* As always in Jerusalem, the builders borrowed from elsewhere, so Aqsa’s wooden beams were taken from a Christian site, still marked in Greek with the name of a sixth-century Patriarch (now in the Rockefeller and Haram Museums). The Double and Triple Gates to the south, matching the Golden Gate to the east, all of them now closed, are the most beautiful in Jerusalem, built using the stones of earlier Herodian and Roman buildings. It was there that the wall contains the upside-down inscription to Emperor Antoninus Pius from his equestrian statue on the Temple Mount.
* ‘Every soul shall taste death and you will be paid in full only on the Day of Resurrection,’ says the Koran. The Muslims created a geography of Apocalypse around Jerusalem. The forces of evil perish at the Golden Gate. The Mahdi – the Chosen – dies when the Ark of the Covenant is placed before him. At the sight of the Ark, the Jews convert to Islam. The Kaaba of Mecca comes to Jerusalem with all those who ever made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Heaven descends on the Temple Mount with Hell in the Valley of Hinnom. The people assemble outside the Golden Gate on the Plain – al-Sahira. Israfil the Archangel of Death (one of the Dome’s gates is named after him) blows his trumpet: the dead (especially those buried close to the Golden Gate) are resurrected and pass through the Gate, the portal to the End of Days (with its two little domed Gates of Mercy or that of Repentance), to be judged in the Dome of the Chain where the scales of justice hang.
* An imam is the leader of a mosque or community but in Shia, imams can be spiritual leaders, chosen by God and blessed with infallibility. The Twelver Shiites of Iran believe in the first twelve imams descended from Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali and his daughter Fatima and that the Twelfth Imam was ‘occulted’ – hidden by God – and will return as the Madhi, the Chosen messianic redeemer of Judgement Day. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini on this millenarian expectation: the clergy rule only until the Imam’s return.
* Jerusalem’s importance lessened as Mecca’s grew: if Jerusalem had perhaps at one point approached Mecca and Medina as part of the haj –‘You shall only set out for the three mosques Mecca,Medina, and al-Aqsa,’ declared one of the hadith of al-Khidri – now under the Abbasids,Jerusalem was reduced to a ziyara, a pious visit.
* The Abbasids, particularly Maamun, regularly requested copies of Greek classics from the Byzantines, securing for posterity Plato,Aristotle,Hippocrates,Galen,Euclid and Ptolemy of Alexandria. The Arabs developed an entire new vocabulary of science that entered the English language: alcohol, alembic, alchemy, algebra, almanac are just some of the words thus borrowed. Al-Nadim’s famous Index shows that they also produced 6,000 new books. Paper was now replacing parchment scrolls: in one of history’s decisive battles, the Abbasids had defeated an invasion by the Chinese Tang emperors, ensuring the Middle East would be Islamic not Chinese and also capturing the secrets of Chinese paper-makers.
* The Jewish communities of the world were ruled by the two hereditary gaons of the Jerusalem Academy and the Babylonian/Iraqi Academy, whose seat was in Baghdad. The Karaites spread throughout the Jewish world, building up large communities from the Crimea to Lithuania that survived up to the Holocaust, when most of them were annihilated. This led to one of the strangest anomalies of the Nazi repression: in the Crimea, some Karaites were of Turkic rather than Semitic origin, so the Nazis actually ordered the protection of this Jewish sect.
† The Khazars – shamanist Turkic nomads, ruling the steppes from the Black Sea to Central Asia – formed the last Jewish state before the creation of Israel. In about 805, their kings converted to Judaism, taking names such as Manasseh and Aaron. When the Jerusalemite writer Muqaddasi passed through Khazaria he laconically observed, ‘Sheep, honey and Jews exist [there] in large quantities.’ By the 960s, this Jewish empire was in decline. However, writers from Arthur Koestler to the recent Shlomo Sand have claimed that much of European Jewry are actually descended from these Turkic tribesmen. If true, this would undermine Zionism. But modern genetics refutes the theory: the two latest surveys suggest that modern Jews, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, are around 70 per cent descended from Middle Eastern genes of 3,000 years ago and around 30 per cent from European stock.
* Recent rulers of Jerusalem had also been buried there, believing, like the Jews, that burial in Jerusalem would mean they would be resurrected first on the Day of Judgement. The closer to the Temple Mount, the sooner they would rise again. The Ikhshid tombs have never been found but are believed to have been just on the northern edge of the Temple Mount. A Palestinian historian showed this author how History has so often been invented in Jerusalem by all three religions for political reasons only to gain its own sacred momentum. When there was talk of Israeli building just north of the Temple Mount, the historian suggested simply putting up a plaque identifying this as the site of the Ikhshid tombs, which has become the accepted shrine. The new building was cancelled.
* Al-Quds first appeared on Maamun’s coins in 832. Henceforth Jerusalemites were known as people from Quds: qudsi, or in slang, ‘utsi’.
* Khidr is the most fascinating of Islamic saints, closely associated with Jerusalem where he was said to celebrate Ramadan. Khidr the Green Man was a mystical stranger, eternally young but with a white beard, cited in the Koran (18.65) as Moses’ guide. In Sufism – Islamic mysticism – Khidr is the guide and illuminator of the holy path. The Green Man seems to have inspired the Green Knight in the Arthurian epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But he is chiefly identified with the Jewish Elijah and the Christian St George, a Roman officer executed by Diocletian. His shrine at Beit Jala near Bethlehem is still revered by Jews,Muslims and Christians.
* Not all the synagogues had been destroyed. The Jewish synagogue in Fustat,Old Cairo, contained one of the key historical resources of the Middle Ages: the Cairo Geniza. In those times, all three Peoples of the Book revered the paper on which holy language was written because words had spiritual life like people. The Jews kept papers received in synagogues in a geniza or storehouse for seven years at which point they were buried in a cemetery or stowed in a special attic. For over 900 years, the Cairo Geniza was not emptied, preserving 100,000 papers showing Jewish Egyptian life, its connections with Jerusalem, and the Mediterranean world in all its aspects, sealed and forgotten until 1864 when a Jerusalemite scholar first penetrated it. In the 1890s,Geniza documents started to emerge, bought by English,American and Russian scholars, but it was only in 1896 that two eccentric Scottish ladies showed some Geniza documents to Professor Solomon Schechter, who recognized the earliest Hebrew text of Ben Sira’s Ecclesiasticus. Schechter collected the priceless hoard, which enabled S. D. Goitein to produce his six-volume Mediterranean Society.