Moschea di Omar (Dome of the Rock) - Gerusalemme

The Islamization of the Temple Mount is the historical process by which

Muslim Muslims ( ar, المسلمون, , ) are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abrah ...

authorities have sought to appropriate and Islamicize the

Temple Mount The Temple Mount ( hbo, הַר הַבַּיִת, translit=Har haBayīt, label=Hebrew, lit=Mount of the House f the Holy}), also known as al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf (Arabic: الحرم الشريف, lit. 'The Noble Sanctuary'), al-Aqsa Mosque compou ...

for exclusive Muslim use. Originally an

Israelite The Israelites (; , , ) were a group of Semitic-speaking tribes in the ancient Near East who, during the Iron Age, inhabited a part of Canaan. The earliest recorded evidence of a people by the name of Israel appears in the Merneptah Stel ...

and subsequently

Jew Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""T ...

ish holy site, as the location of the First and

Second Temple The Second Temple (, , ), later known as Herod's Temple, was the reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem between and 70 CE. It replaced Solomon's Temple, which had been built at the same location in the United Kingdom of Israel before being inherited ...

s, the site was subsequently the location of a Roman pagan temple, a Byzantine public building, possibly a church, a garbage dump, and later the

Dome of the Rock The Dome of the Rock ( ar, قبة الصخرة, Qubbat aṣ-Ṣakhra) is an Islamic shrine located on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, a site also known to Muslims as the ''al-Haram al-Sharif'' or the Al-Aqsa Compound. Its initial ...

and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism, and the third holiest in

Sunni Islam Sunni Islam () is the largest branch of Islam, followed by 85–90% of the world's Muslims. Its name comes from the word '' Sunnah'', referring to the tradition of Muhammad. The differences between Sunni and Shia Muslims arose from a disag ...

Early Muslim period

During his excavations in the 1930s, Robert Hamilton uncovered portions of a multicolor mosaic floor with geometric patterns inside the al-Aqsa mosque, but didn't publish them. The date of the mosaic is disputed:

Zachi Dvira Zachi (Yitzhak) Dvira (Heb.:יצחק דבירה; formerly Zachi Zweig) is an Israeli archaeologist. He co-directs the Temple Mount Sifting Project and was the first person to recognize the archaeological importance of the debris removed from Templ ...

considers that they are from the pre-Islamic Byzantine period, while Baruch, Reich and Sandhaus favor a much later

Umayyad The Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 CE; , ; ar, ٱلْخِلَافَة ٱلْأُمَوِيَّة, al-Khilāfah al-ʾUmawīyah) was the second of the four major caliphates established after the death of Muhammad. The caliphate was ruled by the ...

origin on account of their similarity to a known Umayyad mosaic. The Islamization of the Temple Mount climaxed at the end of the seventh century, with the construction of the

in the early 690s when Abd al-Malik was developing his program of Islamization. It was built over the

Foundation Stone The cornerstone (or foundation stone or setting stone) is the first stone set in the construction of a masonry foundation. All other stones will be set in reference to this stone, thus determining the position of the entire structure. Over tim ...

, the site of the historic Jewish Temple. The al-Aqsa mosque was built at the southern end of the mount in the 8th century. Throughout the entire period of the Early Muslim period, from the Muslim conquest until the Crusader capture of Jerusalem in 1099, various structures were built on the mount including memorial sites and gates.

Crusades and counter-Crusade

The Temple Mount, along with the entire Holy Land, changed hands several times during the Crusader period (1099-1244 for Jerusalem), Christians and Muslims rededicating its buildings to their own religious and power needs every time they managed to wrangle control over them from their respective enemies.

Mamluk and Ottoman periods

From the 13th-century onwards, after the Muslims had regained control of the city, building projects in Jerusalem and around the Temple Mount sought to further establish the city's Islamic character.

Post-1967

In 1990, the ''

waqf A waqf ( ar, وَقْف; ), also known as hubous () or '' mortmain'' property is an inalienable charitable endowment under Islamic law. It typically involves donating a building, plot of land or other assets for Muslim religious or charitab ...

'' began construction of a series of outdoor ''

minbar A minbar (; sometimes romanized as ''mimber'') is a pulpit in a mosque where the imam (leader of prayers) stands to deliver sermons (, '' khutbah''). It is also used in other similar contexts, such as in a Hussainiya where the speaker sits a ...

'' (pulpits) to create open-air prayer areas for use on popular holy days. A monument to the victims of the

Sabra and Shatila massacre The Sabra and Shatila massacre (also known as the Sabra and Chatila massacre) was the killing of between 460 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites, by the militia of the Lebanese Forces, a Maronite Christian Lebanese ...

was also erected. In 1996, the Waqf began underground construction of the new el-Marwani Mosque in the southeastern corner of the Temple Mount. The area was claimed by the ''waqf'' as a space that served in earlier Islamic periods as a place of prayer, but some saw the move as a part of a "political agenda""Remnants of the Temple?,"
Danny Rubinstein, September 12, 2004. and a "pretext" for the Islamization of the underground space, and believed it had been instigated to prevent the site being used a synagogue for Jewish prayers.''Contested holiness: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian perspectives on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,'' Rivka Gonen, KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 2003, p.. 167-8. A spate over the use of the

Golden Gate The Golden Gate is a strait on the west coast of North America that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. It is defined by the headlands of the San Francisco Peninsula and the Marin Peninsula, and, since 1937, has been spanned by t ...

(Bab adh-Dhahabi) gatehouse as a mosque has followed in 2019.

References

External links

Video of renovations (English)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Islamization Of The Temple Mount