Jerusalem: The Biography

The most luxurious desert palace or qasr survives at Amra, in today’s Jordan, where the caliphs relaxed in private quarters and bathhouses decorated with mosaic floors and graphic paintings depicting hunting scenes, nude or half-dressed women, athletes, cupids, satyrs and a bear playing the lute. Walid I appears in the colourful fresco of Six Kings showing monarchs defeated by the Umayyads such as the emperors of Constantinople and China. These decadent, Hellenistic paintings seem distinctly unIslamic, but, like the Herods, they perhaps lived differently in public. Walid I ended the sharing arrangement with the Christians in Damascus, creating the glorious Umayyad Mosque there, and the language of government now changed from Greek to Arabic. Yet Jerusalem remained overwhelmingly Christian. Muslims and Christians mixed freely: both celebrated the feast of the Dedication of the Holy Sepulchre in September, attracting ‘a great crowd to Jerusalem’, the streets filling with ‘camels and horses, asses and oxen’. Christian pilgrims, now more Armenian and Georgian than Greek, scarcely noticed the Muslim sites, while Jews hardly mention the Christians. Henceforth visitors tended to be increasingly blinkered and uncurious pilgrims who saw no more than their own religion.

In 715, Walid’s brother, Suleiman, received the acclamation on the Temple Mount: ‘Never had one seen such richness that greeted the new Caliph. Seated under one of the domes that ornament the platform, he held an audience’ on a sea of carpets and cushions with his treasury piled around him to pay his soldiers. Suleiman, who made the last full-scale Arab assault on Constantinople (and almost captured it), ‘conceived the plan of living in Jerusalem and making it his capital and bringing together there great wealth and a considerable population’. He founded the city of Ramla as an administrative centre, but died before he could move to Jerusalem.

Jews, many of them from Iran and Iraq, settled in the Holy City, living together south of the Temple Mount, retaining the privilege of praying on (and maintaining) the Temple Mount. But in about 720, after almost a century of freedom to pray there, the new Caliph Omar II, who was, unusually in this decadent dynasty, an ascetic stickler for Islamic orthodoxy, banned Jewish worship – and this prohibition would stand for the rest of Islamic rule. Instead the Jews started to pray around the four walls of the Temple Mount and in a subterranean synagogue called ha-Meara – the Cave – at Warren’s Gate, almost beneath the Temple Mount near the Holy of Holies.

While the Umayyad caliphs enjoyed their Hellenistic palaces and dancing girls, the empire reached its limits for the first time. Islamic forces in Spain were already probing France, but in 732, a Frankish nobleman, Charles, Mayor of the Palace of the Merovingian kings, defeated a Muslim raid at Tours. Hailed as a Maccabee, he became Charles Martel – the Hammer.

‘Dynasties,’ writes the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, ‘have a natural lifespan like individuals’ and now the decadent, worldly Umayyads had reached the end of theirs. In a village east of the Jordan lived the descendants of Abbas, the Prophet’s uncle who had long secretly opposed the hedonistic rule of the Umayyads, who were totally unrelated to Muhammad. ‘Woe to the House of Umayya,’ declared their leader Abu al-Abbas, ‘they preferred the ephemeral to the eternal; crime obsessed them; they possessed forbidden women.’ The discontent spread fast. Even the tribes of the loyal Syrian heartland rebelled – even Jerusalem. The last caliph had to storm the city and raze her walls. An earthquake shook Jerusalem damaging al-Aqsa and the palaces as if God was angry with the Umayyads. Christians and Jews dreamed that this was the Apocalypse. But so did Muslims, and the real threat to the Umayyads came from far away to the east.

In 748, in Khorasan, today’s eastern Iran and Afghanistan, a charismatic mystic named Abu Muslim demanded a sterner Islam and the rule by one of Muhammad’s descendants. The new Muslims of the borderlands joined his puritanical army, which dressed all in black and marched under black banners and hailed the coming of the imam, precursor of the Mahdi, ^*

to redeem Islam. Abu Muslim led his triumphant armies westwards but he had not yet decided whether to back the family of Ali or the family of Abbas – and there were still many Umayyad princes around too. But it was Abu al-Abbas who defeated the last Umayyad ruler and solved this problem in a way that earned him his nickname.⁶

THE ABBASIDS: DISTANT MASTERS

750–969

CALIPH SAFFAH: THE SLAUGHTERER