Al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf — the Jerusalem Sanctuary

Al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf is the walled platform in Jerusalem holding the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqṣā Mosque — a sanctuary revered in Islam and, as the site of the Temple, in Judaism.

At a glance

In Muslim tradition the sanctuary is bound to two things: the first direction of prayer, and the Prophet's night journey. Before the qibla was fixed toward Mecca, the community prayed toward Jerusalem; and the Qurʾān's opening verse of Sūrat al-Isrāʾ speaks of a servant carried by night to “the farthest mosque” (al-masjid al-aqṣā), which the mainstream of Muslim exegesis identifies with this site — though early exegetes differed, some reading the phrase otherwise — and from which tradition describes the Prophet's ascent through the heavens. On that identification rests the compound's standing in Muslim tradition as the third of the sanctuaries, after the Great Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina.

The platform's Islamic architecture is Umayyad in origin. ʿAbd al-Malik completed the Dome of the Rock, an octagon under a gilded dome enclosing the outcrop of bare stone, in 691–92; the congregational mosque of al-Aqṣā at the southern end took its first form under his successor al-Walīd, though earthquakes in the eighth and eleventh centuries brought it down more than once, so that the standing building is largely of later — chiefly Abbasid and Fāṭimid — construction. The two buildings are distinct, a point often blurred outside the region, and the name al-Aqṣā is used both for the mosque proper and, in common speech, for the whole enclosure. Successive dynasties — Fāṭimid, Ayyūbid, Mamlūk, Ottoman — repaired, rebuilt and endowed the site, and the Crusader interval, in which the buildings served Latin Christian use, was ended by Saladin's recovery of the city in 1187.

The ground is layered with other communities' sanctity, and Chronicle records those claims without adjudicating among them. In Jewish tradition the platform is the Temple Mount, site of Solomon's Temple and of the Second Temple destroyed by Roman forces in 70 CE, and the retaining wall below its western flank — the Western Wall — has been a place of Jewish prayer and pilgrimage through the centuries since, though access has always depended on the ruling power of the day, and was closed to Jews altogether between 1948 and 1967; rabbinic tradition holds that the divine Presence never departed from it. Christian writers of the Roman and Byzantine periods knew the esplanade as a ruin whose desolation they read as prophecy fulfilled.

Since 1967, when Israel took control of East Jerusalem, the compound has been among the most contested places on earth: administered in practice through arrangements involving the Jordanian waqf authority and Israeli security control, and repeatedly the trigger for wider confrontation. The competing legal and religious claims to the site are actively disputed by the parties and are not resolved here; what belongs to an encyclopedia of Islamic history is the sanctuary's place in Muslim devotion, its Umayyad foundation, and the fact that its sanctity has never been Muslims' alone.

Related in Chronicle

Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.