Why was the Dome of the Rock built in Jerusalem?
Some speculations about one of the city's greatest mysteries
The 17th chapter of the Quran briefly mentions an Isra’, a ‘journey of the night’ taken by Muhammed to Al-Aqsa, the ‘farthest mosque’: “Glory be to the One who took his servant Muhammad by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque whose surroundings We have blessed, so that We may show him some of Our signs. Indeed, He alone is the All-Hearing, All-Seeing.” The hadith (oral traditions related to the life of Muhammed) expands on this, explaining that Muhammad was in the Great Mosque in Mecca, where the Archangel Jibril (Gabriel) came to him with Buraq, the traditional heavenly mount of the prophets, who carried him to the “farthest mosque.” There he dismounted, tethered Buraq, prayed, and was tested by Jibril. In the second part, the Mi’raj (‘ladder’), Jibril took him to the heavens, where he spoke with earlier prophets like Ibrahim (Abraham), Musa (Moses), Yaha ibn Zakariya (John the Baptist), and Isa (Jesus). At the Sidrat al-Muntaha, a holy tree in the seventh heaven that Gabriel was not allowed to pass, God told Muhammed that Muslims must pray 50 times per day, but Moses (who had his own painful experiences with stubborn followers) told Muhammad that this would be too arduous and encouraged him to negotiate a reduction, which he subsequently did. This, we are told, is why Muslims pray five times a day.
By the eleventh century, this event was understood to have taken place in Jerusalem. Muhammed travelled there from Mecca, tethered Buraq to the Western Wall (which in the last century, amidst the escalating conflict, has come to be called Al-Buraq Wall by Muslims), went up to the Temple Mount, and ascended to heaven. In simple terms, the Al-Aqsa Mosque commemorates the Isra and the Dome of the Rock commemorates the Mi’raj – there is in an indent in the foundation stone, today located inside the Dome of the Rock, where according to Islamic tradition Muhammad ascended to heaven.
Neither the Quran nor the hadiths explicitly mention Jerusalem in the context of this story. In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this has led some to question the authenticity of the Islamic connection to the city. According to this argument, the Muslims built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem as a way of erasing the history of the Temple and suppressing the Jews. This is a consequence of reading history backwards. The Jews were far too weak at the time for the Muslims to need to suppress them; as we shall see, the Christians were a far more important target. And far from erasing memories of the Temple, the early Muslims saw the Dome of the Rock as a Third Temple.
How, though, did the Dome of the Rock come to be built? According to Islamic legend, following their conquest of the city, the Christian Patriarch Sophronius insisted on negotiating with the Caliph Omar, who arrived dressed in simple clothes. After being shown the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (where he refused to pray, so it wouldn’t be subsequently turned into a mosque), he was taken up to the Temple Mount, where he and the patriarch personally cleared the foundation stone of rubble. The entire mount was subsequently cleared of debris, the platform for the Dome of the Rock was formed, and further repairs were made. Construction of the Dome of the Rock began at some point between the 660s and 691 and was completed by the end of that century.
Beyond the associations with Muhammad’s ascent to heaven, the original meaning of the Dome of the Rock remains somewhat of a mystery. In Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade, Andreas Kaplony, a Swiss Islamic studies scholar, writes:
As Carolanne Mekeel-Matterson has proposed, the Dome of the Rock was a paradox: it was a commemorative building, a martyrium in Christian terms, and also, in Arabic and Muslim terms, a mashhad, meaning literally “a place of witnessing” for an event yet to come. Its purpose was unique, and no model for it existed; its patrons had to find ways to adapt building practices and decorative programs to fit these new purposes.
The Christian connection is significant. At the time of its construction, Caliph Abd al-Malik was at war with the Byzantines. Subsequently, some have interpreted the Dome of the Rock, with its octagonal design, as a rival to the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre (others emphasize Abd al-Malik’s war with a rival caliph, Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, who controlled Mecca). This is supported by the inscriptions inside the Dome, which, quoting the Quran, challenge the idea that Jesus was son of God: “Praise to God who begets no son and who has no associate in power and who has no surrogate for [protection] from humiliations and magnify His greatness” (Quran 17:11). As Kaplony summarizes: “Islam is the original undistorted faith, i.e., original undistorted Christianity, and contemporary Christianity is only a travesty.”
Of perhaps greater significance are the Temple aspects of the whole endeavor. In The Dome of the Rock, Oleg Grabar notes that Temple-like features in the Dome’s architecture include the “conches on the soffits of the octagonal arcade, the cornucopias intertwined like horns and recalling the Jewish liturgical shofar, or the bejeweled trees and other forms of vegetation that appear in post-Biblical descriptions of the Temple and palace.” He also writes:
How historically conscious this definition was is hard to know. Did the Muslims simply preserve a space from which they, little by little, consciously or not, appropriated many components of the religious memories associated with it? Or did they feel they were restoring, in a new version and with new associations and practices, the Temple that God had originally ordered to build?
A tradition emerged that Abd al-Malik announced the eventual re-sacralization of the Temple, but this was almost certainly a later invention. No references are made to the Temple in the one contemporary text dealing with the Dome’s construction. But we know that 40 acolytes stayed in shifts inside the Dome of the Rock, conducting a service every Tuesday and Thursday, where they donned special clothes. They circumambulated the Dome in a procession with censers, anointing it (similar reenactments of the Temple Service took place in the fourth-century Holy Sepulchre and the Templum Domini – the Dome of the Rock’s name when it was controlled by the Crusaders). As Kaplony writes: “To cut a long story short: this is the Former Temple rebuilt, the Qu’ran is the true Torah, and the Muslims are the true People of Israel.”
In other words, the Muslim yearning for Jerusalem predates its later associations with the Isra’ and Mi’raj. In his most recent book, The Quest of the Historical Muhammad and Other Studies on Formative Islam, the American scholar Stephen J. Shoemaker writes:
One of the clearest and most uncontestable facts to emerge from the contemporary Jewish and Christian witnesses to the rise of Islam is that Muhammad’s earliest followers were well-night obsessed with restoring worship and dignity to the site of the destroyed Jewish temple in Jerusalem. These eyewitness accounts of various Jewish and Christian writers from the seventh century persistently signal that Jerusalem and the site of its then devastated temple were regarded with the highest sanctity by Muhammad’s followers at the time when they entered the Holy Land.
According to Shoemaker, the Dome of the Rock was “a sort of ersatz temple, a placeholder for the real thing until the arrival of the impending eschaton, which they were expecting very soon, it would seem.”
In the beginning, Muslims prayed towards Jerusalem. Then, in 622, in the aftermath of the Jewish rejection of Muhammad, the direction of prayer was switched to Mecca. In the words of the second chapter of the Quran: “[God] has turned man from the qiblah to which he was accustomed toward a qiblah that shall please men, turning their faces in the direction of the Meccan sanctuary.”
It's easily forgotten, but Mecca was not a major pilgrimage center in late antiquity. Its shrine, Shoemaker tells us, was only significant to its small number of inhabitants: “Memories in the early Islamic tradition suggesting otherwise are simply projection of later Islamic practices back onto the blank canvas of pre-Islamic Mecca.” Jerusalem, he suggests, was more important to the early Muslims. He notes the single appearance of the word Baca in both the Bible (Psalms 84:6-7) and the Quran (the term for this rare phenomenon is ‘hapax legomenon’), a location next to the Temple, using this to argue that the Ka’ba – the Sacred House – of the Quran should be identified with the Temple in Jerusalem.
The verse in Psalms seems to describe the Valley of Baca in the context of performing pilgrimage (although many interpret it less literally). Shoemaker accepts this parallel while noting other possible references to the Temple in the Quran, for example the fact that Ka’ba means cube (the shape of the Temple), possible mentions of circumambulation (li-l-ta’ifina, ‘those who go about’), and Sura 8:34-35’s reference to unbelievers preventing the righteous from worshipping at the inviolable place of prayer, which possibly refers to Christian control of the Temple Mount.
The connections he draws are somewhat speculative (and neglectful of the rabbinic tradition), but the basic argument is compelling: The association of Isra’ and Mi’raj with Jerusalem seems to be a later development, but it must have drawn on an earlier relationship. Islam understood itself as superseding Christianity (and, by association, Judaism); the destroyed Temple and its eschatological associations must have played a role in this theology.
Ironically, given the role the Dome of the Rock’s presence on the Temple Mount plays in current events, we have some evidence of Jews who praised Abd al-Malik for rebuilding the Temple, and we know that the Ummayad period was one of the few eras following the destruction of the Second Temple that Jews were allowed to pray at the site. This, of course, was as long as they knew their place. As Kaplony writes: “Jews are not necessarily forbidden to enter the interior – Muslim devotion just occupies the center, marginalizes Jewish devotion, and relegates it to the borders.”
Today, in the context of the conflict and the fight over the Temple Mount, people wrongly believe that the Muslims built on the Temple Mount to slight the Jews. On the other hand, many Muslims deny the Jewish history of the site, in a way nobody did one hundred years ago, when Palestinians were proud of its connections to Solomon’s Temple. Whatever the precise reason for the Dome of the Rock’s construction, it undoubtedly owes a huge debt to Judaism, one that should be acknowledged and even celebrated, rather than denied.