Jerusalem is the third holiest city of Islam. Its status rests on the fact that the prophet Mohammed originally told his followers to pray facing the city where, according to the Koran, he was taken on his “Night Journey”, “Glory be to him who made His servant go by night from the Sacred Temple (Mecca) to the farther Temple (Jerusalem) whose surroundings we have blessed”, Sutra 17:1. Situated on the Temple Mount, those surroundings are known in Arabic as Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary – the heart of Moslem Jerusalem.
Caliph Omar ibn-al-Khattab, the second leader of Islam after Mohammed, conquered the Holy Land from the crumbling Byzantine world. Entering Jerusalem in 638 AD he cleared the ruins of the ancient Temple and built there a simple Moslem mosque.
This was described two years later by the Christian pilgrim, Arculf, who wrote, “In that renowned place where once the Temple had been magnificently constructed, …the Saracens now prepared a quadrangular place of prayer which they have built rudely constructed by setting great beams on some remains of ruins”.
It was the Ummayad caliph al-Walid who originally erected the great Al Aqsa Mosque above this shrine between 705 and 715. Damaged by repeated earthquakes it was rebuilt by the caliph of Egypt, al-Zahir, in 1035 who gave the structure much of its present form. When the Crusaders took the city soon after they renamed the mosque the Temple of Solomon, and turned it into the headquarters of the first and fiercest group of fighting monks – the Order of the Knights Templar. They added their own touch to the mosque and many fine structures to the precinct, but most of these were unfortunately destroyed during the last century.
Saladin, who recaptured the city, the Mameluks, Ayyubis and the later Ottoman rulers, all took a hand in giving the mosque a mixed style unique in Islamic architecture. The final touches to the Al Aqsa came in 1939 when the ceiling was redecorated as a gift from Egypt’s last monarch, King Faroukh.
This page is part of the book The Holy Land of Jesus
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