Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

228 t CHAPTER NINE
Both the rock-hewn tomb and Golgotha, the mound upon which
Jesus was crucified, were laid bare. Over the tomb was built a
circular domed edifice, which opened on its eastern side to an uncovered
courtyard where Golgotha stood, now surmounted by
Jesus’ cross. On the eastern side of this porticoed court lay Constantine’s
enormous basilica, with its monumental entry opening
onto the cardo, the main colonnaded street that ran north-south
through Jerusalem. A similar building was constructed over the
grotto identified as Jesus’ birth site in Bethlehem, another at the
place where Jesus stood on the Mount of Olives, and finally a
shrine was built around Abraham’s oak near Hebron. Where Constantine
led, the nobility followed: the Christian holy places of Jerusalem
and Palestine were richly endowed and enshrined over the
next three centuries.
In 735 or 738 the Muslims took Jerusalem, together with much
else around the Mediterranean, almost effortlessly and without
bloodshed. They left the Christians pretty much as they were, but
the new Muslim masters of the city seem to have struck up what
appears to us an odd symbiotic relationship with the Jews. The
Jewish community was permitted to return to Jerusalem, which it
did, soon moving the rabbinic circles that directed Jewish legal and
religious affairs from Tiberias, where they had been for more than
five centuries, back to Jerusalem. Moreover, the Muslims built
their first place of prayer in the city not in or by one of the Christian
churches or shrines but atop the temple mount, a place ignored
and neglected by the Christians but obviously still important
to the Jews. Indeed, the Jews may have been permitted to pray
once again on the mount. Within a generation the Muslims had
greatly enhanced their first crude mosque there and constructed
atop the same Herodian platform a magnificent domed shrine over
the rock that was said to have been the temple’s foundation stone.
This Noble Sanctuary, or Haram al-Sharif as the Muslims call it,
the Herodian platform with the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa
mosque placed atop, not only dominates the cityscape of Jerusalem
to this day; it may be the single most impressive architectural
expression of Islamic sanctity in the entire Abode of Islam.