Jerusalem: The Biography

Evliya wrote that the city, which boasted 240 prayer-niches and forty madrassas, was ‘the object of desire of the kings of all nations’ but he was most dazzled by the breathtaking beauty and sanctity of the Dome: ‘This humble one has travelled for thirty-eight years through seventeen empires and viewed countless buildings but I’ve never seen one that so resembled paradise. When a person enters, one stands dumbfounded and amazed with finger to mouth.’ In al-Aqsa, where the preacher mounted the pulpit every Friday brandishing the sword of Caliph Omar and the rituals were serviced by a staff of 800, Evliya observed how the mosaics reflected the rays of the sun so that ‘the mosque becomes light upon light and the congregants’ eyes shine with reverence as they pray’.

In the Dome ‘all pilgrims circumabulate the Rock outside the railing’, while the Temple Mount had become a ‘promenading place embellished with roses, hyacinths, myrtle filled with the intoxicating twitter of nightingales’ and he happily embraced most of its legends – that King David had started building al-Aqsa while Solomon ‘being Sultan of all creatures ordered the demons to complete the construction’. Nonetheless, when he was shown ropes that Solomon had supposedly woven 3,000 years earlier, he could not resist exclaiming to the ulema: ‘Do you mean to tell me that the ropes used to bind the demons haven’t rotted?’

Naturally he visited the Church at Easter where his reaction resembled that of the English Protestants. He worked out the secret of the Holy Fire, claiming that a hidden zinc jar of naphtha was dripped down a chain by a hidden monk to deliver the annual miracle. The festival itself was just ‘pandemonium’ and the Church ‘ lacks spirituality, more like a tourist attraction’ but he chatted to a Protestant there who blamed it on the Orthodox Greeks, ‘a stupid and credulous people’.

Evliya returned several times before he retired to finish his books in Cairo but he never saw anything to compare with the Dome of the Rock – ‘verily a replica of a pavilion in paradise’. Not everyone agreed: conservative Muslims were horrified by all the Sufi dancing, miracle-working and the saintly cults that Evliya so enjoyed. ‘Some of the women unveil their faces, displaying their beauty, their ornaments and perfumes. By God, they were sitting cheek-to-jowl among men!’ observed Qashashi, denouncing ‘excited clamours and dancing’, the playing of tambourines and merchants selling sweets. ‘These are the days of the wedding-feast of Satan.’

The Ottomans were now in full decline, the sultans shoved back and forth between the demands of European powers, each of them backing their own Christian sect. When the Catholic Austrians and French won the praedominium for the Franciscans, the Russians, a brash new power in Europe and in Jerusalem, lobbied and bribed the Ottomans until they had regained it for the Orthodox. The Franciscans soon got it back again, but three times actual fighting broke out in the Church.^* In 1699, the Ottomans, defeated on the battlefield, signed the Treaty of Karlowitz, which allowed the Great Powers to protect their brethren in Jerusalem – a disastrous concession.⁷

Meanwhile Istanbul’s governors had so repressed Palestine that the peasants rebelled. In 1702, the new Governor of Jerusalem crushed the rebellion and decorated the walls with the heads of his victims. But when he destroyed a village owned by the religious leader – the mufti – of Jerusalem, the city’s qadi denounced him at Friday prayers in al-Aqsa and opened the gates to the rebels.

THE FAMILIES

1705–1799

THE HUSSEINIS: THE REVOLT OF THE NAQIB AL-ASHRAF

AND THE CANINE POGROM

Armed peasants marauded through the streets. The qadi – the chief judge – backed by the garrison, stormed the prison and took command of Jerusalem. In one of her stranger moments, the city found herself independent: the qadi, in return for bribes, appointed Muhammad ibn Mustafa al-Husseini as head of the city.

Husseini was the chief of Jerusalem’s pre-eminent clan who had risen on the coat-tails of the Farrukhs a century earlier, but he was also the Naqib al-Ashraf, the leader of the families descended from the Prophet, via his grandson Hussein: only the Ashraf could wear the green turban and be addressed as Sayyid.