Authors: Kanan Makiya
Jamal al-Din Ahmad, in his fourteenth-century
Muthir al-Gharam
, puts a very different spin on the events of Umar’s entry into Jerusalem than does Theophanes. Tracking down a long chain of transmission, the author arrives at what purports to be an eyewitness description of the Caliph’s entry: “Umar, as soon as he was at leisure from the writing of the Treaty of Capitulation … said to the Patriarch of Jerusalem: ‘Conduct us to the Mosque of David.’ And the Patriarch agreed thereto. Then Umar went forth girt with his sword, and with him four thousand of the Companions who had come to Jerusalem with him, all begirt likewise with their swords, and a crowd of us Arabs who had come up to the Holy City followed them, none of us bearing any weapons except our swords. And the Patriarch walked before Umar among the Companions, and we all came behind the Caliph. Thus we entered the Holy City. And the Patriarch took us to the Church which goes by the name of the
Qumama
[Dungheap, a play on the Arabic word
Qiyama
, Resurrection], and said he: ‘This is David’s Mosque.’ And Umar looked around and pondered, then he answered the Patriarch: ‘Thou liest, for the Apostle described to me the Mosque of David, and by his description this is not it.’ Then the Patriarch went on with us to the Church of
Sihyun
(Zion), and again he said: ‘This is the Mosque of David.’ But the Caliph replied to him: ‘Thou liest.’ So the Patriarch went on with him till he came to the noble Sanctuary of the Holy City, and reached the gate thereof, called [afterwards] the Gate of Muhammad” (Le Strange, 1890).
The prophecy that Ka’b recites regarding Umar’s decision to enter Jerusalem on an ass comes from Zechariah 9:9. R. J. McKelvey in
The New Temple: The Church in the New Testament
(Oxford University Press, 1969) argues that the use of an ass is a sign of messiahship, an acting out of the parable of the coming of the kingdom of God. Umar’s entry into Jerusalem recalls that of Jesus in more ways than one. Mark 11:11 records that Jesus, upon entering into Jerusalem, had proceeded to the
Temple as Umar did; and Umar’s throwing himself on the ground in prayer before the Gate of the Sheep’s Pool is reminiscent of Jesus’ passionate prayer in Gethsemane. In Arabic the pilgrimage prayer spoken by Umar is:
“labyka, allahumma, labayka bi ma huwa ahabbu ilayka.”
Its use in the context is discussed by Busse (1984). Typically, it is recited during the
hajj
at the early stages of
ihram
and then repeatedly during the rest of the pilgrimage. The Arabic traditions that cite this prayer by Umar at the gates of Jerusalem are obviously those that tend to equate the religious status of Jerusalem with that of Mecca, not those that elevate Mecca over Jerusalem (which, much later, come to the fore and dominate the tradition). Busse also compares Umar’s prayer before the gates of the Holy City with that of Solomon upon his completion of the Temple. Solomon had the keys but could not open the doors of the new Temple until he had uttered David’s prayer asking God to forgive him. The text of the Muslim prayer featuring David asking for God’s forgiveness that appears later in the chapter is from the Quran 38:15–24.
The negative opinions and rumors circulating in Jerusalem regarding the Arabs are based on those of several ancient Christian sources. Moshe Gil writes that Nilus described Arabs as uninterested in anything but plundering and war, and I have cited the words of Antonius of Chozeba, who called Arabs “beasts of prey” that happen to “look like human beings.”
Several pilgrims described Gethsemane as Ishaq does. See Eusebius, fourth century, and Hesychius of Jerusalem, fifth century, in Wilkinson’s
Pilgrims
(1977). Also see John Wilkinson’s
Jerusalem as Jesus Knew It: Archaeology as Evidence
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). The fig tree cursed by Jesus, which subsequently withered to its roots, is discussed by McKelvey. The unprofitable fig tree was turned into a Christian symbol of Israel’s unfaithfulness and wretchedness before God. The Gate of the Sheep’s Pool went by other names in the seventh century: the Gate of Benjamin, perhaps even the Gate of the Paralyzed Man (Wilkinson, 1977). Descriptions of the Christian crowds present during Umar and Sophronius’s entry into the city are from an account by the pilgrim Silvia, as cited in George Jeffery’s
A Brief Description of the Holy Sepulchre
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919).
The Gate of Repentance,
Bab al-Tawba
, is more commonly known as the Golden Gate or the Gate Beautiful. The earliest Arabic sources refer to it as
Bab al-Rahma
, the Gate of Mercy, and the Gate of Repentance. Myriam Rosen-Ayalon,
The Early Islamic Monuments of Al-Haram
al-Sharif: An Iconographic Study
(Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1989) suggests that both names were used as a way of distinguishing between the two doorways. Rosen-Ayalon also notes that these names may relate to the elaborate traditions concerning the Day of Judgment and the Mount of Olives, which is opposite the Gate of Repentance. Muslim sources note that the gate was sealed when Umar arrived (as it is to this day), to be reopened only on Judgment Day. The description of the Gate of Repentance is taken from the pilgrim of Piacenza who visited Jerusalem around 570 (Wilkinson, 1977). Muslims of the seventh century would not have known that the gate is Byzantine in design and sits above a Herodian gate of the same dimensions; the Jerusalem that lived in their imaginations was that of David and Solomon—hence Ishaq’s error in describing it as a remnant of the Temple.
The poem cited by Sophronius was written by him between 614 and 630, just after the triumphant return of the Holy Cross to Jerusalem by the emperor Heraclius; it is known as the
Anacreonticon
20; see Wilkinson (1977). Umar’s disdain for too much focus on building and architecture is in a tale by Ibn Sa’d (died 845), describing what the Prophet said to his wife, Umm Salama, when he discovered she had built an extension to her room “to shut out the glances of men.” The Prophet said: “O Umm Salama! Verily, the most unprofitable thing that eateth up the wealth of a Believer is building”; cited by K. A. C. Creswell,
Early Muslim Architecture
, part 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932).
The Gate of the Column,
Bab al-Amud
, is also known as the Damascus Gate. It is impossible to know exactly when
Bab al-Amud
came into use as a name. Since Muslims would not have been happy with the name Saint Stephen’s Gate, it is not unreasonable to assume they would have from very early on begun calling it by the name of the column that sat so conspicuously at its center. Saint Stephen’s Gate today is the east-facing gate, through which Umar and Sophronius entered the city. The martyrdom of Stephen is recorded in Acts 7:54–8:1. The description of what could be found on Jerusalem’s prime commercial street, the Cardo, is based on al-Muqadassi’s description of his native city written in 985.
The highlight of Umar’s tour,
Kanisat al-Qiyama
to Eastern Christians, or the Church of the Resurrection, is more commonly known these days as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The description of the fourth-century Basilica (destroyed in the eleventh by a deranged Caliph) is a montage of different Christian accounts, beginning with the Church historian Eusebius, who was an eyewitness to the construction, and including the first Christian pilgrim known to have visited the finished
building, the Pilgrim of Bordeaux in 333; his description is discussed in Jeffery. Sophronius and Umar visited other churches as well; Grabar (1996) notes the importance of the New Church of the Virgin Mary, known as the
Nea
, and the Church of Zion. But the Holy Sepulchre was by far the most important of the churches visited by Umar. It has had a continuous history of use from the second quarter of the fourth century until today. The political importance of the alignment of the Church of the Resurrection on a longitudinal axis facing east, overlooking the ruins of the Temple, is highlighted by Grabar in
The Shape of the Holy
using computer-aided reconstructions of the Church in relation to the seventh-century city. Christian tradition refers to the Rotunda over the tomb of Jesus by the Greek name of
anastasis
, or resurrection; the word “rotunda,” however, is ancient and was used by the pilgrim Arculf in the seventh century.
Ka’b’s warning to Umar not to enter into the Church of the Resurrection is adapted from a remark made by Ka’b as cited by Al-Wasiti: “Do not come to the Church of Mary or approach the two pillars, for they are idols. Whoever goes to them, his prayers will be as naught.…
Cursed be the Christians for not seeing the things to come. They could not find a place in which to build a church except in the valley of
Jahannam
[Hell].” The reference here is to the Church of Mary on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, and to the Church of the Ascension on the top of the same mountain, known as
Kanisat al-Tur
in Arabic; it had two pillars facing the north and south walls, according to the eighth-century pilgrim Willibald. Amikam Elad convincingly makes this connection by citing several versions of Ka’b’s words in his
Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship: Holy Places, Ceremonies, Pilgrimage
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).
Sophronius’s comment to Umar regarding the two Jerusalems is adapted from a line by Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century (Grabar, 1996). Cyril proclaimed victory over Judaism with the phrase “Jerusalem crucified Christ, but that which now is worships him.” The interior of the Basilica is based on the description by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, who was born in Palestine around 275–280 C.E.; Eusebius was an eyewitness to the construction of the Basilica, which he describes in his
Life of Constantine
. The description of the Holy City’s “baptism” by rain is taken from an observation by the British pilgrim Arculf, who visited Jerusalem around 680.
This chapter’s physical descriptions of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are based on the reconstruction by Father Charles Cousanon in
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem
(London: Oxford University Press, 1974). Sophronius quotes from John 16:33 when describing the slow death of Christ on the cross. The phrase “rock of refuge” is from Psalm 31. The famous words of Christ predicting the destruction of the Temple are found in Mark 13:1–2. Sophronius’s argument regarding the founding of the church on the body of Christ, and the discussion of the transfer of the center of the world from Moriah’s rock to the body of Christ, are based on the interpretations developed by McKelvey in
The New Temple
. The discussion of Sophronius concerning the end of Jewish sacrifices refers to the ending of the tradition of animal sacrifice carried out by the Sadducean priests in the Herodian Temple after Titus’s destruction of it in the year 70. See Busse (1984) for the ways in which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was seen as a successor to the old Temple.
Saint Augustine discusses the burial place of Adam in
De Civitate Dei
(The City of God), in which he writes, “The ancients hold that because Adam was the first man, and was buried there, it was called Calvary, because it holds the head of the human race.” Sophronius’s sentence, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” comes from I Corinthians 15:22. The idea that Christ’s sacrifice affected the nature of death itself, as argued by Sophronius, is adapted from Saint Basil, who wrote: “Probably Noah was not ignorant of the sepulchre of our forefather and that of the first born of all mortals, and in that place, Calvary, the Lord suffered, the origin of death there being destroyed”; cited in the Reverend William Wood Seymour’s
The Cross: In Tradition, History, and Art
(New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1898).
The words that Sophronius sings are a stanza from John Donne’s poem entitled “Hymne to God, my God, in my sickness.” John 19:17–18 refers to the meaning of Golgotha: “And carrying his cross himself he went out to the place referred to as ‘of a skull,’ which in Hebrew is Golgotha.” The opinion attributed to Ka’b concerning the real meaning of Golgotha comes from Saint Jerome, who lived in Jerusalem and studied its local lore carefully, and who said that in his own day the places where criminals were executed were called Golgotha. See S. Gibson and J. Taylor,
Beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem: The Archaeology and Early History of Traditional Golgotha
(Palestine
Exploration Fund Monograph, 1994). The distance between Moriah and Calvary, it should be pointed out, is under 600 meters.
The Tree of Life is known to Arabs as the heavenly tree of
Tuba
. Another tree is mentioned in the Quran (37:60), called the
Zaqqum;
it is reserved for the damned, has fruit in the form of demons, and grows in the depths of the furnaces of Hell, like the tree that Seth saw in Sophronius’s story. The story of Seth, Adam, and the Tree of Life is from a fifteenth-century Dutch source, as retold by the Reverend Seymour (1898). The Muslim denial of Jesus’ crucifixion is referred to in the Quran 4:157. Unlike Jews, however, Muslims hold Jesus in very high regard and argue that, if he was not crucified, someone made to resemble him probably was. The caliph al-Mahdi is said to have explained to the Catholic Timothy I that God did not allow the Jews to crucify the Messiah because He esteemed him so highly that He took him up to Heaven before the deed could be done. The description of Adam’s role on the Day of Resurrection is taken from
Kitab Muthir al-Gharam li-Ziyarat al-Khalil, Alaihi al-Salam, The Book of Inciting Desire to Visit Hebron
. It was written in 1351 by Abu al-Fida Ishaq, preacher of the Hebron mosque, who died in 1429. Charles Mathews translated it as
Palestine—Mohammedan Holy Land
(Yale University Press, 1949).
Cousanon explains how, assuming that local memories kept alive the actual place of Jesus’ crucifixion, the Bible—in particular John 19:41, cited by Ishaq—might be reconciled with what is left at or below the foundations of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The description of the tomb is based on the account of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who wrote a detailed description sometime between 867 and 878. His account conforms in its broad outlines with what one can still see under the rotunda of the existing church. The description of the fifteen golden lamps comes from the English pilgrim Willibald, who visited Jerusalem between A.D. 724 and 730.
Kanisat al-Qiyama
, the Church of the Resurrection, is occasionally referred to in Muslim sources as
Kanisat al-Qumama
, the Church of the Dungheap. S. D. Goitein sees in this phrase a retaliation for the previous Christian desecration of the Temple site; see his “Jerusalem in the Arab Period: 638–1099,” in
The Jerusalem Cathedra: Studies in the History, Archaeology, Geography and Ethnography of the Land of Israel
, edited by Lee Levine (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981). There is no evidence that Ka’b was responsible for this play on words as is stated in the narrative.