Jerusalem: The Biography (158 page)

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The Golden Gate, actually two gates, is directly and precisely aligned with the Tomb itself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place to which Heraclius took the Cross. The place had further symbolism, as we have seen, because the Byzantines mistakenly believed it also marked the Beautiful Gate where Jesus entered on Palm Sunday and where his apostles performed a miracle after his death. Nonetheless some scholars believe the gate was actually built by the Ummayad caliphs. The Gate soon assumed mystical significance for the Jews who called it the Gate of Mercy.

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The word ‘mosque’ derives from the Arabic
masjid
, which led to the Spanish
mezquita
and the French
mosquée
.

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Muhammad’s successors used the title Commander of the Believers. Later the Heads of State were known as
Khalifat Rasul Allah
– Successor to the Messenger of God – or caliph. Abu Bakr may have used this title but there is no evidence it was again used for another seventy years, until the reign of Abd al-Malik. Then it was applied retrospectively: the first four rulers became known as the Righteous Caliphs.

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The early history of Islam, including the surrender of Jerusalem, is mysterious and contested. The pre-eminent Islamic historians wrote one or two centuries later and far from Jerusalem or Mecca: Ibn Ishaq,Muhammad’s first biographer, wrote in Baghdad, dying in 770; al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri and al-Yaqubi all lived in late-ninth-century Persia or Iraq.

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The early Muslims seem to have called themselves ‘Believers’ – the word appears 1,000 times in the Koran while ‘Muslim’ appears about 75 times – and as we will see in Jerusalem, they were certainly not yet hostile to their fellow monotheists,Christians or Jews. Professor Fred M. Donner, an authority on early Islam, takes this further: ‘There is no reason to believe’, he writes, ‘that the Believers viewed themselves as a new or separate religious confession. Some of the early Believers were Christians or Jews.’

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There is no contemporary account of the fall of Jerusalem but the Arab historians describe the armies that simultaneously invaded Persia and this is based on those sources.

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Jews and most Christians would not have had a problem with the earliest versions of the Muslim statement of faith – the
shahada –
which read ‘There is no God but God’, as it may not have been until 685 that they added ‘Muhammad is the apostle of God’. Jewish and Muslim names for Jerusalem overlap: Muhammad called Palestine ‘The Holy Land’ in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Jews called the Temple
Beyt ha-Miqdash
(the Holy House) which the Muslims adapted: they called the city herself
Bayt al-Maqdis
. The Jews called the Temple Mount
Har ha-Beyt
(the Mount of the Holy House); Muslims initially called it
Masjid Bayt al-Maqdis
, the Mosque of the Holy House, and later also
Haram al-Sharif
, the Noble Sanctuary. Ultimately Muslims had seventeen names for Jerusalem; Jews claimed seventy, and both agreed ‘a multiplicity of names is a sign of greatness’.

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The traditional text of the Covenant or Pact of Omar with the Christians claims Omar agreed to ban the Jews from Jerusalem. This is Christian wishful thinking or a later forgery because we know that Omar welcomed the Jews back in Jerusalem, that he and the early caliphs allowed Jewish worship on the Temple Mount and that the Jews did not leave again as along as Islam held sway. The Armenians were already a large Christian community in Jerusalem with their own bishop (later patriarch). They established close relations with the Muslims and received their own Covenant. For the next millennium and a half,Christians and Jews were
dhimmi
, people of the Covenant, tolerated but inferior, sometimes left to themselves, sometimes viciously persecuted.

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Omar ordered the retirement of Khaled, victor of Yarmuk, after hearing about a wine-soaked bathhouse orgy in which a poet sang of the general’s heroics. Khaled died of plague though today’s Khalidi family claim descent from him. One of Muhammad’s early supporters had been a woman named Nusaybah who lost two sons and a leg fighting for the Prophet. Now Nusaybah’s brother,Ubadah ibn al-Samit, arrived with Omar, who is said to have appointed him as a judge in Jerusalem, and custodian of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Rock. His descendants, the Nusseibeh family, are still Custodians of the Holy Sepulchre in 2010 (see the Epilogue).

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This was a handshake which meant a contract to render obedience: the word comes from
baa –
to sell.

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The modern mosque contains both a
mihrab
, a prayer-niche facing Mecca, and a
minbar
, the pulpit. Muawiya’s prayer-hall had the
mihrab
but probably not yet a
minbar
because early Islam was too egalitarian to have a pulpit. However, according to the historian Ibn Khaldun, Muawiya’s imperial reign changed that. His Egyptian governor, the general Amr, invented the
minbar
in his mosque in Egypt and Muawiya started to use it to give the Friday sermon, adding a latticed enclosure around it to protect him from assassins.

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Iran remains a Shiite theocracy. Shiites are a majority in Iraq and a large minority in Lebanon. Hussein’s brother Hasan bin Ali remained in retirement, though he too may have been murdered. His direct descendants include today’s royal dynasties of Morocco’s Alouite and of Jordan’s Hashemite kings. The Twelve Shiite Imams, the Fatimid dynasty, the Aga Khans and the Jerusalemite Family the Husseinis all trace their roots back to Hussein. Their descendants are often known as the Nobility, the Ashraf (the singular is Sherif usually addressed as
Sayyid
).

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In 1902, one of Abd al-Malik’s milestones was found east of Jerusalem with an inscription that defined the way the caliph saw his power in relation to that of God: ‘There is no God but God alone. Muhammad is the messenger of God… Abd al-Malik, the Commander of the Faithful and servant of God, had ordered the repair of this road and construction of this milestone. From Ilya [Jerusalem] to here is seven miles…’

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‘O People of the Book do not go beyond the bounds of your religion and do not speak anything about God except the truth,’ read the inscriptions around the Dome. ‘Indeed the Messiah Jesus son of Mary was only a messenger of God so believe in God and in his messengers and do not say “three”… It is not for God to take a son.’ This seems more an attack on Trinitarianism than on Christianity as a whole. As for the Jews, the bi-weekly service there referred strongly to the Jewish Temple: ‘On every Tuesday and Thursday, they order saffron and they prepare with musk, ambergris and sandalwood perfumed with rosewater. Then the servants (who were Jews and Christians) eat and enter the bath to purify themselves. They go to the wardrobe and come out with new red and blue clothes and bands and belts. Then they go to the Stone and anoint.’ As the scholar Andreas Kaplony writes, this was ‘a Muslim service, the Temple service as the Muslims think it should be. To cut a long story short, this is the Former Temple rebuilt, the Koran is the new Torah and the Muslims are the true people of Israel.’

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As always in Jerusalem, the builders borrowed from elsewhere, so Aqsa’s wooden beams were taken from a Christian site, still marked in Greek with the name of a sixth-century Patriarch (now in the Rockefeller and Haram Museums). The Double and Triple Gates to the south, matching the Golden Gate to the east, all of them now closed, are the most beautiful in Jerusalem, built using the stones of earlier Herodian and Roman buildings. It was there that the wall contains the upside-down inscription to Emperor Antoninus Pius from his equestrian statue on the Temple Mount.

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‘Every soul shall taste death and you will be paid in full only on the Day of Resurrection,’ says the Koran. The Muslims created a geography of Apocalypse around Jerusalem. The forces of evil perish at the Golden Gate. The Mahdi – the Chosen – dies when the Ark of the Covenant is placed before him. At the sight of the Ark, the Jews convert to Islam. The Kaaba of Mecca comes to Jerusalem with all those who ever made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Heaven descends on the Temple Mount with Hell in the Valley of Hinnom. The people assemble outside the Golden Gate on the Plain – al-Sahira. Israfil the Archangel of Death (one of the Dome’s gates is named after him) blows his trumpet: the dead (especially those buried close to the Golden Gate) are resurrected and pass through the Gate, the portal to the End of Days (with its two little domed Gates of Mercy or that of Repentance), to be judged in the Dome of the Chain where the scales of justice hang.

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An imam is the leader of a mosque or community but in Shia, imams can be spiritual leaders, chosen by God and blessed with infallibility. The Twelver Shiites of Iran believe in the first twelve imams descended from Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali and his daughter Fatima and that the Twelfth Imam was ‘occulted’ – hidden by God – and will return as the Madhi, the Chosen messianic redeemer of Judgement Day. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini on this millenarian expectation: the clergy rule only until the Imam’s return.

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Jerusalem’s importance lessened as Mecca’s grew: if Jerusalem had perhaps at one point approached Mecca and Medina as part of the
haj –
‘You shall only set out for the three mosques Mecca,Medina, and al-Aqsa,’ declared one of the
hadith
of al-Khidri – now under the Abbasids,Jerusalem was reduced to a
ziyara
, a pious visit.

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The Abbasids, particularly Maamun, regularly requested copies of Greek classics from the Byzantines, securing for posterity Plato,Aristotle,Hippocrates,Galen,Euclid and Ptolemy of Alexandria. The Arabs developed an entire new vocabulary of science that entered the English language: alcohol, alembic, alchemy, algebra, almanac are just some of the words thus borrowed. Al-Nadim’s famous
Index
shows that they also produced 6,000 new books. Paper was now replacing parchment scrolls: in one of history’s decisive battles, the Abbasids had defeated an invasion by the Chinese Tang emperors, ensuring the Middle East would be Islamic not Chinese and also capturing the secrets of Chinese paper-makers.

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The Jewish communities of the world were ruled by the two hereditary gaons of the Jerusalem Academy and the Babylonian/Iraqi Academy, whose seat was in Baghdad. The Karaites spread throughout the Jewish world, building up large communities from the Crimea to Lithuania that survived up to the Holocaust, when most of them were annihilated. This led to one of the strangest anomalies of the Nazi repression: in the Crimea, some Karaites were of Turkic rather than Semitic origin, so the Nazis actually ordered the protection of this Jewish sect.

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The Khazars – shamanist Turkic nomads, ruling the steppes from the Black Sea to Central Asia – formed the last Jewish state before the creation of Israel. In about 805, their kings converted to Judaism, taking names such as Manasseh and Aaron. When the Jerusalemite writer Muqaddasi passed through Khazaria he laconically observed, ‘Sheep, honey and Jews exist [there] in large quantities.’ By the 960s, this Jewish empire was in decline. However, writers from Arthur Koestler to the recent Shlomo Sand have claimed that much of European Jewry are actually descended from these Turkic tribesmen. If true, this would undermine Zionism. But modern genetics refutes the theory: the two latest surveys suggest that modern Jews, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, are around 70 per cent descended from Middle Eastern genes of 3,000 years ago and around 30 per cent from European stock.

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Recent rulers of Jerusalem had also been buried there, believing, like the Jews, that burial in Jerusalem would mean they would be resurrected first on the Day of Judgement. The closer to the Temple Mount, the sooner they would rise again. The Ikhshid tombs have never been found but are believed to have been just on the northern edge of the Temple Mount. A Palestinian historian showed this author how History has so often been invented in Jerusalem by all three religions for political reasons only to gain its own sacred momentum. When there was talk of Israeli building just north of the Temple Mount, the historian suggested simply putting up a plaque identifying this as the site of the Ikhshid tombs, which has become the accepted shrine. The new building was cancelled.

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Al-Quds first appeared on Maamun’s coins in 832. Henceforth Jerusalemites were known as people from Quds: qudsi, or in slang, ‘utsi’.

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Khidr is the most fascinating of Islamic saints, closely associated with Jerusalem where he was said to celebrate Ramadan. Khidr the Green Man was a mystical stranger, eternally young but with a white beard, cited in the Koran (18.65) as Moses’ guide. In Sufism – Islamic mysticism – Khidr is the guide and illuminator of the holy path. The Green Man seems to have inspired the Green Knight in the Arthurian epic
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. But he is chiefly identified with the Jewish Elijah and the Christian St George, a Roman officer executed by Diocletian. His shrine at Beit Jala near Bethlehem is still revered by Jews,Muslims and Christians.

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Not all the synagogues had been destroyed. The Jewish synagogue in Fustat,Old Cairo, contained one of the key historical resources of the Middle Ages: the Cairo Geniza. In those times, all three Peoples of the Book revered the paper on which holy language was written because words had spiritual life like people. The Jews kept papers received in synagogues in a
geniza
or storehouse for seven years at which point they were buried in a cemetery or stowed in a special attic. For over 900 years, the Cairo Geniza was not emptied, preserving 100,000 papers showing Jewish Egyptian life, its connections with Jerusalem, and the Mediterranean world in all its aspects, sealed and forgotten until 1864 when a Jerusalemite scholar first penetrated it. In the 1890s,Geniza documents started to emerge, bought by English,American and Russian scholars, but it was only in 1896 that two eccentric Scottish ladies showed some Geniza documents to Professor Solomon Schechter, who recognized the earliest Hebrew text of Ben Sira’s Ecclesiasticus. Schechter collected the priceless hoard, which enabled S. D. Goitein to produce his six-volume
Mediterranean Society
.