The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem (Vintage International)

by Kanan Makiya

  It is worth noting, in view of the origin of Solomon’s Temple in the tentlike structure of the ancient tabernacle used by the ancient Israelites, that Abd al-Malik decided to build his temple in the shape of a qubba, which today means “dome,” or “cupola,” in Arabic, and by extension has become a reference to the whole building. But in the seventh century, qubba meant “tent,” or some variety of a temporary covering like the Ka’ba’s covering of black cloth, the kiswa. The use of the word qubba in the inscription on the outer face of the octagon of Abd al-Malik’s building is, as Grabar puts it in The Shape of the Holy (p. 64), “the first example of a new usage for a traditional Arabic word.” With these comments in mind, it is interesting to return to the image of the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in al-Biruni’s fourteenth-century manuscript (shown in “Finding of the Rock”). The Muslim illustrator has, it is worth noting, imagined Solomon’s Temple as a tented dome modelled after the Dome of the Rock.

  The diameter of Abd al-Malik’s qubba, as K. A. C. Creswell has measured it, is “within less than half a metre” of that of the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, strongly suggesting that the Dome of the Rock, in addition to all its other meanings, had to rival the Church of the Resurrection; see Creswell, “The Origin of the Plan of the Dome of the Rock,” British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, Supplementary Papers no. 2 (1924). When al-Muqaddasi, a resident of Jerusalem, asked his uncle why Abd al-Malik’s successor, his son Walid, spent so much money building the mosque of Damascus, his uncle replied: “O my little son, thou hast not understanding. Verily al-Walid was right, and he was prompted to a worthy work. For he beheld Syria to be a country that had long been occupied by the Christians, and he noted there the beautiful churches still belonging to them, so enchantingly fair, and so renowned for their splendor, as are the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Churches of Lydda and Edessa. So he sought to build for the Muslims a mosque that should be unique and a wonder to the world. And in like manner is it not evident that Abd al-Malik, seeing the greatness of the martyrium [qubbah] of the Holy Sepulchre and its magnificence, was moved lest it should dazzle the minds of the Muslims and hence erected above the Rock the Dome which is now there.” Cited in Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art.

  On the importance of books as artifacts, see the delightful story of the Holy Scroll in al-Mahalla, a provincial capital in the Nile delta, in Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society, vol. 5.

  The Father and the Son

  There are only two, nonexclusive ways that the Jewish symbolism of the Rock could be appropriated for Muslim purposes and used to rebut Christian religious claims to Jerusalem: through the Rock’s association with God and his center of Creation, and through its association with the “Friend of God” and the first Muslim, Abraham, a prophet who was the ancestor of the Arabs and in the Muslim view, neither a Christian nor a Jew. The hypothesis that the latter might have been the case was powerfully put forth in the seminal essay by Grabar, “The Umayyad Dome of the Rock.” But between the story of Abraham’s trial as told in Genesis (22:16–18), and the Muslim version in the Quran (37:99–110), an important change had taken place. The son, who is not identified by name in the Quran and whom the majority of early traditionalists thought of as Isaac (Ishaq), became an active participant in his own sacrifice. “My father, do as thou art bidden,” he tells Abraham in the Quran, “thou shalt find me, God willing, one of the steadfast.” The interregnum was of course filled with the enormous influence of Christianity and the example of the supreme sacrifice of the Christian Messiah on Golgotha. Judaism had to confront the same influence long before Islam, the difference being that Muslims found the figure of Christ admirable and attractive, whereas Jews did not. And still the pressure to prove one’s own foundational act of sacrifice to be at least equal to that of Christ remained great. Shalom Spiegal’s translation and marvelous 140-page commentary on a twelfth-century poem by Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn, which retells the story of the Akedah, provided me with my inspiration for the writing of this chapter: See his The Last Trial: On the Legends of Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). Spiegal argues that the requirement of blood for expiation of sins is a Talmudic teaching that predates Christ. Certainly that was also true of the Arabs before Islam, as the story of Abd al-Muttalib’s sacrifice from Ibn Ishaq’s Life demonstrates. Two other books were helpful: Jon Levenson’s treatment in The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son; and Frederic Mann, ed., The Sacrifice of Isaac in the Three Monotheistic Traditions (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1995). The words of the son of Abraham cited in the last paragraph were attributed to him by Ibn Ishaq, the eighth-century biographer of the Prophet, as edited by Newby.

  The Importance of Eight

  In “The Origin of the Plan of the Dome of the Rock,” published in the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, Supplementary Papers no. 2 (1924), K. A. C. Creswell shows that the design of the Dome of the Rock was arrived at working from the inside out, as I have Ishaq working it out, and he argues that the all-critical diameter of the Dome, and its height off the ground, were the governing factors in the design. In both the Church of the Resurrection and the Dome of the Rock, “the height of the top edge of the drum from the ground is equal to its diameter.” This observation accords well with al-Muqaddasi’s previously cited explanation for why the Dome of the Rock was built. However, while the Church of the Resurrection was the monument that Abd al-Malik’s new Dome had to overshadow, the round (or octagonal) Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives was more likely to have had an influence on its general form. The Cathedral at Bosra in Syria, built in the sixth century, another annular building, was set out in much the same way as the Dome of the Rock; it may also have influenced the design. Ishaq’s drawings in the sand follow Creswell’s line of reasoning closely.

  In Anastase of Sinai’s seventh-century collection of edifying tales, the story is told of the archdeacon John, who incurred the wrath of Sophronius in the year of the Muslim conquest. John was a marble setter or a stonemason by trade who was “very good with his hands.” But he “let himself be seduced by the Saracens,” according to Anastase. He started to work on Umar’s mosque “for a dishonest gain.” When Sophronius found out, “he made John come, and asked him, like a father … not to profane his hands, and to keep away from such an abominable enterprise.” Sophronius also promised John alternative work at double the wages. “Only, disobey not my will. Do not do harm unto yourself and do not be for others the cause of their loss, while working on the construction of the place which Christ has damned.” Two days later John was discovered working on Umar’s mosque “in secrecy,” whereupon Sophronius had him excommunicated. A few days later, John fell off a ladder, was disabled, and died in agony from gangrene. I have based the character of Nicholas on this tale, reprinted in full in Flusin. The moral of Anastase’s story is a line attributed to Jesus (Matthew 16:19) and cited in the chapter “Building on the Rock”: “What you bind on earth will be bound in the heavens, and what you unbind on earth will be unbound in the heavens.”

  The association of the number eight with Paradise is one that has persisted across the ages; it is discussed in Annemarie Schimmel’s chapter on “The Auspicious Number” in the The Mystery of Numbers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). A famous saying of the Prophet speaks of the eight gateways to Paradise. The Islamic Paradise, Janna, is a garden in Muslim thought and imagery, more prominently so than in Christianity or Judaism, from which derives the custom common to Iran and Muslim India of dividing gardens into eight parts. This Garden is lavishly built with bricks of silver and gold and furnished with seats made from precious stones. See more on this in Images of Paradise in Islamic Art, edited by Sheila Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom (Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum, Dartmouth College of Art, 1991), and the article on “Djanna” in EI2. The lote tree is mentioned in the Quran 53:14. Other descriptions of Paradise used in this chapter are from Quran 15:45, 4
7:15, and 64:9. On the association of Rightness with Truth and Right, see the delightful essay by Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  Finally, the Dome’s relation to the Ka’ba with which this chapter ends is a figment of my imagination; it works nicely if the tradition of the Ka’ba’s “union” with the Dome of the Rock (which is not an invention), told at the end of the chapter on Mecca and Jerusalem, was in circulation at the time. Otherwise, there is no evidence that the builders of the Dome of the Rock had such an idea in mind, nor has anyone previously suggested it.

  Stone into Light

  The plans of the ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo were drawn on animal skins, according to Creswell (1932). Regarding the Dome of the Rock, al-Muqaddasi suggests that a model was made for the benefit of the Caliph. It stood somewhere in the Haram court. Scholars have suggested that another very old Umayyad structure on the Haram, due east of the Dome of the Rock, Qubbat al-Silsila, the Dome of the Chain, may very well have been that model. See Rosen-Ayalon, Early Islamic Monuments and Grabar, The Shape of the Holy. Ishaq’s reply to Abd al-Malik, “To Him belongs the sublime similitude,” comes from the Quran 16:61.

  In his Muruj, al-Mas’udi identifies the Temple of Solomon as one of the three most important monuments of ancient times. According to Soucek, citing Ibn al-Faqih and Wahb ibn Munabbih, the edifice itself was imagined as encrusted with jewels and precious stones. “It shone in the darkness of a moonless night like a brilliant lamp because of the quantities of jewels and gold used in its construction,” writes the ninth-century chronicler al-Dinawari. Moreover the Temple was surrounded by a miraculous garden in which trees grew spontaneously overnight and artificial trees made of gold bore real fruit. On these and other elaborations, undoubtedly of Jewish origin, see Soucek’s “The Temple of Solomon.”

  Raja’ ibn Haywa and Yazid ibn Sallam are the only two names mentioned in the sources who clearly had something to do with the building of the Dome of the Rock. The information I have provided about Raja’ is true to what little is known about him. That he was considered an expert on the Holy City is a point made by Nasser Rabbat in “The Dome of the Rock Revisited: Some Remarks on al-Wasiti’s Accounts,” Muqarnas, vol. 10 (1993). Yazid ibn Sallam was a local Jerusalemite and less important than Raja’.

  On the issue of light and the design of the Dome, which Ishaq and Raja’ argue about, there is reason to believe that the fifty-six windows in the edifice let in much more light before Sultan Sulayman changed all the marble grilles in the sixteenth century. Transparency, brightness, and vividness of color are central features of the design that must have made this building stand out dramatically from all its Christian predecessors in the seventh century. Although we can only guess at the design of the exterior mosaics on the eight octagonal walls, because they too were replaced in the sixteenth century, it is known that a great deal of color was deployed. As Grabar puts it in The Shape of the Holy, “such external decoration in color is virtually unknown before Umayyad times.” The twenty-fourth Sura from the Quran that so moved Ishaq (verses 35–37 are cited) is called “Light,” and is often used in association with glass lamps hung in mosques to symbolize the divine presence. The conversation about the origin of the use of calligraphy in Muslim religious architecture is an invention. Words on walls, however, became prominent in Muslim architecture in place of images. The Dome of the Rock stands at the forefront of an aesthetic revolution in the use of calligraphy as decoration. Grabar, who has written extensively about the inscriptions, considers applied calligraphy on this scale an invention inspired by Islam; its manipulation on buildings is comparable to the ways in which images were used in Christianity. A great deal of aesthetic energy and symbolic meaning was invested in the act of writing itself, as well as in all that accompanied or made writing on a surface possible; see Grabar (1987, 1996).

  Building on the Rock

  The reference to a visit by Abd al-Malik to Jerusalem during the rebellion of Mus’ab ibn al-Zubayr in Iraq (687–90) during the construction of the Dome of the Rock has been transmitted on the authority of Raja’ ibn Haywa. See on this Elad, Medieval Jerusalem. The platform upon which the Dome sits today has eight sets of stairs, not four, and is an irregular trapezoid in shape. Sources tell us nothing about its appearance in early Umayyad times. Following Grabar, I have assumed that it had four sets of stairs opposite the four entrances to the Dome. See The Shape of the Holy. The use of flour instead of plaster because it is an “emblem of fertility” is an anecdote I took from Creswell (1932); it relates in the original to a different building and Caliph. According to the sources, the labor force on the site was Egyptian and Nabataean peasants, the remnants of the Aramaic-speaking population of Syria and Iraq. On all matters of construction methods and details, I have relied on Creswell’s Early Muslim Architecture. The ceiling of “expressed structure” described by Ishaq is not what one sees today, because all structural elements were covered up with false ceilings in later centuries. The pilgrim John of Wurzberg reported seeing the “most beautifully adorned beams … supporting the roof itself.” On the strength of this description, Creswell (1932) believes that there was no false ceiling at the outset, “and that the beams of the roof were visible from within.” The effect would have undoubtedly been to make the building feel lighter and more impressive. Marguerite Van Berchem, in her essay on “The Mosaics of the Dome of the Rock” included in Creswell’s Early Muslim Architecture, cites a mosaic worker during the reign of al-Walid, Abd al-Malik’s son, who says of a different building “we have made it [the decorations] according to what we know of the forms of the trees and mansions of Paradise.” And Rosen-Ayalon, in Early Islamic Monuments, relates the whole iconographic scheme in the Dome to the theme of Paradise. Finally, Abd al-Malik’s concluding comment “Not for the sake of God did your friend meet his end but for the sake of money,” is adapted from a report in Tabari’s History, vol. 21, The Victory of the Marwanids.

  All Is Vanity

  The writings of al-Muqaddasi confirm how deep and pervasive Christian influence on Muslims in Jerusalem remained through the tenth century. See also Goitein, “Jerusalem in the Arab Period.” Grabar, in Formation of Islamic Art and his other writings, sees in the use of crowns, diadems, breastplates, and other imperial ornaments of the Byzantine and Persian princes on the surfaces of Abd al-Malik’s Dome “a conscious use of symbols belonging to the subdued or to the still active opponents of the Muslim state.” Soucek has argued the connection between the mosaic decoration of the interior of the Dome and the memory of the decoration of Solomon’s Temple as retained in the Muslim literary tradition; see “The Temple of Solomon.” The craftsmanship of the glass mosaic work above the arches on the outer face of the octagonal arcade is still the original of thirteen centuries ago. The mosaics are of outstanding quality, and rank, as Rosen-Ayalon has written, “among the most beautiful” and largest preserved walled surfaces of mosaic in the seventh century. With the exception of the dedication of the building, the inscriptions are taken from the Quran (4:169–71 and 3:16–17 are cited). As Grabar has stressed, these Quranic passages “precede by more than two centuries any other dated or datable quotation of any length from the Holy Book including pages from manuscripts”; see The Shape of the Holy. On the words that were left out of one verse by mistake, presumably because of a miscalculation, see Grabar, “The Umayyad Dome of the Rock.” It is an irony that the crusading order of the Knights of the Temple, ferocious fighters who took the Temple Mount area as their headquarters in Jerusalem during the Crusades, mistook the Dome of the Rock for Solomon’s Temple. They converted this Muslim building celebrating a Jewish Rock into a Christian Church called Templum Domini, the Temple of our Lord Jesus. Staring in the face of the Christian knights every day for eighty-eight years were inscriptions asserting the importance of Muhammad, and impatiently demanding of Christians that they submit to his faith; it was fortunate for the ensuing history of Islamic
art and architecture that the good knights appear not to have had anyone in their company who could read Arabic.

  Abd al-Malik’s appointment of Jewish Servants of the Haram, known as the akhmas, and the extremely important ritual ceremonies held on the Haram during the days of Abd al-Malik, are cited in Sibt ibn al-Jawzi’s thirteenth-century Mir’at al-Zaman. Al-Jawzi bases his account on the earlier ninth-century writings of al-Waqidi. The relevant several pages of Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, upon which I have based my account, are translated in full and exhaustively analyzed in Elad, Medieval Jerusalem. S. D. Goitein, in “Jerusalem in the Arab Period,” says the practice of having foreigners serve in temples was not all that unusual in ancient times (see Ezekiel 44:9–10). The tradition of employing Jews to light the lamps in the Dome of the Rock seems to have continued until the reign of Umar ibn Abd al-’Aziz (717–720). The significance of the cleansing and purifying rituals being performed on Mondays and Thursday, as cited by Sibt ibn al-Jawzi, is that these are the days Jews read the Torah. Julian Raby, in “In Vitro Veritas: Glass pilgrim vessels from seventh-century Jerusalem,” has shown that a first century Jewish tradition of making glass vessels for ceremonial and religious purposes during the days of the second Temple was restarted by Abd al-Malik in the seventh century; see his article in Bayt al-Maqdis: Jerusalem and Early Islam, part 2, edited by Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). See the same source on the coins issued by Abd al-Malik, probably in Jerusalem, showing a branched candlestick that looks like a menorah. The sum total of all of these activities must have been viewed by the Christians of Jerusalem as deeply threatening; certainly, according to Anastase of Sinai, they seemed to have interpreted Abd al-Malik’s actions as building “the Temple of God.” Elad in “Why Did Abd al-Malik Build the Dome of the Rock?” in Bayt al-Maqdis, part 1, cites a Kharijite sermon denouncing Abd al-Malik in these words: “He destroyed the sacred house of God, and revived the way of the ignoble people [the Jews]. Then he gave the Rock a form like that of the Place [the Ka’ba], to it the rough Arabs of Syria go on pilgrimage.” Finally, while there is no direct written testimony confirming that the Umayyads considered Jerusalem to be their capital during this period, Elad convincingly shows in his article that the scale of their human and material investment in the city was such as to leave no doubt that this was the case.