Jerusalem: The Biography

Muawiya was probably the real creator of today’s Islamic Temple Mount. It was he who actually built the first mosque there, flattening the rock of the old Antonia Fortress, extending the esplanade and adding an open-sided hexagon, the Dome of the Chain: no one knows what it was for but since it is in the precise middle of the Temple Mount, it may celebrate the centre of the world. Muawiya, writes a contemporary, ‘hews Mount Moriah and makes it straight and builds a mosque there on the holy rock’. When a Gallic bishop named Arculf visited Jerusalem, he saw that ‘in the former place where the Temple stood, the Saracens now frequent an oblong house of prayer pieced together with upright planks and large beams over some ruined remains, said to hold 3, 000 people.’ It was scarcely yet recognizable as a mosque but it probably stood where al-Aqsa stands today.^*

Muawiya personified hilm, the wisdom and patience of the Arab sheikh: ‘I apply not my sword when my lash suffices nor my lash when my tongue suffices. And even if but one hair is binding me to my fellow men, I don’t let it break. When they pull, I loosen, if they loosen I pull.’ This is almost a definition of statesmanship and Muawiya, the creator of Arab monarchy and the first of the Umayyad dynasty, is a much-neglected paragon of how absolute power does not have to corrupt absolutely. He expanded his realm into eastern Persia, Central Asia and north Africa and he took Cyprus and Rhodes, making the Arabs a maritime power with his new navy. He launched annual assaults on Constantinople, and on one occasion besieged it by land and sea for three years.

Yet Muawiya never lost the ability to laugh at himself, a quality that is rare amongst politicians, let alone conquerors. He became very fat (perhaps for this reason he became the first Arab monarch to recline on a throne instead of sitting on cushions) and teased another fat old grandee: ‘I’d like a slavegirl with legs like yours.’

‘And a bottom like yours, Commander of the Believers,’ retorted the old man.

‘Fair enough,’ laughed Muawiya. ‘If you start something, you have to take the consequences.’ He never lost his pride in his legendary sexual prowess but even there he could take some mockery: he was cavorting with a Khurasani girl in his harem when he was presented with another whom he took without further ado. When she had left, he turned back to the Khurasani girl, proud of his leonine performance: ‘How do you say “lion” in Persian?’ he asked her.

‘Kaftar,’ she replied.

‘I’m a kaftar

,’ the Commander boasted to his courtiers until someone asked him if he knew what a kaftar was.

‘A lion?’

‘No, a lame hyena!’

‘Well done,’ Muawiya chuckled, ‘that Khurasani girl knew how to get her own back.’

When he died in his eighties, his heir Yazid, a debauchee always accompanied by a pet monkey, was acclaimed Commander on the Temple Mount but soon faced two rebellions in Arabia and Iraq, the start of Islam’s second civil war. His enemies taunted him: ‘Yazid of liquors, Yazid of whoring, Yazid of dogs, Yazid of monkeys, Yazid of wine-swoons.’

The Prophet’s grandson Hussein rebelled to avenge his father Ali’s death, but was beheaded at Karbala in Iraq, his martyrdom creating Islam’s great schism between the majority of Sunni and the Shia, ‘the party of Ali’.^* But in 683 Yazid died young, at which the Syrian armies summoned his shrewd old kinsman Marwan to become the Commander. When Marwan died in April 685, his son Abd al-Malik was acclaimed as Commander in Damascus and Jerusalem. But his empire was fragile: Mecca, Iraq and Persia were controlled by rebels. Yet it was Abd al-Malik who gave Islamic Jerusalem the jewel in her crown.⁴

ABD AL-MALIK: THE DOME OF THE ROCK

Abd al-Malik did not suffer fools gladly. When a sycophant complimented him, he snapped, ‘Don’t flatter me. I know myself better than you.’ According to the image on his rare coins, he was severe, thin and hook-nosed. His hair was curly, shoulder length, and he wore long brocaded robes with a sword at his belt, but his critics later claimed that he had big eyes, eyebrows grown together, a protruding nose and a cleft lip. Yet here was another royal lover who liked to muse on eroticism: ‘He who wishes to take a slave girl for pleasure, let him take a Berber; to produce a child, take a Persian; as a domestic servant, a Byzantine.’ Abd al-Malik grew up in a rough school. At sixteen, he was commanding an army against the Byzantines; he witnessed the murder of his cousin, Commander of the Believers Othman; and matured into a sacred monarch never afraid to get his hands dirty. He started by reconquering Iraq and Iran. When he captured a leading rebel, he publicly tortured him in front of the Damascene crowds, placed a silver collar around his neck and led him around like a dog before ‘straddling his chest, butchering him and tossing his head out to his supporters’.