AL-QUDS

THE MUSLIMS had established a system that enabled Jews, Christians, and Muslims to live in Jerusalem together for the first time. Ever since the Jews had returned from exile in Babylon, monotheists had developed a vision of the city that had seen its sanctity as dependent upon the exclusion of outsiders. Muslims had a more inclusive notion of the sacred, however: the coexistence of the three religions of Abraham, each occupying its own district and worshipping at its own special shrines, reflected their vision of the continuity and harmony of all rightly guided religion, which could only derive from the one God. The experience of living together in a city that was sacred to all three faiths could have led monotheists to a better understanding of one another. Unfortunately, this was not to be. There was an inherent strain in the situation. For over six hundred years there had been tension between Jews and Christians, particularly regarding the status of Jerusalem. Each believed the other was in error, and living side by side in the Holy City did not improve matters. Some Muslims were also beginning to abandon the universal vision of the Qurān and to proclaim Islam the one true faith. Sufis and philosophers all tried to reassert the old ideal in their different ways, but an increasing number of Muslims began to take it for granted that Islam had superseded the older traditions. Once monotheism makes such exclusive assertions, coexistence becomes very difficult. Since each faith assumes that it—and it alone—is right, the proximity of others making the same claim becomes an implicit challenge that is hard to bear. As each of the three religions tried to assert a distinct identity and an inherent superiority, tension increased in the bayt al-maqdis during Abbasid rule.

One reason for the increased anxiety in the city was the caliphate’s decision to move to Baghdad, which became the new capital of the Islamic empire in 762. Jerusalem still had a symbolic importance for the Abbasid caliphs, but they were not ready to lavish as much money and attention on al-Sham and the bayt al-maqdis as their predecessors. Jerusalem had too many associations with Umayyad rule. Where the Umayyad caliphs had regularly visited the Holy City and were familiar figures about town, the Abbasids were remote celebrities, and a visit from any one of them was a major event, but at first the caliphs still found it necessary to visit Jerusalem as a symbol of their legitimacy. As soon as Caliph al-Mansur finally succeeded in establishing his rule in 757, he visited Jerusalem on his way home from the ḥajj. The city was in a sorry state. The Ḥaram and the Umayyad palace were still in ruins after the earthquake of 747. When the Muslims asked the caliph to restore al-Walīd’s mosque at the southern end of the Ḥaram, he simply replied that he had no money, but he suggested that the gold and silver plating of the Dome of the Rock be melted down to pay for the repairs. The Abbasids would not neglect the Ḥaram, but they would not adorn it as munificently as the Umayyads. No sooner had the mosque been restored than it was brought down again by yet another earthquake in 771. When Caliph al-Mahdi came to the throne (775–85), he gave orders that it be rebuilt and enlarged. This time all the provincial governors and the commanders of the local garrisons were told to foot the bill. The new mosque was far more substantial than the old and was still standing when Muqaddasī wrote his description of Jerusalem in 785. It had a beautiful dome and was now much wider than before: what remained of the Umayyad building stood “like a beauty spot in the midst of the new.”¹

The mosque was now called al-masjid al-aqsā, “the Remote Mosque”: it was now definitely identified with the Night Journey of Muḥammad, which had been briefly mentioned in the Qurān.² The first full account of the Prophet’s visionary experience in Jerusalem appears in the biography written by Muḥammad ibn Ishaq (d. 767), which tells how Muḥammad was conveyed miraculously from Mecca to the Temple Mount by Gabriel, the angel of Revelation; he then ascended through the seven heavens to the divine throne. Some Muslims interpret the story literally, and believe that Muḥammad journeyed physically to Jerusalem and ascended to heaven in the body. Others, including Āishah, the Prophet’s favorite wife, have always insisted that it was a purely spiritual experience. It was natural for Muslims to associate this flight to God with Jerusalem. Ever since the Dome of the Rock was completed in 691, the Ḥaram had been a powerful image of the archetypal spiritual ascent. Sufis were drawn irresistibly to thebayt al-maqdis. At about the time the Aqsā Mosque was being restored, the celebrated woman mystic Rabi a al-Adawiyya died in the city and was buried within sight of the Dome on the Mount of Olives. Abu Ishaq Ibrāhīm ibn Adham, one of the founders of Sufism, also came all the way from Khurusan to live in Jerusalem. The Sufis were teaching Muslims to explore the interior dimension of Islamic spirituality: the motif of return to the primal Unity is crucial in their understanding of the mystical quest, and Muḥammad’s Night Journey and mirāj became the paradigm of their own spiritual experience. They saw Muḥammad as losing himself in ecstasy before the divine throne. But this annihilation (fanā) was merely the prelude to his total recovery (baqā) of an enhanced and fulfilled humanity.

Sufis began to cluster around the Ḥaram: some even took up residence in the colonnaded porches around the borders of the platform, so that they could contemplate the symbolism of the Dome and the Rock from which Muḥammad had begun his ascent. Their presence could have been a beneficial influence in Jerusalem, since the Sufis developed an outstanding appreciation of the value of other faiths. While the jurists and clergy (ulamā) who were developing Islamic law tended to stress the exclusive claims of Islam, Sufis remained true to the universalism of the Qurān. It was quite common for a Sufi mystic to cry in ecstasy that he or she was neither a Jew, a Christian, nor a Muslim and was at home equally in a mosque, synagogue, church, or temple, because having experienced the loss of ego in fanā, he or she had transcended these man-made distinctions. Not all Muslims could reach these mystical heights, but they were deeply influenced by Sufi ideas; in some parts of the empire, Sufism would become the dominant Islamic piety, though in these early days it was regarded as rather marginal and dubious.

Now that Muḥammad was thought to have visited Jerusalem, the city was regarded as doubly holy. It had always been revered as the City of the Temple, a spiritual center of the earth, but it was now also associated with the Prophet, the Perfect Man, whose mystical flight (al-isrā) from Mecca to Jerusalem had reinforced the link between the two holy places. Muḥammad had, as it were, conveyed in his own person the primal sanctity of Mecca to the Distant Mosque in Jerusalem. Like that of Mecca and Medina, the sanctity of Jerusalem had been enhanced by the presence of the archetypal Man, who had provided a new link between heaven and earth. The story of Muḥammad’s mirāj made this quite clear. By this time, Muslims were beginning to see the life of the Prophet as a theophany. He had not been divine, of course, but his career had been an āyah, a symbol of God’s activity in the world and of the perfect human surrender to Allah. During the eighth and ninth centuries, scholars had begun to compile the collections of Muḥammad’s maxims (aḥādīth) and customary practice (sunnah). These formed the basis of Islamic Law (sharīah) and of each Muslim’s daily life. The sunnah taught Muslims to imitate the way Muḥammad spoke, ate, washed, loved, and worshipped so that in the smallest details of their lives they were participating in his perfect islām. The symbolic act of repetition linked Muslims with the eternal prototype: Muḥammad, who represented humanity as God had intended it to be.

A Muslim studying the Qurān, the word of God, in the Aqsā Mosque. Through such study Muslims make contact with the divine and learn how to surrender to God in the smallest details of their daily lives.

Few of the stories about Muḥammad’s life displayed his perfect surrender to God as eloquently as the mirāj from the Ḥaram in Jerusalem to the highest heaven. For Muslims it was an archetypal image of the return that all human beings had to make to the source of existence. Muslims who came to pray in Jerusalem thus evolved a symbolic way of imitating the external events of the isrā and the mirāj as a way of participating in the mystical flight of the Prophet. They hoped in this way to approximate to some degree his internal disposition of total surrender. Their new sunnah on the Ḥaram was not unlike the ritual processions of the Christians, which followed in the footsteps of Jesus around Jerusalem. During the eighth and ninth centuries—we are not sure exactly when—a number of small shrines and oratories began to appear on the Ḥaram. (See map.) Just north of the Dome of the Rock was the smaller Dome of the Prophet and the Station of Gabriel.³ These little shrines marked the places where Muḥammad and the angel had prayed with the other prophets before the golden ladder (al-mirāj) rose before them. Nearby was the Dome of the Mirāj, where the Prophet began his ascent to the divine throne. Muslims also liked to pray at the southern gate of the Ḥaram, which was now known as the Gate of the Prophet, because, it was said, Muḥammad had entered the city there with Gabriel walking ahead of him, illuminating the darkness with a light as strong as the sun. Then they would go to a place in the southwest corner of the Ḥaram where Burāq, Muḥammad’s heavenly steed, had been tethered after the journey from Mecca.

But other shrines on the Ḥaram recalled the presence of other prophets, and here again we can see Sufi influence. Muslim pilgrims to Jerusalem were being taught to honor the holy men and women who had lived, prayed, and suffered in the city before them. The Dome of the Chain, east of the Dome of the Rock, was said to be the place where King David had judged the Children of Israel. He had made use of a special chain of light, which possessed the faculty of unmasking liars. At the northern end of the Ḥaram was the Chair of Solomon, where the king had prayed after he finished building the Temple. Some of the gates of the Ḥaram were also associated with Jewish history: the Israelites had carried the Ark through the Gate of the Divine Presence (Bab al-akina) and prayed for forgiveness at the Gate of Repentance (Bab Hitta) on Yom Kippur. But Jerusalem was also the city of Jesus, and the Qurān tells a number of stories about his birth and childhood. It says that when Mary was pregnant, Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist, took care of her and that food was provided miraculously. When he was a baby, Jesus spoke prodigiously from his cradle; it was an early āyah of his prophethood.⁴ Now Muslim visitors to the Ḥaram would pray at the Oracle of Zakariyya in the northeastern corner of the platform and at two shrines in the vaults under the pavement: the Oratory of Mary (Mihrab Mariam) and the Cradle of Jesus (Mahd Isa). Finally, Muslims looked from the parapet to the Valley of Hinnom (Wadi Jahannum) and the Mount of Olives, which would be the scene of the Last Judgment and the Resurrection. They called the “Golden Gate” in the eastern wall of the Ḥaram the Gate of Mercy (Bab al-Rahma). This would be the dividing line between the blessed and the damned mentioned in the Qurān:⁵ after the Judgment, the Ḥaram would be paradise and the Valley of Hinnom hell. In the rooms over the gate, the Sufis had established a convent with a mosque, where they could meditate on the approaching end.

Caliph al-Hārūn al-Rashid (786–809) was the first Abbasid ruler who felt no compulsion to visit Jerusalem, even though he came several times to Syria on his return from the ḥajj. The Abbasids were beginning to free themselves from the holy city which had been so important to the hated Umayyads. Hārūn’s court at Baghdad was of legendary splendor and the scene of a great cultural florescence. But in fact the caliphate had begun its decline: Hārūn was not able to impose his rule effectively outside of the Iraq, and already local commanders were beginning to establish dynasties in other parts of the empire. They would usually rule in the name of the caliph but enjoyed a de facto independence. At this date, Palestine experienced the decay of the central government economically: under the Umayyads, the country had flourished, but now the Abbasids were beginning to exploit the region, to drain it of its wealth and resources. A plague also wiped out large numbers of the population, and the Bedouin began to invade the countryside, pillaging the towns and villages and fighting their own tribal wars on Palestinian territory. In Umayyad times, the Bedouin had fought for the caliphate; now, increasingly, they became the scourge of the country. The unrest led to the first signs of overt tension between the local Muslims and the Christians in Jerusalem. Bedouin attacked the Judaean monasteries, and the Christians on the Western Hill became aware that the economically deprived Muslims were beginning to resent their affluence. Their churches seemed to represent vast wealth, and in times of hardship Muslims would become enraged by stories of Christian treasure.

To the people of Jerusalem, Hārūn al-Rashid was a remote and unpopular figure, but to the Christians of Western Europe he was a benign personage who had recognized the worth of their own emperor. On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charles, King of the Franks, the Holy Roman Emperor of the West. The coronation was attended by monks from Jerusalem. The Byzantines refused to recognize Charles’s elevation: they were appalled at the idea of an illiterate barbarian assuming the imperial purple. Charles would have to look farther afield for allies, and, like his father, he made approaches to Baghdad. The people of the West were thrilled to have an emperor once again: it seemed that the obscurity and darkness that had fallen upon Europe after the collapse of Rome was finally beginning to lift. They called Charles “Charlemagne,” “Charles the Great,” and saw him as the king of a new Chosen People. His capital at Aachen was to be a New Jerusalem, and his throne there had been modeled upon the throne of King Solomon. Instinctively as they sought a new Western identity, the people of Europe reached out for the Holy City of Jerusalem, which had inspired them to make the long and arduous pilgrimage ever since the discovery of the Tomb of Christ. Charlemagne had already exchanged gifts with Caliph Hārūn, and the patriarch of Jerusalem had sent him a gift of relics and the keys of the Anastasis. The caliph was probably glad of a new foreign ally and allowed Charles to build a hospice in Jerusalem opposite the Anastasis, together with a church and a splendid library. Charles also commissioned a building in the Kidron Valley containing twelve rooms for pilgrims and with an estate of fields, vineyards, and a market garden. The new emperor had a base in Jerusalem: his new empire could be said to be rooted in the center of the earth.

In fact, Charles’s empire did not survive his death, but the people of Europe never forgot his brief renaissance nor his links with Jerusalem. Later historians and chroniclers claimed that the caliph had been so impressed by Charles that he had wanted to give him the whole of the Holy Land;⁶ others said that he had put Charles in charge of the Christians of Jerusalem. It became firmly established in the Western consciousness that even though Hārūn had not been able to give Palestine to Charles, he had made him the owner of the Anastasis. This holy place, therefore, belonged by rights to them.⁷ It was a belief that would surface perniciously three hundred years later at the time of the Crusades, when the West achieved another more permanent revival. But some of these imperial dreams could have been expressed by the European monks, priests, and nuns who came out to run Charles’s new establishments in Jerusalem. In 807 there were riots in the Nativity Church between Greeks and Latins. Eastern and Western Christians, who were developing very different interpretations of their religion, felt an instinctive doctrinal aversion to one another that led to violence in one of the holiest places in the Christian world. It was also the start of a long and disgraceful antagonism in Jerusalem.

For the Muslims, the new Latin buildings on the Western hill merely underlined the increasing power and wealth of the Christians of Jerusalem. Their own caliph seemed to be neglecting the holy city, whereas the Christian kings spared no expense in securing a foothold there. The Jacobites, a Syrian Monophysite sect, had also built a new monastery dedicated to Mary Magdalene just north of the Ḥaram. These were grim years in Palestine. From 809 to 813 there was civil war in the empire as Hārūn’s two sons fought over the succession. When that was settled by the accession of Caliph al-Mamūn, Jerusalem was shaken by yet another earthquake, which gravely damaged the dome of the Anastasis, and by a plague of locusts, which devastated the countryside and led to severe famine. The Muslims, whose quarters beside the Ḥaram were in the more unhealthy part of the town, were forced to leave Jerusalem for a few weeks. When they returned, they were furious to discover that Patriarch Thomas had seized the opportunity to repair the dome of the Anastasis, which was now nearly as big as the Dome of the Rock. The Muslim residents of the city complained bitterly to the imperial commander that the Christians had contravened Islamic law, which clearly stated that none of the dhimmis’places of worship should be higher than or as large as a mosque or other sacred building of the ummah.

This was a worrying new development, the sort of problem which would continually recur in Jerusalem. Construction had long been an ideological weapon in the city; since the time of Hadrian it had been a means of obliterating the tenancy of previous owners. Now buildings were becoming a way for the communities of Jerusalem to express their hostility toward one another. The Muslims had always felt edgy about the Christians’ magnificent churches in the bayt al-maqdis, but such display had been easier to bear in the Umayyad period, when the caliphs were willing to pour money into Islamic Jerusalem and into the country as a whole. But now that they were economically deprived and felt abandoned by the caliphate, Muslims found the size of the Anastasis dome intolerable. Islam had burst into Palestine as a confident religion, but a new insecurity had made the religious buildings, formerly symbols of transcendence, come to stand for their own imperiled identity. The Christians too had almost certainly intended the enlargement of their own dome as an aggressive statement of their own power and position in the city. They may have been conquered by Islam, but they would not long remain inferior dependents.

In the end a compromise was reached. The patriarch managed to escape a beating by pointing out that the burden lay with his accusers to prove that the old dome had been smaller than the new—a ruse actually suggested to him by a Muslim, whose family received a regular allowance from the grateful patriarchate for the next fifty years. Caliph al-Mamūn soothed Muslim feelings by ordering new building work on the Ḥaram: eastern and northern gates to the platform were constructed, and the Dome of the Rock was thoroughly refurbished. Al-Mamūn also took the opportunity to expunge the name of the Umayyad Abd al-Malik from the principal inscription, replacing it with his own, though he had the sense not to change the date. In 832 the caliph issued new coins bearing the words “al-Quds”: “the Holy,” the new Muslim name for Jerusalem.

But the Christians continued to use their religious symbols to undermine Muslim confidence. In the early ninth century, we read for the first time of the annual ceremony of the Holy Fire in the Anastasis on the evening before Easter Sunday. Crowds gathered expectantly in the Rotunda and the Martyrium, which were both in total darkness. The patriarch then intoned the usual evening prayers from behind the tomb, and then suddenly, as if from heaven, a clear white flame appeared within the shrine. Immediately the congregation, who had been waiting in a tense, strained silence, burst into noisy, exultant jubilation. They yelled sacred texts at the tops of their voices, waved their crucifixes in the air, and shrieked with joy. The patriarch passed the flame to the Muslim governor, who always attended the ceremony, and then to the crowds, who had brought their own candles with them. Then they dispersed, carrying the holy fire to their own homes and shouting “Hasten to the religion of the Cross!” as they stormed through the streets. The event seemed to disturb the Muslims, who are our major source of information about the ceremony at this early stage. Each year the governor had to write a report to the caliph, and on one occasion in 947, Baghdad officials actually tried to stop it, reprimanding the patriarch for the “magic ritual” and claiming that “you have filled all Syria with your Christian religion and you have destroyed our customs.”⁸ The Muslims tried to discount the apparent “miracle” as a sordid trick, and everybody had his own theory as to how it was done. But they could not quite convince themselves that there was nothing in it. They were appalled by the unrestrained joy of the crowds, whose “abominations,” according to Mūjīr ad-Dīn, “make one shudder with horror.”⁹ The sober worship of Islam had nothing comparable, and for these few tumultuous hours the ceremony seemed to blot out the Muslim presence in Jerusalem in a way that fed Muslim anxiety during this difficult time. Each year the Christians seemed to prove the superiority of their faith, and the Muslims could not entirely dismiss this demonstration.

The decline of Abbasid power meant that the imperial authorities found it increasingly difficult to keep order in Palestine. In 841 all the inhabitants of Jerusalem—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—fled in panic from the city during a peasants’ revolt, whose leader, Tamim Abu Harb, claimed to be restoring Umayyad rule. He and his followers plundered the city, attacking mosques and churches. The Anastasis escaped total destruction only because of a large bribe offered by the patriarch. It was thus a relief when in 868 the local Turkish commander, Aḥmad ibn Tulun, seized power in Egypt and established an independent state there, which also controlled Syria and Palestine. He was able to restore law and order, the economy improved, and trade picked up. Ibn Tulun was particularlygracious to the dhimmis. He appointed a Christian governor in Jerusalem and restored the churches which had been damaged and fallen into disrepair. He also allowed a new Jewish sect to establish itself in Jerusalem.

Daniel al-Qumusi emigrated from Khurasan to Jerusalem with a small band of companions in about 880. They were members of the obscure sect of the Karaites, Jews who rejected the Talmud and based their lives entirely on the Bible. Once they arrived in Jerusalem, however, Daniel gave Karaism an entirely new messianic dimension. In Palestine he came across documents belonging to the Qumran sect, which had recently been unearthed by a dog belonging to the Bedouin. These ninth-century Dead Sea Scrolls convinced Daniel that the exile of the Jews would shortly end. If Jews left their comfortable homes in the Diaspora and settled in sufficient numbers in Jerusalem, they would hasten the coming of the Messiah. Christians and Muslims from all parts of the world came to Jerusalem; why could Jews not do the same? Each Diaspora community should send at least five settlers to swell the Jewish presence in the Holy City. Sahl ibn Masliah, Daniel’s disciple, painted a poignant picture of Jerusalem as a city yearning for its true sons. Neglecting the city was almost equivalent to abandoning God himself: “Gather ye to the Holy City and gather in your brethren,” he pleaded in his texts and letters, “for at present you are a nation which does not long for its Father in Heaven.”¹⁰

The propaganda of Daniel and Sahl bore fruit, and Karaites began to arrive in Jerusalem. Ibn Tulun allowed them to establish a separate quarter for themselves outside the city walls, on the eastern slope of the Ophel. Since Karaites did not observe the laws of the Talmud regarding food and purity, they could not live with the “Rabbanates,” as they called the majority of Jews who accepted the authority of the rabbis. They also practiced an asceticism that was unusual in Judaism, dressing in sackcloth and, in Jerusalem, refraining from meat. They built a cheese factory for themselves on the Mount of Olives. Jews had wept over their ruined Temple on the Ninth of Av for centuries, but the Karaites made this lamentation a way of life. They organized continuous prayer shifts at the city gates, when they would bewail the “desolation” of their holy city in Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic. They believed that the prayers of the Mourners of Zion, as they were called, would force God to send the Messiah and rebuild Jerusalem as a wholly Jewish city. The Rabbanates looked askance at these rituals. They had become very wary of all forms of messianism, which had time and again been the cause of tragedy and unacceptable loss of Jewish life. They believed that God would send the Redemption in his own good time and that it was blasphemous to try to hasten it. Indeed, some rabbis went so far as to forbid Jews to make the aliyah to Jerusalem in the hope of bringing the Messiah.

Tulunid rule came to an end in 904, when the Abbasids regained control of Palestine. But they could not hold on to it for long. In 935, Muḥammad ibn Tugh, a Turk from central Asia, seized control of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, ruling nominally in the name of the Caliph of Baghdad but enjoying a complete de facto autonomy. He and his successors assumed the Asian royal title ikhshid. Other dynasties were also rising to power in other parts of the empire, with the result that Palestine was often a battleground for these competing dynasts in their endless struggle for power. To make matters worse, the Greek emperors of Byzantium had seized the opportunity offered by the manifest disorder in the Muslim empire to declare a holy war against Islam. During the tenth century, the Byzantines recovered territory in Cilicia, Tarsus, and Cyprus with the avowed aim of recovering Jerusalem for the true faith.

Inevitably these Greek victories led to a further deterioration of Muslim-Christian relations in Jerusalem. Usually Muslims were able to accept the Christian majority in al-Quds. There was occasional trouble and a residual unease, centering on such matters as the Holy Fire, but they recognized the Christian claim to the city and assumed that there would always be a Christian presence in al-Quds. At the height of his war with Byzantium, the ikhshid was able to write to the Christian emperor reminding him that Jerusalem was holy to both faiths. It was

the sacred land, in which there are the Aqsā Mosque and the Christian Patriarch. Jews and Christians make pilgrimages there; it is where the Messiah and his mother were born; and it is the place where the Sepulchres of the two are found.¹¹

Muslims took part in Christian festivals in a secular way. At Enkainia they celebrated the beginning of the grape harvest; the feast of St. George was the day to sow new seed. The festival of St. Barbara marked the onset of the rainy season. Muslims accepted the fact that Christians were there to stay. But when the Greeks began their holy war and there was bellicose talk about the liberation of Jerusalem, the tension became unbearable. In 938, Christians were attacked during their Palm Sunday procession and the Muslims set fire to the gates of the Martyrium. Both the Anastasis and the Golgotha Chapel were badly damaged. In 966, after a fresh spate of Byzantine victories, Patriarch John IV urged the emperor to proceed immediately to the reconquest of Jerusalem. At once Muslims and Jews attacked the Anastasis, set fire to the roof of the Martyrium, and looted the Basilica of Holy Sion. The patriarch was dragged from the oil vat where he had been cowering during the riot and was burned at the stake.

The ikhshid had tried to prevent these hostilities. As soon as John issued his unwise plea to the emperor, troops had been dispatched from Cairo to protect the patriarch. Afterward the ikhshid apologized to the emperor for the damage to the churches and offered to rebuild them himself at his own expense. The emperor curtly refused: he would rebuild the holy city himself—with the sword. It was a vicious circle: Greek victories led to reprisals against the Christians, and this “persecution” only fueled the Byzantine holy war effort.¹² It was natural that the Muslims would become defensive about al-Quds: they did not imagine that, in the event of a Greek victory, the Christians would deal as magnanimously with its inhabitants as Umar. For the first time they began to look farther afield than the Ḥaram and built a new mosque on the Western Hill near the Anastasis, which they dedicated to the Caliph Umar. It was the first Muslim building in Christian Jerusalem. Situated provocatively close to their holiest place, the mosque reminded Christians who were the real rulers of Jerusalem and, perhaps, also reminded Muslims of Umar’s courteous behavior in the Anastasis—a far cry from their own in recent years.

The ikhshids were ejected from Palestine, first by the Shii sect of the Qarmatis and then by the Shii Fatimids of Tunisia, who conquered Ramleh in May 970. For the next thirteen years, the countryside of Palestine was laid waste in a series of campaigns in which Fatimids, Qarmatis, Bedouin, and Abbasid troops all fought one another for the control of the region. Eventually the Fatimids were able to establish their own rival Shii caliphate in 983, moving their capital from Kairouan to Cairo. An uneasy peace settled on the country. The Arab tribes frequently rebelled, but the Jews gave the Fatimids unqualified support. The caliph signed a truce with Byzantium, and arrangements were made to restore the Anastasis and the Martyrium, which had been without a roof since 966. This truce put the Christians in a stronger position, and the tension in the city abated.

Yet an undercurrent of unease remained. When the local geographer Muqaddasī wrote his description of Jerusalem in 985, he saw it as a city of dhimmis: “everywhere the Jews and the Christians have the upper hand.”¹³ The Christians were the most privileged people in Jerusalem: they were much richer than the Jews and more literate than the Muslims. Muqaddasī was intensely proud of his city. There was no building to rival the Dome of the Rock anywhere else in the Muslim world; the climate was perfect, the markets clean and beautifully appointed, the grapes enormous, and the inhabitants paragons of virtue. Not a single brothel could be found in Jerusalem, and there was no drunkenness. But Muqaddasī did not paint an entirely glowing picture. The public baths were filthy, food expensive, taxes heavy, and the Christians rude. He was particularly worried about the decline of intellectual stimulus in Jerusalem. Hitherto, great Muslim scholars, such as al-Shafii, founder of one of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, had often come to visit Jerusalem, drawn by the holiness of the city. Now that the Shii Fatimids were in power, the number of visitors from the Sunni world had understandably declined. The Fatimids had established a study center (dār alilm) to propagate Shiite ideals: they had dreams of conquering the whole Islamic world and probably clamped down on the public teaching of the Sunnah. Muqaddasī complained of the Fatimid controls: there were guards at every gate and tight curbs on trade. Above all, there was a lack of scholarly debate. There were very few reputable ulamā in the city: “Jurists [fuqahā] remain unvisited, and erudite men have no renown; also the schools are unattended for there are no lectures.”¹⁴ True, there was not an entire dearth of scholarship: the Qurān readers had their circles in the city, the Hanifah law school had a study group in the Aqsā Mosque, and Sufis met in their hostels [khawāniq]. But such learning as there was tended to be conservative and defensive, adopting the most literal interpretation of the Qurān, possibly as a reaction against what Muqaddasī called the “peculiar customs” of the Shiah.¹⁵ Muqaddasī had traveled widely and missed in his own city the easy exchange of views that was the norm in other parts of the Islamic world.

In October 996, the Fatimid caliph al-Aziz died in Cairo and was succeeded by his son al-Hākim, a pious, austere man who was passionately committed to the Shii ideal of social justice. Yet he was of a troubled disposition, given to outbursts of fanatical rage and cruelty. His mother had been a Christian, and it is likely that many of the caliph’s problems sprang from a conflicted identity. At first the caliph’s evident sympathy with the Christians boded well for the Christians of Jerusalem. Al-Hākim appointed his uncle Orestes patriarch and appeared to desire close personal links with the community there. In 1001 he concluded a further truce with Emperor Basil II of Byzantium, which made a great impression on his contemporaries. It seemed as though Islam and Christianity were about to enter a new era of friendship and peace.

Then, out of the blue in 1003, the caliph ordered the destruction of St. Mark’s Church in Fustat, which, he claimed, had been built without permission in flagrant contravention of Islamic law. In its place, al-Hākim built the Mosque of al-Rashida, enlarging it during the construction so that it covered the nearby Jewish and Christian cemeteries. There followed ordinances ordering further confiscation of Christian property in Egypt, the burning of crosses, and the building of small mosques on the roofs of churches. The caliph was also disturbed by rumors of trouble in Palestine: it was said that the Christians and Byzantines had been behind recent Bedouin raids there, which threatened to escalate into full-blown revolution. Everything came to a head one Easter when the caliph noticed a large group of Coptic Christians setting off to Jerusalem “with a great and offensive display.” They looked like ḥajjis en route to Mecca. He asked Qutekin al-Adudi, the Shii propagandist, what was happening and heard about the immense riches of the Anastasis Church. At Easter vast numbers of Christians of the highest rank went to pray there. Even the Byzantine emperors were said to have visited Jerusalem incognito: “they carry there immense sums of silver, vestments, dyed cloths and tapestries … and over the course of a long period a considerable number of objects of immense value have been amassed.”¹⁶ All the pent-up envy of the Christians, fear of their powerful contacts abroad, and worry about the Christian challenge to the Muslim faith can be discerned here. Worst of all, al-Adudi told the caliph, was the ceremony of the Holy Fire, a trick “that made a great impression on [Muslim] spirits and introduces confusion in their hearts.”¹⁷

This account certainly introduced panic into the already confused heart of al-Hākim. In September 1009, the caliph gave orders that both the Anastasis and the Martyrium of Constantine be razed to the ground. Even the foundations of the churches and chapels must be uprooted. Yarukh, the Fatimid governor of Ramleh, carried out the work with deadly thoroughness. All the buildings on the site of Golgotha were torn down, except for a few portions of the Rotunda which, explained the Christian historian Yahya ibn Saīd, “proved too difficult to demolish.”¹⁸ These fragments have survived and been incorporated into the present building. The tomb, its shrine, and the rock of Golgotha were hacked to pieces with pickaxes and hammers and the ground leveled off, though, Yahya hinted, a small fragment of the tomb remained behind. All the rest of the stone was carried out of the city. It was an entirely uncharacteristic act by an Islamic ruler and filled even the caliph’s Muslim subjects with unease. Next new legislation introduced measures designed to separate the dhimmis from the ummah and force them to convert to Islam. Christians had to wear heavy crosses around their necks and Jews a large block of wood. In 1011 the Jews of Fustat were stoned as they followed a funeral cortège. The synagogue in Jerusalem was desecrated and its scrolls burned. Many dhimmis were terrorized into accepting Islam; others held firm, though some Christians took the option of escaping over the border into Byzantium.

The next people to suffer from the caliph’s dementia were the Muslims. In 1016, al-Hākim declared that he was an incarnation of the divinity and had been sent to bring a new revelation to the human race. He substituted his own name for that of God in the Friday prayers. This naturally appalled Muslims throughout the Islamic world. There were riots in Cairo, and since Muslims were inevitably more incensed about this blasphemy than Christians, al-Hākim turned his wrath upon them. In 1017 the decrees against Christians and Jews were revoked and the Christians had their property restored to them. Muslims, on the other hand, were forbidden to fast during Ramadan or to make the ḥajj. Those who disobeyed were horribly tortured. The caliph seemed to glide through these violent events in a dream of his own: he wandered through the streets of Cairo unnoticed during the riots, unmolested by the angry mob. One night in 1021 he simply rode out of Cairo alone into the desert and was never seen again.

The mad caliph had left Christian Jerusalem in ruins: somehow a new shrine would have to be built over what was left of the tomb and the Golgotha rock. In 1023, Sitt al-Mulk, al-Hākim’s sister, sent Patriarch Nicephorus of Jerusalem to Constantinople to report on the situation. But the following year, the Bedouin tribe of Jarrah rose against the Fatimids yet again, seized control of the roads in Palestine, and systematically laid waste to the countryside. Conditions were so bad in Jerusalem that there could be no thought of building. The position of the Jews was particularly desperate. During the tenth century, the Jewish community of Jerusalem had slightly increased when refugees fleeing disturbances that had broken out in Baghdad and North Africa during the 940s settled in Palestine. Most of the new immigrants preferred to live in Ramleh or Tiberias, however. Jerusalem, one of them wrote, is a town that had been “cursed.… its provisions are brought from afar and its sources of livelihood are limited. Many come there rich and there become poverty-stricken and depressed.”¹⁹ The Christians held the most affluent and prestigious positions: Jews worked as bankers, dyers, and tanners,²⁰ though there was little work to be had. Nevertheless, despite these problems, the Jews had moved their governing body from Tiberias to Jerusalem during the tenth century, so that Jerusalem was once again the administrative capital of Palestinian Jewry. Despite their sufferings under al-Hākim, the Jews remained staunchly supportive of the Fatimid government. For their loyalty during the Bedouin rebellion of 1024 they were rewarded by merciless taxation. Many Jews went to prison because they could not pay their debts. There was starvation and destitution, and many Jews died. Others were “empty, naked, sad, poor,” wrote Solomon Ha-Kohn, the gaon, or head, of the governing council. “Nothing remained to a man in his house, even a garment for himself or houseware.”²¹ The suffering continued. Other Bedouin invaded Palestine from the north and the Fatimid caliph al-Zahīr did not regain control of the country until 1029. To strengthen his position, he made a new treaty with Byzantium, promising that the Christians would be allowed to rebuild the Anastasis. The year 1030 was the first peaceful year that Palestine had enjoyed for almost a century. The Turkish governor al-Dizbiri immediately began the task of bringing order to the shattered country.

Muslims had their own rebuilding to do in Jerusalem. In 1017 the Dome of the Rock had collapsed, and, possibly as part of a fund-raising campaign, the Muslim scholar al-Wasiti published the first anthology of Traditions in Praise of Jerusalem (fadāil al-quds). Now the various maxims (aḥādīth) about Jerusalem attributed to the Prophet, caliphs, and sages, which had been circulating in the Islamic world since the Umayyad period, could be read in one volume. There had been much tension in the holy city, and, most recently, the disaster of al-Hākim’s persecution had made all three faiths defensive, but al-Wasiti’s collection was faithful to the old Muslim ideal of integration. Many of the maxims quoted come from the isrāīliyāt and others recalled the presence of the prophet Jesus in Jerusalem. Al-Quds was still acknowledged to be sacred to all the children of Abraham. We can also see how indissolubly Jerusalem had been fused imaginatively with Mecca and Medina. Al-Wasiti, for example, attributes this ḥadīth to the Prophet:

Mecca is the city that Allah exalted and sanctified and created and surrounded by angels one thousand years before creating anything else on earth. Then he joined it with Medina and united Medina to Jerusalem and only a thousand years later he created [the rest of the world] in a single act.²²

On the Last Day, paradise would be established in Jerusalem like a bride, and the Kabah and the Black Stone would also come from Mecca to al-Quds, which was the ultimate destination of the whole of humanity.²³ Indeed, the two cities of Mecca and Jerusalem were already physically connected in local lore. During the month of the ḥajj to Mecca, on the night when the pilgrims stood in vigil on the plain of Arafat, it was said that the water from the holy well of Zamzam, near the Kabah, came underground to the Pool of Siloam. On that night the Muslims of Jerusalem held a special festival there. The legend was a picturesque way of expressing the belief that the holiness of Jerusalem was derived from the primal sanctity of Mecca, a process that would be illustrated at the End of Time when the holiness of Mecca would be transferred to al-Quds for all eternity. When that final integration took place, there would be paradise on earth.

The local people certainly felt that Mecca and Jerusalem shared the same sanctity. It was probably during the early eleventh century that Muslims who could not make the ḥajj to Mecca would gather in Jerusalem during the days of the pilgrimage. On the night when the ḥajjis stood in vigil on the plain of Arafat, just outside Mecca, crowds of country people and Jerusalemites would gather on the Ḥaram platform and in the Aqsā Mosque facing Mecca, standing all night and praying in loud voices as though they were in Arafat. On the Eid al-Adha, the last day of the ḥajj, they would perform the customary sacrifice on the Ḥaram—again, as if they were in Mecca. Some ḥajjis liked to combine their pilgrimage with a pious visit (ziyārah) to Jerusalem, putting on there the special white robes traditionally worn for the ḥajj and entering the required state of ritual purity. Some Muslims objected to this innovation. There were traditions which had the Prophet actually advising his followers against going to Jerusalem. But though some of the more exuberant expressions of the devotion to al-Quds were frowned upon in certain circles, it was generally accepted that it was one of the three holy cities of Islam. Muḥammad says in this most famous ḥadīth: “You shall only set out to three mosques, the Ḥaram mosque [in Mecca], my mosque [in Medina], and the Aqsā mosque.”

Governor al-Dizbiri began the restoration of the Dome of the Rock immediately, spurred on by Caliph al-Zahīr, who was especially interested in the Ḥaram. The wooden beams that were inserted to support the Dome at this time are still in place today. But then, alas, yet again disaster struck. Palestine was hit by an especially violent earthquake on 5 December 1033. Fortunately it happened before sundown, so not many people were in their homes. It was days before anybody dared to go indoors, and the population camped in the hills surrounding the city. A whole new building program was needed. The supporting walls of the Ḥaram had to be repaired, and al-Zahīr ordered work to begin on a new city wall, a project which continued for over a generation. The Aqsā Mosque had been badly damaged in the quake: all fifteen of the aisles north of its dome had been destroyed. Work began at once, and the new mosque was complete when the Persian traveler Nasir-i-Khusraw visited Jerusalem in 1047. The mosque was now much narrower: the damaged aisles had been replaced by a nave, spanned by seven arches. Nasir described with admiration the beautiful carpets, the marble flags, the 280 marble columns, and the exquisite enamelwork on the Dome.

Today huge crowds of Muslims assemble on the Ḥaram every Friday afternoon—not simply during the month of the ḥajj—for communal prayers.

By the mid-eleventh century, Jerusalem seemed to have made a valiant recovery. Nasir suggests that there were about 20,000 families living in the city, which would put the overall population at about 100,000. He was impressed by Jerusalem’s excellent markets and high buildings. Each craft had its own sūq, the town had many excellent craftsmen, and goods were plentiful and cheap. Nasir also mentioned a large hospital, generously endowed, where medicine was taught, and two Sufi hostels (khawāniq) beside the mosque where they lived and prayed. One congregation of Sufis had made an oratory in the cloister beside the northern wall of the Ḥaram. Nasir walked meditatively around the shrines and oratories on the Ḥaram platform, going from one “station” to another and recalling the prayers and strivings of the prophets. He imagined the Prophet Muḥammad praying beside the Rock before his mirāj, laying his hand upon it so that the Rock rose up to meet him, creating the cave beneath. He also communed with the other prophets, thinking especially of King David at the Gate of Repentance and asking for forgiveness for himself. He prostrated himself in prayer at the Cradle of Jesus. As in the Christian holy places, the prophets had left a physical impression behind them. Nasir contemplated the marks that Mary had made when she gripped the marble columns during her labor and—somewhat cautiously—reported that the footsteps of Abraham and Isaac could be seen on the Rock itself.

Nasir was also able to visit the new Anastasis Church, which was completed in 1048 with funds donated by Emperor Constantine IX Monomarchus. Nasir found it extremely beautiful and was quite fascinated by the paintings and mosaics depicting Jesus, the prophets, and the Last Judgment, since he was unaccustomed to figural art in places of worship. The new church was very different from the Constantinian buildings. No attempt had been made to rebuild the Martyrium, and there was now just a field full of stones, broken columns, and masonry in the place where the basilica had been. The new church around the tomb was built on the remains of the Rotunda which had escaped al-Hākim’s demolition team. Monomarchus’s new building transformed the former Roman mausoleum. The builders added an upper story and an apse, linked to the Rotunda by a great arch. (See diagram.) There had always been a courtyard in front of the Anastasis, and now this was enlarged to include the remains of Golgotha in the southeast corner and the Chapel of Adam behind it. New chapels dedicated to St. John, the Trinity, and St. James were added to the old baptistery wing, and on the Golgotha side of the courtyard were chapels connected with various incidents of the Passion.

Nasir had felt no tension when he visited the new church. He was able to walk in freely and obviously felt quite at home with the pictures of familiar prophets, such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. But the Christians had not been able to forget the distress and destruction they had experienced during the past century and still felt vulnerable. In 1055, while the new city walls were under construction, the governor told the Christians that they would have to finance the wall in their own part of town. Since they had no means of paying, they turned to Constantine IX, who eagerly Seized the chance of intervening in the life of the Holy City. After negotiations with the caliph, it was agreed that Constantine would provide the money for the new wall on condition that only the Christians would reside in that part of the city. Thus by 1063 the Christians of Jerusalem had their own exclusive quarter. It was bounded by the outside wall from the Citadel at the western gate of the city to the northern gate. Internally, the boundary ran along the old Cardo Maximus until the intersection leading back to the Citadel. Thanks to Constantine IX, they now had “no other judge or lord than the Patriarch.”²⁴ The Byzantines had managed to achieve a protectorate of sorts, a Christian enclave that was separate from the Muslim city and backed by a foreign power. One of the buildings in what was now known as the “Patriarch’s Quarter” was the Hospital of St. John the Almoner, which was built at about this time on the site of Charlemagne’s old hospice by the people of Amalfi in Italy. The people of Western Europe were making another attempt to recover from the chaos of the Dark Ages. Merchants from the Italian cities had started to trade with the East, and since the Amalfitans had come to play a key role in Fatimid commerce, they easily got permission from the caliph to build a monastery for Italian Benedictine monks which offered accommodation to pilgrims from their city.

Other newcomers to Jerusalem were the Armenians. Like the Europeans, they had been coming to visit the Holy City ever since the fourth century. Many had stayed on as monks and ascetics. Now they brought the new church on Mount Sion, which had been built in the 1030s by the Georgian monk Prochore at the same time as he built the Monastery of the Cross outside the city walls. The Armenians acquired the Sion church from the Georgians some forty years later and made it their cathedral. It was dedicated to St. James (or “Surp Hagop,” as he was called in Armenian). In its main shrine, the Kilkhateer, was the head of James the “Pillar,” the apostle of Jesus who had been beheaded in Jerusalem in about 42 CE. Under the high altar was the tomb of James the Tzaddik, the first “bishop” of Jerusalem, who had long been venerated by Christians on Mount Sion. Once they were installed, the Armenian monks gradually began to build a convent for their patriarch and the Brotherhood of St. James, which included priests, bishops, and deacons. Over the centuries, the Armenian patriarchs patiently bought land and houses adjoining the convent buildings until they eventually owned an almost unbroken ring of properties in the southwest corner of the city. When Armenian pilgrims decided to stay in Jerusalem, they were assigned a house in the developing Armenian quarter and became part of a permanent secular community supporting the brotherhood. They became known as the kaghakatsi, inhabitants of Jerusalem, and adopted the city as their own. For their parish church, they were assigned the Chapel of the Holy Archangels (Hristagabed) near the center of the convent, which was thought to be on the site of the house of Annas, the priest who had helped Caiaphas to condemn Jesus to death. In its courtyard, there was an ancient olive tree where Jesus was supposed to have been tied. Gradually the kaghakatsi came to form a sizable and separate community. The Armenians were Monophysites, but, unlike the Greek Orthodox and the Latin Catholics, they did not receive converts, so they remained ethnically distinct. By the end of the nineteenth century, there would be about a thousand kaghakatsi, and the Armenian Quarter would comprise a tenth of the whole city of Jerusalem.

More and more pilgrims were flocking to Jerusalem during the eleventh century. The influx was particularly noticeable from Western Europe, where pilgrimage was promoted by the reforming monks of the Abbey of Cluny in Burgundy as a way of instructing the laity in true Christian values. In the millennial year 1000, according to the Burgundian annalist Raoul Glaber, an “immeasurable multitude” of nobles and common folk took to the road, determined to reach Jerusalem: they came from Italy, Gaul, Hungary, and Germany and were largely inspired by apocalyptic ideas.²⁵ People recalled the old prophecies, dating from the late Roman period, which had foretold that before the End of Days an emperor from the West would be crowned in Jerusalem and would fight the Antichrist there. The Book of Revelation indicated that this final battle would take place a thousand years after Christ’s victory over Satan,²⁶ so in the year 1000, pilgrims congregated in Jerusalem to witness the Second Coming. Like the Karaites, they probably believed that their presence in the Holy City would force God to send down the New Jerusalem and a better world order. When the End of Days failed to occur, people began to wonder whether 1033, the thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion, was a more appropriate date; there was severe famine in Europe that year, and, Glaber tells us, many people imagined that this catastrophe heralded the Last Days. First the peasants, then the established classes of society, and finally the rich nobles began “to stream towards the Saviour’s Tomb in Jerusalem.” Glaber was convinced that never before had the Holy City witnessed such a press of people, and the pilgrims were convinced that this “presaged nothing else than the coming of the miserable Antichrist, which must indicate the coming end of the world.”²⁷ There was a desperation in the Christianity of Western Europe, as people struggled out of the long period of barbarism and disorder toward Jerusalem, an emblem of salvation.

The great Western pilgrimage of 1064 was very different. Led by Arnold, bishop of Bamberg, these crowds of pilgrims were not traveling in holy poverty. Life in Europe had improved, and the German grandees flaunted their wealth and magnificence proudly—and rashly. The Bedouin tribes were always on the lookout for pilgrim bands, knowing that even the humblest might have gold pieces sewn into their rough cloaks. The spendor of the German pilgrimage was an open invitation: tribes attacked the pilgrims, who died in droves almost within sight of the Holy City. Every thirty years or so, there had been a huge mass pilgrimage from Europe. As the century drew to a close, it was time for another of these Western expeditions, but the pilgrims who arrived in the Holy City in 1099 would come with a sword, prepared not only to defend themselves but to fight and kill.

Jewish pilgrims and settlers were also inspired to make the aliyah to Jerusalem, and, like the Christians, were often impelled by catastrophe at home. When the nomadic Berbers invaded Kairouan during the 1050s, Jews and Muslims both migrated to Palestine to escape the devastation; other immigrants arrived from Spain in flight from penury and starvation. Some of these Jewish “Maghribis,” as these Westerners were called, settled in the Holy City, but the hard conditions there made them homesick for their homes at the other end of the Islamic world. Joseph ha-Kohn described the lot of Jerusalem’s Jews, “eaten by the swallowers … devoured by the insolent … the poor, the destitute, squeezed and mortgaged.” The presence of Christians and Muslims was intolerable. As if life were not bad enough, Jews had to listen to “the noise of the Edom [Christian] masses” during their pilgrimages and “the five-fold mendacious voice [of the Muslim muezzin] which never stops.”²⁸ Since the Jerusalem community was entirely dependent on alms from Fustat and Ramleh, any plague or drought there meant that they went hungry.

Yet despite these hardships, Jewish pilgrims continued to make the journey to Jerusalem, especially during the month of Tishri, when they would gather there to celebrate Sukkoth, coming from as far away as Khurasan. They had developed their own rituals for this messianic festival. First pilgrims and residents would circle the city walls, praying at the Ḥaram gates as of old. Then they would climb the Mount of Olives, singing psalms as they made the ascent. There, wrote the gaon Solomon ben Judah, they would stand “facing the Temple of God on the holidays, the place of the Divine Presence, his strength and his footstool.”²⁹ Despite the melancholy sight of the Temple Mount covered with Muslim shrines, these enormous Jewish rallies on the Mount of Olives were convivial and joyous. Jews would greet one another warmly and embrace with emotion. They liked to gather around a large stone on the mountain which was thought to mark the spot where the Shekhinah had rested when leaving Jerusalem. Here the Jerusalem Gaon would preach his annual sermon. Unfortunately a sectarian hostility clouded the friendliness of this gathering: the gaon would take out a Torah scroll and solemnly excommunicate the Karaites, who had their own camp on the mountain opposite the Rabbanates. This excommunication nearly always led to serious quarreling and even to unseemly brawling, and Gaon Solomon, a peaceable man, wanted to abolish the custom. The Muslim authorities also insisted that the excommunications cease, maintaining that Rabbanates and Karaites both had the right to practice their faith as they saw fit.

The Fatimid occupation of Jerusalem had been a mixed blessing for the city. Soon the inhabitants had to face a new enemy from the north. In about 1055, Turkish tribes, recent converts to Sunni Islam, took control of northern Syria in the name of the Abbasid caliph and the Sunnah. They were gifted administrators and excellent soldiers. Because the Seljuk family played a key role in these campaigns, these Turkomans (“Noble Turks”) are often called Seljuks, though not all their leaders were members of this family. In 1071, the Turkish leader Alp Asian smashed through the defense lines of the Byzantines at Manzikurt in Armenia, and soon the Turks had overrun most of Asia Minor. Meanwhile, Atsiz ibn Abaq led the holy war against the Shiites, invading Palestine, conquering Ramleh, and laying siege to Jerusalem. The city surrendered in June 1073, and the inhabitants were amazed at the restraint of the conquerors. Atsiz had issued an amnesty for all the people of Jerusalem, and he ordered his men not to touch anything and not to plunder the great wealth in the city. He even appointed guards to protect the churches and mosques. The Fatimid garrison—composed of Turks, Sudanese, and Berbers—remained in the city; the Turks went over to the Seljuks, and the others stayed on as private citizens.

The Turkish occupation meant that Jerusalem was now back in the Sunni sphere. Scholars began to return to Jerusalem, and the city enjoyed a renaissance after the Fatimid repression of intellectual life. Turkoman rule brought prosperity to the city. In 1089 a new mosque was built, and two of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, the Shafi’i and the Hanafi, founded establishments in the city. The Turks rebuilt the old church commemorating the birthplace of the Virgin Mary beside the Pool of Beth-Hesda and transformed it into a Shafii madrasah, under the leadership of Sheikh Nasr al-Maqdisī. ḥadīth and fiqh (jurisprudence) studies flourished in Jerusalem once again: Mūjīr ad-Dīn listed the eminent scholars who came to teach and write in al-Quds, including Abu al-Fath Nasr and al-Tartushi, the great jurist from al-Andalus. In 1095 the eminent Sunni scholar Abu Hamid al-Ghazzālī came to Jerusalem to pray and meditate; he took up residence in the little convent above the Gate of Mercy, where he practiced Sufi exercises. In Jerusalem he wrote his famous treatise The Revival of the Religious Sciences, which, as we shall see in Chapter 14, became the blueprint of the reformed Sunnah. At about the same time, the Spanish traveler Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi visited Jerusalem and found it so stimulating that he decided to stay for three years. He was impressed by the two law schools, where prominent scholars gave regular lectures and seminars, using methods of debate and discussion that were unknown in al-Andalus. He was also impressed by the dialogues between Muslim intellectuals and the dhimmis, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims explored many topics of religion and spirituality together.

There was strife in the city. In 1077 the pro-Fatimid groups in Jerusalem rebelled against the Turks while Atsiz was campaigning in Egypt. The qādī imprisoned all the Turkish women and children and barricaded them into the Citadel; he also confiscated Turkish property. This time when Atsiz appeared outside the city walls there was no mercy. When the city surrendered, his soldiers massacred about three thousand of the inhabitants, sparing only those who had sought sanctuary in the Ḥaram. The Christians in the Patriarch’s Quarter were safe, however. Not so the Jews, who had always been loyal supporters of the Fatimids and may not have enjoyed the same Tulunid patronage as the Christians. They describe Turkoman rule as a time of catastrophe, speaking of widespread destruction and ruin, the burning of harvests, the razing of plantations, plunder, and terrorism. The Jewish Yeshiva moved from Jerusalem to Tyre during this period, and leading Muslims who supported Fatimid rule were also forced to leave the country. Yet most of the population seemed able to block out these violent disturbances. Ibn al-Arabi was astonished by the way the inhabitants went about their daily business during a small uprising. A rebel had entrenched himself in the citadel, the governor’s archers were bombarding him, and the soldiers, divided into two factions, began to fight one another. If such a thing had happened in al-Andalus, fighting would have broken out all over the city, shops would have been closed, and normal life would have been entirely disrupted. Instead, Ibn al-Arabi watched with amazement the way life went on as usual in this relatively small town:

No market was closed because of these disturbances, no one of the commoners participated in it by making violence, no ascetic left his place in the Aqsa Mosque and no discussion was suspended.³⁰

The inhabitants of Jerusalem had been through so many violent reversals during the previous two hundred years that they had acquired a lordly indifference to such relatively minor vicissitudes.

Despite such occasional outbursts, therefore, Jerusalem prospered under Turkoman rule and became the most important city of Palestine. Ramleh had never fully recovered from the 1033 earthquake, but Jerusalem now had new walls, impressively restored buildings, and a thriving cultural life and had become an international city, visited each year by thousands of pilgrims from all over the world. Yet even as Ibn al-Arabi was enjoying its amenities, a catastrophe was approaching the city which not even the Jerusalemites could regard with their usual phlegm. The Fatimids had not abandoned Palestine: in August 1098, the Shii caliph al-Afdal conquered the city after a siege of six months, to the joy of Fatimid supporters. But less than a year later, in June 1099, the Christian Crusaders from Europe arrived in the hills outside Jerusalem. When they first caught sight of the Holy City, the whole army was convulsed with a fearful ecstasy. Soldiers wept and screamed aloud, their delight mingling with rage as they saw the golden Dome of the Rock majestically dominating the spectacle of their Holy City. Then the Crusader army settled outside the walls of Jerusalem, where, says the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum, rejoicing and exulting, they laid siege to the city.