Jerusalem: The Biography

The Dome has a power beyond all this: it ranks as one of the most timeless masterpieces of architectural art; its radiance is the cynosure of all eyes wherever one stands in Jerusalem. It shimmers like a mystical palace rising out of the airy and serene space of the esplanade which immediately became an enormous open-air mosque, sanctifying all the space around it. The Temple Mount became instantly – and still remains – a place for recreation and relaxation. Indeed the Dome created an earthly paradise that combined the tranquillity and sensuality of this world with the sanctity of the hereafter, and that was its genius. Even in its earliest years, there was, wrote Ibn Asakir, no greater pleasure than ‘eating a banana in the shade of the Dome of the Rock’. It ranks with the Temples of Solomon and Herod as one of the most sucessful sacred-imperial edifices ever built and, in the twenty-first century, it has become the ultimate secular touristic symbol, the shrine of resurgent Islam and the totem of Palestinian nationalism: it still defines Jerusalem today.

Soon after the Dome was built, Abd al-Malik’s armies recaptured Mecca and resumed the jihad to spread God’s kingdom against the Byzantines. He expanded this colossal empire westward across northern Africa and eastward into Sind (today’s Pakistan). But within his realm, he needed to unify the House of Islam as a single Muslim religion with an emphasis on Muhammad, expressed in the double shahada that now appeared on many inscriptions: ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the apostle of God.’ The Prophet’s sayings –hadith –

were collected and Abd al-Malik’s full edition of the Koran became the invincible source of legitimacy and holiness. Rituals became more rigidly defined; graven images banned – he stopped minting coins bearing his own image. Abd al-Malik now called himself Khalifat Allah, God’s Deputy, and henceforth Islamic rulers became the caliphs. The official versions of Muhammad’s earliest biography and the Muslim Conquest excluded the Christians and Jews from Islam. The administration was Arabized. Like Constantine, Josiah and St Paul rolled into one, Abd al-Malik believed in a universal empire of one monarch, one God, and it was he more than anyone who oversaw the evolution of Muhammad’s community into today’s Islam.

WALID: APOCALYPSE AND LUXURY

Jerusalem had a shrine in the Dome but not an imperial mosque, so Abd al-Malik and his son Walid, who succeeded him, next built the Further Mosque, al-Aqsa, Jerusalem’s mosque for ordinary Friday prayers, at the southern boundary of the Temple Mount. The caliphs saw the Temple Mount as the centrepiece of Jerusalem just as Herod had. For the first time since ad 70, they built a new Great Bridge across the valley for pilgrims to enter the Temple Mount from the west, over Wilson’s Arch, today’s Gate of the Chain. To enter from the south, they created the domed Double Gates, which matched the Golden Gate in style and beauty.^*

This was a vibrant moment in Jerusalem. In the space of a few years, the caliphs had turned the Temple Mount into a holy Islamic shrine and Jerusalem into an imperial-Umayyad city and this once again unleashed the infectious competition for shrines and stories that characterizes Jerusalem even today. The Christians had commandeered many of the Jewish myths which were gradually placed at their central shrine, the Sepulchre. But now the raising of the Dome and al-Aqsa reinvigorated the old myths all over again: a footprint on the Rock that had once been shown to Christian pilgrims as the mark of Jesus became the footprint of Muhammad. The Umayyads covered the Temple Mount with new domes all linked to Biblical traditions from Adam and Abraham via David and Solomon to Jesus. Their scenario of the Last Judgement took place on the Temple Mount when the Kaaba would come to Jerusalem.^* And it was not just the Temple Mount: the Muslims came to revere anything associated with David, so now they regarded the Citadel, which the Christians called David’s Tower, as David’s Mihrab (prayer-niche): they were not the last to mistake Herod’s grandeur for David’s. The Umayyads did not just build for God but also for themselves.

These caliphs were pleasure-loving and cultured: this was the apogee of their Arab empire – even Spain was now theirs – and though Damascus was their capital, they spent much time in Jerusalem. Just south of the Temple Mount, Walid I and his son built a complex of palaces, unknown until they were uncovered in the late 1960s: they stood three or four storeys high around cool courtyards and the caliphs even had a special royal entrance to al-Aqsa via a rooftop bridge. The remains reveal nothing more than the size of the palaces, but the survival of their desert palaces reveal how opulently they would have lived here.⁵