Al-Aqsa Mosque

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The Al-Aqsa Mosque is the large congregational mosque standing at the southern edge of the walled platform in the Old City of Jerusalem that Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, and that Jews and Christians know as the Temple Mount. It should not be confused with the golden Dome of the Rock, the domed shrine near the platform’s center; the two are distinct buildings on the same vast enclosure, and the name al-Aqsa is used both for the silver-grey mosque in particular and, more loosely, for the whole sacred precinct.

The name itself comes from the Qur’an. A single verse speaks of a servant of God carried by night “from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque” — al-masjid al-aqsa, the farthest place of prayer. Islamic tradition came to identify that farthest mosque with Jerusalem, and to read the verse together with a larger account: the Isra and Mi’raj, in which Muhammad is taken from Mecca to Jerusalem and from there ascends through the heavens. How early and how firmly the verse was tied to this specific site is a question historians treat with care, since the textual and architectural evidence comes from somewhat later than the events described. What is not in doubt is that the identification became central, and that Jerusalem held rank for early Muslims as the first direction of prayer, before the qibla turned toward Mecca.

The standing building belongs to the Umayyad caliphate. After the Muslim conquest of the city in the seventh century, the caliph Abd al-Malik raised the Dome of the Rock around 691, and a congregational mosque was built at the southern end of the platform in the years that followed, under him or his son al-Walid, early in the eighth century. The structure has been rebuilt repeatedly after earthquakes and across the centuries — Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman hands all left their mark — so that the present mosque is a layered work rather than a single original.

The platform it occupies is among the most contested ground on earth. The same enclosure is, for Jews, the site of the First and Second Temples, and the Western Wall below it the holiest accessible place in Judaism; for Muslims it is the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina. That overlap of claims has made the precinct a focus of devotion and of conflict in equal measure, and the arrangements governing who may pray where remain politically fraught into the present.

For the believers who gather there, the mosque is not chiefly a monument but a place of prayer, and its significance is held to lie in the Night Journey it commemorates and the sanctity of the ground it stands on. Its history as a building and its weight as a sacred site run on different tracks — the one datable in stone, the other carried in scripture and practice — and at al-Aqsa the two have been bound together for thirteen centuries.

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