The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem.

• Author: SCHICK, ROBERT
• Position: Review

The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem. By OLEG GRABAR. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. 232 + 84 color figures.

The Dome of the Rock. By SA[ddot{I}]D NUSEIBEH and OLEG GRABAR. New York: RIZZOLI, 1996. Pp. 176, color photographs.

The first book under review, that by Grabar alone, is a scholarly study of Jerusalem in the early Islamic period, while the companion book by Nuseibeh and Grabar is a picture book about the Dome of the Rock, aimed at a non-academic readership. Both are especially noteworthy for their comprehensive color photographs of the mosaics inside the Dome of the Rock.

The first book examines the physical characteristics of the city of Jerusalem during the early Islamic period from the Islamic conquest in the 630s to the Crusader conquest in 1099. Grabar begins with an introduction that surveys the various classes of available evidence: "remote" written sources, i.e., the histories, geographies, religious and literary works written by people who did not live in Jerusalem or Visit it; Jerusalem-centered sources, that is, the accounts of pilgrims and others who spent time in the city, and the Islamic "merits of Jerusalem" literature; local documents, such as inscriptions, the Geniza documents, and coins; archaeology, especially the excavations south and southwest of the Haram and the study of the extant architectural monuments; visual evidence of how the city would have appeared in earlier periods, derived from computer generated images; and modem scholarship.

In chapter one Grabar examines the formation of the Islamic city of Jerusalem by looking at the architectural legacy of the Christian Byzantine city on the eve of the Islamic conquest and the first decades of Islamic rule. Among the topics that Grabar considers are the general landscape of the city; the religious structures, such as the Temple Mount and the various Christian churches; the secular life of the city; and literary visions of the city. Grabar then turns to the transformations of the city during the first decades of Muslim rule. In chapter two he examines the Dome of the Rock, focusing on the inscriptions, the mosaics, and the shape and location of the building. More has been written about the Dome of the Rock than about any other Islamic monument, but Grabar still has much that is original to contribute, especially concerning the interpretation of the inscriptions, which are the oldest preserved excerpts of the Quranic text. His...