The Muslim conquerors were initially happy to share shrines with the Christians. In Damascus, they shared the Church of St John for many years and the Umayyad Mosque there still contains the tomb of St John the Baptist. In Jerusalem, there are also accounts of them sharing churches. The Cathisma Church outside the city was actually equipped with a Muslim prayer-niche. Contrary to the Omar legend, it seems that the early Muslims first prayed in or beside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre before arrangements could be made on the Temple Mount.
The Jews too welcomed the Arabs after centuries of Byzantine repression. It is said that Jews, as well as Christians, rode in the Muslim armies. Omar’s interest in the Temple Mount understandably excited Jewish hopes, because the Commander of the Believers not only invited the Jews to maintain the Temple Mount but also allowed them to pray there with the Muslims. A well-informed Armenian bishop, Sebeos, who wrote thirty years later, claims that ‘the Jews planned to build the Temple of Solomon and, locating the Holy of Holies, they built (the Temple) without a pedestal’ – and adds that Omar’s first governor of Jerusalem was Jewish. Omar certainly invited the leader of Tiberias’ Jewish community, the Gaon, and seventy Jewish families to return to Jerusalem where they settled in the area south of the Temple Mount.*
Jerusalem was still impoverished and plague-ridden after the Persian depredations and it remained overwhelmingly Christian for many years. Omar also settled Arabs here, especially the more sophisticated Quraysh who liked Palestine and Syria, which they called Bilad al-Shams. Some of the Prophet’s closest followers, known as the Companions, came to Jerusalem and were buried in the first Muslim cemetery just outside the Golden Gate, ready for the Day of Judgement. Two of the famous Jerusalem Families, who play such a prominent role in this story right into the twenty-first century, trace their descent from these earliest Arab grandees.†3
In Jerusalem, Omar was accompanied not only by his generals Khalid and Amr but also by a pleasure-loving but competent young man who could not have been more different from the whip-wielding Commander. Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan was a son of Abu Sufyan, the Meccan aristocrat who had led the opposition to Muhammad. Muawiya’s mother ate the liver of the Prophet’s uncle Hamza after the Battle of Uhuh. When Mecca surrendered to Islam, Muhammad appointed Muawiya as his secretary and married his sister. After Muhammad’s death, Omar appointed Muawiya as governor of Syria. The Commander gave him a backhanded compliment: Muawiya, he said, was the ‘Caesar of the Arabs’.
THE UMAYYADS: THE TEMPLE RESTORED
660–750
MUAWIYA: ARAB CAESAR
Muawiya ruled Jerusalem for forty years, first as governor of Syria and then as the monarch of the vast Arab empire which was expanding eastwards and westwards with astounding speed. But in the midst of all of this success, a civil war about the succession almost destroyed Islam and it created a schism that still divides it today.
In644, Omar was assassinated and his successor was Othman, a cousin of Muawiya. After more than ten years, Othman was hated for his nepotism. When he too was assassinated, the Prophet’s first cousin, Ali, who was also married to his daughter Fatima, was chosen as Commander of the Believers. Muawiya demanded that Ali punish the assassins – but the new Commander refused. Muawiya feared that he would lose his domain in Syria. He won the ensuing civil war, Ali was killed in Iraq, and there ended the reign of the last of the so-called Righteous Caliphs.
In July 661, the grandees of the Arab empire gathered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to acclaim Muawiya as Commander of the Believers and pledge allegiance in the traditional Arab way – the bayah.* Afterwards the new Commander visited the Holy Sepulchre and the Virgin Mary’s Tomb, not as a pilgrim but to show the continuity of religions and his imperial role as protector of the holy places. He ruled from Damascus, but he adored Jerusalem which he advertised on his coins as ‘Iliya Filastin’ – Aelia Palestina. He was tempted to make her his capital and it is likely that he often resided here in one of the luxurious palaces just south of the Temple which he may have built. Muawiya borrowed Jewish traditions about the Temple Mount to declare that Jerusalem was the ‘land of ingathering and resurrection on Judgement Day’, and he added, ‘The area between the two walls of this mosque are dearer to God than the rest of the earth.’
Christian writers hailed his reign as just, peaceful and tolerant; Jews called him a ‘lover of Israel’. His armies contained Christians; indeed he cemented his alliance with Christian Arab tribes by marrying Maysun, the daughter of their sheikh, and she was allowed to remain Christian. Moreover, he ruled through Mansur ibn Sanjun (the Arab for Sergius), a Christian bureaucrat inherited from Heraclius. Muawiya had grown up beside the Jews of Arabia, and it is said that when he was visited by one of their delegations he first asked them if they could cook the delicious haris dish which he had so savoured back home. Muawiya settled more Jews in Jerusalem, permitting them to pray there on the site of the Holy of Holies; the traces of a menorah on the Temple Mount, dating from the seventh century, may be evidence of this.
Muawiya was probably the real creator of today’s Islamic Temple Mount. It was he who actually built the first mosque there, flattening the rock of the old Antonia Fortress, extending the esplanade and adding an open-sided hexagon, the Dome of the Chain: no one knows what it was for but since it is in the precise middle of the Temple Mount, it may celebrate the centre of the world. Muawiya, writes a contemporary, ‘hews Mount Moriah and makes it straight and builds a mosque there on the holy rock’. When a Gallic bishop named Arculf visited Jerusalem, he saw that ‘in the former place where the Temple stood, the Saracens now frequent an oblong house of prayer pieced together with upright planks and large beams over some ruined remains, said to hold 3, 000 people.’ It was scarcely yet recognizable as a mosque but it probably stood where al-Aqsa stands today.*
Muawiya personified hilm, the wisdom and patience of the Arab sheikh: ‘I apply not my sword when my lash suffices nor my lash when my tongue suffices. And even if but one hair is binding me to my fellow men, I don’t let it break. When they pull, I loosen, if they loosen I pull.’ This is almost a definition of statesmanship and Muawiya, the creator of Arab monarchy and the first of the Umayyad dynasty, is a much-neglected paragon of how absolute power does not have to corrupt absolutely. He expanded his realm into eastern Persia, Central Asia and north Africa and he took Cyprus and Rhodes, making the Arabs a maritime power with his new navy. He launched annual assaults on Constantinople, and on one occasion besieged it by land and sea for three years.
Yet Muawiya never lost the ability to laugh at himself, a quality that is rare amongst politicians, let alone conquerors. He became very fat (perhaps for this reason he became the first Arab monarch to recline on a throne instead of sitting on cushions) and teased another fat old grandee: ‘I’d like a slavegirl with legs like yours.’
‘And a bottom like yours, Commander of the Believers,’ retorted the old man.