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