Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE WORSHIPFUL ACTS t 227
from all their pre-Islamic associations, pagan or Jewish, since
those earlier holy days were seasonal. The Christians broke their
religious ties to the past, and redefined themselves, by going solar;
the Muslims, by dropping intercalation.
The Enshrinement of Jerusalem
Holy cities like Mecca have always invited the politically minded
to gain some political advantage by making public and visible investment
in the place, particularly its holy locales. David, Solomon,
and Herod all engaged in such enterprises in Jerusalem,
with varying results, as did various Muslim rulers in Mecca and
Medina as well as Jerusalem. But the two who achieved the most
lasting effects in Jerusalem, if not to their reputation, then to the
city, were David and Constantine. Each took a settlement that was
not particularly regarded by their subjects and converted it into
something very different. David’s achievement is quite complex in
that it had both political and religious results that last to this day.
By moving himself and his court there and by bringing the Ark of
the Covenant into the town and making arrangements for its permanent
housing there—though his son Solomon actually built the
dazzlingly sumptuous House of the Lord—the king of Israel made
the Jebusite settlement of Jerusalem into the political and religious
capital of the Israelites. It has always remained such for the Jews,
even absent both sovereignty and shrine from that place.
David was only the second king of Israel, but Constantine rested
on even less certain terrain: he was the first Christian emperor of a
political enterprise, the Imperium Romanum, that stretched, in
one form or another, a millennium into the past, a thousand pagan
years by Christian reckoning. In the 330s, at Constantine’s express
command, the site of Jesus’ execution and burial, which had been
outside Herod’s wall on that side of the city but now lay well
within the Roman city, was excavated and cleared. Not only was
the site found, but in the excavation were discovered three crosses,
one of which was miraculously demonstrated to be Jesus’ own.