Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

230 t CHAPTER NINE
The Christian Assault on Jerusalem
Thus Jerusalem became a Muslim holy city by reason of the biblical
and Muhammadan associations of its Noble Sanctuary, though
for the next four centuries it remained overwhelmingly Christian
in its population. Around the Haram was a Muslim population
whose interest in living there was in part administrative and in part
simple piety. A modest Jewish community lived somewhere in the
southeast corner, rabbis many of them, who enjoyed the prestige of
constituting the principal yeshiva of the Jewish world but who
otherwise shared little of the prosperity of their coreligionists in
Islamic urban centers like Fustat/Cairo or Baghdad. The reason
was not oppression; it was simply that Jerusalem was not a very
prosperous place. It was of secondary political and administrative
importance; it had little share in the burgeoning trade and commerce
that was beginning to enrich other cities in the Abode of
Islam. Jerusalem remained what it had been since the second century,
a provincial backwater that now possessed major Christian
and Muslim shrines and a Zionist recollection of a Jewish one.
Pilgrims still came and went, more and more of them Western
Christians.
The eleventh-century Palestinian city called al-Quds, “The Holy,”
was, then, neither a very prosperous nor indeed a very safe place
to live. It was in the center of a three-cornered Muslim war zone
amid Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, and like some ancient Belgium or
Armenia, Palestine was often overrun by armies heading elsewhere,
with the additional hazard that when the dust cleared, the
predatory Bedouin who infested the area often moved in to pick
over the bones. The Muslims did not often visit Jerusalem in those
days; indeed, they could scarcely defend the place. When tyranny
descended on the land, it was usually all three communities that
shared the oppression. For the Muslims that oppression was
largely economic; for the Jews, and particularly the far more visible
Christians, it frequently cast itself in religious raiment. Thus al-
Hakim, the eleventh-century ruler of Egypt whose memory is fragrant
in no one’s annals, Muslim, Jewish or Christian, and who
was disturbed, if not entirely deranged, had destroyed the Church