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 welclass="underline" 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.*