Jerusalem by Karen Armstrong

Author:Karen Armstrong [Armstrong, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79859-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

The Dome of the Rock, built by Caliph Abd al-Malik and completed in 691. By restoring the Temple Mount and erecting the first major Islamic building there, Muslims expressed their conviction that their new faith was rooted in the sanctity of the older traditions.

The caliph chose to build his dome around the rock that protruded from the Herodian pavement toward the northern end of the platform. Why did he choose to honor this rock, which is not mentioned in either the Bible or the Qurān? Later Muslims would believe that Muḥammad had ascended to heaven from the Rock after his Night Journey and that he had prayed in the small cave beneath. But in 688 this event had not yet been definitively linked with Jerusalem: had Abd al-Malik intended to commemorate the mirāj of the Prophet, he would certainly have inscribed the appropriate Qurānic verses somewhere in the shrine. But he did not do so. We do not know whence the devotion to the Rock originates. The Bordeaux Pilgrim had seen Jews anointing a “pierced stone” on the Temple mount, but we cannot know for certain that this was the Rock. In the second century, the Mishnah speaks of a “stone of foundation” (even shetiyah) which had been placed beside the Ark in the days of David and Solomon, but the rabbis do not tell us whether this stone was still in place in Herod’s Temple, nor do they identify it with the Rock on the devastated Temple Mount. It is likely that both Jews and Muslims assumed that the Rock marked the site of the Holy of Holies in the Temple, though the present scholarly consensus is that it did not.29 If so, they would naturally see the Rock as the “center of the earth,” a place which had always yielded access to heaven. After the building of the Dome of the Rock, Jews and Muslims would both develop legends about the Rock, so the Muslim shrine might have stimulated the Jewish imagination. Both Jews and Muslims came to regard the Rock as the foundation of the Temple, the center of the world, the entrance to the Garden of Eden and the source of fertility—all the usual imagery associated with a monotheistic holy place. From a very early date, the Muslims felt that a visit to their new shrine took them back to the primal harmony of paradise.

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