The Early Islamic Monuments of al-Haram al-Sharif: An Iconographic Study.

• Author: Kane, Carolyn

Since the early 1970s, Myriam Rosen-Ayalon has directed the survey of all the monuments on the Haram (noble enclosure), sponsored by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Her monograph involves only the structures of the Umayyad period (661-750). (The writer gives the terminal date as 749.) Specifically, she credits " Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705) and his immediate successors" as being the patrons of the early building program on the ancient Mt. Moriah. The area was uninhabited during the Byzantine period, and the commanding location was easily available for construction.

The writer proposes that all the buildings of the early Umayyad period were planned as an interconnected entity, deliberately planned to line the structures on a north-south or east-west axis. Thus, the Dome of the Rock aligns with the mihrab of the second al-Aqsa mosque, the Double Gate, and the recently excavated complex to the west and south of the Haram. The Dome of the Chain aligns up to the mihrab of Umar, and the intersection of the two axial lines falls on the mihrab of the Dome of the Chain. The original stairways fall within the scheme, though the Golden Gate does not.

Further, she maintains the pairing of structures is in the Herodian tradition of Solomon's temple and royal palace, the Herodian temple and royal stoa on the mount, used also in the Holy Sepulchre and Rotonda. The ancient tradition was adapted to an Islamic building program with the rock the focal point on the platform in the sacred city of Jerusalem. She implies that the rock is the omphalos, the center of the world where the tree of life grows, and the locus of judgment day, paradise and resurrection. The eschatological symbolism is traced through the mosaics, marble panels, and the numerical plan of the octagon. The stylistic comparisons made to non-Islamic material do not, to this reviewer, appear relevant. The inscription is cited but not used in support of her argument, and she does not include the decorations on the soffits or painted beams.

The author states that she hesitated to publish this study for some time, and given the brief text for so overwhelming a subject, it is understandable. The lack of contemporary Umayyad sources makes the subject even more difficult. A recent publication of a late tenth- or early eleventh-century book by Abu Bakr al-Wasiti describes the sanctity of Jerusalem and the building of the Dome of the Rock by Abd al-Malik. Al-Wasiti also points out the site...