Medieval Jerusalem: Forging an Islamic City in Spaces Sacred to Christians and Jews.

• Author: Frenkel, Miriam

Medieval Jerusalem: Forging an Islamic City in Spaces Sacred to Christians and Jews. By JACOB LASSNER. Ann Arbor: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS, 2017. Pp. xxv + 242. $75.

At the core of Jacob Lassner's book is a topic that has occupied orientalist scholars since the nineteenth century, namely, Jerusalem's sanctity in Islam, or in the author's words: "when and in what circumstances did Jerusalem, a city long venerated by Jews and Christians, become a hallowed place for Muslims?" (p. vii). The sanctification of Jerusalem in Islam was a long and complex process, of which the book in hand focuses on the early phase, from the Prophet until the days of (f)Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705) and his son al-Walld (r. 705-715). The book presents a critical digest of the rich and multidisciplinary research written to date on the topic. It is aimed at an audience of Islamicists as well as nonscholarly readers.

The book contains nine chapters, each dedicated to another aspect of the main theme, but building together toward the author's final conclusions.

The first chapter is dedicated to the literary genre of Fadd'il al-Quds, literature in praise of Jerusalem, which Lassner deems an important source for understanding Jerusalem's place in the Muslim imaginary. Most compilations were written about four centuries after the rise of Islam, but for Lassner some contain traditions going back to the eighth century, and some of the transmitters could possibly have been direct witnesses to the construction of the Dome of the Rock, justifying their study as a tool in the construction of the perception of Jerusalem as a scared Islamic city. The author discerns a double motivation behind this literature's emergence: adoption of Jewish and Christian narratives concerning Jerusalem's sanctity and Umayyad policy to forsake Mecca and Medina in favor of political strongholds in Syria and Palestine, including Jerusalem, as a way to legitimate their rule.

The second chapter moves back in time and tries to answer the question whether Muhammad and his generation conceived of Jerusalem as a sacred place, or if there are traditions in praise of Jerusalem before the rise of the Umayyads. This is hardly a new question, and Lassner distinguishes two sides in the scholarly discussions. One, which according to Lassner speaks the currently "accepted wisdom," strives to read "real" Islamic history in early Muslim historical writings. The other, the "revisionists" or "minimalists," deny them any authenticity, reading the sources as reflecting only developments of the eighth century. These revisionist scholars believe that Jerusalem occupied a central place for the Prophet and his followers. They envisage the early Islamic community as an eclectic and messianic group of believers of diverse confessions, who were compelled to forge an Islamic narrative connected to an Arabian past once their messianic expectations were not realized, or, in an alternative narrative, wished to...