Jerusalem: The Biography

Sophronius presented Omar with the keys of the Holy City. When the patriarch saw Omar and his ragged hordes of Arab cameleers and horsemen, he muttered that this was ‘the abomination of desolation’. Most of them were tribesman from the Hejaz or the Yemen; they travelled light and fast, draped in turbans and cloaks, living on ilhiz ( ground camel hair mixed with blood and then cooked). A far cry from the heavily armoured Persian and Byzantine cataphract cavalry, only the commanders wore chain-mail or helmets. The rest ‘rode shaggy stumpy horses, their swords highly polished but covered in a shabby cloth scabbard’. They carried bows and spears that were bound with camel sinews, and red cowhide shields resembling ‘a thick red loaf of bread’. They cherished their broadswords, their

sayf, gave them names and sang poems about them.

Priding themselves on their uncouthness, they wore ‘four locks of hair’ stuck up like ‘the horns of a goat’. When they encountered rich carpets, they rode on to them and cut them up to make spear coverings, enjoying the booty – human and material – like any other conquerors. ‘Suddenly, I sensed the presence of a human form hidden under some covers,’ wrote one of them. ‘I tear them away and what do I find? A woman like a gazelle, radiant like the sun. I took her and her clothes and surrendered the latter as booty but put in a request that the girl should be alotted to me. I took her as a concubine.’^*

The Arab armies had no technical advantages, but they were fanatically motivated.

Sophronius, say the traditional Muslim sources, dating from much later, escorted the Saracen Commander to the Holy Sepulchre, hoping his visitor would admire or even embrace the perfect sanctity of Christianity. When Omar’s muezzin called his soldiers to prayer, Sophronius invited the Commander to pray there, but he is said to have refused, warning that this would make it a place of Islamic worship. Omar knew that Muhammad had revered David and Solomon. ‘Take me to the sanctuary of David,’ he ordered Sophronius. He and his warriors entered the Temple Mount, probably through the Prophets’ Gate in the south, and found it contaminated by ‘a dungheap which the Christians had put there to offend the Jews.’

Omar asked to be shown the Holy of Holies. A Jewish convert, Kaab al-Ahbar, known as the Rabbi, replied that, if the Commander preserved ‘the wall’ (perhaps referring to the last Herodian remains, including the Western Wall), ‘I will reveal to him where are the ruins of the Temple.’ Kaab showed Omar the foundation-stone of the Temple, the rock which the Arabs called the Sakhra.

Aided by his troops, Omar began to clear the debris to create somewhere to pray. Kaab suggested he place this north of the foundation-stone ‘so you will make two qibla

s, that of Moses and that of Muhammad.’ ‘You still lean towards the Jews,’ Omar supposedly told Kaab, placing his first prayer house south of the rock, roughly where al-Aqsa Mosque stands today, so that it clearly faced Mecca. Omar had followed Muhammad’s wish to reach past Christianity to restore and co-opt this place of ancient holiness, to make the Muslims the legitimate heirs of Jewish sanctity and outflank the Christians.

The stories of Omar in Jerusalem date from over a century later when Islam had formalized its rituals in ways that were very distinct from those of Christianity and Judaism. Yet the story of Kaab and other Jews, which later formed the Islamic literary tradition of Israiliyyat, much of it about Jerusalem’s greatness, proves that many Jews and probably Christians joined Islam. We will never know exactly what happened in those early decades but the relaxed arrangements in Jerusalem and elsewhere suggest that there may have been a surprising amount of mingling and sharing amongst the Peoples of the Book.^*

The Muslim conquerors were initially happy to share shrines with the Christians. In Damascus, they shared the Church of St John for many years and the Umayyad Mosque there still contains the tomb of St John the Baptist. In Jerusalem, there are also accounts of them sharing churches. The Cathisma Church outside the city was actually equipped with a Muslim prayer-niche. Contrary to the Omar legend, it seems that the early Muslims first prayed in or beside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before arrangements could be made on the Temple Mount.