When the victorious Caliph Omar ibn-al-Khattab entered the Temple Mount in 638 he knelt and immediately began clearing away the accumulated rubble of centuries – using the hem of his own robe. Joined by his followers, they soon revealed the Rock – al-Sakhra – from which the prophet Mohammed stepped up to the Seventh Heaven to stand before God on his “Night Journey”.
This is the same Rock upon which Abraham is said to have prepared to sacrifice his son. Though the Bible recounts that this was Isaac (Genesis 22), Moslem tradition relates that it was his first-born son Ishmael who was about to be sacrificed.
In 688 the fifth Ummayad caliph, Abd al-Malik, began work on the sublimely created Dome of the Rock. Ruling most of the Islamic world from Damascus, but without Mecca and Medina, he desperately wanted to undermine the power of his enemies.
In a bid to make Jerusalem the new center of Moslem pilgrimage, Abd al-Malik invested seven years’ income from the rich province of Egypt.
Employing Byzantine and local Christian experts and labor brought in from Egypt he raised a golden domed monument 180 feet high (55m) over the Rock to outshine anything in the Islamic world – or in Christendom.
Based on the design principles of the Holy Sepulcher, constructed of stone and marble, sumptuously decorated with mosaics and glazed tiles bearing entire chapters of the Koran and illuminated by 36 stained-glass windows, the Dome of the Rock became the centerpiece for all Islamic ceremonies in Jerusalem. In the same way as they circled the Black Stone of the Ka’ ba in Mecca, Moslem pilgrims filled with wonder as they walked seven times around the Rock from where tradition says a trumpet will sound on Judgment Day, and where the Gates of Heaven will open.
Once the base of the altar in Solomon’s Temple, the Faithful see in the Rock Mohammed’s footprint and the mark of the hand of the Angel Gabriel. Beneath it a large cavern called the Well of the Souls is where the spirits of the dead gather to join Friday prayers.
In the time of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Crusaders renamed the Dome of the Rock Templum Domini – the Temple of the Lord – and transformed it into a church, raising a great golden cross on its dome in place of the Moslem crescent moon. Restored to Islam by Saladin, the next major change came with the arrival of the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66). In 1552 he replaced the old external mosaics with new azure-blue tiles fired in the renowned Persian kilns of Kashan. The inscribed texts from the Koran inside were executed in 1876 by the famed Turkish calligrapher, Mohammed Chafik.
Moslem traditions abound both about the Rock and about Jerusalem as a whole. They say that the Rock was the first thing to appear out of the waters of the Flood; that whoever offers even the shortest prayer in Jerusalem secures a place in Paradise; and that on Judgment Day the shrine of Mecca – the holy black Ka’ba – will be brought in a triumphal procession like a bride to Jerusalem. Laid out in three concentric sections marking the passage from the mundane to the divine, the Dome of the Rock, like a waiting bridegroom, stands ready to welcome its arrival.
This page is part of the book The Holy Land of Jesus
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