Jerusalem: The Biography

630–60

MUHAMMAD: THE NIGHT JOURNEY

Muhammad’s father died before he was born and his mother died when he was just six. But he was adopted by his uncle, who took him on trading trips to Bosra in Syria. There he was taught about Christianity by a monk, studied the Jewish and Christian scriptures, coming to venerate Jerusalem as one of the noblest of sanctuaries. In his twenties, a wealthy widow named Khadija, much older than he, employed him to manage her caravan trading and then married him. They lived in Mecca, the home of the Kaaba and its black stone, the sanctuary of a pagan god. The city thrived on the pilgrims attracted by this cult and by caravan trading. Muhammad was a member of the Quraysh tribe, who provided its leading merchants and custodians of the sanctuary, but his Hashemite clan was not one of the more powerful.

Muhammad, described as handsome with curly hair and beard, possessed both an all-conquering geniality – it was said that when he shook someone’s hand he never liked to be the one to let go first – and a charismatic spirituality. He was admired for his integrity and intelligence – as his warriors later put it, ‘He was the best among us’ – and he was known as al-Amin, the Reliable.

As with Moses, David or Jesus, it is impossible now for us to divine the personal essence of his success, but like them, he came at the time he was needed. In the Jahiliya, the Time of Ignorance before his revelation, ‘there was nobody more destitute than we were,’ wrote one of his soldiers later. ‘Our religion was to kill one another and raid. There were those among us who would bury their daughters alive not wanting them to eat our food. Then God sent us a well-known man.’

Outside Mecca was the Cave of Hira where Muhammad liked to meditate. In 610, according to tradition, the Archangel Gabriel visited him there with his first revelation from the one God who had chosen him to be his Messenger and Prophet. When the Prophet received God’s revelations, his face was said to become flushed, he fell silent, his body lying limp on the ground, sweat poured down his face; he was engulfed by humming sounds and visions – and then he would recite his poetical, divine revelations. Initially he was terrified by this, but Khadija believed in his vocation and he started to preach.

In this rough military society where every boy and man bore arms, the literary tradition was not written but consisted of a rich spoken poetry that celebrated the deeds of honourable warriors, passionate lovers, fearless hunters. The Prophet was to harness this poetical tradition: his 114 sura – chapters – were initially recited before they were collated into the Koran, ‘The Recitation’, a compendium of exquisite poetry, sacred obscurity, clear instruction and bewildering contradiction.

Muhammad was an inspirational visionary who preached submission – Islam – to the one God in return for universal salvation, the values of equality and justice, and the virtues of pure living, with easily learned rituals and rules for life and death. He welcomed converts. He revered the Bible, and regarded David and Solomon, Moses and Jesus as prophets, but his revelation superseded the earlier ones. Importantly for the fate of Jerusalem, the Prophet stressed the coming of the Apocalypse that he called the Judgement, the Last Day or just the Hour, and this urgency inspired the dynamism of early Islam. ‘The knowledge of it is only with God,’ says the Koran, ‘but what will make you realize the Hour is near?’ All the Judaeo-Christian scriptures stressed that this could take place only in Jerusalem.

One night, his followers believed that, as he slept beside the Kaaba, Muhammad had a vision. The Archangel Gabriel awoke him and together they embarked on a Night Journey mounted on Buraq, a winged steed with a human face, to the unnamed ‘Furthest Sanctuary’. There Muhammad met his ‘fathers’ (Adam and Abraham) and his ‘brothers’ Moses, Joseph and Jesus, before ascending by a ladder to heaven. Unlike Jesus, he just called himself the Messenger or Apostle of God, claiming no magical powers. Indeed the Isra – Night Journey – and the Miraj – Ascension – were his only miraculous exploits. Jerusalem and the Temple are never actually mentioned but Muslims came to believe that the Furthest Sanctuary was the Temple Mount.

When his wife and uncle died, Muhammad was exposed to the disapproval of the richer families of Mecca, who depended on the Kaaba stone for their livelihoods. The Meccans tried to kill him. But he was contacted by a group from Yathrib, a date-palm oasis to the north founded by Jewish tribes but also the home of pagan artisans and farmers. They asked him to make peace between its feuding clans. He and his inner circle of believers departed on the Migration – Hijra – to Yathrib, which became Madinat un-Nabi, the city of the Prophet – Medina. There he fused his first devotees, the Emigrants, and new followers, the Helpers, and their Jewish allies, into a new community, the umma. It was 622, the beginning of the Islamic calendar.

Muhammad was a skilled conciliator of men and co-opter of ideas. Now in Medina, with its Jewish clans, he created the first mosque, ^* adopting the Jerusalem Temple as the first qibla, the direction of prayer. He prayed at Friday sundown – the Jewish Sabbath – fasted on the Day of Atonement, banned pork and practised circumcision. The oneness of Muhammad’s God rejected the Christian Trinity but other rituals – the prostration on prayer mats – owed much to Christian monasteries; his minarets were perhaps inspired by the pillars of the stylites; the festival of Ramadan resembled Lent. Yet Islam was very much his own.

Muhammad created a small state with its own laws, but he faced resistance from Medina and his old home Mecca. His new state needed to defend itself and to conquer: jihad – struggle – was both internal mastery of self and holy war of conquest. The Koran promoted not only the destruction of infidels but also tolerance if they submitted. This was relevant because the Jewish tribes resisted Muhammad’s revelations and his control. Hence he changed the qibla to Mecca and rejected the Jewish way: God had destroyed the Jewish Temple because the Jews had sinned so ‘they will not follow your qibla, Jerusalem’.

When he fought the Meccans, he could not afford disloyalty in Medina so he expelled the Jews and made an example of one Jewish clan: its 700 men were beheaded, its women and children enslaved. In 630, Muhammad finally took Mecca, spreading his monotheism across Arabia by conversion and force. Muhammad’s followers became ever more militant as they strove to live righteously to prepare for the Last Judgement. Now, having conquered Arabia, they encountered the sinful empires beyond. The Prophet’s early followers, the Emigrants and Helpers, formed his entourage – but he also welcomed former enemies and talented opportunists with equal enthusiasm. Meanwhile Muslim tradition recounts his personal life: he had many wives – Aisha, daughter of his ally Abu Bakr was his favourite – and took numerous concubines, including beautiful Jewesses and Christians; and he had children, most importantly a daughter named Fatima.¹

In 632 Muhammad, aged about sixty-two, died and was succeeded by his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, who was acclaimed Amir al-Muminin, Commander of the Believers.^* Muhammad’s realm tottered after his death, but Abu Bakr managed to pacify Arabia. Then he turned to the Byzantine and Persian empires, which the Muslims regarded as evanescent, sinful and corrupt. The Commander despatched contingents of warriors on camels to raid Iraq and Palestine.

KHALID IBN WALID: SWORD OF ISLAM

Somewhere near Gaza, ‘there was a battle between the Romans and the nomads of Muhammad’, writes Thomas the Presbyter, a Christian who in 640 was the first independent historian to mention the Prophet.^† ‘The Romans fled.’ The Emperor Heraclius, still in Syria, prepared to smash these Arab armies who in turn asked Abu Bakr for reinforcements. He called for his best general, Khalid bin Walid, who was raiding Iraq. Riding six days across the waterless desert, Khalid arrived in Palestine just in time.

Khalid was one of the Meccan aristocrats who had fought against Muhammad but when he finally converted, the Prophet welcomed this dynamic commander and called him the Sword of Islam. Khalid was one of those swaggering generals who pay little attention to the orders of their political masters. The sequence of events is unclear but he joined up with the other Arab warlords, assumed command and then defeated a Byzantine detachment south-west of Jerusalem before storming Damascus. Far to the south in Mecca, Abu Bakr died and was succeeded by Omar, one of the Prophet’s first converts and closest confidants. The new Commander of the Believers distrusted Khalid, who was amassing a fortune, and a legend, and recalled him to Mecca: ‘Khalid,’ he said, ‘take your property out of our arse.’

Heraclius despatched an army to stop the Arabs. Omar appointed a new commander, Abu Ubayda, and Khalid rejoined the armies as his subordinate. After months of skirmishing, the Arabs finally lured the Byzantines to battle amidst the impenetrable gorges of the Yarmuk river between today’s Jordan, Syria and Israeli Golan. ‘This is one of God’s battles,’ Khalid told his men – and on 20 August 636, God delivered a duststorm that blinded the Christians who panicked and bolted helterskelter over the cliffs of the Yarmuk. Khalid cut off their retreat and by the end of the battle, the Christians were so exhausted that the Arabs found them lying down in their cloaks, ripe for the slaughter. Even the emperor’s brother was killed and Heraclius himself never recovered from this defeat, one of the decisive battles of history, that lost Syria and Palestine. Byzantine rule, weakened by the Persian war, seems to have collapsed like a house of cards and it is unclear whether the Arab conquest was more a triumphant series of raids. However intense the conquest really was, it was an astonishing achievement that these tiny contingents of Arabian cameleers, some of them as small as 1, 000 men, had smashed the legions of the Eastern Rome. But the Commander of the Believers did not rest; he sent another army northwards to conquer Persia which also fell to the Arabs.²

In Palestine, Jerusalem alone held out under Patriarch Sophronius, a Greek intellectual who praised her in his poetry as ‘Zion, radiant Zion of the Universe’. He could scarcely believe the disaster that had befallen the Christians. Preaching in the Church of the Sepulchre, he denounced the sins of the Christians and the atrocities of the Arabs, whom he called Sarakenoi in Greek – Saracens: ‘Whence come these wars against us? Whence multiply barbarian invasions? The slime of the godless Saracens has captured Bethlehem. The Saracens have risen up against us with a beastly impulse because of our sins. Let us correct ourselves.’

It was too late for that. The Arabs converged on the city which they called Ilya (Aelia, the Roman name). The first of their commanders to besiege Jerusalem was Amr ibn al-As, who after Khaled was their best general and another irrepressibly larger-than-life adventurer from the Meccan nobility. Amr, like the other Arab leaders, knew the area very well: he even owned land nearby and had visited Jerusalem in his youth. But this was not just a quest for booty.

‘The Hour has drawn nigh,’ says the Koran. The early Muslim Believers’ militant fanaticism was stoked by their belief in the Last Judgement. The Koran did not state this specifically but they knew from the Jewish-Christian prophets that it had to take place in Jerusalem. If the Hour was upon them, they needed Jerusalem.

Khaled and the other generals joined Amr around the walls but the Arab armies were probably too small to storm the city and there does not seem to have been much fighting. Sophronius simply refused to surrender without a guarantee of tolerance from the Commander of the Believers himself. Amr suggested solving this problem by passing off Khaled as the Commander but he was recognized so Omar was summoned from Mecca.

The Commander inspected the rest of the Arab armies at Jabiya in the Golan and Jerusalemites probably met him there to negotiate their surrender. The Monophysite Christians, who were the majority in Palestine, hated the Byzantines and it seems the early Moslem Believers were happy to allow freedom of worship to their fellow monotheists.^* Following the Koran, Omar offered Jerusalem a Covenant –dhimma – of Surrender that promised religious tolerance to the Christians in return for payment of the jizya tax of submission. Once this was agreed, Omar set out for Jerusalem, a giant in ragged, patched robes riding a mule, with just one servant.

OMAR THE JUST: TEMPLE REGAINED

When he saw Jerusalem from Mount Scopus, Omar ordered his muezzin to give the call to prayer. After praying, he donned the white robes of the pilgrim, mounted a white camel and rode down to meet Sophronius. The Byzantine hierarchs awaited the conqueror, their bejewelled robes contrasting with his puritanical simplicity. Omar, the hulking Commander of the Believers, a wrestler in his youth, was an implacable ascetic who always carried a whip. It was said that when Muhammad entered a room, women and children would continue to laugh and chat, but when they saw Omar they fell silent. It was he who started to collate the Koran, created the Muslim calendar and much Islamic law. He enforced far more severe rules on women than the Prophet himself. When his own son got drunk, Omar had him scourged with eighty lashes which killed him.

Sophronius presented Omar with the keys of the Holy City. When the patriarch saw Omar and his ragged hordes of Arab cameleers and horsemen, he muttered that this was ‘the abomination of desolation’. Most of them were tribesman from the Hejaz or the Yemen; they travelled light and fast, draped in turbans and cloaks, living on ilhiz ( ground camel hair mixed with blood and then cooked). A far cry from the heavily armoured Persian and Byzantine cataphract cavalry, only the commanders wore chain-mail or helmets. The rest ‘rode shaggy stumpy horses, their swords highly polished but covered in a shabby cloth scabbard’. They carried bows and spears that were bound with camel sinews, and red cowhide shields resembling ‘a thick red loaf of bread’. They cherished their broadswords, their sayf, gave them names and sang poems about them.

Priding themselves on their uncouthness, they wore ‘four locks of hair’ stuck up like ‘the horns of a goat’. When they encountered rich carpets, they rode on to them and cut them up to make spear coverings, enjoying the booty – human and material – like any other conquerors. ‘Suddenly, I sensed the presence of a human form hidden under some covers,’ wrote one of them. ‘I tear them away and what do I find? A woman like a gazelle, radiant like the sun. I took her and her clothes and surrendered the latter as booty but put in a request that the girl should be alotted to me. I took her as a concubine.’^* The Arab armies had no technical advantages, but they were fanatically motivated.

Sophronius, say the traditional Muslim sources, dating from much later, escorted the Saracen Commander to the Holy Sepulchre, hoping his visitor would admire or even embrace the perfect sanctity of Christianity. When Omar’s muezzin called his soldiers to prayer, Sophronius invited the Commander to pray there, but he is said to have refused, warning that this would make it a place of Islamic worship. Omar knew that Muhammad had revered David and Solomon. ‘Take me to the sanctuary of David,’ he ordered Sophronius. He and his warriors entered the Temple Mount, probably through the Prophets’ Gate in the south, and found it contaminated by ‘a dungheap which the Christians had put there to offend the Jews.’

Omar asked to be shown the Holy of Holies. A Jewish convert, Kaab al-Ahbar, known as the Rabbi, replied that, if the Commander preserved ‘the wall’ (perhaps referring to the last Herodian remains, including the Western Wall), ‘I will reveal to him where are the ruins of the Temple.’ Kaab showed Omar the foundation-stone of the Temple, the rock which the Arabs called the Sakhra.

Aided by his troops, Omar began to clear the debris to create somewhere to pray. Kaab suggested he place this north of the foundation-stone ‘so you will make two qiblas, that of Moses and that of Muhammad.’ ‘You still lean towards the Jews,’ Omar supposedly told Kaab, placing his first prayer house south of the rock, roughly where al-Aqsa Mosque stands today, so that it clearly faced Mecca. Omar had followed Muhammad’s wish to reach past Christianity to restore and co-opt this place of ancient holiness, to make the Muslims the legitimate heirs of Jewish sanctity and outflank the Christians.

The stories of Omar in Jerusalem date from over a century later when Islam had formalized its rituals in ways that were very distinct from those of Christianity and Judaism. Yet the story of Kaab and other Jews, which later formed the Islamic literary tradition of Israiliyyat, much of it about Jerusalem’s greatness, proves that many Jews and probably Christians joined Islam. We will never know exactly what happened in those early decades but the relaxed arrangements in Jerusalem and elsewhere suggest that there may have been a surprising amount of mingling and sharing amongst the Peoples of the Book.^*

The Muslim conquerors were initially happy to share shrines with the Christians. In Damascus, they shared the Church of St John for many years and the Umayyad Mosque there still contains the tomb of St John the Baptist. In Jerusalem, there are also accounts of them sharing churches. The Cathisma Church outside the city was actually equipped with a Muslim prayer-niche. Contrary to the Omar legend, it seems that the early Muslims first prayed in or beside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before arrangements could be made on the Temple Mount.

The Jews too welcomed the Arabs after centuries of Byzantine repression. It is said that Jews, as well as Christians, rode in the Muslim armies. Omar’s interest in the Temple Mount understandably excited Jewish hopes, because the Commander of the Believers not only invited the Jews to maintain the Temple Mount but also allowed them to pray there with the Muslims. A well-informed Armenian bishop, Sebeos, who wrote thirty years later, claims that ‘the Jews planned to build the Temple of Solomon and, locating the Holy of Holies, they built (the Temple) without a pedestal’ – and adds that Omar’s first governor of Jerusalem was Jewish. Omar certainly invited the leader of Tiberias’ Jewish community, the Gaon, and seventy Jewish families to return to Jerusalem where they settled in the area south of the Temple Mount.^*

Jerusalem was still impoverished and plague-ridden after the Persian depredations and it remained overwhelmingly Christian for many years. Omar also settled Arabs here, especially the more sophisticated Quraysh who liked Palestine and Syria, which they called Bilad al-Shams. Some of the Prophet’s closest followers, known as the Companions, came to Jerusalem and were buried in the first Muslim cemetery just outside the Golden Gate, ready for the Day of Judgement. Two of the famous Jerusalem Families, who play such a prominent role in this story right into the twenty-first century, trace their descent from these earliest Arab grandees.^†3

In Jerusalem, Omar was accompanied not only by his generals Khalid and Amr but also by a pleasure-loving but competent young man who could not have been more different from the whip-wielding Commander. Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan was a son of Abu Sufyan, the Meccan aristocrat who had led the opposition to Muhammad. Muawiya’s mother ate the liver of the Prophet’s uncle Hamza after the Battle of Uhuh. When Mecca surrendered to Islam, Muhammad appointed Muawiya as his secretary and married his sister. After Muhammad’s death, Omar appointed Muawiya as governor of Syria. The Commander gave him a backhanded compliment: Muawiya, he said, was the ‘Caesar of the Arabs’.