Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship: Holy Places, Ceremonies, Pilgrimage.

• Author: Little, Donald P.

The main questions addressed by Elad in this exemplary study are the following: 1) What was the character of early Muslim Jerusalem as perceived and propagated by the rulers and scholars of (mainly) the Umayyad period? 2) How accurately have modern scholars construed that character? 3) How can contemporary scholars cope with the inherent difficulties of the sources for the history of early Islamic Jerusalem? As innocent as these questions may seem to be on the surface, they are, of course, of considerable significance for the ongoing, intensifying debate on the future of the city. This aspect of his research the author alludes to, without elaborating on, in the very first sentences of the book:

Though this book is without any doubt the outcome of the political-social reality in which I live, it is not a political piece of work. It deals with certain historical aspects of the history of Medieval Muslim Jerusalem, out of scholarly interest, in a purely scholarly manner, namely primarily through critical analysis of the vast Arabic literary sources. (p. 10)

As far as I could tell, there is not a sentence in the book which would belie the candid naivete of Elad's characterization of the goal, methodology, and product of his research, which derive, as he acknowledges, from an impressive trio of scholars at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Ayalon, Kister, and Sharon. On any given page the only indication of commitment to a cause invariably betrays a historicist's dedication to extracting and organizing plausible data from refractory sources.

In the last analysis, Elad's solution to the source question is, I believe, the most fruitful aspect of his book, not only because it provides the methodological basis for research on his specific topic but also because it reopens the study of Umayyad history in general. Nevertheless, the historiographical crux of the matter is peculiar to Jerusalem, inasmuch as Elad's primary sources are the Praise-of-Jerusalem-Traditions (Fada il al-Quds), most notably two hitherto neglected compilations by al-Wasiti and Ibn al-Murajja, both of which date to the first half of the eleventh century. Here Elad takes pointed issue with scholars such as E. Sivan who claim that much if not most of this literature originated as propaganda during and after the Crusades. Instead Elad sides with Kister and Juynboll in concluding that "most of the traditions in the Jerusalem Praise compositions are from the Umayyad period. They...