Soon after the Dome was built, Abd al-Malik’s armies recaptured Mecca and resumed the jihad to spread God’s kingdom against the Byzantines. He expanded this colossal empire westward across northern Africa and eastward into Sind (today’s Pakistan). But within his realm, he needed to unify the House of Islam as a single Muslim religion with an emphasis on Muhammad, expressed in the double shahada that now appeared on many inscriptions: ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the apostle of God.’ The Prophet’s sayings –hadith – were collected and Abd al-Malik’s full edition of the Koran became the invincible source of legitimacy and holiness. Rituals became more rigidly defined; graven images banned – he stopped minting coins bearing his own image. Abd al-Malik now called himself Khalifat Allah, God’s Deputy, and henceforth Islamic rulers became the caliphs. The official versions of Muhammad’s earliest biography and the Muslim Conquest excluded the Christians and Jews from Islam. The administration was Arabized. Like Constantine, Josiah and St Paul rolled into one, Abd al-Malik believed in a universal empire of one monarch, one God, and it was he more than anyone who oversaw the evolution of Muhammad’s community into today’s Islam.
WALID: APOCALYPSE AND LUXURY
Jerusalem had a shrine in the Dome but not an imperial mosque, so Abd al-Malik and his son Walid, who succeeded him, next built the Further Mosque, al-Aqsa, Jerusalem’s mosque for ordinary Friday prayers, at the southern boundary of the Temple Mount. The caliphs saw the Temple Mount as the centrepiece of Jerusalem just as Herod had. For the first time since ad 70, they built a new Great Bridge across the valley for pilgrims to enter the Temple Mount from the west, over Wilson’s Arch, today’s Gate of the Chain. To enter from the south, they created the domed Double Gates, which matched the Golden Gate in style and beauty.*
This was a vibrant moment in Jerusalem. In the space of a few years, the caliphs had turned the Temple Mount into a holy Islamic shrine and Jerusalem into an imperial-Umayyad city and this once again unleashed the infectious competition for shrines and stories that characterizes Jerusalem even today. The Christians had commandeered many of the Jewish myths which were gradually placed at their central shrine, the Sepulchre. But now the raising of the Dome and al-Aqsa reinvigorated the old myths all over again: a footprint on the Rock that had once been shown to Christian pilgrims as the mark of Jesus became the footprint of Muhammad. The Umayyads covered the Temple Mount with new domes all linked to Biblical traditions from Adam and Abraham via David and Solomon to Jesus. Their scenario of the Last Judgement took place on the Temple Mount when the Kaaba would come to Jerusalem.* And it was not just the Temple Mount: the Muslims came to revere anything associated with David, so now they regarded the Citadel, which the Christians called David’s Tower, as David’s Mihrab (prayer-niche): they were not the last to mistake Herod’s grandeur for David’s. The Umayyads did not just build for God but also for themselves.
These caliphs were pleasure-loving and cultured: this was the apogee of their Arab empire – even Spain was now theirs – and though Damascus was their capital, they spent much time in Jerusalem. Just south of the Temple Mount, Walid I and his son built a complex of palaces, unknown until they were uncovered in the late 1960s: they stood three or four storeys high around cool courtyards and the caliphs even had a special royal entrance to al-Aqsa via a rooftop bridge. The remains reveal nothing more than the size of the palaces, but the survival of their desert palaces reveal how opulently they would have lived here.5
The most luxurious desert palace or qasr survives at Amra, in today’s Jordan, where the caliphs relaxed in private quarters and bathhouses decorated with mosaic floors and graphic paintings depicting hunting scenes, nude or half-dressed women, athletes, cupids, satyrs and a bear playing the lute. Walid I appears in the colourful fresco of Six Kings showing monarchs defeated by the Umayyads such as the emperors of Constantinople and China. These decadent, Hellenistic paintings seem distinctly unIslamic, but, like the Herods, they perhaps lived differently in public. Walid I ended the sharing arrangement with the Christians in Damascus, creating the glorious Umayyad Mosque there, and the language of government now changed from Greek to Arabic. Yet Jerusalem remained overwhelmingly Christian. Muslims and Christians mixed freely: both celebrated the feast of the Dedication of the Holy Sepulchre in September, attracting ‘a great crowd to Jerusalem’, the streets filling with ‘camels and horses, asses and oxen’. Christian pilgrims, now more Armenian and Georgian than Greek, scarcely noticed the Muslim sites, while Jews hardly mention the Christians. Henceforth visitors tended to be increasingly blinkered and uncurious pilgrims who saw no more than their own religion.
In 715, Walid’s brother, Suleiman, received the acclamation on the Temple Mount: ‘Never had one seen such richness that greeted the new Caliph. Seated under one of the domes that ornament the platform, he held an audience’ on a sea of carpets and cushions with his treasury piled around him to pay his soldiers. Suleiman, who made the last full-scale Arab assault on Constantinople (and almost captured it), ‘conceived the plan of living in Jerusalem and making it his capital and bringing together there great wealth and a considerable population’. He founded the city of Ramla as an administrative centre, but died before he could move to Jerusalem.
Jews, many of them from Iran and Iraq, settled in the Holy City, living together south of the Temple Mount, retaining the privilege of praying on (and maintaining) the Temple Mount. But in about 720, after almost a century of freedom to pray there, the new Caliph Omar II, who was, unusually in this decadent dynasty, an ascetic stickler for Islamic orthodoxy, banned Jewish worship – and this prohibition would stand for the rest of Islamic rule. Instead the Jews started to pray around the four walls of the Temple Mount and in a subterranean synagogue called ha-Meara – the Cave – at Warren’s Gate, almost beneath the Temple Mount near the Holy of Holies.
While the Umayyad caliphs enjoyed their Hellenistic palaces and dancing girls, the empire reached its limits for the first time. Islamic forces in Spain were already probing France, but in 732, a Frankish nobleman, Charles, Mayor of the Palace of the Merovingian kings, defeated a Muslim raid at Tours. Hailed as a Maccabee, he became Charles Martel – the Hammer.
‘Dynasties,’ writes the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, ‘have a natural lifespan like individuals’ and now the decadent, worldly Umayyads had reached the end of theirs. In a village east of the Jordan lived the descendants of Abbas, the Prophet’s uncle who had long secretly opposed the hedonistic rule of the Umayyads, who were totally unrelated to Muhammad. ‘Woe to the House of Umayya,’ declared their leader Abu al-Abbas, ‘they preferred the ephemeral to the eternal; crime obsessed them; they possessed forbidden women.’ The discontent spread fast. Even the tribes of the loyal Syrian heartland rebelled – even Jerusalem. The last caliph had to storm the city and raze her walls. An earthquake shook Jerusalem damaging al-Aqsa and the palaces as if God was angry with the Umayyads. Christians and Jews dreamed that this was the Apocalypse. But so did Muslims, and the real threat to the Umayyads came from far away to the east.
In 748, in Khorasan, today’s eastern Iran and Afghanistan, a charismatic mystic named Abu Muslim demanded a sterner Islam and the rule by one of Muhammad’s descendants. The new Muslims of the borderlands joined his puritanical army, which dressed all in black and marched under black banners and hailed the coming of the imam, precursor of the Mahdi, * to redeem Islam. Abu Muslim led his triumphant armies westwards but he had not yet decided whether to back the family of Ali or the family of Abbas – and there were still many Umayyad princes around too. But it was Abu al-Abbas who defeated the last Umayyad ruler and solved this problem in a way that earned him his nickname.6