Dome of the Rock

The Dome of the Rock is an octagonal Islamic shrine standing at the centre of the Al-Aqsa compound, on the raised platform known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount, inside the Old City of Jerusalem. It was built on the orders of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik and completed, by most accounts, in 691–692. It is the oldest surviving major work of Islamic architecture, and its interior carries the earliest known inscriptions proclaiming Islam and its prophet Muhammad.

The platform it occupies had been the site of the Second Jewish Temple, rebuilt on a grand scale by Herod the Great and destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. After the Bar Kokhba revolt the emperor Hadrian put up a temple to Jupiter there. Under Byzantine rule from the fourth century Jerusalem became a centre of Christian pilgrimage, but the platform itself was left largely empty. In 638 the city fell to the Arab armies of the Rashidun Caliphate under the caliph Umar.

Medieval writers disagree on when work began: one places the start in 685/6, another in 688. A dedicatory inscription gives the year 72 of the Islamic calendar (691/2), which most historians take as the completion date, though some read it as the start. The work was supervised by the theologian Raja ibn Haywa and by Yazid ibn Sallam and his son, and the craftsmen, drawn from Syria and Egypt, were probably Christians. The plan and mosaics follow Byzantine models, and the dome, about 20 metres across, is close in size to that of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Inside, a wooden-roofed drum on piers and columns rises above the bare rock that gives the building its name, ringed by two walkways.

Why Abd al-Malik built it is debated. He was fighting Byzantium as well as Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, a rival caliph who controlled Mecca. One view, argued by the historian Shelomo Dov Goitein among others, sees the shrine as a statement of Islam's place among the older faiths of Jerusalem, designed to rival the city's Christian domes. Another, found in some medieval sources, holds that it was meant to draw pilgrims away from Mecca; most modern historians treat this as hostile propaganda, though some say it cannot be ruled out. The original inscriptions dwell on the Qur'anic view of Jesus rather than on Muhammad's Night Journey, the event many Muslims now associate with the rock.

Earthquakes damaged the building in 808 and 846. During Abbasid repairs Abd al-Malik's name in the inscription was replaced with that of the caliph al-Ma'mun, though the original date was left untouched. The dome collapsed in 1015, and the Fatimid caliph al-Zahir had it rebuilt in 1022–23.

When the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099, the shrine was handed to Augustinian canons and made into a church, the Templum Domini, whose image appeared on the seals of the Knights Templar. Saladin recaptured the city in 1187, replaced the cross on the dome with a crescent and restored the building to Muslim use. The sultans of the Mamluk Sultanate, which ruled from 1260 to 1516, repaired and regilded it.

Under the Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent had the worn exterior mosaics stripped away and the walls faced with glazed tiles, dated by inscriptions to 1545–46 and 1552; the work may not have been finished until the reign of Murad III. Repairs followed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

An earthquake in 1927, under the British Mandate, left the walls badly cracked. Between 1959 and 1964 the Jordanian government carried out a large restoration funded by Arab states and Turkey, replacing many tiles and covering the dome, previously lead, in gilded aluminium bronze. During the Six-Day War in 1967 Israel took East Jerusalem; an Israeli flag raised over the shrine was taken down within hours on Moshe Dayan's orders, and management of the compound was left with the Muslim religious trust, the waqf. In 1993 King Hussein of Jordan paid for the dome to be regilded.

The building is maintained by Jordan's Ministry of Awqaf. Under long-standing arrangements known as the Status Quo, non-Muslims may visit the compound but may not pray there. The Old City of Jerusalem and its walls were placed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981 and on the List in Danger in 1982.