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When 'Imad al din al
isfahani wrote his chronicle to celebrate Saladin's victories, he
suggested that Islam had
with the achievements of his master entered upon a new era,
comparable to that
ushered in by the first Hijra of the Prophet. This vast hyperbole
contains
a suspicion of truth for
the city of Jerusalem. The occupation by the Crusaders, almost a
century in duration, had
inevitably left a powerful physical mark on the city and brought
about a serious
discontinuity in Muslim life and experience. Great changes in local
nomenclature and in the
locating of holy sites can be explained by this break in tradition
caused by the Frankish
presence. The reconquest was a new beginning for Islam.
Immediately upon
the completion of the reconquest in 583/1187 a start was made upon
cleansing as much as
possible of the city, above all the Haram area, of the Christian
accretions and upon
restoring and rededicating the Haram to its Muslim purposes and
taking over Crusader
buildings in the city to convert them to Muslim uses. The
institutions
thus created by Saladin
continued to function throughout and beyond the Mamluk period. Of
special importance were
the Salahiyya Madrasa and the Salahiyya Khanqah. Both
maintained their
pre-eminence during the whole of our period.
The long struggle
to recover Jerusalem, waged by a number of Islamic sovereigns to a
greater or lesser
degree, but above all exemplified in the careers of Nur al din and
Saladin,
had gained its
ideological nourishment from a re-elaboration of the doctrine of
Jihad and a
rediscovery of the
position that the Holy Land (al ard al Muqaddasa) and especially
Jerusalem itself had
gained in Muslim tradition. This was based upon the interpretation
of
certain texts of the
Koran and a variety of the Hadiths of the Prophet and the
association of
the area with the tombs
of Prophets, honored as predecessors of Islam's own seal of the
Prophets, with the tombs
of heroes of the original Islamic conquest and with the lives of
generations of holy men
and scholars. Of crucial importance in this tradition was the
identification of
Jerusalem as the site of the 'Furthest Mosque', to which Muhammad
traveled during his
night journey from Mecca. In the words of the Koran: 'Praise be to
Him
who traveled by night
with his servant from the Masjid al Haram to the Masjid al Aqsa,
whose surroundings we
blest, in order to show him Our signs. Prophetic Tradition also
claimed that Jerusalem
was the starting-point for Mohammed's visit to Heaven, his
'ascension' (Miraj).
Originally the whole area of the Haram, the sacred precinct where
formerly the Temple had
stood, was referred to as the Masjid al Aqsa, but this name came
to identify in
particular the mosque on the south edge of the Haram area. All these
associations were
gathered together in a series of works on the 'Excellencies of
Jerusalem', which had
its beginnings early in the eleventh century.
To mark the
arrival of Islam as a religious and political power to be reckoned
with, 'Abd
al Malik, the Umayyad
Caliph, had built the Dome of the Rock near the very center of the
Haram. Its liberation
by Saladin and the restoration of the original inscriptions which
had in
chosen quotations from
the Koran challenged the position and basic tenets of Christianity,
no doubt renewed the
triumphs of the Umayyad period. The residue of this heightened
awareness and the
continuing importance of Jerusalem in Islam's own tradition are in
themselves enough, apart
from more specific explanations, to account for the interest
shown by individuals in
conserving and adding to the Muslim institutions and the Muslim
character of the city.
The range of these individuals within society and their geographical
distribution we will
attempt to set forth later.
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