sacred, and the domestic could—and, indeed, must—be integrated. Similarly, politics, welfare, and the ordering of social life must be brought into the ambit of holiness and under the rule of God. Holiness in Islam was thus seen as inclusive rather than exclusive: the Christians of Medina were allowed to worship in the mosque, an expression of the continuity of the Islamic tradition with the gospel. The multifaceted function of the mosque was thus an expression oftawḥīd, the sacralization of the entire spectrum of human life.8 Further, since all space is inherently sacred, the mosque should not be cordoned off from its surroundings. The Prophet is reported to have said: “Revile not the world for the world is God,” and the Qurān constantly urges Muslims to regard the beauty and order of the earth as ayāt. Thus trees, which were prohibited on the Temple Mount, are encouraged in a Muslim sanctuary; there will be fountains in the courtyard, and the mosques will be full of light; birds can fly around during the Friday prayers. The world is to be invited into the mosque, not left outside. The principles of Medina would also become apparent in Jerusalem, the third-holiest place in the Islamic world.
When Muḥammad died on 6 June 632, he had united almost the whole of Arabia under his leadership. But so endemic was tribal warfare to the peninsula that there was a real danger the ummah would fall apart after his death. Many of the tribes who had allied themselves to Medina were more attached to the Prophet than to his religion, and when he died they no longer felt bound to obey his successor (khalīfah) Abu Bakr or to pay the religious tax (zakat) to the Islamic treasury. Local “prophets” set out to rival Muḥammad and broke away from the ummah; Abu Bakr had to fight a pitiless campaign against the rebel tribes of Asad, Tamim, Ghatafan, and Hanīfah. Once he had crushed the rebellion, Abu Bakr may well have decided to alleviate internal tensions by employing the unruly energies within the ummah against external foes. Whatever the case, in 633 Muslim armies began a new series of campaigns in Persia, Syria, and the Iraq. By the time Abu Bakr died in 634, one Arab army had driven the Persians from Bahrein and another had penetrated Palestine and conquered Gaza.
These wars were almost certainly not inspired by religious motives: nothing in the Qurān encouraged Muslims to believe that they had a duty to conquer the world for Islam. There are indications, however, that at the end of his life Muḥammad had plans to bring more Arabs into the ummah: in 630 he had led military expeditions to the northern regions of the Arabian Peninsula. At this stage, however, Islam was still not a missionary religion like Christianity. Muḥammad had not expected Jews or Christians to convert to Islam unless they especially wished to do so, because he believed that they had received valid revelations of their own. In these early days, the Muslims regarded Islam as the religion given to the Arabs, the sons of Ishmael, just as Judaism was a faith for the sons of Jacob. The old idea that the Bedouin converts to Islam immediately rushed out of Arabia to impose their new religion on a reluctant world by force of arms has been completely quashed by modern historians. Most of the Muslim generals probably had more mundane motives. For centuries the nomads of the harsh Arabian steppes had sought to break out of the peninsula to find more fertile land and better pasturage. Hitherto they had been held in check by the armies of two great powers, Byzantium and Persia. But the Muslims began their external campaigns in 633 in the face of a power vacuum. Persia and Byzantium were both exhausted after long years of warfare against each other. Some of the troops employed by the two empires to turn back the Muslim armies were Arabs, who felt an ethnic bond with the invaders. The tribe of Ghassān on the Arabian border, for example, had long been clients of Constantinople, with the assigned mission of holding the Arabian nomads at bay. But they were resentful that Byzantium had recently withheld their subsidies, and were ready to defect to the armies of the ummah, not for religious reasons, but out of a vague sense of Arab solidarity. Other, Aramaic and Semitic elements in both Syria and the Iraq were either indifferent to the Arab invasion or enthusiastic about it. We have seen that in the Byzantine empire, the oppressive policies of the Christian emperors had thoroughly alienated the Monophysite “heretics” and the large Jewish population. They were not inclined to support the Byzantines, and the Jews in particular welcomed Muslim armies into Palestine. For these complex reasons, the Muslim armies were able to conquer with relative ease a considerable amount of territory in the old empires.
After Abu Bakr’s death, the Caliph Umar, one of the most austere and passionate Companions of the Prophet, continued the military campaigns in both Persia and Byzantium. Although the Muslims were beginning to become quite rich, Umar continued to live as simply as Muḥammad had done. He always wore an old, patched woolen tunic; he carried his own baggage, like any other soldier, and insisted that his officers do the same. Islam thus arrived in Palestine as an energetic faith, in the flush of its first enthusiasm. The Byzantine emperor Heraklius, by contrast, had alienated many of his subjects and, sick with depression and in the grip of a spiritual crisis, feared that the Muslim invasion was a sign of God’s displeasure. The Arab armies continued their advance into Palestine. On 20 August 636, the Muslims defeated the Byzantine troops at the battle of Yarmuk. In the midst of the fighting, the Ghassānids defected from Byzantium and went over to their fellow Arabs. With the help of the Jews, the Muslims began to subjugate the rest of the country. Heraklius paused only to make a quick dash to Jerusalem to retrieve the True Cross and then left Syria forever. By July 637 the Muslim army was encamped outside the walls of Jerusalem.
The patriarch Sophronius valiantly organized the defense of the city with the help of its Byzantine garrison, but by February 6389 the Christians were forced to surrender. Tradition has it that the patriarch refused to deliver the Holy City to anybody but Caliph Umar. One of the earliest Muslim sources claims that Umar was not present in person but only visited Jerusalem at a later date. But most scholars still believe that Umar came to receive the city’s surrender. He was in Syria at the time, and, given the status of Jerusalem in early Islam, it is very likely that he would have wanted to preside over this momentous occasion. The traditional account says that Sophronius rode out of the city to meet Umar and then escorted the caliph back into Jerusalem. Umar must have looked incongruous amid the splendidly dressed Byzantines, as he rode into the city on a white camel wearing his usual shabby clothes, which he had refused to change for the ceremony. Some of the Christian observers felt that the caliph was being hypocritical: they were probably uncomfortably aware that the Muslim caliph embodied the Christian ideal of holy poverty more faithfully than their own officials.
Umar also expressed the monotheistic ideal of compassion more than any previous conqueror of Jerusalem, with the possible exception of King David. He presided over the most peaceful and bloodless conquest that the city had yet seen in its long and often tragic history. Once the Christians had surrendered, there was no killing, no destruction of property, no burning of rival religious symbols, no expulsions or expropriations, and no attempt to force the inhabitants to embrace Islam. If a respect for the previous occupants of the city is a sign of the integrity of a monotheistic power, Islam began its long tenure in Jerusalem very well indeed.
Umar had asked to see the holy places, and Sophronius took him straight to the Anastasis. The fact that this magnificent complex of buildings commemorated the death and resurrection of Jesus would not have pleased the caliph. The Qurān reveres Jesus as one of the greatest of the prophets but does not believe that he died on the cross. Unlike Jesus, Muḥammad had been a dazzling success in his own lifetime, and Muslims found it hard to believe that God would allow a prophet to die in such disgrace. The Arabs seem to have picked up the Docetist and Manichean idea, current in many areas of the Near East, that Jesus had only seemed to die: the figure on the cross was only a phantom, a simulacrum. Instead, like Enoch and Elijah, Jesus had ascended triumphantly to heaven at the end of his life. Later Muslims would express their contempt for the Christian belief by calling the Anastasis al-qumāmah (“the Dungheap”) instead of al-qiyāmah (“the Resurrection”). Umar, however, showed no such chauvinism, even in the excitement of an important military victory. While he was standing beside the tomb, the time for Muslim prayer came around, and Sophronius invited the caliph to pray where he was. Umar courteously refused; neither would he pray in Constantine’s Martyrium. Instead he went outside and prayed on the steps beside the busy thoroughfare of the Cardo Maximus. He explained to the patriarch that had he prayed inside the Christian shrines, the Muslims would have confiscated them and converted them into an Islamic place of worship to commemorate their caliph’s prayer in the bayt al-maqdis. Umar immediately wrote a charter forbidding Muslims to pray on the steps of the Martyrium or to build a mosque there.10 Later he prayed in the Nea and, again, was careful to ensure that it would remain in Christian hands.
But the Muslims needed a place where they could build a mosque without annexing Christian property. They were also anxious to see the famous Temple of Solomon. According to the traditionist al-Walīd ibn Muslīm, Sophronius tried to pass off the Martyrium and the Basilica of Holy Sion as the “mosque of David,” but eventually he led Umar and his entourage to the Temple Mount. Ever since the Persian occupation, when the Jews had resumed worship on the platform, the Christians had used the place as the city rubbish dump. When Umar reached the old ruined gates of the Temple, says the Muslim historian Mujīr al-Dīn, he was horrified to see the filth, “which was then all about the holy sanctuary, had settled on the steps of the gates so that it even came out into the streets in which the gate opened, and it had accumulated so greatly as almost to reach up to the ceiling of the gateway.”11 The only way to get up to the platform was to crawl on hands and knees. Sophronius went first and the Muslims struggled up behind. When they arrived at the top, the Muslims must have gazed appalled at the vast and desolate expanse of Herod’s platform, still covered with piles of fallen masonry and garbage. The shock of this sad encounter with the holy place whose fame had reached them in far-off Arabia was never forgotten: Muslims claimed that they called the Anastasis al-qumāmah, “the Dungheap,” in retaliation for the impious behavior of the Christians on the Temple Mount.
Umar does not seem to have spent any time on this occasion examining the rock, which would later play such an important part in Islamic piety. Once he had taken stock of the situation, he threw handfuls of dung and rubble into his cloak and then hurled it over the city wall into the Valley of Hinnom. Immediately his followers did the same.12 This act of purification was not dissimilar to the excavations at Golgotha under Constantine. Yet again, a newly triumphant religion was seeking to establish itself in Jerusalem by delving beneath the impiety of the previous occupants to make physical contact with the foundations of the faith.
The Muslims’ arrival in Jerusalem was an event of immense importance. At the hijrah, the first Meccan converts had painfully torn themselves away from their home and most sacred traditions. Now the Arab armies had started to penetrate a world that was alien in its sophistication and culture to anything known in Arabia, which had hitherto been beyond the pale of civilization. They had to confront mythologies and religious and political traditions that were deeply challenging to their new faith. The Islamic armies were on the move perpetually, cut adrift from their roots. But now they had possession of the bayt al-maqdis, the home of some of the greatest of the prophets and their first qiblah. It was a homecoming of sorts, a physical “return” to the city of their fathers in religion. Islam could now graft itself physically onto these ancient traditions in a way that symbolized the continuity and wholeness of the Qurānic vision. As part of their mandate to sacralize the world, Muslims also had a duty to reconsecrate a place that had been so horribly desecrated.
As soon as the platform had been cleared, Umar summoned Kab ibn Aḥbar, a Jewish convert to Islam and an expert in the isrāīliyāt or, as we would say, “Jewish studies.” It came naturally to the Muslims to consult the Jews about the disposition of the site that had been sacred to their ancestors. Both the Jewish and the Muslim sources make it clear that Jews took part in this reclamation of the Mount. Umar is also said to have traveled to Jerusalem with a group of rabbis from Tiberias. The distinguished tenth-century historian Abu Jafar at-ṭabarī says that Umar began his meeting with Kab by reciting Surahs 17 and 18 of the Qurān, which tell the stories of David, Solomon, and the Temple. Then he asked Kab to point out the best place on the Mount for prayer. Kab chose a spot north of the rock, assuming—almost certainly incorrectly—that it was the site of the Devir. If they prayed there, Muslims could orient themselves toward both Mecca and the Jewish Holy of Holies.13 This is almost certainly legendary, since it was fifty years before the Muslims showed any interest in the rock. But the story does show Muslims holding on to the principle of Islamic independence of the older faiths. Umar refused Kab’s suggestion and decided to build his mosque at the southern end of the platform, on the site of Herod’s Royal Portico, where the present Mosque of al-Aqsā stands. There the Muslims would face only Mecca when they prayed. Ulnar’s was a humble wooden building, in keeping with the austere ideal of early Islam. The first person to describe it was the Christian pilgrim Arculf, who visited Jerusalem in about 670 and was struck by its contrast with the magnificent Temple that had preceded it: “The Saracens now frequent a four-sided house of prayer, which they have built rudely, constructing it by raising boards and great beams upon some remains of ruins.”14 It was large, however, able to accommodate three thousand worshippers. By this time, the Arab tribes of the region had converted to Islam and would have come to Umar’s mosque for the Friday prayers.
None of the Christians of the city were obliged to convert to Islam, however. Indeed, conversion was not encouraged until the eighth century. ṭabarī quotes a document that is supposed to be the covenant agreement between Umar and the Christians of Jerusalem. It is almost certainly not authentic, but it does accurately express Muslim policy regarding a conquered people.
[Umar] grants them security, to each person and their property: to their churches, their crosses, to the sick and the healthy, to all the people of their creed. We shall not station Muslim soldiers in their churches. We shall not destroy their churches nor impair any of their contents or their property or their crosses or anything that belongs to them. We shall not compel the people of Jerusalem to renounce their beliefs and we shall not do them any harm.15
Like the other subject people of the Islamic empire, the Jews and Christians of Palestine became “protected minorities” (dhimmis): they had to give up all means of self-defense and could not bear arms. Instead, the Muslims provided military protection for which the dhimmis paid a poll tax (jizyah). In Jerusalem it seems that each family had to pay one dinar per year. Christian pilgrims had to pay a dinar as an entrance fee if they came from outside the Islamic empire, so that they became dhimmis during their stay.16 Thedhimmi system was not perfect. Later Islamic law evolved some rather humiliating legislation: dhimmis were not allowed to build without permission; their places of worship must not tower above the mosque; they had to bow when they presented thejizyah tax, were forbidden to ride on horseback, and had to wear distinctive clothing, although these rules were not often rigidly enforced. The system granted the dhimmis religious freedom but not equality: they were subject to the Muslims and had to accept Muslim supremacy. But the system did enable people of different faiths to coexist in relative harmony and ensured that, in the main, subject peoples were treated with decency and legality. It was certainly a vast improvement on Byzantine law, which, increasingly, had persecuted such minorities as Monophysites, Samaritans, and Jews.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Nestorian and Monophysite Christians welcomed the Muslims and found Islam preferable to Byzantium. “They did not inquire about the profession of faith,” wrote the twelfth-century historian Michael the Syrian, “nor did they persecute anybody because of his profession, as did the Greeks, a heretical and wicked nation.”17 Orthodox Christians obviously had to make a more difficult adjustment. Sophronius had wept when he saw Umar standing on the Temple Mount and remembered the “abomination of desolation” foretold by the prophet Daniel. He is said to have died broken-hearted a few weeks later. Some Christians had apocalyptic fantasies of a Greek emperor liberating Jerusalem and preparing the way for the Second Coming of Christ.18 The Christians of Jerusalem now found themselves cut off from Constantinople, which seemed to forget all about them. No patriarch was appointed to replace Sophronius until 691. They had to watch the transformation of the Temple Mount, whose desecration had been so important to them. Many probably resorted to the psychological expedient of denial: Christian pilgrims such as Arculf scarcely register the presence of Muslims in their Holy City. Perhaps Christians believed subconsciously that if they ignored the “Saracens” they would cease to exist.19 It was not difficult for them to do so. Christians retained their majority in the city, and even Muslims would acknowledge that Jerusalem was largely a city of dhimmis. Christian holy places had nearly all centered on the Western Hill, and this remained an entirely Christian area. The Muslim conquerors did not settle in that part of town, even though it was cooler and healthier than their own quarters at the foot of their Ḥaram. Muslims were also forbidden to go into those churches that still remained on the Mount of Olives and in the Kidron Valley, especially the Ascension Church and the Tomb of the Virgin—both of which commemorated sites and events that Muslims revered. Christians were allowed to build and restore their churches freely: indeed, during the seventh and eighth centuries there was quite a spate of church-building in Syria and Palestine. Christians were still allowed to hold their processions and services. The only place where Muslims congregated in large numbers was on their Ḥaram,20 the old Temple Mount, and this place had never played any part in the Christian liturgy.
Immediately after the conquest, Umar agreed with Sophronius that Jews would not be permitted to reside in Jerusalem. When conquering a new city, Umar generally reinforced the status quo, and Jews had long been banned from Jerusalem and its environs. Later, however, this arrangement was revoked. There seemed no good reason to deny the Jews the right to live in the City of David. Umar invited seventy Jewish families from Tiberias to settle in Jerusalem: they were assigned the district around the Pool of Siloam at the southwest corner of the Ḥaram. This neighborhood had been devastated at the time of the Persian conquest in 614 and was still littered with debris and rubble. The Jews cleared this away, using the old stones for their new houses. They were also allowed to build a synagogue—known as “the Cave”—near Herod’s western supporting wall, possibly in the vaults underneath the platform.21 Some sources say that the Jews were allowed to pray on the platform itself, just as the Christians had been allowed to pray in the Medina mosque. Some of the dhimmis—Jews and Christians—were employed as guards and servants on the Ḥaram, a privilege which exempted them from paying the jizyah.22 Jews were probably willing to do this because the Muslim conquest had given them new hope. The Byzantine emperors had outlawed Judaism, and Heraklius had been on the point of forcing Jews to be baptized. They had been as willing to support the Muslims as they had the Persians, especially since this new form of monotheism was much closer to Judaism than Christianity. Perhaps some believed that Islam was merely a stage in the Ishmaelites’ conversion to the true faith. The Muslims had not only liberated them from the oppression of Byzantium but had also given Jews rights of permanent residence in their Holy City. It is not surprising that this reversal inspired some apocalyptic dreams, especially since the Muslims had attempted to purify the Temple Mount. Were they clearing the way for the building of the new and definitive Temple by the Messiah? Toward the end of the seventh century, a Hebrew poem hailed the Arabs as the precursors of the Messiah and looked forward to the ingathering of the Jewish exiles and the restoration of the Temple.23 Even when the Messiah failed to arrive, Jews continued to look favorably on Islamic rule in Jerusalem. In a letter written in the eleventh century, the Jerusalem rabbis recalled the “mercy” God had shown his people when he allowed the “Kingdom of Ishmael” to conquer Palestine. They were glad to remember that when the Muslims arrived in Jerusalem, “there were people from the children of Israel with them; they showed them the spot of the Temple and they settled with them until this very day.”24
The Muslim conquest of Palestine did not mean that the country was suddenly overrun with Arabs from the Hijaz. Ethnically, the population of Palestine remained as mixed as it had ever been. The Muslim conquerors were not permitted to settle down in their new territories. They remained a small military caste who lived apart from the local people in special military compounds. Some of the generals were allowed to build estates, but only in unoccupied territory. In Jerusalem, as we have seen, the Muslims did not attempt to settle in the more salubrious part of town but in a district at the base of their Ḥaram next to the Jewish Quarter. Jerusalem remained a largely Christian city with one Muslim sacred area. Muḥammad once said that anybody who spoke Arabic was an Arab, rather as Greek speakers had been called Hellenes. Over the years, the inhabitants adopted Arabic as their main language, and today we call their descendants—Muslim and Christian—Arabs.
When setting up their own administration in Palestine—“Filasṭīn” in Arabic—the Muslims took over the old Byzantine system, which had divided the country into three sections. Now Jerusalem was included in the Jund Filasṭīn, which included the coastal plain and the highlands of Judaea and Samaria. The Jund Urdunn comprised Galilee and the western part of Peraea, while the Jund Dimashq covered the old Moab and Edom. The Arabs continued to call Jerusalem either bayt al-maqdis or “Ilya” (Aelia). Their esteem for the city can be seen in the caliber of the people who were appointed to govern it. Muāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān, a future caliph, became the governor of the whole of Syria and Palestine (which the Arabs called al-Sham). Uwaymir ibn Sad, one of the most important Muslim officers, was put in charge of the Jund Filasṭīn and was known for his decent treatment of the dhimmis. Ubādah ibn al-Samīt, one of the five leading experts in the Qurān, became the first qādī (Islamic judge) of Jerusalem. Other eminent Companions of the Prophet, such as Fairuz at-Dailami and Shaddad ibn Aws, also settled in Jerusalem, drawn by the holiness of the city.
After its auspicious beginning, the Islamic empire seemed in danger of falling apart when Umar was killed in 644 by a Persian prisoner of war. It is one of the tragedies of religion that it frequently fails to live up to its most treasured ideals. Thus Christianity, the religion of love, had often expressed itself in Jerusalem in hatred and contempt. Now Islam, the faith of unity and integration, seemed to fall prey to disintegration and sectarianism. There had been tension between the caliphs and the Prophet’s family regarding the leadership of the ummah ever since Muḥammad’s death. Ultimately this conflict would lead to the Sunni/Shiite split. Umar was succeeded by Uthmān ibn Affān, one of the first Companions of the Prophet and a member of the aristocratic Umayyad clan. His main contribution to Jerusalem was to create and endow a large public garden at the Pool of Siloam for the city’s poor. Uthman was a pious but ineffective leader, and when he was murdered in 656 by a group of officers, they proclaimed Alī ibn Abī Tālib, the Prophet’s closest living male relative, as the fourth caliph. At once civil war broke out between Alī and Muāwiyah, ruler of al-Sham and now the leader of the Umayyad clan. He insisted that Uthman’s murderers be delivered to him for punishment. The war dragged on untilAlī was stabbed to death in 661 by a member of a new fanatical sect. Six months later, Muāwiyah was proclaimed caliph in Jerusalem. He was the first caliph of the Umayyad dynasty, which would rule the Islamic empire for nearly a century.
Muāwiyah immediately moved the capital of the empire from Medina to Damascus. This did not mean that he was abandoning the old religious ideal, as has sometimes been suggested. Muslims now ruled an empire that extended from Khurasan in the east to what is now Libya in North Africa. By the end of the Umayyad period, the Islamic empire would stretch from Gibraltar to the Himalayas. It was essential that the capital be more central and that the Muslims integrate fully with the territories they had conquered. It was also part of the Muslim mission to sacralize the world: Muslims must move outward and bring the holiness of God to the outer reaches of the empire, not cling to their holy places at home. The move to Damascus was good for Palestine, which was now close to the seat of power and prospered culturally and economically. Muāwiyah had been governor of al-Sham for nearly twenty years, and he had learned to love Jerusalem. He would make a point of visiting the city whenever he was in Palestine, even though an attempt was once made on his life there. Muslims collected his words of praise for bayt al-maqdis, which show that the Muslims had acquired much Jerusalem lore from the dhimmis. The city was “the place where the people will gather and arise on the Day of Judgment”; it was a place that sanctified the people who lived there; the whole of al-Sham was “the chosen land of Allah to which he will lead the best of his servants.” Once when he was preaching in the Ḥaram the caliph said: “God loves the area between the two walls of this mosque more than any other place in the world.”25 The Muslims who worshipped there might be far from Mecca, but they could experience its holiness in the Jerusalem Ḥaram.
There was more dissension in the empire after the death of Muāwiyah, since some of his Muslim subjects refused to accept the caliphate of his son Yazid. In 680 al-Ḥusayn, the son of Alī and grandson of the Prophet, led an insurrection against the Umayyads and was cruelly slaughtered with his pitifully small band of followers at Kerbala in the Iraq. Henceforth Kerbala would become a holy city to the Shiah, who believed that the ummah should be ruled by a direct descendant of Muḥammad. Yet despite the holiness of Kerbala, the Shiis still revered their imams (leaders), who descended from Muḥammad and Alī. Each imam was regarded as the qutb of his generation: he provided Muslims with direct access to heaven by sharing in the holiness of Muḥammad, the Perfect Man.
There was another rebellion against the Umayyads in 683 when Caliph Yazīd fell mortally ill. Abdallah ibn al-Zubayr proclaimed himself caliph and seized the holy city of Mecca. He remained in power there until 692 but could not win the support of the wholeummah. After the death of Yazīd, Marwān I (684–85) and his son Abd al-Malik (685–705) were able to reestablish Umayyad power in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt and then in the rest of the empire. Abd al-Malik, a particularly able ruler, began the process of replacing the old Byzantine and Persian systems with a new Arab administration: a centralized monarchy built on the theocratic ideal.
Once he had established a measure of peace and security, Caliph Abd al-Malik could turn his attention to Jerusalem, to which, like all the Umayyads, he was devoted. He repaired the city walls and gates, which had been damaged in the recent disturbances, and built the Dar Imama, a residence for the governor of Ilya, near the Ḥaram. But Abd al-Malik’s greatest contribution to the city was undoubtedly the Dome of the Rock, which he commissioned in 688. Islam had its own holy places; it had an Arabic scripture of extraordinary power and beauty. But Islam had no great monuments, and in Jerusalem, a city filled with magnificent churches, the Muslims felt at a disadvantage. They must have wanted to show the Christians, who, if Arculf’s reaction was typical, sneered at their humble wooden mosque on the Ḥaram, that they also had a formidable vision to express. In the tenth century, the Jerusalem historian Muqaddasī noted that all the churches of al-Sham were so “enchantingly fair” and the “Dome of Qumāmah so great and splendid that Abd al-Malik feared that “it would dazzle the minds of the Muslims.” They wanted monuments that were “unique and a wonder to the world.”26 So Abd al-Malik decreed that there would be a new dome to challenge the Dome of the Anastasis on the Western Hill and the extraordinary Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, which, when illuminated at night, shone so brightly that it was one of the great sights of Jerusalem.27 To make sure that the new Muslim building was equally brilliant, Abd al-Malik employed craftsmen and architects from Byzantium, and two of the three people in charge of the construction may have been Christians.28 Despite this input from the dhimmis, however, the first great Muslim shrine carried an unmistakably Islamic message.
The Dome of the Rock, built by Caliph Abd al-Malik and completed in 691. By restoring the Temple Mount and erecting the first major Islamic building there, Muslims expressed their conviction that their new faith was rooted in the sanctity of the older traditions.
The caliph chose to build his dome around the rock that protruded from the Herodian pavement toward the northern end of the platform. Why did he choose to honor this rock, which is not mentioned in either the Bible or the Qurān? Later Muslims would believe that Muḥammad had ascended to heaven from the Rock after his Night Journey and that he had prayed in the small cave beneath. But in 688 this event had not yet been definitively linked with Jerusalem: had Abd al-Malik intended to commemorate themirāj of the Prophet, he would certainly have inscribed the appropriate Qurānic verses somewhere in the shrine. But he did not do so. We do not know whence the devotion to the Rock originates. The Bordeaux Pilgrim had seen Jews anointing a “pierced stone” on the Temple mount, but we cannot know for certain that this was the Rock. In the second century, the Mishnah speaks of a “stone of foundation” (even shetiyah) which had been placed beside the Ark in the days of David and Solomon, but the rabbis do not tell us whether this stone was still in place in Herod’s Temple, nor do they identify it with the Rock on the devastated Temple Mount. It is likely that both Jews and Muslims assumed that the Rock marked the site of the Holy of Holies in the Temple, though the present scholarly consensus is that it did not.29 If so, they would naturally see the Rock as the “center of the earth,” a place which had always yielded access to heaven. After the building of the Dome of the Rock, Jews and Muslims would both develop legends about the Rock, so the Muslim shrine might have stimulated the Jewish imagination. Both Jews and Muslims came to regard the Rock as the foundation of the Temple, the center of the world, the entrance to the Garden of Eden and the source of fertility—all the usual imagery associated with a monotheistic holy place. From a very early date, the Muslims felt that a visit to their new shrine took them back to the primal harmony of paradise.
Some scholars have recently suggested that Abd al-Malik did not choose the site himself. Their theory is that during the Persian occupation, the Jews had begun to rebuild their Temple on the Mount and that when Heraklius reconquered the city, he commissioned an octagonal victory church to celebrate the Christian triumph over Persia and Judaism. The foundations had been laid, but the Greeks had to abandon their plan when the Arabs invaded Palestine. Abd al-Malik would have been able to build on these Byzantine foundations when work began on the Dome of the Rock in 688.30 It is a controversial theory to explain a building which, in one sense, is unique in the Islamic world. The Dome of the Rock is not a mosque. There is no qiblah wall to orient the faithful toward Mecca and no large space for prayer. Instead, the Rock takes up the central position and two circular walkways have been created around it, marked by forty pillars. The Dome of the Rock is a shrine, a reliquary. It would not have been an unusual building in Jerusalem, however. It was surrounded by famous churches which all enshrined rocks and caves: the Rotunda of the Anastasis around the cave-tomb; the Martyrium containing the Rock of Golgotha; the Nativity Church over the cave of Christ’s birth; and the Ascension Church encircling the rock imprinted with Jesus’s footstep. These sites all commemorated the Incarnation. Now Abd al-Malik’s magnificent new building rose up to defy them.
Inside the Dome, the major inscription over the arches of the inner arcade is devoted almost exclusively to the Qurānic verses denying the shocking notion that God had sired a son. It is addressed to the “Followers of the Gospel” and warns them against inaccurate and dangerous statements about God:
The Christ Jesus, son of Mary, was but God’s apostle—[the fulfillment of] His promise which he had conveyed unto Mary—and a soul created by Him. Believe then in God and his apostle and do not say “[God] is a trinity.” Desist [from this assertion] for your own good. God is but One God: utterly remote is He in his glory from having a son.31
The Muslims were in a minority in Jerusalem; the Christian majority probably regarded their conquerors with disdain, seeing them as primitive barbarians. But the Dome of the Rock, rising majestically from the most ancient holy place in Jerusalem, was a dramatic assertion that Islam had arrived and was here to stay. It issued an imperious call to the Christians to revise their beliefs and return to the pure monotheism of Abraham.32
The Jews must have approved of this inscription. Not all of them gazed aghast at this Muslim building project on their Temple Mount. In about 750 the Jewish author of “The Mysteries of Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai” saw the building as a prelude to the messianic age. He praises the Muslim caliph as “a lover of Israel” who had “restored the breaches of Zion and the breaches of the Temple.” He “hews Mount Moriah and makes it all straight and builds a mosque there on the Temple Rock [even shetiyah].”33 But the Dome of the Rock also had a message for the Jews. It occupied the site of their Temple, which had itself been built on the place where Abraham had sacrificed his son. Now the sons of Ishmael had established themselves on this sacred site. The Jews were not the only children of Abraham and should remember that he had been neither a Jew nor a Christian but a muslīm.
It is more likely that the Dome of the Rock was an assertion of Muslim identity than that it was designed to deflect the ḥajj from Mecca, which was still in the hands of Ibn al-Zubayr. This theory was first proposed by the ninth-century Iraqi historian Yaqūbī, who tells us that the circular walkways were designed for the ṭawāf: “the people began to walk round [the Rock] as they walk round the Kabah.”34 This is most unlikely. The ambulatories of the Dome of the Rock are far too small for the complex ritual of ṭawāf, and if replacing Mecca had been the caliph’s aim, it would have been far simpler merely to reproduce the Kabah than to go to all the trouble of designing the elaborate Dome. No other contemporary historian mentions this blasphemous project of the caliph, which would have shocked the whole Muslim world, and Abd al-Malik showed nothing but the deepest piety toward Mecca and the Kabah. Yaqūbī was strongly opposed to the Umayyads, and this theory can almost certainly be dismissed as propaganda.
Inside the Dome of the Rock. The rock and the circular dome symbolize the spiritual ascent to wholeness and perfection.
Had the Dome of the Rock simply been a political ploy or designed to score points against the dhimmis, however, it would never have won the hearts of the Muslim people. Instead, it became the archetype of all future Muslim shrines. When pilgrims and worshippers entered this building, they found that it perfectly symbolized the path that all must follow to find God.35 As such, the design may have been inspired by the new metaphysics of the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, who started to come to live in Jerusalem from a very early date. We have seen the importance of symbolism in Islam. Because God was incomparable, the Muslims would eventually forbid all figurative art in their places of worship, but the patterns and shapes of geometry were permitted, because they reflected the ideal world of the imagination. They pointed to the underlying structure of existence to which Muslims must attune themselves if they were to find the harmony, peace, and unity of God. In the Meccan Ḥaram, the square of the Kabah had led to the circle of the ṭawāf, reflecting the journey from earth to eternity. There was a similar pattern in the Jerusalem shrine. The Rock and its cave symbolize the earth, the origin and starting point of the quest. It is surrounded by an octagon, which, in Muslim thought, is the first step away from the fixity of the square. It thus marks the beginning of the ascent toward wholeness, perfection, and eternity, replicated by the perfect circle of the Dome.
The Dome itself, which would become such a feature of Muslim architecture, is a powerful symbol of the soaring ascent to heaven. But it also reflects the perfect balance of tawḥīd: its exterior, which reaches toward the infinity of the sky, is a perfect replica of its internal dimension. It illustrates the way the divine and the human, the inner and the outer worlds fit and complement one another as two halves of a single whole. The very colors of the shrine also convey a message. In Islamic art, blue, the color of the sky, suggests infinity, while gold is the color of knowledge, which in the Qurān is the faculty which brings Muslims an apprehension of God.
The Dome of the Rock had been built on the site of the first qiblah of the Muslims. The place was known to have been a spiritual “center”; in the cave underneath the Rock, Muslims pointed out the spots where Abraham, David, Solomon, and Elijah had prayed. Some could see Enoch’s footprint on the Rock, believing that he had ascended thence to heaven. This was one of the places where heaven and earth met; it had helped Muslims to start on their journey to God, and the symbolism of Abd al-Malik’s shrine delineated the process of that return to the ultimate reality, an ascent that was also, as the Sufis were discovering, a descent within. We have seen that the architecture of the Temple continued to shape the Jewish spirit long after the building itself was destroyed. Now the Dome of the Rock, the first major piece of Muslim architecture, had become a spiritual map for Muslims.
As such this basic design would often be used for the mausoleum of a man or woman who had been revered as a qutb, a link between heaven and earth. In its turn too, the Dome of the Rock had replicated the basic symbolism of Mecca. Yaqūbi’s story of the Dome’s being designed as a substitute for Mecca is almost certainly false, but it does at least reveal the kinship that Muslims felt between the two. At the very beginning of Muslim history, the first qiblah had, briefly, been a substitute for the Kabah. Both sites were seen as the Garden of Eden, the center of the earth, and were associated with Adam and with Abraham and the sacrifice of his son. This replication of the central holiness of Mecca in myth and in the architecture of other shrines was not slavish imitation. It was itself a symbol of that struggle for unity, the desire to restore all things to their original perfection by relating everything to the Source.
This became clear in the new traditions about the holiness of Jerusalem that had begun to circulate in the Islamic world by the end of the seventh century—some obviously influenced by the isrāīliyāt. Jews had always imagined the Temple as the source of the world’s fertility, and now Muslims proclaimed, “All sweet water originates from beneath the Rock.” The Last Judgment would take place in Jerusalem; God would defeat Gog and Magog there; the dead would arise and congregate in the Holy City on the Last Day. To die in Jerusalem was a special blessing: “He who chose to die in Jerusalem, has died as if in heaven.” All prophets longed to be buried there. Before his death, even “Adam commanded that he be brought to Jerusalem for burial.” It was said that Muḥammad’s friends had wanted to bring his body to be buried in Jerusalem, the resting-place of the prophets and the place of Resurrection. Jerusalem was the natural end of all holy men and holy objects: on the Last Day the Kabah itself would be brought to Jerusalem—a frequently recurring myth which shows how deeply fused the two were in the Muslim imagination.36
Caliph al-Walīd I, who succeeded Abd al-Malik in 705, continued to build up the holiness and majesty of the Ḥaram. In 709 he ordered the construction of a new mosque to replace Umar’s rough building, on the site of the present Mosque of al-Aqsā. Unlike the Dome of the Rock, this mosque has been frequently destroyed, rebuilt, and altered. Al-Walīd’s mosque was destroyed shortly afterward in an earthquake, and very little survived. We know that it had a marble pavement and columns; later it would be criticized as too long and narrow. The caliph also repaired Herod’s supporting walls and extended them upward, though he could not match the massive size of the Herodian stones. Around the walls of the platform, the caliph built colonnades, rather like the ones there today. Finally the old residential quarters in the immediate vicinity of the Ḥaram were cleared to make room for some magnificent imperial buildings. The gates at the southern end of the platform were rebuilt and a complex of public buildings erected, the most spectacular of which was a large palace, two stories high, with its rooms arranged around a central courtyard. The upper story was linked to the Ḥaram by a bridge leading directly into the new mosque. A series of other colonnaded buildings extended to the west and north, along the western supporting wall. There was a hostel for pilgrims, a bathhouse, a barracks, and other public structures. Finally the old Herodian bridge to the Ḥaram from the street known today as the Street of the Chain (Tariq al-Silsila) was reconstructed. This is the largest building complex the Umayyads ever built: did al-Walīd intend to make Jerusalem the capital of the Islamic empire?37
Certainly al-Walīd’s son Sulayman (715–17) was deeply drawn to Jerusalem and, Mūjīr al-Dīn says, “conceived the plan of living in Jerusalem and making it his capital and bringing together there great wealth and a considerable population.”38 Sulayman had been proclaimed caliph in the city, and delegations had come to the bayt al-maqdis to pledge loyalty. Like his namesake Solomon, Sulayman liked to receive the people on the Temple Mount sitting under a domed building near the Dome of the Rock, which was furnished with a carpet, cushions, and divans. Yet his plan of making Jerusalem his capital came to nothing. Jerusalem was too inconveniently situated to be the center of a huge empire. Sulayman recognized this when he built the new city of Ramleh, near Lydda, which became the administrative capital of the Jund Filasṭīn. It also drew much of the power and prosperity of Jerusalem away to the coast. It was probably impossible for the Umayyads to make a capital of a city which had such an overwhelming Christian majority. But this did not mean that they did not value Jerusalem, as has sometimes been argued. From the earliest times, Muslims had tended to keep their capital away from the holiest places of the region. Muḥammad did not move his capital from Medina to Mecca once he had conquered the city, though he left his followers in no doubt that Mecca was the more sacred place. The first caliphs had kept their capital at Medina, and a similar pattern can be seen in the choice of Ramleh over Jerusalem. Even the Jews, who had no doubts at all about the sanctity of Jerusalem, preferred to live in Ramleh: the Jewish community in the new city was always much larger than the one in Jerusalem.
By the middle of the eighth century, the empire was in turmoil. In 744, Caliph al-Walīd II was murdered and the tribes of both the Jund Filasṭīn and the Jund Urdunn rebelled against his son Yazid, and they continued to oppose his tolerant attitude to thedhimmislong after the revolt was suppressed. The rebellion continued in al-Sham against Marwān II, Yazīd’s successor, in the course of which the caliph destroyed the walls of Jerusalem, Hims, Damascus, and other cities as a precautionary measure. Jerusalem suffered more damage on 11 September 747 when an earthquake wrecked the city. The eastern and western sides of the Dome of the Rock came down, as did al-Walīd’s mosque, the Umayyad palace, and Justinian’s Nea Church. Many of the Muslims who lived near the Ḥaram were killed, and, fearing aftershocks, the inhabitants lived in the hills for nearly six weeks. The earthquake heralded the political collapse of the Umayyad dynasty. The descendants of Abbas, the uncle of Muḥammad, had long challenged the Umayyads from their base at Humayma in Transjordan. In 749 they joined forces with Abu Muslīm of Khurasan, who had managed to unite all the opponents of the caliphate into a single party. In January, Caliph Marwān II suffered his final defeat on the great Zab river, east of the Tigris, and shortly afterward the remaining Umayyads were slaughtered at Antipatris in Palestine. Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah became the first Abbasid caliph. But the Abbasids moved their capital to the new city of Baghdad, and this would have serious consequences in Jerusalem.