Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In Palestine, Jerusalem alone held out under Patriarch Sophronius, a Greek intellectual who praised her in his poetry as “Zion, radiant Zion of the Universe.” He could scarcely believe the disaster that had befallen the Christians. Preaching in the Church of the Sepulchre, he denounced the sins of the Christians and the atrocities of the Arabs, whom he called Sarakenoi in Greek—Saracens: “Whence come these wars against us? Whence multiply barbarian invasions? The slime of the godless Saracens has captured Bethlehem. The Saracens have risen up against us with a beastly impulse because of our sins. Let us correct ourselves.”

  It was too late for that. The Arabs converged on the city which they called Ilya (Aelia, the Roman name). The first of their commanders to besiege Jerusalem was Amr ibn al-As, who after Khaled was their best general and another irrepressibly larger-than-life adventurer from the Meccan nobility. Amr, like the other Arab leaders, knew the area very well: he even owned land nearby and had visited Jerusalem in his youth. But this was not just a quest for booty.

  “The Hour has drawn nigh,” says the Koran. The early Muslim Believers’ militant fanaticism was stoked by their belief in the Last Judgement. The Koran did not state this specifically but they knew from the Jewish-Christian prophets that it had to take place in Jerusalem. If the Hour was upon them, they needed Jerusalem.

  Khaled and the other generals joined Amr around the walls but the Arab armies were probably too small to storm the city and there does not seem to have been much fighting. Sophronius simply refused to surrender without a guarantee of tolerance from the Commander of the Believers himself. Amr suggested solving this problem by passing off Khaled as the Commander but he was recognized so Omar was summoned from Mecca.

  The Commander inspected the rest of the Arab armies at Jabiya in the Golan and Jerusalemites probably met him there to negotiate their surrender. The Monophysite Christians, who were the majority in Palestine, hated the Byzantines and it seems the early Muslim Believers were happy to allow freedom of worship to their fellow monotheists.d Following the Koran, Omar offered Jerusalem a Covenant—dhimma—of Surrender that promised religious tolerance to the Christians in return for payment of the jizya tax of submission. Once this was agreed, Omar set out for Jerusalem, a giant in ragged, patched robes riding a mule, with just one servant.

  OMAR THE JUST: TEMPLE REGAINED

  When he saw Jerusalem from Mount Scopus, Omar ordered his muezzin to give the call to prayer. After praying, he donned the white robes of the pilgrim, mounted a white camel and rode down to meet Sophronius. The Byzantine hierarchs awaited the conqueror, their bejewelled robes contrasting with his puritanical simplicity. Omar, the hulking Commander of the Believers, a wrestler in his youth, was an implacable ascetic who always carried a whip. It was said that when Muhammad entered a room, women and children would continue to laugh and chat, but when they saw Omar they fell silent. It was he who started to collate the Koran, created the Muslim calendar and much Islamic law. He enforced far more severe rules on women than the Prophet himself. When his own son got drunk, Omar had him scourged with eighty lashes which killed him.

  Sophronius presented Omar with the keys of the Holy City. When the patriarch saw Omar and his ragged hordes of Arab cameleers and horsemen, he muttered that this was “the abomination of desolation.” Most of them were tribesmen from the Hejaz or the Yemen; they travelled light and fast, draped in turbans and cloaks, living on ilhiz (ground camel hair mixed with blood and then cooked). A far cry from the heavily armoured Persian and Byzantine cataphract cavalry, only the commanders wore chain-mail or helmets. The rest “rode shaggy stumpy horses, their swords highly polished but covered in a shabby cloth scabbard.” They carried bows and spears that were bound with camel sinews, and red cowhide shields resembling “a thick red loaf of bread.” They cherished their broadswords, their sayf, gave them names and sang poems about them.

  Priding themselves on their uncouthness, they wore “four locks of hair” stuck up like “the horns of a goat.” When they encountered rich carpets, they rode onto them and cut them up to make spear coverings, enjoying the booty—human and material—like any other conquerors. “Suddenly, I sensed the presence of a human form hidden under some covers,” wrote one of them. “I tear them away and what do I find? A woman like a gazelle, radiant like the sun. I took her and her clothes and surrendered the latter as booty but put in a request that the girl should be alotted to me. I took her as a concubine.”e The Arab armies had no technical advantages, but they were fanatically motivated.

  Sophronius, say the traditional Muslim sources, dating from much later, escorted the Saracen Commander to the Holy Sepulchre, hoping his visitor would admire or even embrace the perfect sanctity of Christianity. When Omar’s muezzin called his soldiers to prayer, Sophronius invited the Commander to pray there, but he is said to have refused, warning that this would make it a place of Islamic worship. Omar knew that Muhammad had revered David and Solomon. “Take me to the sanctuary of David,” he ordered Sophronius. He and his warriors entered the Temple Mount, probably through the Prophets’ Gate in the south, and found it contaminated by “a dungheap which the Christians had put there to offend the Jews.”

  Omar asked to be shown the Holy of Holies. A Jewish convert, Kaab al-Ahbar, known as the Rabbi, replied that if the Commander preserved “the wall” (perhaps referring to the last Herodian remains, including the Western Wall), “I will reveal to him where are the ruins of the Temple.” Kaab showed Omar the foundation-stone of the Temple, the rock which the Arabs called the Sakhra.

  Aided by his troops, Omar began to clear the debris to create somewhere to pray. Kaab suggested he place this north of the foundation-stone “so you will make two qiblas, that of Moses and that of Muhammad.” “You still lean towards the Jews,” Omar supposedly told Kaab, placing his first prayer house south of the rock, roughly where al-Aqsa Mosque stands today, so that it clearly faced Mecca. Omar had followed Muhammad’s wish to reach past Christianity to restore and co-opt this place of ancient holiness, to make the Muslims the legitimate heirs of Jewish sanctity and outflank the Christians.

  The stories of Omar in Jerusalem date from over a century later when Islam had formalized its rituals in ways that were very distinct from those of Christianity and Judaism. Yet the story of Kaab and other Jews, which later formed the Islamic literary tradition of Israiliyyat, much of it about Jerusalem’s greatness, proves that many Jews and probably Christians joined Islam. We will never know exactly what happened in those early decades but the relaxed arrangements in Jerusalem and elsewhere suggest that there may have been a surprising amount of mingling and sharing amongst the Peoples of the Book.f

  The Muslim conquerors were initially happy to share shrines with the Christians. In Damascus, they shared the Church of St. John for many years and the Umayyad Mosque there still contains the tomb of St. John the Baptist. In Jerusalem, there are also accounts of them sharing churches. The Cathisma Church outside the city was actually equipped with a Muslim prayer-niche. Contrary to the Omar legend, it seems that the early Muslims first prayed in or beside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before arrangements could be made on the Temple Mount.

  The Jews too welcomed the Arabs after centuries of Byzantine repression. It is said that Jews, as well as Christians, rode in the Muslim armies. Omar’s interest in the Temple Mount understandably excited Jewish hopes, because the Commander of the Believers not only invited the Jews to maintain the Temple Mount but also allowed them to pray there with the Muslims. A well-informed Armenian bishop, Sebeos, who wrote thirty years later, claims that “the Jews planned to build the Temple of Solomon and, locating the Holy of Holies, they built (the Temple) without a pedestal”—and adds that Omar’s first governor of Jerusalem was Jewish. Omar certainly invited the leader of Tiberias’ Jewish community, the Gaon, and seventy Jewish families to return to Jerusalem where they settled in the area south of the Temple Mount.g

  Jerusalem was still impoverished and plague-ridden after the Persia
n depredations and it remained overwhelmingly Christian for many years. Omar also settled Arabs here, especially the more sophisticated Quraysh who liked Palestine and Syria, which they called Bilad al-Shams. Some of the Prophet’s closest followers, known as the Companions, came to Jerusalem and were buried in the first Muslim cemetery just outside the Golden Gate, ready for the Day of Judgement. Two of the famous Jerusalem Families, who play such a prominent role in this story right into the twenty-first century, trace their descent from these earliest Arab grandees.h3

  In Jerusalem, Omar was accompanied not only by his generals Khalid and Amr but also by a pleasure-loving but competent young man who could not have been more different from the whip-wielding Commander. Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan was a son of Abu Sufyan, the Meccan aristocrat who had led the opposition to Muhammad. Muawiya’s mother ate the liver of the Prophet’s uncle Hamza after the Battle of Uhuh. When Mecca surrendered to Islam, Muhammad appointed Muawiya as his secretary and married his sister. After Muhammad’s death, Omar appointed Muawiya as governor of Syria. The Commander gave him a backhanded compliment: Muawiya, he said, was the “Caesar of the Arabs.”

  a The word “mosque” derives from the Arabic masjid, which led to the Spanish mezquita and the French mosquée.

  b Muhammad’s successors used the title Commander of the Believers. Later the Heads of State were known as Khalifat Rasul Allah—Successor to the Messenger of God—or caliph. Abu Bakr may have used this title but there is no evidence it was again used for another seventy years, until the reign of Abd al-Malik. Then it was applied retrospectively: the first four rulers became known as the Righteous Caliphs.

  c The early history of Islam, including the surrender of Jerusalem, is mysterious and contested. The pre-eminent Islamic historians wrote one or two centuries later and far from Jerusalem or Mecca: Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad’s first biographer, wrote in Baghdad, dying in 770; al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri and al-Yaqubi all lived in late-ninth-century Persia or Iraq.

  d The early Muslims seem to have called themselves “Believers”—the word appears 1,000 times in the Koran while “Muslim” appears about 75 times—and as we will see in Jerusalem, they were certainly not yet hostile to their fellow monotheists, Christians or Jews. Professor Fred M. Donner, an authority on early Islam, takes this further: “There is no reason to believe,” he writes, “that the Believers viewed themselves as a new or separate religious confession. Some of the early Believers were Christians or Jews.”

  e There is no contemporary account of the fall of Jerusalem but the Arab historians describe the armies that simultaneously invaded Persia and this is based on those sources.

  f Jews and most Christians would not have had a problem with the earliest versions of the Muslim statement of faith—the shahada—which read “There is no God but God,” as it may not have been until 685 that they added “Muhammad is the apostle of God.” Jewish and Muslim names for Jerusalem overlap: Muhammad called Palestine “The Holy Land” in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Jews called the Temple Beyt ha-Miqdash (the Holy House) which the Muslims adapted: they called the city herself Bayt al-Maqdis. The Jews called the Temple Mount Har ha-Beyt (the Mount of the Holy House); Muslims initially called it Masjid Bayt al-Maqdis, the Mosque of the Holy House, and later also Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Ultimately Muslims had seventeen names for Jerusalem; Jews claimed seventy, and both agreed “a multiplicity of names is a sign of greatness.”

  g The traditional text of the Covenant or Pact of Omar with the Christians claims Omar agreed to ban the Jews from Jerusalem. This is Christian wishful thinking or a later forgery because we know that Omar welcomed the Jews back in Jerusalem, that he and the early caliphs allowed Jewish worship on the Temple Mount and that the Jews did not leave again as along as Islam held sway. The Armenians were already a large Christian community in Jerusalem with their own bishop (later patriarch). They established close relations with the Muslims and received their own Covenant. For the next millennium and a half, Christians and Jews were dhimmi, people of the Covenant, tolerated but inferior, sometimes left to themselves, sometimes viciously persecuted.

  h Omar ordered the retirement of Khaled, victor of Yarmuk, after hearing about a wine-soaked bathhouse orgy in which a poet sang of the general’s heroics. Khaled died of plague though today’s Khalidi family claim descent from him. One of Muhammad’s early supporters had been a woman named Nusaybah who lost two sons and a leg fighting for the Prophet. Now Nusaybah’s brother, Ubadah ibn al-Samit, arrived with Omar, who is said to have appointed him as a judge in Jerusalem, and custodian of the Holy Sepulchre and of the Rock. His descendants, the Nusseibeh family, are still Custodians of the Holy Sepulchre in 2010 (see the Epilogue).

  CHAPTER 18

  The Umayyads:

  The Temple Restored

  660–750

  MUAWIYA: ARAB CAESAR

  Muawiya ruled Jerusalem for forty years, first as governor of Syria and then as the monarch of the vast Arab empire which was expanding eastwards and westwards with astounding speed. But in the midst of all of this success, a civil war about the succession almost destroyed Islam and it created a schism that still divides it today.

  In 644, Omar was assassinated and his successor was Othman, a cousin of Muawiya. After more than ten years, Othman was hated for his nepotism. When he too was assassinated, the Prophet’s first cousin, Ali, who was also married to his daughter Fatima, was chosen as Commander of the Believers. Muawiya demanded that Ali punish the assassins—but the new Commander refused. Muawiya feared that he would lose his domain in Syria. He won the ensuing civil war, Ali was killed in Iraq, and there ended the reign of the last of the so-called Righteous Caliphs.

  In July 661, the grandees of the Arab empire gathered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to acclaim Muawiya as Commander of the Believers and pledge allegiance in the traditional Arab way—the bayah.a Afterwards the new Commander visited the Holy Sepulchre and the Virgin Mary’s Tomb, not as a pilgrim but to show the continuity of religions and his imperial role as protector of the holy places. He ruled from Damascus, but he adored Jerusalem which he advertised on his coins as “Iliya Filastin”—Aelia Palestina. He was tempted to make her his capital and it is likely that he often resided here in one of the luxurious palaces just south of the Temple which he may have built. Muawiya borrowed Jewish traditions about the Temple Mount to declare that Jerusalem was the “land of ingathering and resurrection on Judgement Day,” and he added, “The area between the two walls of this mosque are dearer to God than the rest of the earth.”

  Christian writers hailed his reign as just, peaceful and tolerant; Jews called him a “lover of Israel.” His armies contained Christians; indeed he cemented his alliance with Christian Arab tribes by marrying Maysun, the daughter of their sheikh, and she was allowed to remain Christian. Moreover, he ruled through Mansur ibn Sanjun (the Arab for Sergius), a Christian bureaucrat inherited from Heraclius. Muawiya had grown up beside the Jews of Arabia, and it is said that when he was visited by one of their delegations he first asked them if they could cook the delicious haris dish which he had so savoured back home. Muawiya settled more Jews in Jerusalem, permitting them to pray there on the site of the Holy of Holies; the traces of a menorah on the Temple Mount, dating from the seventh century, may be evidence of this.

  Muawiya was probably the real creator of today’s Islamic Temple Mount. It was he who actually built the first mosque there, flattening the rock of the old Antonia Fortress, extending the esplanade and adding an open-sided hexagon, the Dome of the Chain: no one knows what it was for but since it is in the precise middle of the Temple Mount, it may celebrate the centre of the world. Muawiya, writes a contemporary, “hews Mount Moriah and makes it straight and builds a mosque there on the holy rock.” When a Gallic bishop named Arculf visited Jerusalem, he saw that “in the former place where the Temple stood, the Saracens now frequent an oblong house of prayer pieced together with upright planks and large beams over some ruined remains, said to h
old 3,000 people.” It was scarcely yet recognizable as a mosque but it probably stood where al-Aqsa stands today.b

  Muawiya personified hilm, the wisdom and patience of the Arab sheikh: “I apply not my sword when my lash suffices nor my lash when my tongue suffices. And even if but one hair is binding me to my fellow men, I don’t let it break. When they pull, I loosen, if they loosen I pull.” This is almost a definition of statesmanship and Muawiya, the creator of Arab monarchy and the first of the Umayyad dynasty, is a much-neglected paragon of how absolute power does not have to corrupt absolutely. He expanded his realm into eastern Persia, Central Asia and north Africa and he took Cyprus and Rhodes, making the Arabs a maritime power with his new navy. He launched annual assaults on Constantinople, and on one occasion besieged it by land and sea for three years.

  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.