JERUSALEM. One of Islam’s three holiest cities, Jerusalem was originally an old Canaanite settlement where David, king of Israel, built his capital and his son Solomon, the Temple. Generally called simply “the Holy” (al-Quds) by the Muslims, Jerusalem is not mentioned by name in the Qur’an, but the Muslim tradition unanimously sees a reference to it in the allusion in surah 17.1 where Muhammad was borne by night from Mecca to “the distant shrine” (al-masjid al-aqsa). Muslim armies took Jerusalem without resistance in 635 CE and immediately set to refurbishing its chief holy place, the neglected Temple mount of the “noble sanctuary” (al-Hram al-sharif). They first built at its southern end their congregational mosque (al-Aqsa), and, by 692, had completed at its center the splendid shrine called the “Dome of the Rock,” revered both as the terminus of the Night journey and the biblical site of Abraham’s sacrifice and Solomon’s Temple.
Excavations of extensive buildings south of the Haram suggest that the Umayyads may have had ambitious political plans for Jerusalem, which they apparently aborted when Damascus became the new capital of the “Abode of Islam.” The city’s history was generally uneventful until the Crusades, and Christians and Jews (Jerusalem was filled with Christians and Christian holy places and the Jews had been permitted by the Muslims to return to the city for the first time since their ban by the Romans in 135 CE) may have outnumbered the Muslims. The Egyptian ruler al-Hakim bi-amr Allah had the Christians’ Holy Sepulcher Church burned down in 1009, one of the events that provoked the Europeans’ invasion of Palestine and their occupation of Jerusalem in 1099. The Latin Christian interregnum in Jerusalem lasted a scant century before Salah al-Din (Saladin) drove them out in 1187, long enough, however, for the Crusaders to convert the Dome of the Rock into a church and (al-Aqsa), into the headquarters of the Knights Templars.
Under Salah al-Din, the Muslim holy places were restored to their original use, and it was he, aided by popular preachers, who raised Muslim appreciation of what was, after Mecca and Medina, the third holiest city in Islam. The Frankish Crusade appears to have taken the Muslims by surprise, but, thereafter, they were well aware of European intentions toward Jerusalem. In the centuries after the Crusades, the level of hostility between the Muslims and the indigenous Christian population, and particularly the European pilgrims who continued to visit the city (and whose accounts graphically document life there) rose appreciably. Salah al-Din also wished to make Jerusalem a safely Sunni city; the Shi’is were regarded as far more subversive enemies than the Christians. His goal was realized under the Mamluks, his family’s successors in Egypt and Palestine. From their accession in 1250 they invested heavily in Jerusalem; many of the Sunni law schools (madrasahs) and convents (khanaqahs) they constructed around the northern and western margins of the Haram still retain some of their expensive elegance, though they are now empty of the students and Sufis who used to inhabit them.
The Ottomans, who inherited the city in 1517 from the Mamluks, continued their predecessors’ generous support of the holy city. The walls that still set off the “Old City” today were built by the Ottomans, somewhat uselessly, perhaps, since the greatest threat to the city came from abroad, not in the form of armed warriors. The might of the Ottomans was tested and broken in the Balkans during the seventeenth to nineteenth century; consequently, their control of their own affairs in their own dominions was progressively eroded. Even before the Crusades, the Christians of Jerusalem, the Latins, Greeks, and Armenians, had learned the benefit of invoking the protection of the more powerful of their coreligionists; somewhat later, the European powers learned what benefits might accrue to them from manipulating those invocations.
The disintegration of Ottoman sovereignty was nowhere more evident than in Palestine and Jerusalem in the nineteenth century. The city began to fill up with European consulates, European missionaries, and, finally, European archaeological missions, many of them instruments of national policy and all of them far beyond the reach of the Ottoman authorities in what was by then an exceedingly poor city. Even the Jews, always the least considerable and most wretched of Jerusalem’s medieval population, discovered that they too had powerful friends and benefactors in Europe. With the aid of those benefactors, the Montefiores and Rothschilds chief among them, the lot of the Jews of Jerusalem im proved, and their numbers began to spiral upward. By 1900 there were 35,000 (Muslims and Christians each 10,000) out of a total population of 55,000.
Turkey joined Germany in its unsuccessful war against the Allies in 1914; in December 1917 Jerusalem fell, without harm, to General Edmund Allenby and a British
Expeditionary Army. It rested under the uneasy control of British governors during the entire Mandate period (1922-1948). When the British withdrew in 1948, the Jordanians hastened to occupy the Old City, despite the United Nations’ recommendations for internationalization. It remained a part of Jordan until the 1967 war, when the Israelis took it after fierce fighting. The whole city has since been integrated into the State of Israel, and declared its capital, though in June 1967 the Israeli minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, acknowledged the entire Haram al-Sharif to be the possession of the Muslims. The policy has remained in force to this day.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua. Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century: The Old City. New York, 1984. Charts in detail the rapid and radical changes to Jerusalem in the nineteenth century.
Benvenisti, Meron. Jerusalem: The Torn City. Jerusalem, 1976. Generally balanced account of the fate of Jerusalem, its Muslim population, and its Muslim holy places, after 1967.
Burgoyne, Michael. The Architecture of Islamic Jerusalem. Jerusalem, 1976. Inventory of the chief Islamic monuments of the city. Busse, Heribert. “The Sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam.” Judaism 17 (1968): 441-468.
Goitein, S. D. “al-Kuds: Part A. History.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 5, pp. 322-339. Leiden, 1960-. Succinct yet detailed account of the history of Muslim Jerusalem.
Grabar, Oleg. “al-Kuds: Part B. The Monuments.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed., vol. 5, pp. 339-344. Leiden, 1960-. The best brief survey of the monuments of Muslim Jerusalem.
Peters, F. E. Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginning of Modern Times. Princeton, 1985. Broad collection of sources on the city, its visitors, and their impressions, from the earliest days to the 1830s.
Peters, F. E. Jerusalem and Mecca: The Typology of the Holy City in the Near East. New York, 1987. Comparative study of two of Islam’s holiest cities.
Peters, F. E. The Distant Shrine: The Islamic Centuries in Jerusalem. New York, 1993. Shaping of the city of Jerusalem from the seventh to the nineteenth century.
Silberman, Neil Asher. Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917. New York, 1982. Informative and entertaining account of the archaeological “invasion” of Jerusalem in the nineteenth century.
Tibawi, A. L. Jerusalem: Its Place in Islamic and Arabic History. Beirut, 1969. Muslim’s account of the importance of Jerusalem.
F. E. PETERS