Jerusalem: The Biography

* The early Muslims seem to have called themselves ‘Believers’ – the word appears 1,000 times in the Koran while ‘Muslim’ appears about 75 times – and as we will see in Jerusalem, they were certainly not yet hostile to their fellow monotheists,Christians or Jews. Professor Fred M. Donner, an authority on early Islam, takes this further: ‘There is no reason to believe’, he writes, ‘that the Believers viewed themselves as a new or separate religious confession. Some of the early Believers were Christians or Jews.’