Authors: Kanan Makiya
One of the compilers of these early traditions in praise of Jerusalem, Ibn al-Murajja, who wrote his
Kitab Fada’il Bayt al-Maqdis
in the first half of the eleventh century, cites a prophecy which he attributes to Ka’b al-Ahbar: “It is written in some holy books: I [God] will send to
Aryusalaim
, which means Jerusalem, and the Rock which is called the
haykal
[Temple] my servant Abd al-Malik, who will build you and adorn you. I shall surely restore to Bayt al-Maqdis its first kingdom, and I shall crown it with gold and silver and gems. And I shall surely
send to you my creatures. And I shall surely invest my throne of glory upon the Rock, since I am the sovereign God, and David is the King of the Children of Israel.” Cited by Elad,
Medieval Jerusalem
.
Whatever the reasons for building the Dome of the Rock, just like its great predecessor the Temple of Solomon, the project would have been controversial in a Muslim—Arab context that was still simple and pure in its habits and ways. David had after all positively ached to build the Temple but was unable to do so, perhaps because building a Canaanite—Baal temple—which is what Solomon built—was perceived by a majority of the Israelites at the time as a concession to the despotic systems of kingship they were ideologically against. Direct evidence for this tension at the heart of the whole Solomonic enterprise is in the Bible (2 Samuel 7: 5–7). “Go tell my servant David,” says God, speaking to David’s seer and counselor, Nathan, “would you build a house for me to dwell in? I have never dwelt in a house [before] but have been moving about in a tent as a dwelling.” What is this if not an argument against kingship of the sort Umar ibn al-Khattab would have felt completely at home with? Both Solomon and Abd al-Malik did not agree, and for much the same reasons, although perhaps Solomon had his doubts (I Kings 8:27), which are cited by Ishaq as he struggles with his own doubts over the idea of building over the Rock.
It is worth noting, in view of the origin of Solomon’s Temple in the tentlike structure of the ancient tabernacle used by the ancient Israelites, that Abd al-Malik decided to build his temple in the shape of a
qubba
, which today means “dome,” or “cupola,” in Arabic, and by extension has become a reference to the whole building. But in the seventh century,
qubba
meant “tent,” or some variety of a temporary covering like the Ka’ba’s covering of black cloth, the
kiswa
. The use of the word
qubba
in the inscription on the outer face of the octagon of Abd al-Malik’s building is, as Grabar puts it in
The Shape of the Holy
(p. 64), “the first example of a new usage for a traditional Arabic word.” With these comments in mind, it is interesting to return to the image of the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in al-Biruni’s fourteenth-century manuscript (shown in “Finding of the Rock”). The Muslim illustrator has, it is worth noting, imagined Solomon’s Temple as a tented dome modelled after the Dome of the Rock.
The diameter of Abd al-Malik’s
qubba
, as K. A. C. Creswell has measured it, is “within less than half a metre” of that of the dome of
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, strongly suggesting that the Dome of the Rock, in addition to all its other meanings, had to rival the Church of the Resurrection; see Creswell, “The Origin of the Plan of the Dome of the Rock,”
British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem
, Supplementary Papers no. 2 (1924). When al-Muqaddasi, a resident of Jerusalem, asked his uncle why Abd al-Malik’s successor, his son Walid, spent so much money building the mosque of Damascus, his uncle replied: “O my little son, thou hast not understanding. Verily al-Walid was right, and he was prompted to a worthy work. For he beheld Syria to be a country that had long been occupied by the Christians, and he noted there the beautiful churches still belonging to them, so enchantingly fair, and so renowned for their splendor, as are the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Churches of Lydda and Edessa. So he sought to build for the Muslims a mosque that should be unique and a wonder to the world. And in like manner is it not evident that Abd al-Malik, seeing the greatness of the martyrium
[qubbah]
of the Holy Sepulchre and its magnificence, was moved lest it should dazzle the minds of the Muslims and hence erected above the Rock the Dome which is now there.” Cited in Grabar,
The Formation of Islamic Art
.
On the importance of books as artifacts, see the delightful story of the Holy Scroll in al-Mahalla, a provincial capital in the Nile delta, in Goitein’s
A Mediterranean Society
, vol. 5.
There are only two, nonexclusive ways that the Jewish symbolism of the Rock could be appropriated for Muslim purposes and used to rebut Christian religious claims to Jerusalem: through the Rock’s association with God and his center of Creation, and through its association with the “Friend of God” and the first Muslim, Abraham, a prophet who was the ancestor of the Arabs and in the Muslim view, neither a Christian nor a Jew. The hypothesis that the latter might have been the case was powerfully put forth in the seminal essay by Grabar, “The Umayyad Dome of the Rock.” But between the story of Abraham’s trial as told in Genesis (22:16–18), and the Muslim version in the Quran (37:99–110), an important change had taken place. The son, who is not identified by name in the Quran and whom the majority of early traditionalists thought of as Isaac (Ishaq), became an active participant in his own sacrifice. “My father, do as thou art bidden,” he tells Abraham in the Quran, “thou shalt find me, God willing, one of the steadfast.” The interregnum was of course filled with the enormous influence of Christianity and the
example of the supreme sacrifice of the Christian Messiah on Golgotha. Judaism had to confront the same influence long before Islam, the difference being that Muslims found the figure of Christ admirable and attractive, whereas Jews did not. And still the pressure to prove one’s own foundational act of sacrifice to be at least equal to that of Christ remained great. Shalom Spiegal’s translation and marvelous 140-page commentary on a twelfth-century poem by Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn, which retells the story of the
Akedah
, provided me with my inspiration for the writing of this chapter: See his
The Last Trial: On the Legends of Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969). Spiegal argues that the requirement of blood for expiation of sins is a Talmudic teaching that predates Christ. Certainly that was also true of the Arabs before Islam, as the story of Abd al-Muttalib’s sacrifice from Ibn Ishaq’s
Life
demonstrates. Two other books were helpful: Jon Levenson’s treatment in
The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son;
and Frederic Mann, ed.,
The Sacrifice of Isaac in the Three Monotheistic Traditions
(Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1995). The words of the son of Abraham cited in the last paragraph were attributed to him by Ibn Ishaq, the eighth-century biographer of the Prophet, as edited by Newby.
In “The Origin of the Plan of the Dome of the Rock,” published in the
British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem
, Supplementary Papers no. 2 (1924), K. A. C. Creswell shows that the design of the Dome of the Rock was arrived at working from the inside out, as I have Ishaq working it out, and he argues that the all-critical diameter of the Dome, and its height off the ground, were the governing factors in the design. In both the Church of the Resurrection and the Dome of the Rock, “the height of the top edge of the drum from the ground is equal to its diameter.” This observation accords well with al-Muqaddasi’s previously cited explanation for why the Dome of the Rock was built. However, while the Church of the Resurrection was the monument that Abd al-Malik’s new Dome had to overshadow, the round (or octagonal) Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives was more likely to have had an influence on its general form. The Cathedral at Bosra in Syria, built in the sixth century, another annular building, was set out in much the same way as the Dome of the Rock; it may also have influenced the design. Ishaq’s drawings in the sand follow Creswell’s line of reasoning closely.
In Anastase of Sinai’s seventh-century collection of edifying tales, the story is told of the archdeacon John, who incurred the wrath of Sophronius in the year of the Muslim conquest. John was a marble setter or a stonemason by trade who was “very good with his hands.” But he “let himself be seduced by the Saracens,” according to Anastase. He started to work on Umar’s mosque “for a dishonest gain.” When Sophronius found out, “he made John come, and asked him, like a father … not to profane his hands, and to keep away from such an abominable enterprise.” Sophronius also promised John alternative work at double the wages. “Only, disobey not my will. Do not do harm unto yourself and do not be for others the cause of their loss, while working on the construction of the place which Christ has damned.” Two days later John was discovered working on Umar’s mosque “in secrecy,” whereupon Sophronius had him excommunicated. A few days later, John fell off a ladder, was disabled, and died in agony from gangrene. I have based the character of Nicholas on this tale, reprinted in full in Flusin. The moral of Anastase’s story is a line attributed to Jesus (Matthew 16:19) and cited in the chapter “Building on the Rock”: “What you bind on earth will be bound in the heavens, and what you unbind on earth will be unbound in the heavens.”
The association of the number eight with Paradise is one that has persisted across the ages; it is discussed in Annemarie Schimmel’s chapter on “The Auspicious Number” in the
The Mystery of Numbers
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). A famous saying of the Prophet speaks of the eight gateways to Paradise. The Islamic Paradise,
Janna
, is a garden in Muslim thought and imagery, more prominently so than in Christianity or Judaism, from which derives the custom common to Iran and Muslim India of dividing gardens into eight parts. This Garden is lavishly built with bricks of silver and gold and furnished with seats made from precious stones. See more on this in
Images of Paradise in Islamic Art
, edited by Sheila Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom (Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum, Dartmouth College of Art, 1991), and the article on “Djanna” in
EI2
. The lote tree is mentioned in the Quran 53:14. Other descriptions of Paradise used in this chapter are from Quran 15:45, 47:15, and 64:9. On the association of Rightness with Truth and Right, see the delightful essay by Elaine Scarry,
On Beauty and Being Just
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Finally, the Dome’s relation to the Ka’ba with which this chapter ends is a figment of my imagination; it works nicely if the tradition of the Ka’ba’s “union” with the Dome of the Rock (which is not an invention),
told at the end of the chapter on Mecca and Jerusalem, was in circulation at the time. Otherwise, there is no evidence that the builders of the Dome of the Rock had such an idea in mind, nor has anyone previously suggested it.
The plans of the ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo were drawn on animal skins, according to Creswell (1932). Regarding the Dome of the Rock, al-Muqaddasi suggests that a model was made for the benefit of the Caliph. It stood somewhere in the Haram court. Scholars have suggested that another very old Umayyad structure on the Haram, due east of the Dome of the Rock,
Qubbat al-Silsila
, the Dome of the Chain, may very well have been that model. See Rosen-Ayalon,
Early Islamic Monuments
and Grabar,
The Shape of the Holy
. Ishaq’s reply to Abd al-Malik, “To Him belongs the sublime similitude,” comes from the Quran 16:61.
In his
Muruj
, al-Mas’udi identifies the Temple of Solomon as one of the three most important monuments of ancient times. According to Soucek, citing Ibn al-Faqih and Wahb ibn Munabbih, the edifice itself was imagined as encrusted with jewels and precious stones. “It shone in the darkness of a moonless night like a brilliant lamp because of the quantities of jewels and gold used in its construction,” writes the ninth-century chronicler al-Dinawari. Moreover the Temple was surrounded by a miraculous garden in which trees grew spontaneously overnight and artificial trees made of gold bore real fruit. On these and other elaborations, undoubtedly of Jewish origin, see Soucek’s “The Temple of Solomon.”
Raja’ ibn Haywa and Yazid ibn Sallam are the only two names mentioned in the sources who clearly had something to do with the building of the Dome of the Rock. The information I have provided about Raja’ is true to what little is known about him. That he was considered an expert on the Holy City is a point made by Nasser Rabbat in “The Dome of the Rock Revisited: Some Remarks on al-Wasiti’s Accounts,”
Muqarnas
, vol. 10 (1993). Yazid ibn Sallam was a local Jerusalemite and less important than Raja’.
On the issue of light and the design of the Dome, which Ishaq and Raja’ argue about, there is reason to believe that the fifty-six windows in the edifice let in much more light before Sultan Sulayman changed all the marble grilles in the sixteenth century. Transparency, brightness, and vividness of color are central features of the design that must have
made this building stand out dramatically from all its Christian predecessors in the seventh century. Although we can only guess at the design of the exterior mosaics on the eight octagonal walls, because they too were replaced in the sixteenth century, it is known that a great deal of color was deployed. As Grabar puts it in
The Shape of the Holy
, “such external decoration in color is virtually unknown before Umayyad times.” The twenty-fourth Sura from the Quran that so moved Ishaq (verses 35–37 are cited) is called “Light,” and is often used in association with glass lamps hung in mosques to symbolize the divine presence. The conversation about the origin of the use of calligraphy in Muslim religious architecture is an invention. Words on walls, however, became prominent in Muslim architecture in place of images. The Dome of the Rock stands at the forefront of an aesthetic revolution in the use of calligraphy as decoration. Grabar, who has written extensively about the inscriptions, considers applied calligraphy on this scale an invention inspired by Islam; its manipulation on buildings is comparable to the ways in which images were used in Christianity. A great deal of aesthetic energy and symbolic meaning was invested in the act of writing itself, as well as in all that accompanied or made writing on a surface possible; see Grabar (1987, 1996).