Jerusalem: The Biography (32 page)

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’.
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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.
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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’.

Mecca remained for the moment beyond his control, but he possessed Jerusalem, which he revered as much as Muawiya had. Abd al-Malik envisaged the creation of a united Islamic empire out of a second civil war, with Bilad al-Shams – Syria–Palestine – as its heart: he planned a highway between Jerusalem and Damascus.
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Muawiya had planned to build over the Rock: now Abd al-Malik assigned seven years’ worth of his Egyptian revenues to create the Dome of the Rock.

The plan was exquisitely simple: a dome, 65 feet in diameter supported by a drum, all resting on octagonal walls. The Dome’s beauty, power and simplicity are equalled by its mystery: we do not know exactly why Abd al-Malik built it – he never said. It is not actually a mosque but a shrine. Its octagonal shape resembles a Christian martyrium, indeed its dome echoes those of the Holy Sepulchre and Hagia Sofia in Constantinople yet its circular walkways designed for circumambulation recall the Kaaba of Mecca.

The Rock was the site of Adam’s paradise, Abraham’s altar, the place where David and Solomon planned their Temple later visited by Muhammad on his Night Journey. Abd al-Malik was rebuilding the Jewish Temple for the true revelation of God, Islam.

The building has no central axis but is encircled thrice – first by the outside walls, next by the octagonal arcade and then right under the dome, bathed in sunlight, the arcade around the Rock itself: this declared that this place was the centre of the world. The dome itself was heaven, the link to God in human architecture. The golden dome and the lush decorations and gleaming white marble declared this was the new Eden, and the place for the Last Judgement when Abd al-Malik and his Umayyad dynasty, would surrender their kingdom to God at the Hour of the Last Days. Its wealth of images – jewels, trees, fruit, flowers and crowns – make it a joyful building even for non-Muslims – its imagery combined the sensuality of Eden with the majesty of David and Solomon.

The Dome’s message was therefore also imperial: since he had not regained Mecca from his rebels, he was declaring the grandeur and permanence of his dynasty to the Islamic world – and possibly, if he had not retaken the Kaaba, he might have made this his new Mecca. The gold dome projected his glory as an Islamic emperor. But it had a wider audience: just as Justinian’s Hagia Sofia in Constantinople had surpassed Solomon, so Abd al-Malik was surpassing Justinian, and Constantine the Great too, a rebuke of the Christian claim to be the new Israel. Ironically, the mosaics were probably the work of Byzantine craftsmen, lent to the Commander by Justinian II during a rare peace between the empires.

After it was finished in 691/2, Jerusalem was never the same again: Abd al-Malik’s astonishing vision seized the skyline of Jerusalem for Islam by building on the mountain, disdained by the Byzantines, which ruled the city. Physically the Dome dominated Jerusalem and overshadowed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – and that was Abd al-Malik’s purpose, believed later Jerusalemites such as the writer al-Muqaddasi. It worked: henceforth right up into the twenty-first century, the Muslims mocked the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – the
Kayamah
in Arabic – calling it the
Kumamah –
the Dungheap. The Dome both complemented and vanquished the rival yet related claims of Jews and Christians, so Abd al-Malik confronted both with the superior novelty of Islam. Circling the building, he placed 800 feet of inscriptions that denounce the idea of the divinity of Jesus with a directness that hints at the close relationship between the two faiths of monotheists: they shared much but not the Trinity. The inscriptions are fascinating because they are our first glimpse at the text of the Koran which Abd al-Malik was having collated into its final form.

The Jews were less important imperially but more important theologically. The Dome was maintained by 300 black slaves assisted by twenty Jews and ten Christians. The Jews could not help but see the Dome with hope: was it their new Temple? They were still allowed to pray there and the Umayyads created an Islamic version of the Temple rituals of purification, anointment and circumambulation of the stone.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.