JIHAD

ONCE THE FRANKS had all left Jerusalem, the Muslims wandered around the city marveling at the splendors of Crusader Jerusalem. Yet in many ways it felt like a homecoming. Saladin was enthroned in the Hospital, right in the heart of Crusader Jerusalem, to receive the congratulations of his emirs, sufis, and ulamā. His face shone with delight, Imād ad-Dīn tells us. Poets and Qurān reciters declaimed verses in his praise, while others wept and could hardly speak for joy.¹ But the Muslims knew that the jihād for Jerusalem had not ended with the conquest of the city. The word jihād does not mean merely “holy war.” Its primary meaning is “struggle,” and it is in this sense that it is chiefly used in the Qurān. Muslims are urged to “struggle in the way of God,” to make their lives a purposeful striving to implement God’s will in a flawed, tragic world. A famous hadīth has Muḥammad say on returning from a battle: “We are now returning from the lesser jihād to the greater jihād,” the more important and exacting struggle to establish justice in one’s own society and integrity in one’s own heart. Saladin had conducted his jihād in accordance with the Qurānic ideal: he had always granted a truce when the Crusaders had asked for one; he had, for the most part, treated his prisoners fairly and kindly. He had behaved with humanity in the hour of triumph. Indeed, some of the Muslim historians believe that he was element to a fault. Because he allowed the Christians to congregate in Tyre, they had retained a foothold in Palestine and the conflict would continue for over a hundred years. A Third Crusade, led by King Richard I of England and King Philip II of France, failed to reconquer Jerusalem, but it did establish the Franks in a thin coastal state stretching from Jaffa to Beirut. Though their capital was Acre, its rulers wistfully continued to call themselves “King of Jerusalem.” The Crusader dream was not dead, and as long as the Franks remained in Palestine, the Muslims were wary and defensive.

But in 1187, Muslim hopes were high. Saladin knew that he now had to undertake a different kind of jihād to make Jerusalem into a truly Muslim city once again. The first task was to purify the Ḥaram. The Aqsā Mosque had to be cleared of the Templars’ latrines and furniture and made ready for Friday prayers. The mihrāb indicating the direction of Mecca had been bricked up and needed to be uncovered. The internal walls built by the Templars were knocked down and the floor covered in rugs. The pulpit commissioned years before by Nūr ad-Dīn was brought from Damascus and installed. In the Dome of the Rock, the pictures and statues were removed, the Qurānic inscriptions revealed, and the marble casing over the Rock taken away. Like Umar, the Muslim chroniclers tell us, Saladin worked all day beside his men, washing the courts and pavements of the Ḥaram with rose water and distributing alms to the poor. On Friday, 4 Shaban, the Aqsā was filled with Muslim worshippers for the first time since 1099. People wept with emotion as the qādī of Jerusalem, Muhyi ad-Din al-Qurashi, mounted the new pulpit.

Before the Crusade, Muslim Jerusalem had consisted almost entirely of the buildings on and around the Ḥaram, but Saladin’s new building jihād demanded that the Christian topography be overlaid with Muslim institutions. Once again, building had become an ideological weapon in the hands of the victors. Instead of being a predominantly Christian city with an important Muslim shrine, Jerusalem was to be an obviously Muslim city. There was a new hostility toward Christianity. Saladin confiscated the residence of the patriarch next to the Holy Sepulcher and with state funds acquired the Convent and Church of St. Anna. He did not simply turn these buildings into mosques, however. As part of their Crusade against the Shiites, both Nūr ad-Dīn and Saladin had endowed Sufi convents (khawāniq) and colleges of jurisprudence (madāris) in every city they conquered. These were the chief institutions of the reformed Sunnah, as devised by al-Ghazzālī, the great scholar who had lived in the Sufi khānaqāh over the Gate of Mercy shortly before the First Crusade. Now Saladin turned the Church of St. Anna into a mosque, while the adjoining convent became a madrasah; the patriarch’s residence became a khanaqah. Both institutions were endowed by the sultan and bore his name. There had been Sufis in Jerusalem from the earliest days, but now Saladin insisted that the Sufis in his new khanaqah must not be local people, who might have been infected by the Shiah, but must come from the Sunni heartland.

Sufis and scholars came to live in these new institutions, and ulamā came to serve on the Ḥaram. After the conquest of Jerusalem, thousands of Muslims came to visit the city that had been for so long in enemy hands. Saladin remained encamped on the Mount of Olives until the city was settled and he had appointed a governor. A garrison was installed in the citadel. Then Saladin returned to Damascus to plan the Muslim riposte to the Third Crusade. The soldiers and civil servants settled in the former Patriarch’s Quarter. Soon after the conquest, Muslims also began to arrive in al-Quds from North Africa, which had been overrun by Berber tribes who were savaging the countryside. These Maghribi Muslims settled in the southwest corner of the Ḥaram and retained their own cultural and religious traditions. They were allowed to convert the Templars’ refectory on the Ḥaram into a mosque of their own, and the Maghribi Quarter became a new feature of Jerusalem. But Saladin did not intend to exclude Christians and Jews from the city entirely: the old ideal of integration and coexistence persisted. A few thousand Syrian and Armenian Christians asked to stay on as dhimmis, and Saladin gave the Greek Orthodox the custody of the Holy Sepulcher Church. These local Christians could not be blamed for the European Crusade. The Holy Sepulcher was now surrounded by the new Islamic buildings. Saladin had also taken over large portions of the Hospital for the governor’s residence, a Muslim hospital, and a mosque, endowed by his son al-Af˙dal. There was also a new mosque in the Citadel, dedicated to the prophet David. Minarets now bristled around the Christian holy place, and the call to prayer resounded through the streets of the Patriarch’s Quarter. Some emirs had wanted to destroy the Holy Sepulcher itself, but Saladin agreed with his wiser officers, who pointed out that it was not the church but the site that was sacred to Christians. After the Third Crusade, even Latin pilgrims from Europe would be permitted to come on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Saladin also invited the Jews to come back to Jerusalem, from which they had been almost entirely excluded by the Crusaders. He was hailed throughout the Jewish world as a new Cyrus. The Crusades had not only inspired a new jihād in the Muslim world. They had also given rise to a form of Zionism among the Jews of Europe and the Islamic empire. The first stirrings of this new religious Zionism had appeared in the early twelfth century. The Toledan physician Judah Halevi had been caught in the crossfire of the Christian wars of reconquista in Muslim Spain. Frequently he had to uproot himself, alternating between Muslim and Christian territory. This experience of dislocation had convinced him that Jews must return to the land of their fathers. That was their true place in the world. The Holy Land did not belong to either the Christians or the Muslims, who were fighting over it at the present time. Jews must stake their claim to Palestine and the Holy City. Jerusalem was the center of the earth, the place where the mundane world opened to the divine. Prayers rose through the Gate of Heaven, which was situated directly over the site of the Devir, and the divine power flowed back through this opening to the people of Israel, filling them with prophetic power. Only in Palestine could the Jews maintain their creative link with the divine world and be truly themselves. They had a duty to make the aliyah to Palestine and risk their lives for Zion. Then the Shekhinah would return to Jerusalem and the Redemption would begin. Halevi himself set sail from Spain to make this effort, but almost certainly never reached Jerusalem. He probably died in Egypt in 1141. Few Jews felt inclined to follow him at this stage, but his story was emblematic. When people become alienated from their surroundings and feel that, physically and spiritually, they have no home in the world, they feel drawn to return to their roots to find healing.

Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem was both wonderful and disturbing to the Jewish people. The sultan had brought the Jews home to their Holy City and allowed them to live there in large numbers. In September 1187, Saladin had conquered Ascalon, but when Jerusalem was conquered the following month the Muslims could not defend both cities. Ascalon was, therefore, systematically destroyed, and the inhabitants were taken to safety. The Jews of Ascalon were settled in Jerusalem in 1190 and allowed to build a synagogue. They were assigned a district to the west of the new Maghribi Quarter, with the residential Sharaf Quarter in between. More Jews began to arrive from North Africa in 1198, and in about 1210 three hundred Jewish families made the aliyah, in two groups, from France. This return was exciting and inspired some messianic hopes of imminent Redemption. But the Islamization of Jerusalem was also extremely distressing. The sight of the Christians and Muslims battling for the city that the Jews were convinced belonged to them was confusing. When the Spanish poet Yehuda al-Harizi made his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1217 he found the sight of the Muslim buildings on the Ḥaram profoundly upsetting.

What torment to see our holy courts converted into an alien temple! We tried to turn our faces away from this great and majestic church now raised on the site of the ancient tabernacle where once Providence had its dwelling.²

More and more Jews became convinced that the land was waiting for the return of its true inhabitants. As Halevi had pointed out, neither the Christians nor the Muslims could benefit from its holiness.

The ferment even affected the sober Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher who was one of Saladin’s personal physicians. He was convinced that Jerusalem remained the center of gravity for the Jewish people and that a Jewish state founded elsewhere would have no validity. A Jewish kingdom and Jewish law must be based on the Temple. The Temple Mount might be desacralized by the Goyim, but it was still a holy place, because Solomon had consecrated it for all time. The divine Presence could never be banished from the Temple Mount. Consequently, when they visited the Ḥaram, Jews must comport themselves as though the Temple were still standing. They must not venture into the forbidden areas nor act irreverently when they faced the east, where the Devir had once stood. The Temple had gone, but the sanctity of the place would endure for all time, a symbol of God’s continued care for his people.

Saladin died of typhoid fever in 1194. His empire was split up and its various cities ruled by members of his family of Ayyūb, each with its own separate army and administration. But the unity that Saladin had been able to inspire died with him, and soon his heirs were fighting among themselves. Jerusalem would suffer from this internal conflict. Yet their enthusiasm for al-Quds did not diminish. Muslims had also suffered from the loss of Jerusalem, and now that they had returned they were more devoted to it than ever. They continued their building jihād. In 1193, Izz ad-Din Jardick, the emir of Jerusalem, rededicated the small mosque near the Holy Sepulcher, which had been dedicated to Umar before the First Crusade; next to this mosque a Qurān school was opened. Al-Āfdal endowed the whole Maghribi Quarter so that aid and services could be provided for North African pilgrims and the poor; he also built a madrasah where the jurisprudence of the North African Māliki school could be taught and studied and provided it with a permanent endowment.

This is one of the earliest recorded instances of a waqf endowment in Jerusalem, whereby a donor would surrender his ownership of an income-producing property, such as a shop, and dedicate the profits (after the running costs had been subtracted) to a good cause. A waqf could be used to ransom prisoners of war, fund a soup kitchen, or build a madrasah. It was a virtuous act to make such an endowment, especially in al-Quds, where a good deed was thought to be especially meritorious. But there were also practical advantages. Some donors used awqāf to provide for their descendants, who could either live in the endowed building or become the salaried inspector of the endowment. Sometimes a madrasah or a khanāqāh had an apartment for the donor, who planned to retire to Jerusalem. The waqf was an act of practical charity: it promoted Islamic learning, offered scholarships to needy students, and provided for the poor. The system thus ensured that the ideal of social justice, which was so crucial to the teaching of the Qurān, was central to the jihād for Jerusalem. The waqf not only contributed to the beauty and fabric of the city but also provided employment. Somebody in straitened circumstances could get a job as the custodian of a madrasah or join a Sufi order. Any surplus money of anywaqf was always given to the poor, so that people who had to live on charity were treated with dignity and respect. Justice and compassion had been central to the holiness of Jerusalem from the very earliest days of the city. It had not been much in evidence in Crusader Jerusalem but had been of great concern to Saladin. Almsgiving had accompanied the purification of the Ḥaram after the Crusaders had left, and now the institution of the waqf made the care of the poor and needy an essential part of the Ayyūbid Islamization of Jerusalem.

But the Muslims could not relax as long as the Crusaders remained in Palestine. In fact, the Franks who lived in the Kingdom of Acre were now anxious to keep the peace; they had learned a valuable lesson at the battle of Hittin. But the Christians of the West were more bellicose and continued to send Crusades to liberate Jerusalem. Al-Ādil’s son al-Muazzam Isa became the Sultan of Damascus in 1200 but was so devoted to al-Quds that he made it his chief residence. He endowed two madāris: one, which bore his name, for the Hanifi school of law to the north of the Ḥaram, and the second for the teaching of Arabic over the Gate of Mercy. Al-Muazzam also repaired the colonnades around the Ḥaram borders. But in 1218 there was another Crusade from the West.

This time the Crusaders did not sail directly to Palestine but tried to dislodge the Muslims from Egypt, hoping to establish a base there for the reconquest of Jerusalem. The mere presence of Crusaders in the Near East was enough to inspire dread throughout the region. People fearfully recalled the massacre of 1099 and expected new atrocities. Al-Muazzam was convinced that the Crusaders would take back Jerusalem, slaughter the population, and dominate the whole Islamic world. In fact, after its initial success, the Crusade made little headway. But the Franks had left such a legacy of terror behind that it was difficult for the Muslims to see the situation objectively. Al-Muazzam gave orders that the walls of Jerusalem be dismantled so that the Crusaders would not be able to establish themselves there. It was a drastic step; the emirs of Jerusalem argued that they would be able to ward off a Crusader attack, but al-Muazzam waved away their objections and insisted on overseeing the demolition himself. There was huge distress in the city and the region as a whole. From the very beginning, the raison d’ètre of any city was to give its inhabitants security, and when the sultan’s engineers, masons, and miners arrived in Jerusalem and began to pull the walls down there was panic. The most vulnerable people in the city—women, girls, and old men—rushed through the streets weeping and tearing their garments. They congregated in the Ḥaram and fled the city for Damascus, Cairo, and Kerak, leaving their families and possessions behind. Eventually the city was left without fortifications and its garrison was withdrawn. Only the Tower of David remained standing.

Al-Quds was no longer a viable city. Now that it had no walls, the Muslims dared not live there while the Franks remained close by in the Kingdom of Acre. The city became little more than a village, inhabited only by a few devoted ascetics and jurists, who somehow kept the new Ayyūbid institutions going, and state officials and a handful of soldiers. Al-Muazzam’s decision proved to be premature, since in 1221 the Crusaders were forced to return home. But the Crusades had so profoundly unsettled the region that it seemed impossible for Muslims to contemplate a Western presence with any degree of confidence or equanimity. A new defensiveness had entered the Muslim feeling for Jerusalem, which could be destructive to the city.

Security had become a top priority to the Muslim rulers. In 1229, al-Kāmil, the Sultan of Egypt, was ready to give Jerusalem up rather than face the hideous prospect of fighting a new invasion of Crusaders. Meanwhile Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor of Europe, was being pressured by the pope to lead a new expedition to the Holy Land. Known by his contemporaries as Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World, Frederick constantly flouted Western expectations. He had been brought up in cosmopolitan Sicily and did not share the usual xenophobia of Europe. He had no hatred of Islam; on the contrary, he spoke fluent Arabic and enjoyed conversing and corresponding with Muslim scholars and rulers. He regarded the Crusade for Jerusalem as a waste of time, but knew that he could not continue to disregard public opinion by putting it off any longer. He rather cynically suggested to al-Kāmil that he simply hand Jerusalem over to him. After all, now that the city had no walls, it was of no use to the sultan, economically or strategically. Al-Kāmil was ready to agree. By this time, he had seriously quarreled with his brother al-Muazzam, Sultan of Damascus, and without a united front could not contemplate fighting an army of Crusaders. A Frankish presence in unfortified Jerusalem could pose no military threat, and giving the city back to the Franks might defuse the danger from the West. Frederick would also be a useful ally against al-Muazzam.

Eventually, after some hesitation on both sides, Frederick and al-Kāmil signed the treaty of Jaffa on 29 February 1229. There would be a truce for ten years; the Christians would take back Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, but Frederick promised not to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. The Jews would have to leave the city, but the Muslims would retain the Ḥaram. Islamic worship would continue there without hindrance and the Muslim insignia be displayed.

News of the treaty evoked outrage in both the Muslim and the Christian world. Muslims poured onto the streets of Baghdad, Mosul, and Aleppo in angry demonstrations; imāms mobbed al-Kāmil’s camp at Tel al-Ajul and had to be driven away by force. Al-Muazzam, who was mortally ill, was so shocked by the news that he insisted on leaving his bed in order personally to supervise the destruction of Jerusalem’s last remaining defenses. Crowds sobbed and groaned in the Great Mosque in Damascus as Sheikh Sibt al-Jauzi denounced al-Kāmil as a traitor to Islam. Al-Kāmil tried to defend himself: he had not ceded the sacred shrines of Islam to the Christians; the Ḥaram was still under Muslim jurisdiction; they had merely given up “some churches and ruined houses” of no real value.³ It would be a simple matter for the Muslims to recover the city at a later date. But after the bloodshed and the wars, Jerusalem had become a symbol of Muslim integrity and no Islamic ruler could easily make concessions about the Holy City.

The Christians were equally shocked. To make such a treaty with the infidel was almost blasphemous. The very notion of allowing the Muslims to remain on the Ḥaram in a Christian city was intolerable. They were utterly scandalized by Frederick’s behavior when he visited the Holy City. Because he had recently been excommunicated by the pope, no priest would crown him King of Jerusalem,⁴ and the emperor simply placed the crown on his own head at the high altar of the Holy Sepulcher Church. Then he walked to the Ḥaram, joked with the attendants in Arabic, admired the architecture profusely, and beat up a Christian priest who had dared to enter the Aqsā carrying his Bible. He had been most upset when he learned that the qā˙ī had ordered the muezzin to be silent during his stay and asked that the call to prayer be issued as usual. This was no way for a Crusader to behave! The Templars plotted to have Frederick killed, and he hastily left the country; as he hurried to his ship in the early hours of the morning, the butchers of Acre pelted him with offal and entrails. Jerusalem had now become such a sensitive issue in the Christian world that anybody who fraternized with Muslims or appeared to trifle with the Holy City was likely to be assassinated. The whole story of Frederick’s extraordinary Crusade shows that Islam and the West were finding it impossible to accommodate each other: on neither side was there any desire for coexistence and peace.

Nonetheless the truce held for ten years, even though Muslims from Hebron and Nablus raided the city shortly after Frederick’s departure and pilgrims were harassed on the road leading to Jerusalem from the coast. But the Christians did not have the resources to defend Jerusalem, which was an isolated enclave in the midst of enemy territory. When the truce expired in 1239, al-Nasir Dāūd, governor of Kerak, was able to force the Franks to leave the city after a short siege. But since there was still internecine warfare among the Āyyūbids, he gave the city back to the Christians shortly afterward in return for their help against the Sultan of Egypt. This time the Muslims did not hold on to the Ḥaram, and they were horrified to hear that the Christians had hung bells in the Aqsā Mosque and “set bottles of wine on the Rock” for the celebration of Mass.⁵ But their tenure was short-lived. In 1244 an army of Khwarazmian Turks, who were fleeing the Mongol invasion of their own land in Central Asia, burst into Palestine, having been summoned by the Sultan of Egypt to help him with his wars in Syria. They sacked Damascus and devastated Jerusalem, killing the Christians there and violating the shrines, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The city was back in Ayyūbid hands, but many of its houses and churches were little more than smoking ruins. After this catastrophe, most of the inhabitants fled to the relative safety of the coastal cities. There was now only a skeleton community of about two thousand Muslims and Christians living on the site of the once-populous metropolis.

A seventh Crusade, led by King Louis IX of France, failed to reconquer Jerusalem; indeed, the whole army was taken prisoner in Egypt for a few months in 1250. While the Crusaders were in captivity, the Ayyūbids of Egypt were defeated by a party of disaffected Mamluks, who founded their own kingdom. Mamālīk had originally come from the Eurasian steppes, beyond the borders of the Islamic empire. As children they had been enslaved by Muslims, converted to Islam, and then drafted into elite regiments in the Muslim armies. Since their lives had dramatically improved after their capture and conversion, they were usually devoted Muslims, who yet retained a distinct ethnic identity and felt strong solidarity with one another. Now the Bahariyya regiment that had seized control of Egypt would create a new Mamluk state and become a major power in the Near East.

At first the rise of the Mamluks did not affect Jerusalem. The Ayyūbids in the rest of Saladin’s empire opposed them, and the position of Jerusalem continued to be unstable. But in 1260 the Mamluk sultan al-Zahīr Baybars (1260–76) defeated the invading Mongol army at the battle of Ain Jalut in Galilee. It was a glorious achievement: the Mongols had brought down the Abbasid caliphate; they had sacked and destroyed major Muslim cities, including Baghdad itself. Now Baybars had dispatched them beyond the Euphrates and become a hero of Islam. Since the Ayyūbid sultans had also been brought down by the Mongols, Bay-bars was now the ruler of Syria and Palestine. He still had to deal with occasional Mongol sorties and was determined to eject the Franks from their coastal state, but ultimately the Mamluks brought the region a security and order it had not known for years.

Jerusalem was of no strategic importance to the Mamluks, and they never bothered to rebuild the walls, but they were most impressed by the holiness of the city, whose religious status rose during their tenancy. Nearly all the sultans made a point of visiting Jerusalem and endowing new buildings there. When Baybars visited al-Quds in 1263, besides undertaking restoration work on the Ḥaram, he found an imaginative solution to Jerusalem’s security problem. Easter was a particularly dangerous time, because the city was full of Christians. So Baybars founded two new sanctuaries close by: one to the prophet Moses (Nebī Mūsā) near Jericho and the other to the Arab prophet Salih in Ramleh. The festivals of the prophets were held during the week before Easter, so that Jerusalem was surrounded by crowds of devout Muslim pilgrims during this vulnerable season. Nebī Mūsā became particularly important. Pilgrims processed around Jerusalem to the Ḥaram and through the streets, as they had seen the Christians doing for centuries. They were demonstrating their ownership of al-Quds, just as the Christians had done. A special Nebī Mūsā banner was unfurled. When all the pilgrims had gathered in Jerusalem, the crowds left for the shrine, having made sure that the Christians saw how numerous they were. At Nebī Mūsā they spent the week praying, reciting the Qurān, taking part in Sufi exercises, and also enjoying themselves, camping out in the courtyards of the shrine and in the surrounding hills. The Christian pilgrims, meanwhile, were celebrating Easter in Jerusalem, knowing that there were crowds of Muslims nearby ready to spring to the defense of al-Quds. It was an ingenious device, but the Nebī Mūsā celebrations together with the other festivals that developed at new shrines in the vicinity demonstrated the new defensiveness in Muslim piety.

A militant element was also creeping into the Jewish devotion to Jerusalem. In 1267, Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, better known as Nachmanides, was exiled from Christian Spain, and made the aliyah to Jerusalem. He was appalled by the desolate state of the city, where he found only two Jewish families on his arrival. Undeterred, Nachmanides founded a synagogue in a deserted house with a beautiful arch in the Jewish Quarter. Known as the Ramban Synagogue (after Rabbi Moses ben Nachman), it became the center of Jewish life in Mamluk Jerusalem. Students were attracted by Nachmanides’s intellectual reputation as a Talmudist and began to settle in Jerusalem to study in his yeshiva. In his new homelessness, Nachmanides found comfort in making physical contact with Jerusalem. He could “caress” and “fondle” its stones and weep over its ruined state.⁶ It is almost as though the ruined city had replaced his wife and family, whom he had been obliged to leave behind in Spain. He was convinced that all Jews had a duty to settle in Palestine. The sorry plight of Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside, which had been ravaged by three hundred years of intermittent warfare, seemed evidence that the land would never prosper under Christians or Muslims but was awaiting the return of its true owners. Nachmanides taught that aliyah was a “positive precept,” an obligatory commandment incumbent upon all Jews of every generation. But the anti-Semitic persecution that Nachmanides had experienced in Spain had put iron in his soul and a new antagonism toward Christians and Muslims, with whom in previous centuries Jews had been able to live together fruitfully when al-Andalus was in the hands of Islam. The words he now addressed to his fellow Jews reflected this new intransigence toward his people’s political and religious rivals in Palestine:

For we were enjoined to destroy those nations if they make war upon us. But if they wish to make peace, we shall make peace with them and let them stay upon certain conditions. But we shall not leave the land in their hands or those of any other nation at any time whatsoever!⁷

The Crusades in the East and the reconquista in Europe had made a new and permanent rift between the three religions of Abraham.

Nachmanides was a Kabbalist, a practitioner of the esoteric form of mysticism that had developed in Spain during the thirteenth century. Even though few Jews had the capacity to undertake this discipline in its entirety, the spiritual ideas and myths of Kabbalah would become normative in Jewish piety. Indeed, Kabbalah represents the triumph of mythology over the more rational forms of Judaism at this time. In their new distress, Spanish Jews found the God of philosophy too remote from their suffering. They turned instinctively to the old sacred geography, which they internalized and spiritualized still more. Instead of seeing ten degrees of holiness radiating from the inaccessible God in the Devir, Jews now imagined the incomprehensible and utterly mysterious Godhead (which they called Ein Sof: “Without End”) reaching out toward the world in ten sefiroth (“numerations”), each of which represents a further stage in God’s unfolding revelation or, as it were, the Godhead’s adaptation of itself to the limited minds of human beings. But these ten sefiroth also represented the stages of consciousness by which the mystic makes the aliyah to God. Yet again, this was an “ascent inward” to the depths of the self. The imagery of Kabbalah, a restatement of the spirituality of the Jerusalem Temple, symbolized the interior life of both God and man. Kabbalah stressed this identity between the emanations of the Godhead and humanity. The last of the sefiroth was the Shekhinah, also called Malkhuth (“Dominion”). It represented both the divine Presence and the power that unites the people of Israel. Here below, this last sefirah is identified with Zion, which was thus taken up into the divine sphere without losing its earthly reality. The Presence, Israel, and Jerusalem remained in one profound sense inseparable.

Kabbalah made it possible to make the aliyah to God in the Diaspora without going to Jerusalem, but it also stressed that the Jews’ separation from Zion was a victory for the forces of evil.⁸ During the Exodus, Israelites had been forced to wander in the “desert of horrors,” doing battle with the demonic powers that haunt the wilderness. As soon as the Israelites had taken possession of the land and inaugurated the liturgy on Mount Zion, order had been restored and everything had fallen into its right place. The Shekhinah had dwelt in the Devir, the source of blessing, fertility, and order for the whole world. But when the Temple was destroyed and the Jews were exiled from Jerusalem, the demonic forces of chaos triumphed. There was now a deep imbalance at the heart of all existence, which could be rectified only when the Jews were reunited with Zion and restored to their proper place. This mythology showed how deeply their geographic displacement had affected the Jewish soul: it symbolized a more profound separation from the source of being. Now that Jews were beginning to be forced out of Spain by the Christians, they felt anew their alienation and anomie. The myths of Kabbalah also spoke to the condition of the Jews in the rest of Europe, whose lives had become intolerable since the repeated pogroms of the Crusaders. This mythology, delineating their interior world, spoke to them at a deeper level than did the more cerebral doctrines of the Jewish philosophers. At this stage, most were content with a symbolic and spiritual return to Zion. Indeed, it was still considered wrong to try to hasten redemption by making the aliyah to Palestine. But some Kabbalists like Nachmanides felt impelled to find healing in making physical contact with Jerusalem.

The Christians of the West were having to face the fact that they would probably never regain control of Jerusalem, and to make their own accommodation to this loss. In 1291 the Mamluk sultan Khalil finally destroyed the Kingdom of Acre and expelled the Franks from their coastal state. For the first time in nearly two hundred years, the whole of Palestine was in Muslim hands. From this point, the fortunes of Jerusalem improved. Once the Franks were no longer on the scene, Muslims began to feel safe enough to come back to live there even though the city still had no proper fortifications. But the Christians had not given up. For centuries they would continue to plan new Crusades and dream of liberating the holy city. It seemed crucial that some Western presence be preserved in Jerusalem. Shortly after the fall of Acre, Pope Nicholas IV asked the sultan to allow a group of Latin clergy to serve in the Holy Sepulcher. The sultan agreed, and since the pope was himself a Franciscan, he sent a small group of friars to keep the Latin liturgy going in Jerusalem. They had no convent and no income and had to live in an ordinary pilgrim hostel. In 1300, their plight came to the attention of Robert, King of Sicily, who made the sultan a large gift of money and asked him to let the Franciscans have the church on Mount Sion, the Mary Chapel in the Holy Sepulcher Church, and the Nativity Cave. Again, the sultan agreed. This would be the first of many occasions when a Western power would use its influence to further the cause of the Latins in Jerusalem. Henceforth the Sion Church became the Franciscans’ new headquarters and the father superior became the custos or guardian of all the Europeans living in the East. He was in effect fulfilling the role of a consul in Jerusalem. The Franciscans had developed militant policies toward Islam in other parts of the world, and in Europe their preaching often inspired anti-Semitic pogroms, so they were unlikely to be an altogether soothing influence in Jerusalem.

Now that there was peace in the country, the Mongol and Crusader threat contained, Palestine flourished under the Mamluks. Jerusalem was never an important political center in their empire. It was governed by a low-ranking emir and was chiefly used as a place of exile for officials who were battal, out of favor. In this unfortified town, they could do little harm, but many of these exiles were drawn into the religious life of al-Quds. Some were given the prestigious position of superintendent of the two ḥarams of Jerusalem and Hebron and many made waqf endowments. The building jihād continued, and this brought Sufis, scholars, lecturers, jurists, and pilgrims to the town. The Mamluks transformed Jerusalem.⁹ Only the sultans were permitted to build on the Ḥaram itself, and most took advantage of this privilege. In 1317, Sultan al-Nasir Muḥammad commissioned new colonnaded porches along the northern and western borders, restored the dome of the Aqsā, and regilded the Dome of the Rock. He also built a new commercial center on the site of an old Crusader market. It was a sign of a new prosperity in Jerusalem during the early fourteenth century. Soap, cotton, and linen products were all manufactured in the city, and Ḥaram documents show that foreign traders from the east, especially textile merchants, were often present in the city, though we have no detailed information about the actual volume of trade. The sultan’s new market was called Suq al-Qattanin, the Cotton Merchants’ Market. He was anxious that it actually made contact with the Ḥaram wall, where he built a magnificent new gate—Bab al-Qattanin—from which twenty-seven steps led up to the Ḥaram platform.

The desire to make physical contact with the holy place had often characterized Jewish and Christian devotion to Jerusalem. During the Mamluk period, this longing to touch the Ḥaram was particularly evident in the new madāris that were built around the Ḥaram borders. Often the architects had to be extremely ingenious, since space was at a premium. (See diagram.) It was only possible to build around the northern and western borders of the Ḥaram, because on the eastern and southern sides the ground fell away too sharply. But all the donors wanted their madrasah to have a view of the Ḥaram or to touch the sacred ground. One of the earliest of the new buildings was endowed in 1328 by Tanziq, the viceroy of Syria, beside the western supporting wall. He was particularly proud to be building so close to the third-holiest site in Islam. In the mosque of the Tanziqiyya Madrasah an inscription reads: “[God] made his mosque the neighbor of the Aqsā Mosque and how goodly is a pure neighbor.” The building was exquisitely decorated and cruciform in shape: four halls for lectures and communal prayers led off a central courtyard. The Tanziqiyya was not simply a law school, however. It also contained a convent (khānaqāh) for eleven Sufis and a school for orphans. Study, mystical prayer, and philanthropy were all conducted under one roof. The plan showed the desire for integration, which was still crucial in the Muslim conception of sacred space. It also showed how central practical charity continued to be in the ongoing Islamization of al-Quds. The architect found, however, that the site was too small to house all the institutions adequately, so he had the inspiration of building the Sufi convent on top of the sultan’s new porch on the western border of the Ḥaram. Now when the Sufis made their spiritual exercises, they could look at the Dome of the Rock, a paradigm of their own quest.

Other donors were quick to follow Tanziq’s example. The Aminiyya Madrasah (1229–30) had to be crammed into a very narrow site—a mere nine meters—between the eastern spur of the Antonia rock and the street, so they built upward; the third story was constructed on top of the northern portico. The Malikiyya Madrasah adopted the same solution, so that the main floor of the law school overlooked the Ḥaram. The Manjakiyya Madrasah (1361) was built entirely on the porches and over the Inspector’s Gate (Bab al-Nasir), one of the busiest entrances of the Ḥaram during the Mamluk period. The Tuluniyya Madrasah and Faraniyya Madrasah were also built on top of the northern porch, one on either side of the minaret of the Gate of the Tribes (Bab al-Asbat): students had to use the narrow staircase of the minaret, since there was no other entrance.

This view of the borders of the Ḥaram ad-Sharif shows how it was possible for the Mamluks to build their madāris on top of the porticoes around the edge of the sacred precincts.

As in Judaism, the study of law was not a dry, academic discipline but, like mystical prayer, a way of lifting the mind and heart to God. The desire to study with a view of the Dome of the Rock, the great Islamic symbol of spiritual ascent, shows this clearly. But the madrasah had acquired a wholly new importance since the Mongol invasions. So many libraries, manuscripts, and artifacts had been sacked and burned that Muslims felt a new urgency about the study of their traditions. It had become a jihād to recover what had been lost, and, perhaps inevitably, a new conservatism had entered Islamic thought. These new madāris, built protectively around the Ḥaram, can also be seen as an attempt to create a bulwark between the sacred place and a hostile world. They expressed the new defensiveness that the Muslims now felt for Jerusalem. This can also be seen in the austere hospices (ribāts) that were being built throughout the city. Originally the ribāt had been a military fortress; now it was used to house ascetics, the poor, and the pilgrims.

The new conservatism was countered by the Sufi movement, which enjoyed a great flowering after the Mongol scourge, as Muslims struggled to make some ultimate sense of the catastrophe and suffering. More Sufis congregated in al-Quds during the fourteenth century than ever before, some, as we have seen, taking up residence in the new buildings beside the Ḥaram, others in smaller communities scattered over the city. Sufism was not a discipline for the chosen few; it was also a popular movement, and, intensely individualistic, it encouraged the laity to defy the traditional teachings of the ulamā, even though some Sufi sheikhs also taught law in the madāris. Eventually Sufism would introduce a spirit of freethinking into the Islamic world. Sufis were beginning to form large orders, and several of them were established in Jerusalem at this time. But their members were not taught to turn away from the world, like Christian ascetics. The extremely influential Qadariyya, which had its headquarters in the old Hospital complex, taught that social justice was the highest religious duty. The jihād for spirituality and interior prayer had to be combined—yet again—with practical compassion. The Bistamiyya, settled in the north of the city, taught yogic disciplines to help its members pay attention to the deeper currents of the unconscious that surfaced in dreams and visions. But it also promoted a program called sulh-e kull (“universal conciliation”) to enable the different religious traditions to understand one another. After the centuries of hatred and warfare, it was an attempt to find reconciliation that could have been very valuable in the tense city of al-Quds.

The clash between conservatism and innovation can be seen in the work of the fourteenth-century reformer Taqiyy ad-Dīn ibn Taymiyya, who was alarmed at the new intensity of devotion to Jerusalem, which, he felt, was incompatible with Islamic tradition. During the Mamluk period, at least thirty new anthologies of the fadāil al-quds were published, repeating the old traditions in praise of the city’s holiness and urging Muslims to make the ziyāra (“visit”) to Jerusalem. Practices had crept into the Ḥaram devotions that disturbed Ibn Taymiyya. We have seen that for some time Muslims had liked to perform some of the ḥajj rituals in Jerusalem; it was a way of expressing their conviction that al-Quds derived its holiness from Mecca. Ibn Taymiyya insisted that it was important to keep the ziyāra to al-Quds quite separate from the ḥajj to Mecca in his brief treatise In Support of Pious Visits to Jerusalem. It was wrong to circle the Rock and kiss it as though it were the Kabah. Such shrines as the Cradle of Jesus were pure fabrications, and only fools could give them credence. Ibn Taymiyyah still believed that Jerusalem was the third-holiest city in the Islamic world but wanted to make it clear that the ziyāra could only be a private devotion and was not binding upon all Muslims, as was the ḥajj. His zeal to conserve tradition and to stop innovation (bida) was characteristic of the time; his austere view of Jerusalem has never been accepted by the majority of Muslims, who still quote the fa˙dāil al-quds and regard the cult of Jerusalem as an authentic Muslim devotion.

It was a devotion that was not always easy to cultivate. Some of the fa˙dā il see the ziyāra as a pious act that needed courage and endurance. “He who lives in Jerusalem is considered a warrior of the jihād,” Muḥammad is reported to have said in one of the new traditions. Others spoke of the “inconvenience and adversity” of visiting al-Quds.¹⁰ By the second half of the fourteenth century, the first cracks could be seen in the Mamluk system. New sultans were finding it difficult to establish their authority. The Bedouin, who had been too frightened to invade Jerusalem during the Crusader period, had resumed their incursions. In 1348 they had actually driven all the inhabitants out of the city. In the years 1351-53, Jerusalem was badly hit by the Black Death. Then the political instability meant that governors were appointed for only short periods and never gained a sound knowledge of local conditions. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, there were more Bedouin raids, and Christian pirates attacked the coastal cities of Palestine. The economy was depressed, taxation increased, and there were occasionally riots in the city that resulted in fatalities. The building jihād continued, despite these problems. Sultans al-Nasir Hasan (1347–51) and al-Salih Salih (1351–54) completed a major renovation of the Aqsā Mosque, and new madāris and ribāts were endowed in the city and around the borders of the Ḥaram. Money was pouring into Jerusalem for these foundations, but this did not help the economy of the city, since the madāris generated no income.

As always, economic and political problems in Muslim Jerusalem made it harder for Christians and Muslims to live peaceably together. Jews did not feel as hostile toward Islam. Visitors described the Jewish community as prosperous and peaceful during the fourteenth century. But in these hard times most new immigrants preferred to settle in Galilee, where there was more opportunity and which was becoming a rabbinic holy land. Pilgrims now liked to pray at the tombs of the great Talmudic scholars, such as Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiva. Safed, near the grave of Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, the hero of the Kabbalistic classic the Zohar, was becoming another holy city, especially to Jews who were mystically inclined. Muslims also honored these tombs, and Jewish visitors noted that Jews and “Saracens” both tended the same country shrines in Palestine. Muslims also enjoyed good relations with the local Christians and the Armenians. The chief problem to disturb the peace of al-Quds was the tension between the Muslims and the Western Christians, a direct legacy of the Crusades.

In 1365, for example, when the Hospitalers attacked Alexandria from their base in Cyprus, the Muslims arrested the whole Franciscan community and closed the Holy Sepulcher. The Franciscans were no passive victims, however. They began to launch an occasional suicide attack, similar to those undertaken by other Franciscans in other parts of the Islamic world, against the Muslim establishment in Jerusalem. On 11 November 1391, a group of them processed to the Aqsā and insisted on an audience with theqādī. As soon as they were brought before him, they announced that Muḥammad had been “a libertine, a murderer, a glutton, a despoiler who thought that the purpose of human life was eating, whoring, and wearing expensive clothes.”¹¹ The news of this verbal assault spread, and soon an angry mob had gathered at the qādī’s door. Since it was a capital offense to insult the Prophet, the qādī offered the friars the option of conversion to Islam before sentencing them to death. This had been the Franciscans’ intention. By forcing the Muslims to make martyrs of them, they intended to bring “death and damnation on the infidel.”¹² There was another, similar incident in 1393 when three friars challenged the ulamā to a public debate and then proceeded to denounce Muḥammad in the coarsest terms as an impostor. These incidents could not but lead to a deterioration of Muslim-Christian relations. Muslims felt exploited and abused, and the attacks revealed a loathing that made real coexistence impossible.

As a result of this increased tension, the building jihād of the Muslims sometimes seemed intended—and was certainly perceived—as an invasion of other people’s sacred space. At the end of the fourteenth century, the Muslims rebuilt a minaret which belonged to a mosque adjoining the Ramban Synagogue. This proximity would cause a great deal of trouble in the future. In 1417 the sheikh of the Salihiyya khanāqāh built a minaret that towered provocatively above the Holy Sepulcher: Muslims in Jerusalem believed that he would be rewarded for this at the Last Judgment. But, not surprisingly, this clash of interests came most aggressively to the surface at the Franciscans’ headquarters on Mount Sion.

When the Franciscans purchased the site of the Sion Church in 1300, it had included the so-called Tomb of David, which had come to light during the Crusader period. It was not one of their major attractions. The Franciscans had little love of Jewish lore, and when they escorted pilgrims around the city, they emphasized its New Testament associations. The Sion Church was principally a monument to the early church: pilgrims were shown the Upper Room, the Pentecost Shrine, the place where St. John used to say Mass for the Virgin Mary, and the place where Mary “fell asleep” at the end of her life on earth. The Tombs of David and the Kings of Judah were often mentioned last in pilgrims’ descriptions of Mount Sion. But the Jews of the city had suddenly awakened to the fact that the tomb of the first Jewish king of Jerusalem was in a Christian precinct. They repeatedly asked Sultan Barsbay (1422–37) to hand it over to them. This was a mistake. When Barsbay was told about the Tomb of the Prophet Dā’ūd, he found it intolerable that it should be in the hands of avowed enemies of Islam. He descended upon Mount Sion and locked up the tomb in such a way that the Franciscans could not enter it from their convent. He then dismantled the Christian accouterments of the tomb and turned it into a mosque. Finally he closed the Upper Room, also known as the Cenacle Church, because it was directly above the Tomb of David and it was not suitable for Christians to traipse about in processions on top of the new mosque.¹³ As far as the Latin Christians were concerned, the old Muslim ideal of coexistence and integration was crumbling fast.

The so-called Tomb of David on Mount Sion has been the cause of much dispute among Jews, Christians, and Muslims since the fifteenth century. Today Orthodox Jews tacitly make their claim to the site when they celebrate here the first haircut of their sons in a traditional ceremony.

The jihād was continued by Sultan al-Zahir Jaqmaq (1438–53), who decided to apply the letter of the law forbidding dhimmis to restore their places of worship without permission. He closed down the rest of the Sion Church and exhumed the bones of the friars buried in the nearby cemetery. A wooden balustrade that had been “illegally” erected in the Holy Sepulcher Church was carried off to the Aqsā, and new buildings were also pulled down in Bethlehem. A Syrian convent was confiscated, but in the main the sultan’s offensive was directed solely against the Latins. He issued a special edict in favor of the Armenians, forbidding the emir of Jerusalem to harass them with unnecessary taxation, and an inscription to this effect was engraved on a plaque at the western entrance to the Armenian Quarter. The Armenians had been closely involved with the Crusaders, but they had not followed them in uncritical and fanatical hatred of Islam. They had already learned not to take sides, and as a result, they were the only community that had remained in its own quarter without being dislodged during the upheavals of the previous three hundred years.

Yet despite the tension in the city, huge numbers of Western pilgrims continued to visit the city. Their stay was not always comfortable, but they were allowed to see what they had come to see and their visit was efficiently organized. They spent a whole night in the Holy Sepulcher Church and were escorted around the city in a set tour, which began before daybreak so as not to antagonize the Muslims. The circuit began at the Holy Sepulcher Church, whence pilgrims marched quietly to the eastern gate of the city (known today as the Lion Gate), crossed the Kidron Valley to Gethsemane, and then climbed to the Ascension Church on the Mount of Olives. They returned to the city via the Pool of Siloam and finally visited what they could of Mount Sion. There was also a three-day trip to Bethlehem and the River Jordan. As before, the pilgrims scarcely mention the mosques and madāris, though the Franciscans countered the Islamization of the Ḥaram by stressing its exclusively Christian significance. The “Temple of the Lord,” as they still called the Dome of the Rock, was important because the Virgin Mary had been presented to God there as a baby; later she had gone to school in the Temple and had wed St. Joseph there. The Christians now proprietorially called the Aqsā Mosque “the Church of Our Lady.”

The Franciscans had a special devotion to the Passion of Christ, and they were beginning to point out places connected with Jesus’s last painful hours. These were now, as far as the Latins were concerned, nearly all located in the northern districts of Jerusalem. The transfer from Mount Sion, which had begun during the Crusader period, seemed almost complete. Thus James of Verona, who visited Jerusalem in 1335, entered the city at the eastern (Lion) gate near the Pool of Beth-Hesda; he passed St. Anna’s Church (now the Salihiyya Madrasah) and proceeded down the road known today as the Via Dolorosa. He was shown the house of Annas (now a mosque) and the house of Herod in this street; he saw “Pilate’s House” (the “Ecce Homo Arch” of Hadrian’s forum), the place where Mary fainted when she saw Jesus carrying the cross, and the ruins of a gate near which Jesus was supposed to have left the city. Once he had entered the Holy Sepulcher precinct, James paused at other “stations.” There was a cracked stone in the courtyard where Jesus rested before mounting Golgotha, and a cave inside the church where he had been imprisoned while the cross was being prepared and had been stripped of his garments. Then came Golgotha itself, the Black Stone of Unction, where Jesus had been laid after being taken down from the cross, and, finally, the tomb. Some of these sites would change: this is not yet the devotion known today as the Stations of the Cross. When the Franciscans led the pilgrims down the Via Dolorosa by torchlight, they were taking them in the reverse direction. But the ground had been prepared. Now that the Latin Christians no longer had much space of their own in the Holy Sepulcher Church, they were cultivating other sites outside.

Today the Franciscans, still the official Roman Catholic guardians of Jerusalem’s holy places, process down the Via Dolorosa, regarded somewhat warily by Muslim residents.

The German Dominican Felix Fabri, who visited Jerusalem in about 1480, has left a vivid account of his pilgrimage. He became aware of the tension that now existed between the Muslim population and the Latins as soon as his ship docked at Jaffa. Muslim officials grabbed each pilgrim roughly, demanding his name and particulars, and then Felix was hurled into a “darksome and decayed dwelling beneath a ruinous vault … even as men are wont to thrust a sheep into a stable to be milked.”¹⁴ Here he was assigned his dragoman, a guide who would be his only contact with the Muslim world during his stay, and the Franciscan custos gave the pilgrims a stern lecture. They must on no account wander around without their dragoman, inscribe graffiti on the walls, look appreciatively at Muslim women, or drink wine in public (it might inflame the Muslims to murderous envy). There must be no fraternization with Muslims at all; the tension was now such that the authorities could no longer guarantee the goodwill of the local population.

This grim reception, however, did not dampen the pilgrims’ ardor. As soon as they saw the Holy City, Felix tells us, they leaped from their donkeys and burst into tears. There was more weeping when they first saw the Holy Sepulcher: “such bitter heartfelt groans, such sweet wailings, and such deep sighs, such sorrow, such sobs from the inmost breast, such peace and gladsome solace.”¹⁵ Some pilgrims wandered around like zombies, beating their breasts in an uncoordinated manner, as though possessed. Women shrieked as though in labor; some pilgrims simply collapsed and lay on the ground like corpses. Pilgrims were regularly so overcome that they had to be hospitalized. Western devotion to Jerusalem had taken on a hysterical cast. There was no disciplined “ascent” here and no real transcendence. These pilgrims seemed mired in their own neuroses.

Yet Western piety was changing in other ways. Felix examined his own response analytically in a way that would not have occurred to earlier pilgrims. He found that pilgrimage was very hard work. It was not easy to march from place to place in the blazing sun, kneeling and prostrating yourself to the ground and, above all, worrying whether you were responding properly. “To struggle after mental abstraction whilst bodily walking from place to place is exceedingly toilsome.”¹⁶ Felix was also worried about the authenticity of some of the sites. How much of the original tomb could remain after all this time? How was it that nobody had discovered the Tomb of David before?¹⁷ A new critical spirit was beginning to appear that would make the traditional pilgrimage impossible for many Western pilgrims.

But perhaps the pilgrimage had already had its day. All the major faiths insist that a true religious experience must issue in practical compassion. That is, as it were, the litmus test of authentic spirituality. In the past, Jerusalem had not helped Christians to be charitable, either to one another or to people of other faiths. The Crusades can be seen as a travesty of religion: an idolatry that regarded the mere possession of a holy place as the ultimate goal. Now, on the brink of modernity, the critical Felix could scarcely find a good word to say about any of the other inhabitants of Jerusalem. The “saracens” are “befouled with the dregs of all heresies, worse than idolaters, more loathsome than the Jews”; the Greek church, once learned, is now “darkened with numberless errors”; the Syrians are the “children of the devil” and the Armenians sunk in diverse heresies; the Jews are justly hated by all the rest, their intellects dulled by the misery and contempt they undergo. Only the Franciscans, of all the citizens of Jerusalem, live a virtuous life, the chief mark of their piety being a longing “with all their hearts” for a new Crusade to conquer the holy city.¹⁸ This dismal catalogue shows that the pilgrimage did nothing to liberate Felix from his projections and prejudices but had simply led him to a dead end of hatred and self-righteousness.

During the reign of Sultan al-Ashraf Qaytbay (1468–96), the Mamluk empire entered its last phase. The armies of the Ottoman Turks of Asia Minor were beginning to encroach on their territory; the Bedouin raids made it dangerous to leave the city: sixty people had been killed by Bedouin in 1461 outside the walls of Jerusalem. Mamluk trade was also damaged by the Portuguese. Yet still the sultan did not neglect Jerusalem but commissioned a new madrasah beside the western wall of the Ḥaram. The Ashrafiyya Madrasah is probably the loveliest of all the Mamluk buildings. Mūjīr ad-Dīn called it the third jewel of the Ḥaram. Built partly on the roof of the Baladiyya Madrasah and partly on the Ḥaram portico, its main hall was unique in extending onto the Ḥaram itself. It was as though the last Mamluk rulers were yearning toward the Rock, even as al-Quds was slipping from their grasp. Again, the Ashrafiyyah symbolized the integration of Islam: there were ulamā from all four law schools and sixty Sufis. But the sultan also tried to alleviate the religious tensions of Jerusalem. The Franciscans had befriended him in his youth, while he had been banished to Jerusalem, and Qaytbay did not forget this. He allowed them to return to Mount Sion, where they lived rather grimly in cramped quarters, guarded by savage watchdogs. In 1489 they managed, by bribery, to have the Tomb of David and the Cenacle Chapel returned, and they began to rebuild. But the following year an assembly of ulamā decreed that since the place had once been a mosque, it was unlawful to return it to the Christians.

Relations between the Muslims and the Jewish community of Jerusalem also took a turn for the worse during these last years. In 1473, part of the Ramban Synagogue collapsed in a heavy rainstorm. When the Jews asked permission to rebuild, the officials of the adjoining mosque protested: they should be able to walk straight into the mosque from the street, without having to pass through the grounds of the synagogue. The Jews offered the appropriate bribes and retained the site, but this so enraged their Muslim neighbors that they invaded the synagogue one night and demolished it. Sultan Qaytbay, however, found for the Jews and gave orders that the synagogue be rebuilt. There were now only about seventy Jewish families in Jerusalem; most were poor, and many lived in ramshackle houses. Yet this was not entirely the fault of the Muslims, the Italian traveler Obadiah da Bertinero pointed out when he visited Jerusalem in 1487. Their chief problem was the bitter discord between the Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and the Sephardi Jews from Spain and the Islamic countries. Jews now refused to set foot in the Ḥaram, Obadiah tells us. Sometimes the Muslims needed repairs there, but Jews would never take these jobs because they were not in the required state of ritual purity. This is the first time we hear of this self-imposed restriction, which some Jews still follow today; when Maimonides, who had similar views, visited Jerusalem he had nonetheless felt able to enter the Ḥaram. Now that the Temple Mount was even more removed from them, the Jews would need a new holy place. Yet when Obadiah passed the western supporting wall of the Ḥaram, he felt no special emotion. The wall was “composed of large, thick stones, such as I have never seen before in an old building, either in Rome or in any other city.”¹⁹ The Western Wall was not yet holy to the Jews of Jerusalem. But that would soon change.

The historian Mūjīr ad-Dīn, writing in 1496, gives us a valuable description of Jerusalem in the last days of the Mamluks. During the Mamluk centuries, the holiness of Jerusalem had become more central to the Muslim imagination than ever before. But the city was still without walls and virtually without a garrison. The evening parade at the Citadel had been discontinued, and the governor lived like a private citizen. Even though the Mamluks had lavished so much loving attention on the Ḥaram, they had never bothered to fortify the city, which was completely without strategic importance. The Mamluks had not neglected the city’s mundane life, however. Mūjīr tells us that the buildings of the city were solidly constructed and the markets were the finest in the world. Mamluk devotion to the Ḥaram had changed the focus of the city, so that the center of its urban life had shifted back from the Western Hill, which had dominated Jerusalem since the time of Constantine, to the Ḥaram area. When Saladin first conquered Jerusalem, he and his emirs had taken up residence beside the Holy Sepulcher. By Mūjīr’s time, the governor lived beside the northern border of the Ḥaram. Like most Oriental cities, Jerusalem was divided into quarters. The inhabitants of Jerusalem tended to settle in different districts according to their religion and ethnic origin. The Armenians and the Maghribis lived together, as did the Muslims from Iran, Afghanistan, and India, beside the northwest corner of the Ḥaram. Yet there was no strict segregation. There were still neighborhoods where Jews and Muslims lived side by side in the south of the city; similarly in the northeastern neighborhood of Bezetha, Christians and Muslims lived together. The divide was not yet total.

During the reign of Sultan al-Ashraf Aqnouk al-Ghuri (1513–16) it became clear that the Mamluks could not keep the Ottomans at bay indefinitely. In 1453 the Ottomans had conquered Constantinople and absorbed the old Christian empire of Byzantium. For a time it seemed as though they would conquer Europe too, but they were driven back from Belgrade by the Hungarian army. Then in 1515 the Ottoman sultan Selim I moved to the offensive. Within two years he had checked the Iranian advance at the battle of Chaldiran and defeated the Mamluks at Merj-Dibik to the north of Aleppo. One more battle outside Cairo brought the Mamluk empire effectively to an end. On 1 December 1516, Selim arrived outside Jerusalem. There was no opposition. The ulamā went out to meet the sultan and presented him with the keys of the Aqsā and the Dome of the Rock. At once Selim leaped from his horse, prostrated himself in the attitude of Muslim prayer, and shouted: “Thanks be to God! I am the possessor of the sanctuary of the firstqiblah!”