Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE WORSHIPFUL ACTS t 231
of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009 in an act of senseless malice, unwittingly
setting in train events that are still unfolding to this day.
There is no need to rehearse the First or Jerusalem Crusade, or
better, the Pilgrimage, as its participants called it. The Western
knights, most of them French, took Jerusalem in 1099, slew the
Muslim defenders down to the women and children—the fate of the
Jewish community is less clear; some were doubtless killed but many
others were ransomed by their coreligionists in Egypt—and so found
themselves in possession of a city that was filled with holy places but
had no inhabitants other than themselves. The Dome of the Rock
was converted into a church, the Templum Domini, and the Aqsa
mosque, renamed the Templum Solomonis, after a brief career as the
palace of the Latin king, was handed over to the new Order of the
Knights Templars who began to subdivide, enlarge, and adapt the
building to their own uses. Some Eastern Christians were lured back
into the city, and eventually too a few Jews and Muslims must have
made their tentative and modest reappearance in Jerusalem.
This extraordinary interlude in Jerusalem’s history lasted less
than a century, from 1099 to 1187, when the crusaders were
driven out by Saladin’s armies. The fighting was savage once again,
but this time there was no massacre in its wake. The Haram buildings
were of course reconverted to the Islamic cultus, but the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which the crusaders had extensively
rebuilt, was left untouched, as were most of the city’s other major
Christian shrines. Saladin did, however, convert the convent attached
to the Church of St. Anne into a madrasa, or law school,
and part of the palace of the now departed Latin patriarch into a
Sufi convent and hospice.
Muslim Jerusalem in the Middle Ages
The Old City of Jerusalem as it appears to the visitor today is
Ottoman on the outside—the walls were built by Ottoman Sulayman
in the early sixteenth century—and largely Mamluk within.
The careful eye can catch a considerable number of crusader traces
in the city, and the design of the Haram complex dates back of