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. A worshipper who says he is going to pray at al-Aqsa may mean the lead-domed hall at the southern wall or may mean the entire thirty-five-acre esplanade; the ambiguity is old, and it is not idle, since the law of who may enter and pray turns on which of the two is meant. The mosque proper is the building treated here; the platform that holds it, the rock at its heart, and the great retaining wall below belong to the wider sanctuary.

The name and the verse

The name comes from a single verse of the Qur’an. The opening of the seventeenth sura, Surat al-Isra, glorifies the One who carried His servant by night from al-masjid al-haram, the Sacred Mosque, to al-masjid al-aqsa, the Farthest Mosque — the most distant place of prayer, whose surroundings God has blessed. The verse names no city. It names two mosques, one near and one far, and a journey between them in a single night. Islamic tradition came to identify the farther of the two with Jerusalem, and to read the verse alongside a larger narrative: the Isra and the Mi’raj, the Night Journey and the Ascension, in which Muhammad is borne from Mecca to Jerusalem and from the rock of the sanctuary rises through the seven heavens to the threshold of the divine presence. In that reading the verse is the textual root of the whole city’s standing in Islam, and the rock beneath the golden dome the point of departure for the ascent.

The buildings that anchor the site today — Abd al-Malik’s shrine over the rock, the congregational hall to its south — were raised in stone two or three generations later. The identification of the farther mosque with Jerusalem became central and stayed central. By the time the Umayyads built in stone, Jerusalem already held a rank in Muslim memory that the building work then made visible: the first qibla, the original direction of prayer, toward which the early community in Medina turned for some sixteen or seventeen months before a later revelation turned the qibla south to the Kaaba in Mecca. Jerusalem ceased to be the direction of prayer; it did not cease to be holy. After Mecca and Medina it is held the third holiest site in Sunni Islam, and the journey of the qibla — first toward it, then away — is itself part of why.

The Umayyad fabric and its rebuildings

The standing building belongs in its origins to the Umayyad caliphate. After the Muslim conquest of the city in the late 630s, the open southern end of the platform — long neglected, by some accounts heaped with refuse — was cleared and made a place of prayer. The caliph Abd al-Malik raised the Dome of the Rock over the summit around 691, one of the oldest works of Islamic architecture to survive substantially intact; and a congregational mosque was built at the southern end of the esplanade in the years that followed, under Abd al-Malik or, more probably in its completed monumental form, under his son al-Walid I early in the eighth century. The two undertakings were of a piece: a shrine to mark the holy rock and ring it with mosaic, and a broad hall to hold the Friday assembly that the shrine could not. The hall was, and is, a hypostyle mosque — a roofed forest of columns rather than a single domed volume — laid out as parallel aisles running south toward the qibla wall and the mihrab, with a raised central nave drawing the eye and the body toward the niche. In its present form the prayer hall carries seven such aisles on a span of columns of white marble and reused stone, beneath a roof of timber and lead, and it holds several thousand worshippers at the Friday prayer. The plan is the standard congregational type of the early Islamic city, built here at the largest scale the southern platform allowed.

From the start the mosque sat on unstable ground in a literal sense. Jerusalem lies near the Jordan Rift, and earthquake after earthquake has thrown the building down and forced it up again, so that the present structure is a layered work rather than a single original. A quake in 746 wrecked the early hall; the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur rebuilt it, and his successor al-Mahdi rebuilt it again, broadening the prayer hall. The disastrous earthquake of 1033 brought much of it down a second time, and the Fatimid caliph al-Zahir reconstructed it in the years around 1035 on a markedly reduced plan — the aisles cut from some fifteen to seven, a contraction that registers, in stone, the shrinking of the city’s population by that date. The central nave, the lead-sheathed dome over the bay before the mihrab, and the broad mosaic of the apse belong in their essentials to this Fatimid rebuilding, however much later hands touched them.

Then came the Crusades. When the armies of the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099 and founded the Latin Kingdom, the mosque was turned to wholly other uses. The Frankish kings made it a royal palace; the Crusaders, who believed the platform to be the site of Solomon’s Temple, called the building the Templum Salomonis, the Temple of Solomon, and the Dome of the Rock to its north the Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord. Around 1119 King Baldwin II granted a wing of the palace to a new fighting order vowed to guard the pilgrim roads; from their quarters in the Temple of Solomon the order took its name — the Knights of the Temple, the Templars. For close to seventy years the Friday hall of al-Aqsa served as the headquarters of a Christian military order, with stables and stores hollowed into the great vaulted substructures at the platform’s southeastern corner — the long subterranean halls that medieval and later usage came to call Solomon’s Stables, themselves a vast Herodian and Umayyad engineering work supporting the esplanade above. The Crusader century thus left the building doubly marked: a Christian palace and arsenal grafted onto an Umayyad and Fatimid mosque, the dome above and the vaults below pressed into a use neither was raised for.

The restoration came with Saladin. After his victory at Hattin and the recovery of Jerusalem in 1187, the Ayyubid sultan stripped out the Crusader fittings and restored the building to Muslim prayer, and had carried up from Aleppo a carved wooden minbar — a pulpit of cedar, ivory and inlay commissioned decades before by Nur al-Din Zengi against the very day the city should be retaken. That minbar stood in the mosque for nearly eight centuries. Mamluk sultans and then the Ottomans who took the city in 1517 added porches, repaired the roofs, retiled and reglazed; restoration continued under the British Mandate after the earthquakes of 1927 and 1937. In August 1969 an arsonist — an Australian acting on an apocalyptic conviction of his own — set the mosque alight, and the medieval minbar of Nur al-Din was consumed in the fire, along with much of the southeastern aisle and the ceiling above the apse. The loss of the pulpit reverberated far beyond the building; it helped occasion the founding of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, summoned that same year in part in response to the fire. A faithful reconstruction of the minbar, the work of an international team of craftsmen and carried out in Jordan, was installed in its place in 2007. The cumulative effect of so many hands — Umayyad foundation, Abbasid and Fatimid rebuilding, Crusader conversion, Ayyubid restoration, Mamluk and Ottoman repair, modern reconstruction — is that almost nothing in the standing mosque is of a single date, and that the building reads as a stratigraphy of the city’s whole history laid one course upon another.

The Sufi sanctuary

The mosque has never been only a Friday hall. Around and within the Noble Sanctuary, especially from Ayyubid and Mamluk times onward, grew a dense fabric of teaching colleges, hospices and Sufi lodges — the zawiyas and khanqahs of the orders — so that by the Ottoman centuries dozens of Sufi brotherhoods kept houses in the streets ringing the Haram. The shape of that presence is institutional: the Sufi order as an institution, with its chain of transmission and its shaykhs, planting a lodge near the holiest accessible ground it could reach. The Naqshbandi zawiya by the sanctuary was founded in 1731 by a shaykh of the al-Bukhari family, come from Bukhara in Central Asia to keep the order’s presence beside al-Aqsa. For the seeker, nearness to the place of the Ascension was itself a reason to settle there.

A contested ground

The platform the mosque occupies is among the most contested on earth, and the contest runs through the names themselves. The same enclosure is, for Judaism, the site of the First and Second Temples — the Holy of Holies held to have stood somewhere on the summit rock — and the great Herodian retaining wall below, the Western Wall, is the holiest place accessible in Jewish practice, where the divine presence is held never wholly to have departed. For Islam the rock is the Sakhra of the Ascension and the precinct the Haram al-Sharif, third of the sanctuaries; the wider sacred geography of the Holy Land folds Jerusalem in beside Mecca and Medina, and the standing of the city in Islam rests on the verse, the qibla, and the Night Journey together. The festival calendar carries the association forward: the night of the Isra and Mi’raj is kept across the Muslim world, and in the devotional life of the city the Prophet’s memory is honored in the gatherings of the mawlid. What scholarship can date in the fabric is firm — the Umayyad and Fatimid layers, the Crusader interlude, the Ottoman repairs. What it cannot reach is the ground beneath, since the site’s sanctity has long made excavation impossible, and that very silence leaves the competing claims free to contend. The arrangements governing who may enter and where any may pray remain politically fraught into the present, a matter no account of the building can settle.

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.

Sources and scholarship

The standard modern account of the early Islamic transformation of the precinct is Oleg Grabar’s The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem (Princeton University Press, 1996), which reconstructs the Umayyad and Fatimid sanctuary and treats the Dome of the Rock and the mosque as a single ideological program; Grabar’s earlier The Dome of the Rock extends the architectural analysis of the shrine at the precinct’s center (catalog record). The Qur’anic root of the city’s standing is the opening verse of Surat al-Isra, Qur’an 17:1, the “Farthest Mosque” passage read together with the account of the Isra and Mi’raj; the change of the qibla from Jerusalem toward Mecca is recorded at Qur’an 2:144 in Surat al-Baqara. The history of the carved pulpit destroyed in the 1969 fire — Nur al-Din’s minbar, carried to Jerusalem by Saladin and reconstructed in 2007 — is documented in the record of the Hashemite restorations of the mosque (King Abdullah II official site).

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